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A General Sketch of the European War: The First Phase

by Hilaire Belloc · English · Gutenberg #18042 · 382,870 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A General Sketch of the European War: The First Phase

Author: Hilaire Belloc


        
Release date: March 23, 2006 [eBook #18042]

Language: English

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       *       *       *       *       *




A
GENERAL SKETCH
OF THE
EUROPEAN WAR

BY
HILAIRE BELLOC

THE FIRST PHASE


THOMAS NELSON & COMPANY
LONDON, EDINBURGH, PARIS, AND NEW YORK





_First published June 1, 1915_
_Reprinted June 1915_




CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION                                                    7


PART I.

THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.

(1) THE GERMAN OBJECT                                          17

(2) CONFLICT PRODUCED BY THE CONTRAST OF THIS GERMAN
      ATTITUDE OR WILL WITH THE WILLS OF OTHER NATIONS         23

(3) PRUSSIA                                                    27

(4) AUSTRIA                                                    39

(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR                           50

(6) THE IMMEDIATE OCCASION OF THE WAR                          64


PART II.

THE FORCES OPPOSED.

(1) THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF THE BELLIGERENTS              80

      The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of
      the Germanic Body                                        86

      The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of
      the Allies                                              121

(2) THE OPPOSING STRENGTHS                                    136

      The Figures of the First Period, say to
      October 1-31, 1914                                      145

      The Figures of the Second Period, say to
      April 15-June 1, 1915                                   151

(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR                           164


PART III.

THE FIRST OPERATIONS.

(1) THE BATTLE OF METZ                                        316

(2) LEMBERG                                                   322

(3) TANNENBERG                                                345

(4) THE SPIRITS IN CONFLICT                                   365




INTRODUCTION.


It is the object of this book, and those which will succeed it in the
same series, to put before the reader the main lines of the European
War as it proceeds. Each such part must necessarily be completed and
issued some little time after the events to which it relates have
passed into history. The present first, or introductory volume, which
is a preface to the whole, covers no more than the outbreak of
hostilities, and is chiefly concerned with an examination of the
historical causes which produced the conflict, an estimate of the
comparative strength of the various combatants, and a description of
the first few days during which these combatants took up their
positions and suffered the first great shocks of the campaigns in East
and West.

But in order to serve as an introduction to the remainder of the
series, it is necessary that the plan upon which these books are to
be constructed should be clearly explained.

There is no intention of giving in detail and with numerous exact maps
the progress of the campaigns. Still less does the writer propose to
examine disputed points of detail, or to enumerate the units employed
over that vast field. His object is to make clear, as far as he is
able, those great outlines of the business which too commonly escape
the general reader.

This war is the largest and the weightiest historical incident which
Europe has known for many centuries. It will surely determine the
future of Europe, and in particular the future of this country. Yet
the comprehension of its movements is difficult to any one not
acquainted with the technical language and the special study of
military history; and the reading of the telegrams day by day, even
though it be accompanied by the criticisms of the military experts in
the newspapers, leaves the mass of men with a most confused conception
of what happened and why it happened.

Now, it is possible, by greatly simplifying maps, by further
simplifying these into clear diagrams, still more by emphasizing what
is essential and by deliberately omitting a crowd of details--by
showing first the framework, as it were, of any principal movement,
and then completing that framework with the necessary furniture of
analysed record--to give any one a conception both of what happened
and of how it happened.

It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over which
the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to the author
of this), so to describe such ground to the reader that he will in
some sort be able to see for himself the air and the view in which the
things were done: thus more than through any other method will the
things be made real to him. The aim, therefore, of these pages, and of
those that will succeed them, is to give such a general idea of the
campaigns as a whole as will permit whoever has grasped it a secure
comprehension of the forces at work, and of the results of those
forces. It is desired, for example, that the reader of these pages
shall be able to say to himself: "The Germanic body expected to
win--and no wonder, for it had such and such advantages in number and
in equipment.... The first two battles before Warsaw failed, and I can
see why. It was because the difficulties in Russian supply were met by
a contraction of the Russian line.... The 1st German Army was
compelled to retreat before Paris, and I can now see why that was so:
as it turned to envelop the Allied line, a great reserve within the
fortified zone of Paris threatened it, and forced it back."

These main lines, and these only, are attempted in the present book,
and in those that are to follow it in this series.

The disadvantage of such a method is, of course, that the reader must
look elsewhere for details, for the notices of a particular action,
and the records of particular regiments. He must look for these to the
large histories of the war, which will amply supply his curiosity in
good time. But the advantage of the method consists in that it
provides, as I hope, a foundation upon which all this bewildering
multitude of detailed reading can repose.

I set out, then, to give, as it were, the alphabet of the campaign,
and I begin in this volume with the preliminaries to it--that is, its
great political causes, deep rooted in the past; the particular and
immediate causes which led to the outbreak of war; an estimate of the
forces engaged; and the inception of hostilities.


PLAN OF THIS BOOK.

This first volume will cover three parts. In Part I. I shall write of
The Causes of the War. In Part II. I shall Contrast the Forces
Opposed. In Part III. (the briefest) I shall describe the First Shock.

In Part I., where I deal first with the general or historical causes
of the war, later with the particulars, I shall:--

1. Define the German object which led up to it.

2. Show how this object conflicted with the wills of other nations.

3. Briefly sketch the rise of Prussia and of her domination over North
Germany.

4. Define the position of Austria-Hungary in the matter, and thus
close the general clauses.

5. The particular causes of the war will next be dealt with; the
curious challenge thrown down to Great Britain by the German Fleet
_before_ the German Empire had made secure its position on the
Continent; the French advance upon Morocco; the coalition of the
Balkan States against the remainder of the Turkish Empire in Europe.

6. Lastly, in this First Part, I shall describe the immediate occasion
of the war and its surroundings: the ultimatum issued by the
Austro-Hungarian Government to the little kingdom of Servia.

In Part II. I will attempt to present the forces opposed at the
outbreak of war.

First, the contrast in the geographical position of the Germanic
Allies with their enemies, the French, the English, and the Russians.
Secondly, the numbers of trained men prepared and the numbers of
reserves available in at least the first year to the various numbers
in conflict. Thirdly, the way in which the various enemies had thought
of the coming war (which was largely a matter of theory in the lack of
experience); in what either party has been right, and in what wrong,
as events proved; and with what measure of foresight the various
combatants entered the field.

In Part III, I will very briefly describe the original armed
dispositions for combat at the outbreak of war, the German aim upon
the West, and the German orders to the Austrians upon the East; the
overrunning of Belgium, and the German success upon the Sambre; then
the pursuit of the Franco-British forces to the line Paris-Verdun, up
to the eve of the successful counter-offensive undertaken by them in
the first week of September. I will end by describing what were the
contemporary events in the Eastern field: in its northern part the
overrunning of East Prussia by the Russians, and the heavy blow which
the Germans there administered to the invader; in its southern the
Austrian opposition to the Russians on the Galician borders, and the
breakdown of that opposition at Lemberg.

My terminal date for this sketch will be the 5th of September.




A GENERAL SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR.

PART I.

THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.


War is the attempt of two human groups each to impose its will upon
the other by force of arms. This definition holds of the most
righteous war fought in self-defence as much as it does of the most
iniquitous war of mere aggression. The aggressor, for instance,
proposes to take the goods of his victim without the pretence of a
claim. He is attempting to impose his will upon that victim. The
victim, in resisting by force of arms, is no less attempting to impose
his will upon the aggressor; and if he is victorious does effectually
impose that will: for it is his will to prevent the robbery.

Every war, then, arises from some conflict of wills between two human
groups, each intent upon some political or civic purpose, conflicting
with that of his opponent.

War and all military action is but a means to a non-military end, to
be achieved and realized in peace.

Although arguable differences invariably exist as to the right or
wrong of either party in any war, yet the conflicting wills of the two
parties, the irreconcilable political objects which each has put
before itself and the opposition between which has led to conflict,
can easily be defined.

They fall into two classes:--

1. The general objects at which the combatants have long been aiming.

2. The particular objects apparent just before, and actually
provoking, the conflict.

In the case of the present enormous series of campaigns, which occupy
the energies of nearly all Europe, the general causes can be easily
defined, and that without serious fear of contradiction by the
partisans of either side.

On the one hand, the Germanic peoples, especially that great majority
of them now organized as the German Empire under the hegemony of
Prussia, had for fully a lifetime and more been possessed of a certain
conception of themselves which may be not unjustly put into the form
of the following declaration. It is a declaration consonant with most
that has been written from the German standpoint during more than a
generation, and many of its phrases are taken directly from the
principal exponents of the German idea.


(I) THE GERMAN OBJECT.

"We the Germans are in spirit one nation. But we are a nation the
unity of which has been constantly forbidden for centuries by a number
of accidents. None the less that unity has always been an ideal
underlying our lives. Once or twice in the remote past it has been
nearly achieved, especially under the great German emperors of the
Middle Ages. Whenever it has thus been nearly achieved, we Germans
have easily proved ourselves the masters of other societies around us.
Most unfortunately our very strength has proved our ruin time and
again by leading us into adventures, particularly adventures in
Italy, which took the place of our national ideal for unity and
disturbed and swamped it. The reason we have been thus supreme
whenever we were united or even nearly united lay in the fact, which
must be patent to every observer, that our mental, moral, and
physical characteristics render us superior to all rivals. The German
or Teutonic race can everywhere achieve, other things being equal,
more than can any other race. Witness the conquest of the Roman Empire
by German tribes; the political genius, commercial success, and final
colonial expansion of the English, a Teutonic people; and the peculiar
strength of the German races resident within their old homes on the
Rhine, the Danube, the Weser, and the Elbe, whenever they were not
fatally disunited by domestic quarrel or unwise foreign ideals. It was
we who revivified the declining society of Roman Gaul, and made it
into the vigorous mediaeval France that was ruled from the North. It
was we who made and conquered the heathen Slavs threatening Europe
from the East, and who civilized them so far as they could be
civilized. We are, in a word, and that patently not only to ourselves
but to all others, the superior and leading race of mankind; and you
have but to contrast us with the unstable Celt--who has never produced
a State--the corrupt and now hopelessly mongrel Mediterranean or
'Latin' stock, the barbarous and disorderly Slav, to perceive at once
the truth of all we say.

[Illustration: Sketch 1.]

"It so happens that the various accidents which interrupted our
strivings for unity permitted other national groups, inferior morally
and physically to our own, to play a greater part than such an
inferiority warranted; and the same accidents permitted men of
Teutonic stock, not inhabiting the ancient homes of the Teutons, but
emigrated therefrom and politically separated from the German Empire,
to obtain advantages in which we ourselves should have had a share,
but which we missed. Thus England, a Teutonic country, obtained her
vast colonial empire while we had not a ship upon the sea.

"France, a nation then healthier than it is now, but still of much
baser stock than our own, played for centuries the leading part in
Western Europe; she is even to-day 'over-capitalized,' as it were,
possessing a far greater hold over the modern world than her real
strength warrants. Even the savage Slavs have profited by our former
disunion, and the Russian autocracy not only rules millions of
German-speaking subjects, but threatens our frontiers with its great
numbers of barbarians, and exercises over the Balkan Peninsula, and
therefore over the all-important position of Constantinople, a power
very dangerous to European culture as a whole, and particularly to our
own culture--which is, of course, by far the highest culture of all.

"Some fifty years ago, acting upon the impulse of a group of great
writers and thinkers, our statesmen at last achieved that German unity
which had been the unrealized ideal of so many centuries. In a series
of wars we accomplished that unity, and we amply manifested our
superiority when we were once united by defeating with the greatest
ease and in the most fundamental fashion the French, whom the rest of
Europe then conceived to be the chief military power.

"From that moment we have incontestably stood in the sight of all as
the strongest people in the world, and yet because other and lesser
nations had the start of us, our actual international position, our
foreign possessions, the security that should be due to so supreme an
achievement, did not correspond to our real strength and abilities.
England had vast dependencies, and had staked out the unoccupied world
as her colonies. We had no colonies and no dependencies. France,
though decadent, was a menace to our peace upon the West. We could
have achieved the thorough conquest and dismemberment of France at any
time in the last forty years, and yet during the whole of that time
France was adding to her foreign possessions in Tunis, Madagascar, and
Tonkin, latterly in Morocco, while we were obtaining nothing. The
barbarous Russians were increasing constantly in numbers, and somewhat
perfecting their insufficient military machine without any
interference from us, grave as was the menace from them upon our
Eastern frontier.

"It was evident that such a state of things could not endure. A nation
so united and so immensely strong could not remain in a position of
artificial inferiority while lesser nations possessed advantages in no
way corresponding to their real strength. The whole equilibrium of
Europe was unstable through this contrast between what Germany might
be and what she was, and a struggle to make her what she might be
from what she was could not be avoided.

"Germany must, in fulfilment of a duty to herself, obtain colonial
possessions at the expense of France, obtain both colonial possessions
and sea-power at the expense of England, and put an end, by campaigns
perhaps defensive, but at any rate vigorous, to the menace of Slav
barbarism upon the East. She was potentially, by her strength and her
culture, the mistress of the modern world, the chief influence in it,
and the rightful determinant of its destinies. She must by war pass
from a potential position of this kind to an actual position of
domination."

Such was the German mood, such was the fatuous illusion which produced
this war. It had at its service, as we shall see later, _numbers_,
and, backed by this superiority of numbers, it counted on victory.


(2) CONFLICT PRODUCED BY THE CONTRAST OF THIS GERMAN ATTITUDE OR
WILL WITH THE WILLS OF OTHER NATIONS.

When we have clearly grasped the German attitude, as it may thus be
not unfairly expressed, we shall not find it difficult to conceive
why a conflict between such a will and other wills around it broke
out.

We need waste no time in proving the absurdity of the German
assumptions, the bad history they involve, and the perverse and
twisted perspective so much vanity presupposes. War can never be
prevented by discovering the moral errors of an opponent. It comes
into being because that opponent does not believe them to be moral
errors; and in the attempt to understand this war and its causes, we
should only confuse ourselves if we lost time over argument upon
pretensions even as crassly unreal as these.

It must be enough for the purposes of this to accept the German will
so stated, and to see how it necessarily conflicts with the English
will, the French will, the Russian will, and sooner or later, for that
matter, with every other national will in Europe.

In the matter of sea-power England would answer: "Unless we are
all-powerful at sea, our very existence is imperilled." In the matter
of her colonies and dependencies England would answer: "We may be a
Teutonic people or we may not. All that kind of thing is pleasant talk
for the academies. But if you ask whether we will allow any part of
our colonies to become German or any part of our great dependencies to
fall under German rule, the answer is in the negative."

The French would answer: "We do not happen to think that we are either
decadent or corrupt, nor do we plead guilty to any other of your vague
and very pedantic charges; but quite apart from that, on the concrete
point of whether we propose to be subjugated by a foreign Power,
German or other, the answer is in the negative. Our will is here in
conflict with yours. And before you can proceed to any act of mastery
over us, you will have to fight. Moreover, we shall not put aside the
duty of ultimately fighting you so long as a population of two
millions, who feel themselves to be French (though most of them are
German-speaking) and who detest your rule, are arbitrarily kept in
subjection by you in Alsace-Lorraine."

The Russians would reply: "We cannot help being numerically stronger
than you, and we do not propose to diminish our numbers even if we
could. We do not think we are barbaric; and as to our leadership of
the Slav people in the Balkans, that seems as right and natural to us,
particularly on religious grounds, as any such bond could be. It may
interfere with your ambitions; but if you propose that we should
abandon so obvious an attitude of leadership among the Slavs, the
answer is in the negative." There is here, therefore, again a conflict
of wills.

In general, what the German peoples desired, based upon what they
believed themselves to be, was sharply at issue with what the English
people, what the French people, what the Russian people respectively
desired. Their desires were also based upon what _they_ believed
themselves to be, and they thought themselves to be very different
from what Germany thought them to be. The English did not believe that
they had sneaked their empire; the French did not believe that they
were moribund; the Russians did not believe that they were savages.

It was impossible that the German will should impose itself without
coming at once into conflict with these other national wills. It was
impossible that the German ideal should seek to realize itself without
coming into conflict with the mere desire to live, let alone the
self-respect, of everybody else.

And the consequence of such a conflict in ideals and wills translated
into practice was this war.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the war would not have come nor would it have taken the shape that
it did, but for two other factors in the problem which we must next
consider. These two other factors are, first, the position and
tradition of Prussia among the German States; secondly, the peculiar
authority exercised by the Imperial House of Hapsburg-Lorraine at
Vienna over its singularly heterogeneous subjects.


(3) PRUSSIA.

The Germans have always been, during their long history, a race
inclined to perpetual division and sub-division, accompanied by war
and lesser forms of disagreement between the various sections. Their
friends have called this a love of freedom, their enemies political
incompetence; but, without giving it a good or a bad name, the plain
fact has been, century after century, that the various German tribes
would not coalesce. Any one of them was always willing to take service
with the Roman Empire, in the early Roman days, against any one of the
others, and though there have been for short periods more or less
successful attempts to form one nation of them all in imitation of the
more civilized States to the west and south, these attempts have never
succeeded for very long.

But it so happens that about two hundred years ago, or a little more,
there appeared one body of German-speaking men rather different from
the rest, and capable ultimately of leading the rest, or at least a
majority of the rest.

[Illustration: Sketch 2.]

I use the words "German-speaking" and "rather different" because this
particular group of men, though speaking German, were of less pure
German blood than almost any other of the peoples that spoke that
tongue. They were the product of a conquest undertaken late in the
Middle Ages by German knights over a mixed Pagan population,
Lithuanian and Slavonic, which inhabited the heaths and forests along
the Baltic Sea. These German knights succeeded in their task, and
compelled the subject population to accept Christianity, just as the
Germans themselves had been compelled to accept it by their more
powerful and civilized neighbours the French hundreds of years before.
The two populations of this East Baltic district, the large majority
which was Slavonic and Lithuanian, and the minority which was really
German, mixed and produced a third thing, which we now know as the
_Prussian_. The cradle of this Prussian race was, then, all that flat
country of which Koenigsberg and Danzig are the capitals, but
especially Koenigsberg--"King's Town"--where the monarchs of this
remote people were crowned. By an historical accident, which we need
not consider, the same dynasty was, after it had lost all claim to
separate kingship, merged in the rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg, a
somewhat more German but still mixed district lying also in the Baltic
plain, but more towards the west, and the official title of the
Prussian ruler somewhat more than two hundred years ago was the
Elector of Brandenburg. These rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg were a
family bearing the title of Hohenzollern, a castle in South Germany,
by which name they are still distinguished. The palace of these
Hohenzollerns was henceforward at Berlin.

Now, much at the same time that the civil wars were being fought in
England--that is, not quite three hundred years ago--the Reformation
had produced in Germany also very violent quarrels. Vienna, which was
the seat of the Imperial House, stood for the Catholic or traditional
cause, and most Germans adhered to that cause. But certain of the
Northern German principalities and counties took up the side of the
Reformation. A terrible war, known as the Thirty Years' War, was
fought between the two factions. It enormously reduced the total
population of Germany. In the absence of exact figures we only have
wild guesses, such as a loss of half or three-quarters. At any rate,
both from losses from the adherence of many princes to the Protestant
cause and from the support lent to that cause for political reasons by
Catholic France, this great civil war in Germany left the Protestant
part more nearly equal in numbers to the Catholic part, and, among
other things, it began to make the Elector of Brandenburg with his
Prussians particularly prominent as the champion of the Protestant
cause. For, of all the warring towns, counties, principalities, and
the rest, Prussia had in particular shown military aptitude.

From that day to this the advance of Prussia as, first, the champion,
then the leader, and at last the master of Northern Germany as a whole
(including many Catholic parts in the centre and the south), has been
consistent and almost uninterrupted. The "Great Elector" (as he was
called) formed an admirable army some two hundred years ago. His
grandson Frederick formed a still better one, and by his great
capacities as a general, as well as by the excellence of his troops,
gave Prussia a military reputation in the middle of the eighteenth
century which has occasionally been eclipsed, but has never been
extinguished.

Frederick the Great did more than this. He codified and gave
expression, as it were, to the Prussian spirit, and the manifestation
of that spirit in international affairs is generally called the
"Frederician Tradition."

This "Frederician Tradition" must be closely noted by the reader,
because it is the principal moral cause of the present war. It may be
briefly and honestly put in the following terms:--

"The King of Prussia shall do all that may seem to advantage the
kingdom of Prussia among the nations, notwithstanding any European
conventions or any traditions of Christendom, or even any of those
wider and more general conventions which govern the international
conduct of other Christian peoples."

For instance, if a convention of international morals has arisen--as
it did arise very strongly, and was kept until recent times--that
hostilities should not begin without a formal declaration of war, the
"Frederician Tradition" would go counter to this, and would say: "If
ultimately it would be to the advantage of Prussia to attack without
declaration of war, then this convention may be neglected."

Or, again, treaties solemnly ratified between two Governments are
generally regarded as binding. And certainly a nation that never kept
such a treaty for more than a week would find itself in a position
where it was impossible to make any treaties at all. Still, if upon a
vague calculation of men's memories, the acuteness of the
circumstance, the advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to
the advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a
treaty should be broken.

It will be apparent that what is called the "Frederician Tradition,"
which is the soul of Prussia in her international relations, is not an
unprincipled thing. It has a principle, and that principle is a
patriotic desire to strengthen Prussia, which particular appetite
overweighs all general human morals and far outweighs all special
Christian or European morals.

This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the
Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or in
acts of treason and bad faith. What it means is that, wherever they
are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do _this_, which is to the advantage
of my country but opposed to European and common morals, or _that_,
which is consonant with those morals but to the disadvantage of my
country?" they choose the former and not the latter course.

Prussia, endowed with this doctrine and possessed of a most excellent
military organization and tradition, stood out as the first military
power in Europe until the French Revolution. The wars of the French
Revolution and of Napoleon upset this prestige, and in the battle of
Jena (1806) seemed to have destroyed it. But it was too strong to be
destroyed. The Prussian Government was the first of Napoleon's allies
to betray Napoleon _after_ the Russians had broken his power (1812).
They took part with the other Allies in finishing off Napoleon after
the Russian campaign (1813-14); they were present with decisive effect
upon the final field of Waterloo (1815), and remained for fifty years
afterwards the great military power they had always been. They had
further added to their dominions such great areas in Northern
Germany, beyond the original areas inhabited by the true Prussian
stock, that they were something like half of the whole Northern German
people when, in 1864, they entered into the last phase of their
dominion. They began by asking Austria to help them in taking from
Denmark, a small and weak country, not only those provinces of hers
which spoke German, but certain districts which were Danish as well.
France and England were inclined to interfere, but they did not yet
understand the menace Prussia might be in the future, and they
neglected to act. Two years later Prussia suddenly turned upon
Austria, her ally, defeated her in a very short campaign, and insisted
upon Austria's relinquishing for the future all claims over any part
of the German-speaking peoples, save some ten millions in the valley
of the Middle Danube and of the Upper Elbe. Four years later again, in
1870, Prussia having arranged, after various political experiments
which need not be here detailed, for the support of all the German
States except Austria, fought a war with France, in which she was
immediately and entirely successful, and in the course of which the
rulers of the other German States consented (1) to give the
Hohenzollern-Prussian dynasty supreme military power for the future
over them, under the hereditary title of German Emperors; (2) to form
a united nation under the more or less despotic power of these
emperors.

This latter point, the national unity, though really highly
centralized at Berlin, especially on the military side, was softened
in its rigour by a number of very wise provisions. A great measure of
autonomy was left to the more important of the lesser States,
particularly Catholic Bavaria; local customs were respected; and,
above all, local dynasties were flattered, and maintained in all the
trappings of sovereign rank.

From that date--that is, for the last forty-four years--there has been
a complete _Northern_ Germany, one strong, centralized, and thoroughly
co-ordinated nation, in which the original Prussian domination is not
only numerically far the greatest element, but morally overshadows all
the rest. The spiritual influence ruling this state issues from Berlin
and from the Prussian soul, although a large minority consist of
contented but respectful Catholics, who, in all national matters,
wholly sympathize with and take their cue from the Protestant North.

So far one may clearly see what kind of power it is that has initiated
the German theory of supremacy which we have described above, is
prepared to lead it to battle, and is quite certain of leading it to
victory.

But we note--the fatal mark in all German history--that the unity is
not complete. The ten millions of Austrian Germans were, when Prussia
achieved this her highest ambition, deliberately left outside the new
German Empire. And this was done because, in Prussian eyes, a
so-called "German unity" was but a means to an end, and that end the
aggrandizement of the Hohenzollern dynasty. To include so many
southern and Catholic Germans would have endangered the mastery of
Berlin. The fact that Austria ruled a number of non-German subjects
far larger than her Austrian population would further have endangered
the Hohenzollern position had Austria been admitted to the new German
Empire, and had the consolidation of all Germans into one true state
been really and loyally attempted. Lastly, it would have been
impossible to destroy the historic claims to leadership of the
Imperial Hapsburgs, and that, more than anything else, was the rivalry
the Hohenzollerns dreaded. Once more had the Germans proved themselves
incapable of, and unwilling to submit to, the discipline of unity.
What part, then, was Austria, thus left out, to play in the
international activity of Prussia in the future? What part especially
was she to play when Prussia, at the head of Northern Germany, should
go out to impose the will of that Germany and of herself upon the rest
of the world? That is the next question we must answer before we can
hope to understand the causes of the present war in their entirety.


(4) AUSTRIA.

Austria, or, more strictly speaking, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
means no more than the congeries of States governed each separately
and all in combination by the head of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine.
Of these various States only one is German-speaking as a whole, and
that is the Austrian State proper, the "Eastern States" (for that is
what the word "Austria" originally meant) which Christendom erected
round the Roman and Christian frontier town of Vienna to withstand the
pressure of the heathen Slavs and Mongol Magyars surging against it
upon this frontier.

The complexity of the various sections which make up the realm of the
present Emperor Francis Joseph, the present head of the House of
Hapsburg-Lorraine, would be only confusing if it were detailed in so
general a description as this. We must be content with the broad lines
of the thing, which are as follows:--

[Illustration: Sketch 3.]

From the Upper Danube and its valley--all the basin of it, one may
say, down to a point about twenty miles below Vienna--is the original
Austrian State; German-speaking as a whole, and the historic centre of
the entire agglomeration. East of this is the far larger state of
Hungary, and Hungary is the valley of the river Danube, from where the
German-speaking boundary cuts it, just below Vienna down to the Iron
Gates, up to the crest of the Carpathians. These two great units of
Austria proper and of Hungary have round them certain frills or edges.
On the north are two great bodies, Slav in origin, Bohemia and
Galicia; on the south another Slav body, separated from the rest for
centuries by the eruption of the Magyars from Asia in the Dark Ages,
and these Slav bodies are represented by Croatia, by much of Dalmatia,
and latterly by Bosnia and Herzegovina, which have been governed by
Austria for a generation, and formally annexed by her with the consent
of Europe seven years ago. Finally, there is a strip, or, to be more
accurate, there are patches of Italian-speaking people, all along the
coasts of the Adriatic, and occupying the ports governed by Austria
along the eastern and northern coast of that sea. There is also a belt
of Alpine territory of Italian speech--the Trentino--still in Austrian
hands.

This very general description gives, however, far too rough an idea of
the extraordinarily complicated territories of the House of Hapsburg.
Thus, there are considerable German-speaking colonies in Hungary, and
these, oddly enough, are more frequent in the east than in the west
of that State. Again, the whole western slope of the Carpathians is,
so far as the mass of the population is concerned, Roumanian in
tongue, custom, and race. Bohemia, though Slavonic in origin, is
regularly enframed along its four sides by belts of German-speaking
people, and was mainly German-speaking until a comparatively recent
revival of its native Slavonic tongue, the Czech. Again, though the
Magyar language is Mongolian, like the Turkish, centuries of Christian
and European admixture have left very little trace of the original
race. Lastly, in all the north-eastern corner of this vast and
heterogeneous territory, something like a quarter of the population is
Jewish.

The Western student, faced with so extraordinary a puzzle of race and
language, may well wonder what principle of unity there is lying
behind it, and, indeed, this principle of unity is not easy to find.

Some have sought it in religion, pointing out that the overwhelming
majority of these various populations are Catholic, in communion with
Rome; and, indeed, this Catholic tincture or colour has a great deal
to do with the Austro-Hungarian unity; and of late years the chief
directing policy of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine has been to pose as
the leader of the Catholic Slavs against the Slavs belonging to the
Greek Church.

But this principle of unity is not the true one, for two reasons:
first, that the motive leading the House of Hapsburg to the difficult
task of so complicated a government is not a religious motive; and,
secondly, because this religious unity is subject to profound
modification. Hungary, though Catholic in its majority, contains, and
is largely governed by, powerful Protestant families, who are
supported by considerable bodies of Protestant population. The Greek
Church is the religious profession of great numbers along the Lower
Danube valley and to the south of the river Save. There are in Bosnia
a considerable number of Mahomedans even, and I have already mentioned
the numerous Jewish population of the north-east, particularly in
Galicia.

The true principle of unity in what has hitherto been the
Austro-Hungarian Empire is twofold. It consists, first, in the
reigning family, considerable personal attachment to which is felt in
every section of its dominions, utterly different as these are one
from another; and, secondly (a more important point), in the
historical development of the State.

It is this last matter which explains all, and which can make us
understand why a realm so astonishingly ill constructed was brought
into the present struggle as one force, and that force a force allied
to, and in a military sense identical with, modern Prussian Germany.

For the historical root of Austria-Hungary is German. Of its
population (some fifty-one millions) you may say that only about a
quarter are German-speaking (less than another quarter are
Magyar-speaking, most of the rest Slavonic in speech, together with
some proportion of Roumanian and Italian).

But it is from this German _quarter_ and from the emperor at their
head that the historical growth of the State depends, because this
German _quarter_ was the original Christian nucleus and the civilized
centre, which had for its mission the reduction of Slavonic and Magyar
barbarism. The Slavs of the Bohemian quadrilateral were subjected,
not indeed by conquest, but by a process of culture, to Vienna. The
crown of Hungary, when it fell by marriage to the Hapsburgs, continued
that tradition; and when the Empress Maria-Theresa, in the last
century, participated in the abominable crime of Frederick the Great
of Prussia, and took her share of the dismembered body of Poland (now
called the Austrian province of Galicia), that enormous blunder was,
in its turn, a German blunder undertaken under the example of Northern
Germany, and as part of a movement German in spirit and origin. The
same is true even of the very latest of the Austrian developments, the
annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The act was that of Vienna, but
the spirit behind it, perhaps the suggestion of it, and the support
that made it possible came from Berlin.

In a word, if you could interrogate the Genius of the Hapsburgs and
ask it for what their dominion stood, it would tell you that for
uninterrupted centuries they had stood for the German effort to
repress or to overcome pressure upon the German peoples from the
East. And that is still their role. They have come into this war, for
instance, as the servants of Prussia, not because Prussia threatened
or overawed them, but because they felt they had, in common with
Prussia, the mission of withstanding the Slav, or of tolerating the
Slav only as a subject; because, that is, they feared, and were
determined to resist, Russia, and the smaller Slavonic States, notably
Servia to the south, which are in the retinue of Russia.

       *       *       *       *       *

We may sum up, then, and say that the fundamental conflict of wills in
Europe, which has produced this general war, is a conflict between the
German will, organized by Prussia to overthrow the ancient Christian
tradition of Europe (to _her_ advantage directly; and indirectly, as
she proposes, to the advantage of a supposedly necessary German
governance of the world under Prussian organization), and the will of
the more ancient and better founded Western and Latin tradition to
which the sanctity of separate national units profoundly appeals, and
a great deal more which is, in their eyes, civilization. In this
conflict, Prussia has called upon and received the support of not only
the German Empire, which she controls, but also the Hapsburg monarchy,
controlling the organized forces of Austria-Hungary; while there has
appeared against this strange Prussian claim all that values the
Christian tradition of Europe, and in particular the doctrine of
national freedom, with very much else--which very much else are the
things by which we of the civilized West and South, who have hitherto
proved the creators of the European world, live and have our being.
Allied with us, by the accident that this same German claim threatens
them also, is the young new world of the Slavs.

It is at this final point of our examination that we may see the
immensity of the issues upon which the war turns. The two parties are
really fighting for their lives; that in Europe which is arrayed
against the Germanic alliance would not care to live if it should fail
to maintain itself against the threat of that alliance. It is for them
life and death. On the other side, the Germans having propounded this
theory of theirs, or rather the Prussians having propounded it for
them, there is no rest possible until they shall either have "made
good" to our destruction, or shall have been so crushed that a
recurrence of the menace from them will for the future be impossible.

There is here no possibility of such a "draw" or "stalemate" as was
the result, for instance, of the reduction of Louis XIV.'s ambition,
or of the great revolutionary effort throughout Europe which ended
with the fall of Napoleon. Louis XIV.'s ambition cast over Europe,
which received it favourably, the colour of French culture. The
Revolutionary Wars were fought for a principle which, if it did not
appeal universally to men, appealed at least to all those millions
whose instincts were democratic in every country. But in this war
there is no such common term. No one outside the districts led by
Prussia desires a Prussian life, and perhaps most, certainly many, of
those whom Prussia now leads are in different degrees unwilling to
continue a Prussian life. The fight, in a word, is not like a fight
with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign away some property,
or make you acknowledge some principle to which you are already half
inclined; it is like a fight with a man who says, "So long as I have
life left in me, I will make it my business to kill you." And fights
of that kind can never reach a term less absolute than the destruction
of offensive power in one side or the other. A peace not affirming
complete victory in this great struggle could, of its nature, be no
more than a truce.

       *       *       *       *       *

So much for the really important and the chief thing which we have to
understand--the general causes of the war.

Now let us turn to the particular causes. We shall find these to be,
not like the general causes, great spiritual attitudes, but, as they
always are, a sequence of restricted and recent _events_.


(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR.

After the great victories of Prussia a generation ago (the spoliation
of Denmark in 1864, the supremacy established over Austria in 1866,
the crushing defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine,
with two millions of people in 1870-1), Europe gradually drifted into
being an armed camp, the great forces of which were more or less in
equilibrium. Prussia had, for the moment at least, achieved all that
she desired. The French were for quite twenty years ardently desirous
of recovering what they had lost; but Europe would not allow the war
to be renewed, and Prussia, now at the head of a newly constituted
German Empire, made an arrangement with Austria and with Italy to curb
the French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before
this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support
them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking
another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling
gradually deadened. It did not disappear--any incident might have
revived it--but the anxious desire for immediate war when the
opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the
process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all
the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock, every one very
heavily armed, the principal antagonists, France and Germany, armed
to their utmost, but the European States, as a whole, unwilling to
allow any one of them to break the peace.

It was about this moment that Prussia committed what the future
historian will regard, very probably, as the capital blunder in her
long career of success. She began to build a great fleet. Here the
reader should note two very important consequences of the great
Prussian victories which had taken place a generation before. The
first was the immense expansion of German industrialism. Germany, from
an agricultural State, became a State largely occupied in mining,
smelting, spinning, and shipbuilding; and there went with this
revolution, as there always goes with modern industrialism, a large
and unhealthy increase of population. The German Empire, after its war
with France, was roughly equal to the population of the French; but
the German Empire, after this successful industrial experiment, the
result of its victories, was much more than half as large again in
population as the French (68 to 39).

Secondly, the German Empire developed a new and very large maritime
commerce. This second thing did not follow, as some have imagined it
does, from the first. Germany might have exported largely without
exporting in her own ships. The creation of Germany's new mercantile
marine was a deliberate part of the general Prussian policy of
expansion. It was heavily subsidized, especially directed into the
form of great international passenger lines, and carefully
co-ordinated with the rest of the Prussian scheme throughout the
world.

At a date determined by the same general policy, and somewhat
subsequent to the first creation of this mercantile marine, came the
decision to build a great fleet. Now, it so happens that Great Britain
alone among the Powers of Europe depends for her existence upon
supremacy at sea, and particularly upon naval superiority in the
Narrow Seas to the east and the south of the British islands.

Such a necessity is, of course, a challenge to the rest of the world,
and it would be ridiculous to expect the rest of the world to accept
that challenge without protest. But a necessity this naval policy of
Great Britain remains none the less. The moment some rival or group
of rivals can overcome her fleet, her mere physical livelihood is in
peril. She cannot be certain of getting her food. She cannot be
certain of getting those foreign materials the making up of which
enables her to purchase her food. Further, her dominions are scattered
oversea, and supremacy at sea is her only guarantee of retaining the
various provinces of her dominion.

It is a case which has happened more than once before in the history
of the world. Great commercial seafaring States have arisen; they have
always had the same method of government by a small, wealthy class,
the same ardent patriotism, the same scattered empire, and the same
inexorable necessity of maintaining supremacy at sea. Only one Power
had hitherto rendered this country anxious for the Narrow Seas: that
Power was France, and it only controlled one-half of the two branches
of the Narrow Seas, the North Sea and the Channel. It had been for
generations a cardinal piece of English policy that the French Fleet
should be watched, the English Fleet maintained overwhelmingly
superior to it, and all opportunities for keeping France engaged with
other rivals used to the advantage of this country. On this account
English policy leant, on the whole, towards the German side, during
all the generation of rivalry between France and Germany which
followed the war of 1870.

But when the Germans began to build their fleet, things changed. The
Germans had openly given Europe to understand that they regarded
Holland and Belgium, and particularly the port of Antwerp, as
ultimately destined to fall under their rule or into their system.
Their fleet was specifically designed for meeting the British Fleet;
it corresponded to no existing considerable colonial empire, and
though the development of German maritime commerce was an excuse for
it, it was only an excuse. Indeed, the object of obtaining supremacy
at sea was put forward fairly clearly by the promoters of the whole
scheme. Great Britain was therefore constrained to transfer the weight
of her support to Russia and to France, and to count on the whole as a
force opposed, for the first time in hundreds of years, to North
Germany in the international politics of Europe. Similarity of
religion (which is a great bond) and a supposed identity (and partly
real similarity) of race were of no effect compared with this
sentiment of necessity.

Here it is important to note that the transference of British support
from one continental group to another neither produced aggression by
Great Britain nor pointed to any intention of aggression. It is a
plain matter of fact, which all future history will note, that the
very necessity in English eyes of English supremacy at sea, and the
knowledge that such a supremacy was inevitably a provocation to
others, led to the greatest discretion in the use of British naval
strength, and, in general, to a purely defensive and peaceful policy
upon the part of the chief maritime power. It would, indeed, have been
folly to have acted otherwise, for there was nothing to prevent the
great nations, our rivals, if they had been directly menaced by the
British superiority at sea, from beginning to build great fleets,
equal or superior to our own. Germany alone pursued this policy, with
no excuse save an obvious determination to undo the claim of the
British Fleet.

I have called this a blunder, and, from the point of view of the
German policy, it was a blunder. For if the Prussian dynasty set out,
as it did, to make itself the chief power in the world, its obvious
policy was to deal with its enemies in detail. It ought not, at any
cost, to have quarrelled with Russia until it had finally disposed of
France. If it was incapable, through lack of subtlety, to prevent the
Franco-Russian group from forming, it should at least have made itself
the master of that group before gratuitously provoking the rivalry of
Great Britain. But "passion will have all now," and the supposedly
cold and calculating nature of Prussian effort has about it something
very crudely emotional, as the event has shown. From about ten years
ago Prussian Germany had managed to array against itself not only the
old Franco-Russian group but Great Britain as well.

This arrangement would not, however, have led to war. Equilibrium was
still perfectly maintained, and the very strong feeling throughout all
the great States of Europe that a disturbance of the peace would mean
some terrible catastrophe, to be avoided at all costs, was as
powerful as ever.

The true origin of disturbance, the first overt act upon which you can
put your finger and say, "Here the chain of particular causes leading
to the great war begins," was the revolution in Turkey. This
revolution took place in the year 1908, and put more or less
permanently into power at Constantinople a group of men based upon
Masonic influence, largely Western in training, largely composed of
Jewish elements, known as the "Young Turks."

The first result of this revolution, followed as it inevitably was by
the temporary weakening in international power which accompanies all
civil war at its outset, was the declaration by Austria that she would
regard the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina--hitherto only
administrated by her and nominally still Turkish--as her own
territory.

It was but a formal act, but it proved of vast consequence. It was an
open declaration by a Germanic Power that the hopes of the Servians,
the main population of the district and a Slav nation closely bound
to Russia in feeling, were at an end; that Servia must content herself
with such free territory as she had, and give up all hope of a
completely independent State uniting all Servians within its borders.
It was as though Austria had said, "I intend in future to be the great
European Power in the Balkans, Slav though the Balkans are, and I
challenge Russia to prevent me." The Russian Government, thus
challenged, would perhaps have taken the occasion to make war had not
the French given it to be understood that they would not imperil
European peace for such an object. The Prussian Government of the
German Empire had, in all this crisis, acted perhaps as the leader,
certainly as the protector and supporter of Austria; and when France
thus refused to fight, and Russia in turn gave way, the whole thing
was regarded, not only in Germany but throughout the world, as
equivalent to an armed victory. Observers whose judgment and criticism
are of weight, even in the eyes of trained international agents,
proclaimed what had happened to be as much a Prussian success as
though the Prussian and Austrian armies had met in the field and had
defeated the Russian and the French forces.

The next step in this series was a challenge advanced by Germany
against that arrangement whereby Morocco, joining as it did to French
North Africa, should be abandoned to French influence, so far as
England was concerned, in exchange for the French giving up certain
rights of interference they had in the English administration of
Egypt, and one or two other minor points. Germany, advancing from a
victorious position acquired over the Bosnian business, affirmed (in
the year 1911) her right to be consulted over the Moroccan settlement.
Nor were the French permitted to occupy Morocco until they had ceded
to Germany a portion of their African colony of the Congo. This
transaction was confused by many side issues. German patriots did not
regard it as a sufficient success, though French patriots certainly
regarded it as a grave humiliation. But perhaps the chief consequence
of the whole affair was the recrudescence in the French people as a
whole of a temper, half forgotten, which provoked them to withstand
the now greatly increased power of the German Empire and of its ally,
and to determine that if such challenges were to continue unchecked
during the coming years, the national position of France would be
forfeited.

Following upon this crisis came, in the next year--still a consequence
of the Turkish Revolution--the sudden determination of the Balkan
States, including Greece, to attack Turkey. It was the King of
Montenegro (a small Slav State which had always maintained its
independence) who fired the first shot upon the 8th of October, 1912,
with his own hand. In the course of that autumn the Balkan Allies were
universally successful, failed only in taking Constantinople itself,
reduced Turkey in Europe to an insignificant strip of territory near
the capital itself, and proceeded to settle the conquered territory
according to an agreement made by them before the outbreak of
hostilities.

But here the Germanic Powers again intervened. The defeated Turkish
Army had been trained by German officers upon a German system; the
expansion of German and Austrian political military influence
throughout the Near East was a cardinal part of the German creed and
policy. Through Austria the Balkans were to be dominated at last, and
Austria, at this critical moment, vetoed the rational settlement which
the allied Balkan States had agreed to among themselves. She would not
allow the Servians to annex those territories inhabited by men of
their race, and to reach their natural outlet to the sea upon the
shores of the Adriatic. She proposed the creation of a novel State of
Albania under a German prince, to block Servia's way to the sea. She
further proposed to Servia compensation by way of Servia's annexing
the territory round Monastir, which had a Bulgarian population, and to
Bulgaria the insufficient compensation of taking over, farther to the
east, territory that was not Bulgarian at all, but mixed Greek and
Turkish.

The whole thing was characteristically German in type, ignoring and
despising national feeling and national right, creating artificial
boundaries, and flagrantly sinning against the European sense of
patriotism. A furious conflict between the various members of the
former Balkan Alliance followed; but the settlement which Austria had
virtually imposed remained firm, and the third of the great Germanic
steps affirming the growing Germanic scheme in Europe had been taken.

But it had been taken at the expense of further and very gravely
shaking the already unstable armed equilibrium of Europe.

The German Empire foresaw the coming strain; a law was passed
immediately increasing the numbers of men to be trained to arms within
its boundaries, and ultimately increasing that number so largely as to
give to Germany alone a very heavy preponderance--a preponderance of
something like thirty per cent.--over the corresponding number trained
in France.

To this move France could not reply by increasing her armed forces,
because she already took every available man. She did the only
possible thing under the circumstances. She increased by fifty per
cent. the term during which her young men must serve in the army,
changing that term from two years to three.

The heavy burden thus suddenly imposed upon the French led to very
considerable political disputes in that country, especially as the
parliamentary form of government there established is exceedingly
unpopular, and the politicians who live by it generally despised.
When, therefore, the elections of last year were at hand, it seemed as
though this French increase of military power would be in jeopardy.
Luckily it was maintained, in spite of the opposition of fairly honest
but uncritical men like Jaures, and of far less reputable professional
politicians.

Whether this novel strain upon the French people could have been long
continued we shall never know, for, in the heat of the debates
provoked by this measure and its maintenance, came the last events
which determined the great catastrophe.


(6) THE IMMEDIATE OCCASION OF THE WAR.

We have seen how constantly and successfully Austria had supported the
general Prussian thesis in Europe, and, in particular, the
predominance of the German Powers over the Slav.

We have seen how, in pursuit of this policy, the sharpest friction was
always suffered at the danger-point of _Servia_. Servia was the Slav
State millions of whose native population were governed against their
will by Austro-Hungarian officials. Servia was the Slav State mortally
wounded by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And Servia was
the Slav State which Austria had in particular mortified by forbidding
her access to the Adriatic, and by imposing upon her an unnatural
boundary, even after her great victories of the Balkan War.

The heir to the Hapsburgs--the man who, seeing the great age of his
uncle, might at any moment ascend the throne--was the Archduke
Francis. He had for years pursued one consistent policy for the
aggrandizement of his House, which policy was the pitting of the
Catholic Slavs against the Orthodox Slavs, thereby rendering himself
in person particularly odious to the Orthodox Serbs, so many of whose
compatriots and co-religionists were autocratically governed against
their will in the newly annexed provinces.

To the capital of these provinces, Sarajevo, he proceeded in state in
the latter part of last June, and there, through the emissaries of
certain secret societies (themselves Austrian subjects, but certainly
connected with the population of independent Servia, and, as some
claimed, not unconnected with the Servian Government itself), he was
assassinated upon Saturday, the 28th of June, 1914.

For exactly a month, the consequences of this event--the provocation
which it implied to Austria, the opportunity which it gave the
Hapsburgs for a new and more formidable expression of Germanic power
against the Slavs--were kept wholly underground. _That is the most
remarkable of all the preliminaries to the war._ There was a month of
silence after so enormous a moment. Why? In order to give Germany and
Austria a start in the conflict already long designed. Military
measures were being taken secretly, stores of ammunition overhauled,
and all done that should be necessary for a war which was premeditated
in Berlin, half-feared, half-desired in Vienna, and dated for the end
of July--after the harvest.

The Government of Berlin was, during the whole of this period,
actively engaged in forcing Austria forward in a path to which she was
not unwilling; and, at last, upon the 23rd of July, Europe was amazed
to read a note sent by the Imperial Governor at Vienna to the Royal
Government in the Servian capital of Belgrade, which note was of a
kind altogether unknown hitherto in the relations between Christian
States. This note demanded not only the suppression of patriotic, and
therefore anti-Austrian, societies in Servia (the assassins of the
Crown Prince had been, as I have said, not Servian but Austrian
subjects), but the public humiliation of the Servian Government by an
apology, and even an issue of the order of the day to the Servian
Army, so recently victorious, abasing that army to the worst
humiliation. The note insisted upon a specific pledge that the Servian
Government should renounce all hope of freeing the Servian nation as a
whole from foreign government, and in many another clause subjected
this small nation to the most thorough degradation ever suggested by a
powerful European people towards a lesser neighbour.

So far, though an extreme hitherto unknown in European history had
been reached, the matter was one of degree. Things of the same sort,
less drastic, had been known in the past.

But what was novel in the note, and what undoubtedly proceeded from
the suggestion of the Prussian Government (which was in all this the
real agent behind Austria), _was the claim of the Austrian Government
to impose its own magistrates upon the Servian courts, and to condemn
at will those subjects of the Servian king and those officers holding
his commission whom Austria might select so to condemn, and that to
penalties at the goodwill and pleasure of Austria alone_. In other
words, Austria claimed full rights of sovereignty within the territory
of her small neighbour and enemy, and the acceptation of the note by
Servia meant not only the preponderance of Austria for the future over
the Slavs of the Balkans, but her continued and direct power over that
region in the teeth of national and religious sentiment, and in clean
despite of Russia.

So strong was the feeling still throughout Europe in favour of
maintaining peace and of avoiding the awful crash of our whole
international system that Russia advised Servia to give way, and the
Germanic Powers were on the eve of yet another great success, far more
important and enduring than anything they had yet achieved. The only
reservation which Servia was permitted by the peaceful Powers of
Europe, and in particular by Russia, to make was that, upon three
points which directly concerned her sovereignty, Austria should admit
the decision of a Court of Arbitration at the Hague. But the
time-limit imposed--which was the extraordinarily short one of
forty-eight hours--was maintained by Austria, and upon the advice, as
we now know, of Berlin, no modification whatever in the demands was
tolerated. Upon the 25th, therefore, the Austrian Minister left
Belgrade. There followed ten days, the exact sequence of events in
which must be carefully noted if we are to obtain a clear view of the
origin of the war.

Upon that same day, Saturday, July 25th, the English Foreign Office,
through Sir Edward Grey, suggested a scheme whereby the approaching
cataclysm (for Russia was apparently determined to support Servia)
might be averted. He proposed that all operations should be suspended
while the Ambassadors of Germany, Italy, and France consulted with him
in London.

What happened upon the next day, Sunday, is exceedingly important.
The German Government refused to accept the idea of such a conference,
but at the same time the German Ambassador in London, Prince
Lichnowski, was instructed to say that the principle of such a
conference, or at least of mediation by the four Powers, was agreeable
to Berlin. _The meaning of this double move was that the German
Government would do everything it could to retard the entry into the
business of the Western Powers, but would do nothing to prevent
Russia, Servia, and the Slav civilization as a whole from suffering
final humiliation or war._

That game was played by Germany clumsily enough for nearly a full
week. Austria declared war upon Servia upon Monday the 27th; but we
now know that her intention of meeting Russia halfway, when she saw
that Russia would not retire, was stopped by the direct intervention
of the Prussian Government. In public the German Foreign Office still
pretended that it was seeking some way out of the crisis. In private
it prevented Austria from giving way an inch from her extraordinary
demands. And all the while Germany was secretly making her first
preparations for war.

It might conceivably be argued by a special pleader that war was not
the only intention of Berlin, as most undoubtedly it had not been the
only intention of Vienna. Such a plea would be false, but one can
imagine its being advanced. What is not capable even of discussion is
the fact that both the Germanic Powers, under the unquestioned
supremacy of Prussia, _were_ determined to push Russia into the
dilemma between an impossible humiliation and defeat in the field.
They allowed for the possibility that she would prefer humiliation,
because they believed it barely possible (though all was ready for the
invasion of France at a moment already fixed) that the French would
again fail to support their ally. But war was fixed, and its date was
fixed, with Russia, or even with Russia and France, and the Germanic
Powers arranged to be ready before their enemies. In order to effect
this it was necessary to deceive the West at least into believing that
war could after all be avoided.

One last incident betrays in the clearest manner how thoroughly
Prussia had determined on war, and on a war to break out at her own
chosen moment. It was as follows:

As late as Thursday, the 30th of July, Austria was still willing to
continue a discussion with Russia. The Austrian Government on that day
expressed itself as willing to reopen negotiations with Russia. The
German Ambassador at Vienna got wind of this. He communicated it at
once to Berlin. _Germany immediately stopped any compromise, by
framing that very night and presenting upon the next day, Friday the
31st, an ultimatum to Russia and to France._

Now, the form of these two ultimata and the events connected with them
are again to be carefully noted, for they further illuminate us upon
the German plan. That to Russia, presented by the German Ambassador
Portales, had been prepared presupposing the just possible humiliation
and giving way of Russia; and all those who observed this man's
attitude and manner upon discovering that Russia would indeed fight
rather than suffer the proposed humiliation, agreed that it was the
attitude and manner of an anxious man. The ultimatum to France had,
upon the contrary, not the marks of coercion, but of unexpected and
violent haste. If Russia was really going to fight, what could Prussia
be sure of in the West? It was the second great and crude blunder of
Prussian diplomacy that, instead of making any efforts to detach
France from Russia, it first took the abandonment of Russia by France
for granted, and then, with extreme precipitancy, asked within the
least possible delay whether France would fight. That precipitancy
alone lent to the demand a form which ensured the exact opposite of
what Prussia desired.

This double misconception of the effect of her diplomatic action
dates, I say, from Friday, the 31st of July, and that day is the true
opening day of the great war. Upon Sunday, the 2nd of August, the
German army violated the neutrality of Luxembourg, seizing the railway
passing through that State into France, and pouring into its neutral
territory her covering troops. On the same day, the French general
mobilization was ordered; the French military authorities having lost,
through the double action of Germany, about five days out of, say,
eleven--nearly half the mobilization margin--by which space of time
German preparations were now ahead of theirs.

There followed, before the action state of general European conflict,
the third German blunder, perhaps the most momentous, and certainly
the most extraordinary: that by which Germany secured the hitherto
exceedingly uncertain intervention of England against herself.

Of all the great Powers involved, Great Britain had most doubtfully to
consider whether she should or should not enter the field.

On the one hand, she was in moral agreement with Russia and France; on
the other hand, she was bound to them by no direct alliance, and
successive British Governments had, for ten years past, repeatedly
emphasized the fact that England was free to act or not to act with
France according as circumstances might decide her.

Many have criticized the hesitation, or long weighing of circumstance,
which astonished us all in the politicians during these few days, but
no one, whether friendly to or critical of a policy of neutrality, can
doubt that such a policy was not only a possible but a probable one.
The Parliamentarians were not unanimous, the opposition to the great
responsibility of war was weighty, numerous, and strong. The
financiers, who are in many things the real masters of our
politicians, were all for standing out. In the face of such a
position, in the crisis of so tremendous an issue, Germany, instead of
acting as best she could to secure the neutrality of Great Britain,
simply took that neutrality for granted!

Upon one specific point a specific question was asked of her
Government. To Great Britain, as we have seen in these pages, the
keeping from the North Sea coast of all great hostile Powers is a
vital thing. The navigable Scheldt, Antwerp, the approaches to the
Straits of Dover, are, and have been since the rise of British
sea-power, either in the hands of a small State or innocuous to us
through treaty. Today they are the possession of Belgium, an
independent State erected by treaty after the great war, and
neutralized by a further guarantee in 1839. This neutrality of Belgium
had been guaranteed in a solemn treaty not only by France and England,
but by Prussia herself; and the British Government put to the French
and to the Germans alike the question whether (now they were at war)
that neutrality would be respected. The French replied in the
affirmative; the Germans, virtually, in the negative. But it must not
be said that this violation of international law and of her own word
by Germany automatically caused war with England.

_The German Ambassador was not told that if Belgian territory was
violated England would fight_; he was only told that if that territory
were violated England _might_ fight.

The Sunday passed without a decision. On Monday the point was, as a
matter of form, laid before Parliament, though the House of Commons
has no longer any real control over great national issues. In a speech
which certainly inclined towards English participation in the war
should Germany invade Belgium, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs
summed up the situation before a very full House.

In the debate that followed many, and even passionate, speeches were
delivered opposing the presence of England in the field and claiming
neutrality. Some of these speeches insisted upon the admiration felt
by the speaker for modern Germany and Prussia; others the ill judgment
of running the enormous risk involved in such a campaign. These
protests will be of interest to history, but the House of Commons as a
whole had, of course, no power in the matter, and sat only to register
the decisions of its superiors. There was in the Cabinet resignation
of two members, in the Ministry the resignation of a third, the
threatened resignation of many more.

Meanwhile, upon that same day, August 3rd, following with
superstitious exactitude the very hour upon which, on the very same
day, the French frontier had been crossed in 1870, the Germans entered
Belgian territory.

The Foreign Office's thesis underlying the declaration of its
spokesman, Sir Edward Grey, carried the day with the politicians in
power, and upon Tuesday, August 4th, Great Britain joined Russia and
France, at war with the Prussian Power. There followed later the
formal declaration of war by France as by England against Austria, and
with the first week in August the general European struggle had
opened.




PART II.

THE FORCES OPPOSED.


Here, then, at the beginning of August 1914, are the five great Powers
about to engage in war.

Russia, France, and Great Britain, whom we will call the Allies, are
upon one side; the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, whom we will
call the Germanic Powers, are upon the other.

We must at the outset, if we are to understand the war at all, see how
these two combatant groups stood in strength one against the other
when the war broke out. And to appreciate this contrast we must know
two things--their geographical situation, and their respective weight
in arms. For before we can judge the chances of two opponents in war,
we have to know how they stand physically one to the other upon the
surface of the earth, or we cannot judge how one will attack the
other, or how each will defend itself against the other. And we must
further be able to judge the numbers engaged both at the beginning of
the struggle and arriving in reinforcement as the struggle proceeds,
because upon those numbers will mainly depend the final result.

Having acquired these two fundamental pieces of information, we must
acquire a third, which is _the theories of war_ held upon either side,
and some summary showing which of these theories turned out in
practice to be right, and which wrong.

For, after a long peace, the fortune of the next war largely depends
upon which of various guesses as to the many changes that have taken
place in warfare and in weapons will be best supported by practice,
and what way of using new weapons will prove the most effective. Until
the test of war is applied, all this remains guess-work; but under the
conditions of war it ceases to be guess-work, and becomes either
corroborated by experience or exploded, as the case may be. And of two
opponents after a long peace, that one which has had the most
foresight and has guessed best what the effect of changes in armament
and the rest will effect in practice is that one who has the best
chance of victory.

We are going, then, in this Second Part, of the little book, to see,
first, the geographical position of the belligerents; secondly, their
effective numbers; and, thirdly, what theories of war each held, and
how far each was right or wrong.


(1) THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF THE BELLIGERENTS.

The position of the original belligerent countries (excluding Turkey)
upon the map of Europe was that which will be seen upon the
accompanying sketch map.

Of this belligerent area, which is surrounded by a thick black line,
the part left white represents the territory of the Allies at the
origin of the war--Great Britain, France, Russia, and Servia. This
reservation must, however, be made: that in the case of Russia only
the effective part is shown, and only the European part at that;
Arctic Russia and Siberia are omitted. The part lightly shaded with
cross lines represents the Germanic body--to wit, the German Empire
and Austria-Hungary.

1. The first thing that strikes the eye upon such a map is the great
size of the Germanic body.

[Illustration: Sketch 4.]

When one reads that "Germany" was being attacked by not only France
and England, but also Russia; when one reads further that in the Far
East, in Asia, Japan was putting in work for the Allies; and when one
goes on to read that Belgium added her effort of resistance to the
"German" invasion, one gets a false impression that one single nation
was fighting a vast coalition greatly superior to it. Most people had
an impression of that kind, in this country at least, at the outset of
the war. It was this impression that led to the equally false
impression that "Germany" must necessarily be beaten, and probably
quickly beaten.

The truth was, of course, that we were fighting something very much
bigger than "Germany." We set out to fight something more than twice
as big as Germany in area, and very nearly twice as big as the German
Empire in mere numbers. For what we set out to fight was not the
German Empire, but the German Empire _plus_ the whole of the dominions
governed by the Hapsburg dynasty at Vienna.

How weighty this Germanic body was geographically is still more
clearly seen if we remember that Russia north of St. Petersburg is
almost deserted of inhabitants, and that the true European areas of
population which are in conflict--that is, the fairly well populated
areas--are more accurately represented by a modification of the map
on page 81 in some such form as that on page 84, where the comparative
density of population is represented by the comparative distances
between the parallel cross-lines.

2. The next thing that strikes one is the position of the neutral
countries. Supposing Belgium to have remained neutral, or, rather, to
have allowed German armies to pass over her soil without actively
resisting, the Germanic body would have been free to trade with
neutral countries, and to receive support from their commerce, and to
get goods through them over the whole of their western front, with the
exception of the tiny section which stands for the frontier common to
France and Germany. On the north, supposing the Baltic to be open, the
Germanic body had a vast open frontier of hundreds of miles, and
though Russia closed most of the eastern side, all the Roumanian
frontier was open, and so was the frontier of the Adriatic, right away
from the Italian border to Cattaro. So was the Swiss frontier and the
Italian.

[Illustration: Sketch 5.]

Indeed, if we draw the Germanic body by itself surrounded by a
frontier of dots, as in the accompanying sketch, and mark in a thick
line upon that frontier those parts which touched on enemy's
territory, and were therefore closed to supply, we shall be
immediately arrested by the comparatively small proportion of that
frontier which is thus closed.

[Illustration: Sketch 6.]

It is well to carry this in mind during the remainder of our study of
this war, because it has a great effect upon the fighting power of
Germany and Austria after a partial--but very partial--blockade is
established by the Allied and especially by the British naval power.

3. The third thing that strikes one in such a map of the belligerent
area is the way in which the Germanic body stands in the middle facing
its two groups of enemies East and West.


_The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Germanic Body_.

With this last point we can begin a comparison of the advantages and
disadvantages imposed by geographical conditions upon the two
opponents, and first of these we will consider the geographical
advantages and disadvantages of the Germanic body--that is, of the
Austrian and German Empires--passing next to the corresponding
advantages and disadvantages of the Allies.

The advantages proceeding from geographical position to Germany in
particular, and to the Germanic body as a whole, gravely outweigh the
disadvantages. We will consider the disadvantages first.

The chief disadvantage under which the Germanic body suffered in this
connection was that, from the outset of hostilities, it had to fight,
as the military phrase goes, upon two fronts. That is, the commanders
of the German and Austrian armies had to consider two separate
campaigns, to keep them distinct in their minds, and to co-ordinate
them so that they should not, by wasting too many men on the East or
the West, weaken themselves too much on the other side of the field.

To this disadvantage some have been inclined to add that the central
position of Austria and Germany in Europe helped the British and
Allied blockade (I repeat, a very partial, timid, and insufficient
blockade) of their commerce.

But this view is erroneous. The possibility of blockading
Austria-Hungary and Germany from imports across the ocean was due not
to their central but to their continental position; to the fact that
they were more remote from the ocean than France and Great Britain. It
had nothing to do with their central position between the two groups
of the Allies.

Supposing, for instance, that Germany and Austria-Hungary had stood
where Russia stands, and that Western Europe had been in alliance
against them. Then they would have been in no way central; their
position would have been an extreme position upon one side; and yet,
so far as blockading goes, the blockade of them would have been
infinitely easier.

Conversely, if Germany and Austria had been in the west, where Great
Britain and France are, their enemies lying to the east of them could
not have blockaded them at all.

As things are the blockade that has been established exists but is
partial. As will be seen upon the following sketch map, the British
Fleet, being sufficiently powerful, can search vessels the cargoes of
which might reach the Germanic body directly through the Strait of
Gibraltar (1), the Strait of Dover (2), or the North Sea between
Scotland and Norway (3). But it is unable to prevent supplies reaching
the Germanic body from Italy, whether by land or by sea (4), or
through Switzerland (5), or through Holland (6), or through Denmark
(7), or across the frontier of Roumania (8); or, so long as the German
Fleet is strongest in the Baltic, by way of Norway and Sweden across
the Baltic (9).

[Illustration: Sketch 7.]

The blockading fleet is even embarrassed as to the imports the
Germanic body receives indirectly through neutral countries--that is,
imports not produced in the importing countries themselves, but
provided through the neutral countries as middlemen.

It is embarrassed in three ways.

(_a_) Because it does not want to offend the European neutral
countries, which count in the general European balance of power.

(_b_) Because it does not wish to offend Powers outside Europe which
are neutral in this war, and particularly the United States. Such
great neutral Powers are very valuable not only for their moral
support if it can be obtained, but on account of their great financial
resources untouched by this prolonged struggle, and, what lies behind
these, their power of producing materials which the Allies need just
as much as Austria and Germany do.

(_c_) Because, even if you watch the supplies of contraband to
neutrals, and propose to stop supplies obviously destined for German
use, you cannot prevent Germany from buying the same material "made
up" by the neutral: for example, an Italian firm can import copper ore
quite straightforwardly, smelt it, and offer the metal in the open
market. There is nothing to prevent a German merchant entering that
market and purchasing, unless Italy forbids all export of copper,
which it is perfectly free not to do.

To leave this side question of blockade, and to return to the relative
advantages and disadvantages of our enemy's central position, we may
repeat as a summary of its disadvantages the single truth that it
compels our enemy to fight upon two fronts.

All the rest is advantage.

It is an advantage that Germany and Austria-Hungary, as a corollary to
their common central position, are in some part of similar race and
altogether of a common historical experience. For more than a hundred
years every part of the area dominated by the Germanic body--with the
exception of Bosnia and Alsace-Lorraine--has had a fairly intimate
acquaintance with the other part. The Magyars of Hungary, the Poles of
Galicia, of Posen, of Thorn, the Croats of the Adriatic border, the
Czechs of Bohemia, have nothing in race or language in common with
German-speaking Vienna or German-speaking Berlin. But they have the
experience of generations uniting them with Vienna and with Berlin.
In administration, and to some extent in social life, a common
atmosphere spreads over this area, nearly all of which, as I have
said, has had something in common for a hundred years, and much of
which has had something in common for a thousand.

In a word, as compared with the Allies, the Germanic central body in
Europe has a certain advantage of moral homogeneity, especially as the
governing body throughout is German-speaking and German in feeling.

That is the first point of advantage--a moral one.

The second is more material. The Governments of the two countries,
their means of communication and of supply, are all in touch one with
another. Those governments are working in one field within a ring
fence, and working for a common object. They are not only spiritually
in touch; they are physically in touch. An administrator in Berlin can
take the night express after dinner and breakfast with his
collaborator in Vienna the next morning.

It so happens, also, that the communications of the two Germanic
empires are exactly suited to their central position. There is
sufficient fast communication from north to south to serve all the
purposes necessary to the intellectual conduct of a war; there is a
most admirable communication from east to west for the material
conduct of that war upon two fronts. Whenever it may be necessary to
move troops from the French frontier to the Russian, or from the
Russian to the French, or for Germany to borrow Hungarian cavalry for
the Rhine, or for Austria to borrow German army corps to protect
Galicia, all that is needed is three or four days in which to entrain
and move these great masses of men. There is no area in Europe which
is better suited by nature for thus fighting upon two land frontiers
than is the area of the combined Austrian and German Empire.

With these three points, then--the great area of our enemy in Europe,
his advantage through neutral frontiers, and his advantage in
homogeneity of position between distant and morally divided
Allies--you have the chief marks of the geographical position he
occupies, in so far as this is the great central position of
continental Europe.

But it so happens that the Germanic body in general, and the German
Empire in particular, suffer from grave geographical disadvantages
attached to their political character. And of these I will make my
next points.

The Germanic body as a whole suffers by its geographical disposition,
coupled with its political constitution, a grave disadvantage in its
struggle against the Allies, particularly towards the East, because
just that part of it which is thrust out and especially assailable by
Russia happens to be the part most likely to be disaffected to the
whole interests of the Germanic body; and how this works I will
proceed to explain.

Here are two oblongs--A, left blank, and B, lightly shaded. Supposing
these two oblongs combined to represent the area of two countries
which are in alliance, and which are further so situated that B is the
weaker Power to the alliance both (1) in his military strength, and
(2) in his tenacity of purpose. Next grant that B is divided by the
dotted line, CD, into two halves--B not being one homogeneous State,
but two States, B1 and B2.

Next let it be granted that while B1 is more likely to remain attached
in its alliance to A, B2 is more separate from the alliance in moral
tendency, and is also materially the weaker half of B. Finally, let
the whole group, AB, be subject to the attack of enemies from the
right and from the left (from the right along the arrows XX, and from
the left along the arrows YY) by two groups of enemies represented by
the areas M and N respectively.

[Illustration: Sketch 8.]

It is obvious that in such a situation, if A is the chief object of
attack, and is the Power which has both provoked the conflict and made
itself the chief object of assault by M and N, A is by this
arrangement in a position _politically_ weak.

That is, the strategical position of A is gravely embarrassed by the
way in which his ally, B, separated into the two halves, B1 and B2,
stands with regard to himself. B2 is isolated and thrust outward. The
enemy, M, upon the right, attacking along the lines XX, may be able to
give B2 a very bad time before he gets into the area of B1, and long
before he gets into the area of the stronger Power, A. It is open to M
so to harass B2 that B2 is prepared to break with B1 and give up the
war; or, if the bond between B2 and B1 is strong enough, to persuade
B1 to give up the struggle at the same time that he does. And if B2 is
thus harassed to the breaking-point, the whole alliance, A plus B,
will lose the men and materials and wealth represented by B2, and
_may_ lose the whole shaded area, B, leaving A to support singly for
the future the combined attacks of M and N along the lines of attack,
XX and YY.

Now, that diagram accurately represents the political embarrassment in
strategy of the German-Austro-Hungarian alliance. B1 is Austria and
Bohemia; B2 is Hungary; A is the German Empire; M is the Russians; N
is the Allies in the West. With a geographical arrangement such as
that of the Germanic alliance, a comparatively small proportion of the
Russian forces detached to harry the Hungarian plain can make the
Hungarians, who have little moral attachment to the Austrians and none
whatever to the Germans, abandon the struggle to save themselves;
while it is possible that this outlier, being thus detached, will drag
with it its fellow-half, the Austrian half of the dual monarchy, cause
the Government of the dual monarchy to sue for peace, and leave the
German Empire isolated to support the undivided attention of the
Russians from the East and of the French from the West.

It is clear that if a strong Power, A, allied with and dependent for
large resources in men upon a weaker Power, B, is attacked from the
left and from the right, the ideal arrangement for the strong Power,
A, would be something in the nature of the following diagram (Sketch
9), where the weaker Power stands protected in the territory of the
stronger Power, and where of the two halves of the weaker Power, B2,
the less certain half, is especially protected from attack.

[Illustration: Sketch 9.]

Were Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Rhineland, upon the one
hand, the Hungarian plain, Russian Poland, and East Prussia, upon the
other hand, united in one strong, patriotic, homogeneous
German-speaking group with the Government of Berlin and the Baltic
plain, and were Bavaria, Switzerland, the Tyrol, Bohemia, to
constitute the weaker and less certain ally, while the least certain
half of that uncertain ally lay in Eastern Bohemia and in what is now
Lower Austria, well defended from attack upon the East, the conditions
would be exactly reversed, and the Austro-German alliance would be
geographically and politically of the stronger sort. As it is, the
combined accidents of geography and political circumstance make it
peculiarly vulnerable.

[Illustration: Sketch 10.]

Having already considered in a diagram the way in which the
geographical disposition of Austria-Hungary weakens Germany in the
face of the Allies, let us translate that diagram into terms of actual
political geography. These two oblongs, with their separate parts,
are, as a fact, as follows: Where A is the German Empire, the shaded
portion, B, is Austria-Hungary, and this last divided into B1, the
more certain Austrian part, and B2, the less certain exposed
Hungarian part, the latter of which is only protected from Russian
assault by the Carpathian range of mountains, CCC, with its passes at
DDD. M, the enemy on the right, Russia, is attacking the alliance, AB,
along XX; while the enemy on the left, N, France and her Allies, is
attacking along the lines YY.

Hungary, B2, is not only geographically an outlier, but politically is
the weakest link in the chain of the Austro-Germanic alliance. The
area of Hungary is almost denuded of men, for most of these have been
called up to defend Germany, A, and in particular to prevent the
invasion of Germany's territory in Silesia at S. The one defence
Hungary has against being raided and persuaded to an already tempting
peace is the barrier of the Carpathian mountains, CCC. When or if the
passes shall be in Russian possession and the Russian cavalry reappear
upon the Hungarian side of the hills, the first great political
embarrassment of the enemy will have begun--I mean the first great
political embarrassment to his strategy.

(_a_) Shall he try to defend those passes above all? Then he must
detach German corps, and detach them very far from the areas which are
vital to the core of the alliance--that is, to the German Empire, A.

(_b_) Shall he use only Hungarian troops to defend Hungary? Then he
emphasizes the peculiar moral isolation of Hungary, and leaves her
inclined, if things go ill, to make a separate peace.

(_c_) Shall he abandon Hungary? And let the Russians do what they will
with the passes over the Carpathians and raid the Hungarian plain at
large? Then he loses a grave proportion of his next year's wheat, much
of his dwindling horse supply, his almost strangled sources of petrol.
He tempts Roumania to come in (for a great sweep of Eastern Hungary is
nationally Roumanian); and he loses the control in men and financial
resources of one-half of his Allies if the danger and the distress
persuade Hungary to stand out. For the Hungarians have no quarrel
except from their desire to dominate the southern Slavs; to fight
Austria's battles means very little to them, and to fight Germany's
battles means nothing at all.

There is, of course, much more than this. If Hungary dropped out,
could Austria remain? Would not the Government at Vienna, rather than
lose the dual monarchy, follow Hungary's lead? In that case, the
Germanic alliance would lose at one stroke eleven-twenty-fifths of its
men. It would lose more than half of its reserves of men, for the
Austrian reserve is, paradoxically enough, larger than the German
reserve, though not such good material.

Admire how in every way this geographical and political problem of
Hungary confuses the strategical plan of the German General Staff!
They cannot here act upon pure strategics. They _cannot_ treat the
area of operations like a chessboard, and consider the unique object
of inflicting a military defeat upon the Russians. Their inability to
do so proceeds from the fact that this great awkward salient,
Hungarian territory, is not politically subject to Berlin, is not in
spiritual union with Berlin; may be denuded of men to save Berlin, and
is the most exposed of all our enemy's territory to attack. Throughout
the war it will be found that this problem perpetually presents itself
to the Great General Staff of the Prussians: "How can we save Hungary
without weakening our Eastern line? If we abandon Hungary, how are we
to maintain our effectives?"

Such, in detail, is the political embarrassment to German strategy
produced by the geographical situation and the political traditions of
Hungary itself, and of Hungary's connection with the Hapsburgs at
Vienna. Let us now turn to the even more important embarrassment
caused to German strategy by the corner positions of the four
essential areas of German territory.

This last political weakness attached to geographical condition
concerns the German Empire alone.

Let us suppose a Power concerned to defend itself against invasion and
situated between two groups of enemies, from the left and from the
right, we will again call that Power A, the enemy upon the right M,
and the enemy upon the left N, the first attacking along the lines XX,
and the second along the lines YY.

Let us suppose that A has _political_ reasons for particularly
desiring to save from invasion four districts, the importance of
which I have indicated on Sketch 12 by shading, and which I have
numbered 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Illustration: Sketch 11.]

Let us suppose that those four districts happen to lie at the four
exposed corners of the area which A has to defend. The Government of A
knows it to be essential to success in the war that his territory
should not be invaded. Or, at least, if it is invaded, it must not,
under peril of collapse, be invaded in the shaded areas.

It is apparent upon the very face of such a diagram, that with the
all-important shaded areas situated in the corners of his
quadrilateral, A is heavily embarrassed. He must disperse his forces
in order to protect all four. If wastage of men compels him to
shorten his line on the right against M, he will be immediately
anxious as to whether he can dare sacrifice 4 to save 2, or whether he
should run the dreadful risk of sacrificing 2 to save 4.

[Illustration: Sketch 12.]

If wastage compels him to shorten his defensive line upon the left, he
is in a similar quandary between 1 and 3.

The whole situation is one in which he is quite certain that a
defensive war, long before he is pushed to extremities, will compel
him to "scrap" one of the four corners, yet each one is, for some
political reason, especially dear to him and even perhaps necessary to
him. Each he desires, with alternating anxieties and indecisions, to
preserve at all costs from invasion; yet he cannot, as he is forced
upon the defensive, preserve all four.

Here, again, the ideal situation for him would be to possess against
the invader some such arrangement as is suggested by Sketch 11. In
this arrangement, if one were compelled unfortunately to consider four
special districts as more important than the mass of one's territory,
one would have the advantage of knowing that they were clearly
distinguishable into less and more important, and the further
advantage of knowing that the more important the territory was, the
more central it was and the better protected against invasion.

Thus, in this diagram, the government of the general oblong, A, may
distinguish four special zones, the protection of which from invasion
is important, but which vary in the degree of their importance. The
least important is the outermost, 1; the more important is an inner
one, 2; still more important is 3; and most important of all is the
black core of the whole.

Some such arrangement has been the salvation of France time and time
again, notably in the Spanish wars, and in the wars of Louis XIV., and
in the wars of the Revolution. To some extent you have seen the same
thing in the present war.

To save Paris was exceedingly important, next came the zone outside
Paris, and so on up to the frontier.

But with the modern German Empire it is exactly the other way, and the
situation is that which we found in Sketch 12; the four external
corners are the essentials which must be preserved from invasion, and
if any one of them goes, the whole political situation is at once in
grave peril.

The strategical position of modern Germany is embarrassed because each
of these four corners must be saved by the armies. 1 is
Belgium--before the war indifferent to Germany, but now destined to be
vital to her position--2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is
Silesia, and the German commanders, as well as the German Government,
must remain to the last moment--if once they are thrown on the
defensive--in grave indecision as to which of the four can best be
spared when invasion threatens; or else, as is more probable, they
must disperse their forces in the attempt to hold all four at once. It
is a situation which has but rarely occurred before in the history of
war, and which has always proved disastrous.

Germany then must--once she is in Belgium--hold on to Belgium, or she
is in peril; she must hold on to East Prussia, or she is in peril; she
must hold on to Alsace-Lorraine, or she is in peril; and she must hold
on to Silesia, or it is all up with her. If there were some common
strategical factor binding these four areas together, so that the
defence of one should involve and aid the defence of all, the
difficulties thus imposed upon German strategy would be greatly
lessened. Though even then the mere having to defend four outlying
corners instead of a centre would produce confusion and embarrassment
the moment numerical inferiority had appeared upon the side of the
defence. But, as a fact, there is no such common factor.
Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium, East Prussia and Silesia, stand
strategically badly separated one from the other. Even the two on the
East and the two on the West, though apparently forming pairs upon the
map, are not dependent on one system of communications, and are cut
off from each other by territory difficult or hostile, while between
the Eastern and the Western group there is a space of five hundred
miles.

Let us, before discussing the political embarrassment to strategy
produced by these four widely distant and quite separate areas,
translate the diagram in the terms of a sketch map.

On the following sketch map, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia,
and Silesia are shaded, as were the four corners of the diagram. No. 1
is Belgium, 2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is Silesia. The
area occupied by the German Empire, including its present occupation
of Belgium, is marked by the broad outline; and the areas shaded
represent, not the exact limits of the four territories that are so
important, but those portions of them which are essential: the
non-Polish portion of Silesia, the non-Polish portion of East Prussia,
the plain of Belgium, and all Alsace-Lorraine.

[Illustration: Sketch 13.]

Now the reason that each of these must at all costs be preserved from
invasion is, as I have said, different in each case, and we shall do
well to examine what those reasons are; for upon them depends the
political hesitation they inevitably, cause to arise in the plans of
the Great General Staff.

1. _Belgium._ The military annexation of Belgium has been a result of
the war, and, from the German point of view, an unexpected result.
Germany both hoped and expected that her armies would pass through
Belgium as they did, in fact, pass through Luxembourg. The resistance
of Belgium produced the military annexation of that country; the reign
of terror exercised therein has immobilized about 100,000 of the
German troops who would otherwise be free for the front; the checking
of the advance into France has turned the German general political
objective against England, and, to put the matter in the vaguest but
most fundamental terms, the German mind has gradually come, since
October, to regard the retention of Belgium as something quite
essential. And this because:--(_a_) It gives a most weighty asset in
the bargaining for peace. (_b_) It gives a seaboard against England.
(_c_) It provides ample munition, house-room, and transport facility,
without which the campaign in North-eastern France could hardly be
prolonged. (_d_) It puts Holland at the mercy of Germany, for she can,
by retaining Belgium, strangle Dutch trade, if she chooses to divert
her carriage of goods through Belgian ports. (_e_) It is a specific
conquest; the Government will be able to say to the German people, "It
is true we had to give up this or that, but Belgium is a definite new
territory, the occupation of which and the proposed annexation of
which is a proof of victory." (_f_) The retention of Belgium has been
particularly laid down as the cause of quarrel between Great Britain
and Germany; to retain Belgium is to mark that score against what is
now the special enemy of Germany in the German mind. (_g_) Antwerp is
the natural port for all the centre of Europe in commerce westward
over the ocean. (_h_) With Belgium may go the Belgian colonies--that
is, the Congo--for the possession of which Germany has worked
ceaselessly year in and year out during the last fifteen years by a
steady and highly subsidized propaganda against the Belgian
administration. She has done it through conscious and unconscious
agents; by playing upon the cupidity of French and British
Parliamentarians, of rum shippers, upon religious differences, and
upon every agency to her hand.

We may take it, then, that the retention of Belgium is in German eyes
now quite indispensable. "If I abandon Belgium," she says, "it is much
more than a strategic retreat; it is a political confession of
failure, and the moral support behind me at home will break down."

If I were writing not of calculable considerations, but of other and
stronger forces, I should add that to withdraw from Belgium, where so
many women and children have been massacred, so many jewels of the
past befouled or destroyed, so wanton an attack upon Christ and His
Church delivered, would be a loss of Pagan prestige intolerably
strong, and a triumph of all that against which Prussia set out to
war.

2. _Alsace-Lorraine._ But Alsace-Lorraine is also "indispensable." We
have seen on an earlier page what the retention of that territory
means. Alsace-Lorraine is the symbol of the old victory. It is the
German-speaking land which the amazingly unreal superstitions of
German academic pedantry discovered to be something sacredly necessary
to the unity of an ideal Germany, though the people inhabiting it
desired nothing better than the destruction of the Prussian name. It
is more than that. It is the bastion beyond the Rhine which keeps the
Rhine close covered; it is the two great historic fortresses of
Strassburg and Metz which are the challenge Germany has thrown down
against European tradition and the civilization of the West; it is
something which has become knit up with the whole German soul, and to
abandon it is like a man abandoning his title or his name, or
surrendering his sword. Through what must not the German mind pass
before its directors would consent to the sacrifice of such a
fundamentally symbolic possession? There is defeat in the very
suggestion; and the very suggestion, though it has already occurred to
the Great General Staff, and has already, I believe, been mentioned in
one proposal for peace, would be intolerable to the mass of the
enemy's opinion.

3. _East Prussia._ East Prussia is sacred in another, but also an
intense fashion. It is the very kernel of the Prussian monarchy. When
Berlin was but a market town for the Electors of Brandenburg, those
same Electors had contrived that East Prussia, which was outside the
empire, should be recognized as a kingdom. Frederick the Great's
father, while of Brandenburg an Elector, was in Prussia proper a king,
a man who had emancipated that cradle of the Prussian power. The
province in all save its southern belt (which is Polish) is the very
essence of Prussian society: a mass of serfs, technically free,
economically abject, governed by those squires who own them, their
goods, and what might be their soil. The Russians wasted East Prussia
in their first invasion, and they did well though they paid so heavy a
price, for to wound East Prussia was to wound the very soul of that
which now governs the German Empire. When the landed proprietors fled
before the Russian invasion, and when there fled with them the
townsfolk, the serfs rose and looted the country houses. In a way
quite different from Belgium, quite different from Alsace-Lorraine,
East Prussia is essential. Forces will and must be sent periodically
to defend that territory, however urgently they may be needed
elsewhere, as the pressure upon Germany increases. The German
commanders, if they forget East Prussia for a moment in the
consideration of the other essential points, will, the moment their
eyes are turned upon East Prussia again, remember with violent emotion
all that the province means to the reigning dynasty and its
supporters, and they will do anything rather than let that frontier
go. The memory of the first invasion is too acute, the terror of its
repetition too poignant, to permit its abandonment.

4. _Silesia._ Silesia, for quite other reasons (and remember that
these different reasons for defending such various points are the
essence of the embarrassment in which German strategy will find
itself), must be saved. It has been insisted over and over again in
these pages what Silesia means. Its meaning is twofold. If Silesia
goes, the safest, the most remote from the sea, the most independent
of imports of the German industrial regions, is gone. Silesia is,
again, the country of the great proprietors. Amuse yourselves by
remembering the names of Pless and of Lichnowsky. There are dozens of
others. But, most important of all, Silesia is what Belgium is not,
what Alsace-Lorraine is not, what East Prussia is not--it is the
strategic key. Who holds Silesia commands the twin divergent roads to
Berlin northwards, to Vienna southwards. Who holds Silesia holds the
Moravian Gate. Who holds Silesia turns the line of the Oder, and
passes behind the barrier fortresses which Germany has built upon her
Eastern front. Who holds Silesia strikes his wedge in between the
German-speaking north and the German-speaking south, and joins hands
with the Slavs of Bohemia. Not that we should exaggerate the Slav
factor, for religion and centuries of varying culture disturb its
unity. But it is something. The Russian forces are Slav; the
resurrection of Poland has been promised; the Czechs are not
submissive to the German claim of natural mastery, and whoever holds
Silesia throws a bridge between Slav and Slav if his aims are an
extension of power in that race. For a hundred reasons Silesia must be
saved.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now put yourself in the position of the men who must make a decision
between these four outliers--Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia,
and Silesia--and understand the hesitation such divergent aims impose
upon them. Hardly are they prepared to sacrifice one of the four when
the defensive problem becomes acute, but its claims will be pressed in
every conceivable manner--by public sentiment, by economic
considerations, by mere strategy, by a political tradition, by the
influence of men powerful with the Prussian monarchy, whose homes and
wealth are threatened. "If I am to hold Belgium, I must give up
Alsace. How dare I do that? To save Silesia I must expose East
Prussia. How dare I? I am at bay, and the East must at all costs be
saved. I will hold Prussia and Silesia, but to withdraw from Belgium
and from beyond the Rhine is defeat." The whole thing is an embroglio.
That conclusion is necessary and inexorable. It would not appear at
all until, or if, numerical weakness imposed on the enemy a gradual
concentration of the defensive; but once that numerical weakness has
come, the fatal choices must be made. It may be that a strict, silent,
and virile resolution, such as saved France this summer, a
preparedness for particular sacrifices calculated beforehand, will
determine first some one retirement and then another. It may
be--though it is not in the modern Prussian temperament--that a
defensive as prolonged as possible will be attempted even with
inferior numbers, and that, as circumstances may dictate,
Alsace-Lorraine or Belgium, Silesia or East Prussia will be the first
to be deliberately sacrificed; but one must be, and, it would seem,
another after, and in the difficulty of choice a wound to the German
strategy will come.

The four corners are differently defensible--Alsace-Lorraine and
Belgium only by artifice, and with great numbers of men; Silesia only
so long as Austria (and Hungary) stand firm. East Prussia has her
natural arrangement of lakes to make invasion tedious, and to permit
defence with small numbers.

Between the two groups, Eastern and Western, is all the space of
Germany--the space separating Aberdeen from London. Between each part
of each pair, in spite of an excellent railway system, is the block in
the one case of the Ardennes and the Eifel, in the other of empty,
ill-communicated Poland. But each is strategically a separate thing;
the political value of each a separate thing; the embarrassment
between all four insuperable.

Such is the situation imposed by the geography of the European
continent upon our enemies, with the opportunities and the drawbacks
which that situation affords and imposes.

I repeat, upon the balance, our enemies had geographical opportunities
far superior to our own.

Our power of partial blockade (to which I will return in a moment) is
more than counterbalanced by the separation which Nature has
determined between the two groups of Allies. The ice of the North, the
Narrows of the Dardanelles, establish this, as do the Narrows of the
Scandinavian Straits.

The necessity of fighting upon two fronts, to which our enemies are
compelled, is more than compensated by that natural arrangement of the
Danube valley and of the Baltic plain which adds to the advantage of a
central situation the power of rapid communication between East and
West; while the chief embarrassment of our enemies in their
geographical arrangement, which is the outlying situation of Hungary
coupled with the presence of four vital regions at the four external
corners of the German Empire, is rather political than geographical in
nature.

I will now turn to the converse advantages and disadvantages afforded
and imposed by geographical conditions upon the Allies.


_The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Allies._

It has been apparent from the above in what way the geographical
circumstance of Germany and Austria-Hungary advantaged and
disadvantaged those two empires in the course of a war against East
and West.

Let us next see how the Allies were advantaged and disadvantaged by
their position.

1. The first great disadvantage which the Allies most obviously suffer
is their separation one from the other by the Germanic mass.

The same central position which gives Germany and Austria-Hungary
their power of close intercommunion, of exactly coordinating all their
movements, of using their armies like one army, and of dealing with
rapidity alternate blows eastward and westward, produces contrary
effects in the case of the Allies. Even if hourly communication were
possible by telegraph between the two main groups, French and Russian,
that would not be at all the same thing as personal, sustained, and
continuous contact such as is enjoyed by the group of their enemies.

But, as a fact, even the very imperfect and indirect kind of contact
which can be established by telegraphing over great distances is
largely lacking. The French and the Russians are in touch. The
commanders can and do pursue a combined plan. But the communication of
results and the corresponding arrangement of new dispositions are
necessarily slow and gravely interrupted. Indeed, it is, as we shall
see in a moment, one of the main effects of geography upon this
campaign that Russia must suffer during all its early stages a very
severe isolation.

In general, the Allies as a whole suffer from the necessity under
which they find themselves of working in two fields, remote the one
from the other by a distance of some six hundred miles, not even
connected by sea, and geographically most unfortunately independent.

2. A second geographical disadvantage of the Allies consists in the
fact that one of them, Great Britain, is in the main a maritime Power.

That this has great compensating advantages we shall also see, but for
the moment we are taking the disadvantages separately, and, so
counting them one by one, we must recognize that England's being an
island (her social structure industrialized and free from
conscription, her interests not only those of Europe but those of such
a commercial scattered empire as is always characteristic of secure
maritime Powers) produces, in several of its aspects, a geographical
weakness to the Allied position, and that for several reasons, which I
will now tabulate:--

(_a_) The position of England in the past, her very security as an
island, has led her to reject the conception of universal service. She
could only, at the outset of hostilities, provide a small
Expeditionary Force, the equivalent at the most of a thirtieth of the
Allied forces.

(_b_) Her reserves in men who could approach the continental field in,
say, the first year, even under the most vigorous efforts, would never
reach anything like the numbers that could be afforded by a conscript
nation. The very maximum that can be or is hoped for by the most
sanguine is the putting into the field, after at least a year of war,
of less than three-sixteenths of the total Allied forces, although her
population is larger than that of France, and more than a third that
of the enemy.

(_c_) She is compelled to garrison and defend, and in places to
police, dependencies the population of which will in some cases
furnish no addition to the forces of the Allies, and in all cases
furnish but a small proportion.

(_d_) The isolation of her territory by the sea, coupled with her
large population and its industrial character, makes Britain
potentially the most vulnerable point in the alliance.

So long as her fleet is certainly superior to that of the enemy, and
has only to meet oversea attack, this vulnerability is but little
felt; but once let her position at sea be lost, or even left
undecided, or once let the indiscriminate destruction of commercial
marine be seriously begun, and she is at the mercy of that enemy. For
she cannot feed herself save by supplies from without, and she cannot
take part in the supplying of armies with men and munitions upon the
continent.

(_e_) She is open to fear aggression upon any one of her independent
colonies oversea, and yet she is not able to draw upon them for the
whole of their potential strength, or, indeed, for more than a very
small proportion of it. In other words, the British Fleet guarantees
some fifteen million of European race beyond the seas from attack by
the enemy, but cannot draw from these fifteen million more than an
insignificant fraction of the million of men and more which, fully
armed, they might furnish; nor has she any control over their finance,
so as to be able to count upon the full weight of their wealth; nor
can she claim their resources in goods and munitions. She can only
obtain these by paying for them.

There is here a very striking contrast between her position and that
of the Germanic Powers.

(_f_) Her isolation and maritime supremacy, coupled with her
industrial character, make her during the strain of equipment the
workshop of the Allies. That this is a great advantage is evident; but
the disadvantage attaching to it is that very large proportions of her
manhood are necessarily withdrawn from the field for the purposes of
her shipbuilding, her communications, her manufactory of arms and all
kinds of supplies, her seafaring work, both civil and military.

Of the two other main Allies, the French disadvantage may be thus
summarized, and it is slight:--

(_a_) The French political frontier, as established since the defeat
of the French in 1871, is an open frontier. It has no natural features
upon which the defensive can rely. In the lack of this the French
fortified at very heavy expense that portion of their frontier which
faced their certain enemy, and established a line from Verdun to
Belfort calculated to check the first movement of his offensive. But
all the two hundred miles to the north of this, the whole line between
Verdun and the North Sea, was virtually open. There were, indeed,
certain fortified places upon that line, but they formed no
consecutive system, and, as their armaments grew old, they were not
brought up to date. The truth is, that the defence of France upon this
frontier was really left to the co-operation of Belgium. If, as was
believed to be almost certain, Prussian morals being what they are,
the Prussian guarantee to respect Belgian neutrality would be torn up
at the outbreak of war, then three great fortresses--Liege, Namur, and
Antwerp--would hold up the enemy's advance in this quarter, and
perform the function of delay which the obsolete armament of the
north-eastern French frontier could not perform. We shall see, when we
come to the conflicting theories of warfare held by the various
belligerents, what a grievous miscalculation this was, and how largely
it accounted for the first disasters of the war. But, at any rate, let
us remember, as our first point, the absence of any natural line of
defence in France as against a German invasion, remembering, also,
that the French would necessarily, at the beginning of any war, be
upon the defensive on account of their inferior numbers. Had France,
for instance, had along her frontiers, and just within them, such a
line as Germany possesses in the Rhine, she would have fallen back at
the outset upon that line. But she has no such advantage.

(_b_) The second disadvantage of the French geographically is one
immixed with political considerations. The French have for centuries
produced, and have for two thousand years believed in, central
government. For at least three hundred years all the life of the
nation has centred upon Paris; all the railways and all the great
system of roads and most of the waterways of the north similarly have
Paris for their nucleus. Now, this central ganglion of the whole
French organism is but 120 miles from the frontier, ten days' easy
marching. An enemy coming in from the north-east not only finds no
natural obstacle in his way, but has Paris as nearly within his grasp
as, say, Cologne is within the grasp of a French invasion of North
Germany. This feature has had the most important consequences upon the
whole of French history. It was particularly the determining point of
1870.

To meet the handicap, the French of our generation have combined two
policies.

First, they have fortified the whole region of Paris so thoroughly
that it has sometimes been called "a fortified province;" an area of
nearly thirty miles across at its narrowest, and of something like
from seven to eight hundred square miles, is comprised within this
plan.

The weakness of this in the face of modern fire will again be dealt
with when we come to the conflicting theories upon war established
during the long peace.

Secondly, the French established a policy whereby, if Paris were
menaced in a future campaign, the Government should abandon that
central point, and, in spite of the grave inconvenience proceeding
from the way in which all material communications centred upon the
capital and all established offices were grouped there, would withdraw
the whole central system of government to Bordeaux, and leave Paris to
defend itself, precisely as though it were of no more importance than
any other fortified point. They would recognize the strategic values
of the district; they would deliberately sacrifice its political and
sentimental value. They would never again run the risk of losing a
campaign because one particular area of the national soil happened to
be occupied. The plans of their armies and the instructions of their
Staff particularly warned commanders against disturbing any defensive
scheme by too great an anxiety to save Paris.

If this were the disadvantage geographically of France, what was that
of Russia?

Russia's geographical disadvantage was twofold. First, she had no
outlet to an open sea in Europe save through the arctic port of
Archangel. This port was naturally closed for nearly half the year,
and how long it might be artificially kept partially open by
ice-breakers it remained for the war to prove. But even if it were
kept open the whole year in this precarious fashion, it lay on the
farther side of hundreds of miles of waste and deserted land connected
only with the active centre of Russia by one narrow-gauge line of
railway with very little rolling stock. The great eastern port of
Vladivostok was nearly as heavily handicapped, and its immense
distance from the scene of operations in the West, with which it was
only connected by a line six thousand miles long, was another
drawback. Russia might, indeed, by the favour of neutrals or of
Allies, use warm water ports. If the Turks should remain neutral and
permit supply to reach her through the Dardanelles, the Black Sea
ports were open all the year round, and Port Arthur (nearly as far off
as Vladivostok) was also open in the Far East. But the Baltic, in a
war with Germany, was closed to her. Certain goods from outside could
reach her from Scandinavia, round by land along the north of the
Baltic, but very slowly and at great expense. It so happened also
that, as the war proceeded, this question of supply became
unexpectedly important, because all parties found the expenditure of
heavy artillery high-explosive ammunition far larger than had been
calculated for, and Russia was particularly weak therein and dependent
upon the West. This disadvantage under which Russia lay was largely
the cause of her embarrassment, and of the prolongation of hostilities
in the winter that followed the declaration of war.

The fact that Russia was ill supplied with railways, and hardly
supplied at all with hard roads (in a climate where the thaw turned
her deep soil into a mass of mud) is political rather than
geographical, but it must be remembered in connection with this
difficulty of supply.

If these, then, were the various disadvantages which geographical
conditions had imposed upon the Allies, what were the corresponding
advantages?

They were considerable, and may be thus tabulated:--

1. The western Allies stood between their enemies and the ocean. If
they could maintain superiority at sea through the great size and
efficiency of the British Fleet, and through its additional power when
combined with the French, they could at the least embarrass, and
perhaps ultimately starve out the enemy in certain essential materials
of war. They could not reduce the enemy to famine, for with care his
territories, so long as they were not ravaged, would be just
self-supporting. The nitrates for his explosives the enemy could also
command, and, in unlimited quantity, iron and coal. But the raw
material of textiles for his clothing, cotton for his explosives,
copper for his shell, cartridge cases, and electrical instruments,
antimony for the hardening of the lead necessary to his small-arm
ammunition, to some extent petrol for his aeroplanes and his
motor-cars, and india-rubber for his tyres and other parts of
machinery, he must obtain from abroad. That he would be able in part
to obtain these through the good offices of neutrals was probable; but
the Allied fleets in the West would certainly closely watch the extent
of neutral imports, and attempt, with however much difficulty and with
however partial success, to prevent those neutrals acting as a mere
highroad by which such goods could pass into Germany and Austria. They
would hardly allow, especially in the later phases of the war, Italy
and Switzerland, Holland and Scandinavia, to act as open avenues for
the supply of the Germanic body. Though they would have to go warily,
and would find it essential to remain at peace with the nations whose
commerce they thus hampered and in some sense controlled, the Allies
in the West could in some measure, greater or less, embarrass the
enemy in these matters.

Conversely, they could supply themselves freely with tropical and
neutral goods, and even with munitions of war obtained from across the
ocean, from Africa and from America.

So long as North-western France and the ports of Great Britain were
free from the enemy this partial blockade would endure, and this
freedom of supply for France and Britain from overseas would also
endure.

2. The Allies had further the geographical advantage of marine
transport for their troops--an important advantage to the French, who
had a recruiting ground in North Africa, and to the British, who had a
recruiting ground in their dominions oversea, and, above all, an
advantage in that it permitted the constant reinforcement of the
continental armies by increasing contingents arriving from these
islands.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of geographical advantages attaching to the position of Russia only
one can be discovered, and it consists in the immense extent and unity
of the Russian Empire. This permitted operations upon a western front
from the Baltic to the Carpathians, or rather to the Roumanian border,
which vast line could never be firmly held against them by the enemy
when once the Russians had trained and equipped a superior number of
men. The German forces were sufficient, as events proved, long to
maintain a strict cordon upon the shorter front between the Swiss
frontiers and the sea, but upon the other side of the great field,
between the Baltic and the Carpathians, they could never hope to
establish one continued wall of resistance.


(2) THE OPPOSING STRENGTHS.

When nations go to war their probable fortunes, other things being
equal, are to be measured in numbers.

Other things being equal, the numbers one party can bring against the
other in men, coupled with the numbers of weapons, munitions, and
other material, will decide the issue.

But in European civilization other things are more or less equal.
Civilian historians are fond of explaining military results in many
other ways, particularly in terms of moral values that will flatter
the reader. But a military history, however elementary, is compelled
to recognize the truth that normally modern war in Europe has followed
the course of numbers.

Among the very first, therefore, of the tasks set us in examining the
great struggle is a general appreciation of the numbers that were
about to meet in battle, and of their respective preparation in
material.

More than the most general numbers--more than brief, round
statements--I shall not attempt. I shall not do more than state upon
such grounds as I can discover proportions in the terms of single
units--as, to say that one nation stood to another in its immediate
armed men as eight to five, or as two to twenty. Neither shall I give
positive numbers in less than the large fractions of a million. But,
even with such large outlines alone before one, the task is
extraordinarily difficult.

It will almost certainly be found, when full details are available
after the war, that the most careful estimates have been grievously
erroneous in some particular. Almost every statement of fact in this
department can be reasonably challenged, and the evidence upon matters
which in civilian life are amply recorded and easily ascertainable is,
in this department, everywhere purposely confused or falsified.

To the difficulty provided by the desire for concealment necessary in
all military organization, one must add the difficulty presented by
the cross categories peculiar to this calculation. You have to
consider not only the distinction between active and reserve, but also
between men and munitions, between munitions available according to
one theory of war, and munitions available according to another. You
have to modify statical conclusions by dynamic considerations (thus
you have to modify the original numbers by the rate of wastage, and
the whole calculus varies progressively with the lapse of time as the
war proceeds).

In spite of these difficulties, I believe it to be possible to put
before the general reader a clear and simple table of the numbers a
knowledge of which any judgment of the war involves, and to be fairly
certain that this table will, when full details are available, be
discovered not too inaccurate.

We must begin by distinguishing between the two sets of numbers with
which we have to deal--the numbers of men, and the amount of munitions
which these men have to use.

The third essential element, equipment, we need not separately
consider, because, when one says "men" in talking of military affairs,
one only means equipped, trained, and organized men, for no others can
be usefully present in the field.

Let us start, then, with some estimate of the number of men who are
about to take part in battle; let us take for our limits the
convenient limits of a year, and let us divide that space of time
arbitrarily into three parts or periods.

There was a first period in which the nations opposed brought into the
field the men available in the first few weeks for immediate action.
It is not possible to set a precise limit, and to say, "This period
covers the first six" or "the first eight weeks;" but we can say
roughly that, when we are speaking of this first period, we mean the
time during which men for whom the equipment was all ready, whose
progress and munitioning had all been organized, were being as rapidly
as possible brought into play. Such an estimate is not equivalent to
an estimate of the very first numbers that met in the shock of battle;
those numbers were far smaller, and differed according to the rate of
mobilization and the intention of the various parties. The estimate is
only that of the total number which the various parties could, and
therefore did, bring into play before men not hitherto trained as
soldiers, or trained but not believed to be required in the course of
the campaign--according as that campaign had been variously foreseen
by various governments--came in to swell the figures.

The conclusion of this first period would come, of course, gradually
in the case of every combatant, and would come more rapidly in the
case of some than in the case of others. But we are fairly safe if we
take the general turning-point from the first period to the second to
be the month of October 1914. The second period had begun for
some--notably for Germany--with the first days of that month; it had
already appeared for all, especially for England, before the beginning
of November.

The second period is marked for all the combatants by the bringing
into play of such forces as, for various reasons, the Government of
each had once hoped would not be required. The German Empire might
have marked them as not required, in the reasonable hope that victory
would be quickly assured. The British Government might, from a very
different standpoint, have believed them not to be required, because
it regarded the work of its continental Allies as sufficient to gain
the common object, etc. But in the case of all, however various the
motives, the particular mark of this second period is the straining to
put into the field newly trained and equipped bodies which in the
first period were, it was imagined, neither needed nor perhaps
available.

This second period merges very gradually into the third, or final,
period, which is that of the last effort possible to the belligerents.
There comes a moment before the end of the first year when, in the
case of most of the belligerents, every man who is available at all
has been equipped, trained, and put forward, and after which there is
nothing left but the successive batches of yearly recruits growing up
from boyhood to manhood.

Although Britain is in a peculiar position, and Russia, through her
tardiness in equipment, in a peculiar position of another kind, yet
one may fairly say that the vague margin between the second period of
growth and the third period of finality appears roughly somewhere
round the month of June. It will fall earlier with Germany, a good
deal earlier with France; but from the middle of May at earliest to
the end of June at latest may be said to mark the entry of the
numerical factor into its third and final phase.

Let us take these three periods one by one.

The first period is by far the most important to our judgment of the
campaign; a misapprehension of it has warped most political statements
made in this country, and most contemporary judgments of the war as a
whole. It is impossible to get our view of the great European
struggle--of its nature in the bulk--other than fantastically wrong,
if we misapprehend the opening numbers with which it was waged.

There are three ways of getting at those numbers.

The first and worst way is the consulting of general statistics
published before the war broke out. Thus we may see in almanacs the
French army put down as a little over four million, the German at the
same amount, the Russian at about five million, and so forth.

These figures have no relation to reality, because they omit a hundred
modifying considerations--such as the age of the reserves, the degree
of training of the reserves, the organization prepared for the
enrolment of untrained men, etc. The only element in them which is of
real value is the statistics--when we can obtain them--of men actually
present with the colours before mobilization, to which one may add,
perhaps--or at any rate in the case of France and Germany--the numbers
of the _active_ reserve immediately behind the conscript army in
peace.

The second method, which is better, but imperfect, is that which has
particularly appealed to technical writers. It consists in numbering
_units_; in noting the headquarters and the tale of army corps and of
independent divisions.

The fault of this method is twofold. First, that only actual
experience can tell one whether units are really being maintained
during peace at full strength; and secondly, that only actual
experience discovers how many new units can and will be created when
war is joined. In other words, the fault of this method (necessary
though it is as an adjunct to all military calculations) lies in its
divorce from the reality of numbers.

At the end of the retreat from Moscow each army corps of the Grand
Army still preserved its name, each regiment its nominal identity. And
the roll was called by Ney, for instance, before the Beresina,
division by division and regiment by regiment, and even in the
regiments company by company; but in most of these last there was no
one to answer, and there is a story of one regiment for which one
surviving man answered with regularity until he also died. What fights
is numbers of living men--not headings; and if five army corps are
present, each having lost two-fifths of its men, three full army corps
are a match for them.

The third method is that of commonsense. We must deduce from the
results obtained, from the fronts covered, from the energy remaining
after known losses, from the reports of intelligence, from the avenues
of communication available, what least and what largest numbers can be
present. We must correct such conclusions by our previous knowledge of
the way in which each service regards its strength, which most depends
upon reserves, how each uses his depots and drafts, what machinery it
has for training the untrained and for equipping them. This
complicated survey taken, we can arrive at general figures.[1]

Using that method, and applying it to the present campaign, I think we
shall get something like the following.


_The Figures of the First Period, say to October 1-31, 1914._

Germany put across the Rhine in the first period (without counting a
certain small proportion of Hungarian cavalry and Austrian artillery)
rather more than two and a quarter million men. She put into the
Eastern field first a quarter of a million, which rapidly grew to half
a million, and before the end of October to nearly a million; a
balance of rather more than another million she used for filling gaps
and for keeping her strength at the full, and also in particular
cases (as in her violent attempt to break out through Flanders, or
rather the beginning of that attempt) for the immediate reinforcement
of a fighting line. Say that Germany put into the field altogether
five million men in the first period, and you are saying too much. Say
that she put into the field altogether in the first period four and a
quarter million men, and you are saying probably somewhat too little.

France met the very first shock with about a million men, which
gradually grew in the fighting line to about a million and a half.
Here the limit of the French force immediately upon the front will
probably be set. The numbers continued to swell long before the end of
the first period and well on into the second, but they were kept in
reserve. Counting the men drafted in to supply losses and the reserve,
it is not unwise to put at about two and a half million men the
ultimate French figure, of which one and a half million formed, before
the end of the first period, the immediate fighting force.

Austria was ordered by the Germans to put into the field, as an
initial body to check any Russian advance and to confuse the beginning
of Russian concentration, about a million men; which in the first
period very rapidly grew to two million, and probably before the end
of the first period to about two million and a half.

Russia put into the field during the first weeks of the war some
million and a quarter, which grew during the first period (that is,
before the coming of winter had created a very serious handicap, to
which allusion will presently be made) to perhaps two million and a
half at the very most. I put that number as an outside limit.

Servia, of men actually present and able to fight, we may set down at
a quarter of a million; and Belgium, if we like, at one hundred
thousand--though the Belgian service being still in a state of
transition, and the degree of training very varied within it, that
minor point is disputable. Indeed it is better, in taking a general
survey, to consider only the five Great Powers concerned.

Of these the fifth, Great Britain, though destined to exercise by sea
power and by her recruiting field a very great ultimate effect upon
the war, could only provide, in this first period upon the Continent,
an average of one hundred thousand men. To begin with, some
seventy-five thousand, dwindling through losses to little more than
fifty thousand, replenished and increased to about one hundred and
twenty-five thousand, and approaching, as the end of the first period
was reached, one hundred and fifty thousand men actually present upon
the front.

We can now set down these figures in the shape of simple units, and
see how the numerical chances stood at the opening of the campaign.

The enemy sets out with =32= men, of whom he bids =10= men against the
Russians, and sends =22= against the French. The Russians meet the
=10= men with about =12=, and the French meet the =22= with about
=10=; but as they have not the whole =22= to meet in the first shock,
they are struck rather in the proportion of =10= to =16= or =17=,
while the presence of the British contingent makes them rather more
than =101/2=. But these initial figures rapidly change with the growth
of the armies, and before the first period is over the Germans have
=22= in the West against =15= French and =1= British, making =16=;
while in the East the Russian =12= has grown to, say, =24=, but the
Austro-Germans in the East, against those =24=, have grown to be quite
=32=. And there is the numerical situation of the first period
clearly, and I think accurately, put, _supposing the wastage to be
equal in proportion throughout all the armies_. The importance of
appreciating these figures is that they permit us to understand why
the enemy was morally certain of winning, quite apart from his right
judgment on certain disputed theories of war (to which I shall turn in
a moment), and quite apart from his heavy secret munitioning, which
was of such effect in the earlier part of the campaign. He was ready
with forces which he knew would be overwhelming, and how superior he
was thus numerically in that first period can best be appreciated, I
think, by a glance at the diagram on the next page.

[Illustration: Sketch 14.]

It is no wonder that he made certain of a decisive success in the
West, and of the indefinite holding up or pushing back of the Russian
forces in the East. It is no wonder that he confidently expected a
complete victory before the winter, and the signing of peace before
the end of the year. To that end all his munitioning, and even the
details of his tactics, were directed.


_The Figures of the Second Period, say to April 15-June 1, 1915._

The second period saw in the West, and, in the enemy's case, a very
great change proceeding by a number of minute steps, but fairly rapid
in character.

The French numbers could not grow very rapidly, because the French had
armed every available man. They could bring in a certain number of
volunteers; but neither was it useful to equip the most of the older
men, nor could they be spared from those duties behind the front line
which the much larger population of the enemy entrusted to men who,
for the most part, had received no regular training. The French did,
however, in this second period, gradually grow to some two and a half
million men, behind which, ready to come in for the final period, were
about a third of a million young recruits.

Great Britain discovered a prodigious effort. She had already,
comparatively early in the second period, put across the sea nearly
half a million men, and drafts were perpetually arriving as the second
period came to a close; while behind the army actually upon the
Continent very large bodies--probably another million in
number--hastily trained indeed, and presented with a grave problem in
the matter of officering, but of excellent material and _moral_, were
ready to appear, before the end of the second period or at its close,
the moment their equipment should be furnished. Counting the British
effort and the French together, one may say that, without regard to
wastage, the Allies in the West grew in the second period from the
original 16 to over 30, and might grow even before the second period
was over to 35 or even more.

On the enemy's side (neglecting wastage for the moment) there were the
simplest elements of growth. Each Power had docketed every untrained
man, knew his medical condition, where to find him, where and how to
train him. The German Empire had during peace taken about one-half of
its young men for soldiers. It had in pure theory five million
untrained men in the reserve, excluding the sick, and those not
physically efficient for service.

In practice, however, a very large proportion of men, even of the
efficients, must be kept behind for civilian work; and in an
industrial country such as Germany, mainly urban in population, this
proportion is particularly large. We are safe in saying that the
German army would not be reinforced during the second period by more
than two and a half million men. These were trained in batches of some
800,000 each; the equipment had long been ready for them, and they
appeared mainly as drafts for filling gaps, but partly as new
formations in groups--the first going in or before November, the
second in or before February. A third and last group was expected to
have finished this rather elementary training somewhere about the end
of April, so that May would complete the second period in the German
forces.

Austria-Hungary, by an easily appreciable paradox, possessed, though
but 80 per cent. of the Germans in population, a larger available
untrained reserve. This was because that empire trained a smaller
proportion of its population by far than did the Germans. It is
probable that Austria-Hungary was able to train and put forward during
the second period some three million men.

It is a great error, into which most critics have fallen, to
underestimate or to neglect the Austro-Hungarian factor in the enemy's
alliance. Without thus nearly doubling her numbers, Germany could not
have fought France and Russia at all, and a very striking feature of
all the earlier weeks of 1915 was the presence in the Carpathians of
increasing Austro-Hungarian numbers, which checked for more than three
months all the Russian efforts upon that front.

Say that Austria-Hungary nearly doubled her effectives (apart from
wastage) in this second period, and you will not be far wrong.

Russia, which upon paper could almost indefinitely increase during the
second period her numbers in the field, suffered with the advent of
winter an unexpected blow. Her equipment, and in particular her
munitioning (that is, her provision of missiles, and in especial of
heavy shell), must in the main come from abroad. Now the German
command of the Baltic created a complete blockade on the eastern
frontier of Russia, save upon the short Roumanian frontier; and the
entry of Turkey into the campaign on the side of the enemy, which
marked the second period, completed that blockade upon the south, and
shut upon Russia the gate of the Dardanelles. The port of Archangel in
the north was ice-bound, or with great difficulty kept partially open
by ice-breakers, and was in any case only connected with Russia by one
narrow-gauge and lengthy line; while the only remaining port of
Vladivostok was six thousand miles away, and closed also during a part
of the winter.

In this situation it was impossible for the great reserves of men
which Russia counted on to be put into the field, and the Russians
remained throughout the whole of this second period but little
stronger than they had been at the end of the first. If we set them
down at perhaps somewhat over three millions (excluding wastage)
towards the end of this second period, we shall be near to a just
estimate.

We can now sum up and say that, _apart from wastage_, the forces
arrayed against each other after this full development should have
been about 120 men for the central powers of the enemy--35 (and
perhaps ultimately 40) men against them upon the West, and, until
sufficient Russian equipment could at least be found, only some 30 men
against them upon the East.

Luckily such figures are wholly changed by the enormous rate of the
enemy's wastage. The Russians had lost men almost as rapidly as the
enemy, but the Russian losses could be and were made good. The
handicap of the blockade under which Russia suffered permitted her to
maintain only a certain number at the front, but she could continually
draft in support of those numbers; and though she lost in the first
seven months of the war quite four hundred thousand in prisoners, and
perhaps three-quarters of a million in other casualties, her strength
of somewhat over three millions was maintained at the close of the
first period.

In the same way drafts had further maintained the British numbers. The
French had lost not more than one-fifth of a million in prisoners, and
perhaps a third of a million or a little more in killed and
permanently disabled--that is, unable to return to the fighting line.
In the case of both the French and the British sanitary conditions
were excellent.

You have, then, quite 35 for your number in the West, and quite 33 for
your number in the East of the Allied forces at the end of the winter;
but of your enemy forces you may safely deduct 45-50 might be a truer
estimate; and it is remarkable that those who have watched the matter
carefully at the front are inclined to set the total enemy losses
higher than do the critics working at home. But call it only 45 (of
which 5 are prisoners), and you have against the 68 Allies in East and
West no more at the end of this second period than 75 of the enemy.

The following diagram illustrates in graphic form the change that six
months have produced.

[Illustration: Sketch 15.]

In other words, at the end of the winter and with the beginning of the
spring, although the enemy still has a numerical preponderance, it is
no longer the overwhelming thing it was when the war began, and that
change in numbers explains the whole change in the campaign.

The enemy was certain of winning mainly because he was fighting more
than equal in the East, and at first nearly two to one, later quite
four to three, in the West. Those are the conditions of the late
summer of 1914. 1915, before it was a third over, had seen the numbers
nearly equalized. With the summer of 1915 we might hope to see the
numbers at last reversed, and, after so many perilous months, a total
(not local) numerical majority at last appearing upon the side of the
Allies. If ever this condition shall arrive before the enemy can
accomplish a decisive result in either field the tide will have
turned.

The third period belongs at the moment of writing to the future. All
we can say of it is that it presents for the enemy no considerable
field of recruitment; but while in the West it offers no increase to
the French, it does offer another five units at least, and possibly
another six or eight, to the British; and to the Russians, if the
blockade can be pierced at any point, or if the change of weather,
coupled with the broadening of the gauge of the railway to Archangel,
permits large imports, an almost indefinite increase in
number--certainly an increase of two millions, or twenty of the units
we were dealing with in the figures given above.

So much, then, for the numerical factor in men which dominates the
whole campaign.

When we turn from this to the second factor--that of munitions--we
discover something which can be dealt with far more briefly, but which
follows very much the same line.

The enemy in the first period of the war had, if anything, an even
greater superiority in munitioning than in men. This superiority was
due to two distinct causes. In the first place, as we shall see in a
few pages, his theory upon a number of military details was well
founded; in the second place, _he made war at his own chosen moment,
after three years of determined and largely secret preparation_.

As to the first point:--

We may take as a particular example of these theories of war the
enemies' reliance upon heavy artillery--and in particular upon the
power of the modern high explosive and the big howitzer--to destroy
permanent fortification rapidly, and to have an effect in the field,
particularly in the preparation of an assault, which the military
theories of the Allies had wrongly underestimated. It is but one
example out of many. It must serve for the rest, and it will be dealt
with more fully in the next section. The Germans to some extent, and
much more the Austrians, prepared an immensely greater provision of
heavy ammunition than their opponents, and entered the field with
large pieces of a calibre and in number quite beyond anything that
their opponents had at the outset of the campaign.

As to the second point:--

No peaceful nations, no nations not designing a war at their own hour,
lock up armament which may be rendered obsolete, or, in equipment more
extensive than the reasonable chances of a campaign may demand, the
public resources which it can use on what it regards as more useful
things. Such nations, to use a just metaphor, "insure" against war at
what they think a reasonable rate. But if some one Government in
Europe is anarchic in its morals, and proposes, while professing
peace, to declare war at an hour and a day chosen by itself, it will
obviously have an overwhelming advantage in this respect. The energy
and the money which it devotes to the single object of preparation
cannot possibly be wasted; and, if its sudden aggression is not fixed
too far ahead, will not run the risk of being sunk in obsolete
weapons.

Now it is clearly demonstrable from the coincidence of dates, from the
exact time required for a special effort of this kind, and from the
rate at which munitions and equipment were accumulated, that the
Government at Berlin came to a decision in the month of July 1911 to
force war upon Russia and upon France immediately after the harvest of
1914; and of a score of indications which all converge upon these
dates, not one fails to strike them exactly by more than a few weeks
in the matter of preparation, by more than a few days in the date at
which war was declared.

Under those circumstances, Berlin with her ally at Vienna had the
immense numerical advantage over the French and the Russians when war
was suddenly forced upon those countries on the 31st of July last
year.

But, as in the case of men, the advantage would only be overwhelming
during the first period. The very fact that the war had to be won
quickly involved an immense expenditure of heavy ammunition in the
earlier part of it, and this expenditure, if it were not successful,
would be a waste.

It takes about five months to produce a heavy piece, and the rate of
production of heavy ammunition, though slow, is measurable. At the
moment of writing this, towards the close of the second period, the
balance is not yet redressed, but it is in a fair way to be redressed.
The imperfect and too tardy blockade to which the enemy is somewhat
timidly subjected is a factor in aid of this; and we may be fairly
confident that, if a third period is reached before the enemy shall
have the advantage of a decision, there will be a preponderance of
munitioning upon the Allied side in the West and the East which will
be, if anything, of superior importance to the approaching
preponderance in numbers.

Having thus briefly surveyed the opposing strength of either
combatant, checked and measured as it varied with the progress of the
war, we will turn to the _moral_ opposition of military theory
between the one party and the other, and show how here again that,
_save in the most important matter of all, grand strategy_, the enemy
was on the highroad to the victory which he confidently and, for that
matter, reasonably expected.


(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR.

The long peace which the most civilized parts of Europe had enjoyed
for now a generation left more and more uncertain the value of
theories upon the conduct of war, which theories had for the most part
developed as mere hypotheses untested by experience during that
considerable period. The South African and the Manchurian war had
indeed proved certain theories sound and others unsound, so far as
their experience went; but they were fought under conditions very
different from those of an European campaign, and the progress of
material science was so rapid in the years just preceding the great
European conflict that the mass of debated theories still remained
untried at its outbreak.

The war in its first six months thoroughly tested these theories, and
proved, for the greater part of them, which were sound in practice and
which unsound. I will tabulate them here, and beg the special
attention of the reader, because upon the accuracy of these forecasts
the first fortunes of the war depended.

I. A German theory maintained that, with the organization of and the
particular type of discipline in the German service, attacks could be
delivered in much closer formation than either the French or the
English believed to be possible.

The point is this: After a certain proportion of losses inflicted
within a certain limit of time, troops break or are brought to a
standstill. That was the universal experience of all past war. When
the troops that are attacking break or are brought to a standstill,
the attack fails. But what you cannot determine until you test the
matter in actual war is what numbers of losses in what time will thus
destroy an offensive movement. You cannot determine it, because the
chief element in the calculation is the state of the soldier's mind,
and that is not a measurable thing. One had only the lessons of the
past to help one.

The advantages of attacking in close formation are threefold.

(_a_) You launch your attack with the least possible delay. It is
evident that spreading troops out from the column to the line takes
time, and that the more extended your line the more time you consume
before you can strike.

[Illustration: Sketch 16.]

If I have here a hundred units advancing in a column towards the place
where they are to attack (and to advance in column is necessary,
because a broad line cannot long keep together), then it is evident
that if I launched them to the attack thus:--

[Illustration: Sketch 17.]

packed close together, I get them into that formation much more
quickly than if, before attacking, I have to spread them out thus:--

[Illustration: Sketch 18.]

(_b_) The blow which I deliver has also evidently more weight upon it
at a given point. If I am attacking a hundred yards of front with a
hundred units of man and missile power, I shall do that front more
harm in a given time than if I am attacking with only fifty such
units.

(_c_) In particular circumstances, where troops _have_ to advance on a
narrow front, as in carrying a bridge or causeway or a street or any
other kind of defile, my troops, if they can stand close formation and
the corresponding punishment it entails, will be more likely to
succeed than troops not used to or not able to bear such close
formation. Now, such conditions are very numerous in war. Troops are
often compelled, if they are to succeed, to rush narrow gaps of this
kind, and their ability to do so is a great element in tactical
success.

I have here used the phrase "if they can stand close formation and the
corresponding punishment it entails," and that is the whole point.
There are circumstances--perhaps, on the whole, the most numerous of
all the various circumstances in war--in which close formation, if it
can be used, is obviously an advantage; but it is equally self-evident
that the losses of troops in close formation will be heavier than
their losses in extended order. A group is a better target than a
number of dispersed, scattered points.

Now, the Germans maintained in this connection not only, as I have
said, that they could get their men to stand the punishment involved
in close formation, but also that:--

(_a_) The great rapidity of such attacks would make the _total_ and
_final_ wastage less than was expected, and further:--

(_b_) That the heavy wastage, such as it was, was worth while, because
it would lead to very rapid strategical decision as well as tactical.
In other words, because once you had got your men to stand these heavy
_local_ losses and to suffer heavy _initial_ wastage, you would win
your campaign in a short time, so that the high-rate wastage not being
prolonged need not be feared.

Well, in the matter of this theory, the war conclusively proved the
following points:--

(_a_) The Germans were right and the Allies were wrong with regard to
the mere possibility of using close formations. The German temper,
coupled with the type of discipline in the modern German service, did
prove capable of compelling men to stand losses out of all proportion
to what the Allies expected they could stand, and yet to continue to
advance neither broken nor brought to a standstill. But--

(_b_) The war also proved that, upon the whole, and taking the
operations in their entirety, such formations were an error. In case
after case, a swarm of Germans advancing against inferior numbers got
home after a third, a half, or even more than a half of their men had
fallen in the first few minutes of the rush. But in many, many more
cases this tactical experiment failed. Those who can speak as
eye-witnesses tell us that, though the occasions on which such attacks
actually broke were much rarer than was expected before the war began,
yet the occasions on which the attack was thrown into hopeless
confusion, and in which the few members of it that got home had lost
all power to do harm to the defenders, were so numerous that the
experiment must be regarded as, upon the whole, a failure. It may be
one that no troops but Germans could employ. It is certainly not one
which any troops, after the experience of this war, will copy.

(_c_) Further, the war proved even more conclusively that the wastage
was not worth while. The immense expense in men only succeeded where
there was an overwhelming superiority in number. The strategical
result was not arrived at quickly (as the Germans had expected)
through this tactical method, and after six months of war, the enemy
had thrown away more than twice and nearly three times as many men as
he need have sacrificed had he judged sanely the length of time over
which operations might last.

II. Another German theory had maintained that modern high explosives
fired from howitzers and the accuracy of their aim controlled by
aircraft would rapidly and promptly dominate permanent fortification.

This theory requires explanation. Its partial success in practice was
the most startling discovery and the most unpleasant one to the Allies
of the early part of the war.

In the old days, say up to ten years ago or less, permanent
fortification mounting heavy guns was impregnable to direct assault if
it were properly held and properly munitioned. It could hold out for
months. Its heavy guns had a range superior to any movable guns that
could be brought against it--indeed, so very heavily superior that
movable guns, even if they were howitzers, would be smashed or their
crews destroyed long before the fortress was seriously damaged by
them.

A howitzer is but a form of mortar, and all such pieces are designed
to lob a projectile instead of throwing it. The advantage of using
these instruments when you are besieging permanent works is that you
can hide them behind an obstacle, such as a hill, and that the heavy
gun in the fortress cannot get its shell on to them because that shell
has a flatter trajectory. The disadvantage is that the howitzer has a
very much shorter range than the gun size for size.

[Illustration: Sketch 19.]

Here is a diagram showing how necessarily true this is. The howitzer,
lobbing its shell with a comparatively small charge, has the advantage
of being able to hide behind a steep bit of ground, but on such a
trajectory the range is short. The gun in the fortress does not lob
its shell, but throws it. The course of the gun shell is much more
straight. It therefore can only hit the howitzer and its crew
indirectly by exploding its shell just above them. Until recently, the
gun was master of the howitzer for three reasons:--

First, because the largest howitzers capable of movement and of being
brought up against any fortress and shifted from one place of
concealment to another were so small that their range was
insignificant. Therefore the circumference on which they could be used
was also a small one; their opportunities for hiding were consequently
reduced; the chances of their emplacement being immediately spotted
from the fortress were correspondingly high, and the big gun in the
fortress was pretty certain to overwhelm the majority of them at least.
It is evident that the circumference {~GREEK SMALL LETTER
ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~} offers
far more chances of hiding than the circumference ABC, but a still more
powerful factor in favour of the new big howitzer is the practical one
that at very great ranges in our climate the chances of spotting a
particular place are extremely small. Secondly, because the explosives
used, even when they landed and during the short time that the howitzer
remained undiscovered and unheard, were not sufficiently powerful nor,
with the small howitzers then in existence, sufficiently large in
amount in each shell to destroy permanent fortification. Thirdly,
because the effect of the aim is always doubtful. You are firing at
something well above yourself, and you could not tell very exactly
where your howitzer shell had fallen.

[Illustration: Sketch 20.]

What has modified all this in the last few years is--

First, the successful bringing into the field of very large howitzers,
which, though they do lob their shells, lob them over a very great
distance. The Austrians have produced howitzers of from 11 to 12
inches in calibre, which, huge as they are, can be moved about in the
field and fired from any fairly steady ground; and the Germans have
probably produced (though I cannot find actual proof that they have
used them with effect) howitzers of more than 16 inches calibre, to be
moved, presumably, only upon rails. But 11-inch was quite enough to
change all the old conditions. It must be remembered that a gun varies
as the _cube_ of its calibre. A 12-inch piece is not twice as powerful
as a 6-inch. It is _eight times_ as powerful. The howitzer could now
fire from an immense distance. The circumference on which it worked
was very much larger; its opportunities for finding suitable steep
cover far greater. Its opportunities for moving, if it was endangered
by being spotted, were also far greater; and the chances of the gun in
the fortress knocking it out were enormously diminished.

Secondly, the high explosives of recent years, coupled with the vast
size of this new mobile howitzer shell, is capable, when the howitzer
shell strikes modern fortification, of doing grievous damage which,
repeated over several days, turns the fort into a mass of ruins.

Thirdly, the difficulty of accurate aiming over such distances and of
locating your hits so that they destroy the comparative small area of
the fort is got over by the use of aircraft, which fly above the fort,
note the hits, and signal the results.

Now, the Germans maintained that under these quite recently modified
conditions not even the best handled and heaviest gunned permanent
fort could hold out more than a few days. The French believed that it
could, and they trusted in the stopping power not only of individual
works (such as the fortress of Manonvilliers on the frontier), but
more especially of great rings of forts, such as surround Liege,
Namur, Verdun, etc., and enclose an area within the security of which
large bodies of troops can be held ready, armies which no one would
dare to leave behind them without having first reduced them to
surrender.

The very first days of the war proved that the German theory was right
and the French wrong. The French theory, upon which such enormous
funds had been expended, had been perfectly right until within quite
recent years the conditions had changed. Port Arthur, for instance,
only ten years ago, could hold out for months and months. In this war
no individual fort has held out for more than eleven days.

It might be imagined under such circumstances that the very existence
of fortresses was doomed; yet we note that Verdun continues to make a
big bulge in the German line four months after the first shots fell on
its forts, and that the Germans are actively restoring the great
Belgian rings they have captured at Liege, Antwerp, and Namur.

Why is this? It is because another German theory has proved right in
practice.

III. This German theory which has proved right in practice is what may
be called "the mobile defence of a fortress." It proposes no longer to
defend upon expensive permanent works precisely located upon the map,
but upon a number of improvised batteries in which heavy guns can move
somewhat behind field-works concealed as much as possible, numerous
and constructed rapidly under the conditions of the campaign. Such
works dotted round the area you desire to defend are quite a different
thing to reduce from isolated, restricted, permanent forts. In the
first place, the enemy does not know where they are; in the second
place, you can make new ones at short notice; in the third place, if a
howitzer does spot your heavy gun, you can move it or its neighbours
to a new position; in the fourth place, the circumference you are
defending is much larger, and the corresponding area that the
besiegers have to search with their fire more extended. Thus, in the
old forts round Verdun, about a dozen permanent works absolutely fixed
and ascertainable upon the map, and covering altogether but a few
acres, constituted the defence of the town. Before September was out
the heavy guns had been moved to trenches far advanced into the field
to the north and east, temporary rails had been laid down to permit
their lateral movement--that is, to let them shift from a place where
they had perhaps been spotted to a new place, under cover of darkness,
and the sectors thus thrown out in front of the old fortifications in
this improvised mobile fashion were at least three times as long as
the line made by the ring of old forts, while the area that had to be
searched was perhaps a hundred times as large. For in the place of the
narrowly restricted permanent fort, with, say, ten heavy guns, you had
those same ten heavy guns dotted here and there in trenches rapidly
established in half a dozen separate, unknown, and concealed spots,
along perhaps a mile of wooded hill, and free to operate when moved
over perhaps double that front.

IV. _In Grand Strategy a German general theory of strategics was
opposed to a French general theory of strategics, and upon which of
the two should prove right depended, much more than on any of the
previous points, the ultimate issue of the campaign._

This is far the most important point for the reader's consideration.
It may be said with justice that no one can understand this war who
has not grasped the conflict between these two fundamental conceptions
of armed bodies in action, and the manner in which (by the narrowest
and most fortunate margin!) events in the first phase of the war
justified the French as against the German school.

I must therefore beg the reader's leave to go somewhat thoroughly into
the matter, for it is the foundation of all that will follow when we
come to the narration of events and the story of the Western battle
which began in the retreat from the Sambre and ended in the Battle of
the Marne.

The first postulate in all military problems is that, other things
being equal, numbers are the decisive factor in war. This does not
mean that absolute superiority of numbers decides a campaign
necessarily in favour of the superior power. What it means is that _in
any particular field_, if armament and discipline are more or less
equal on the two sides, the one that has been able to mass the greater
number _in that field_ will have the victory. He will disperse or
capture his enemy, or at the least he will pin him and take away his
_initiative_--of which word "initiative" more later. Now, this field
in which one party has the superior numbers can only be a portion of
the whole area of operations. But if it is what is called the decisive
portion, then he who has superior numbers _in the decisive time and
place_ will win not only there but everywhere. His local victory
involves consequent success along the whole of his line.

For instance, supposing five men are acting against three. Five is
more than three; and if the forces bear upon each other equally, the
five will defeat the three. But if the five are so badly handled that
they get arranged in groups of two, two, and one, and if the three are
so well handled that they strike swiftly at the first isolated two and
defeat them, thus bringing up the next isolated two, who are in their
turn defeated, the three will, at the end of the struggle, have only
one to deal with, and the five will have been beaten by the three
because, although five is larger than three, yet _in the decisive time
and place_ the three never have more than two against them. It may be
broadly laid down that the whole art of strategics consists for the
man with superior numbers in bringing all his numbers to bear, and for
the man with inferior numbers in attempting by his cunning to compel
his larger opponent to fight in separated portions, and to be defeated
in detail.

As in every art, the developments of these elementary first principles
become, with variations of time and place, indefinitely numerous and
various. Upon their variety depends all the interest of military
history. And there is one method in particular whereby the lesser
number may hope to pin and destroy the power of the greater upon which
the French tradition relied, and the value of which modern German
criticism refused.

Before going into that, however, we must appreciate the mental
qualities which led to the acceptance of the theory upon the one side
and its denial upon the other.

The fundamental contrast between the modern German military temper and
the age-long traditions of the French service consists in this: That
the German theory is based upon a presumption of superiority, moral,
material, and numerical. The theory of the French--as their national
temperament and their Roman tradition compel them--is based upon an
_envisagement_ of inferiority: moral, material, and numerical.

There pervades the whole of the modern German strategic school this
feeling: "I shall win if I act and feel as though I was bound to win."
There pervades the whole French school this sentiment: "I have a
better chance of winning if I am always chiefly considering how I
should act if I found myself inferior in numbers, in material, and
even in moral at any phase in the struggle, especially at its origins,
but even also towards its close."

This contrast appears in everything, from tactical details to the
largest strategical conception, and from things so vague and general
as the tone of military writings, to things so particular as the
instruction of the conscript in his barrack-room. The German soldier
is taught--or was--that victory was inevitable, and would be as swift
as it would be triumphant: the French soldier was taught that he had
before him a terrible and doubtful ordeal, one that would be long, one
in which he ran a fearful risk of defeat, and one in which he might,
even if victorious, have to wear down his enemy by the exercise of a
most burdensome tenacity. In the practice of the field, the contrast
appeared in the French use of a great reserve, and the German contempt
for such a precaution: in the elaborate thinking out of the use of a
reserve, which is the core of French military thought; in the
superficial treatment of the same, which is perhaps the chief defect
of Germany.

It would be of no purpose to debate here which of these two mental
attitudes, with all their consequences, is either morally the better
or in practice the more successful. The French and Latin tradition
seems to the German pusillanimous, and connected with that decadence
which he perceives in every expression of civilization from Athens to
Paris. The modern German conception seems to the French theatrical,
divorced from reality, and hence fundamentally weak. Either critic may
be right or either wrong. Our interest is to follow the particular
schemes developing from that tone of mind. We shall see how, in the
first phases of the war, the German conception strikingly justified
itself for more than ten days; how, after a fortnight, it was
embarrassed by its opponent; and how at the end of a month the German
initiative was lost under the success--only barely achieved after
dreadful risk--of the French plan.

That plan, inherited from the strategy of Napoleon, and designed in
particular to achieve the success of a smaller against a larger
number, may be most accurately defined as _the open strategic square_,
and its leading principle is "the method of detached reserves."

This strategic conception, which I shall now describe, and which (in a
diagram it is put far too simply) underlies the whole of the
complicated movements whereby the French staved off disaster in the
first weeks of the war, is one whose whole object it is to permit the
inferior number to bring up a _locally_ superior weight against a
_generally_ superior enemy in the decisive time and at the decisive
place.

Let us suppose that a general commanding _twelve_ large units--say,
twelve army corps--knows that he is in danger of being attacked by an
enemy commanding no less than _sixteen_ similar units.

Let us call the forces of the first or weaker general "White," and
those of the second or stronger general "Black."

It is manifest that if White were merely to deploy his line and await
the advance of Black thus,

[Illustration: Sketch 21.]

he would be outflanked and beaten; or, in the alternative, Black might
mass men against White's centre and pierce it, for Black is vastly
superior to White in numbers. White, therefore, must adopt some
special disposition in order to avoid immediate defeat.

Of such special dispositions one among many is the French Open
Strategic Square.

This disposition is as follows:--

White arranges his twelve units into four quarters of three each, and
places one quarter at each corner of a square thus:--

[Illustration: Sketch 22.]

We will give them titles, and call them A, B, C, and D.

If, as is most generally the case in a defensive campaign at its
opening, White cannot be certain from which exact direction the main
blow is coming, he may yet know that it is coming from some one
general direction, from one sector of the compass at least, and he
arranges his square to face towards that sector.

For instance, in the above diagram, he may not know whether the blow
is coming from the precise direction 1, or 2, or 3, but he knows that
it is coming somewhere within the sector XY.

Then he will draw up his square so that its various bodies all face
towards the average direction from which the blow may come.

The SIZE of his square--which is of great importance to the
result--he makes as restricted as possible, _subject to two prime
conditions_. These conditions are:--

First, that there shall be room for the troops composing each corner
to be deployed--that is, spread out for fighting. Secondly, that there
shall be room between any two corners (A and C, for instance) for a
third corner (D, for instance) to move in between them and spread out
for fighting in support of them. He makes his square as close and
restricted as possible, because his success depends--as will be seen
in a moment--upon the rapidity with which any one corner can come up
in support of the others. But he leaves enough room for the full
numbers to spread out for fighting, because otherwise he loses in
efficiency; and he leaves room enough between any two squares for a
third one to come in, because the whole point of the formation is the
aid each corner can bring to the others.

In this posture he awaits the enemy.

That enemy will necessarily come on in a lengthy line, lengthy in
proportion to the number of his units. For it is essential to the
general commanding _superior_ numbers to make the _whole_ of the
superior numbers tell, and this can only be done if they march along
parallel roads, and these roads are sufficiently wide apart for the
various columns to have plenty of room to deploy--that is, to spread
out into a fighting line--when the shock comes.

[Illustration: Sketch 23.]

This extended line of Black marching thus against White strikes White
first upon some one corner of his square. Suppose that corner to be
corner A. Then the position when contact is established and the first
serious fighting begins is what you will observe in the above diagram.
A is the corner (now spread out for fighting) which gets the first
shock.

Note you (for this is the crucial point of the whole business) that
upon the exposed corner A will fall a very dangerous task indeed. A
will certainly be attacked by forces superior to itself. Normally
forces more than half as large again as A will be near enough to A to
concentrate upon him in the first shock. The odds will be at least as
much as five to three, the Black units, 4, 5, and 6, will be right on
A, and 3 and 7 will be near enough to come in as well in the first day
or two of the combat, while possibly 2 may have a look in as well.

A, thus tackled, has become what may be called "the _operative corner_
of the square." It is his task "to retreat and hold the enemy" while
B, C, and D, "the masses of manoeuvre," swing up. But under that
simple phrase "operative corner" is hidden all the awful business of a
fighting retreat: it means leaving your wounded behind you, marching
night and day, with your men under the impression of defeat; leaving
your disabled guns behind you, keeping up liaison between all your
hurrying, retreating units, with a vast force pressing forward to your
destruction. A's entire force is deliberately imperilled in order to
achieve the success of the plan as a whole, and upon A's tenacity, as
will be seen in what follows, the success of that plan entirely
depends.

[Illustration: Sketch 24.]

Well, while A is thus retreating--say, from his old position at A_1 on
the foregoing diagram to such a position as A_2, with Black swarming
up to crush him--the other corners of the square, B, C, and D, receive
the order to "swing"--that is, to go forward inclining to the left or
the right according to the command given.

Mark clearly that, until the order is given, the general commanding
Black cannot possibly tell whether the "swing" will be directed to
the left or to the right. Either B will close up against A, C spread
out farther to the left, and D come in between A and C (which is a
"swing" to the left) as in Sketch 25, or C will close up against A, B
will spread well out to the right, and D come up between A and B, as
in Sketch 26 (which is a "swing" to the right).

[Illustration: Sketch 25.]

Until the "swing" actually begins, Black, the enemy, cannot possibly
tell whether it is his left-hand units (1 to 8) or his right-hand
units (9 to 16) which will be affected. One of the two ends of his
line will have to meet White's concentrated effort; the other will be
left out in the cold. Black cannot make dispositions on the one
hypothesis or on the other. Whichever he chose, White would, of
course, swing the other way and disconcert him.

Black, therefore, has to keep his line even until he knows which way
White is going to swing.

[Illustration: Sketch 26.]

Let us suppose that White swings to the left.

Mark what follows. The distances which White's units have got to go
are comparatively small. B will be up at A's side, and so will D in a
short time after the swing is over, and when the swing is completed,
the position is after this fashion. Black's numbers, 1 to 9 inclusive,
find themselves tackled by all Black's twelve. There is a superiority
of number against Black on his right, White's left, and the remaining
part of Black's line (10 to 16 inclusive), is out in the cold.

If it were a tactical problem, and all this were taking place in a
small field, Black's left wing, 10-16, would, of course, come up at
once and redress the balance. But being a strategical problem, and
involving very large numbers and very great distances, Black's left
wing, 10-16, can do nothing of the kind. For Black's left wing, 10-16,
_cannot possibly get up in time_. Long before it has arrived on the
scene, White's 12 will have broken Black's 9 along Black's right wing.

[Illustration: Sketch 27.]

There are three elements which impose this delay upon Black's left
wing.

First, to come round in aid of the right wing means the marching
forward of one unit after another, so that each shall overlap the
last, and so allow the whole lot to come up freely. This means that
the last unit will have to go forward six places before turning, and
that means several days' marching. For with very large bodies, and
with a matter of 100 miles to come up, all in one column, it would be
an endless business (Sketch 28).

[Illustration: Sketch 28.]

Next you have the delay caused by the _conversion of direction_
through a whole right angle. That cause of delay is serious. For when
you are dealing with very large bodies of men, such as half a dozen
army corps, to change suddenly from the direction S (see Sketch 29)
for which your Staff work was planned, and to break off at a moment's
notice in direction E, while you are on the march towards S, is
impossible. You have to think out a whole new set of dispositions,
and to re-order all your great body of men. White was under no such
compulsion, for though he had to swing, the swing faced the same
general direction as his original dispositions. And the size of the
units and the distances to be traversed--the fact that the problem is
strategical and not tactical--is the essence of the whole thing. If,
for instance, you have (as in Sketch 30) half a dozen, not army corps,
but mere battalions of 1,000 men, deployed over half a dozen miles of
ground, AB, and advancing in the direction SS, and they are suddenly
sent for in the direction E, it is simple enough. You form your 6,000
men into column; in a few hours' delay they go off in the direction
E, and when they get to the place where they are wanted, the column
can spread out quickly again on the front CD, and soon begin to take
part in the action. But when you are dealing with half a dozen army
corps--240,000 men--it is quite another matter. The turning of any one
of these great bodies through a whole right angle is a lengthy
business. You cannot put a quarter of a million men into one
column--they would take ages to deploy--so you must, as we have seen,
make each unit of them overlap the next before the turn can begin.

[Illustration: Sketch 29.]

[Illustration: Sketch 30.]

Nor is that all the delay involved. It would never do for these six
separate corps to come up in driblets and get defeated in detail; 10,
11, and 12 will have to wait until 13, 14, 15, and even 16, have got
up abreast of them--and that is the third cause of delay.

Here are three causes of delay which, between them and accumulated,
have disastrous effect; and in general we may be certain that where
very large bodies and very extensive stretches of territory are
concerned, that wing of Black which has been left out in the cold can
never come up in time to retrieve the situation created by White's
twelve pinning Black's engaged wing of only nine.

If the square has worked, and if the twelve White have pinned the
right-hand wing of Black, 1 to 9 inclusive, there is nothing for Black
to do but to order his right wing, 1 to 9, to retreat as fast as
possible before superior numbers, and to order his left wing, 10 to
16, to fall back at the same time and keep in line; and you then have
the singular spectacle of twelve men compelling the retreat of and
pursuing sixteen.

_That is exactly what happened in the first three weeks of active
operations in the West. The operative corner A in the annexed diagram
was the Franco-British force upon the Sambre. The retirement of that
operative corner and its holding of the enemy was what is called in
this country "The Retreat from Mons." BB are the "masses of manoeuvre"
behind A. The swinging up of these masses involving the retirement of
the whole was the Battle of the Marne._

[Illustration: Sketch 31.]

Now, it is evident that in all this everything depends upon the
tenacity and military value of the operative corner, which is exposed
and sacrificed that the whole scheme of the Open Square may work.

If that operative corner is destroyed as a force--is overwhelmed or
dispersed or surrounded--while it is fighting its great odds, the
whole square goes to pieces. Its centre is penetrated by the enemy,
and the army is in a far worse plight than if recourse had never been
had to the open strategic square at all. For if the operative corner,
A, is out of existence before the various bodies forming the
"manoeuvring mass" behind it have had time to "swing," then the enemy
will be right in their midst, and destroying, in overwhelming force,
these remaining _separated_ bodies in detail.

It was here that the German strategic theory contrasted so violently
with the French. The Germans maintained that an ordeal which Napoleon
might have been able to live through with his veterans and after
fifteen years of successful war, a modern conscript army, most of its
men just taken from civilian life and all of short service, would
never endure. They believed the operative corner would go to pieces
and either be pounded to disintegration, or outflanked, turned, and
caught in the first days of the shock before the rest of the square
had time to "work." The French believed the operative corner would
stand the shock, and, though losing heavily, would remain in being.
They believed that the operative corner of the square would, even
under modern short service and large quasi-civilian reserve
conditions, remain an army. They staked their whole campaign upon that
thesis, and they turned out to be right. But they only just barely won
through, and by the very narrowest margin. Proving right as they did,
however, the success of their strategical theory changed the whole
course of the war.

With this contrast of the great opposing theories considered, I come
to the conclusion of my Second Part, which examines the forces
opposed. I will now turn to the Third Part of my book, which concerns
the first actual operations from the Austrian note to the Battle of
the Marne.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Thus, after these lines were written, I had occasion in _Land and
Water_ to estimate the garrison of Przemysl before the figures were
known. The element wherewith to guide one's common sense was the known
perimeter to be defended; and arguing from this, I determined that a
minimum of not less than 100,000 men would capitulate. I further
conceived that the total losses could hardly be less than 40,000, and
I arrived at an original force of between three and four corps.

[Illustration: Sketch 32.]




PART III.

THE FIRST OPERATIONS.


In any general view of the great war which aims both at preserving
proportion between its parts, and at presenting especially the main
lines in relief, the three weeks between the German sudden forcing of
war and the seventeen or eighteen days between the English declaration
and the main operations upon the Sambre, will have but a subsidiary
importance. They were occupied for at least half the period in the
mobilization of the great armies. They were occupied for the second
half of the period in the advance across the Rhine of German numbers
greatly superior to the Allies, and also through the plain of Northern
Belgium. The operation, as calculated by the German General Staff, was
delayed by but a very few days--one might almost say hours--by the
hastily improvised resistance of Liege, and the imperfect defence of
their country which was all the Belgian forces, largely untrained,
could offer.

We must, therefore, pass briefly enough over that preliminary period,
though the duty may be distasteful to the reader, on account of the
very exaggerated importance which its operations took, especially in
British eyes.

For this false perspective there were several reasons, which it is
worth while to enumerate, as they will aid our judgment in obtaining a
true balance between these initial movements and the great conflicts
to which they were no more than an introduction.

1. War, as a whole, had grown unfamiliar to Western Europe. War on
such a scale as this was quite untried. There was nothing in
experience to determine our judgment, and after so long a peace,
during which the habits of civil life had ceased to be conventioned
and had come to seem part of the necessary scheme of things, the first
irruption of arms dazzled or confounded the imagination of all.

2. The first shock, falling as it did upon the ring fortress of
Liege, at once brought into prominence one of the chief questions of
modern military debate, the value of the modern ring fortress, and
promised to put to the test the opposing theories upon this sort of
stronghold.

3. The violation of Belgian territory, though discounted in the
cynical atmosphere of our time, when it came to the issue was, without
question, a stupendous moral event. It was the first time that
anything of this sort had happened in the history of Christian Europe.
Historians unacquainted with the spirit of the past may challenge that
remark, but it is true. One of the inviolable conventions, or rather
sacred laws, of our civilization was broken, which is that European
territory not involved in hostilities by any act of its Government is
inviolable to opposing armies. The Prussian crime of Silesia, nearly
two centuries before, the succeeding infamies of 1864, and the forgery
of the Ems dispatch, the whole proclaimed tradition of contempt for
the sanctities of Christendom, proceeding from Frederick the Great,
had indeed accustomed men to successive stages in the decline of
international morals; but nothing of the wholly crude character which
this violation of Belgium bore was to be discovered in the past, even
of Prussia, and posterity will mark it as a curious term and possibly
a turning-point in the gradual loss of our common religion, and of the
moral chaos accompanying that loss.

4. The preparations of this country by land were not complete. Those
of the French were belated compared with those of the Germans, a

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