A Short History of the Great War
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Title: A Short History of the Great War
Author: A. F. Pollard
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7189]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SHORT HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR ***
Produced by Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders Team
A SHORT HISTORY OF
THE GREAT WAR
BY
A. F. POLLARD
M.A., Litt.D.
FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
WITH NINETEEN MAPS
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
First Published in 1920
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE BREACH OF THE PEACE
II. THE GERMAN INVASION
III. RUSSIA MOVES
IV. THE WAR ON AND BEYOND THE SEAS
V. ESTABLISHING THE WESTERN FRONT
VI. THE FIRST WINTER OF THE WAR
VII. THE FAILURE OF THE ALLIED OFFENSIVE
VIII. THE DEFEAT OF RUSSIA
IX. THE CLIMAX OF GERMAN SUCCESS
X. THE SECOND WINTER OF THE WAR
XI. THE SECOND GERMAN OFFENSIVE IN THE WEST
XII. THE ALLIED COUNTER-OFFENSIVE
XIII. THE BALKANS AND POLITICAL REACTIONS
XIV. THE TURN OF THE TIDE
XV. HOPE DEFERRED
XVI. THE BALANCE OF POWER
XVII. THE EVE OF THE FINAL STRUGGLE
XVIII. THE LAST GERMAN OFFENSIVE
XIX. THE VICTORY OF THE ENTENTE
XX. THE FOUNDATIONS OF PEACE
INDEX
LIST OF MAPS
1. THE GERMAN INVASION OF FRANCE
2. THE BATTLES OF THE AISNE
3. THE CAMPAIGNS IN ARTOIS
4. THE DARDANELLES
5. THE RUSSIAN FRONT
6. THE BALKANS
7. MESOPOTAMIA
8. THE CAUCASUS
9. THE ATTACK ON VERDUN
10. THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
11. THE RUMANIAN CAMPAIGN
12. THE CONQUEST OF EAST AFRICA
13. THE BALTIC CAMPAIGNS
14. THE BATTLES IN FLANDERS
15. THE ITALIAN FRONT
16. THE BATTLES OF ARRAS AND CAMBRAI
17. THE LAST GERMAN OFFENSIVE
18. THE CONQUEST OF SYRIA
19. FOCH'S CAMPAIGN
NOTE
The manuscript of this book, except the last chapter, was finished on
21 May 1919, and the revision of the last chapter was completed in
October. It may be some relief to a public, distracted by the
apologetic deluge which has followed on the peace, to find how little
the broad and familiar outlines of the war have thereby been affected.
A. F. P.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE
GREAT WAR
CHAPTER I
THE BREACH OF THE PEACE
On 28 June 1914 the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir-presumptive to
the Hapsburg throne, was shot in the streets of Serajevo, the capital
of the Austrian province of Bosnia. Redeemed by the Russo-Turkish war
of 1876-7 from Ottoman rule, Bosnia had by the Congress of Berlin in
1878 been entrusted to Austrian administration; but in 1908, fearing
lest a Turkey rejuvenated by the Young Turk revolution should seek to
revive its claims on Bosnia, the Austrian Government annexed on its
own authority a province confided to its care by a European mandate.
This arbitrary act was only challenged on paper at the time; but the
striking success of Serbia in the Balkan wars of 1912-13 brought out
the dangers and defects of Austrian policy. For the Serbs were kin to
the great majority of the Bosnian people and to millions of other
South Slavs who were subject to the Austrian crown and discontented
with its repressive government; and the growing prestige of Serbia
bred hopes and feelings of Slav nationality on both sides of the
Hapsburg frontier. The would-be and the real assassins of the
Archduke, while technically Austrian subjects, were Slavs by birth,
and the murder brought to a head the antagonism between a race
becoming conscious of its possibilities and a government determined to
repress them. The crime gave a moral advantage to the oppressor, but
the guilt has yet to be apportioned, and instigation may have come
from secret sources within the Hapsburg empire; for the Archduke was
hated by dominant cliques on account of his alleged pro-Slav
sympathies and his suspected intention of admitting his future Slav
subjects to a share in political power.
For some weeks after the murder it bade fair to pass without a
European crisis, for the public was unaware of what happened at a
secret conclave held at Potsdam on 5 July. It was there decided that
Germany should support to the uttermost whatever claims Austria might
think fit to make on Serbia for redress, and she was encouraged to put
them so high as either to ensure the domination of the Balkans by the
Central Empires through Serbian submission, or to provoke a war by
which alone the German militarists thought that German aims could be
achieved. That was the purport of the demands presented to Serbia on
23 July: acceptance would have reduced her to a dependence less formal
but little less real than that of Bosnia, while the delay in
presenting the demands was used to complete the preparations for war
which rejection would provoke. It was not, however, against Serbia
that the German moves were planned. She could be left to Austria,
while Germany dealt with the Powers which would certainly be involved
by the attack on Serbian independence.
The great Power immediately concerned was Russia, which had long
aspired to an outlet into European waters not blocked by winter ice or
controlled by Baltic States. For that and for the less interested
reasons of religion and racial sympathy she had fought scores of
campaigns against the Turks which culminated in the liberation of most
of the Balkans in 1878; and she could not stand idle while the fruits
of her age-long efforts were gathered by the Central Empires and she
herself was cut off from the Mediterranean by an obstacle more fatal
than Turkish dominion in the form of a Teutonic corridor from Berlin
to Baghdad. Serbia, too, Orthodox in religion and Slav in race, was
more closely bound to Russia than was any other Balkan State; and an
attack on Serbia was a deadly affront to the Russian Empire. It was
not intended as anything else. Russia was slowly recovering from her
defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 and from the revolutionary
outbreaks which had followed; and there was little doubt that sooner
or later she would seek compensation for the rebuffs she had suffered
from the mailed fist during her impotence. Conscience made Germany
sensitive to the Slav peril, and her militarist philosophy taught her
that the best defence was to get her blow in first. Her diplomacy in
July was directed towards combining this advantage with the
appearance, needed to bemuse her people and the world at large, of
acting in self-defence.
But Russia was the object of Germany's diplomatic activity rather than
of her military preparations. It was thought that Russia could not
mobilize in less than six weeks or strike effectively in less than two
or three months, and that that interval would suffice for the crushing
of France, who was bound by treaty to intervene if Russia were
attacked. The German mobilization was therefore directed first against
France, defence against Russia being left to second-line German troops
and to an Austrian offensive. The defeat of France was not, however,
regarded by Germans as a mere incident in a war against Russia; for it
was a cardinal point in the programme of the militarists, whose mind
was indiscreetly revealed by Bernhardi, that France must be so
completely crushed that she could never again cross Germany's path. To
Frenchmen the war appeared to be mainly a continuation of the national
duel which had been waged since the sixteenth century. To Great
Britain it appeared, on the other hand, as the forcible culmination of
a new rivalry for colonial empire and the dominion of the seas. But
these were in truth but local aspects of a comprehensive German
ambition expressed in the antithesis Weltmacht oder Niedergang.
Bismarck had made the German Empire and raised it to the first place
as a European Power. Europe, it was discovered, was a small portion of
the globe; and Bismarck's successful methods were now to be used on a
wider scale to raise Germany to a similar predominance in the world.
The Serbian plot was merely the lever to set the whole machinery
working, and German activities all the world over from Belgrade and
Petrograd to Constantinople, Ulster, and Mexico were parts in a
comprehensive piece.
But while the German sword was pointed everywhere, its hilt was in
Berlin. Prussia supplied the mind which conceived the policy and
controlled its execution; and in the circumstances of the Prussian
Government must be sought the mainspring of the war. The cause of the
war was not the Serbian imbroglio nor even German rivalry with Russia,
France, or Britain. These were the occasions of its outbreak and
extension; but national rivalries always exist and occasions for war
are never wanting. They only result in war when one of the parties to
the dispute wants to break the peace; and the Prussian will-to-war was
due to the domestic situation of a Prussian government which had been
made by the sword and had realized before 1914 that it could not be
maintained without a further use of the sword. That government was the
work of Bismarck, who had been called to power in 1863 to save the
Hohenzollerns from subjection to Parliament and had found in the
Danish and Austrian wars of 1864 and 1866 the means of solving the
constitutional issue at Berlin. The cannon of Königgratz proved more
convincing than Liberal arguments; and the methods of blood and iron,
by which Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon conquered Denmark, Austria, and
France and annexed to Prussia the greater part of German soil,
impressed upon Germany a constitution in which the rule of the sword
was merely concealed behind a skilfully emasculated parliamentary
system. The Reichstag with its universal suffrage was the scabbard of
the Prussian sword, and it was because the sword could not do the work
required of it while it lay in the scabbard that it was drawn in 1914.
Since 1871 the object of every Prussian Government had been to
reconcile the German people to the veiled rule of the sword by
exhibiting results which, it was contended, could not otherwise have
been secured. Historians dwelt on the failure of the German Parliament
at Frankfurt to promote a national unity which was left for Prussian
arms to achieve, and philosophers deduced from that example a
comprehensive creed of might. More material arguments were provided
for the man in business and in the street by the skilful activities of
the Government in promoting trade, industry, and social welfare; and
the wealth, which would in any case have accrued from the removal of
the tariff-walls and other barriers between the thirty-nine
independent States of Germany, was credited to the particular method
of war by which the unification had been accomplished. No State had
hitherto made such economic progress as did the German Empire in the
generation after Metz and Sedan, and the success of their rulers led
most of the German people to place implicit reliance on the testimony
those rulers bore to the virtue of their means. The means did not,
however, commend themselves to the rest of the world with equal
conviction; and an increasing aversion to the mailed fist on the part
of other countries led to what Germans called the hostile encirclement
of their Fatherland. Gradually it became clearer that Prussian
autocracy could not reproduce in the sphere of world-ambitions the
success which had attended it in Germany unless it could reduce the
world to the same submission by the use of similar arguments.
But still the Prussian Government was driven towards imperialistic
expansion by the ever-increasing force of public opinion and popular
discontent. It could only purchase renewed leases of autocratic power
at home, with its perquisites for those who wielded and supported
autocracy, by feeding the minds of the people with diplomatic triumphs
and their bodies with new markets for commercial and industrial
expansion; and the incidents of military domination grew ever more
irksome to the populace. The middle classes were fairly content, and
the parties which represented them in the Reichstag offered no real
opposition to Prussian ideas of government. But the Social Democrats
were more radical in their principles and were regarded by Prussian
statesmen as open enemies of the Prussian State. Rather than submit to
social democracy Prussians avowed their intention of making war, and
war abroad would serve their turn a great deal better than civil
strife. The hour was rapidly advancing two years before the war broke
out. The German rebuff over Agadir in 1911 was followed by a general
election in 1912 at which the Social Democrats polled nearly a third
of the votes and secured by far the largest representation of any
party in the Reichstag. In 1913, after a particularly violent
expression of militarism called "the Zabern incident," the Reichstag
summoned up courage for the first time in its history to pass a vote
of censure on the Government. The ground was slipping from under the
feet of Prussian militarism; it must either fortify its position by
fresh victories or take the risk of revolution. It preferred the
chances of European war, and found in the Serbian incident a means of
provoking a war the blame for which could be laid at others' doors.
The German Kaiser played but a secondary part in these transactions.
It is true that the German constitution placed in his hands the
command of the German Army and Navy and the control of foreign policy;
but no paper or parchment could give him the intellect to direct the
course of human affairs. He had indeed dismissed Bismarck in 1890, but
dropping the pilot did not qualify him to guide the ship of state, and
he was himself in 1906 compelled to submit to the guidance of his
ministers. The shallow waters of his mind spread over too vast a
sphere of activity to attain any depth, and he had the foibles of
Frederick the Great without his courage or his capacity. His barbaric
love of pomp betrayed the poverty of his spirit and exhibited a
monarchy reduced from power to a pageant. He was not without his
generous impulses or exalted sentiments, and there was no section of
the British public, from Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to Mr. Rudyard Kipling
and the "Daily Mail," to which one or other of his guises had not
commended itself; it pleased him to pose as the guardian of the peace
of Europe, the champion of civilization against the Boxers, and of
society against red revolution. But vanity lay at the root of all
these manifestations, and he took himself not less seriously as an
arbiter of letters, art, and religion than as a divinely appointed
ruler of the State. The many parts he played were signs of versatile
emotion rather than of power; and his significance in history is that
he was the crest of a wave, its superficial froth and foam without its
massive strength. A little man in a great position, he was powerless
to ride the whirlwind or direct the storm, and he figured largely in
the public eye because he vented through an imperial megaphone the
fleeting catchwords of the vulgar mind.
After Agadir he had often been called a coward behind his back, and it
was whispered that his throne would be in danger if that surrender
were repeated. He had merited these reproaches because no one had done
more than he to inflate the arrogance of his people, and his eldest
son took the lead in exasperating public opinion behind the scenes.
The militarists, with considerable backing from financial and
commercial groups, were bent on war, and war appeals to the men in the
streets of all but the weakest countries. The mass of the people had
not made up their mind for a war that was not defensive; but modern
governments have ample means for tuning public opinion, and with a
people so accustomed as the Germans to accept the truth from above,
their rulers would have little difficulty, when once they had agreed
upon war, in representing it as one of defence. It is, however,
impossible to say when, if ever, the rulers of Germany agreed to
attack; and to the last the Imperial Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg,
struggled to delay if not to avert the breach. But he gradually lost
his grip on the Kaiser. The decisive factor in the Emperor's mind may
have been the rout in 1912-13 of the Turks, on whom Germany had staked
her credit in return for control of the Berlin-Baghdad route; for the
free Balkan confederation, which loomed on the horizon, would bar for
ever German expansion towards the East. The Balkan States themselves
provided the German opportunity; the Treaty of Bukarest in 1913
entrenched discord in their hearts and reopened a path for German
ambition and intrigue. Austria, not without the usual instigation,
proposed to Italy a joint attack upon Serbia; the offer was not
accepted, but by the winter of 1913-14 the Kaiser had gone over to the
party which had resolved upon war and was seeking an occasion to
palliate the cause.
The immeasurable distance between the cause and the occasion was shown
by the fact that Belgium was the first to suffer in an Austro-Serbian
dispute; and the universal character of the issue was foreshadowed by
the breach of its neutrality. Germany would not have planned for two
years past an offensive through that inoffensive, unconcerned, and
distant country, had the cause of the war been a murder at Serajevo.
The cause was a comprehensive determination on the German part to
settle international issues by the sword, and it involved the
destinies of civilization. The blow was aimed directly or indirectly
at the whole world, and Germany's only prospect of success lay in the
chance that most of the world would fail to perceive its implications
or delay too long its effective intervention. It was the defect of her
self-idolatry and concentration that she could not develop an
international mind or fathom the mentality of other peoples. She could
not conceive how England would act on a "scrap of paper," and never
dreamt of American participation. But she saw that Russia and France
would inevitably and immediately be involved in war by the attempt at
armed dictation in the Balkans, and that the issue would decide the
fate of Europe. The war would therefore be European and could only be
won by the defeat of France and Russia. Serbia would be merely the
scene of local and unimportant operations, and, Russia being the
slower to move, the bulk of the German forces were concentrated on the
Rhine for the purpose of overwhelming France.
The condition of French politics was one of the temptations which led
the Prussian militarists to embark upon the hazard. France had had her
troubles with militarism, and its excesses over the Dreyfus case had
produced a reaction from which both the army command and its political
ally the Church had suffered. A wave of national secularism carried a
law against ecclesiastical associations which drove religious orders
from France, and international Socialism found vent in a pacifist
agitation against the terms of military service. A rapid succession of
unstable ministries, which the group system in French parliamentary
politics encouraged, militated against sound and continuous
administration; and in April 1914 a series of revelations in the
Senate had thrown an unpleasant light upon the efficiency of the army
organization. On military grounds alone there was much to be said for
the German calculation that in six weeks the French armies could be
crushed and Paris reached. But the Germans paid the French the
compliment of believing that this success could not be achieved before
Russia made her weight felt, unless the Germans broke the
international guarantees on which the French relied, and sought in
Belgium an easier and less protected line of advance than through the
Vosges.
For that crime public opinion was not prepared either in France or
England, but it had for two years at least been the settled policy of
the German military staff, and it had even been foretold in England a
year before that the German attack would proceed by way of Liège and
Namur. There had also been military "conversations" between Belgian
and British officers with regard to possible British assistance in the
event of Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality. But the Belgian
Ministry was naturally reluctant to proceed far on that assumption,
which might have been treated as an insult by an honest or dishonest
German Government; and it was impossible for England to press its
assistance upon a neutralized State which could not even discuss it
without casting a slur upon the honour of its most powerful neighbour.
Nor was England bound by treaty to defend the neutrality of Belgium.
She had been so bound by a treaty concluded during the Franco-Prussian
War; but that treaty expired in the following year, and the treaty of
1839, which regulated the international situation of Belgium, merely
bound the five great signatory Powers not to violate Belgian
neutrality without obliging them individually or collectively to
resist its violation. It was not in fact regarded in 1839 as
conceivable that any of the Great Powers would ever violate so solemn
a pledge, and there was some complacent satisfaction that by thus
neutralizing a land which had for centuries been the cockpit of
Europe, the Powers had laid the foundations of permanent peace. But
the bond of international morality was loosened during the next
half-century, and in the eighties even English newspapers argued in
favour of a German right-of-way through Belgium for the purposes of
war with France. It does not appear that the treaty was ever regarded
as a serious obstacle by the German military staff; for neither
treaties nor morality belong to the curricula of military science
which had concluded that encirclement was the only way to defeat a
modern army, and that through Belgium alone could the French defence
be encircled. The Chancellor admitted that technically Germany was
wrong, and promised full reparation after the war. But he was never
forgiven the admission, even by German jurists, who argued that
treaties were only binding rebus sic stantibus, while the conditions
in which they were signed remained substantially the same; and Germans
had long cast covetous eyes on the Congo State, the possession of
which, they contended, was inconsistent with Belgium's legal immunity
from attack in Europe.
The opposition of Bethmann-Hollweg and the German foreign office was
accordingly brushed aside, and the army made all preparations for an
invasion of France through Belgium. The diplomatists would have made a
stouter resistance had they anticipated the attitude England was to
adopt. But the German ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowsky, failed
to convince his Government that there was anything to fear from the
British Empire. Mr. Lloyd George has claimed it as one of the
advantages we derive from the British press that it misleads public
opinion abroad, and a study of "The Times," the only British newspaper
that carries much weight in foreign countries, may well have persuaded
the German Government in 1914 that eight years of Liberal
administration were not likely to have provided England with the
means, or left it the spirit, to challenge the might of Germany. She
was known to have entered into no binding alliance with France or
Russia; the peace had never in all their history been broken between
the two great Protestant Powers; and, while there had been serious
naval and colonial rivalry and some diplomatic friction, relations in
1913-14 seemed to have entered calmer waters. Germany had been well
satisfied with the efforts and sacrifices England had made to prevent
the Balkan crisis from developing into a European war; and Lichnowsky
was successfully negotiating treaties which gave Germany unexpected
advantages with regard to the Baghdad railway and African
colonization. On the eve of war the English were hailed as cousins in
Berlin, and the earliest draft of the German official apology,
intended for American consumption, spoke of Great Britain and Germany
labouring shoulder to shoulder to preserve the peace against Russian
aggression. The anger of the Kaiser, the agitation of the Chancellor,
and the fury of the populace when England declared war showed that
Germany had no present intention of adding the British Empire to her
list of enemies and little fear that it would intervene unless it were
attacked. Any anxiety she may have felt was soothed by the studied
assumption that England's desire, if any, to intervene would be
effectively checked by her domestic situation. Agents from Ulster were
buying munitions to fight Home Rule with official connivance in
Germany, and it was confidently expected that war would shake a
ramshackle British Empire to its foundations; there would be
rebellions in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and the self-governing
Dominions would at least refuse to participate in Great Britain's
European adventures. In such circumstances "the flannelled fool at the
wicket and the muddied oaf at the goal" might be trusted to hug his
island security and stick to his idle sports; and the most windy and
patriotic of popular British weeklies was at the end of July
placarding the streets of London with the imprecation "To hell with
Servia."
The object of German diplomacy was to avoid offence to British
susceptibilities, and the first requisite was to keep behind the
scenes. The Kaiser went off on a yachting cruise to Norway, where,
however, he was kept in constant touch with affairs, while Austria on
23 July presented her ultimatum to the Serbian Government. The terms
amounted to a demand for the virtual surrender of Serbian
independence, and were in fact intended to be rejected. Serbia,
however, acting on Russian and other advice, accepted them all except
two, which she asked should be referred to the Hague Tribunal. Austria
refused on the ground that the dispute was not of a justiciable
nature; and the meagre five days' grace having expired on the 28th,
Austrian troops crossed the Save and occupied Belgrade, the Serbians
withdrawing without resistance. Meanwhile feverish activity agitated
the chancelleries of Europe. The terms of the ultimatum had been
discussed by the British Cabinet on Friday the 24th, and the British
Fleet, which had been reviewed at Spithead on the previous Saturday,
was, instead of dispersing at Portland, kept together, and then, on
the 29th, dispatched to its war stations in the North Sea.
Simultaneously the German High Seas Fleet withdrew on the 26th to Kiel
and Wilhelmshaven. Russia replied to the Austrian invasion of Serbia
by mobilizing her southern command and extending the mobilization, as
the hand of Germany became more apparent, to her northern armies. Sir
Edward Grey made unceasing efforts to avert the clash of arms by
peaceable negotiation, and proposed a conference of the four Great
Powers not immediately concerned in the dispute--Germany, France,
Italy, and Great Britain. Germany, knowing that she would stand alone
in the conference, declined. The dispute, she pretended, was merely a
local affair between Austria and Serbia, in which no other Power had
the right to intervene. But she refused to localize the dispute to the
extent of regarding it as a Balkan conflict between the interests of
Austria and Russia. Austria was less unyielding when it became evident
that Russia would draw the sword rather than acquiesce in Serbia's
subjection, and on the 30th it seemed that the way had been opened for
a settlement by direct negotiation between Vienna and Petrograd. At
that moment Germany threw off the diplomatic disguise of being a
pacific second to her Austrian friend, and cut the web of argument by
an ultimatum to Russia on the 31st. Fear lest the diplomatists should
baulk them of their war had already led the German militarists to
publish in their press the unauthorized news of a complete German
mobilization, and on 1-2 August German armies crossed the frontiers.
It was not till some days later that war was declared between Austria
and any of the Allies; the war from first to last was made in Germany.
Throughout that week-end the British Cabinet remained in anxious
conclave. The Unionist leaders early assured it of their support in
any measures they might think fit to take to vindicate Great Britain's
honour and obligations; but they could not relieve it of its own
responsibility, and the question did not seem as easy to answer as it
has done since the conduct of Germany and the nature of her ambitions
have been revealed. A purely Balkan conflict did not appear to be an
issue on which to stake the fortunes of the British Empire. We were
not even bound to intervene in a trial of strength between the Central
Empires and Russia and France, for on 1 August Italy decided that the
action of the Central Empires was aggressive and that therefore she
was not required by the Triple Alliance to participate. There had in
the past been a tendency on the part of France to use both the Russian
alliance and English friendship for purposes in Morocco and elsewhere
which had not been quite relished in England; and intervention in
continental wars between two balanced alliances would have found few
friends but for recent German chauvinism. It might well seem that in
the absence of definite obligations and after having exhausted all
means of averting war, Great Britain was entitled to maintain an
attitude of benevolent neutrality, reserving her efforts for a later
period when better prepared she might intervene with greater effect
between the exhausted belligerents.
Such arguments, if they were used, were swept aside by indignation at
Germany's conduct. Doubts might exist of the purely defensive
intentions of France and Russia; each State had its ultra-patriots who
had done their best to give away their country's case; and if Russia
was suspect of Panslavist ambition, France was accused of building up
a colonial empire in North Africa in order to throw millions of
coloured troops into the scale for the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine.
But no such charge could be brought against Belgium. She had no
interest and no intention but to live in peace with her neighbours,
and that peace had been guaranteed her by international contract. If
such a title to peace was insecure there could be no security for the
world and nothing but subservience for little nations. The public
sense which for a century had been accustomed to welcome national
independence wherever it raised its head--in Greece, the Balkans,
Italy, Hungary, Poland, the South American Republics--revolted at its
denial to Belgium in the interest of German military aggression; and
censure of the breach of international contract was converted to
passion by the wrong wantonly done to a weak and peaceful by a mighty
and ambitious Power. Great Britain was not literally bound to
intervene; but if ever there was a moral obligation on a country, it
lay upon her now, and the instant meeting of that obligation implied
an instinctive recognition of the character of the war that was to be
fought. Mixed and confused though the national issues might be in
various quarters, the war, so far as concerned the two Powers who were
to be mainly instrumental in its winning, was a civil war of mankind
to determine the principle upon which international relations should
repose.
That issue was not for every one to see, and there were many to whom
the struggle was merely national rivalry in which the interests of
England happened to coincide with those of France and in which we
should have intervened just the same without any question of Belgium's
neutrality. Whether it might have been so can never be determined. But
it is certain that no such struggle would have enlisted the united
sympathies and whole-hearted devotion of the British realms, still
less those of the United States, and in it we might well have been
defeated. From that division and possible defeat we and the world were
saved by Germany's decision that military advantage outweighed moral
considerations. The invasion of Belgium and Luxemburg united the
British Empire on the question of intervention. Three ministers alone
out of more than forty--Lord Morley, Mr. John Burns, and Mr. C. P.
Trevelyan--dissented from the Cabinet's decision, and the minority in
the nation was of still more slender proportions. Parliament supported
the Ministry without a division when on 4 August England declared war.
Had we counted the cost? the German Chancellor asked our ambassador in
Berlin on the eve of the declaration. The cost would not have affected
our decision, but it was certainly not anticipated, and the Entente
was ill-prepared to cope with the strength displayed by Germany. The
British Navy was, indeed, as ready as the German Army, and the command
of the sea passed automatically into our hands when the German Fleet
withdrew from the North Sea on 26 July. But for that circumstance not
a single division could have been sent across the sea, and the war
would have been over in a few months. Nor was the British Army
unprepared for the task that had been allotted to it in anticipation.
It was the judgment not only of our own but of Allied Staffs that an
expeditionary force of six divisions would suffice to balance German
superiority in the West; and that force, consisting of better material
better trained than any other army in the field, was in its place in
the line of battle hundreds of miles from its base within three weeks
of the declaration of war. The real miscalculation was of the
respective strength of France and Germany, and no one had foreseen
that it would ultimately require three times the force that France
could put in the field to liberate French soil from the German
invader. The National Service League would have provided us with a
large army; but even its proposals were vitiated by their assumption
that these forces were needed to do the navy's work of home-defence,
and by the absence of provision for munitions, without which sending
masses of men into battle was sending them to useless slaughter. Time
was needed to remedy these miscalculations, but time was provided by
our command of the sea, about which there had been no misjudgment and
no lack of pre-vision. We made our mistakes before, and during the
war, but neither Mr. Asquith's Governments nor that of his successor
need fear comparison with those of our Allies or our enemies on that
account; and it is merely a modest foible of the people, which has
hardly lost a war for nearly four hundred years, to ascribe its escape
to fortune, and to envy the prescience and the science which have
lightened the path of its enemies to destruction.
CHAPTER II
THE GERMAN INVASION
Germany began the war on the Western front before it was declared, and
on 1-2 August German cavalry crossed the French frontier between
Luxemburg and Switzerland at three points in the direction of Longwy,
Lunéville, and Belfort. But these were only feints designed to prolong
the delusion that Germany would attack on the only front legitimately
open to warfare and to delay the reconstruction of the French defence
required to meet the real offensive. The reasons for German strategy
were conclusive to the General Staff, and they were frankly explained
by Bethmann-Hollweg to the British ambassador. There was no time to
lose if France was to be defeated before an effective Russian move,
and time would be lost by a frontal attack. The best railways and
roads from Berlin to Paris ran through Belgium; the Vosges protected
more than half of the French frontier south of Luxemburg, Belfort
defended the narrow gap between them and Switzerland, and even the
wider thirty miles' gap between the northern slopes of the Vosges and
Luxemburg was too narrow for the deployment of Germany's strength; the
way was also barred by the elaborate fortifications of Verdun, Toul,
and Nancy. Strategy pointed conclusively to the Belgian route, and its
advantages were clinched by the fact that France was relying on the
illusory scrap of paper. Her dispositions assumed an attack in
Lorraine, and her northern fortifications round Lille, Maubeuge, and
Hirson were feeble compared with those of Belfort, Toul, and Verdun.
Given a rapid and easy march through Belgium, the German armies would
turn the left flank of the French defence and cut it off from the
capital. Hence the resistance of Belgium had a great military
importance apart from its moral value. To its lasting honour the
Belgian Government had scorned the German proposal for connivance even
in the attractive form which would have limited the German use of
Belgian territory to the eastern bank of the Meuse.
Haste and contempt for the Belgian Army, whose imperfect organization
was due to a natural reliance on the neutrality which Germany had
guaranteed, accounted for the first derangement of German plans. The
invasion began towards Visé, near the Dutch frontier where the direct
road from Aix to Brussels crosses the Meuse, but the main
advance-guard followed the trunk railway from Berlin to Paris via
Venders and Liège. It was, however, inadequately mobilized and
equipped, and was only intended to clear away an opposition which was
not expected to be serious. The Belgians fought more stubbornly than
was anticipated; and aided by Brialmont's fortification of Liège,
although his plans for defence were not properly executed, they held
up the Germans for two days in front of the city. It was entered on 7
August, but its fall did not give the Germans the free passage they
wanted; for the forts on the heights to the north commanded the
railway, and the Germans contented themselves with bringing up their
transport and 11 2 in. howitzers. Brialmont had not foreseen the
explosive force of modern shells, and two days' bombardment on the
13th-15th reduced the remaining forts, in spite of their construction
underground, to a mass of shell-holes with a handful of wounded or
unconscious survivors. The last to be reduced was Fort Loncin, whose
gallant commander, General Leman, was found poisoned and half-dead
from suffocation. He had succeeded in delaying the German advance for
a momentous week.
No more could be done with the forces at his disposal, and the German
masses of infantry were pouring across the Meuse at Visé, towards
Liège by Verviers, up the right bank of the Meuse towards Namur, and
farther south through the Ardennes. The German cavalry which spread
over the country east and north-east of Brussels and was sometimes
repulsed by the Belgians, was merely a screen, which defective
air-work failed to penetrate, and the frequent engagements were merely
the brushes of outposts. Within a week from the fall of Fort Loncin
half of Belgium was overrun and the real menace revealed. Belgium was
powerless before the avalanche, and its only hope lay in France. But
the French Army was still mobilizing on its northern front, and its
incursions into Alsace and Lorraine did nothing to relieve the
pressure. The Belgians had to fall back towards Antwerp, uncovering
Brussels, which was occupied by the Germans on the 20th and mulcted in
a preliminary levy of eight million pounds, and leaving to the
fortifications of Namur the task of barring the German advance to the
northern frontiers of France. Namur proved a broken reed. The troops
which paraded through Brussels with impressive pomp and regularity
were only a detail of the extreme right wing of the invading force;
the mass was advancing along the north bank of the Meuse and
overrunning the whole of Belgium south and east of the river. On the
15th an attempt to seize Dinant and the river crossing above Namur was
repulsed by French artillery; but there was apparently no cavalry to
follow up this success, and the Germans were allowed to bring up their
heavy howitzers for the bombardment of Namur without disturbance. It
began on the 20th, and, unsupported by the Allied assistance for which
they looked, the Belgians were panic-stricken; on the 23rd the city
and most of the forts were in German hands though two resisted until
the 26th. The Germans had not, as at Liège, wasted their infantry in
premature attacks, and with little loss to them, a fortress reputed
impregnable had been captured, the greater part of the southern
Belgian Army destroyed, and the provisional plan of French defence
frustrated. The fall of Namur was the first resounding success of the
Germans in the war.
Its loss was not redeemed by the French offensive in Alsace and
Lorraine. On 7 August a weak French force advanced through the Belfort
gap and, finding still weaker forces to oppose it, proceeded to occupy
Altkirch and Mulhouse, while a proclamation by General Joffre
announced the approaching liberation of the provinces torn from France
in 1870. It was a feeble and ill-conceived effort to snatch a
political advantage out of a forbidding military situation. German
reinforcements swept up from Colmar and Neu Breisach, and on the both
the French were back within a few miles of the frontier, leaving their
sympathizers to the vengeance of their enemies. More legitimate though
not more successful was the French thrust in Lorraine. It had other
motives than the political: it would, if pushed home, menace the left
of the German armies in Belgium and disturb their communications; and
a smaller success would avert the danger of a German advance in
Lorraine which would threaten the right of the French on the Meuse.
Accordingly, Generals Pau and de Castelnau, commanding the armies of
Alsace and Lorraine respectively, ordered a general advance on the
10th. At first it met with success: the chief passes of the Vosges
from Mt. Donon on the north to the Belfort gap were seized;
counter-thrusts by the Germans towards Spincourt and Blamont in the
plain of Lorraine were parried; Thann was captured, Mulhouse was
re-occupied, and the Germans looked like losing Alsace as far north as
Colmar. German Lorraine seemed equally insecure, for on the 18th
Castelnau's troops were in Saarburg cutting the rail and roads between
Strassburg and Metz. The Germans, however, were not unprepared: their
Fifth Army, under the Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, came down
from Metz and fell upon the exposed French left, which was routed with
great losses in guns and prisoners on the 21st. Not only did the
invasion collapse, but the Bavarians pushed across the French frontier
nearly as far as Toul and occupied Lunéville, compelling also a French
retreat from the passes of the Vosges. General Pau had soon to follow
suit and retire again from Mulhouse and all but the south-west corner
of Alsace.
The operations in Alsace and Lorraine had dismally failed to discount
the advance of the Germans through Belgium or even to impede the march
of their centre through Luxemburg and the Ardennes. At the end of
three weeks France was still in the throes of mobilization: the
original scheme of defence along the Franco-German frontier had been
upset by the German attack through Belgium; and second thoughts had
fared little better at Namur. The shortest line of defence after the
Germans had broken through at Liège was one running from Antwerp to
Namur, and the shortest line is imperative for the weaker combatant.
But the Germans were well across it when they entered Brussels, and
with the fall of Namur the hinge upon which depended the defence of
the northern frontier of France was broken. It was to an almost
forlorn hope that the British Army was committed when it took its
place on the left of the French northern armies at Mons to encounter
for the first time since Waterloo the shock of a first-rate European
force. But for its valour and the distraction caused by the Russian
invasion of East Prussia, Paris and possibly the French armies might
not have been saved.
It was a meagre force for so great a responsibility, but far from the
"contemptible little army" it was falsely believed to have been called
by the Kaiser. The men were all volunteers who had enlisted for seven
years' service with the colours as against the three years' service of
the Germans and the French; and on an average they had seen far more
actual fighting than the Germans, who contemptuously dismissed this
experience as colonial warfare. If in the science of tactics and
strategy the British was inferior to the German Army, its marksmanship
and individual steadiness were unequalled; and under anything like
equal conditions British troops proved themselves the better men. But
the conditions were never equal during the first two years of the war
owing to the German superiority in numbers and in artillery; and there
was a third cause of inequality due to the different military systems
of the two countries. Universal service enabled Germany to select the
ablest men--at least from the middle and upper classes--to officer and
command her armies. In England before the war only an infinitesimal
fraction of her youthful ability found its way into the army.
Independent means and social position rather than brains were the
common qualifications for a commission; and what there was to be said
for such a system so long as fighting was mainly a matter of physical
courage and individual leadership lost its validity when war became a
matter of science and mechanical ingenuity. The fact that four of the
six British army-commanders (Plumer, Byng, Rawlinson, Cavan) in the
West at the end of the war were old Etonians, testifies to more things
than their military skill; and it was a characteristic irony that from
first to last the British armies should have been commanded by cavalry
officers in a war in which cavalry played hardly any part.
The commander-in-chief was Sir John French, who had made his
reputation as a cavalry leader in the Boer War and had been chief of
the imperial staff since 1911. As inspector-general of the forces from
1907 to 1911 he had a good deal to do with Lord Haldane's
reorganization of the British Army, and as chief of the staff he was
largely responsible for the equipment of the Expeditionary Force and
the agreement with the French Government with regard to its dimensions
and the way in which it should be used. He was the obvious general to
command it when it came to the test. With similar unanimity the
popular voice approved of the appointment of Lord Kitchener as
Secretary of State for War on 5 August. The Expeditionary Force
consisted of three army corps, each comprising two divisions, and a
cavalry division under Allenby. The First Army Corps was commanded by
Sir Douglas Haig, the youngest lieutenant-general in the army, and the
second by Sir James Grierson, its most accomplished student. Unhappily
Grierson died suddenly soon after the landing, and he was succeeded by
Sir H. Smith-Dorrien, who, like French, had made his name in South
Africa. The Third Corps, under Sir W. Pulteney, came later into the
field. The embarkation began on 7 August, less than three days after
war had been declared, and the Government showed a sound confidence in
our little-understood command of the sea when it risked the whole of
our effective fighting force by sending it across the Channel to
assist the French and thus abandoning the defence of British shores to
the British Navy. By the 16th the transportation had been accomplished
without a hitch or loss of any kind. It was an achievement which even
domestic faction failed to belittle until time itself had effaced it
from popular recollection.
From Boulogne and from other ports the troops were sent up to the
wavering line of battle along the Franco-Belgian frontier. They came
not to win a victory but to save an army from disaster. The mass of
French reserves were in Lorraine or far away to the south, and the
safety of the French line on the northern front had depended upon the
assumed impregnability of Namur and an equally fallacious
underestimate of the number of German troops in Belgium. Three French
armies, the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth, were strung along the
frontier from Montmédy across the Meuse and the Sambre to a point
north-west of Charleroi, where the British took up their position
stretching through Binche, Mons, and along the canal from Mons to
Condé. Far away to the south-west was a French Territorial corps in
front of Arras, and at Maubeuge behind the British centre was a French
cavalry corps under General Sordet. The French staff anticipated a
defeat of the German attack on these lines and then a successful
offensive, and military critics in England even wrote of the hopeless
position of the Germans under Von Buelow and Von Kluck thrust far
forward into a cul-de-sac in Belgium with the French on their left at
Charleroi, the British on their right front at Mons, and the Belgians
on their right rear before Antwerp. The German calculation was that
the Belgians had been effectively masked by a corps detached
north-westwards from Brussels, that the Duke of Württemberg and Von
Hausen had troops enough to force the Meuse, drive in the French
right, and threaten the centre at Charleroi, and that Von Buelow could
cross the Sambre and Von Kluck encircle the British flank. The
strength which the Germans developed in Belgium and the extension of
their right wing are said to have been an afterthought due to the
intervention of the British Expeditionary Force; but the original
German plan required some such modification when the presence of
British troops lengthened the line of French defence.
The first two army corps, under Haig to the right and Smith-Dorrien to
the left, were in position on Saturday the 22nd hard at work throwing
up entrenchments and clearing the ground of obstacles to their fire.
That day was more eventful for the French, and it is not quite clear
why they were not assisted by a British offensive on their left. On
the right, the Third and Fourth French armies under Ruffey and Langle
de Cary had advanced from the Meuse to attack the Germans across the
Semois. They were severely checked and withdrew behind the Meuse,
while an unsuspected army of Saxons under Von Hausen attacked the
right flank of the Fifth French army under Lanrezac which lay along
the Sambre with its right flank resting on the Meuse. The fall of
Namur in the angle of the two rivers made Von Hausen's task
comparatively easy, and the Fifth army, which was also attacked by Von
Buelow in front, fell back in some confusion. A breach was thus made
in the French line, and Von Hausen turned left to roll up the Fourth
and Third armies of Langle de Cary and Ruffey; they, too, in their
turn retreated in some haste, and the Germans were free to concentrate
on the British. They had cleared their left and centre of danger, and
Von Kluck was able on the 23rd not only to face our troops with
superior forces in front, but to outflank them towards the west and
bring Von Buelow down upon them from Charleroi on the east. He had at
least four army corps with which to crush the British two, and our
75,000 men were spread out on a line of twenty-five miles thinner far
than the French line just broken at Charleroi. Finally, owing to
defective staff-work and the confusion of the French retreat, they
were left in utter ignorance of what had happened, and faced the
German attack as if they were part of one unbroken front instead of
being a fragment round which the tide of battle surged, and under the
impression conveyed to them on their arrival at the scene of action
that their opponents numbered little more than one or at most two army
corps.
Fighting began at 12.40 p.m. on Sunday the 23rd with a bombardment
from between five and six hundred German guns along the whole
twenty-five miles of front. It did surprisingly little damage in spite
of the spotting by German aeroplanes; and when the German infantry
came forward in massed formation, they discovered that their shelling
had had no effect upon the moral of our troops or the accuracy of
their rifle-fire. The Germans fought, of course, with obstinate
courage and advanced again and again into the murderous fire of our
rifles and machine guns and against occasional bayonet charges. But
their own shooting went to pieces under the stress, and the frontal
attack was a failure. Success there could not, however, ward off Von
Buelow's threat to our right flank, and under the converging pressure
Binche and then Mons itself had to be evacuated. But it was the
long-delayed news of the French defeat and withdrawal on the whole of
the rest of the line, coupled with more accurate information about the
size of the German force, that determined the abandonment of the
British position. Sir John French had to hold on till nightfall, but
orders were given to prepare the way for retreat. The weary troops
were to have a few hours' rest and start at daybreak. Their retreat
was covered by a counter-attack soon after dawn by the First Division
on the right which suggested to the Germans that we had been strongly
reinforced and intended an offensive. Meanwhile Smith-Dorrien moved
back five miles from the Canal, and then stood to protect the
withdrawal of the First Division after its feint attack. It was a
heavy task, and the 9th Lancers suffered severely in an attempt to
hold up the Germans at Audregnies. But by Monday afternoon Haig's
First Army Corps was back on the line between Maubeuge and Bavai, and
Smith-Dorrien fell into line from Bavai westwards to Bry.
The design was to offer a second battle in this position, and
entrenchments were begun. The fortress of Maubeuge and the Sambre gave
some protection to the British right, but the Sambre was only of use
in front if the Meuse was held by the French on the right and Von
Kluck could not outflank on the left. Neither of these conditions was
fulfilled: Von Kluck had seized Tournai and captured the whole of the
French Territorial brigade which attempted to defend it, while the
Meuse had been forced and the three French armies were in full
retreat. A battle on the Maubeuge-Bry line would invite an
encirclement from which the British had barely escaped at Mons, and
the retreat was reluctantly continued to Le Cateau. Marching, the
First Army Corps along the east of the Forest of Mormal and the Second
along the west, our troops reached at nightfall on the 25th a line
running from Maroilles through Landrecies and Le Cateau to
Serainvilliers near Cambrai; but they had little rest. About 10 p.m.,
amid rain and darkness, the Germans got into Landrecies. In the fierce
hand-to-hand struggle which ensued, the individual resourcefulness of
our men gave them the advantage, and the Germans were driven out by
detachments of the Grenadier, Coldstream, and 1st Irish Guards. They
were simultaneously repulsed at Maroilles with some French assistance;
but daybreak saw a third and more powerful attack delivered on Le
Cateau. Sir John French had told Smith-Dorrien the night before that
he was risking a second Sedan by a stand. But Smith-Dorrien thought he
had no option. For eight hours on the 26th his men, reinforced by
Snow's Division, but outnumbered in guns by nearly four to one, held
their own, until another envelopment was threatened by Von Kluck.
Fortunately the struggle had apparently exhausted the Germans;
Sordet's cavalry had ridden across Smith-Dorrien's front and protected
his left from envelopment; and the remnants of the three divisions
were able to withdraw. The retreat was harrowing enough, and the 1st
Gordons, missing their way in the dark, fell into the hands of the
Germans and were all killed, wounded, or taken prisoners. But Le
Cateau had taken the sting out of the German pursuit, and touch was at
last regained with French forces to the east, with a newly-formed
corps under D'Amade to the west, and with a Sixth French army which
Maunoury was collecting on the Somme. On the evening of Friday the
28th Smith-Dorrien reached the Oise between Chauny and Noyon and Haig
at La Fère. The First Army Corps had marched by Guise; the loss of a
detachment of Munsters by misadventure early on the 27th was redeemed
by the defeat on the 28th of two German columns by two brigades of
Allenby's cavalry led by Gough and Chetwode. That night the
Expeditionary Force had its first real sleep since Sunday, and next
day there were no marching orders.
The British Army had saved itself and a good deal else by its courage,
skill, and, above all, its endurance. But there was much that was lost
in men, material, and ground. The fortification of the French frontier
south and west of Mons was obsolete, and the country had been denuded
of troops save a few Territorials in the process of mobilization.
Maubeuge was the only fortress that made a stand, and Uhlans swept
across Belgium as far as the Lys and down upon Lille and Arras with
the object of cutting communications between the British Army and its
bases at Boulogne and Dieppe. Some resistance was offered at Bapaume,
where the arrival of a British detachment delayed the German advance
until Amiens had been evacuated and the rolling stock removed. But the
threat was sufficiently serious to induce Sir John French to move his
base as far south as St. Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire, and the
Germans could, had they been so minded, have occupied the Channel
ports as far as the Seine. But they were not calculating on a long war
or a serious contest with British forces for the control of Flanders,
and their object was to destroy the French armies and dictate a peace
at Paris before the autumn leaves began to fall.
They seemed to be making excellent progress towards that end. Sir J.
French, indeed, took a sombre view of our losses at Le Cateau, and
apparently it needed a visitation from Lord Kitchener on 1st September
to retain the British Army in co-operation with the French. The fall
of Namur, the battles of Charleroi and Mons, and the defeat of the
French on the Semois were followed by the rout of Ruffey's and
Langle's armies on the Meuse. They stretched north-westwards from
Montmédy by way of Sedan and Mezières down the Meuse towards Dinant
and Namur. But their left flank had been turned by Von Hausen's
victory and the fall of Namur; and on the 27th Von Hausen, wheeling to
his left, rolled up the French left wing while the Duke of Württemberg
and the Crown Prince attacked all along the front. Ruffey had to seek
safety in the Argonne, while Langle's army made for Rethel on the
Aisne. On the 28th Longwy, the last French fortress north of Verdun,
capitulated after a stout resistance. The defence of the frontier had
collapsed, and the hopes that were entertained of resistance along the
upper Aisne and thence by Laon and La Fère towards St. Quentin, proved
delusive. Lanrezac's Fifth army turned on the 29th between Vervins and
Ribemont, and near Guise inflicted on the Germans the most serious
check to their advance. This reaction was not helped by the British
retreat on Lanrezac's left, and its principal value was to protect
that withdrawal. Nor was it better supported on the right. The Third
and Fourth French armies were too severely hustled in their retreat to
make a stand, and the reserves were still far away to the south. On
the 28th-29th the Aisne was forced at Rethel, and Reims and Chalons
were abandoned to the enemy; and La Fère and Laon followed on the
30th.
The British fell back from the Aisne and the Oise through the forests
of Villers-Cotterets and Compiègne towards the Marne. At Néry on 1
September a battery of Royal Horse Artillery was almost wiped out, and
the guns were only saved by a gallant cavalry charge of the 1st
Brigade; and on the same day a hard rearguard defence had to be fought
by the 4th Guards Brigade. On the 3rd they reached the Marne, but it
too was abandoned farther east without resistance, and on the 5th the
Expeditionary Force was concentrated behind the Grand Morin. A
retreat, upon the successful conduct of which depended the existence
of the Force, the security of France, and the cause of the Entente,
had been successfully accomplished by the skill of its commanders and
still more by the fortitude and unquenchable spirit of the men. The
French, too, showed a steadiness in misfortune for which their enemies
had not looked; their reverses had been more severe, and their
preparation less complete than our own, and a high morale was required
for armies to react against such a run of ill-success with the
effectiveness that was presently displayed upon the Marne.
A public on both sides of the Channel which was unfamiliar with the
elements of military science and history, looked, as soon as it was
allowed to learn the facts about the German advance, for the
investment of Paris and regarded the French capital as the objective
of the German invasion. But Napoleon's maxim that fortresses are
captured on the field of battle was even truer in 1914 than it was a
century earlier; for only the dispersal of the enemy enables an army
to bring up the heavy artillery needed to batter down modern
fortifications, and the great war saw no sieges worth the name
because, the armies being once driven off, no forts could stand
prolonged bombardment by the artillery which followed in the victor's
train. The cities that suffered were not isolated units, they were
merely knotty points in the lines of battle, and there could be no
siege of Paris so long as Joffre's armies kept in line along the Marne
or anywhere in contact with the capital. There was therefore no change
of plan and no mystery when Von Kluck's right veered in the direction
of its advance from south-west to south and then south-east. It was
both avoiding an obstacle and pursuing its original design of
outflanking the Entente's left. Not that Paris was without its
strategic value. It and the line of the Seine impeded the
encirclement, offered a nucleus of resistance, and provided a screen
behind which could be organized a blow against the right flank of the
deflected German march. Still, there was no certainty that Joffre
could hold the Marne, and the French Government took the somewhat
alarming precaution of removing to Bordeaux.
The presence of the British on the French left, the spectacular threat
to Paris, and the comparative proximity of these operations to our own
shores have possibly led to too great an emphasis being placed upon
Von Kluck's attempt to outflank the left, or at least to too little
weight being attached to the German effort to turn the right in
Lorraine. The Crown Prince was in front of Verdun and the Kaiser
himself went to stimulate the Bavarians at Lunéville and Nancy, and it
was not the imperial habit to bestow the light of the imperial
countenance upon scenes of secondary importance. Lunéville had been
occupied on the 22nd after the French failure on the Saar, and on the
23rd fighting began for the Grand Couronné de Nancy defended by
Castelnau. The line of battle stretched from St. Dié to
Pont-á-Mousson; but although the fiercest attack was still to come,
the German thrust had been decisively checked at Mirecourt before
Joffre determined to stand on the Marne. At last the French seemed to
have a security on their right flank, the lack of which had proved
fatal at Charleroi and on the Meuse. Paris on the one wing and Nancy
on the other forbade the threat of encirclement which had hitherto
compelled retreat; and the French armies were also at last in touch
with their reserves.
There were other elements in the situation to encourage resistance The
momentum of the German rush was somewhat spent in its rapidity, and
the Germans were to illustrate the defect in their own maxim that the
essence of war is violence; for violence is not the same as force and
often wastes it. Moreover, the Russian invasion of East Prussia, if it
did not actually compel the transference of divisions from France to
the Eastern front, diverted thither reserves which might otherwise
have appeared on the Marne or released the troops detained until 7
September by the siege of Maubeuge. Assuredly Joffre seized the right
moment when on the 4th he decided to strike his blow. Two new armies
of reserves had come into line, Foch's Ninth and Maunoury's Sixth; and
two old armies had new commanders, the Third with Sarrail instead of
Ruffey and the Fifth with Franchet d'Esperey instead of Lanrezac. In
the east Castelnau and Sarrail stood almost back to back along the
eastern and western heights of the Meuse above Verdun. On Sarrail's
left was Langle's Fourth army behind Vitry, and the line was continued
westwards by Foch behind Sezanne and the marshes of St. Gond. Next
came D'Esperey's Fifth at La Ferté-Gaucher, and cavalry linked his
left with the British guarded by the Crecy forest. Thence
north-westward stretched across the Paris front the new Sixth army of
Maunoury.
As early as 31 August Von Kluck had turned south-east at a right angle
to his south-western march from Brussels to Amiens; but he had not
thereby replaced his enveloping design by a stroke at Joffre's centre.
For he thought he had disposed of the British at Le Cateau and of
Maunoury on the Somme, and that D'Esperey's Fifth had thus become the
flank of Joffre's forces. He was merely curving his claws to grip, and
by the night of the 5th he had crossed the Marne, the Petit Morin, and
the Grand Morin, and his patrols had reached the Seine. It was a brief
and solitary glimpse of the river on which stood the capital of
France. The battle began, like that of Mons, on a Sunday, the 6th of
September reached its climax on the 9th, and was over by the 12th, The
fighting extended in a curved line from Meaux, which is almost a
suburb of Paris, to Lunéville, which is almost on the German frontier;
and Joffre hoped that this line was too strong to be broken, and could
be gradually drawn tighter until the head of the German invasion was
squeezed out of the cul-de-sac into which, in the German anxiety for a
prompt decision, it had been thrust. The German object, of course,
was, as soon as Von Kluck discovered that Maunoury's new and the
British returning armies forbade the enveloping plan, to break the
line where it bent the most, that is, towards the south-east, and the
weight of attack was thrown against Foch and Langle in Champagne. The
business of those two generals was to stand fast while the right flank
of the Germans was exposed to the counter-offensive of Maunoury and
the British.
Von Kluck had committed the error of underrating his foes, and
assuming that they had been broken beyond the chance of reaction; for
to march across the front of an army that is still able to strike is
inviting disaster, and Joffre had at last been able to shift his
weight from east to west to cope with Von Kluck's unexpected attack
through Belgium. Maunoury's army debouched from Meaux and began
fighting its way to the Ourcq, a little river which runs southwards
into the Marne at Lizy, while the British emerged from the Crecy
forest and drove the Germans back to the Grand Morin. D'Esperey made
headway against the bulk of Von Kluck's army between La Ferté-Gaucher
and Esternay, while Foch held his own against Von Buelow and Von
Hausen's right, and Langle against the Duke of Württemberg. Sarrail's
Third army had, however, to give a little ground along the Meuse. The
morrow's tale was similar: most progress was made by the British, who
drove the Germans across the Grand Morin at Coulommiers, and thus
enabled D'Esperey to do the like with Von Kluck's centre. On the 8th,
however, Maunoury was hard pressed by Von Kluck's desperate efforts to
deal with this sudden danger; but reinforcements poured out from
Paris, the British gained the Petit Morin from Trilport to La
Trétoire, while D'Esperey carried victory farther east and captured
Montmirail. By 11 a.m. on the 9th Von Kluck's army was ordered to
retreat, thus exposing Von Buelow's right, and giving Foch his
opportunity for the decisive stroke of the battle.
It consisted of two blows, right and left, and both came off late on
the 9th. Maunoury's counter-attack on the left had compelled the
Germans to weaken their centre. Not only was Von Buelow's right
exposed, but a gap had been left between his left and Von Hausen's
right, possibly for troops which were detained at Maubeuge or had been
diverted to East Prussia. Nor was this all, for his centre was bogged
in the famous marshes of St. Gond. Foch struck hard at Von Buelow's
centre, right, and left, and by the morning of the 10th he had smashed
the keystone of the German arch. Meanwhile, on the 9th Maunoury had
cleared the Germans from the Ourcq, the British had crossed the Marne
at Chângis, and reached it at Château-Thierry, and D'Esperey farther
east. Von Kluck now received considerable reinforcements which Von
Buelow needed more, and the latter's rapid retreat made even
reinforcements useless for holding the Ourcq. It was equally fatal to
success against Langle and Sarrail, and on the 10th the German retreat
became general. By the end of the week the Germans were back on a line
running nearly due east from a point on the Oise behind Compiègne to
the Aisne, along it to Berry-au-Bac, and thence across Champagne and
the Argonne to Verdun. They had failed in Lorraine as well, where the
climax of their attack was from the 6th to the 9th. Castelnau then
took the offensive, and by the 12th had driven the Bavarians from
before Nancy beyond the Meurthe, and out of Lunéville and St. Dié.
The German right had fallen back thirty-five miles and the centre
nearly fifty; but the retreat was not a rout, and the losses in guns
and prisoners were meagre. The first battle of the Marne was important
by reason of what it prevented the Germans from doing, rather than by
reason of what the Allies achieved, and they had to wait nearly four
years for that precipitate evacuation of France which it was hoped
would follow upon the German repulse from the Marne in September 1914.
Nevertheless it was one of the decisive battles and turning-points of
the war. The German surprise, so long and so carefully prepared, had
failed, and the knockout blow had been parried. The Allied victory had
not decided how the war would end, but it had decided that the war
would be long--a test of endurance rather than of generalship, a
struggle of peoples and a conflict of principles rather than duel
between professional armies. There would be time for peaceful and even
unarmed nations to gird themselves in defence; and the cause of
democracy would not go down because military autocrats had thought to
dispose of France before her allies could effectively intervene.
CHAPTER III
RUSSIA MOVES
The first month of the war in the West had coincided more nearly with
German plans than with Entente hopes, but both Germany and the Western
Allies agreed in miscalculating Russia. The great Moltke had remarked
early in his career that Russia had a habit of appearing too late on
the field and then coming too strong. The war was to prove that to be
a fault of democracy rather than of autocrats, and Russia intervened
with an unexpected promptitude which was to be followed in time by an
equally unexpected collapse. The forecasting of the course of wars is
commonly left to military experts, and military experts commonly err
through ignoring the moral and political factors which determine the
weight and distribution of military forces. The soldier, so far as he
looks behind armies at all, only looks to the numbers from which those
armies may be recruited, and pays scant regard to the political,
moral, social, and economic conditions which may make havoc of armies,
evoke them where they do not exist, or transfer them to unforeseen
scales in the military balance. Russia appeared to the strategist as a
vast reservoir of food for powder which would take time to mobilize,
but prove almost irresistible if it were given time. Both these
calculations proved fallacious, and still less was it foreseen that
the reservoir would revolt. The first misjudgment deranged the German
plans, the second those of the Allies, while the third upset the minds
of the world.
The outbreak of war found Russia with a peace-strength of over a
million men, a war-strength of four millions, and reserves which were
limited not by her population but by her capacity for transport,
organization, and production of munitions. Her Prussian frontiers were
guarded by no natural defences, but neither were Prussia's. Nature, it
has been said, did not foresee Prussia; Prussia is the work of men's
hands. Nor had Nature foreseen Russia, and men's hands had not made up
the deficiency. Mechanical means had remedied the natural defects of
Prussia's frontier, but not those of the Russian; and Russia's defence
consisted mainly in distance, mud, and lack of communications. The
value of these varied, of course, with the seasons, and the
motor-transport, which atoned to some extent for the lack of railways,
told in favour of German science and industry, and against the
backward Russians. Apart from the absence of natural defences, the
Russian frontier had been artificially drawn so as to make her Polish
province an indefensible salient, though properly organized it would
have been an almost intolerable threat alike to East Prussia and to
Austrian Galicia. But for her preoccupation in the West, Germany could
have conquered Poland in a fortnight, and Russian plans, indeed,
contemplated a withdrawal as far as the line of Brest-Litovsk. As it
was, the German offensive in Belgium and France left the defence of
Prussia to the chances of an Austrian offensive against Lublin, a
containing army of some 200,000 first-line and 300,000 second-line
troops, and the delays in Russian mobilization.
Two of these proved to be broken reeds. Russian troops were almost as
prompt in invading East Prussia as German troops in crossing the
frontiers of France and Belgium, and by the end of the first week in
August a flight to Berlin had begun. The shortest way from the Russian
frontier to Berlin was by Posen, and it lay through a country peopled
with Poles who were bitterly hostile to their German masters. But it
was impossible to exploit these advantages at the expense of deepening
the Polish salient with its already too narrow base, and the flanks in
East Prussia and Galicia had first to be cleared. Under the supreme
command of the Grand Duke Nicholas, who in spite of his rank was a
competent professional soldier, and the more immediate direction of
Rennenkampf, one of the few Russian officers to emerge with enchanced
reputation from the Japanese War, the Russians proceed to concentrate
on East Prussia (see Map). On the east Gumbinnen was captured after a
battle on the 20th, and the important junction of Insterburg occupied
by Rennenkampf, while on the south Samsonov on the 21st turned the
German right, threatened Allenstein and drove the fugitives, as
Rennenkampf had done, into the lines of Königsberg. East Prussia lay
at Russia's feet, and something like a panic alarmed Berlin. The
Teutonic cause was faring even worse in Galicia and Poland. Austria
had a million troops in Galicia, but her offensive under Dankl towards
Lublin only produced a strategic Russia retirement, while Ruszky and
Brussilov overran the eastern borders and menaced Lemberg.
Fortunately for the Germans their own right hand proved a stronger
defence. The incompetent General von François, who had been driven
into Königsberg, was superseded by Hindenburg, a retired veteran of
nearly seventy, whose military career had made so slight an impression
on the German mind that his name was not even included in the German
"Who's Who." Nevertheless he had commanded corps on the Prussian
frontier, and even after his retirement made the study of its defence
his hobby. He knew every yard of the intricate mixture of land and
water which made up the district of the Masurian Lakes, and had,
unfortunately for Russia, defeated a German financial scheme for
draining the country and turning it into land over which an invader
could safely march. Within five days of Samsonov's victory,
Hindenburg, taking advantage of the magnificent system of German
strategic railways, had collected some 150,000 men from the fortresses
on the Vistula and concentrated them on a strong position stretching
from near Allenstein south-west towards Soldau, his left resting on
the railway from Eylau to Insterburg and his right on that from Eylau
to Warsaw. In front of him were marshes with the ways through which he
was, but Samsonov was not, familiar; and the railways enabled him to
threaten either of the enemy's flanks.
Samsonov was practically isolated. Rightly ignoring the strong
defences of Königsberg but wrongly getting out of touch with
Rennenkampf, he had pushed on, thinking there could be no serious
resistance east of the Vistula and hoping to seize the bridge at
Graudenz. Hindenburg made a feint on his right, but pushed his real
outflanking movement along the railway on his left. But the feint was
enough to outflank Samsonov's left and close the retreat towards
Warsaw. It also diverted his reserves from his centre and from his
right, which on the 27th was cut off from a possible junction with
Rennenkampf. A gallant attempt by Gourko to relieve him on the 30th
came too late. The only exit was along a narrow strip of land between
the marshes leading to Ortelsburg, and here between the 28th and the
31st the Russian forces were almost annihilated. Less than a third
escaped, and the loss of guns was even greater. Over eighty thousand
prisoners were taken, and the Germans who had missed their Sedan in
the West secured a passable imitation in the East. Samsonov perished
in the retreat. The Russian censorship suppressed the news, and what
was allowed to come through from Germany was treated in Entente
countries as a German lie. For more than a fortnight little was known
of a victory which, save for Allenby's four years later, was the
completest in the war. The relief in Berlin was immense; Hindenburg
became the popular idol, Field-Marshal, and Generalissimo of the
Teutonic armies in the East; and a little village, which lay behind
Hindenburg's centre, was selected to give its name to the battle and
to commemorate a national revenge for that defeat at Tannenberg five
centuries before when the Slavonic kingdom of Poland had broken the
power of the Teutonic Order in Prussia.
Russia, however, was a different power from the Teutonic Order, and
Austrian generals were not Hindenburgs; Ruszky and Brussilov, too,
were better leaders than Samsonov, and though Rennenkampf had to
evacuate East Prussia before Hindenburg's advance, the Austrians were
driven like chaff before their enemies in Galicia. The object of
Russian strategy was to straighten the serpentine line of the frontier
for military purposes. Hence, while pushing forward her wings in East
Prussia and Galicia, she would merely stand on guard or withdraw in
the Polish centre, and the Germans encountered little opposition when
they seized Czenstochowa and Kalisch and pushed towards the Warta, or
the Austrians when they advanced by Zamosc towards the Bug. The
advance in East Prussia was also represented as a chivalrous attempt
to reduce the pressure in France by a threat to Berlin, and the real
Russian effort was the sweep westwards from the eastern Galician
frontier, where the Second Russian army under Ruszky and the Third
farther south under Brussilov were already threatening the envelopment
of Lemberg (or Lwow [Footnote: Pronounced and sometimes spelt Lvoff.])
and the Austrians under Von Auffenberg. Ruszky, formerly like Foch a
professor in a military academy, was perhaps the most scientific of
Russian generals; Brussilov showed his strategy two years later at
Luck; [Footnote: Pronounced Lutsk: the Slavonic "c" = "ts" "cz" = "ch"
and "sz" = "sh."] and Radko Dmitrieff was a Bulgarian general, now in
Russian service, who in the Balkan wars had won the battle of Kirk
Kilisse and helped to win that of Lule-Burgas. There was not an abler
trio in any field of the war.
By the end of August Brussilov had captured Tarnopol and Halicz and
forced the successive rivers which guarded the right flank of Lemberg
and Von Auffenberg's forces and protected their communications with
the Carpathian passes; and on 1 September the battle for the capital
of eastern Galicia began. It lasted for nearly three days, and was
almost as decisive as that of Tannenberg. Brussilov's outflanking
movement was continued with success, but the coup de grâce was given
here, as at Charleroi and the Marne, by isolating a central group and
thus breaking the line. Thrusting forward his right, Ruszky outflanked
Lemberg and interposed between Von Auffenberg and the Austrian army in
Poland. On the 3rd Lemberg was evacuated, and the retreat, which was
for a time protected by the entrenched camp at Grodek, gradually
became more disorderly. Over 70,000 prisoners were taken, mostly, no
doubt, Czecho-Slovaks and Jugo-Slavs who had more sympathy with the
Russians than with their Teutonic masters, and masses of machine guns
and artillery. The victory was brilliantly and promptly followed up.
While Brussilov pressed on to Stryj and the Carpathians, Ruszky and
Dmitrieff beat Von Auffenberg again at Rawa Ruska near the frontier on
the 10th, and Ivanoff, who had taken command in Poland, drove Dankl
and the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand from the line they held between
Lublin and the borders. The whole of the Austrian forces fell back
behind the Vistula and the San, Von Auffenberg finding safety in
Przemysl, and others a more temporary refuge at Jaroslav, while the
van of the retreating army did not stop short of Cracow. The German
detachments in Poland had to conform, and by the middle of September
Poland had been cleared as far as the Warta, and Galicia was
defenceless, save for invested Przemysl, as far south as the
Carpathians and as far west as the Dunajec. The days of the Marne were
even more sombre for the Central Empires on the Vistula and the San.
Their gloom was relieved by the halo which shone round Hindenburg's
head. Rennenkampf was gone and all the faculties of the University of
Königsberg conferred degrees on the victor to celebrate its escape.
Reinforcements were sent to the frontier, and on 7 September Russia
was invaded. The object of the offensive is not clear except on the
assumption that Hindenburg's strategic acumen was defective, and that
he thought he could turn the Russian right by an advance across the
Niemen. But the difficulties were insuperable and the distances were
vast. Even if he got to Kovno it would need far greater forces than he
possessed to cover and control the illimitable land beyond; and
between him and success lay swamps more extensive then the Masurian
Lakes and the heavily fortified line of the Narew. He was, indeed, in
his turn falling into Samsonov's error, and seems to have been saved
from his fate mainly by the prematurely successful Russian defence. He
was allowed to reach the Niemen at various points between Kovno and
Grodno, but was unhappily prevented from committing his fortunes to
the eastern bank by the Russian artillery, which repeatedly destroyed
his pontoons as soon as they were constructed. Lower down on his right
an attempt on the fortress of Ossowiec proved equally futile, because
the Germans could find no ground within range solid enough to bear the
weight of their artillery. The inevitable retreat began on the 27th,
and it was sadly harassed by the pursuing Russians, especially in the
forest of Augustowo, where Rennenkampf claimed to have inflicted
losses amounting to 60,000 men in killed, prisoners, and wounded. By 1
October the Russian cavalry was again across the German frontier, and
Hindenburg was called south to attempt in Poland to frustrate the
Russian advance on Cracow which his turning movement in the north had
failed to check.
The call was urgent, for the conquest of Galicia portended disaster to
the Central Empires. Cracow was a key both to Berlin and Vienna; its
possession would turn the Oder and open the door to Silesia, which was
hardly less vital to Germany than Westphalia as a mining and
manufacturing district. It would also give access to Vienna and
facilitate the separation of Hungary, and all that that meant in the
Balkans, from the Teutonic alliance. Even without the loss of Cracow,
that of the rest of Galicia was serious enough; her oil-wells were the
main sources of the German supply of petroleum, and her Slav
population, once assured of the solidity of Russian success, would
throw off its allegiance to the Hapsburgs and entice the
Czecho-Slovaks on its borders to do the same. These prospects were not
visionary in September 1914. Jaroslav fell on the 23rd and Przemysl
was invested. Russian cavalry rode through the Carpathian passes into
the Hungarian plain, and west of the San patrols penetrated within a
hundred miles of Cracow. In her own interests as well as in those of
her ally, Germany was compelled to throw more of her weight against
the Russian front. The German and Austrian commands were unified under
Hindenburg, and having failed on the north he now tried to stop the
Russians by a blow at their centre in Poland. Here Ruszky was now in
command, while Ivanoff with Brussilov and Dmitrieff as his two
lieutenants controlled the armies in Galicia.
Like every German general Hindenburg believed in the offensive being
the best form of defence, and like all Germans in the advantage of
waging war in the enemy's country. His plan of attack was a concentric
advance on Warsaw along the three railway lines leading from Thorn,
Kalisch, and Czenstochowa, combined with an effort to cross the
Vistula at Josefow while the Austrians kept step in Galicia, relieved
Przemysl, and recovered Lemberg. There was even a movement southwards
from East Prussia which captured Mlawa, but it was only a raid which
did not hamper the Grand Duke's contemplated counter-offensive. Warsaw
had obvious attractions; Josefow was selected because it was far from
Russia's railway lines but near to Ostrowiec, the terminus of a line
which led from the German frontier; and the object of crossing the
Vistula was to take in the rear the great fortress of Ivangorod lower
down, and then to get behind Warsaw. The Grand Duke had divined these
intentions, while he concealed his own by misleading the Germans into
a belief that he proposed abandoning the Polish salient and retiring
on Brest. His real plan was to stand on the east bank of the Vistula
save for the defence of Warsaw which lies upon the west, and to
counter-attack round the north of the German left wing under the guns
of the great fortress of Novo Georgievsk. Rennenkampf was brought down
to command this movement, while Ruszky took charge of the defence at
Josefow.
On 10 October Hindenburg's centre moved out from Lodz and on the 15th
the battle was joined all along the Vistula. Warsaw was vigorously
defended by Siberian and Caucasian troops, aided by Japanese guns. The
battle raged from the 16th to the 19th, when the planned surprise from
Novo Georgievsk forced back the German left and threatened the centre
before Warsaw. Ruszky was still more successful with his stratagem at
Josefow. The Germans were suffered to construct their pontoons, cross
the river, and make for the railway between Warsaw and Lublin. Then on
the 21st the Russians came down upon them with a bayonet charge, and
not a man is said to have escaped across the river. Next day the
Russians also crossed at Novo Alexandria lower down, and a general
attack drove the Germans back to Radom on the 25th and thence from
Kielce on 3 November. Threatened by Rennenkampf on the north and
Ruszky on the south, the German centre had to abandon Skierniewíce,
Lowicz, and then Lodz, destroying every vestige of communication as
they withdrew and lavishly sacrificing men in rearguard actions to
protect their stores and their equipment.
Ironically enough the chief success of Hindenburg's offensive was
achieved by the Austrian subordinates he had come to help. Ivanoff was
a bad substitute for Ruszky, and Dankl temporarily retrieved the
reputation he had lost the previous month. Jaroslav was recovered,
Przemysl was relieved and abundantly revictualled for a second and a
longer siege, and an attack on Sambor bade fair to put the Austrians
once more in Lemberg. But the German defeat in Poland compelled an
Austrian retreat in Galicia. Przemysl was reinvested and the Russians
resumed their march with quickened pace on Cracow. This time they
threatened it first from the north of the Vistula, and on 9 November
their cavalry, pursuing the Germans, was at Miechow, only twenty miles
from Cracow. Moving more slowly through Galicia while Brussilov
occupied the Carpathian passes, Dmitrieff pushed his cavalry into
Wielitza south-east of the city on 6 December, and on the 8th he
fought a successful action in its outskirts. Farther north the
Cossacks had occupied Nieszawa, a few miles from Thorn, on 9 November,
and on the following day a Russian raid across the Silesian frontier
cut the German railway from Posen to Cracow. It was high time that the
Germans turned the weight of their offensive from the Flanders front
and the Channel ports to parrying the Russian menace on their East.
Austria was in no happier case. Her invasion of Serbia which had
opened the flood-gates of war had been almost submerged in the
torrent, and the punitive expedition she had planned had brought
punishment mainly upon herself, and that not merely at the hands of
Serbia's powerful patron, but at those of the little people who were
to be chastised. The early fighting was of a desultory character, and
Austria's two first-line corps having been withdrawn to meet the
Russians, the Serbs and Montenegrins made a combined effort on 12
August to invade Bosnia and capture Serajevo. No great progress was
made, and on the 16th the Austrians retaliated with the capture of
Shabatz in the north-west corner of Serbia. But next day the Serbs
routed a large Austrian force in the neighbourhood, and the Crown
Prince Alexander followed up this victory by another on the 18th
against the Austrians on the Jadar, who were seeking, in co-operation
with those at Shabatz, to cut the Serbs off from their base. The
result was that by the 24th the Austrians were practically cleared out
of the country, and Vienna announced that the punitive expedition,
which had cost 40,000 casualties and fifty guns, had accomplished its
object.
A second attempt to achieve it was, however, provoked by the invasion
of Bosnia with which the Serbs had supplemented their victory, and by
their capture of Semlin in order to stop the Austrian bombardment of
Belgrade. On 8 September the Austrians launched an attack across the
Drina which forms the boundary between Serbia and Bosnia, and the
battle raged till the 17th. Again the Serbs were victorious, though
they made no impression on Serajevo and the Austrians retained a
foothold on the eastern bank of the Drina; and for six weeks Serbia
was left in comparative peace. But at the end of October the entrance
of Turkey into the war and the relief afforded to Austria's troops
farther north by the increasing activity of Germany in Poland and
Galicia encouraged another effort; and under General Potiorek the
Austrians began a more ambitious campaign. The Serbian frontier
constituted a sharp salient which was indefensible against a superior
force, and the Austrians exploited this advantage by extending their
front of attack from Semendria on the Danube right round to Ushitza
beyond the Drina. Their object was to envelop the Serbs and seize,
firstly, Valievo, their advanced base, secondly, Kraguievatz the
Serbian arsenal, and, finally, Nish, to which the Serbian Court and
Government had withdrawn.
The only chance the Serbs had of success was to shorten their line by
withdrawing to the semicircular mountain ridge which lies south and
south-east of Valievo, and even so their prospects were gloomy. Two
wars had already depleted Serbia's manhood and her munitions, and her
numbers were sadly inferior to the Austrians. But individually her
troops were far better fighters than their opponents, and the Crown
Prince, Marshal Putnik, and General Míshitch, the commander of the 1st
Serbian Army, quite outclassed Potiorek in tactics, strategy, and
knowledge of the terrain. By 10 November the Austrians were in
Valievo, and Potiorek was inclined to rest on his laurels. For a fatal
fortnight he did nothing, and even detached three of his corps to
serve in the Carpathians against the Russians who were there doing
Serbia the service they had done in East Prussia to the Allies on the
Marne. In that interval Greek and other munitions were conveyed in
spite of Bulgar and Turkish intervention to the hard-pressed Serbians;
King Peter, old, blind, and deaf, came from Nish to make a stirring
appeal to his troops; and when on 1-3 December Potiorek once more
advanced to the ridges of Rudnik and Maljen, he encountered a
re-munitioned army, skilfully posted in strong positions and pledged
to death or victory. Victory was its guerdon all along the line; the
Austrian left centre and centre were broken on the 5th; at night their
right was shattered near Ushitza; and on the morrow the whole army was
in retreat, which soon became a rout. There were 80,000 casualties
before, on the 15th, the fugitives were back in their own land across
the Drina, the Danube, and the Save, leaving Belgrade once more in the
hands of the heroic Serbs.
Austria had, however, acquired a strange new friend in the Turk, who
had thrice besieged Vienna, and with whom she had waged an
intermittent warfare of the Crescent and the Cross for some four
centuries; and the blood-stained hand of Turkey was stretched out to
save its "natural allies"--to quote Bernhardi--at Buda-Pesth and
Potsdam. There was, indeed, a bond of sympathy, for in each of the
enemy capitals a ruling caste oppressed one or more subject
nationalities. Prussia stood for the Junker domination of the German
tribes; Austria, for Teutonic government of Czechs, Slovaks, and
Poles; Hungary, for Magyar dictation to Jugo-Slavs and Rumanes; and
Turkey, for the exploitation or extermination of Armenians, Greeks,
and Arabs. The Young Turk, who had dispossessed Abdul Hamid in 1908,
only differed from the Old in being more efficient and less of a
gentleman, and in seeking his inspiration from Krupp's guns and
Treitschke's philosophy instead of from the Koran. He was a Turk
without the Turk's excuse, and the adventurer Enver, who inaugurated
the rule of the Committee of Union and Progress by assassinating his
rivals, was willing to give Germany control of the Berlin-Baghdad
route in return for a free hand with the subject nationalities of the
Ottoman Empire. Russia was the common obstacle to both ambitions; but,
Russia finally crippled, the Balkan States would become Turco-Teutonic
provinces, and the Near East a German avenue into Asia, while Egypt
might be recovered for the Sultan and made a base for German
penetration of Africa.
Millions of German money had already been invested in this scheme, and
the Kaiser's versatile piety had assumed a Mohammedan hue in the East.
He had proclaimed himself the friend of every Mohammedan under the
sun, and had carefully refrained from wounding the feelings of the
authors of the Armenian massacres. The defeat of his Turkish friends
in the Balkan Wars had been almost as great a blow to him as to them,
and he had seen in the subsequent discord of the victors a chance of
crushing them all. Rumania, he thought, was tied to his chariot-wheels
by its Hohenzollern king, and Greece by its Hohenzollern queen; and
Bulgaria could be won through its hatred of the successful Serbs.
Serbia conquered, the corridor would be complete; but Serbia could not
be permanently crushed while Russia remained intact, and Turkey would
be a useful ally in the Russian campaign. There were millions of
Mohammedans under Russian rule, and a Turkish invasion of the
Caucasus, even if it did not stimulate insurrection in Russia, would
keep hundreds of thousands of Russian troops from East Prussia,
Poland, or Galicia.
Apart from the vulgar bribes which affected the Young Turk politicians
there were other motives to move the populace. A Jehad against the
Christian might stir the honest fanatic; well-to-do Turks had invested
some of their savings in two Turkish Dreadnoughts under construction
in England which the British Government had commandeered; and two
German warships, the Goeben and the Breslau, had arrived at the Golden
Horn to impress or to encourage the Ottoman mind. Such were some of
the straws which finally broke the back of sober resistance to the
warlike gamble of Enver and Talaat; but the substantial argument was
the chance which was offered for Turkey to get back some of what her
inveterate Russian enemy had seized in the course of a century and her
inveterate British friend had pocketed as the price of her protection.
On 29 October a horde of Bedouins invaded the Sinai Peninsula while
Turkish torpedo boats raided Odessa, and on 1 November the British
ambassador departed from Constantinople. The two Central Empires had
enlisted their first ally, and the war had taken another stride
towards Armageddon.
CHAPTER IV
THE WAR ON AND BEYOND THE SEAS
The declaration of war by Great Britain on 4 August converted the
conflict into one unlike any other that had been waged since Napoleon
was sent to St. Helena in 1815; and sea-power was once more revealed
to a somewhat purblind world. There had, indeed, been wars in which
navies had been engaged, and Japan in 1904 had exhibited the latest
model of a naval battle. But Japan only commanded the sea in Far
Eastern waters; and the wars in which Great Britain herself was
engaged since 1815 had displayed her command in limited spheres and at
the expense of enemies who had no pretensions to be her naval rivals.
But in 1914 the second navy in the world seemed by the conduct of
Germany to challenge the first, and for nearly four and a half years
there were hopes and fears of a titanic contest for the command of the
sea. But in fact the challenge was not forthcoming, and from first to
last the command remained in our hands through Germany's default.
There was no Trafalgar because no one came forth to fight, and in the
end the German Navy surrendered without a struggle.
But while our command of the sea was not disputed in deed by the
Germans, it was disputed in word by domestic critics and denied by
loquacious generals; and the exploits of German submarines, airships,
and aeroplanes lent some colour to the denial and to the assertion
that England had ceased to be an island. Both contentions were the
outcome of inadequate knowledge and worse confusion of thought.
Islands are made by the sea and not by the air; even if the Germans
had secured command of the air, which they did not, that command would
not have given them the advantages which accrue from the command of
the sea. It might please pessimists to believe that England would be
cowed into submission by air-raids, but the most inveterate
scaremongers hesitated to assert that armies with their indispensable
artillery and equipment could be dropped on British soil from the
skies. Belgium and France were far more troubled than we by aircraft;
but it was not aircraft that carried German armies to Brussels and
near to the gates of Paris, and London was saved from the fate of
Louvain by British command of the sea. Nor was that command abolished
or even threatened by submarines, and the fear lest it was came of the
mentality which denies the existence of a power on the ground that it
is not perfect. Command of the sea never has been and never can be
absolute. French privateers had never been more active nor British
losses at sea more acute than after Trafalgar, when no French Navy
ventured out of port; and the destruction of every German Dreadnought
would not have affected by one iota the success of German submarines.
The command of the sea does not mean immunity from the risks of naval
warfare or from loss by the capture or sinking of merchant vessels. It
does not imply absolute security for British coasts, for British
coasts have been raided in every great war that Britain has waged. It
does not even involve the defeat or destruction of the enemy's naval
forces, or it would be a simple task for any naval Power to deprive us
of the command of the sea by locking its fleets in harbour, and on
that theory the forts of the Dardanelles would have enabled Turkey to
deny the command of the sea to the combined fleets of the world. The
meaning is familiar enough to intelligent students of history. Bacon
sketched it three hundred years ago when he wrote, "He that commands
the sea is at great liberty and may take as much and as little of the
war as he will ... and the wealth of both Indies seems in great part
but an accessory to the command of the seas." "Both Indies" have grown
to-day to include the resources of nearly the whole extra-European
world which the command of the sea placed at the disposal of the
Entente and denied to the Central Empires; and the last great war,
like those against Napoleon, Louis XIV, and Philip II, was decided by
the same indispensable factor in world-power. Others might control for
a time a continent; only those who command the sea can dispose of the
destinies of the world.
But while an essential factor in world-power, the command of the sea
is not its sum; and the war throughout its course illustrated the
weakness of attack by sea against a well-defended coast. No attempt
was made to land an army on German territory, and complete command of
the Ægean did not avail for the capture of Gallipoli. It could not
turn sea into land nor enable a navy to do an army's work, and command
of the sea while a more extensive is a less intensive kind of power
than command of the land. The nature of the command varies, indeed,
with the solidity of the element in which it is exercised: land is
more solid than water, and water than air; the command of the land is
therefore more complete than command of the sea, and command of the
sea than command of the air; and endless confusion arose from the use
of the same word to describe three different degrees of control.
Victory can be achieved on sea, conquest only on land; and nothing
like victory, let alone conquest, in war has yet been won in the air.
Conquest, however, while it cannot be effected, can be prevented on
sea, as it was at Salamis in 1588, at Trafalgar, and Navarino; for
sea-power, while conclusive for defence, is merely conducive to
offence, and that is why it has ever been a means of liberty rather
than of despotism. Armies are the weapons of autocracy, navies those
of freedom; for peoples do not live upon water, and only armies
command their homes. Command of the sea is a sufficient protection for
an island-empire; to conquer others it needs a superior army, and the
absence of such an army proved the defensive aims of the British
Empire before the war. World domination could only be secured by the
combination of a dominant army with a dominant navy, and hence the
significance of the German naval programme designed at least to
prevent the counteraction of one by the other.
But while a supreme navy suffices to protect an island empire, it does
not suffice to defend continental states; and the importance of
British sea-power was that it gave us and other oversea peoples the
liberty to take as much or as little part as we chose in a war to
defend states that were threatened on land. The existence of that
facility did not determine the extent to which it might be used by
ourselves or by allies. That would depend upon the size of the armies
we raised and the labour we spent upon their equipment; and we might
have restricted our expeditionary forces to the numbers we sent under
Marlborough against Louis XIV or under Wellington against Napoleon.
But we could not have sent any without the command of the sea; and the
essence of that command is that, firstly, it prevented the enemy from
using his armies to invade our shores, and, secondly, it enabled us to
send whatever forces we liked to whatever sphere of operations was not
commanded by the enemy's armies. Philip II had demonstrated once for
all the emptiness of the invasion scare when he sent a superb military
expedition, the Spanish Armada, across a sea which he did not command;
and the efforts of German submarines failed to affect the transport of
our own and our Allies' troops or seriously to impede their
communications.
The command of the sea was, in fact, abandoned by the Germans when on
26 July 1914 their fleet was recalled from the Norwegian fiords; and
the cruisers which the outbreak of war found beyond reach of German
territorial waters were in turn and in time destroyed. One
Dreadnought, the Goeben, and a light cruiser, the Breslau, escaped to
play a chequered part in the war. Caught by its outbreak in the
Mediterranean, they attempted to make the Straits, were headed off by
the British, and gained Messina on 5 August. Evading the British Fleet
under circumstances which were held to cast no reflection on the
British commander, and with assistance which it was deemed impolitic
to make public, they pursued their flight eastward, gallantly
assaulted by the smaller and slower Gloucester off Cape Matapan, until
they reached the Dardanelles and took the Turkish Government under
their charge. Out in the Atlantic the swift Karlsruhe caused some
anxiety till she was wrecked in the West Indies, and the Geier was
interned at Honolulu by the United States. A few converted merchantmen
also pursued a brief career as raiders: the Cap Trafalgar was disposed
of in a spirited action by the converted Cunarder Carmania on 14
September off Brazil; the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was sunk by the
Highflyer off Cape Verde Islands on 27 August; and the Spreewald was
captured in the North Atlantic by the Berwick on 12 September. For the
rest, the German mercantile marine was interned in neutral ports or
restricted to Baltic waters, and apart from Von Spee and the
submarines the German flag disappeared from the seas.
The Germans had realized from the start a vital difference between war
on sea and war on land. The land affords some protection to the weaker
combatant especially on the defensive; the sea gives none. There are
no trenches in the sea, but only graves. It is merciless to the
vanquished, and the casualties in a beaten fleet are total losses;
instead of prisoners, fugitives, and wounded, there is one vast list
of drowned. Ships that are sunk do not return to the battle-line, and
their loss takes long to repair. Years are required to build a
Dreadnought, and years to make a seaman. Armies are easier to create
and more difficult to destroy than fleets, and the sailor's fight is
ever one to a finish, with little chance of escape from the dread
alternative. It is a case of all or nothing; there are no water-tight
compartments in sea-power, no fluctuating spheres of power, no
divided areas in some of which one and in some the other combatant may
be supreme. Apart from land-locked waters the sea is one and
indivisible, and he who has the command, commands it everywhere. The
battle at sea is a battle without a morrow for those who lose; and
from the day when the Germans wisely withdrew into Kiel and
Wilhelmshaven there was little chance that they would come out to
fight to a finish except as a counsel of despair or until they could
by mine or submarine or skilful raid reduce the disparity of force.
That was the purpose of their early naval strategy; it proved
ineffective owing to British skill and caution, and it became hopeless
when it appeared that we could build ships much faster than the
Germans could sink them or build ships themselves; and the Germans
then turned from the task of destroying the British Navy to that of
destroying the commerce on which we depended for subsistence, from the
hope of securing the command of the sea for themselves to that of
turning it into a "no man's land," a desert which no allied or neutral
ship could cross.
The mine-sowing began the moment war was declared, and on 5 August the
Konigin Luise was sunk in the nefarious act of sowing loose mines in
the North Sea. Fixed mines for coast and harbour defence or minefields
at sea are legitimate means of war, provided that warning is given of
the dangerous area; loose mines are prohibited by international law,
because they can make no distinction in their destruction between
neutrals and belligerents, merchantmen and men-of-war. But the German
flag having practically disappeared from the seas, the Germans paid
little heed to the risks of other people. On 6 August a light cruiser,
the Amphion, struck one of these mines and was sunk, and on 3
September a gunboat, the Speedy, met with a similar fate. A more
serious loss, though only one man was killed, was that of the
super-Dreadnought Audacious, which struck a mine to the north of
Ireland on 27 October and sank as she was being towed into harbour;
and a mine caused the loss of the Hampshire, with Lord Kitchener on
board, in June 1916.
The submarine proved, however, the greater danger, and there was
nothing illegal in the sinking of men-of-war or transports. On 5
September the Pathfinder, a light cruiser, was torpedoed and sunk, and
on the 13th the British retaliated by sinking the German light cruiser
Hela near Heligoland. The warning, however, had not been taken to
heart, and on 22 September the German submarine commander, Otto
Weddigen, successively sank the Aboukir, the Hogue, and the Cressy,
three old but substantial cruisers on patrol duty off the Dutch coast.
The Hogue and the Cressy were lost because they came up to the rescue
and were protected by no screen of destroyers, and 680 officers and
men were drowned. A fourth cruiser, the Hawke, was torpedoed off
Aberdeen on 15 October, and on 1 January 1915 the Formidable, of
15,000 tons, was sunk off Start Point on her way to the Dardanelles,
with a loss of 600 of her crew. The Germans were not, however, immune
in their submarine campaign. H.M.S. Birmingham rammed and sank a
German submarine on 6 August, the Badger did the like on 25 October,
and U18 was sunk on 23 November; Weddigen himself was rammed, with the
loss of his submarine and all on board, later on by the Dreadnought.
The British losses by mine and submarine created some discontent on
the ground that our naval strategy was defensive rather than
offensive; and military critics, whose notions of naval warfare were
derived from the study of German text-books on the principles of war
on land, continually pressed for a more active policy, and asked why
our superior navy did not treat the German Fleet as the German Army
treated its enemies in France and Belgium. It was forgotten that he
who possesses all must always be on the defensive; there must be
something tangible to attack before there can be an offensive, and
there could have been no Trafalgar had Napoleon kept his fleet in
harbour. The abandonment of the high seas by the German Navy precluded
a naval battle, and the defensive strength of harbour defences which
kept Nelson outside Toulon had so increased as to make it vastly
harder for Jellicoe to penetrate Wilhelmshaven or Kiel. Naval power,
which the war proved to be more than ever effective on sea, was shown
to be more than ever powerless on shore. The mine and the submarine
made the sustained bombardment of land fortifications a dangerous
practice, and moving batteries on shore were more than a match for
ships, because they could not be sunk and could be more easily
repaired or replaced. There were wild dreams of British forces landing
on German coasts, and still wilder alarms about German armies
descending on British shores; but the only landing effected on hostile
territory during the war was at Gallipoli, and it did not encourage a
similar attempt against the better defended lands held by the Germans.
We had to content ourselves with the practical realization in war of
our continual claim in peace that sea-power is an instrument for the
defence of island states rather than one for offence against
continental peoples. Only when and where those peoples wished to be
defended and opened their ports to their allies, was it found possible
to land a relieving force. The British armies which liberated Brussels
had to travel via Boulogne and not Ostend; and the German ships which
sheltered in port had to be routed out by the pressure of Allied arms
on land.
The naval actions of the war were therefore of the nature of outpost
raids and skirmishes rather than of battles. The first that developed
any serious fighting took place in the Bight of Heligoland on 28
August. Apparently with the design of inducing the Germans to come
out, a flotilla of submarines under Commodore Keyes was sent close in
to Heligoland, with some destroyers and two light cruisers, the
Arethusa and Fearless, behind them, and more substantial vessels out
of sight in the offing. Presently there appeared a German force of
destroyers and two cruisers, the Ariadne and the Strassburg; they were
driven off mainly by the gallant fighting of the Arethusa; but
thinking there was no further support the Germans then sent out three
heavier cruisers, the Mainz, the Koln, and apparently the Yorck. The
Arethusa and Fearless held their own for two or three hours until
Beatty's battle-cruisers, led by the Lion, came safely through the
German mine-fields and submarines to their assistance. The Lion's
13.5-inch guns soon settled the issue: the Mainz and the Köln were
sunk, while no British unit was lost, and the casualties were 32
killed and 52 wounded against 300 German prisoners and double that
number of other casualties. The overwhelming effect of heavier gunfire
had been clearly demonstrated, and it was further illustrated on 17
October by the destruction of four German destroyers off the Dutch
coast by the light cruiser Undaunted accompanied by four British
destroyers; but the next exhibition of naval gun-power was to be at
our expense.
Among the incidental advantages which the adhesion of Great Britain
brought to the Entente was the intervention of Japan, which, apart
from its alliance with us, had never forgiven Germany the part she
took in depriving Japan of the fruits of her victory over China in
1894, and regarded as a standing offence the naval base which Germany
had established at Tsingtau and the hold she had acquired on North
Pacific islands. On 15 August Japan demanded within eight days the
surrender of the lease of Tsingtau and the evacuation of Far Eastern
waters by German warships. No answer was, of course, returned, but the
German squadron under Von Spee wisely left Tsingtau in anticipation of
its investment by the Japanese. It began on the 27th, and troops were
landed on 2 September: on the 23rd a British contingent arrived from
Wei-hai-wei to co-operate, and gradually the lines of investment and
the heavy artillery were drawn closer. The final assault was fixed for
7 November, but the Germans forestalled it by surrender; there were
3000 prisoners out of an original garrison of 5000, and Germany's last
overseas base, on which she had spent £20,000,000, passed into the
enemy's hands. Australian troops had already occupied without serious
opposition German New Guinea, the Bismarck archipelago, and the
Gilbert and Caroline Islands, while Samoa surrendered to a New Zealand
force, and the Marshall Islands to the Japanese.
Von Spee's squadron was thus left without a German naval base; but one
of its vessels was to show that there was still a career for a raider,
and the others were to demonstrate the paradox that neutral ports
might be more useful than bases of their own, inasmuch as they could
not be treated like Tsingtau. On fleeing from the Japanese menace Von
Spee had steamed eastwards across the Pacific, but two of his
cruisers, the Königsberg and the Emden, were detached to help the
Germans in East Africa and to raid British commerce in the Indian
Ocean. On 20 September the Königsberg sank H.M.S. Pegasus at Zanzibar,
but failed to give much assistance in the projected attack on Mombasa,
and was presently bottled up in the Rufigi River. The Emden under
Captain Müller had better success. Throughout September and October
she haunted the coasts of India and harried British trade, setting
fire to an oil-tank at Madras, torpedoing a Russian cruiser and a
French destroyer in the roadstead of Penang, and capturing in all some
seventeen British merchantmen. She had, however, lost her own
attendant colliers about 25 October, and a raid on the Cocos or
Keeling islands on 9 November was interrupted by the arrival of H.M.S.
Sydney, which had been warned by wireless, on her way from Australia.
In less than two hours the Sydney's 6-in. guns had battered the Emden
to pieces, and with only 18 casualties had killed or wounded 230 of
the enemy. Müller became an honourable prisoner of war; he had proved
himself the most skilful of German captains and the best of German
gentlemen.
Meanwhile Von Spee had gained the South American coast and made
himself at home in its friendly ports and islands. He had with him two
sister cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, each of 11,400
tons and an armament of eight 8.2-inch guns, and three smaller
cruisers, the Dresden, Leipzig, and Nürnberg, each about the size of
the Emden, from 3200 to 3540 tons, and carrying ten 4.1-inch guns;
none of them had a speed of less than 22 knots. To protect the South
Pacific trade the British Government had in August sent Admiral
Cradock with a somewhat miscellaneous squadron, consisting of the
Canopus, a pre-Dreadnought battleship of nearly 13,000 tons, with
6-inch armour, four 12-inch guns, and a speed of 19 knots; the Good
Hope, a cruiser of 14,000 tons, with two 9.2-inch and sixteen 6-inch
guns, and a speed of 22 knots; the Monmouth of 9800 tons, fourteen
6-inch guns, and the same speed as the Good Hope; the Glasgow of 4800
tons, with two 6-inch and ten 4-inch guns, and a speed of 25 knots;
and the Otranto, an armed liner. Reinforcements were expected from
home, and possibly from Japan; but the squadrons were not unequally
matched in weight of metal, though the British were handicapped by the
diversity and antiquity of their armament. The balance was, however,
destroyed before the battle, because, as Cradock in the third week of
October made his way north along the Pacific coast, the Canopus
developed defects which necessitated her being left behind for
repairs.
The squadrons fell in with one another north-west of Coronel late in
the afternoon of 1 November. Cradock had turned south, presumably to
join the Canopus, but Von Spee secured the inestimable advantage of
the in-shore course, and as the sun set it silhouetted the British
ships against the sky while the gathering gloom obscured the Germans.
The fight was really between the two leading cruisers on each side,
the Good Hope and the Monmouth against the Scharnhorst and the
Gneisenau. The Germans got the range first, and the Good Hope's two
9.2-inch guns were soon put out of action in spite of their superior
weight. At 7:50 she blew up, and the Monmouth was a wreck. The
lightly-armoured Glasgow had no option but to use her superior speed
and escape to warn the Canopus. This she did, and the two got safely
round Cape Horn to the Falkland Isles, leaving for the time the
Germans in command of the South Pacific coast. Sixteen hundred and
fifty officers, midshipmen, and men lost their lives with Cradock, and
none were rescued by the Germans. There was hardly a parallel in
British naval history for such a defeat.
Prompt measures were taken to retrieve it. Lord Fisher had succeeded
Prince Louis of Battenberg at the Admiralty on 30 October, and one of
his first acts was to dispatch on 5 November a squadron under Admiral
Sturdee, comprising the Invincible and Inflexible, and four lighter
cruisers, the Carnarvon, Kent, Cornwall, and Bristol; the Glasgow was
picked up in the South Atlantic, while the Canopus was at Port Stanley
in the Falklands. The Invincible and Inflexible were the two first
battle-cruisers built; each had a tonnage of 17,250, a speed of 27-28
knots, and eight 12-inch guns which could be fired as a broadside to
right or left; and there would be little chance for Von Spee if he
encountered such a weight of metal. Sturdee reached Port Stanley on 7
December. Von Spee, who had been refitting at Juan Fernandez, left it
on 15 November, possibly fearing the Japanese approach, and made for
Cape Horn and the Atlantic. His plan was to snap up the Canopus and
the Glasgow, get what he could out of the Falklands, and then proceed
to support the rebellion in South Africa. Early on 8 December he
unsuspectingly approached Port Stanley, not discovering the presence
of Sturdee's squadron until it was too late. He then made off
north-eastwards with the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, while his
lighter cruisers turned south-eastwards. The former were sunk in the
afternoon by the two British battle-cruisers and the Carnarvon, while
the latter succumbed in the evening to the Kent, Glasgow, and
Cornwall; only the Dresden escaped, to be sunk in five minutes on 14
March 1915 at Juan Fernandez by the Kent and the Glasgow. The
Invincible had no casualties, the Inflexible one man killed; the Kent
had four killed and twelve wounded, and the Glasgow nine and four.
About two hundred Germans were saved from drowning, but they did not
include Von Spee.
Such were the effects upon human life of a disparity of weight of
metal in naval action. No skill could avoid the brutal precision of
mechanical and material superiority. Von Spee had it at Coronel,
Sturdee at the Falklands, and there is no reason to suppose that if
the persons had been exchanged, the result would have been any
different. It is the romance of the past which attributes naval
success mainly to superior seamanship or courage; the "little" Revenge
was the super-Dreadnought of her time, and the victories of the
Elizabethan sea-dogs were as surely won by superior weight of metal as
those of Nelson or to-day. Von Spee and his men fought as bravely and
as skilfully as Cradock and his; and the war for command of the sea
went against the Germans because while the Germans were building
pre-Dreadnoughts and casting 8-inch guns, we were building
Dreadnoughts and casting 10 or 12-inch guns; and while they were
constructing their Dreadnoughts, we were building super-Dreadnoughts
with 13.5 and 15-inch guns. Success in naval warfare goes not so much
to the brave as to those who think ahead in terms of mechanical force.
The last German cruisers outside harbour were now destroyed, and
barely a raider remained at large, while the British went on gathering
the fruits of their command of the sea by mustering in Europe the
forces of the Empire and acquiring abroad the disjointed German
colonies. Naval strategy was reduced to the dull but arduous task of
blocking the exits from the North Sea and guarding against the furtive
German raids. The battle-fleet was stationed in Scapa Flow, the
cruisers off Rosyth, while little more than a patrol--backed by a
squadron of pre-Dreadnoughts in the Channel--was left to watch the
Straits of Dover and supplement the mine-fields. Both combatants drew
advantage from the narrow front of Germany's outlook towards the sea;
the exits were easier for us to close than Nelson had found the
lengthy coast of France, and no German Fleet slipped across the
Atlantic as Villeneuve did in 1805. On the other hand, the narrow
front was easier to fortify, protect with mine-fields, and defend
against attack. If there was to be a conclusive naval battle, the
field would be in the North Sea, and the only hope of success for the
Germans lay in the dispersion of our battle-fleet.
This was the object of the German raids on Yarmouth on 3 November, and
on Scarborough, Whitby, and the Hartlepools on 16 December. The former
effected nothing except sowing of some floating mines which
subsequently sank British submarine and two fishing-smacks, while one
of the participating cruisers, the Yorck, struck a German mine and
sank on entering Wilhelmshaven. The December raid was more successful
in its murderous intention of extending the schrecklichkeit practised
in Belgium to civilians on British shores. British delegates had
insisted at The Hague in 1907 on large rights of naval bombardment,
and the Germans expanded the plea that the presence of civilians does
not exempt a fortified town from bombardment into the argument that
the presence of a soldier or even of war-material justifies the
shelling of a crowd of civilians or a watering-place. There was a
cavalry station at Scarborough, a coastguard at Whitby, and some
infantry and a battery at Hartlepool; Scarborough also had a wireless
installation, and Hartlepool its docks, and both were undoubtedly used
for purposes of war. The truth is that war tends to pervade and absorb
the whole energies of the community, and the only legitimate criticism
of German methods is that they pushed to extremes of barbarity
premisses which were commonly admitted and could logically lead in no
other direction. The old restriction of war to a few actual combatants
disappeared as manhood took to universal service, womanhood to
munition-making, and whole nations to war-work, and as the reach of
artillery and aircraft extended the sphere of operations hundreds of
miles behind the battle-lines. Eighteen were killed at Scarborough,
mostly women and children, and 70 were wounded; Whitby had 3 killed
and 2 wounded, but the damage at Hartlepool was serious. Six hundred
houses were damaged or destroyed, 119 persons were killed, over 300
were wounded, and the mines the Germans scattered sank three steamers
with considerable loss of life. The raiders escaped by the skin of
their teeth in a fog which closed down just as two British
battle-cruisers appeared on the scene of their retreat. That the raid
had been effected at all evoked some protest from a public unaware
that such incidents have always been an inevitable accompaniment of
all our naval wars; and critics declared that we had lost the command
of the sea in the first great war in our history in which not an enemy
landed on English soil except as a prisoner. It was the German plan to
provoke such comment, a feeling of insecurity, and a demand for the
scattering of our Grand Fleet along the coasts for defence in order
that it might be dealt with in detail; but the design was happily
defeated by the restraint of the people and the sense of better
judges.
The Germans, however, were encouraged by their success to repeat the
attempt once too often, and on 24 January 1915 a more ambitious effort
was made by Admiral Hipper to emulate these raids, or perhaps rather
to lure the British on to mine-fields north of Heligoland which he
extended before he set out. He had with him three of the best German
battle-cruisers, the Derfflinger, Seydlitz, and Moltke, with speeds
ranging from 27 to 25 knots, tonnage from 26,000 to 22,000, and 12 or
11-inch guns; the Blücher of 15,550 tons, 24 knots, and 8.2-inch guns;
six light cruisers and a torpedo flotilla. The Germans rarely if ever
came out without information of their intended movement preceding
them, and Beatty put to sea within an hour of their start. His
flagship was the Lion, 26,350 tons, 29 knots, and eight 13.5-inch
guns, and he had five other battle-cruisers, the Tiger, 28,000 tons,
28 knots, and the same armament as the Lion; the Princess Royal, a
sister ship of the Lion; the New Zealand, 18,800 tons, 25 knots, and
eight 12-inch guns; and the Indomitable, sister to Sturdee's
Invincible and Inflexible. There were also four cruisers of the "town"
class, three light cruisers, and torpedo flotillas. The fight was,
however, mainly between the battle-crusiers. As soon as Hipper heard
of Beatty's approach he turned south-east. Gradually he was
overhauled, each of the leading British cruisers, Lion, Tiger, and
Princess Royal firing salvos into the slower Blücher as they passed on
to tackle the Moltke, Seydlitz, and Derfflinger. The Blücher was
finally reduced to a wreck by the New Zealand and Indomitable, and
then torpedoed by the Meteor; bombs from German aircraft prevented our
boats from rescuing more than 120 survivors from the sinking ship.
Meanwhile the Lion was damaged by a shell and had to fall behind, and
an hour and twenty minutes passed before Beatty could return to the
scene of action; he found that his second in command had broken off
the fight out of respect for the German mine-field, which seems,
however, to have been still thirty or forty miles away. The German
battle-cruisers, which might apparently have been destroyed, thus got
home with a severe battering which incapacitated them for action for
some months. No British ship was lost, and our casualties were about a
score of men.
The result was disappointing in the escape of the German cruisers, but
it left no doubt about the command of the sea. It was, indeed, being
daily demonstrated by the security of the Channel passage, the muster
of forces from oversea, and the conquest of German colonies. These
were mainly in Africa, and consisted of Togoland, the German
Cameroons, German South-West Africa, and East Africa. The tide of
conquest flowed in this order round Africa from north-west to
south-east, and Togoland, which was also the smallest, was the first
to be subdued. It was about the size of Ireland, and was hemmed in on
all sides, by British sea-power on the south, Nigeria on the west, and
French colonies on the north and east; and converging attacks forced
the handful of German troops to unconditional surrender on 27 August,
The Cameroons were larger than the German Empire in Europe, and the
first attacks, being made with inadequate preparation, were repulsed
in the latter days of August. On 27 September, however, by co-
operation between French troops and two British warships, Duala the
capital was captured and the whole coast-line was seized.
The conquest of German South-West Africa was a more serious matter,
not only because the Germans were there more numerous and better
organized, but because the task was complicated by the politics of the
Union. It was not a Crown colony subject to the orders of the Imperial
Government; troops could only move at the instance of a responsible
local administration, and the back-veld Boers, led by Hertzog and De
Wet, were strenuously opposed to participation in the war on the
British side. Fortunately, perhaps, the Germans began hostilities by
raiding the frontiers of Cape Colony, and on 18 September the British
retaliated by seizing Luderitz Bay, which, like their other port,
Swakopmund, the Germans had abandoned to concentrate at their inland
capital, Windhoek. On the 26th there was a small British reverse at
Sandfontein, which was followed by the more serious news of Maritz'
rebellion in the Cape. Maritz had fought against the British in the
Boer War and for the Germans against the revolted Hereros; he now held
the ambiguous position of rank in the German Army and command of
British forces, but came down on the German side of the fence. Botha
ordered his arrest, and Maritz, with German assistance in arms and
ammunition, attempted to overrun the north-west of Cape Colony. A
fortnight's campaign in October ended with the dispersal of his
commandos by Colonel Van Deventer.
Maritz was the stormy petrel of a far more serious disturbance. While
the grant of self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange River
Colony in 1908 had placated the great majority and the better-educated
Boers, tradition and prejudice kept their hold upon the more
conservative minority; and some like Beyers, who had once been
received by the Kaiser, looked to a war with Germany to restore their
ancient independence. On 24 October De Wet seized Heilbronn in the
Orange State, and Beyers Rustenburg in the Transvaal. Botha's appeal
to the loyal Boers met, however, with an effective response, and soon
he had 30,000 men at his disposal. He acted with remarkable swiftness:
on the 27th he dispersed the commandos of Beyers and Kemp, and on 7
November General Smuts announced that there were but a few scattered
bands of rebels in the Transvaal. De Wet made a longer run by his
elusive heels, but found the motor-transport of his enemies an
insuperable bar to the repetition of his exploits of 1900-2. He had a
slight success at Doornberg on 7 November, when his force amounted to
2000 men; but Botha now came south into the Orange State and
completely defeated De Wet on the 11th to the east of Winburg. De Wet
himself escaped and attempted a junction with Beyers who had fled
south from the Transvaal. But he was gradually driven westward into
the Kalahari desert and overtaken by Colonel Jordaan's motors a
hundred miles west of Mafeking on 1 December, while Beyers was drowned
in trying to cross the Vaal on the 8th. De Wet was once more given his
life, and the other rebels were treated with a lenience which nothing
but its wisdom could excuse.
The rising put off to another year the conquest of German South-West
Africa. The conquest of East Africa (see Map, p. 249) was postponed
for a longer period by the inherent difficulties of the task and the
imported defects in its management. German East Africa was actually
and potentially by far the most valuable of German oversea
possessions. Twice the size of Germany, it had a population of eight
million natives and five thousand Europeans. Although tropical in its
climate, high ground, and especially the slopes of Kilimanjaro,
provided inhabitable land for white men, and its wealth in forests,
gold and other minerals, pastoral and agricultural facilities was
considerable. There were four excellent ports, and from two of them,
Tanga and the capital, Dar-es-Salaam, railways ran far into the
interior. On the north it was bounded by British East Africa and
Uganda, on the west by the Belgian Congo State, and on the south-west
by British Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, while on the south
Portuguese Mozambique provided some means of supply and an ultimate
refuge in defeat. The German forces were greatly superior to those of
the British in East Africa, and the Uganda railway from Mombasa to
Lake Victoria Nyanza running parallel with the frontier was a tempting
object of attack. The Germans took the offensive against the British
north and south-west, without achieving any great success. But only
the arrival of reinforcements from India on 3 September and the
failure of the Konigsberg to co-operate prevented the fall of Mombasa,
and only the inadequacy of the British maps, on which the Germans had
for once to rely, frustrated their attack on the Uganda railway.
Karungu was also besieged on Lake Victoria Nyanza, but relieved by a
couple of British vessels; the invaders of Northern Rhodesia were
beaten back; and a naval force bombarded Dar-es-Salaam and destroyed
the wireless installation. The arrival of a second expeditionary force
from India on 1 November was the prelude to a greater reverse. Landing
at Tanga on the 4th, it was met by a German force, superior in the art
of bush fighting if not in numbers which hurried down from Moschi, and
was compelled to re-embark with a loss of 800 casualties. During the
brief span of their colonial experience the Germans had learnt as much
about colonial warfare as we could teach them after centuries; for
traditions are not an unmixed blessing in the art of war.
CHAPTER V
ESTABLISHING THE WESTERN FRONT
The Battles Of The Aisne
Throughout the war there was an undercurrent of criticism against the
dispersion of British forces and dissipation of British energy, and
the briefest history of it cannot avoid a certain amount of
discursiveness. The reason, if not the justification, is the same in
both cases; for happily or unhappily the British Empire is scattered
all over the globe, and unless colonies were to be abandoned to enemy
attacks and the natural forces of native discontents, they had to be
defended in part at least by British troops. Fortunately the task
required but a fraction of the military strength which Germany needed
to hold Alsace-Lorraine in time of peace, and long before the end
Great Britain received from her dominions fourfold the help in Europe
that she had to lend them overseas. The rally to the British flag was
to us one of the most inspiring, and to the Germans one of the most
dispiriting, portents in the war; but it took time to bear its fruits,
and meanwhile the cause of civilization had to rely upon the gallantry
of French armies and the numerically weak British forces fighting on
the Marne and on the Aisne.
The human eye is ever longing to pierce the veil of the future, but it
was perhaps as well that men could not foresee, as the Allies drove
the Germans across the lower reaches of the Aisne, how long that river
would be reddened with the blood of the contending forces. They
thought that the tide of invasion would recede as fast as it had
advanced, and it was only as the days of German resistance lengthened
into weeks, and the weeks into months of the longest battle in
history, that staffs and armies and peoples began to grasp the awful
potentialities of scientific progress in the art of modern war. The
battle without a morrow had long been the ideal consummation for
victorious strategy, but no one had yet foreseen the battle without an
end and armies without flanks. That sooner or later one or other
combatant would be outflanked had been the universal assumption of the
strategist; but in the autumn of 1914 the combatant forces gradually
extended their fronts in the effort until they rested upon the
frontier of Switzerland and the sea, and the deadlock of a deadly
embrace began which was not effectively broken until the wrestling of
four years wore down the strength of the wrestlers and left the final
decision in the hands of new-comers to the European field of battle.
The deadlock was no part of the original German plan, but German
forethought during the advance to the Marne had provided entrenchments
in the rear for the event of a retreat, and the natural strength of
the forest of St. Gobain, the Chemin des Dames, and the Argonne as
well as a study of the campaign of 1814 had suggested an obvious line
of defence. It was not, however, expected by the Entente higher
command which proceeded with its frontal attack on the assumption that
the Germans were merely fighting rearguard actions to secure their
further retirement; and it was only when the German front refused to
budge that pressure spread out to the Allied left wing in an attempt
to turn the German right flank, which would have stood more chance of
success had it come a fortnight earlier as a first instead of a second
thought. An even better alternative might have been to revert to
Joffre's original plan, which had failed in August on the Saar, to
thrust forward against the Crown Prince and threaten the left of the
Germans and the communications of their forces in Belgium and northern
France. But it is easier on paper after the event than it was in
action at the time to convert an improvised defensive into a
considered offensive strategy; and the Germans themselves had occasion
during the autumn and the rest of the war to regret that their second
thoughts had not come first.
The battle of the Aisne began, like that of the Marne, on Sunday, 13
September. The Germans' retreat had taken them north of the river
except at a few bridgeheads, but the river was deep and its crossings
were all commanded by fire from German batteries concealed on the
slopes rising up from the northern bank. Maunoury's 6th Army attacked
on the left from Compiègne and the Forêt de l'Aigle to Soissons, and
several divisions were got across. From Soissons eastward for fifteen
miles to Pont-Arcy the line of attack was held by the British Army;
the whole of the 4th Division got across near Venizel, and most of the
5th and 3rd Divisions farther east, but the Germans succeeded in
holding the bridge at Condé. The 2nd Division was also only partially
successful in the region of Chavonne, but the whole of the 1st got
across at Pont-Arcy and Bourg. On Monday, Maunoury pressed forward up
the heights, capturing Autrèches and Nouvron, but, like the British on
his right between Vregny and Vailly, he found the German positions
impregnable on the plateau. Haig's First Corps was more successful
farther east; Vendresse and Troyon were captured and the Chemin des
Dames was almost reached. But D'Esperey's 5th French army could make
little impression on the Craonne plateau; Foch's 9th was unable to
force the Suippe to the east of Reims, and Langle's 4th, while it
occupied Souain, was similarly held up in Champagne.
On the 15th the Germans counter-attacked. Maunoury was driven out of
Nouvron and Autrèches, the British were forced back from Vregny almost
to the river, and the Moroccan troops withdrew on Haig's right flank.
There was a lull on the 16th, and on the 17th Maunoury recovered the
quarries of Autrèches; but east of Reims the 9th Army had fallen back
from the Suippe, and the Prussian Guard had captured Nogent l'Abbesse
and was threatening Foch's connexion with Langle in Champagne. The
18th saw little progress on either side, except along the Oise, where
Maunoury had as early as the 15th begun to outflank the German right.
This success, coupled with the stalemate along the rest of the front,
suggested to Joffre a change of strategy. Numerically the opposing
forces were not unequal, but the Germans had all the advantages of
position. To attack up carefully protected slopes with a river in the
rear and its crossings commanded by the enemy's fire, promised little
hope of success, and threatened disaster in case of failure and
retreat. Accordingly, Joffre, taking some risks by weakening his
centre, began on the 16th to lengthen and strengthen his left by
forming two new armies. Castlenau gave up his command of the 2nd to
Dubail in Lorraine and took over the new 7th, and a 10th was entrusted
to Maud'huy, another of the professors of military history to whom the
French and the Russian armies owed so much of their generalship. By
the 20th Maunoury had swung his left round until it stretched at a
right angle from Compiègne north to the west of Lassigny. Castelnau's
7th continued the line north through Roye to the Albert plateau; and
on the 30th Maud'huy's 10th took up the tale through Arras to Lens.
But if the impact of equal forces on the Aisne flattened them out
towards the west, it had the same effect in the other direction,
though here it was the Germans who took the offensive in trying to
penetrate Sarrail's flank on the Meuse and thus get behind the whole
front of the Allies. Verdun was the nut to be cracked, but Sarrail had
been extending its defences so as to put the city beyond the reach of
the German howitzers and surrounding it with miles of trenches and
wire-entanglements; and the Germans preferred to attempt another
method than frontal attack. About the 20th four new corps, chiefly of
Württemburgers, appeared in Lorraine, bringing their forces up to
seven against Sarrail's three; and an attack was made on Fort Troyon
on the Meuse which reduced it to a dust-heap but failed to carry the
Germans across the river. A more serious onslaught was made on the
23rd against St. Mihiel, which was captured while the neighbouring
forts of Paroches and the Camp des Romains were destroyed. But again
the Germans were prevented from pushing their advantage, and were left
with no more than a wonderful salient which looked on the map like
Germany putting out its tongue at France and resisted all efforts to
repress this insolence until the closing months of the war.
Having achieved but a sterile success to the south of Verdun, the
Crown Prince encountered a greater failure to the west. On 3 October
he attacked Sarrail's centre in the forest of the Argonne, seeking to
recapture St. Menehould, the headquarters he had abandoned on 14
September. His troops were caught in La Grurie wood and so badly
mauled that they temporarily lost Varennes and the main road through
the Argonne to Verdun. Foiled in both these directions, the Germans
revenged themselves by bombarding Reims in the centre and ruining its
cathedral; "the commonest, ugliest stone," wrote a German general,
"placed to mark the burial-place of a German grenadier is a more
glorious and perfect monument than all the cathedrals in Europe put
together." The bombardment did not help them much; Neuvillette, which
they had seized two miles north of Reims, was lost again on 28
September, and the French also recovered Prunay, the German occupation
of which had driven a wedge between Foch's and Langle's armies. On the
other hand, Berry-au-Bac, where the great road crossed the Aisne and
the French often reported progress, remained in German hands for four
years longer. Both sides were now firmly entrenched, and their armies
were learning that new art of trench warfare which was to tax their
ingenuity, test their endurance, and drain their strength, until years
later this war of positions once more gave place to a war of movement.
The lines had become stabilized, and between Reims and the Alps they
did not alter by half a dozen miles at any point from September 1914
until September 1918. The question of October was whether and where
they would be fixed between the Aisne and the sea.
Joffre's outflanking move was promptly countered, if not indeed
anticipated, by the German higher command, and in the first days of
October there was a general drift of German forces towards their right
and the Channel ports. Most and the best of the new levies were sent
into Belgium, and the stoutest troops in the fighting line were
shifted from East to West. Alsace was almost denuded; the Bavarians
were moved from Lorraine towards Lille and Arras, and the Duke of
Württemberg into Belgian Flanders. Von Bulow was sent to face
Castelnau and Maud'huy between the Oise and the Somme, and only Von
Kluck and the Crown Prince with a new general, Von Heeringen, from
Alsace were left to hold the line of the Aisne. Von Moltke was
superseded by Falkenhayn, and a new phase came over German strategy.
The knock-out blow against France had failed, and the little British
Army threatened to grow. France had been the only foe the Germans had
counted in the West, but a new enemy was developing strength, and the
German front was turned to meet the novel danger.
The British Army made a movement which was sympathetic with this
change and symptomatic of the future course of the war. It was clearly
out of place along the Aisne in trenches which could be held by French
territorials and where its long communications crossed those of three
French armies. It was needed in Flanders close to its bases and to the
Channel ports which the Germans had now resolved to seize in the hope
of cutting or straining the Anglo-French liaison and furthering their
new campaign on land and sea against their gathering British foes. The
idea had occurred to Sir John French before the end of September, and
on the 29th he propounded it to Joffre; Joffre concurred, called up an
8th Army under D'Urbal to support and prolong the extension of the
line into Flanders, and placed Foch in general charge of the
operations north of Noyon. The transport began on 3 October and was
admirably carried out, though some of the ultra-patriotic English
newspapers did their best to help the enemy by their enterprise in
evading the Censor and giving news of the movement to the public; for
if business was business to the profiteer, news was news to its
vendors.
For a fortnight the British were on the road and out of the fight,
which was left for the most part to Castelnau's 7th and Maud'huy's
10th Armies; and strenuous fighting it was for all-important objects.
There was little profit in a British out-march round the German flank
in Flanders unless the links between it and the Oise could be
maintained, and the Germans were as speedily reinforcing and extending
their right as we were preparing to turn it. At first Castelnau seemed
to be making rapid and substantial progress; he captured Noyon on 21
September, was pushing on by Lassigny to Roye, and optimistic maps in
the English press depicted the German right being bent back to St.
Quentin and the French outflanking it as far north-east as Le Catelet.
These were not intelligent anticipations. Von Kluck had been
reinforced, and a desperate battle ensued from the 25th to the 28th,
in which Castelnau was driven back from Noyon and Lassigny. This
counter-attack was repulsed with great losses at Quesnoy and Lihons a
little farther north, but Maud'huy was not less heavily engaged north
of the Somme in a several days' struggle for the Albert plateau. The
line established was supposed to run through Combles and Bapaume, and
it was not till long afterwards that the public realized how far it
had sagged to the westwards, or what that sagging meant when the
British had to fight their way up to Bapaume.
North of that watershed the fronts were fluid, if the scattered bodies
of French Territorials and German cavalry could be said to constitute
a front at all; and there was a strenuous race and struggle to turn
the respective flanks. Neither side, it was soon apparent, would
succeed in that object, and the practical question was at what point
the outflanking contest would reach the coast. The German ambition was
to push their right as far south as the mouth of the Seine, while the
Allies hoped to thrust their left to the north until it joined the
Belgian Army at Antwerp. Maud'huy had entered Arras on 30 September,
and some of his Territorials pushed forward to Lille and Douai. During
the first three days of October he was fighting hard on the eastern
slopes of Vimy Ridge but was compelled to fall back on Arras, while
the Germans occupied Lille and Douai and their cavalry penetrated as
far as Bailleul, Hazebrouck, and Cassel. But the British from the
Aisne were moving up towards their positions on Maud'huy's left, the
Aire-La Bassée Canal being fixed as the point of their junction, and
the 7th Division, with a division of cavalry, had landed at Ostend and
Zeebrugge while the Naval Division was sent to assist in the defence
of Antwerp. The Allied dream of a front along the Scheldt to Antwerp,
barring German access to the sea, seemed on the verge of realization;
but dramatic as the moment was, the tension would have been far more
acute had men grasped what a difference possession of the Belgian
coast was to make in the course of the war.
Success was missed by the Allies because it had been a more urgent
task to break the German offensive on the Marne than to save the
remnants of Belgian soil and assist the detached Belgian Army; and the
whole of our available force had been sent to the vital spot.
Isolation is always dubious strategy, but there were sound as well as
natural motives behind the decision which led the Belgian Army after
the German occupation of Brussels on 20 August to fall back
north-westwards on Antwerp instead of southwards to join the Allies at
Mons and Charleroi. The isolation did not involve ineffectiveness, and
so far away as the Marne the Allies experienced the benefit of Belgian
fighting at Antwerp. Three successive sorties alarmed the Germans for
the safety of their far-flung right and its communications, and
diverted reserves from their front in France to their rear in Belgium
(see Map, p. 34). The first began on 24 August and drove the Germans
from Malines, while 2000 British marines landed at Ostend. Then the
Belgian right stretched out a hand towards the British and captured
Alost, while the left struck at Cortenburg on the line between
Brussels and Louvain. The communications of the capital were thus
threatened on three sides, and the Germans had to recall at least
three of their corps from France. It was this interference with their
vital plans in France, coupled with the panic produced by the Belgian
advance, which provoked the Germans into their barbarities at Louvain,
Malines, and Termonde. Schrecklichkeit was to deter the contemptible
Belgian Army from spoiling a mighty German success. That was the view
of the German staff, and a soldiery prone as ever to pillage and
rapine, needed little encouragement to extend to civilians, women, and
children the violence which their leaders organized against cathedrals
and cities.
Panic produces plots in all countries--in the minds of the
panic-stricken, and Germans no doubt believed in the tales of civilian
conspiracies which they used to justify their military crimes. Major
Von Manteuffel ordered the systematic destruction of Louvain, with its
ancient university and magnificent library. The Cathedral and Palais
de Justice at Malines were ruined by bombardment after the Belgian
troops had left it; and Termonde was burnt because a fine was not paid
in time. Massacre, looting, and outrage attained a licence which only
the Germans themselves had equalled during the Thirty Years' War. It
and other orgies were a natural expression of German militarism; for
excessive restraint in one direction provokes relaxation in others,
and the tighter the bond of martial law, the less the respect for
civil codes. The proverbial licence of soldiery is the reaction
against their military discipline.
The second, called "the great sortie" from Antwerp, nearly coincided
with the battle of the Marne. It began on 9 September: Termonde was
reoccupied, but the main effort was towards Aerschot and Louvain.
Aerschot was recaptured on the 9th, though the fiercest struggle took
place at Weerde between Malines and Brussels. Kessel, just outside
Louvain, was taken on the 10th, but German reinforcements began to
arrive on the 11th, and two days later the Belgians were back in their
positions on the Nethe, their retirement being marked, as before, by a
fresh series of German atrocities. A third sortie induced by
representations of the French higher command and by the impression
that the German forces before Antwerp had been reduced, was planned
for 26-27 September, and some fighting occurred at Alost and Moll. But
by this time the new Germany strategy was at work, and the
"side-shows" of the first phase of the war became the main objectives
of the second. The French Army was fairly secure in its trenches and
the way to Paris was barred. But the approach to the Channel ports was
not yet closed, and Antwerp was on the way to the Belgian coast. It
was a fine city to ransom; its loss might convince the Belgians that
there was no hope for their independence; and historical Germans
bethought themselves of Napoleon's description of Antwerp as a pistol
pointed at England's heart. Its fall would be some consolation for the
lack of a second Sedan, and on 28 September the siege began.
The Antwerp defences had been, like those of Liège and Namur, designed
by Brialmont, and were begun in 1861. But the rapid growth of the city
and the increasing range of guns made Brialmont's ring of forts, which
was drawn little more than two miles from the walls, useless as a
protection against bombardment, and twenty years later a wider circle
of forts, which was barely completed when war broke out, was begun ten
miles farther out, beyond the Rupel and the Nethe, and extending
almost to Malines. One of the objects of the Belgian sorties had been
to keep this ring intact and prevent the German howitzers from being
brought up within range of the city. But there are only two means by
which forts can be made effective defences; either their artillery
must be equal in range and power to that of the attacking force, or
the attacking force must be prevented by defending troops from
bringing its howitzers within range. Neither of these two conditions
was fulfilled. The Belgian trenches, so far as any had been dug, were
close under this outer ring of forts, and the German 28-cm. howitzers
had an effective range of at least a mile and a half longer than that
of any guns the Belgians could mount. These howitzers had already
disposed of the fortifications of Liège, Namur, and Maubeuge, and it
was only a question of days and hours when they would make a breach in
the outer defences of Antwerp.
Their fire was concentrated on Forts Waelhem and Wavre, south and east
of Antwerp. Both had been destroyed by 1 October, and the reservoir
near the former, which supplied the city with water, was broken down,
flooding the Belgian trenches north of the Nethe, beyond which they
had now taken refuge. Farther to the left Termonde was seized by
German infantry and the Belgians driven across the Scheldt. On the 2nd
the Government resolved to leave Antwerp, but its departure and the
flight of the civilians were postponed by the arrival of Mr.
Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, and first a brigade of Royal
Marines and then two naval brigades of splendid but raw and ill-armed
recruits. They were at once sent out to help the Belgians to defend
their trenches along the north bank of the Nethe against the German
numbers and their more effective shells. On the 5th and following
night both the left and centre of the defence were pierced, the
Germans crossed the Nethe, and began to concentrate their howitzers on
the inner line of ramparts. On the 7th the exodus from the city began
by land and water, and amid heartrending scenes a quarter of a million
people strove to reach the Dutch frontier or safety on the sea. The
Belgian and British troops did their best to hold off the Germans
while the flight proceeded and the city was subject to bombardment. It
was doubtful whether any would get away, for the Germans had at last
begun serious fighting up the Scheldt in order to cut off the retreat
towards Zeebrugge and Ostend. In the narrow gap between the intruding
Germans and the Dutch frontier some were forced across the latter and
interned; others fell into the enemy's hands; and less than a third of
the first Naval Brigade escaped to England. On the 9th the bombardment
ceased, and on the 10th the Germans made their formal entry into a
well-nigh deserted city. They had got their pistol pointed at the
heart of England, but like Napoleon they learnt that it was a pistol
which could only be fired by sea-power.
Most of the Belgian Army with the remnants of the British forces got
away to the coast through the gap beyond the Scheldt which Von Beseler
had failed to close in time; and it is impossible to say whether the
gallant efforts of the Royal Marines and naval brigades did more to
facilitate this escape than the postponement of the retreat, caused by
their arrival, did to frustrate it. As an end in itself the expedition
for the relief of Antwerp was a failure; but it was designed to
subserve a larger operation, the scope of which has not yet been
revealed. At the time of its dispatch there may still have been hopes
for the success of Joffre's larger strategical scheme of bending back
the German flank in Flanders behind the Scheldt; and obviously, if the
failure of the Germans at the Marne and a successful defence of
Antwerp by the Entente should induce the Dutch to intervene, the
German position in the West would be completely turned. In either case
"other and more powerful considerations," as the Admiralty expressed
it on 17 October, prevented the "large operation" of which the
expedition of the Naval Division had been merely a part, from being
carried out; and the "powerful consideration" may have been the forces
which Germany was massing at Aix and in Belgium to defeat the Entente
strategy in Flanders.
The Campaigns In Artois
The fall of Antwerp was as fatal to our scheme of controlling the
Scheldt as Castlenau's and Maud'huy's successful defence between the
Oise and Arras had been to the German project of reaching the mouth of
the Seine; and it still remained to be seen at what point the
expanding pressure upon the opposing flanks would impinge upon the
coast. Neither side had yet reconciled itself to or perhaps conceived
of such a stalemate to their strategy. Rawlinson's 7th Division of
infantry and 3rd of cavalry had not been landed at Zeebrugge and
Ostend on 6 October to defend those ports or even the Yser, and the
fresh German armies advancing through Belgium were not intended to
waste their strength on the ridges in front of Ypres or floods around
Dixmude. The Germans hoped, if not to turn the Entente flank, at least
to seize Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne; and Joffre and French were
planning to make La Bassée, Lille, and Menin the pivot of a turning
movement which should liberate Brussels, isolate Von Beseler in
Antwerp, and threaten the rear of the German position along the Aisne.
To render these plans feasible it was necessary that La Bassée and
Lille should be held and that the indefinite German flank in Flanders
should be outreached; and thus the country from Arras northwards to
the coast became the ground on which the autumn campaign in the West
was doomed to be decided.
Antwerp fell amid a fluid front. On 9 October Maud'huy's 10th Army was
holding up in front of Arras; but his Territorials were falling back
on Lille and its environment as the Belgians retreated to join
Rawlinson at Ostend. French's three corps were on their way to prolong
and establish Maud'huy's left, and an 8th French army under D'Urbal
was designed to fling the line yet farther north. But the Germans were
bent on a similar object, and their masses of cavalry, released from
the front on the Aisne by its settlement into trenches, were keeping
open the country and the issue. The rival armies were like two doors
swinging towards one another on the same hinge; but they were not
wooden or rigid, and the banging together began at the hinge near La
Bassée and extended northwards to the coast in a concussion spread
over several days. On 11 October Smith-Dorrien's 2nd Corps reached the
La Bassée Canal between Aire and Béthune, while Gough's cavalry was
clearing the German patrols out of the forest of Nieppe. On the 12th
he attempted a frontal attack on La Bassée, but found the German
position too strong, and determined to try to wheel round it on the
north. This movement had some success; the 3rd Division drove the
Germans from village to village until on the 17th Aubers and Herlies,
north to north-east of La Bassée, were taken by assault. But the
Germans were simultaneously and in the same way driving in the French
Territorials; on the 13th they occupied Lille, and on the 19th an
Irish brigade which had advanced beyond Herlies to Le Pilly was cut
off and captured. So far as the 2nd Corps was concerned the doors had
banged together.
Pulteney's 3rd was moving towards collision on the left. It detrained
from St. Omer on the 11th, drove the Germans out of Meteren on the
13th, occupied Bailleul and Armentières and then crossed the Lys,
gaining a line from Le Gheir, north of Armentières, to Bois Grenier by
the 17th. An attempt to clear the right bank farther north failed
against the opposition of the German front from Radinghen to
Frelinghien and thence along the river. Here, too, the way was barred,
but north of the Lys there was as yet no stable control. There were
some French and British cavalry and some weak detachments of infantry;
but Haig's 1st Corps had not yet completed its transport from the
Aisne, Rawlinson's 7th Division was being expanded into a 4th Corps,
and the Belgian Army was painfully making its retreat from Antwerp. On
the 13th Von Beseler was in Ghent, on the 14th in Bruges, and on the
16th in Ostend. The outflanking here was being done by the Germans
with uncomfortable rapidity. On the day that the Germans entered
Ostend, the Belgians were driven out of the forest of Houthulst and
took refuge far behind the Yser. Four French cavalry divisions
recovered the forest on the 17th, but the 7th British Division which
had occupied Roulers on the 13th was driven back to a line south-east
of Ypres running through Zandvoorde, Gheluvelt, and Zonnebeke (see
Map, p. 288).
D'Urbal's 8th French army now, however, came up to support the
exhausted Belgians and assist in holding the Yser from Dixmude to the
sea, where British warships were assembled to harass the German flank
along the dunes; and Sir John French thought the moment had come for
an offensive wheel round Menin towards the Scheldt. Haig's 1st Corps
was expected shortly to fill the gap between Rawlinson's 4th and
D'Urbal, and Rawlinson was instructed to advance on the 18th, seize
Menin, and then await Haig, who was to move through Ypres on to
Thourout, Bruges, and Ghent. In England it was confidently expected
that the Germans, who had arrived at Ostend on a Friday, would enjoy
but a week-end visit to the seaside resort, and the newspapers were
not more sadly optimistic or ill-informed than headquarters in France.
The orders given on the 18th and 19th could only have been the outcome
of complete ignorance of the strength of the German Army, which was as
much underestimated by the Intelligence Department on the spot as it
was later exaggerated by writers on the campaign. In reality four new
German Corps were already at Brussels or Courtrai mainly from
Württemberg and Bavaria, and although the presence in them of men with
grey beards and boys with none gave rise to some ill-timed
satisfaction in the British press, these Landsturm troops were not to
be despised. Rawlinson moved on Menin on the 19th, but was stopped
three miles away by the German masses coming from Courtrai, and had to
entrench on a line running east of Gheluvelt. On the same day the 1st
Corps detrained at St. Omer and marched towards Ypres. Instead of
advancing on Thourout and beyond, it had to dig itself in on a line of
defence from Rawlinson's left at Zonnebeke to Bixschoote, where the
French began their own and the Belgian front along the Yser to
Nieuport.
The impact of the opposing forces had flattened them out until they
extended to the coast, and the point at which they reached it remained
fixed for four years to a day. Instead of a brilliant strategical run
round the enemy's flanks to a distant goal in his rear, there was
fated to be a strenuous scrimmage all along the line. It was a
democratic sort of war, depending for its decision upon the stoutness
of the pack rather than on the genius of the individual. The pressure
was differently distributed at different periods during those endless
years; now it was Ypres, now Verdun, then the Somme and the Chemin des
Dames that was selected for the special push; and in time as their
man-power began to fail the Germans laid greater stress on the
concrete of their lines. But the line was never really broken, and no
flank was ever fully turned. It wavered at places and times now in
favour of one side and now in that of the other; but the end only came
when the whole was pushed back by superior weight of numbers,
advancing at an average rate of less than a mile a day.
The first great trial of strength is associated in British minds with
the first battle of Ypres. The French dwell rather on the equally
strenuous struggle farther south round Arras under Foch. For the line
of battle stretched north from the Albert plateau for a hundred miles,
and we can hardly claim that the boys and the middle-aged men, at whom
some were inclined to scoff, in Flanders were the pick of the German
troops sent into the fray. The glory of the defence consisted rather
in the resistance of better troops to superior numbers backed by a
vast preponderance of artillery. The estimates of the German forces
are still little more than conjectures; and the figures of a million
and a half Germans to half a million French, British, and Belgians, or
of fifty corps to twelve and a half, will probably be corrected when
the German statistics are known. If it is further true that at the
actual points of fighting the disproportion was five to one, we need
no further illustration of the ills which inadequate co-ordination
imposes on an Alliance, and inadequate staff-work and intelligence on
any fighting force. The Allied tactics were probably not so clumsy nor
the German troops so feeble as these thoughtless estimates imply.
It was not a struggle in which there was much scope for strategy on
either side, because there had been no fixed data on which to base it.
Each combatant had been bent on out-flanking the other before the sea
was reached and success denied; but neither knew from day to day or
hour to hour where his own or the enemy's line would be. It was idle
to plan at headquarters the investment of places which might at the
moment be well behind the lines, or the defence of others which the
enemy might already have passed; and the alleged inexplicable nature
of the German strategy seems to be largely due to an antedating of the
establishment of a line of battle. They might have done better to
concentrate on Arras with a view to breaking the Anglo-French liaison
on the La Bassée Canal and isolating the British Army, than to
distribute their onslaughts over a front of a hundred miles. But the
problem was to outflank a wing which was still in the air, and not to
break a line which was not yet formed; and even if it were in
existence, subsequent experience would have justified the conviction
that success was to be obtained by pressure along an extended front
rather than by concentration on limited sectors like Verdun, or even
the 18-mile front of the battle of the Somme. The struggle which
closed the autumn campaign in the West was not, in fact, a new battle
fought on a preconceived plan, but the final clash of armies seeking
to outmarch each other's flanks in a battle begun on the Marne; and
the popular German advertisement of a new campaign against the Channel
ports and a different enemy than the French was merely a fresh coat of
paint designed to cover a structure that had gone to pieces.
Apart from the effort to outflank, neither side could therefore have
any definite plan, and neither was able to choose the scene of
conflict. Two years later, when they withdrew to the Hindenburg lines,
the Germans admitted freely enough that the earlier line had been none
of their choice, and it was certainly none of ours. It was, in fact,
imposed upon both the combatants by that same balance of forces which
eventually also imposed upon them, against their will, the deadlock in
the West. On 19 October Sir John French was still hoping that Haig
could outflank the Germans at Ghent, and the presence of the Kaiser on
the coast a few days later suggests that his generals still cherished
the idea of an outmarch rather than a break-through. It was the
British Navy that put the final check on that design, and accident
played its part. Three Brazilian monitors of shallow draught but heavy
armament had been purchased by the Admiralty in August: they could
work inshore even along the shallow waters of the Belgian coast which
precluded counter-attack by submarines, and from 18 to 28 October
their guns swept the Belgian shore for six miles inland and repelled
the onslaught of the German right on Nieuport. Haig's outflanking
project had been rendered equally impossible by the strength of the
German resistance to Rawlinson's move on Menin, and by the 21st both
sides had been pinned down to a ding-dong soldiers' battle all along
the front. Its chronology is as important as its localities, and it is
hard to follow the course of the struggle if the narrative loses
itself in the different threads of the various corps engaged. For all
were fighting at the same time, and the only generalizations possible
are that the struggle tended to concentrate from both wings towards
the apex at Ypres and to culminate in the combat of the last day of
the month.
This bird's-eye view and lack of information about the details do less
than justice to the crucial battle, which Maud'huy under Foch's
general direction waged against the Germans round Arras and both they
and the French regard as one of the decisive incidents in the war.
Clearly, if Von Buelow succeeded in breaking through towards Doullens
or Béthune there was little to stop his reaching Boulogne or
Abbeville, and the British Army would be first isolated and then
driven into the sea. The struggle for Arras began on the 20th, after
the Germans had secured an initial advantage by seizing Lens, and Von
Buelow was given the Prussian Guard to achieve its capture. The climax
was reached on the 24th in an attempt to take the important railway
junction of Achicourt just south of the city. Arras itself was reduced
almost to ruins by the German bombardment; but Maud'huy's men held
good, and on the 26th were even able to take the offensive. The
Germans were driven out of their most advanced positions, though they
held the Vimy Ridge, and accepting defeat before Arras, transferred
some of their best troops, including the Prussian Guards, farther
north. Possibly this relinquishment was the worst of their tactical
mistakes, but the higher commands on both sides had learnt the cost of
persisting in attempts to break through, and Falkenhayn may well have
thought it best to seek a weaker spot.
Maud'huy's successful resistance made it possible for Smith-Dorrien's
2nd Corps to hold a line north of the La Bassée Canal, though not the
line on which he had first come up against the Germans advancing from
Lille. That formed a right angle, stretching north-east from Givenchy
to Herlies and then north-west to Fauquissart; but on the 22nd his
right was driven out of Violaines, and the salient had to be evacuated
by withdrawal to a line in front of Givenchy, Festubert, and Neuve
Chapelle. On the 27th Neuve Chapelle was taken by the Germans. A
gallant attack by Indian troops, who had been brought up from
Marseilles to assist Smith-Dorrien's tried and depleted corps, checked
their advance on the 28th and drove them back into Neuve Chapelle; and
another German attack was held before Festubert. Here Sir James
Willcock's Indian Corps had a hard task for the next few days, and a
breach in our lines on 2 November was only repaired by a desperate
charge of the Gurkhas. The winter of northern France was to have more
effect on their physique than German warfare on their moral, and after
a final assault on Givenchy--one of the virgin pivots of the war in
the West--on 7 November, the battle in front of the 2nd Corps subsided
into an artillery duel. The fighting in front of Pulteney's 3rd Corps,
which carried on the line from Smith-Dorrien's left towards Ypres, was
overshadowed by the struggle round that city; but it had enough to do
to maintain the connexion. Its hold on the left bank of the Lys north
of Armentières was strenuously disputed; on the 20th the Germans
seized Le Gheir at the south-east corner of Ploegstreet Wood, but were
immediately driven out. They took it again on the 29th and some
trenches in the wood with no more permanent success, but managed on
the 30th to take and retain St. Yves a little farther north.
This was part of the Ypres fighting, and downwards from the coast the
surge of battle was also drawn into that maelstrom. The British naval
guns had destroyed the attraction of the dunes, and the Germans turned
towards the inland marshes along the Yser. On the 23rd they crossed it
and advanced to Ramscapelle, but were driven back by the Belgians,
while fourteen unsuccessful attacks were made the following night on
Dixmude, farther south. A more successful attempt was made on the 24th
and 25th on Schoorbakke, and the Germans advanced towards the railway
embankment near Pervyse. The Belgians now bethought themselves of the
expedient their forbears had found effective in the days of William
the Silent and Alexander Farnese. The Yser was dammed at Nieuport, the
sluices were opened above Dixmude, and slowly the river rose above its
banks and spread over the meadow-flats the Germans were striving to
cross. Men were drowned and guns submerged, and presently an
impassable sheet of water protected the Belgians on the railway from
Nieuport to Dixmude. The Germans, however, made two more efforts to
pierce the Belgian line north and south of the inundation. On the 30th
they seized Ramscapelle, but were expelled by the French on the 31st,
and on 7 November a determined attack was made on Dixmude, now
defended by Admiral Ronarc'h and his French marines. It succeeded
after three days' fighting and a heavy bombardment on the 10th. But
Dixmude had, as was natural in a country which had generally feared
attack from France, been built on the eastern bank of the Yser; and
the Germans were never able to debouch across the river (see Map, p.
288).
The capture of Dixmude coincided with the last attack on Ypres. That
famous battle was but an act in the drama played along the Flanders
front, and it may not have been more decisive and was perhaps less
dramatic than the battle of Arras. But the act extended throughout the
play, and gradually attracted more and more attention. It was a
natural continuation of the outflanking struggle, and there was no
interval between the British attempt to get to Ghent and the German
effort to reach the Channel ports. The two ambitions here clashed in
front of Ypres. Rawlinson's failure before Menin left him facing
south-east, while the expulsion of the Belgians and then the French
Territorials from the Houthulst forest left Haig and the French
contingents facing north-east from Bixschoote to Zonnebeke; the apex
of this Ypres salient was at Becelaere. D'Urbal's 8th Army from
Bixschoote north to Dixmude played a subsidiary part similar to that
of Pulteney's 3rd Corps farther south; but had it not been for the
supports he was able to send to Haig's assistance, the Germans would
assuredly have broken through.
The attack began from the apex to our right at Zillebeke on the 21st,
and its momentum showed that nothing more than stubborn defence was
possible. The 7th Division bore the brunt of the attack, and Haig's
1st Corps was precluded from a counter-offensive by the need of
detaching supports to the south-east of Ypres, where long stretches of
line were only held by cavalry, and Pulteney was being pressed in
front of Ploegstreet. On the 23rd the Germans made an impetuous
onslaught on Langemarck, but the pressure was relieved by a French
advance on the left and their taking over the line of our 1st
Division, which enabled Haig to move in support of the centre.
Nevertheless the Germans drove it from Becelaere and got into Polygon
Wood. At night on the 25th they struck at Kruseik, between Gheluvelt
and Zandvoorde. There followed a suspicious lull, and on the 29th the
reinforced Germans drove against the centre of the 1st Corps at
Gheluvelt; an initial success was reversed later on in the day, but on
the 30th the attack shifted towards the right at Zandvoorde, and the
1st Division was forced back a mile to Zillebeke, while the 2nd
conformed and the 2nd Cavalry Division was driven from Hollebeke back
to St. Eloi. The Kaiser arrived that day and the crisis on the morrow.
Gheluvelt was the point selected for the blow, and the 1st Division
was thrust back into the woods in front of Hooge, where headquarters
were heavily shelled. The flank of the 7th Division was thus exposed,
and the Royal Scots Fusiliers were wiped out. Fortunately the arrival
of Moussy with part of the 9th French Corps averted further disaster,
though he had to collect regimental cooks and other unarmed men to
help in holding the line. Allenby's cavalry farther south was in
equally desperate straits near Hollebeke, and he was only saved by the
transference of Kavanagh's 7th brigade from the north of Hooge to his
assistance. North of the Ypres-Menin road the German attack had not
been seriously pressed, and it was from this direction that help came
between 2 and 3 p.m., the hour which Sir John French once described as
the most critical in the Ypres battle. The main instrument was the 2nd
Worcesters, who fell upon the German advanced and exposed right, and
retook Gheluvelt by a bayonet charge. This relieved the pressure on
the 7th Division, and by nightfall their positions had been regained.
But the battle was not yet over. On 1 November the Germans renewed
their attack on Allenby and captured Hollebeke and Messines, and then
in the night Wytschaete. Luckily on that day the French 16th Corps
arrived and recovered Wytschaete. The Germans themselves now needed
reinforcements and time to recover, and for some days there was little
fighting except an unequal artillery duel. On the 6th a German attack
on Zillebeke nearly succeeded, but was eventually repulsed by a charge
of the Household Cavalry. Another pause followed, but the Germans were
bent on one more effort, and the Prussian Guards were brought up from
Arras to make it on the 11th. They charged on the Menin road against
Gheluvelt and drove the 1st Division back into the woods behind; but
then they were held, and counter-attacks recovered most of the lost
positions. The Germans by this time were tired of Ypres, though they
continued for four days longer to struggle for Bixschoote, where
Dubois and his Zouaves put up a splendid and successful defence, and a
few spasmodic attempts were made at Zillebeke and elsewhere between 12
and 17 November. Then, with the arrival of further French
reinforcements, the Germans desisted, and the line of battle in
Flanders sank into an uneasy winter torpor. The second as well as the
first thoughts of the German command for the campaign of 1914 in the
West had come to nought, or to what was nearly as bad, a stalemate;
and the East was calling with an urgent and distracting voice to other
fields of battle.
CHAPTER VI
THE FIRST WINTER OF THE WAR
The lull which followed the battle of Ypres was not entirely due to
the winter season or to the Flanders mud, for both sides had other
reasons for quiescence in the West. The Germans had definitely failed
in their original plan of destroying the French armies before the
Russians could intervene, and they were now threatened with the ruin
of their Austrian ally and the invasion of their own Silesian borders.
The steam-roller, which had been moving to and fro across the Polish
plains, seemed to have at last secured a solid impetus in the forward
direction which might conceivably carry it to the Brandenburg Gate by
Christmas. Württemburgers and Bavarians might afford to keep their
eyes fixed on the Channel ports and their troops in Belgium; but the
affections of Prussians were set on their homes in the East, and
Hindenburg was calling for reinforcement more clamantly than the
Western commanders. Defence was for many a month to be the German
strategy in the West, and, in spite of the failure of their higher
ambitions, they had secured a good deal worth defending. Belgium, with
its great mining and other industrial resources, was theirs to relieve
the strain on German labour and raw materials; from the Briey district
in Lorraine they were drawing ores without which they could not long
have continued the war; and the coalfields of northern France were
divided between their owners and the invaders. The strain which the
lack of these resources put upon the industries and shipping of Great
Britain was incalculable, and the inability of the Entente to defend
the French and Belgian frontiers or to expel the invader prolonged the
war for at least a couple of years.
There were thus compensations for the Germans if they could merely
hold what they had taken from other people; and the Entente on its
side had its reasons for quiescence. French reserves, which were too
late at Charleroi and Sedan, were in time at Arras and Ypres, but our
own were still in the making. A dreadful toll had been taken of the
heroes of Mons, and the original Expeditionary Force had been sadly
depleted. It was a difficulty which time would remedy, for Great
Britain was teeming with recruits in training from every quarter of
the Empire. The response to its need had been almost overwhelming, and
the Government was hard pressed to embody the hundreds of thousands of
volunteers at home and to provide transport for those overseas. At one
moment in September the War Office took the extraordinary step of
checking the rush by refusing all recruits, however fit, who were less
than 5 ft. 6 in. in height; and to arm and equip and train the
accepted was a task which required time and a vast readjustment of
industry. It was not assisted by a business community which took as
its early motto "business as usual," and was mainly alarmed by the
fear of unemployment. But the traditions of peace were potent in other
than Government circles, and history afforded no precedent for the
crisis, nor for the spirit in which it was met by the youth of the
Empire, who feared less for their lives than most of their elders did
for their profits.
The first source from which the regular forces could be recruited was
the Territorials. They had been formed before the war on the idea that
they were required merely for home defence, and no one had yet thought
of the equivocation that home defence included that of India, Egypt,
Belgium, and France, or offence in Mesopotamia and the Dardanelles.
There was no need for the Government to rely on that quibble, for the
Territorials volunteered almost in mass for foreign service, and the
difficulty was to impress Lord Kitchener with the value of a force
with which his absence in the East had made him unfamiliar. As it was,
some of the best of the regiments, like the London Scottish, put in an
appearance at Ypres, while numbers were sent to Egypt and India to
release for service in Europe the regular forces there. With them came
native Indian regiments, Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Bhopals, whose voluntary
service provided the most touching testimonial to its character that
the British Empire has ever received; for they did not govern
themselves, and it is no small thing to govern others in such a way as
to provoke loyalty unto death. No less moving was the response from
Dominions which were thought by the ill-informed to be straining at
the leash of Imperial domination. The Canadians, having the shortest
route, were the first to come, and on 16 October the advance guard
disembarked at Liverpool. They were followed by scores and then
hundreds of thousands from Australia and New Zealand, and finally from
South Africa, where for the moment the task of suppressing rebellion
and dealing with German South-West Africa kept them at more immediate
duties nearer home. They were all volunteers; for although Canada
adopted conscription in the last year of the war, Australia rejected
the proposal twice, and it was never made in South Africa; and the
splendid colonial troops which covered themselves with glory in the
war contained no conscripts among their numbers.
During the winter of 1914-15 Great Britain was a vast camp of men from
all quarters of the Empire training for that offensive in the spring
on which men's hopes were set. A saying attributed to Lord Kitchener
passed from mouth to mouth, to the effect that he did not know when
the war would end, but that it would begin in May. Hitherto our forces
engaged had been merely an advance guard of our manpower, and it was a
common anticipation that the Allied offensive would bring the war to a
successful conclusion by the end of 1915. With such hopes President
Poincaré cheered the French troops in their trenches at Christmas, and
in January a semi-official communiqué announced that the French had
broken the German offensive and could break the German defensive
whenever they chose. This pleasing illusion was maintained, not so
much by a censorship of the truth as by incapacity on the part of
those in authority to discern it, and by a natural tendency of the
wish to be father of the thought. German communiqués afforded some
means of correction, but they were universally disbelieved or
discounted as containing an amount of falsehood of which no ally could
be guilty, although, until the last few months of the war, they were
rather less misleading than our own. Nor was it only official news
that was delusive. "The Times," for instance, in January put the total
German "losses" down to date at two million and a quarter; and an
expert historian debited Germany with a "dead loss, perhaps, of little
less than three million by the beginning of April," whereas the
casualties barely reached half that figure, and of the casualties a
vast percentage consisted of slight wounds which did not prevent a
speedy return to the fighting-line. Medical science prolonged the war
by reducing disease and restoring the sick and wounded; and the
military statistician went as far astray in his prophecies of the
exhaustion of Germany's man-power as the economist in his predictions
of its bankruptcy and starvation by blockade.
Nevertheless the conviction that, whether we or the Germans attacked,
they had double our casualties, comforted the public during the war of
trenches; not merely were we holding our own while our reserves in
training were mounting to millions, but all the time we were thought
to be wearing down the enemy's strength, and his prudent economy in
the use of men and munitions was taken as proof of his poverty in
resources. His real work in those winter months was done behind the
lines in factory and in barracks, and its value was tested and
revealed in the coming campaign, which found the front in the West
almost precisely where it was left to the autumn. Here and there a
village or a line of trenches had been taken, but by different sides,
and the balance was hardly worth counting. A sand-dune was captured
near Nieuport, a trench in front of St. Eloi, and ten days' fighting
round La Bassée, which severely tried the Indian troops, nearly led to
the loss of Givenchy, but quite to the gain of a brickfield. Early in
December the French took the château of Vermelles and improved their
positions at Lihons and Quesnoy, but suffered in January a reverse
north of Vailly. In Champagne they captured Perthes in February and
made some progress in the Argonne; in the Woevre they nibbled at both
sides of the St. Mihiel wedge, while in Alsace they acquired Steinbach
but lost the Hartmannsweilerkopf. But against this balance of gain
must be set a more subtle but comprehensive loss. The contest was not
limited to the occasional bursts of fighting or to the steady
endurance required for holding the trenches amid the discomfort of mud
and water, bombs and shell-fire. It also took the form of incessant
competition in the perfection of surface and underground defences. The
Germans excelled in this art; but even if they had not, the silent
development of the strength of defence would have told in the
defenders' favour when the time came for attack; and it was an
advantage which told all along the line and more than atoned for the
local loss of a trench or position. The truth was that during a
seeming stalemate the Germans made ample provision for holding their
lines in the West while they prepared and dealt a staggering blow at
their formidable foe in the East.
A week before the Prussian Guard made its final charge at Ypres,
Belgians reported the moving of masses of German troops away to the
East. We have seen that the need was urgent, for Cossacks were already
across the Silesian frontier, and Hindenburg required all the help he
could get for his counter-offensive. He was planning an attack from
Thorn up the Vistula primarily to strike the right flank of the
Russian advance through Poland on Silesia and Cracow, and secondly to
menace Warsaw. The command was entrusted to Mackensen, while Ruszky
withstood the Germans with his right near Plock on the Vistula, his
centre behind the Bzura, and his left stretching out towards Lodz. The
Germans attacked all along the line on 18 November, but Ruszky's left
seemed to afford the easiest prey; it had no natural line of defence,
and Hindenburg's devastation during his retreat in October made the
arrival of reinforcements from Ivanov farther south unlikely.
Nevertheless Mackensen's most impetuous drive was against Ruszky's
centre across the causeway at Piontek; it promised a dramatic success,
and nearly ended in resounding disaster. The Russian centre was broken
and the left thrust back upon Lodz, where it was attacked on three
sides and seemed doomed to destruction. But the wedge was not
sufficiently wide; it merely created a pocket in the Russian line. The
sides held fast and Ruszky began to close the mouth. For three days,
24-26 November, the Germans fought desperately to get out, and at
length the remnant succeeded, owing mainly to the lateness of
reinforcements sent by Rennenkampf at Ruszky's request. Troops,
however, were rapidly being rushed up to Mackensen's help, and on 6
December the Russian left withdrew from Lodz, the industrial capital
of Poland with half a million inhabitants. The advantage of the
retirement was to straighten the Russian line in face of the
determined effort which Hindenburg was bent on making to secure Warsaw
as a Christmas present for the Kaiser (see Map, p. 146).
The line selected for defence ran almost due north to south from the
Vistula up the Bzura and its tributary the Rawka to Rawa and thence
across the Pilitza to Opocznow. The territory abandoned was well worth
the security gained on this line, and for three weeks the Germans
stormed against it in vain. A flank attack from the north of the
Vistula was driven back by the Russians at Mlawa, and no better
success attended the German frontal onslaughts at Sochaczew, where the
main road to Warsaw crosses the Bzura, and at Bolimow, where another
crosses the Rawka. The Germans spent their Christmas in the trenches
instead of in the Polish capital, thirty-five miles away. Somewhat
better fortune was experienced by the Hungarian offensive against the
Russians in Galicia, which was part of Hindenburg's plan. Dmitrieff
was almost in the suburbs of Cracow at the beginning of December, but
his left was then threatened by the Hungarian seizure of the Dukla
pass, and he had to retreat to the line of the Dunajec and the Nida
with his flank drawn back to Krosno and Jaslo. Presently the
Hungarians threatened also the Lupkow and Uszok passes farther east;
but reinforcements arrived, Brussilov closed the passes, and
Dmitrieff's left swung forward again. It did not, however, advance
beyond the Biala, and the Russians spent their Christmas as far from
Cracow as the Germans did theirs from Warsaw.
Winter, however, brought less respite from war on the frozen plains of
Poland than on the sodden soil of Flanders. The first and second
attacks upon Warsaw were followed by a third in January; there was a
winter battle by the Masurian lakes in February, and a fierce struggle
along the Niemen in March; and the Russian offensive across the
Carpathians was only stopped by the German spring campaign. The
Russians, indeed, were doomed to bear the brunt of the war in 1915, at
first with success and afterwards in adversity; for the Germans had
reversed the strategy with which they had begun the war. Then they had
relied on the defensive in the East while they gathered up all their
strength for the crushing of France. That blow having failed, they
were now preparing to drive Russia out of the war, while they trusted
to their line in the West to hold against any efforts to break it. The
change of plan was probably a mistake, though it brought such success
at the moment that volatile critics in England were persuaded that the
original war on the West had been merely a blind for real designs in
the East. At any rate, in the West we had cause to be thankful that
the German attacks were but local, and that the serious offensive
against Verdun did not come until 1916, when we were prepared to
counter it on the Somme.
Meanwhile there was some excuse for the German choice. There was
safety enough for the moment in France and Flanders, and events
justified Germany's confidence that no Entente attack in 1915 could
seriously disturb the German lines. No such grounds for complacence
existed on her Eastern frontiers. East Prussia was not yet free, and
graver danger threatened the Hungarian ally on which the Prussian
relied only less than he did on himself. Galicia was in Russian hands,
and Russian man-power was thought to be inexhaustible. The menace on
both the Carpathian and the Prussian flanks could only be properly met
by destroying the central position in Poland, and persistence in the
attacks on Warsaw was essential to German strategy in the East. The
frontal attack at the end of January which failed for the third time
was followed by a flanking attack on the Niemen which also failed, and
then by a drive on the southern flank in Galicia which turned the
whole Russian front of 900 miles, led to a wholesale retreat, and
precipitated the greatest set-back the Allies suffered in the war.
Germany failed against the democracies of the West, she succeeded
against a government more autocratic than her own.
During January the Russian centre in front of Warsaw had been weakened
for the sake of movements against the enemy's extreme flanks, which
were undertaken in response to requests from the Western Powers in
order to divert German reinforcements from France and Flanders. There
was a fresh advance towards the Masurian lakes in East Prussia, and
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