A Campaign of Errors.
So the Great War had ended.
In fifteen months the greatest tragedy the world had ever known came and
passed. One could now calmly review the awful affair with an unbiassed
mind. When one studied events during the war, there was always a
prejudice against the enemy. His virtues were only "accidents" or
strokes of luck. Our successes were always "brilliant affairs."
Yet the Great War was a campaign of blunders.
Victor Hugo said: "Alexander blundered in India, Caesar blundered in
Africa, Napoleon blundered in Russia."
After all, every book of war is a catalogue of errors, and the errors in
a campaign, though unrealised at the time by those who make them, became
palpable after the deed is done, and increase in notoriety as time
passes.
British, French and German Generals blundered through the Great War.
Only one nation came out of that awful clash of arms without criticism.
It was Belgium.
The war opened with two mistakes on the part of Germany.
The first and greatest, as it proved now she was defeated, was the
mistake of entering on a campaign that ended in her disaster.
Germany's second mistake was that of using heavy assaulting columns to
charge the Liege forts, with the resultant horrible carnage. It was the
old military rule of thumb. It went out at Liege, and the Mars of old,
with his blood-dripping sword, had to stand aside as Modern Science
stepped out of the Krupp factory with the great 42 centimeter gun. It
took thirty horses to drag the first of these monsters out of that nest
of the Prussian war eagle, and soldiers had to give way for that great
weapon as it was drawn into place, accompanied by its retinue of
mechanics and engineers, who set it up, armed, and fired it.
The monster required a concrete base; and concrete took 14 days to
harden, but the Krupp experts brought a new concrete that hardened in 24
hours, and, within a week from leaving its home, the great Krupp demon
began to batter a road through Liege.
France made the third blunder of the war as Belgium bravely held the
gate at Liege and awaited aid from France and England.
France, mistaking the main line of the German advance, massed the main
army of her forces along the upper Meuse from Belfort, two hundred miles
away from the right position.
Britain's first blunder was in not being prepared to immediately help
Belgium. So the Krupp monsters smashed that Belgian gate and the German
hordes swept towards Paris.
Britain somewhat retrieved her delay by quickly rushing to block the
triumphant tide of Germany. And two British army corps saved the war by
holding up five of Germany's best armies at Mons; holding them whilst
they waited for the French to move up from their first mistakenly-held
position; till, finding that aid not forthcoming, they fought back to
the Marne.
Germany now blundered once again. Its aerial scouts failed to see a
great French army coming at its right flank; failed to note it, because
it came so swiftly out from behind Paris. It drove the German right
towards its centre, past the British forces, which, catching the Germans
on their flank, smashed them back to the readied trenches on the Aisne
Ridge.
Then the Germans came round the north of Belgium, and Britain blundered
again in sending a force of marines and reserves to hold Antwerp. They
had to ignominiously retire as they found the country too flat for
offensive manoeuvring, and they had arrived too late to do the
necessary extensive trenching which really meant the making of
artificial land contours. That British force, however, helped to cover
the retreat of the Belgian army.
Germany's final mistake was holding their position on the ridge of the
Aisne. It could not have retreated without fearful loss as that ridge
was the last conformation of any military value in the practically flat
country between the Aisne and Liege.
After the war, experts maintained that it would, for many reasons, have
been better strategy for Germany not to have crossed the Meuse in the
first place.
The Germans were fired with the false idea that the capture of Paris
meant the end of French aggression.
They had forgotten the lesson they learnt in 1870, when the capture of
Paris did not end that campaign. They had forgotten the lessons of the
Boer War, that the capture of the South African capitals did not
terminate that long struggle.
They had their fixed plan. It had been prepared many years before and
been put away till required, though military strategy had moved along in
the meantime. At the first blast of war they blindly threw themselves
across Belgium with their battle cry of 34 years before: "A Paris."
They could have occupied the country to the east of the Meuse, fortified
the long length of high cliffs along its right bank, and sat there like
a rock, letting the Allies smash themselves against it, whilst vast
armies could have been free to push the Russians back to St. Petersburg,
obtain supplies from Russia and so neutralise any British blockade.
Furthermore, having the fight nearer German soil would have given the
German people a better idea of the actual state of the war and helped to
stifle any lack of enthusiasm on the part of German Socialists which,
later on, was to develop into serious trouble.
It was a war of surprises.
Science had laid its new-won gifts at the feet of Mars.
It brought as new factors into human warfare, wireless telegraphy,
aeronautics and motor traction.
Wireless telegraphy, one of the greatest gifts to mankind in the saving
of human life at sea, and in the sending of messages of peace, utterly
failed during the stress of human strife.
It seemed that just as clashing human passions in war stultified all
thoughts of brotherly love and goodwill, so the ether waves from
military wireless plants clashed in the air and destroyed all
intelligence in messages.
In aeronautics, the swift aeroplane asserted its superiority over the
balloon, and where movements were in open country as between Liege and
the Aisne, it furnished a new and wonderful aid for reconnaissance.
It failed when the movements took place beneath cover, as in the
fighting in the thickly wooded country to the south of Compeigne; again,
when the French army moved out under cover of the houses of Paris and
environs before the battle of Marne; and finally when, in the conclusive
phases of the war the Allies moved north beneath the screen of the
forests of the Argonne and the Ardennes.
Motor traction counted most in the new aids of science. It brought into
the war the most vital factor of all human element--speed.
The great smash on the German right at the Marne, which gave the first
check to the German advance, was only possible because the French
General, Gallieni, moved 70,000 soldiers out of Paris in taxicabs and
other motor vehicles, and in six hours had them in action before even
the German aerial reconnaissance knew about it.
The motor brought speed into the fighting in running the cheering
soldiers to the front, and with auto hospitals brought the sorry wounded
as speedily back again.
It was a triumph for the machine, and yet the machine, in the end, gave
place to the hand to hand death grip of primitive man.
As Kipling wrote:--
"What I ha' seen since ocean steam began
Leaves me no doot for the machine; what, what about the man?"
The Great War answered that question.
There was a doubt about the man--he dropped off the veneer of the human
and became the animal once again.
When foe came face to face with foe the world dropped back ten thousand
years.
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