I
During the two years that followed the battles of the Somme I recorded
in my daily despatches, republished in book form (“The Struggle in
Flanders” and “The Way to Victory”), the narrative of that continuous
conflict in which the British forces on the western front were at
death-grips with the German monster where now one side and then the
other heaved themselves upon their adversary and struggled for the
knock-out blow, until at last, after staggering losses on both sides,
the enemy was broken to bits in the last combined attack by British,
Belgian, French, and American armies. There is no need for me to retell
all that history in detail, and I am glad to know that there is nothing
I need alter in the record of events which I wrote as they happened,
because they have not been falsified by any new evidence; and those
detailed descriptions of mine stand true in fact and in the emotion
of the hours that passed, while masses of men were slaughtered in the
fields of Armageddon.
But now, looking back upon those last two years of the war as an
eye-witness of many tragic and heroic things, I see the frightful drama
of them as a whole and as one act was related to another, and as the
plot which seemed so tangled and confused, led by inevitable stages, not
under the control of any field-marshal or chief of staff, to the climax
in which empires crashed and exhausted nations looked round upon the
ruin which followed defeat and victory. I see also, as in one picture,
the colossal scale of that human struggle in that Armageddon of our
civilization, which at the time one reckoned only by each day's success
or failure, each day's slaughter on that side or the other. One may add
up the whole sum according to the bookkeeping of Fate, by double-entry,
credit and debit, profit and loss. One may set our attacks in the
battles of Flanders against the strength of the German defense, and say
our losses of three to one (as Ludendorff reckons them, and as many of
us guessed) were in our favor, because we could afford the difference
of exchange and the enemy could not put so many human counters into the
pool for the final “kitty” in this gamble with life and death. One may
balance the German offensive in March of '18 with the weight that was
piling up against them by the entry of the Americans. One may also see
now, very clearly, the paramount importance of the human factor in this
arithmetic of war, the morale of men being of greater influence than
generalship, though dependent on it, the spirit of peoples being as
vital to success as the mechanical efficiency of the war-machine; and
above all, one is now able to observe how each side blundered on in a
blind, desperate way, sacrificing masses of human life without a clear
vision of the consequences, until at last one side blundered more than
another and was lost. It will be impossible to pretend in history that
our High Command, or any other, foresaw the thread of plot as it was
unraveled to the end, and so arranged its plan that events happened
according to design. The events of March, 1918, were not foreseen nor
prevented by French or British. The ability of our generals was not
imaginative nor inventive, but limited to the piling up of men and
munitions, always more men and more munitions, against positions of
enormous strength and overcoming obstacles by sheer weight of flesh and
blood and high explosives. They were not cunning so far as I could
see, nor in the judgment of the men under their command, but simple and
straightforward gentlemen who said “once more unto the breach,” and sent
up new battering-rams by brigades and divisions. There was no evidence
that I could find of high directing brains choosing the weakest spot
in the enemy's armor and piercing it with a sharp sword, or avoiding a
direct assault against the enemy's most formidable positions and leaping
upon him from some unguarded way. Perhaps that was impossible in the
conditions of modern warfare and the limitations of the British front
until the arrival of the tanks, which, for a long time, were wasted in
the impassable bogs of Flanders, where their steel skeletons still lie
rusting as a proof of heroic efforts vainly used. Possible or not, and
rare genius alone could prove it one way or another, it appeared to the
onlooker, as well as to the soldier who carried out commands that our
method of warfare was to search the map for a place which was strongest
in the enemy's lines, most difficult to attack, most powerfully
defended, and then after due advertisement, not to take an unfair
advantage of the enemy, to launch the assault. That had always been the
English way and that was our way in many battles of the great war, which
were won (unless they were lost) by the sheer valor of men who at great
cost smashed their way through all obstructions.
The Germans, on the whole, showed more original genius in military
science, varying their methods of attack and defense according to
circumstances, building trenches and dugouts which we never equaled;
inventing the concrete blockhouse or “pill-box” for a forward defensive
zone thinly held in advance of the main battle zone, in order to lessen
their slaughter under the weight of our gun-fire (it cost us dearly for
a time); scattering their men in organized shell-craters in order to
distract our barrage fire; using the “elastic system of defense” with
frightful success against Nivelle's attack in the Champagne; creating
the system of assault of “infiltration” which broke the Italian lines at
Caporetto in 1917 and ours and the French in 1918. Against all that we
may set only our tanks, which in the end led the way to victory, but the
German High Command blundered atrociously in all the larger calculations
of war, so that they brought about the doom of their empire by a series
of acts which would seem deliberate if we had not known that they were
merely blind. With a folly that still seems incredible, they took the
risk of adding the greatest power in the world--in numbers of men and
in potential energy--to their list of enemies at a time when their own
man-power was on the wane. With deliberate arrogance they flouted
the United States and forced her to declare war. Their temptation,
of course, was great. The British naval blockade was causing severe
suffering by food shortage to the German people and denying them access
to raw material which they needed for the machinery of war.
The submarine campaign, ruthlessly carried out, would and did inflict
immense damage upon British and Allied shipping, and was a deadly menace
to England. But German calculations were utterly wrong, as Ludendorff in
his Memoirs now admits, in estimating the amount of time needed to break
her bonds by submarine warfare before America could send over
great armies to Europe. The German war lords were wrong again in
underestimating the defensive and offensive success of the British
navy and mercantile marine against submarine activities. By those
miscalculations they lost the war in the long run, and by other errors
they made their loss more certain.
One mistake they made was their utter callousness regarding the
psychology and temper of their soldiers and civilian population. They
put a greater strain upon them than human nature could bear, and by
driving their fighting-men into one shambles after another, while they
doped their people with false promises which were never fulfilled, they
sowed the seeds of revolt and despair which finally launched them into
gulfs of ruin. I have read nothing more horrible than the cold-blooded
cruelty of Ludendorff's Memoirs, in which, without any attempt at
self-excuse, he reveals himself as using the lives of millions of men
upon a gambling chance of victory with the hazards weighted against him,
as he admits. Writing of January, 1917, he says: “A collapse on the
part of Russia was by no means to be contemplated and was, indeed, not
reckoned upon by any one... Failing the U-boat campaign we reckoned
with the collapse of the Quadruple Alliance during 1917.” Yet with that
enormous risk visible ahead, Ludendorff continued to play the grand jeu,
the great game, and did not advise any surrender of imperial ambitions
in order to obtain a peace for his people, and was furious with the
Majority party in the Reichstag for preparing a peace resolution. The
collapse of Russia inspired him with new hopes of victory in the
west, and again he prepared to sacrifice masses of men in the
slaughter-fields. But he blundered again, and this time fatally. His
time-table was out of gear. The U--boat war had failed. American manhood
was pouring into France, and German soldiers on the Russian front had
been infected with ideas most dangerous to German discipline and the
“will to win.” At the end, as at the beginning, the German war lords
failed to understand the psychology of human nature as they had failed
to understand the spirit of France, of Belgium, of Great Britain, and
of America. One of the most important admissions in history is made by
Ludendorff when he writes:
“Looking back, I say our decline began clearly with the outbreak of the
revolution in Russia. On the one side the government was dominated
by the fear that the infection would spread, and on the other by the
feeling of their helplessness to instil fresh strength into the masses
of the people and to strengthen their warlike ardor, waning as it was
through a combination of innumerable circumstances.”
So the web of fate was spun, and men who thought they were directing
the destiny of the world were merely caught in those woven threads like
puppets tied to strings and made to dance. It was the old Dance of Death
which has happened before in the folly of mankind.