No one in these days would seek to minimise the untold advantages which
sea power confers upon those who wield it.
But to say that England, supreme at sea, could conquer Germany while the
latter was undefeated on land would be to stretch the doctrine of sea
power very far beyond what is actually within the bounds of possibility.
Very few people to-day hold the doctrines of sea power which were
current coin only a few months ago. That without sea power Germany
could win a decisive victory over England is admittedly impossible.
Without sea power greater than our own she can neither destroy our trade
nor attempt an invasion of England with any prospect of success. In the
presence of the British Fleet any attempt to land on these shores
sufficient forces to act with decisive effect would be impossible. For
such an undertaking Germany must secure command of the narrow seas, even
though it might be for only a few days or even a few hours.
Under existing conditions her sole chance of doing this would be to
decoy our Fleet away from our home waters by a desperate dash of her own
squadrons, trusting to be able to carry out a surprise landing on our
shores in the interval--necessarily brief--in which she could hope to
operate undisturbed. That menace, however, is one to which the chiefs
of our Navy are fully awake, and it is indeed a forlorn hope.
Imagine Germany successful on land. Could we defeat her through our
undisputed command of the sea? Personally I do not believe we could.
In all probability she could under such circumstances obtain the
supplies which would render her self-supporting, while at the same time
doing a great trade with neutral nations or with her former antagonists
over the land routes which we could not command.
It is for this reason that the situation calls for the exercise of
military power on the part of Britain on a scale never dreamed of in
previous years.
We may, I think, take it for granted that without the military as well
as the naval assistance of Great Britain our Allies would have very
little prospect of bringing the War to a successful conclusion. It is
the military power of England, growing gradually day by day, which in
the end must turn the scale if the scale is to be turned. It is true we
have rendered to our Allies very much more than the measure of support
which we promised them when we joined them to combat the peril which
threatened all in common. We have rendered the seas safe; we have
already given assistance on land perhaps far beyond anything they either
expected or had the right to ask. Naturally, we make no special virtue
of this; the fight is one of self-preservation for ourselves just as it
is for France, Russia, and Italy. We all share a common peril; all of
us in common owe to the others the fullest mutual co-operation and
effort.
And upon us, just as much as upon our Allies, rests the duty of
developing our fighting efficiency to the highest pitch of which the
Empire is capable. Nothing less than this will be sufficient to remove
for all time the menace by which civilisation is faced. Those who say
that because Britain has gone beyond what she undertook to do it cannot
be expected that she should do more are nothing less than traitors to
the common cause. We cannot bargain with our destiny. And, assuredly,
if we fail to measure the gravity of the situation, if we fail to put
forth the whole energies of our people, destiny will take a terrible
revenge. Can it be, with the awful lessons of Belgium and Serbia before
our eyes, that this nation will be satisfied with anything less than the
maximum of effort in the prosecution of the War?
Cost what it may, the final overthrow of Germany must be effected _on
land_, and in the execution of that inflexible purpose Britain, whether
she likes it or not, must play a leading part. We have been for
centuries a great naval Power; the day has dawned when we must become a
great military Power as well. We have, indeed, already become so in
part. We have raised armies on a scale which, before the War, neither
our friends nor our enemies would have thought possible. Without unduly
flattering ourselves, we may claim to have done much; we shall yet do
more and more until the power of Prussia is finally broken. It is not
enough that we should content ourselves, as some suggest, with supplying
money and munitions to our Allies.
We must take the field as a nation fighting for everything which makes
life worth living. To those who say that we cannot afford to raise
larger armies than we have already raised, I would reply that if
necessary the last of Britain's savings, the whole strength of her
manhood, must be flung into the melting-pot of war. And I am happy to
think that at length the nation as a whole is showing a growing
realisation of this undoubted fact. We are fast getting over our
preliminary troubles (which have lasted far too long); the entire nation
is settling down in grim and deadly earnest to make an end once and for
all of the German pretensions. "Tear-'em is a good dog, but Holdfast is
better," says the old saw, and we are to-day not far from the time when,
not for the first time in the world's history, the silent, deadly,
dogged determination of the British race will be a fact with which the
entire world will have to reckon. We are out to fight this War to a
finish, and I am glad to think the nation as a whole has at last
awakened to the grim facts of the situation.
Those who are suggesting that the British Navy can by any means give the
death-blow to German aim at world-domination are, I am convinced, doing
the nation ill service. Their argument is that because we are a naval
Power we should be content with the exercise of our naval strength, and
should not venture to embark on military operations on a scale for which
our previous experience has not tended to fit us. Counsels of this
kind, however well intended, are a profound--they might well be a
fatal--mistake. They tend to deaden the brain and paralyse the arm of
the Executive; they add to the terrible perils by which we are already
surrounded. More than this, they tend greatly to prolong the conflict
and add immeasurably to the terrible toll of life and treasure which the
War is extorting from all the nations who have the misfortune to be
engaged in it. Let us put aside once and for all the comfortable theory
that as we have already done more than was expected of us there is no
need for further exertions.
There is a crying need for all that we can do, for more, indeed, than we
can hope to do.
To be sparing of effort in war is to be guilty of the greatest possible
folly. Moderation in war, as Lord Fisher is credited with saying, is
imbecility; and it is infinitely cheaper in the long run to do a thing
well than to half do it and, probably, have all the work to do over
again under still more difficult circumstances, even if it can be done
at all. A glance at the record of the Dardanelles Expedition will show
what I mean.
And unless in this hour of supreme trial Britain is true to herself and
to the great cause for which she and her Allies have unsheathed the
sword, if she is content with less than the utmost effort of which she
is capable, the historian of the future, looking backward across the
centuries, will be able to place his finger unerringly upon the day and
hour of which it will be possible to say, "Here the decline of the
British Empire began." Happily, indeed, for ourselves and civilisation
at large the awakening spirit of our people is the best possible
guarantee against any such disaster.
As I said in my opening chapter, our mythical visitor from another
planet, judging the progress of the War by the map only, might well be
excused if he came to the conclusion that the Germans had already won so
far as the land campaign was concerned. Now this is precisely the
mental position of the German people to-day. They have been told, day
by day and month by month, that Germany is everywhere victorious, and,
speaking generally, they believe it. Of course, a few of the more
thoughtful and better informed are beginning to wonder why, if the
constant tales of victory are true, they seem to be no nearer to the
sight of peace. But the German Government has to deal not with the
well-informed few, but with the ill-informed many.
So long as the mass of the people are prepared to believe what they are
told, they will go on supplying the Government with the means of war,
and, after all, that is no bad frame of mind for the conduct of a great
struggle.
No doubt the process of disillusionment, when it comes, will be all the
more violent and painful, but at present we have to face the fact that a
very large proportion of the German people believe that they are
winning. Up to recently they have shown that they are willing to put up
with the shortage and distress which are growing in Germany, looking
upon them as part of the price of victory. But, as I shall show later,
even this comfortable belief is beginning to break down before the stern
logic of facts, and, as a result, chinks and cracks are appearing even
in the iron wall of German patience and perseverance. That those chinks
and cracks will widen as time goes on is certain; and when the wall
gives way, as it assuredly will, we shall see a catastrophe which will
probably sweep away the German organisation as it exists to-day.
Now let us consider for a moment the grounds upon which Germany assumes
she has won the War. She regards the whole field of the War on land as
absolutely dominated by the German arms. German armies have occupied
practically the whole of Belgium, they have pushed their way far into
France, they have occupied the whole of Poland and a considerable slice
of Russia proper, they have overrun and devastated Serbia and
Montenegro, have won control of the Balkans, and have opened up an
uninterrupted way to Constantinople and the East. But--and it is a very
big "but" indeed--their one complete military success in the real sense
of the word has been the destruction of the fighting power of
Montenegro, the smallest and the weakest of their opponents! Not even
Serbia, properly speaking, has been destroyed as a fighting force, for
at least half of the splendid Serbian Army is intact, and will take the
field again as soon as it has rested and secured fresh equipment.
As regards Germany's more powerful opponents, the only ones which count
so far as the final decision of the War is concerned, they stand to-day
not merely with their fighting efficiency unimpaired, but, taken as a
whole, actually stronger than they were a year ago. The huge armies
which Britain is raising have not yet even taken the field; France is
certainly no more weakened relatively than is Germany herself; Russia,
recovering amazingly from her misfortunes, will soon be ready to strike
new and harder blows; Italy is steadily, if slowly, pushing forward to
the heart of her hereditary enemy. Moreover, all are absolutely united
and determined in the prosecution of the War.
Yet in the face of these indisputable facts the Germans appear to be
genuinely surprised that the Allies are not ready and willing to accept
the preposterous "peace terms" which, in their arrogance, they have been
good enough to put forward, through the usual "unofficial" channels, for
acceptance. It is a surprise to them that the Allies are not ready to
confess that they are vanquished. The fact is, of course, that they are
not vanquished or anything like it. They mean to go on, as Mr Asquith
has said, until the military power of Prussia, the _fons et origo_ of
the whole bloody struggle, is finally and completely destroyed. And
they have the means and the will to do it. The fact that Germany has
forced her way into so large an amount of the Allied territory is
merely, in the eyes of the Allies, another reason why they should
continue to fight, and a good reason why they should fight with growing
hopes of ultimate success.
Longer lines necessarily mean thinner lines, for the simple reason that
Germany has reused her maximum of man-power, while the Allies have still
large reserves as yet untouched.
There we have the bedrock fact of the War, and no amount of boasting and
bragging of German "victories" will alter it. It signifies little or
nothing that Germany shall have overrun the Balkans so long as she is
open to a smashing blow in the West, which is, and must ever be to the
end, the real heart of the War. It is in France and Flanders that the
final blow must come, and it will profit Germany nothing to hold
Constantinople while the Allies are thundering at the crossing of the
Rhine.
If Germany had succeeded in her ambitious design to capture Paris or
London or Petrograd, she might have reasonable excuse for some of the
boasting which has filled the columns of her Press; she would have still
more excuse if she had succeeded in destroying the armed forces of
Britain or of France or of Russia. But she has done none of these
things. Britain, France, Russia, and Italy are not merely still full of
fight, they are growing stronger while she is growing weaker. They are
certainly not weakening as much as she is herself in the moral sense and
in the capacity and determination to endure to the end. And while I am
no believer in the theory that a war can be won by sitting down and
waiting for exhaustion to defeat the enemy, there can be no doubt of the
fact that if the War resolves itself into a contest of endurance the
Allies are at least as well equipped as the Germans to see this thing
through to the end.
We must never lose sight of the fact that the German thrust to the East
is merely an expression of her uncomfortable consciousness that it is
her last chance of breaking the blockade by land as well as by sea which
is exercising such a strangling effect upon her. Germany, as a fact, is
in the position of a beleaguered garrison. Unless she can break the
ring around her she must inevitably perish. If we bear this fact in
mind, we shall be in a better position to appreciate at its real value
the bearing of the German successes in the direction of Constantinople,
and of her real motives in that adventure. So far Germany is closely
blockaded on three fronts--by the French and British, by the Italians,
and by the Russians. She can have no reasonable hope that she will be
able to break the blockade in either of these directions; her efforts
have already brought her disastrous failures and enormous losses. By
her success in the Balkans she has opened, for what they are worth,
fresh sources of supplies; she has secured, again for what it is worth,
the adhesion of Bulgaria; she has secured the neutrality of Greece, and,
so far, of Rumania. But she is not yet safe even here. Salonica
menaces her communications eastwards; and should the Allies take the
offensive from this base, we ought to see the last of Germany's
communications with the outer world, except through the neutral
countries, finally closed. Then, and then only, will the full influence
of the sea power of the Allies begin to make itself felt with decisive
results.
The plain fact is that those who have decried the supposed inactivity of
the British Fleet have failed to take into consideration the fact that
the German successes on land have, to some extent, neutralised British
successes afloat. Germany had every reason to hope that our failure in
the Gallipoli Peninsula would enable her to call upon the services of
some half a million Turks and to secure fresh sources of supplies of
food and raw material, not very great, perhaps, but still helpful; and
in Serbia she has won what is of real value, a fresh supply of copper.
If she could push through a really serviceable system of communication
with Bagdad and the Persian Gulf, she would gain still more solid
advantages, including, it might be, control of the British oil supplies
in Persia. But this hope has been utterly smashed by the great Russian
victory at Erzerum. I do not believe the German aims in these
directions were immediate perils, but the Germans, as we know to our
cost, take long views in matters of war, and the better we understand
their aims the better will be our chance of countering them. And in
this case a full understanding of what Germany is aiming at provides us
with a specially urgent reason for decisive action at the point where
Germany can be hit the hardest. This is unquestionably on the West
front.
The importance of closing at the earliest possible moment the gap in the
blockade--the direct road from Berlin to Constantinople and Egypt and
the East--is supreme, for Germany may very veil secure, if only for a
time, complete control of Turkey. The effect of our sea power is
gravely weakened if Germany is able to draw the supplies of men and
materials she needs through the Balkan countries. We have to
re-establish the barrier on the Eastern road with as little delay as
possible, remembering that the Germans may be trusted to make the utmost
of what must seem to our foes to be nothing less than a heaven-sent
opportunity. We know that already they have very completely looted
Serbia of everything that could be of the slightest use to them, and we
can be fairly confident that the process will be continued in Turkey and
Bulgaria.
It is for this reason that the Balkan area suddenly assumed such
importance in the War. So long as Germany keeps open the road to the
East, so long is she obtaining reinforcements in men and supplies which
enable her to prolong the War.
There are a variety of plans open to us for the purpose of countering
the latest German thrust for the open. But it must be remembered that
the majority of these partake too much of the nature of the "small
packet" to be sound from a military and strategic point of view. Most
of our troubles in the present War have sprung from a diffusion of
effort which has led us to dissipate our strength in a variety of local
attacks which have missed the point at which a decisive blow could be
dealt.
We have over and over again been too weak at the critical point. That
is a danger which I trust will be guarded against in the future by the
improved arrangements that have been made during the past few months for
a better co-ordination of the joint plans of the Allies. Joint
simultaneous action by all the Allies, each on his own front, is one of
the cardinal necessities for bringing the War to a successful
conclusion; and unless this is attained we shall always be faced with
the danger that Germany, having the advantage of operating on interior
lines, will be able, thanks to the mobility afforded her by her
magnificent system of railways, to meet and check, if not to defeat, her
enemies in detail.
It is an unhappy fact that so far there has been a lamentable lack of
co-ordination between the Allies. For some reason or another we have
never been able to bring our preparations to fruition at the same
moment. Valuable steps have been taken of late, however, to bring about
a better co-ordination of the Allies' plans, and there is therefore
reason to hope that in the coming great struggle we shall see greater
unity of action as well as more unity of control and direction.
But whatever may be the success of our efforts in this direction I have
not the least doubt that the West front will remain the decisive theatre
of the War. If the Germans are to be beaten, they will be beaten in the
West; if we can score a great success there, we can with every
confidence leave the Balkan imbroglio and the menace to Egypt and the
East to settle itself. A strong threat in the direction of the Rhine
would bring the German armies westward as fast as express trains could
carry them, would automatically open up the road across the Balkans from
Salonica, and would at once enormously facilitate the Russian recovery
of lost territory and an invasion of Germany from the East.
Moreover, it would be a blow in the decisive direction, for, after all--
and it cannot be too often repeated--it is on the Western front that the
final victory will be won.
Now there can be no doubt that the Germans themselves are fully
conscious of this fact, and that they are taking the speediest measures
to guard against the peril of a great attack by the Allies in the course
of the coming months. The Budapest correspondent of the _Morning Post_
has given us invaluable information upon this point. Great developments
are expected in Austro-German military circles in the early spring, and
preparations are being made to meet a tremendous onslaught by the Allies
on three or four fronts. One of the best informed military writers in
Hungary, Monsieur Tibor Bakos, who is known to have exceptional sources
of information, has stated that in the early spring the Allied Powers
have decided to embark upon an offensive of unparalleled magnitude.
This is the direct result of the steps that have been taken to establish
a common military and diplomatic leadership and control among the
Allies. They know well in Vienna and Berlin that at a given moment the
iron ring round the Central Empires will suddenly tighten at every
point.
"All the political leaders and generals of the Allies," says the writer,
"are absolutely certain of a great and decisive victory, and their
optimism as regards the final issue of the War is even more marked than
it was in 1914, when the War began, and in the spring of 1915, when
Italy joined the Entente."
Now, assuming that a joint scheme of attack has been decided upon, where
will these attacks be delivered? That, of course, is the secret of our
military leaders; but, within certain lines, there is ground for a
reasonable forecast. And first and foremost comes the battle-ground in
the West. In this direction Champagne and Artois seem clearly marked
out. The Russians may be expected to move on both wings of their long
lines--in the south with the idea of joining hands with the French and
British across the Balkans and of convincing Rumania, and in the north
to complete a turning movement which shall drive back the German centre.
On the Italian front the line of the Isonzo seems to be indicated.
As supplementary but still important movements we shall probably see
shrewd blows struck across Macedonia and at Turkey in the Caucasus, and
perhaps elsewhere. Indeed, the blow at Erzerum has come since these
lines were penned.
On the other hand, we have to remember that the Germans may anticipate
our blows at any or all of these points. What are the prospects of
success for us or for our enemies?
Now we are assured by those who ought to know that the strength of the
Allies in men and munitions is greater than that of the enemy. We are
assured that our supplies of shells are now fully adequate, and it is a
remarkable fact that a writer in a leading American magazine has stated
recently that we are no longer ordering shells from the United States.
We know that we and the French have vast supplies of guns. Can we, with
all these advantages, break decisively the German lines in the West,
which the enemy professes to regard as impregnable?
I believe we can, and I believe it is in the West that the real and most
deadly blow will come. No doubt it will be coupled with strong action
elsewhere, but I have seen and heard nothing to shake my conviction that
here must be the real settlement of the War. Given ample supplies of
men and guns and ammunition, I believe we have commanders who are
capable of driving the enemy out of his strong entrenchments from the
North Sea to the Swiss frontier, who are capable of forcing the crossing
of the Rhine and carrying the War into the enemy's territory. And we
must always remember that Germany is peculiarly sensitive to invasion.
We know something of the panic that was caused by the Russian advance
into East Prussia in the early days of the War. And since then the
Germans have begun to fear that in the event of invasion the measure
that they have meted out to those they had in their power will in turn
be meted out to themselves. They have, in fact, a bad conscience, and
they fear the vengeance of their foes.
In this, as in all other wars, one is faced with the fact that the
written word of to-day may be falsified by the events of to-morrow, but
as I write there is every indication that we are on the eve of a renewal
of the great struggle which shall go far to decide on the Western front
the issue of the War. Already we hear the mutterings which prelude the
breaking of the storm. We hear of German guns and reinforcements
hurrying westward, we know that our own commanders are not idle, we know
that the "deadlock" is more apparent than real, and that in war, as in
everything else, nothing ever really stands still. Every day that
passes helps us or our enemies. We cannot say that the coming struggle
will give us all we seek; we know that in any event we have many days of
trial and grievous loss before us. But we have good grounds for hope.
Our people are united and determined to an extent to which we have
hitherto been strangers.
We know that everything has been done to fit our troops to play their
great part in what may well be the final act of Armageddon. We know
they are resolute and of good courage. And if the coming great battle
of the West, of which to-day we hear and see the signs, prove, as it
well may, the most terrible conflict which this old earth has ever
witnessed, we can look forward with calm confidence to the outcome, for
we believe that Britain and France, united and determined, confident in
the justice of their cause, will be far more than a match for any effort
our enemies can make either in offence or defence. If we can secure
united and simultaneous action by all the Allies, it is my firm belief
that before the year is out we shall have set our advancing feet on the
road which leads to Berlin and victory.