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
far to the south Alexeiev captured a Carpathian pass at Kirlibaba.
Mackensen took advantage of this dispersion to organize a strenuous
attack on the Russian lines near the confluence of the Bzura and the
Rawka. It began on the night of 1 February, and the Russians were on
the 2nd and 3rd pressed back from their position on the heights at
Borzymow and Gumin. But two railways from Warsaw ran north and south
of the threatened front, and reinforcements brought up along them
stopped the German advance. It would in any case have been held before
the still stronger lines at Blonie which were the real defences of
Warsaw on the west, and Hindenburg now gave up the frontal attack as
hopeless. It was only, however, to turn to the northern flank and
repeat his attempt of October to pierce the great chain of fortresses
which defended Poland along the line of the Niemen and the Narew from
Kovno to Novo Georgievsk.
His movement was further provoked by the Russian raid which had
already advanced once more across the border to close on Tilsit,
Insterburg, and Angerburg and well to the west of Lyck. Hindenburg was
ever fertile in surprises on this familiar ground, and on 7 February
his left, commanded by Eichhorn, drove the Russians back along the
railway to Kovno, and within a week had occupied Mariampol. His right
was also well across the frontier, marching on Grodno and Ossowiec.
Superior forces and railway communications accounted for his success,
and one Russian corps met with a disaster. But conditions on the
Russian side of the frontier equalized matters. The Germans occupied
Suwalki and Augustowo, and even crossed the Niemen at Drusskeniki
between Olita and Grodno, while farther north they seized Tauroggen.
But they were unable to cut the Kovno-Warsaw railway which ran but ten
miles east of the Niemen, and Ossowiec farther south successfully
stood a siege. By the middle of March Hindenburg had withdrawn his
left and centre to cover the Prussian frontier. He had suffered
considerably, but his right got off even less lightly.
It was here that his main strategic objective lay. The thrust against
the Niemen had been simply designed to drive the Russians out of
Prussia and protect the left of the German offensive to the south on
the Narew and Warsaw. Since the German failure in December a Russian
army had been pushing slowly down the right bank of the Vistula in
front of Plock. This movement was checked in February, and the Germans
hoped by an advance from Mlawa to get across the Narew south of
Pultusk. The centre of the Russian defence was at Prasnysz where eight
roads meet, but the defending force was weak, and on 24 February the
Germans captured the town. But the extreme Russian left made a heroic
stand on the ridge between Prasnysz and Ciechanow against Germans in
front and on both sides of them. Their resistance produced a situation
somewhat resembling that at Lodz, for a rapid concentration of Russian
reinforcements swept round to the help of the flank at Ciechanow,
while others attacked the German left at Krasnosielce. The Germans
encircling Ciechanow found themselves encircled at Prasnysz, and as at
Lodz they had to fight desperately for three days to escape. They were
assisted by the rudimentary equipment of the Russian forces; rifles
and ammunition were scarce, bayonets and hand-grenades were none too
plentiful, and some of the privates are even said to have fought with
pitchforks. By such hand-to-hand and bloody warfare the Germans were
driven out of Prasnysz back towards Stegna and Chorzele and their
flank attack on Warsaw foiled. Ruszky's strategy and Russian heroism
had gained one of the most singular victories in the war.
At the other end of the Russian front, along the Carpathians, politics
were beginning to exert a powerful influence upon strategy.
South-Eastern Europe was reacting to the Serbian successes in
December, and Rumania, like Italy, and with similar Latin feelings,
was negotiating with the Entente about terms of intervention. On 27
January a loan of five million pounds was arranged by Great Britain,
and while we provided financial inducements Russia dispatched a
sympathetic force to overrun the Bukovina, a country kindred to
Rumania which she might acquire by co-operation. There would be little
risk in joining the war if Russian armies could debouch from the
Carpathians; and the intervention of Rumania would link up the
Serbians with the Russians and envelop unfortunate Hungary on three
sides. But the spring was not yet, and Rumania would wait and see. Her
king was a Hohenzollern, and his people were divided in their
sympathies. If there were Rumanes under Magyar rule across the
Transylvanian Alps, there were also Rumanes under Russian rule across
the river Pruth; and the filching of Bessarabia by Russia in 1878
still rankled in the Rumanian mind. Bratianu, the Prime Minister, was
a cautious statesman, quite capable of seeing that the occupation of
the Bukovina by the Russians was a political demonstration rather than
a proof of military capacity to burst the Carpathian barrier. But
another argument was thus adduced to show the Prussians the need of
victory in the East unless they wished the defence of their two
existing fronts to be complicated by another in the south. Hungary was
their chief economic, political, and military bastion outside their
own dominions, and the subtle bond between Magyar and Prussian notions
of government, which gave them a common interest in the war, was now
drawn closer by the appointment of Tisza's henchman, Count Burian, as
Foreign Secretary to the Hapsburg Empire. For Tisza, the Hungarian
Premier, was in all but nationality a Prussian Junker, and his
domination depended as much upon a Teutonic victory over the Slavs as
a Teutonic victory did upon the retention of the Hungarian granary and
a bulwark in the south.
The Carpathians were therefore the key to the future of the war and
history of south-eastern Europe. The Russians had in the autumn
established a solid control of the Galician outlets from the mountain
passes, but had made no serious attempt to achieve the far more
difficult task of securing command of the foothills south of the
range, which alone would enable them to conquer the plains of Hungary.
For a mountain pass is like a river bridge-head; one may often possess
it without being able to debouch. The Austrians experienced that
difficulty in their winter offensive against the Russian flank in
Galicia. They made little progress against Brussilov at the Dukla and
Lupkow passes, but farther east they seized most of the mountain
routes, and Alexeiev was pressed back in Bukovina. Their centre under
Linsingen was, however, held up by the Russians at Hill 992 near
Kosziowa, and all efforts to dislodge the defenders failed. This
defence saved Galicia for the time and prevented the relief of
Przemysl, which otherwise would have been certain. For the Austrian
right succeeded late in February in recovering Czernowitz, Kolomea,
and on 3 March, Stanislau. Reinforcements, however, now reached the
Russians; Stanislau was recaptured, the Austrians lost much of what
they had gained, and on the 22nd Przemysl weakly surrendered. Its fame
as a fortress had been enhanced by its five months' siege since
October, but it did not redound to the credit of its defenders. They
were superior in numbers to the besiegers, were amply provisioned, and
well supplied with heavy artillery and all the munitions of war. Every
sort of blunder seems to have been committed by the commander, who
apparently regarded the siege as a relief from more arduous work in
the field, and capitulated because the repulse of the rescuing
expedition foreboded an increase of inconvenience.
The surrender liberated the besieging force for operations elsewhere,
and the Russians began a serious effort to surmount the Carpathian
rampart. They got well to the south of the Dukla, made substantial
progress in the centre through the Rostoki pass, and by the middle of
April held the crests for a continuous seventy miles; cavalry
penetrated much farther down the slopes, and the Austrians prepared to
evacuate the Ungvar valley. Reciprocal raids occurred elsewhere on the
Eastern front: the Russians seized and burnt Memel, and the Germans
retaliated by the bombardment of Libau. Despite warnings like that of
"The Times" Petrograd correspondent on 13 April to the effect that the
Germans had not only sent enormous reinforcements to the Carpathians,
but had taken charge of the operations, there was general confidence
in the West in a coming triumphant Russian offensive. Dmitrieff
himself had no suspicion of what was in store until a few days before
the storm broke; and a Panslav society in Petrograd passed and
published abroad a resolution that in view of the victorious progress
of the Russian armies across the Carpathians, the contemplated
intervention of Italy in the war was belated and undesirable.
The Russian Government cannot have been ignorant of the weakness of
Russian armies, not in man-power, still less in skill or courage, but
in artillery and equipment; but it had no conception of the material
and mechanical force which Germany was prepared to bring to the urgent
task of relieving the pressure on her ally. Nor was it for nothing
that Turkey had been cajoled and bribed into making war. Turkish
generalship and organization were negligible quantities, but Germany
could supply those defects, and Turkish bravery and man-power could be
used as a valuable means of distracting Russia's attention and
diverting forces from the Polish and Galician fronts. This had been
the main purpose of the campaign in the Caucasus which Turkey waged in
the winter. They began by seizing Tabriz in the province of
Azerbaijan, which though nominally Persian had been for some time
occupied partly by Russian and partly by Turkish troops; but the
Russians were first across the Russo-Turkish frontier and captured
Bayazid, Khorasan, and Kuprikeui. These advance-guards were, however,
pushed back by the Turks, whose leader and evil genius, the
half-Polish and German-educated adventurer, Enver, had conceived an
ambitious design of encircling the Russian armies between Sarikamysh
and Ardahan. In December the Turks succeeded in making their arduous
way across the snow-clad mountains, and on 1 January they were in
Ardahan. But the task would have tried the German Army itself in
summer, and Enver had attempted more than he could achieve. His army
corps were successively isolated and defeated in a series of
engagements collectively known as the battle of Sarikamysh, and driven
back across the frontier with heavy losses. Tabriz was reoccupied by
the Russians, though they were not able to follow up their victory by
the capture of Erzerum (see Map, p. 182).
The other diversion, which the Turks were used to create against the
Entente, was in Egypt. British rule, in spite of the vast benefits it
conferred, was not universally acceptable to the Egyptian people and
still less to Egyptian officials; and chief among those who resented
their restriction to the straight and narrow path of honest
administration was the Khedive Abbas II. He threw in his lot with the
Turks, and was deposed in his absence, while the shadowy Turkish
suzerainty over Egypt was converted into a substantial British
protectorate. Cyprus, which had been in British occupation since 1878,
was annexed at the same time to the British Crown. The Turks had been
deluded by the Germans with hopes of recovering their ancient control
of Egypt, and they at once began their feeble efforts to realize their
ambitions. In November an expedition started from Palestine to cut the
Suez Canal, a main artery of the British Empire, and stir the embers
of Moslem fanaticism in Egypt. It disappeared in the sands of the
intervening desert. Another, better prepared with German assistance,
reached the east bank of the Canal at various points on 2 February,
but miserably failed to effect a crossing; its only success was its
escape, which was partly explained by a sandstorm, and Egypt had rest
until the winter brought the campaigning season round again (see Map,
p. 352).
The British retort to Egypt and the Caucasus lay in the Persian Gulf
and the Dardanelles. The Persian Gulf had long been a scene of British
trade and political enterprise to which the inertia of its rulers
rendered Persia susceptible; and its position as a possible Russian
outlet to the sea on the flank of our communications with India had
produced some rivalry for Persian favours. The advent of a third comer
in the shape of the Germans, with their plans for a Germanized Turkish
Empire controlling the Berlin-Baghdad route, changed the rivalry into
co-operation; and an attack on the Turks at the head of the Persian
Gulf was an obvious reply to the Turkish campaign in the Caucasus. It
afforded an easy means of employing the native Indian army in the
common cause without the long sea journey to France or the risks
inflicted by northern winters upon sub-tropical races. During the
first half of November detachments of the Indian army sailed up the
Shat-el-Arab, the joint estuary of the Tigris and the Euphrates,
defeated the Turks at Sahil on the 17th, occupied Basra on the 22nd,
and cut off Kurna, which surrendered on 9 December. The local Turks
were weak in numbers and equipment, and distance removed them from the
stimulus of Enver's energy and German organization. It was not until
April 1915 that an effective reaction to the British advance was
attempted. Then the Turks and Arabs concerted a movement against the
whole line stretching round from Ahwaz within the Persian frontier to
Shaiba south-west of Basra. The real attack was on Shaiba, and the
battle lasted from 12 to 15 April. The Turks were completely defeated,
with some 6000 casualties; but the most important effect was to
convert the Arabs into our allies. The advantage was pressed in June,
and on the 3rd Amara was captured seventy-five miles to the north of
Kurna. The way was open for an advance on Baghdad as soon as autumn
made exertion possible in that torrid zone (see Map, p. 177).
Sir John Nixon's success in the Mesopotamian delta was, however, but a
pin-prick in a distant part compared with the blow that was aimed at
the heart of the Turkish Empire in the Dardanelles; and the merits of
that famous but ill-starred enterprise, and of the strategy which
inspired it, have been one of the most debated questions of the war.
Soldiers and civilians, writers and talkers, and even thinkers were
divided into two camps, Westerners and Easterners, those who believed
that the war could only be won by frontal attack in the West, and
those who discerned a way round to victory in the Near or the Farther
East. Volumes might be, and no doubt will be, written on this
controversy, and its implications have infinite variety. It involved
questions of policy as well as strategy, and therefore raised the
delicate problem of the relations between civil and military
authority. The soldier only deals with armies, and in the field his
voice is properly supreme; but policy may be as far above strategy as
strategy is above tactics; and policy may dictate a strategy which
would not commend itself on military principles. The soldier has
nothing to do with the policy, but policy and diplomacy may or may not
bring fresh allies into the war and fresh armies into the field; and a
strategy which may be unsound on purely military grounds may be
completely justified by political reasons. The diversion of a force
from the main field of operations where it is needed to a more distant
objective, seems suicidal to the general in command; but if, without
provoking disaster on the field it has left, it has the effect of
turning the enemy's flank, detaching his actual or deterring his
potential allies, and inducing neutrals to intervene, it may win a war
although it postpones or risks the success of a campaign.
On the other hand, it was urged that the fundamental principle of
strategy is to concentrate all available forces where the enemy has
concentrated his, beat him there, and thus win a victory which will
carry with it the desired results in all the subsidiary spheres.
Germany once beaten in the West, it was argued, there would be no need
to trouble about the Balkans or the amateur strategy which looked to
Laibach or Aleppo as the vital spot in the situation. This principle
was erected into a dogma, and dogma is a dangerous impediment to the
art of war. War is an art, and therefore consists in the adaptation of
varying means to conditions which are not constant. Strategy is not,
apart from its mechanical adjuncts, a science in which properties are
fixed, axioms can be assumed, and the results of experiments foretold;
the combination of two armies and a commander-in-chief does not
produce the same uniform result as the combination of two parts of
hydrogen and one of oxygen; and formulae are as irrational in war as
in any other human art. Dogmas deduced from the experience of some
wars are inapplicable to others; and the science of wars between
France and Germany becomes mere imposture when it seeks to dictate
dogma to wars in which the British Empire is involved. The particular
dogma about concentration had three defects: it left the initiative to
the enemy, thus surrendering the advantage, secured by the command of
the sea, of being able to strike in other directions; it assumed that
the enemy could be beaten on that front without disturbance on his
flanks or in his rear; and it abandoned the Near and the Farther East
to any schemes on which the Germans might choose to employ their own
or their allies' subsidiary forces.
No one, on the other hand, imagined that the Western front could be
denuded of the armies required to maintain it. The question was really
how to use the considerable margin of force between what was essential
for defence and what was needed for a successful offensive. Should it
be employed for frontal attack in the West, or flank attack in the
East? Caution counselled one course, adventure suggested the other.
Surplus force intended for an offensive on the West would be
available, if need arose, for defence; it would not, if it were a
thousand miles away, and our needs in the spring of 1918 seemed to
supply an effective answer to arguments drawn from our later successes
in the Balkans and in Syria. The antithesis is, however, largely a
false one, due to the exigencies of popular debate and the habit of
treating war as an abstract science independent of changing but actual
conditions. No one denies that a diversion of our main effort from
France to Laibach in the winter of 1917 would have been fatal to us in
the spring of 1918, but it is not clear that the thousands of troops
we lost at Loos and the French in Champagne in the autumn of 1915
might not better have been employed in saving Serbia or forcing the
Dardanelles.
The Dardanelles
There was much to be said for the policy, and even the strategy, which
led to the Dardanelles expedition. Flanks had disappeared on the
Western front; the lines extended from the Alps to the sea, and it was
natural that, commanding the sea, we should seek to turn them farther
afield. We had asked Russia to relieve the pressure on our Western
front by using her military force in Prussia and Galicia; and it was
reasonable enough for Russia to ask us to reciprocate and relieve the
Turkish pressure on her flank in the Caucasus by a naval attack on
Turkey. The German Fleet lay snug in port beyond the reach of naval
power: could not our supremacy on the sea find an offensive function
somewhere else? There was, moreover, our own position in Egypt to be
defended; no one proposed evacuation, and the best defence of Egypt
was a blow at the Dardanelles in the direction of Turkey's capital. It
was, in fact, no more a dissipation of forces to send troops to force
the Dardanelles than to send them to hold the Suez Canal, and from the
point of view of policy, which was even more important, the effect of
the expedition might be a concentration of power or Powers against the
Central Empires. Serbia had successfully held the gate of the Balkans
against Austria: Rumania's intervention would extend the lines of
possible attack, Greece inclined in the same direction, and the
forcing of the Dardanelles would assuredly have deterred Bulgaria from
hostile intervention, and almost certainly have decided her to join a
common Balkan move against the Teutons and the Turks. To the war on
the Eastern and Western fronts, which was already a German nightmare,
would be added one on an almost undefended Southern frontier. Austria
could not long resist if Italy also intervened, and the collapse of
the Hapsburg Empire would open up an advance against Germany from the
south which would circumvent the Rhine and the Oder and turn the
gigantic bastion she had constructed in France and Belgium into a
house of cards. Well might the Dardanelles expedition be hailed in the
press as a stroke of strategical genius and associated with Mr.
Churchill's imagination. Easy also is it to understand the
concentrated fear and force which the Germans put into Mackensen's
coming drive in Galicia.
There is, indeed, less material for censure in the policy of the
Dardanelles expedition than in the Allies' decision to couple with it
a military offensive on the Western front and to divorce the naval and
military efforts in the Aegean. Divided counsels produced divided
efforts. Mr. Churchill, backed up, we are led to infer, by Mr. Lloyd
George, secured his naval expedition; but he failed, until it was too
late, to secure its military complement because the troops were
earmarked for costly and premature attacks on the German lines in
France. Deprived of this assistance, the naval expedition seems to
have relied on the hope of Greek co-operation to the extent of two
army corps, which Venizelos was only prevented from dispatching by the
vigour of the Prussian Queen of Greece and by the veto of the King.
Possibly there was precipitation, for the naval attack did not await
the arrival of the military forces, which were before long on the way,
extorted, it would seem, by impetuous pressure from a reluctant and
unconvinced authority.
For this purely naval attack on the defences of the Dardanelles there
is little to be said; for no argument of advantage from success can
justify an attempt which is fore-doomed to failure, and history
demonstrated beyond a doubt the strength of modern forts against the
modern battleship. Nor was it in the Dardanelles a test between an
ordinary sea attack and a normal land defence. The strength of the
position attacked was trebled by the forts on both sides of the
channel and by its twist at the Narrows, which enabled the land
batteries to concentrate fire on the attacking fleet from in front as
well as on both flanks. There was no room to manoeuvre in a channel
less than a mile in width, and even when the mine-fields had been
swept, the Turks could send fresh mines down the constant stream, and
discharge torpedoes from hidden tubes along both shores. Against such
formidable defences even the guns of the Queen Elizabeth were an
inadequate attack, and forts that were said to be silenced repeatedly
renewed their bombardment.
The first stage of the attack began on 19 February; it consisted in
demolishing by concentric fire the outpost fortifications at Kum Kale
and Cape Helles. This proved comparatively simple, and after a week of
bad weather the mine-sweepers were able to clear the channel for four
miles. It was a different matter when the real defences in the Narrows
were attacked early in March. The chief bombardment was from outside
in the Gulf of Saros, where it was hoped that the guns of the Queen
Elizabeth and her consorts would by indirect fire dispose of Chanak
and the other forts. None of them were, however, silenced with the
possible exception of Dardanos, and Turkish howitzers, cunningly
concealed in the scrub along the shore, provided an unpleasant surrise
by hitting the Queen Elizabeth. Nevertheless, it was thought that
enough had been effected to justify an attempt to force the Narrows on
the 18th. Three successive squadrons of British and French ships were
sent up the Straits, but the Turks had only waited till the channel
was full of vessels to release their floating mines and land-
torpedoes. First the French Bouvet, then the Irresistible, and thirdly
the Ocean were struck by mines and sunk, the Bouvet with most of her
crew. Three battleships and 2000 men had been lost in an attack which
did not even reach the entrance to the Narrows; and for six weeks
occasional bombardments hardly concealed the fact that the frustrated
naval attack was awaiting the co-operation of the army to give it some
chance of success.
More progress was happily made during the winter in still more distant
spheres, although the conquest of German colonies was regarded by the
pure strategist as belonging to the illegitimate and divergent rather
than to the legitimate and subsidiary type of military operation.
Policy may, however, outweigh strategy, and the circumstance that the
victor only retains as the price of peace his conquests, or part of
them, made in war, extenuates if it does not justify divergent
operations. They were divergent enterprises which gave us India,
Canada, and the Cape of Good Hope; and assuredly the defeat of Germany
on the Western front would not alone have brought German colonies
under the sceptre of a League of Nations. Even from the point of view
of a strategy limited to Central Europe these operations had their
value; for they enlisted against the common foe forces which would
certainly not have been employed had we merely stood on the defensive
in the overseas Dominions, and when their work was done in distant
parts these forces gravitated towards the centre with a weight which
would have grown more crushing had resistance been prolonged. Only
surrender by the enemy stayed Allenby's and Marshall's Oriental hosts
in Asia and anticipated the arrival on the Western front of further
aid from Africa. A blow at the heart may be the normal strategy, but
it is not the only nor always the best means of dealing with an
antagonist clad in a breastplate of steel.
The scene of the least successful of these colonial wars was still
East Africa. The reverse of Tanga in November was followed by another
at Jassin on 19 January, and at the end of the winter the Germans
could claim that their territory was clear of our troops while several
German detachments were in ours; but we had seized the island of Mafia
off the mouth of the Rufigi and declared a blockade of the German East
African coast. On the other side of the continent we made steady
progress in reducing the vast territory of the Cameroons; but the
success of the season was Botha's conquest of German South-West
Africa. The last remnants of the rebellion under Maritz and Kemp were
stamped out at Upington on 3 February, and on 14 January Swakopmund
was captured from the sea. Botha selected that as his base, while
Smuts directed three columns farther south. The first advanced on the
capital Windhoek from Luderitz Bay, the second from Warmbad near the
Orange River, and the third from Kimberley. The second, under Van
Deventer, had the heaviest work, but the fighting was not as a rule
severe. The campaign was a triumph of forethought, strategy, and
organization which left the Germans no choice but a series of
retirements, culminating in the surrender of Windhoek on 12 May, and
the capitulation of the entire remaining German forces at Grootfontein
on 9 July.
On the sea the Germans had abandoned hope of victory. The balance of
power in our favour, which had been insufficient to relieve Jellicoe
of considerable anxiety, began to increase rapidly with the completion
of the Queen Elizabeth class in April; and Germany turned her
anticipatory gaze towards her submarines. Just as Napoleon's efforts
by means of the Berlin and Milan decrees to ruin us by war on commerce
came after the final collapse of his naval ambitions at Trafalgar, so
Germany's submarine campaign followed upon her recognition of the
hopelessness of her naval situation. On 18 February she proclaimed the
waters round the British Isles a war zone in which enemy merchantmen
would, and neutrals might, be sunk by submarines irrespective of the
risks to non-combatants and neutrals. This was a flagrant violation of
the rules of international law which safeguarded the shipping of
neutrals, and only sanctioned the condemnation of contraband goods in
prize courts, and the destruction of enemy vessels when they could not
be taken into port and provision had been made for the safety of their
crews and passengers. The German submarines were not in a position to
guarantee any of these conditions; and trading on the legal maximum
that no one can be required to do what is impossible, the Germans
claimed immunity from these obligations.
To this the British Government replied on 1 March with a blockade
which was more humane and more effective, but none the less involved
an autocratic extension of belligerent rights. All oversea trade with
Germany was to be as far as possible intercepted; goods, whether
contraband or not, were at least to be detained; and the right of
search was to be rendered more secure by being exercised in British
ports, to which neutral ships were brought, instead of on the high
seas amid the danger of submarine attack. These measures inflicted no
loss of life and no loss of property that was not contraband. But they
made havoc with the ideas that neutrals were entitled to trade with
both belligerents, and that neither belligerent could intercept
commerce which did not directly serve for military purposes. It was
not, for instance, a breach of neutrality to sell munitions to a
belligerent, though belligerents were entitled to seize them if they
could; and we ourselves bought vast quantities from the United States.
America was, however, deeply attached to that "freedom of the seas"
which enabled neutrals to sell, without interference, goods which were
not contraband, to either belligerent; and our extension of contraband
to cover food supplies gave deep offence. The difficulty arose not
only from the inevitable tendency of law to disappear amid the clash
of arms, but from the modern absorption of all energies, civilian as
well as military, in the warlike operations of the State. The food of
civilians making munitions became a vital element in the conduct of
war, and the distinction between civil and military purposes was lost
in the fusion of all activities for a common end.
Disquieting as was the course of military operations during the
spring, the diplomatic situation caused even more anxiety; and public
opinion was as impervious to the one as to the other. American
protests against our action on the seas were received with
ill-concealed resentment, popular newspapers adjured the Government to
"stand no nonsense from the United States," President Wilson's name
was hissed by British audiences, and the man in the street seemed bent
on estranging the neutral on whose assistance we were in the end to
rely for victory in the war. It needed all the resources of an
unpopular wisdom and diplomacy to steer between the Scylla of
alienating friends by our blockade and the Charybdis of being, in Mr.
Asquith's words, "strangled in a network of juridical niceties." The
Germans came to our aid with a colossal crime. On 7 May the
passenger-ship Lusitania was torpedoed off the south coast of Ireland
with the loss of 1100 souls, many of them women and children, and some
of them Americans; and the news was hailed in Germany with transports
of delight from ministers of religion and all but an insignificant
section of the people; medals were officially struck to commemorate
the deed. British lives had been lost through Russian action off the
Dogger Bank in 1904 without provoking war, and the sinking of the
Lusitania did not precipitate war between Germany and the United
States. But it eased the friction over our blockade, and gave for the
first time some general American support to the pro-Entente sentiment
which had from the beginning been strong in the New England States. A
moral force was created in reserve which would in time redress the
military disasters which the Entente had yet to encounter.