THE FAILURE OF THE ALLIED OFFENSIVE
Effective and timely military co-operation had been denied to the
naval attack on the Dardanelles because our available forces had been
mortgaged since January to an allied offensive in the West; and the
gradual recognition of the fact that the naval enterprise could not
succeed without the diversion of troops to that object committed the
Entente to the simultaneous prosecution of two major operations which
could only converge in case of success. This was but one of the
factors in the spring campaign which exhibited Allied strategy at its
worst. Even in the West there was inadequate co-operation, and the
efforts made were both disjointed and premature. We had yet to learn
that alphabet of annihilation without which the art of breaking German
lines could not be mastered; and there still lingered the idea that
isolated attacks on distant and narrow sectors of the front could
rupture the German line and either roll it up or compel a general
retreat. Possibly some such plan might have had some chance of success
had the forces of the Entente been concentrated upon a single effort,
and optimistic critics anticipated a breach to the north of Verdun
which might close or at least threaten the neck of the German bottle
between Metz and Limburg and precipitate a withdrawal from their
carefully prepared positions in northern France and Belgium. But fear
of a German counter-offensive threatening the Channel ports,
difficulties of transport across lines of communication, and defective
unity in ideas and in command condemned the Allied attacks to separate
sectors of the front and spheres of operation; even that general
supervision which Foch had exercised over all the forces engaged in
the October and November battles seems to have disappeared before the
spring, and the French offensive began in the Woevre while the British
attacked the other flank protecting Lille (see Map, p. 79).
The point selected was Neuve Chapelle, a village at the foot of the
Aubers ridge which guarded La Bassée to the south-west and Lille to
the north-east. The German line there formed a marked salient, and an
attack on the ridge, if completely successful, would shake the
security of Lille, and if but moderately successful would cut off La
Bassée and straighten the line as far as Givenchy. The moral indicated
by the elaborate defences constructed by the Germans during the winter
had been at any rate partially learnt, and the infantry attack on the
morning of 10 March was preceded by an artillery preparation which set
a new standard of destruction and was designed to obliterate trenches,
barbed wire, and machine-gun positions. It was effective over the
greater part of the front attacked, and in the centre and on our right
the Fourth and Indian Corps quickly overcame the dazed and decimated
Germans and pushed beyond Neuve Chapelle to the Bois du Biez and
slopes of the Aubers ridge beyond. But our left had no such fortune in
the north of the village and at the neighbouring Moulin de Piétre.
There, for some inexplicable reason, the defences had hardly been
touched by the artillery preparation, and the 23rd Brigade in
particular suffered dismally as they tore with their hands at the
barbed wire and were shot down by the German machine guns. The
defences unbroken by artillery were impenetrable by human bodies, and
the defenders were also able to enfilade the troops which had got
through farther south and were now attacking the second German line.
The staff-work, too, was deplorable, and reserves were late or went
astray, though it is doubtful whether anything could have retrieved
the initial error which left the German defences intact, impeded the
whole advance, and enabled the enemy to recover and bring up reserves
before the attack was renewed on the two following days. Possibly our
high-explosive had been exhausted. In any case there was nothing to do
but to count and consolidate our gains. A village and a strip of
territory some three miles by one had been secured, and we estimated
the German casualties at 20,000, and they themselves at 12,000; our
own were nearly 13,000. The chief effect was produced on the German
mind by the shock of our artillery: "this," was the childish complaint
of the masters of high-explosive, "is not war, it is murder." But
German annoyance was poor compensation for the shrinking of our
ambitions, and there was cold comfort in the failure of the German
counter-attacks here and at St. Eloi farther north; for the Germans
were merely out for defence in the West and we for a successful
offensive, which had to be tried again.
The French with their larger forces and greater experience were
perhaps somewhat more fortunate, but their local successes in the
Woevre and Alsace had no more effect upon the general situation. Early
in April a series of attacks, spread over five days and hampered by
snowstorms, gave them the plateau of Les Éparges on the northern side
of the St. Mihiel wedge and enabled them to advance towards Étain on
the road from Verdun to Metz. The importance they attached to these
operations is shown by their claim on 10 April that at Les Éparges the
Germans in two months had had losses amounting to 30,000. Progress was
also made along the southern side of the wedge between St. Mihiel and
Pont-à-Mousson; but although ground was gained as a result of
strenuous combat extending over several weeks, the wedge stood firm;
and the effort to drive it out as a preliminary to the larger
operations contemplated in Lorraine was presently abandoned. In Alsace
Sondernach was taken and an advance was made during April down the
Fecht towards Metzeral and Munster, and the summit of the
Hartmannsweilerkopf was recovered. But the progress never really
disturbed the Germans, and indeed they would probably have viewed
greater success in that divergent sphere with comparative equanimity,
knowing that it would waste an unfriendly country and would not
threaten their main communications or position.
These operations, combined with the Russian descent of the
Carpathians, were announced in "The Times" of 10 April as "the opening
of the Allied offensive in the summer campaign of 1915." But the
disaster which soon overtook the Russian plans had its effect upon
Allied designs in the West, and induced an attempt to menace the
Germans in a quarter more likely to disturb their concentration on the
East than a campaign against the St. Mihiel wedge or in the mountain
frontiers of Alsace. The tender spot on the West was Lille, with its
concentration of railways and importance as protecting the right flank
of the German front along the Aisne and the left flank of their hold
on the Belgian coast. The Germans learnt, divined, or anticipated the
design, and sought to parry or break the force of the projected blow
by a defensive-offensive against Ypres. The attack was not their real
offensive for 1915, but they developed the habit of distracting
attention from their main objectives by decking out their subsidiary
operations with some new devilry of ingenuity; and just as in 1918
they bombarded Paris with guns having a range of 75 miles when their
real objective was the British front, so in 1915, when their main
effort was against the Russians, they treated the defenders of Ypres
to their first experiments in poison-gas. They had tried the effect on
the humbler creation some time before, and had indicated their
intentions by accusing their enemies of the practice they had
themselves in mind; but it came as a ghastly surprise to the French
Territorials and British and Canadian troops along the Yser on 22
April (see Map, p. 288).
The attack had clearly been planned beforehand, because the
preparation of the chlorine gas, arrangement of the gas-tubes along
the front, and delay for the requisite conditions wind and weather
required time; and the absence of any great concentration of troops
merely showed that, in view of their commitments in the East, the
Germans only sought at Ypres a local and tactical success. It was a
mere accident that the gas attack north-east of the city followed upon
strenuous fighting for Hill 60 at the south-east re-entrant, and the
choice of locality was due to the German knowledge of the facts that
the French regulars had been removed from the Yser and our own heavy
guns from Ypres in order to take part in offensives farther south. The
attack on Hill 60 was begun by us on 17th April, and its object was to
acquire a gun position which commanded the German trenches in the
Hollebeke district. The struggle lasted for five days and was one of
the fiercest local combats in the war; at the end of it we were still
on what was left of a mound of earth.
The German offensive on the north-eastern front of Ypres was heralded
by a bombardment of the city on the 20th which was designed as a
barrage to cut off communications with the front along the roads which
all ran through Ypres. On the evening of the 22nd the gas attack
developed, and as the clouds of green vapour moved down on the French
Territorials, unprovided with any sort of gas-masks and unprepared for
the terrifying effects of poison en masse, they broke and fled,
exposing the flank of the Canadians on their right from Langemarck to
Grafenstafel. Never did troops make a more heroic debut in war under
more trying conditions. Less affected by the gas than the French
Territorials, the Canadians counter-attacked the German left flank,
temporarily recaptured guns, and stayed the advance. The gaping breach
on their left was partially filled by reinforcements from the 28th
Division on the 23rd, but the Germans were across the canal at Het Sas
and Lizerne, and the Canadians between St. Julien and Grafenstafel
were fighting on three fronts. A second gas attack followed on the
24th, and presently St. Julien had to be abandoned. Reinforcements
were, however, coming up; French regulars brilliantly recaptured
Lizerne and Het Sas and secured the west bank of the canal against a
German advance; and by the 29th the Canadians, who had saved the
situation but had suffered heavily in the effort, were replaced by
British troops. There was still desperate fighting to do for many
days, and the curve of the Ypres salient had been reduced to a narrow
oblong stretching from Ypres to Grafenstafel and the Polygon Wood, and
little more than half in breadth what it was in length. A shortening
of the line was inevitable, and it was effected with great skill and
little loss on 3-4 May. But heavy bombardment continued to take a
dreadful toll of life until a final gas attack on the 24th concluded
the German effort. Crude respirators had been hastily supplied to our
troops and the gas attack was less effective than before, but we were
left with a line which ran in a curve a bare three miles from Ypres,
and
"an acre sown indeed
With the richest royallest seed
That the earth did e'er suck in."
But if that soil round Ypres was a tomb of British bodies, it became
the grave of German hopes. The shrunken line was enough, and it
remained unbroken till the war had ceased. The military gain, if any,
lay with the Germans, whose casualties were far less than ours. But
the moral advantage lay with us. It was not quite so clear as is
commonly thought. The use of poison-gas as a weapon of war was not a
German invention; it was suggested by a British chemist to Japan
during the Russo-Japanese War. But chemists have nothing to do with
international law or morality, and responsibility rests with
Governments for their adoption of methods provided by science. Nor is
there any clear moral distinction between asphyxiating shells and gas
emitted from tubes. All war is torture; and, the morality of torture
once admitted, the moral reasons for discrimination between particular
degrees of suffering and efficiency cease to be very convincing. The
moral advantage to us consisted in the heroism which our troops
endured the torture. If they could unprepared withstand the gas
attacks at Ypres, there was nothing of which their manhood need be
afraid; while the Germans were in the humiliating position of one who,
foiled in legitimate combat, had tried to take an unfair advantage and
has failed. Poison-gas was an ill-bred attempt at revenge for what
they called murder at Neuve Chapelle, just as they found consolation
in the sinking of the Lusitania for the ignominous situation of their
High Seas Fleet.
The offensive at Ypres slackened to meet the Allied attacks elsewhere,
and our troops in the salient at least were not insensible to the fact
that even the Germans had insufficient artillery or high-explosive to
maintain an intense bombardment all along the line. Both the French
and ourselves began on 9 May, and the object was to threaten the
German position in front of Lens and Lille. Lens was protected by a
bulge in the German front which ran round by Grenay, Aix-Noulette,
Notre Dame de Lorette, Ablain, and Carency to the north-west of Arras,
and then south-eastwards by La Targette, Écurie, and Roclincourt.
Between this line and Lens lay the Vimy Ridge, and in front of its
southwestern slopes the Germans had constructed elaborate
fortifications above and underground known as the White Work and the
Labyrinth. For the attack the French had made careful preparations,
and their concentration of eleven hundred guns and almost limitless
shells exceeded in intensity any previous experiment. They were
rewarded by the comparative ease with which their initial successes
were secured. Barbed wire and earthen parapets were blown to pieces
before the infantry attacked and in an hour and a half coveted two and
a half miles. La Targette and the White Work were captured and an
entrance forced into Neuville St. Vaast. Farther north a second attack
was required, and it was not until the 12th that Carency, Ablain, and
the summit of Notre Dame were mastered. The line had been broken, but
the fragments resolved themselves into almost impregnable strongholds;
it took another fortnight before the Souchez sugar-refinery, half a
mile in front of Ablain, fell, and the Labyrinth held out, while
behind these defences rose the Vimy Ridge to defy for another two
years all attacks upon Lens (see Maps, pp. 79, 302).
The lesson was that of Neuve Chapelle on a larger scale, and all the
more impressive because of the careful preparations made for victory.
The breach of narrow front was useless, because lines were no longer
made of men, but of fortifications which held instead of rolling up,
when broken, and seeking safety in retreat. The simultaneous British
attacks near Neuve Chapelle repeated the French experience and our own
in March. The first was north of Neuve Chapelle towards Fromelles, and
broke down through inadequate artillery preparation; the second, made
on 16 May in front of Richebourg l'Avoué towards the Bois du Biez and
Rue d'Ouvert, was somewhat more successful, and Sir John French wrote
encouragingly about the entire first line of the enemy's trenches
having been captured on a front of 3000 yards with ten machine guns;
but one brigade alone lost 45 officers and 1179 men, and La Bassée and
the Aubers ridge were as forbidding as ever. It was not by victories
of that compass that the Germans would be diverted from their Galician
drive; and the other major operation in the Dardanelles to which the
Entente had been committed gave little better cause for satisfaction.
The French had naturally refused to divert a single division from
their troops on the Western front, and their contingent consisted of a
detachment of some colonial troops, fusiliers marins, and the Foreign
Legion. The substantial force took longer to collect, and had to be
provided by Britain. Sir Ian Hamilton was placed in command, and he
was given the 29th Division, the Naval Division, a Territorial
Division, and the Australian and New Zealand Divisions serving in
Egypt, which was now considered safe for the summer. The total
amounted to three corps, or 120,000 men. The Turks were directed by
the German general Liman von Sanders, and he expected the landing to
be attempted near Bulair on the flat and narrow isthmus which joined
the Gallipoli Peninsula to the mainland. His expectation is perhaps
the best justification for Sir Ian's selection of other spots, but
there were few that were practicable, and none that did not involve
enormous difficulties, for Liman von Sanders' anticipation of an
attack at Bulair did not preclude some effective precautions against a
landing elsewhere.
The attempt began on 25 April at six different points. Some way up the
outer or north-western shore of the peninsula the Australian and New
Zealand Army Corps effected a landing at Gaba Tepe, later called Anzac
from the initials of the force. Farther down another was made in front
of the village of Krithia, and the remaining four attempts were on
beaches stretching round the point of the peninsula from Tekke to
Morto Bay. All prospered fairly well except at Sedd-el-Bahr, where a
concentration of Turkish fire kept most of the troops from
disembarking for thirty-two hours, and near Krithia, where on the 26th
a counter-attack drove our forces back into their boats. Zeal carried
the Anzacs nearly to the summit of the hills overlooking the Straits,
and excess of it led to heavy losses in a Turkish counterattack; nor
could the parties of British troops who got within a few hundred yards
of Krithia on the 28th maintain their position, and the result of this
first attempt was to give us possession of the extremity of the
peninsula from a mile above Eski Hissarlik inside the Straits to three
miles above Tekke on the Aegean, and of an exposed ridge of cliffs at
Anzac. A French force had landed at Kum Kale on the Asiatic mainland,
but only to destroy the Turkish batteries there (see Map, p. 107).
The coup de main had obviously failed, and the struggle for Gallipoli
resolved itself into a costly attack by inferior forces on land
against an almost impregnable position. Never were the difficulties of
invasion by sea more strikingly demonstrated, and it was a misfortune
that the generals who continued throughout the war to distract the
popular mind by depicting a German invasion of England, were not all
sent to study the process in the Dardanelles. In front of our narrow
footholds the Turks, amounting to 200,000 men, held positions rising
to over 700 feet at Achi Baba and Pasha Dagh, and defended by masses
of artillery and machine and elaborate systems of trenches upon which
the big guns from our ships appeared to have little effect. Two
British submarines did gallant work by getting up the Straits under
the mine-fields and disturbing the Turkish communications across the
Sea of Marmara; but there remained land-routes on either shore, and
reserves arrived more quickly on the Turkish than on the British
front. From 6-8 May a second attack was made up the Saghir Dere
towards Krithia and the Kereves Dere towards Achi Baba, while the
Anzacs created as much diversion as possible from Gaba Tepe. But the
bombardment from ships and shore-batteries failed to destroy the
Turkish trenches, and an advance of a thousand yards, which failed to
reach the enemy's main positions, was only achieved at the cost of
casualties amounting by the end of May to more than the losses in
battle during the whole Boer War. A third attack on 4 June reinforced
the lesson that nothing short of an army large enough for a major
operation could master the Dardanelles, and meanwhile an elusive
German submarine was threatening the naval supports. The Goliath had
been sunk by a Turkish torpedo boat on 12 May, and the submarine
disposed of the Triumph on the 26th and the Majestic on the following
day. Silently the Queen Elizabeth and her more important consorts
withdrew to safer waters, and the naval attempt to force the
Dardanelles was gradually transformed into a military siege of the
peninsula.
The spring offensive of the Allies had gone to pieces everywhere
except in the distant spheres of South Africa and Mesopotamia, while
the German offensive was carrying all before it in Galicia. The first
great disillusionment of the war was at hand, and its promised
beginning in May looked uncommonly like a repetition of the previous
August. Popular discontent focused itself on the lack of munitions,
and especially of high-explosives, which "The Times" military
correspondent declared on 14 May to have been a fatal bar to our
success. "Some truth there was, but brewed and dashed with lies," as
Dryden remarked of Titus Oates' plot. There were other bars as fatal,
the lack of guns, men, and generalship; and the ultimate
responsibility for the shortage rested with those experts, Allied as
well as our own, who thought six Divisions an adequate British force
when the war broke out. For the amount of high-explosive required
depends upon the number of guns and gunners to use it and the length
of line that is held; and experience of South African warfare had led
generals to discount the value of heavy guns and high-explosive and to
magnify that of mobility and mounted men. It was only when trenches
stretching from the Alps to the sea were made impervious by German
wire and concrete to assault that the need for unlimited
high-explosive dawned on the minds of the higher commands. The French
were able, thanks to the protection afforded by the British Navy, to
divert labour from naval construction and repair to the production of
munitions and even to send naval guns to the trenches. But that very
fact added to the paramount claim of the navy in Great Britain for
munitions; and a soldier must have been strangely blind to the debt
the Empire and the Entente owed to the British Navy before he could
urge his own Government to follow the French example.
The British Cabinet had begun to appreciate the need in September
1914, and on 21 April 1915 Mr. Lloyd George gave in the House of
Commons the rate of our increased output as from 20 in September to 90
in November, 156 in December, 186 in January, 256 in February, and 388
in March, and added that the production of high-explosives had been
placed on a footing which relieved us of all anxiety. Even an increase
of 2000 per cent was doubtless inadequate to our needs, and Mr.
Asquith's frequently misquoted denial that our operations had been
hampered by the deficiency, showed that both Ministers had been misled
by their technical advisers. But the French, who fired 300,000 shells
on 9 May, were, in spite of that fact and their greater forces, not
much more successful in front of Lens than we at Neuve Chapelle; and
unlimited explosives did not bring us far on the road to victory until
more than three years after Mr. Lloyd George had been appointed
Minister of Munitions in May 1915 to revolutionize the situation which
had inspired him with such confidence in April. We had more to learn
in the art of war than the manufacture of munitions, and the dream
that a better supply would have enabled us to beat the Germans in the
spring of 1915--without any American troops at all and with a British
Army about a tenth of the effective strength that was in the end
required--was as idle as the German fancy that their similar
superiority should have brought us to our knees in the autumn of 1914.
The delusion served, however, to shake Mr. Asquith's Government to its
foundations. Lord Kitchener himself, the popular idol for whom the
press had clamoured at the beginning of the war, was deposed from his
shrine in ultra-patriotic hearts because he had devoted himself to the
raising of armies more than to the making of munitions. But the first
offensive in the press, as often happened in the field, fell short of
its objective: Lord Kitchener received the Garter amid the plaudits of
"Punch," and the curious spectacle was exhibited of the most excitable
journal in the realm being publicly burnt on the Stock Exchange by the
nation's most excitable body of citizens. Another incident supervened
upon the munitions outcry; Lord Fisher resigned from the Admiralty on
15 May. He had had notorious differences with Mr. Churchill over the
Dardanelles and other questions; and unable to do without either at
the Admiralty, Mr. Asquith dispensed with both, and covered up the
deficiency by a Coalition. The principal Unionists joined the Cabinet,
and the chief Liberal Jonah was Lord Haldane, who knew a great deal
about Germany and was therefore accused of being pro-German. He also
knew something of science, and might conceivably have been more alive
to the need of munitions than Lord Kitchener. But the nation would not
have tolerated his presence at the War Office, and even resented it on
the Woolsack. He left his seat to successors who did not fill his
place.
Apart from this concession to popular prejudice, the Coalition was an
advantage from the national though not from the Premier's personal or
party point of view. He would have been wiser in his own interests to
have resigned and left the responsibility to men whose supporters
believed that with a little more energy and foresight the war could be
won in a few months or at most a year. Few had as yet realized that
the struggle was one between mighty nations which only the
perseverance of peoples, and not the merits of Ministers, could
decide; and the inevitable deferment of foolish hopes would sooner or
later have produced a reaction in favour of the retiring Premier and
his party. But it would have been accompanied by a revival of party
warfare which would have undoubtedly weakened national unity and
impaired the prospects of success; and all parties to the
Coalition--Liberal, Unionist, and Labour--were patriotically inspired
when they agreed to share a burden which the wiser among their leaders
foresaw would tax their united strength.
There was need enough for unity during the summer of 1915 when the
Allied offensive in the West had broken down, little progress was
being made in the Dardanelles, and the Germans were driving the
Russians like chaff before them. The one gleam of light was the
intervention of Italy, which might distract Austrian forces from the
Galician front and in any case meant some accession of strength to the
Allied cause. Italy had already rendered inestimable services to the
Entente by proclaiming that Germany's action was offensive in
character, and therefore dispensed Italy from an obligation to support
her partners in the Triple Alliance; and her neutrality during August
and intervention in May disproved the gibe of the French diplomatist
that she would rush to the rescue of the conqueror. The question
throughout the winter was whether she would complete her breach of the
Triple Alliance by attacking her former Allies. The grievance upon
which diplomacy fixed was the reciprocal compensation which Austria
and Italy had promised each other in case either were forced to
disturb the status quo in the Balkans. Austria pleaded that her
invasion of Serbia involved no permanent disturbance, because no
permanent annexation was intended; to which Baron Sonnino retorted
that Austria had declared, during the Turkish-Italian war, that an
Italian bombardment of the Dardanelles or even the use of searchlights
against the Turkish coast would constitute a breach of the agreement.
In March Baron Burian accepted the principle that compensation was due
to Italy, and discussion arose as to its nature and extent. The
Italian Government pressed its advantage, and demanded not only the
whole of Italia irredenta, that unredeemed territory peopled by
Italians in the Trentino and across the Adriatic, which had been left
under Hapsburg dominion after the wars of Italian liberation, but
practically the whole north-eastern coasts of the Adriatic which were
inhabited by a predominantly Slav population.
Austria, under German pressure, travelled far on the path of
concession, but no conclusion could be reached that way. For
concessions at the expense of the Jugo-Slavs would not be recognized
by the Entente if it won the war; and if the Central Empires were
successful, they were not likely to regard these promises extracted
from them in their hour of need as more binding than other scraps of
paper. The negotiations were, indeed, no more than a diplomatic method
of forcing the issue and setting a standard for the concessions to be
demanded from the Entente as the price of Italy's intervention. We
could not afford, it was thought, to offer less than Austria, and we
probably underestimated Italy's fears and difficulties. She was really
bound to intervene, because if she stood out, she would lose whichever
side won. There was a triangular duel for the control of the Adriatic;
if the Central Empires were victorious the Adriatic would become a
Teutonic lake; if the Entente succeeded, its north-eastern shores
would become Jugo-Slav. Italy could only avoid that dilemma by
intervention in favour of the winning side, and thus establishing a
claim to share in the fruits of victory. Her ambitions were
considerable: not only did she insist that control of the eastern
shores of the Adriatic was essential to the safety of her own exposed
and harbourless coasts, but she regarded herself as the heir of
Venice, which "once did hold the gorgeous East in fee"; and she hoped
to retain the Greek islands of the Dodecanese which she had seized
during the Turkish War, and to acquire a foothold in Asia Minor and on
the Illyrian coast along the Straits of Otranto. It would not be easy
to harmonize her claims with those of Serbia who was already our ally,
nor those of Greece whose adhesion was expected. But Italy's sword
seemed worth the risk and the price in the spring of 1915, and the
Treaty of London was concluded on 26 April which promised her most of
what she desired, and produced some of the hardest tasks for the
ultimate Congress of Peace.
The compact was from the first more honoured in the breach than the
observance. Italy undertook to wage war by all means at her disposal
in union with France, Great Britain, and Russia against the Powers at
war with them. But for another year she remained at peace with
Germany. War was, indeed, declared upon Austria on 22 May, but the
union with the Allies was limited almost exclusively to the
prosecution of Italy's territorial ambitions, and the forces employed
hardly produced effects to correspond with the facts that the
population of Italy was almost equal to that of France and that the
bulk of the Austrian armies were involved in the struggle with Russia.
Italy had, indeed, peculiar disadvantages; she was more divided in
mind about the war than any of the great protagonists, and the
splendid qualities of her Bersaglieri and Alpini were not shared by
all her troops. Her war strength was put at a million men, and she
still had to cope with Turkish forces in Tripoli which only
surrendered at the end of the war as a condition of the armistice
concluded between Great Britain and Turkey. She was further hampered
by lack of coal and inadequate industrial equipment, and her northern
frontier had been so drawn in the Alps as to give Austria every
advantage of the passes both for offence and defence. To these
drawbacks were added a defective strategy dictated by political
idiosyncrasies. The capture of Trieste rather than the defeat of the
enemy was made the great objective of the campaign. It had the
advantage that it might not involve German troops in its defence, and
the defect that it was a divergent operation which even if successful
would have no material influence on the general course of the war.
Soon, too, it became evident that Trieste was not likely to fall until
Austria was defeated on other fields or fell into impotence through
domestic disruption (see Map, p. 298).
The campaign began with scattered Italian offensives all along the
northern frontier, designed to wrest from the Austrians their control
of the Alpine heights and passes, and to secure the flank of the main
attack across the Isonzo towards Trieste. Slight successes were gained
at various points, and the enemy was pressed back almost to the head
of Lake Garda. But no serious impression was made on his positions
except along the lower reaches of the Isonzo. Here the west bank from
Tolmino down to Monfalcone and the sea fell into Italian hands.
Gradisca was captured on 10 June and the river was crossed at
different points. On the 20th the Italians announced their firm
establishment on the slopes of Monte Nero above Tolmino and Caporetto,
and on 26 July a similar success on Monte San Michele and Monte dei
Sei Busi farther south near Gorizia. On 4 August they were even said
to be making progress on the Carso to the south-east. But all these
gains were illusory. Gorizia itself remained in Austrian hands for
another year, the heights east of it were not mastered until 1917, and
neither Tolmino nor the Carso fell to the Italians until the war had
been lost and won. There was nothing here to disturb the Austrian
concentration of effort against their Russian foes or to call for
German assistance to their Austrian allies. Italy did, however, on 20
August declare war upon Turkey, with which she had not yet made a
definitive peace since the outbreak of hostilities in 1911; and it was
even announced that she would send an expedition to the Eastern
Mediterranean. This was taken to mean a descent upon Adalia in Asia
Minor, where Italy desired to stake out her claims in the expectation
of an early dissolution of the Turkish Empire. But the Turks showed
unexpected signs of animation under German stimulants, and the
"eastern Mediterranean" expedition was reduced to the nearer and more
practical exploit of seizing Avlona which there were not even Turkish
troops to defend. Italy was not alone to blame, for the first use the
Serbs made of Italy's committal to the Entente cause was to dash
across to the Adriatic coast where their rival claims conflicted.
The Gallipoli campaign therefore dragged its weary length along
throughout the torrid heat of summer without an Italian diversion,
serving mainly as a demonstration of practical though ineffective
sympathy with our Russian allies. Another attack on Krithia, launched
on 28 June, gave us control of the Saghir Dere and led to considerable
Turkish losses in the counter-attacks which Enver, defying Liman's
wiser advice, had ordered; and the French under Gouraud made a
corresponding advance on the eastern shore of the peninsula. Gouraud
received a wound which required the amputation of his leg and his
retirement to France, where he later rendered more brilliant and far
more effective service. On 12 July yet another effort was made to
capture Krithia without substantial success; and the much-tried armies
on that forbidding and barren field then sat down to await the
reinforcements demanded and the new plan which was maturing for the
solution of the problem.
Stagnation also set in along the Western front, and the summer
campaign was marked by as little movement as the winter. An attack was
made in the Argonne on 20 June more in the interests of the Crown
Prince's reputation than in those of strategy; and the advance which
attained the depth of a mile was reduced by counter-attacks on 14 July
to 400 yards. Another at Hooge in front of Ypres on 30 July was marked
by the first employment in battle of one of our new divisions
recruited since the war began, and on the German side by the use of
liquid fire. It was successful in making an awkward dent in our line,
but again a counterattack on 9 August restored the situation. That,
however, was one which suited the Germans, for they were simply out to
hold their lines in the West, while behind those lines they
commandeered French and Belgian labour and worked French and Belgian
mines to eke out their own munitions of war and supply the needs of
their campaign on the other side of Europe. Towards stopping that our
checks to their local attacks in the West and offensive operations of
our own did nothing. Important and sweeping French successes continued
to be announced from time to time in the press, and occasionally
positions were captured and retained, as at Buval near Souchez,
Hébuterne, and Quenneviéres. The Germans, too, failed in their attacks
on Les Éparges, while the French succeeded in capturing Metzeral in
Alsace. But the great offensive in Artois had subsided into stubborn
hand-to-hand fighting in the Labyrinth, which was as costly as a
first-class battle without producing its results.
So spring passed into summer and the days began to wane, with the
Germans reaping the fruits of their foresight and preparations in the
East, while we pinned our faith to the silver lining of the clouds and
looked day by day for that offensive which was to relieve our
hard-pressed Allies but did not come. The truth was hidden from the
public eye, and possibly with prudence; for there are times in which
without illusions the weight of gloom would be intolerable. The
difficulty is that illusion also dims the sense of danger and of duty;
our belated provision for war was still retarded by strikes,
profiteering, and perversity, and the King's example of total
abstinence failed to prevent the nation from spending more on drink in
war than in peace. An imperfectly educated people is slow to grasp a
novel situation; and it was only by stealth and caution that it could
be led along the path of preparation for the part we had to play by
national service, national thrift, and national control.