THE SECOND WINTER OF THE WAR
The failure of the Entente offensives in the Dardanelles and in France
had at last convinced the public of the truth of Lord Kitchener's
prophecy, that the war would be long if it was to result in a German
defeat. Obstinate optimists had in 1914 believed in a victory before
the first Christmas, while more reasonable critics hoped for one by
the end of the following year. When the second Christmas came round
the date of triumph had been postponed for another year or two, and
few expected that it would arrive much before the end of the three
years' term Lord Kitchener had suggested, or come at all unless
greater efforts were made than had hitherto been the case. The
magnificent response to the call for voluntary enlistment in 1914 had
confirmed the traditional English view in favour of volunteers;
between two and three million men had been raised by this method,
either as members of the new army or as Territorials who freely
surrendered their privilege of being called upon to serve for home
defence alone; and it was but slowly that the nation was constrained
to abandon the voluntary principle for that system of conscription
which savoured so strongly of the militarism we were out to fight. But
the Russian disasters and the failure of our offensives in the spring
warned the Government of the advisability of at least preparing for
other measures, and an Act had been passed for a national registration
on 15 August of all males between the ages of 15 and 65. The autumn
confirmed the foreboding of spring, and on 5 October Lord Derby
undertook on behalf of the Government a recruiting campaign by which
those who had not enlisted were induced to do so on the condition that
they would not be compelled to serve before those who had feebler
claims to exemption.
This campaign failed to produce the comprehensive results required,
and at Christmas the Government took the plunge of proposing
conscription for all unmarried men under the age of forty-two who were
physically fit, and whose enlistment was not precluded by the national
importance of their occupation or the onerous nature of their domestic
liabilities. Even this measure of conscription was found inadequate by
the following spring, and in May 1916 the exemption of married men was
cancelled, and a general system of conscription on the continental
model was introduced. Both measures were passed by large majorities,
and encountered no organized opposition in the country. A few hundreds
of conscientious objectors preferred to be treated as criminals rather
than contribute in any way to the shedding of blood even in the
defence of their country and themselves; and only the baser among
their fellow-men attributed to them any worse motive than impractical
idealism. The example of the mother-country was subsequently followed,
with more liberal exemptions, by New Zealand and the Dominion of
Canada; but Australia, which had long enjoyed compulsory military
service for home defence, and was the only country in which the issue
had to be submitted to a referendum, twice rejected the extension of
the principle of compulsion to service outside the borders of the
Commonwealth. The Channel Islands, which also had compulsion for their
own insular defence, were equally loath to expand the idea, and
Ireland was for political and some logical reasons exempted from the
scope of the British Act; the Home Rule Bill had been placed on the
statute-book, though its operation had been suspended, and it was
thought as politic to allow her as it was to allow the Dominions to
make her own decision.
In other matters than conscription Great Britain was slowly and
reluctantly constrained to follow the German lead until the whole
country became a controlled establishment; and a series of Defence of
the Realm Acts deprived Englishmen of nearly all those liberties which
they had regarded for centuries as proofs of their superior wisdom,
but were now found to be merely the accidents of their past insular
security. Freedom of the press, of speech, and even of private
correspondence was subjected to censorship, and there was not in the
whole range of our indictments against foreign autocracy one charge
which might not with some colour be brought against ourselves. Fear
entered once more into the English mind, and fear produced its
invariable results, until precedents for what was done in the
twentieth century had to be sought in the worst days of the Star
Chamber, Titus Oates, and Judge Jeffreys. Once more, when the panic
reached its height during the spring of 1918, British subjects were
deprived of liberty without due process of law and by arbitrary
tribunals sitting behind closed doors; once more we reverted to the
old maxim of Roman law and the everlasting plea of despots, salus
populi suprema lex, and learnt to practise ourselves the precepts we
scorned in others. Liberty and even law were found to be luxuries in
which war made us too poor to indulge. Truth itself was made
tongue-tied to authority and became the handmaid of the State. To save
ourselves and the world from barbarism we had to descend to the
barbarous level of our foes, and poison-gas and the killing and
starvation of women and children were developed into effective methods
of warfare. It was all done in the name of humanity; for to shorten
the war was the humanest course, and the shortest way was that of the
greatest destruction. The means of destruction were developed at a
prodigious rate, and England became a vast laboratory of death. War
for the time was our only industry, and all who could be spared from
the actual work of killing were pressed into the task of providing the
weapons, the food, and the education for those on more active service.
Germany set the pace both in efficiency and in cruelty, and her
success in 1915 convinced her that she could defy the moral scruples
of mankind with impunity. Nothing save verbal protests had followed
the sinking of the Lusitania, and even those had led Mr. Bryan,
President Wilson's Secretary of State, to resign for fear lest they
might prove too strong. That crime was accordingly succeeded by
others, and further American lives were lost by the torpedoing of the
Arabic on 19 August, the Ancona on 7 November, and the Persia on 30
December. The unneutral conduct of Dr. Dumba, the Austro-Hungarian
ambassador in the United States, did, however, precipitate a demand
for his recall; and American relations grew far more strained with
Austria than with her more powerful and pernicious partner. For the
moment President Wilson seemed more concerned with Great Britain's
disrespect for American trade than with Germany's disrespect for
American lives, and put forward a claim to be regarded as the champion
of neutrality which contrasted oddly with his inaction a year before
when Belgian neutrality was at stake. No one, however, could boast of
consistency during the war, and President Wilson atoned for his
earlier tenderness towards neutral rights by fathering in the end a
league of nations which would abolish neutrality altogether. No doubt,
his somewhat censorious protests against the British blockade and the
methods of its enforcement were primarily intended for domestic
consumption, and even then their effect was severely discounted by the
growing tale of German outrage; the world at large was in no mood to
listen to the laments of profiteers when its ears were tingling with
the story of Edith Cavell's execution. She was an English nurse in
Belgium who had tended with impartiality German and Belgian wounded;
but she had facilitated the escape of some of the latter, and the
Germans allowed no feeling of chivalry or humanity to interfere with
the barbarous logic of their martial law. On 12 October, in spite of
the efforts of American diplomacy and the horror of the civilized
world, she was shot by order of a German court martial confirmed by
the German military governor of Belgium. There were many heroines in
the war, but none achieved a surer fame, because no one's fate
exhibited in a clearer light the spirit with which humanity was at
grips.
It was to the credit of humanity that this single outrage produced a
greater horror than the German Zeppelin campaign, which reached its
height in the winter and affected a large proportion of the civilian
population. It was an extension of the policy of the Scarborough
raids, and while it could be justified on the ambiguous and
contradictory provisions of The Hague Convention, which exposed to the
risk of bombardment any locality containing soldiers, munitions, or
material for war, or means for military transport, its object was
mainly to terrorize the civilian population; and the Zeppelin, in
particular, was an engine of war which could not discriminate between
legitimate and other objects of attack. This disability also applied
to the aeroplane, and there was something very childish in the
persistent assumptions that Entente air-raids were not only
exclusively aimed at, but invariably successful in achieving military
damage--even when the French boasted of having on 22 September
dropped thirty bombs on the King of Württemburg's palace at
Stuttgart--and that the Germans always projected civilian destruction
and never succeeded in effecting anything else. It was part of that
delirium of wartime psychology, which induces all belligerents to
believe that no one but an enemy ever commits atrocities, and no one
but an ally is capable of virtue.
The possibility of air-raids had long been foreseen, and as early as
the first October of the war the lights of London had been dimmed. The
first attempt by Zeppelins was made on Norfolk on 19 January 1915
without any loss of life or appreciable loss of property. More damage
was done to property by a second raid on 14 April directed against the
Tyne, and four more were made in April on various parts along the East
Coast. On 10 May a woman was killed and some houses demolished at
Southend, and on the 31st the Zeppelins first reached London to the
great delight of the German people. The East and North-east coasts
were repeatedly raided in June, and by the end of the first year of
war, 89 civilians had been killed and 220 injured, while possibly half
a dozen Zeppelins had suffered destruction in the various theatres of
war. One was destroyed by Lieutenant Warneford's monoplane in Belgium
on 7 June, but none fell victims to anti-aircraft defences in
England. The raids became more serious as the nights grew darker: on 7
September 20 were killed and 86 injured in London, and on 13 October
56 were killed and 114 injured. Bad weather produced a respite in
November and December, but on 31 January 1916 the north Midlands had
67 killed and 117 injured, and in March and April similar casualties
attended raids on the Lowlands of Scotland and the East Coast from
Yorkshire to Kent. France suffered as well as England, but the Germans
took a peculiar pleasure in the English raids, because they thought
Zeppelins were the only means of bringing home to the English people
the realities of war.
Air-raids were, however, one of the horrors of war rather than a means
of achieving victory, and the military importance of aircraft never
attained proportions corresponding to the space the subject occupied
in the public press and the popular mind. They did not affect the
duration of the war by a single day, and throughout the winter of
1915-16 it seemed to increase in horror without any other sort of
progression on land or water. There was no naval action because
Germany kept her fleet in harbour, and relied upon mines and
submarines to wear down not so much the naval strength as the economic
resources of the Allies. Occasionally a cruiser or smaller vessel was
lost, and one pre-Dreadnought battleship, the Edward VII. But German
successes were mostly scored against merchant vessels and similar
craft; and our activities in the Balkans, coupled with the facilities
afforded by the Aegean to submarines, made the Eastern Mediterranean a
favourite scene for their operations. By the end of 1915 over a
thousand vessels, Allied and neutral, of one sort or another, had been
put out of action by mines and submarines; but the fact that few of
them had any fighting value concealed the importance of their economic
loss from the eyes of the public if not of the Government itself. A
more legitimate and romantic form of depredation was the cruise of the
Moewe, a disguised auxiliary cruiser, which succeeded in January and
February 1916 in capturing fifteen British merchantmen in the
Atlantic, and returned safe to Kiel with prisoners and booty. The
absence of German commerce made British retaliation impossible except
in the Baltic, where our submarines had some remarkable successes
until Sweden closed the entrance by mining her territorial waters. She
was within her rights in doing so, but the effect of her action was to
give German commerce in the Baltic a security which was lacking to the
commerce of the world outside, because Holland and Denmark shrank from
following Sweden's example. Mr. Balfour pointed out the unfriendly
nature of Sweden's action, but Russia was particularly averse from
adding Sweden to her enemies at that juncture, and remonstrances were
in vain.
On land the most active spheres of operation were in winter naturally
in the tropical or sub-tropical regions. The East African campaign
still hung fire owing to various causes, principally perhaps because
of doubts and possibly disputes whether it belonged primarily to the
sphere of purely British, Indian, or South African activity, and could
best be fought with the different kinds of troops those various
Governments had at their disposal. The earlier operations had been
undertaken mainly by troops from India, and for a year longer there
was little but border fighting until in March 1916 General Smuts
arrived with South African forces to begin the serious work of
conquest. The principal work of the winter was the reduction of the
Cameroons. Considerable progress had been made by June in overrunning
this vast territory, half as large again as the German Empire in
Europe: the French had occupied Lome from the south, while the
British, after some checks on the Nigerian frontier, had advanced to
Ngaundere. The rainy season then set in, and operations were suspended
until October. The Germans had transferred their capital to Yaunde,
which was made the objective of converging attacks by British, French,
and Belgian columns from north, east, and south. The British reached
it on 1 January 1916, but the movements had been admirably timed, and
the French came three days later. Only isolated posts in distant
localities remained, and the last of them fell on 18 February.
Mesopotamia
From Egypt the Turks had been diverted, since their defeat in February
1915, by the attack on the Dardanelles; but the German advance in the
Balkans had synchronized with attempts to disturb us on the western
borders of Egypt by German and Turkish intrigues with the Senussi
federation of Moslem tribes, and in Tripoli, which the Italians had
never succeeded in completely subjugating. Trouble began to threaten
in November 1915, and the frontier post at Sollum was withdrawn to
Mersa Matruh, the terminus of a railway line from Alexandria. The Arab
attacks began on 13 December and increased in strength until the
middle of January 1916; but with their inferior equipment and means of
communication they had little chance of success and were easily beaten
off with considerable losses, which led to dissension among the Arab
forces and then to their dissipation. They were finally defeated at
Agagia on 26 February, and Sollum was regained on 14 March. There was
no further trouble on the western frontier of Egypt, and a
repercussion of the Senussi discontent far south in Darfur was
satisfactorily suppressed by a detachment of the Egyptian Army which
occupied El Fasher on 22 May. East of the Suez Canal there were only
raids in which we were generally successful, except for the loss of
Katia on 23 April; in retaliation El Arish was destroyed by
bombardment from British monitors on 18 May.
In Egypt we stood and were still to stand for another year upon the
defensive; but farther east in Mesopotamia we were slipping into an
adventurous and chequered offensive which grew insensibly after the
manner of the Dardanelles campaign. Our original operations at the
head of the Persian Gulf had, indeed, unlike the attack on Gallipoli,
been defensive in their purpose; but the distinction between the two
easily disappears in military operations, and the Germans were only
more logical militarists than other people when they openly avowed
that offence was the best means of defence. British dominion in India
and in Egypt had grown upon that principle, and it grew in much the
same way in Mesopotamia. The security of our control of the Persian
Gulf required, we discovered, the occupation of Basra; the defence of
Basra demanded an advance to Kurna, and from Kurna we had proceeded in
June to Amara. There we realized that our left flank might be turned
at Nasiriyeh, and having got both Amara and Nasiriyeh, one on the
Tigris and the other at the junction of the Euphrates with the
Shatt-el-Hai (which links the Euphrates with the Tigris at Kut), we
concluded that our position would be improved if, by seizing Kut, we
could bar a Turkish advance down either the Tigris or the
Shatt-el-Hai. The logic was sound enough for those who had the means
to enforce it; and in spite of the torrid heat, the river route and
our gun-boats enabled us to master Nasiriyeh on 25 July. Early in
August began the advance up the Tigris from Amara to Kut, whither the
Turks had retired. They had been well taught by their German
instructors, and their position astride the river was well entrenched.
But Townshend's attack was skilfully planned; feinting on the Turkish
right on 27 September, he outflanked and drove in their left on the
28th, and at the end of a long day disposed of the Turkish
reinforcements and entered Kut on the 29th.
The campaigning season was only about to begin; the Turks had decamped
in disorganization towards Baghdad; and the temptation to follow
proved irresistible. When so much had been done with such ease, it
seemed to be flying in the face of Providence not to make a dash for
Baghdad and seize the end of that railway-route on which the Germans
were beginning to work with such energy from the other direction in
the Balkans. If it led from Berlin to Baghdad, might it not also lead
from Baghdad to Berlin? There was assuredly a touch of fantastic
imagination in the transformation which first came over and then
overcame our strategy in the East, and we found that the transition
from defence to offence was slight compared with the change from a
sound to a speculative offensive. Kut might be essential to the
defence of the delta, but if Baghdad was needed for the protection of
Kut, there was no limit east of the Bosporus to which the line and the
logic of defence might not be pushed. The argument might have been
sound, had it reposed on a firmer foundation of force. But the impetus
and the organization which had carried us to Kut would be spent before
we reached Baghdad; and arrangements for transport, commissariat, and
medical aid, which might have served for the lesser needs and the
shorter lines of communication, broke down in utter confusion under
the demands of the larger ambition which they had not been planned to
fulfil. We had but 13,000 bayonets, two-thirds of whom were Indian
troops, while the Turks could call up reserves many times that number;
and our men were worn with ten months' incessant campaigning under a
tropical sun. General Townshend protested against the adventure, but
was overruled by Sir John Nixon and the Commander-in-chief in India.
Within a week from the fall of Kut the advance on Baghdad began, and
at Azizie half-way between the two, the Turks were routed again as
they had been at Kut. By 12 November, Townshend was in front of
Ctesiphon, about twenty-four miles from Baghdad. Here the Turks were
strongly entrenched. Their right was protected by the Mahmudiyeh Canal
which ran from the Tigris to the Euphrates, and their main position
consisted of two strongly fortified lines on the eastern bank of the
Tigris. Townshend's attack on the 22nd resembled his attack on Kut,
and after hard fighting the first line was carried. But the second was
the real Turkish defence, and our wearied and smaller forces could not
cope with the continuous stream of Turkish reinforcements. The Turks
lost heavily in their counterattacks on the 23rd, but they could
afford to do so, while we could only succeed by a speedy and
inexpensive victory which the strength of the Turkish position and
reinforcements forbade. The gamble had failed, and the only thing to
do was to cut the loss and retreat as well as we could. No proper
provision had been made for such an eventuality, and the horrors of
that retirement reflected grave discredit on those responsible for the
campaign. Hard pressed by the pursuing Turks, our diminished force was
back at Kut on 3 December, where in a few days it was surrounded by
the enemy now under the command of the German Marshal von der Goltz.
The Germans had not been idle on the flanks of this bid for Baghdad,
and their intrigues in Persia led to a revolt of the gendarmerie,
which was officered by Swedes, and to the seizure by the pro-German
insurgents of Kum, Hamadan, and other towns in central Persia.
Fortunately this move was countered by prompt action on the part of
Russia. Teheran was occupied by Russian forces by the end of November,
Kum and Hamadan by 11 December, and a pro-Entente Government was
established. The German route through Persia towards Afghanistan was
blocked for the time; but pro-German forces at Kermanshah impeded a
Russian march to the relief of Kut, where a fresh Turkish division
from Gallipoli arrived on 23 December and a vigorous effort was made
to carry the place by assault. It failed, and the Turks sat down to a
blockade, while farther south they constructed formidable obstacles to
the advance of the relieving forces coming up the river. Their
position was selected with considerable skill at Sanna-i-Yat on a
narrow strip of land between the Suweicha marshes and the river, while
between it and Kut there was established the strongly-fortified Es
Sinn line. The depth of these defences was nearly twenty-five miles,
and the task of carrying the successive lines would tax anything but a
relieving force far greater than that which was attempting it.
Sir John Nixon had been succeeded by Sir Percy Lake, but the advancing
force was under the immediate command of General Aylmer. On 21 January
he failed to carry the first of the lines at Umm-el-Hanna, although it
was announced in Parliament that British forces had reached the last
position at Es Sinn; and it was not till 7-8 March that Aylmer made a
bold attempt at once to turn the Sanna-i-Yat defences and relieve Kut
by a surprise attack on the right bank of the river. Everything
depended once more upon initial success, for length of communications
and lack of supplies made continuous pressure impossible; and the
Turks were ready and their defences strong. Aylmer was no more
fortunate at Es Sinn than Townshend at Ctesiphon, and the command was
taken by General Gorringe. He reverted on 5 April to the lines on the
left bank at Umm-el-Hanna. They were carried, and twelve hours later
the further line at Felahiyeh. Keary's Lahore division had been
equally successful on the right bank; but a flood caused by the
melting snows on the Armenian hills interposed to bar the way to the
relief of Kut. A final attempt was made on the 23rd across the
water-logged land in front of Sanna-i-Yat; but advance was impossible
along the narrow causeway which alone gave foothold for the troops,
and on the 29th Townshend's force in Kut, consisting of 2000 British
and 6000 Indian troops, surrendered after a siege of nearly five
months.
After Gallipoli, Mesopotamia. Until March 1918 our reverses in these
two "side-shows" were counted our worst disasters in the war, and to
the electorally-heated imagination of Mr. Lloyd George they appeared
even later as the sum and substance of British achievement before he
became Prime Minister. In the case of Kut the responsibility rested
mainly with the Indian Government, to which also was due our brilliant
recovery in the East when Lord Chelmsford, Sir Charles Monro, and Sir
Stanley Maude--all appointed in 1916--had time to retrieve the
mistakes of their predecessors in the Viceroyalty, Command-in-chief of
the Indian Army, and command of the Mesopotamian forces. Meanwhile, it
was fortunate for the prestige of the Entente in the East that
Russia's collapse in Europe appeared to have no effect upon the vigour
of her action in the middle East. The Grand Duke Nicholas, who had
been transferred to the command in the Caucasus, found an admirable
chief of staff in General Yudenitch, and between them they brought off
a stroke against Turkey which was more sensational than the Turks'
success at Kut and Gallipoli.
Erzerum was reckoned the strongest fortress in the Turkish Empire, but
amid the distractions of the Dardanelles and Mesopotamian campaigns it
had escaped proper attention from the Turks and their German experts,
and the Grand Duke profited by the fact that Turkish troops, relieved
from the pressure at Gallipoli, were sent to Kut and not to the
Caucasus. Moreover, the ordinary line of communication with Erzerum by
the sea and Trebizond had been cut by the Russian destruction of
Turkish shipping, and transport by land was almost as difficult as it
was between the head of the Persian Gulf and Kut. The Russian
communications were better, but theirs was an adventurous enterprise
across mountain passes under the arctic conditions of midwinter; and
few people had any inkling of its inception when Yudenitch began to
move on 11 January. By the 16th he was at Kuprikeui where the road
crosses the Araxes, and in a two days' battle he broke the Turkish
army, driving its remnants south towards Mush and clearing the way to
Erzerum. Time was required to bring up the heavy guns, but early in
February the forts on Deve Boyun were under bombardment, and another
Russian army advancing from the north down the valley of the Kara Su
defeated a Turkish division and captured Kara Gubek on the 12th and
Tafta on the 14th. From the south the Russians were also crossing the
Palantuken Dagh, and the fate of Erzerum was sealed. Its evacuation
was completed early on the 16th, and a few hours later the Cossacks
rode into the city. To the south the Russian left entered Mush and
Bitlis, gaining the northern shores of Lake Van, while their right
slowly pushed along the Black Sea coast in the direction of Trebizond.
In Persia, too, the Russians occupied Kermanshah and descended the
pass to Khanikin and the Mesopotamian plain; but it was an adventurous
body of cavalry rather than a substantial military force which joined
hands with the British on the Tigris some weeks after the fall of Kut.
The Russians had to some extent redeemed their failure in Europe, but
others they had not been able to save.
The Caucasus
In Europe their defence was materially assisted by the British and
French attacks in Artois and Champagne and by the needs of Mackensen's
offensive in the Balkans. To both areas troops were diverted from the
German front in Russia, and the centre was especially denuded. No
advantage was, however, taken of this weakness, partly because of
Russia's general debility and partly because what efforts she could
afford were required for the defence of the Dvina and for the
sympathetic activity of Ivanov in Galicia, which was the nearest
approach Russia could make to intervention in the Balkans. The German
attack on the line of the Dvina was not merely intended to fend off a
Russian attack in the centre; it had also the positive aim of securing
Riga and comfortable winter quarters for the German army in the north.
Riga, however, was not an easy nut to crack; its flank was defended by
the sea, immediately south of it were marshes across which only
causeways ran, and to the east stretched the formidable obstacle of
the Dvina. Roads and rails for the most part crossed it at Dvinsk, and
the southern approaches to Dvinsk itself lay through land and water as
intricately mixed as in the Masurian mazes of East Prussia. But on
Dvinsk the German attack was concentrated, and after a preliminary
failure on 25 September a week's bombardment and assault began on 3
October. The siege guns which had been so fatal at Kovno and elsewhere
were brought up against a minor fortress and failed. Ruszky was in
command, and he took care to keep the howitzers out of range of the
city by an arc of far-flung trenches which the numerous scattered
lakes saved from outflanking. Illukst was at one time taken by the
Germans but found of little value for the larger purpose; and German
prisoners complained that Dvinsk, which they failed to take, had cost
them more than all the greater fortresses they had captured. In the
third week of October Hindenburg transferred his efforts back to Riga,
where he met with little better success. He got as far as Olai on the
direct route from Mitau, and even secured a foothold on Dahlen Island
in the river south-east of Riga; but these successes profited him no
more than the capture of Illukst. On 7 November the Russians
recaptured Olai, and on the 10th, with the help of their fleet, drove
back the Germans, who had advanced along the coast, beyond Shlock and
Kemmern and Kish, extending their lines to Ragassem and Kalnzem. In
the same month a similar Russian counter-offensive recaptured Illutsk
and pushed the Germans farther away from Dvinsk (see Map, p. 274).
Far to the south below the Pripet marshes which divided the Russian
front into two, the Germans and the Russians under Brussilov engaged
in thrust and counter-thrust along the Styr which caused Czartorysk to
change hands again and again, and earned for these operations the
nickname of "the Poliesian quadrille"; and the fluctuations on the
Strypa were equally indecisive. But the situation in the Balkans
suggested the need for something less ambiguous nearer the Rumanian
frontier if Rumanian neutrality was to be preserved; and the objective
selected for Ivanov's new offensive was Czernowitz the capital of the
Bukovina. The attack began on 24 December, and the struggle lasted for
over three weeks. Containing battles were fought along the Strypa and
the Styr, and Czartorysk passed once more into Russian hands and Kolki
was added to their gains. But the main object was not attained. The
Russians seized the heights between Toporoutz and Rarancze and threw
some shells into Czernowitz, but they failed to capture the crucial
point at Uscieczko on the Dniester. Mackensen and five divisions had,
however, to be diverted from the Balkans, and Russia's offensive in
the Bukovina helped to conceal her designs on Erzerum. Rumania was
saved from descending on the wrong side of the fence; but her natural
reluctance to abandon her perch prohibited that Russian attack on
Bulgaria through Rumanian territory which might otherwise have been
made, but would probably have failed and would in any case have come
too late to relieve the Serbian disaster.
The winter of 1915-16 thus passed with little to relieve the gloom.
Erzerum had balanced Kut, and the Cameroons had ceased to be a German
land. But these were trifles compared to the gigantic clash of arms in
Europe, and here the Germans had done more than in their first year's
fighting. Russia had been dealt a far more staggering blow than France
in 1914, and Serbia and Montenegro had fared worse than Belgium, while
in both East and West our counter-offensives had been ineffectual.
The Germans naturally thought they had won the war; they had merely
reached the climax of their success, and that climax did not
constitute a victory. The Allies' heads were "bloody but unbowed," and
they were still the masters of their fate. The sea was theirs and all
that therein lay; some of them were only in process of mobilizing
their resources; and the moral factor in war which, like the mills of
God grinds slowly but grinds exceeding small, required patience for
its full development. Meanwhile the German military machine had done
no more than establish a balance of power which was to be tilted in
one direction by the Russian Revolution and then in the other by
American intervention.