THE TURN OF THE TIDE
The German presentiment of disaster was justified by events in the
spring of 1917, and the new British Government seemed to have come in
on a flowing tide. In spite of the gloomy picture of the situation
which Mr. Lloyd George had drawn for his chief in December, confidence
in a speedy victory animated the appeal of his ministry for further
financial support; and in most of the spheres of war the first quarter
of 1917 saw the reaping of harvests sown by other hands. The deferred
dividends on the Somme campaign were paid, and the Germans fell back
from hundreds of square miles of French territory. Mesopotamia was
conquered as the result of the patient labours of Sir Charles Monro
and the brilliant strategy of Sir Stanley Maude, who had been
appointed in August 1916. The meagre German holding in East Africa was
further reduced; and even distressful Rumania put a stop to the German
advance.
Security for the Rumanian forces could not, however, be found short of
the Sereth, which would give them a straight line with the Russian
frontier protected by the impassable delta of the Danube on their
left, and a flank in the Carpathians on their right; and from the fall
of Bukarest to the end of December Averescu the Rumanian commander,
and Presan his chief of staff, retreated to this line fighting
rearguard battles on the way. The most stubborn of these was a four
days' conflict at Rimnic Sarat in the centre on 22-26 December, after
which Mackensen entered the town on the 27th. Sakharov conformed to
this retreat in the Dobrudja; on 4 January Macin, the last place east
and south of the Danube, was evacuated, and on the 5th Braila on the
opposite bank south of the Sereth and Danube confluence. On the 23rd
the Bulgarians, taking advantage of the unprecedented frost, crossed
the marshes at Tulcea, but were annihilated by the Rumanians on the
northern bank, and remained content for the rest with the defensive.
The same wintry conditions put an end to fighting at the other
extremity of the line in the Carpathian passes, but in the centre
Mackensen seized Focsani on the 8th and occupied the bank of the
Sereth. That line had originally been fortified against the Russians,
and it faced in the wrong direction; but the position was strong, and
when on the 19th Mackensen sought to force it he was repulsed in a
costly encounter. Russian reinforcements which might have saved
Wallachia came in time to protect Moldavia; and the war-worn Rumanian
army was retired to refit, the defence of the Sereth being left to the
Russians. The Germans made the most of their booty in Wallachia, which
suffered the fate of Belgium and of Serbia; though the stores of grain
had been burnt and the Rumanian oil-wells put out of action for many
months. In one respect Rumania was less fortunate than the other
little nations: in his fanatical hatred of Russia, Carp rejoiced in
her ally's defeat--albeit that country was his own--and Marghiloman
remained in Bukarest to curry favour with its conquerors, and
ultimately to become for a brief and discreditable period the Premier
whom the Germans imposed on Rumania after the Treaty of Bukarest.
Meanwhile the patriotic parties rallied round the ministry at Jassy
and formed a Coalition Government.
The defence of Rumania now seemed to occupy all the energy Russia
could spare from her domestic preoccupations. In January there was a
sound strategical effort to divert German attention from the south by
a counter-offensive from Riga, and an advance of some four miles was
made to Kalnzem. But the Germans soon recovered most of the ground;
and elsewhere the front was quiescent. There was no repetition of the
great blow at Erzerum of January 1916, and in Persia Baratov's small
but adventurous force was driven back by the Turks from Khanikin to
Hamadan, and the resistance to Turco-Teutonic invasion and intrigue
was left more and more to British effort. Co-operation seemed
impossible to synchronize in the East; one partner retreated whenever
the other advanced. While therefore the Russians halted in Asia Minor
and withdrew in Persia, Sir Stanley Maude was gathering his forces for
a spring on Baghdad. Gorringe had already in May 1916 advanced some
way up the right bank of the Tigris towards Kut; but summer forbade
active operations, and Maude had been duly impressed by the force
which previous experiences in Mesopotamia had given to the adage about
more haste and less speed. The autumn was spent in careful study and
preparation, which would preclude a repetition of the retreat from
Ctesiphon and the fall of Kut (see Map, p. 177).
By 12 December he was ready to attack. The Turks still held the
Sanna-i-Yat positions on the left bank of the Tigris, but on the right
they had been pushed back to a line running across the angle from the
Tigris at Magasis towards its southern tributary the Shatt-el-Hai. The
Turks under their German taskmasters had not been idle, and this
angle, as well as the extension of the Turkish line along the
Shatt-el-Hai and their secondary defences on the right bank of the
Tigris above Kut, had been well protected by trenches and wire
entanglements. The breaking down of these obstacles required stubborn
fighting as well as skilful tactics, but the only alternative was to
penetrate the Sanna-i-Yat positions and they had proved impregnable in
the spring. A serious attempt had, however, to be made at Sanna-i-Yat
in order to detain there a serious Turkish force; and while Marshall
pushed his way through on the right bank, Cobbe was kept hammering on
the left. On the 13th crossings of the Shatt-el-Hai were effected at
Atab and Basrugiyeh some eight miles from Kut, and Marshall advanced
on both banks to Kalah-Hadji-Fahan. On the 18th he reached a point on
the Tigris just below Kut in the Khadairi bend. Rain and floods then
impeded our advance for a month, but the Khadairi bend was gradually
cleared of the Turks, and most of their positions in the angle of the
Tigris and Shatt-el-Hai were taken. On 10 February Marshall pushed on
beyond the Shatt-el-Hai, reached the right bank of the Tigris above
the Shumran bend, and by the 16th forced the Turks in the Dahra bend
across the river.
The Turks had now been driven off the right bank below, in front of,
and far above Kut, but they held the left bank as far down as
Sanna-i-Yat, and Maude's task was to find a way across. He chose the
Shumran bend, but diverted the attention of the Turks by thrusting at
Sanna-i-Yat from 17 to 22 February. On the 22nd he also made feints to
cross at Magasis and Kut, but on the 23rd the real attack was made at
Shumran. Troops were ferried across and a bridge built before evening,
and on the 24th the Turks were driven back on to their lines of
communication between Baghdad and Kut. Meanwhile Cobbe had forced six
enemy lines at Sanna-i-Yat and then found the remainder deserted. The
Turks were in full retreat towards Baghdad, and Cobbe entered Kut
unopposed. The pursuit was taken up by Marshall, who reached Azizieh
in four days. There he halted till 5 March to prepare for his final
advance. On the 6th he passed deserted trenches at Ctesiphon, and on
the 7th reached the Diala. For two days the Turks disputed the
passage, but a force, transported to the right bank of the Tigris,
enfiladed their position on the Diala and captured their trenches at
Shawa Khan on the 9th. Our forces on both sides of the river entered
Baghdad on the 11th, thus concluding a model campaign which reflected
glory alike on the British and Indian troops engaged and on their
commanders, and raised British prestige in the East higher than it had
been before the fall of Kut.
The work of our armies in Egypt was less sensational, but it was
making solid progress and laying firm foundations during the autumn of
1916. The Grand Sherif of Mecca was proclaimed king of the Hedjaz, and
he was a thorn in the side of the Turks. Their defeat at Romani had
been followed by the steady construction of a railway eastward across
the desert from Kantara, and on 20 December El Arish was captured,
while on the 23rd the Turks who had fled south-east to Magdhaba were
there surrounded and forced to surrender. The success was repeated at
Rafa on the Palestine frontier a fortnight later, and presently the
whole Sinai peninsula was cleared of the enemy forces (see Map, p.
352). Early in February a final blow was struck on the western
frontiers of Egypt at the Senussi, and Egypt was converted from an
enemy objective into a fruitful basis of operations against the
Turkish Empire. Whatever might be said for frontal attacks in the west
of Europe, ways round were proved to be the shortest in the East, and
the failure of the direct blow at Turkey's heart in the Dardanelles
was redeemed by success along the circuitous routes through Egypt and
Mesopotamia.
Among the other forgotten achievements of the first two and a half
years of the war was the completion, chiefly by British arms, of the
establishment in the African continent of Entente and mainly British
supremacy. For even before the Turks had been driven from the
frontiers of Egypt the Germans had been expelled from all the
important parts of East Africa. The progress had been slow and not
very creditable to our earlier efforts, which failed through an
underestimate of the German strength, and particularly of the skill
and resource of the German commander Von Lettow-Vorbeck. But it was
sound as well as inevitable strategy to make sure of what we had by
suppressing rebellion in the South African Union and then securing its
frontiers by the conquest of its German neighbour before proceeding to
concentrate forces for an offensive against an isolated German
stronghold which could not threaten any essential interest nor affect
the main struggle for victory in the war. The case against divergent
operations was strongest of all against the East African campaign; and
it would have been criminal folly for the sake of amour propre or
imperial expansion to diminish our safeguards against a German victory
in the West, or weaken the defence of our threatened communications
with Egypt and India. Von Lettow-Vorbeck had forces enough to hold his
own, but he never even attempted the conquest of British East Africa
or the Belgian Congo, and the most nervous anticipation could not
picture him as a serious danger to other dominions.
The Conquest Of East Africa
He was therefore left very much to himself until the South African
Union, having set its own house in order and secured its frontiers by
expelling German rule from the southern part of the continent, was
able to lend its military power and its generalship to the task of
reducing the Germans in East Africa. It was formidable enough, not so
much from the opposition of man as because of the obstacles nature
placed in the way. A tropical climate, torrential rains which played
havoc with transport, the tzetze-fly which slew beasts of burden in
hundreds of thousands, impenetrable forests, impassable swamps,
immense mountain masses, and an area almost as large as Central
Europe, provided a problem as vast as that of the great Boer War, and
more difficult of solution but for the fact that Von Lettow-Vorbeck's
forces could not be compared with those of our past antagonists and
present allies. Still they were far more dangerous than any we had
encountered in our normal wars against native races; for they had been
trained by German officers, experts with machine guns and the other
scientific equipment of civilized conflict; and three ships at least
had eluded the blockade and relieved Von Lettow-Vorbeck's most
pressing need of munitions; and he had selected his coloured troops
from the hardiest and most bellicose of the native tribes. With their
help he had kept the German colony intact until 1916, and even held at
Taveta an angle of British East Africa.
Smith-Dorrien had been selected for the command in the autumn of 1915,
but ill-health prevented him from taking it up, and in February 1916
General Smuts arrived at Mombasa to conduct the campaign. Experience
had made us shy of enforced landings from the sea; and rejecting the
idea of seizing as bases Tanga or Dar-es-Salaam, which would have
given him shorter lines of communication with the Cape, Smuts adopted
the more circuitous route by the railway from Mombasa, with the design
of forcing the gap below Kilimanjaro and driving the Germans
southwards, while British and Belgian subsidiary forces impinged upon
the enemy's flank from the Lakes, the Congo State, and Nyasa in the
west. His advance began on 5 March and Taveta was occupied on the
10th. A frontal attack on the pass between Kilimanjaro and the Pare
mountains savoured rather of British than Boer methods, and Smuts
preferred to send Van Deventer round the north of Kilimanjaro to turn
the German position from Longido and cut off their escape. Van
Deventer was successful, and at Moschi blocked the Germans' retreat
westwards; they managed, however, to slip away south-eastwards by Lake
Jipe, but the Kilimanjaro massif had been cleared, and Smuts
established his headquarters at Moschi. His force was now arranged in
three divisions, the first under Hoskins, the second under Van
Deventer, and the third under Brits; the first consisted of British
and Indian troops, the two others of South African. The plan was to
strike with the second division from Moschi towards Kondoa Irangi and
thence at the German central railway, while the first and third
cleared the Pare and Usambara mountains and the coast, and then
marched on Handeni and threatened the central railway on a parallel
line to Van Deventer's attack. Van Deventer's second division marched
with almost incredible speed. He started from Aruscha on 1 April, and
by the 19th had driven the Germans from Kondoa Irangi, more than a
hundred miles away. In May and June the other divisions cleared the
Pave and Usambara mountains, reached Handeni and Kangata, and with
naval assistance occupied Tanga, Pangani, Sadani Bay, and Bagamoyo in
July and August almost without opposition. Von Lettow-Vorbeck had
transferred the bulk of his troops south and then westwards up the
central railway to bar Van Deventer's progress; and in the process he
had been forced to abandon the north-eastern quarter of the colony. No
small part of the north-western province of Ruanda had been lost as
well: the Belgians had occupied Kigali and the British had driven the
Germans from their shore of Lake Victoria Nyanza.
The rapidity and divergence of these attacks, which were admirably
timed, distracted Von Lettow-Vorbeck's strategy, and in spite of his
interior lines he was unable to offer successful resistance. No sooner
did he send troops to bar Smuts' advance from Kangata into the Nguru
hills than Van Deventer struck west, south, and south-east from Kondoa
Irangi. To the west he took Singida, thus getting behind the Germans
on Lake Tanganyika; to the south and south-east he got astride the
central railway by 14 July and pushed down it eastwards to Kilossa,
which he reached on 22 August. He was now almost due south the Nguru
hills, whence Smuts, attacking from the north, had driven the Germans
before the middle of August. This converging advance made Mrogoro the
only line of retreat, and Smuts planned a complicated outflanking
movement to intercept it. They escaped by a track unknown to our
forces on the 26th, and prepared to stand south of the central railway
in the Ulunguru hills. Smuts was too quick for them, but they repelled
a badly-timed attack at Kissaki on 6 September. Their retreat had,
however, made the coast untenable: on 3 September the capital
Dar-es-Salaam surrendered, and all the remaining ports before the end
of the month. Van Deventer, too, had pressed south to the Ruaha on the
10th, the Belgians occupied Tabora on the 19th, and General Northey,
advancing from Nyasa in the south-west, had reached Iringa before the
end of August, while some Portuguese troops crossed the Rovuma river,
the frontier between German East Africa and Mozambique, and made a
pretence of marching north. By the end of September the great German
colony had been conquered save for the unhealthy south-eastern corner,
where only the Mahenge plateau provided a decent habitation for white
troops.
The campaign had, however, tried the health and endurance of our
forces, and three months' respite was now taken for recuperation and
reinforcement before the final task of eradicating the Germans from
the remnants of their territory. The great difficulty was that, apart
from the Mahenge plateau, they were not rooted to any spot, and their
elusiveness was illustrated by the fact that the Tabora garrison
evaded the encircling forces and joined Von Lettow-Vorbeck at Mahenge.
The campaign reopened on 1 January 1917, and consisted of a converging
attack on Mahenge by Hoskins from Kilwa on the coast, by Northey from
Lupembe, by Van Deventer from Iringa, and by Beves and subsidiary
forces from north of the Rufigi. Smuts was summoned on the 29th to
England to take part in the imperial conference, and Hoskins succeeded
to the chief command. Unprecedented rains impeded our operations;
progress became slow, and remained so after Van Deventer replaced
Hoskins at the end of May. Not till October was Mahenge occupied by
the Belgians. On 26 November half of the German forces under Von
Lettow-Vorbeck's lieutenant Tafel were forced to surrender between
Mahenge and the Rovuma; but Von Lettow himself escaped across the
frontier with sufficient troops to terrorize the Portuguese and
maintain himself in their territory until the end of the war.
The victor in the East African campaign came in 1917 to a Europe where
victory seemed also on the way, for the early spring saw the only
German retreat of moment until the war was near its end. The battles
of the previous September had convinced the Germans that their line
upon the Somme was barely tenable, and they had employed the winter
pause to perfect the shorter and better line upon which they had begun
to work at Michaelmas. Possibly it was to frustrate these preparations
that Haig reopened his campaign so early as he did. On 11 January, the
day on which the Allies answered President Wilson's note, British
troops began to nibble at the point of the salient on the Ancre which
had been created by the battle of the Somme. It was a modest sort of
offensive; for it was no part of the Allies' combined plan of
operations, which had been settled in conference during November, to
launch a first-class attack across the devastated battlefield of the
Somme. That wasted area was as effective a barrier as a chain of Alps
to military pressure, and the Germans were thus left free to withdraw
from their salient without much risk of disaster. They did not
contemplate any serious stand, and until the Allies were ready to
strike at the flanks of their position the Germans could afford to
retreat at a pace which was not seriously hustled by our advance. They
showed as much promptitude, foresight, and skill in retirement as they
had done in their advance; they suffered few casualties and had no
appreciable loss in guns or prisoners.
The details of the movement were therefore of little moment, and owed
the attention they attracted to the habit of measuring progress in war
by miles marked on a map. It was the end of January before the
preliminary operation of clearing the Beaumont-Hamel spur was
completed, and the apparently substantial advance began with the fall
of Grandcourt on 7 February. A more ambitious attack on Miraumont from
the south of the Ancre was somewhat disconcerted on the 17th by a
German bombardment of our troops as they assembled, although the night
was dark and misty; for even in France the Germans found spies to work
for them, and a number of executions for treachery failed to prevent
knowledge of our plans from occasionally reaching the enemy. A week
later the German retreat extended, and Warlencourt, Pys, Miraumont,
and Serre were evacuated. Again the Germans stopped for a time to
breathe, and it was not till 10 March that Irles, a bare mile from
Miraumont, was abandoned. By that time the Germans had only rearguards
and patrols left either north or south of the Somme, and when on the
17th a general Allied advance was ordered it encountered little
resistance. The area of the German withdrawal had spread over a front
of a hundred miles from Arras in the north to Soissons in the south.
On that day British troops occupied Bapaume, while the French, whose
line we had taken over as far as the river Avre, proceeded to liberate
scores of villages between it and the Aisne. On that day, too, by one
of the apparent illogicalities of French politics, M. Briand's
Cabinet, which had held office for the unusual period of eighteen
months, resigned.
The German tide rolled sullenly and slowly back for another fortnight.
Péronne, Nesle, and Chaulnes fell on the 18th, Chauny and Ham on the
19th, and on the 20th French cavalry were within five miles of St.
Quentin. By the end of March the British line ran from a mile in front
of Arras to the Havrincourt wood, some seven miles from Cambrai, and
thence southwards to Savy, less than two miles from St. Quentin.
Thence the French line ran to Moy on the Sambre canal, behind La Fère,
which the Germans had flooded, and through the lower forest of St.
Gobain to the plateau north-east of Soissons. The German resistance
had gradually stiffened, and there was a good deal of local fighting
in the first week of April while the Allies were testing the strength
of the positions behind which the Germans had taken shelter. We called
them the Hindenburg lines, and believed that the Germans had so named
them to give them a nominal invincibility which they did not possess
in fact. In Germany they were known as the Siegfried lines, a name
which properly only applied to the sector between Cambrai and La Fère
which was also protected by the St. Quentin canal. That was the front
of the new German position; its flanks rested on the Vimy Ridge to the
north, and on the St. Gobain forest and the Chemin des Dames to the
south. It was a better and shorter line than that which the battles of
1914 had left to the combatants without much choice on either side,
and the Germans were right enough in claiming that the Hindenburg
lines were selected by themselves. Their retreat thereto was not,
however, a matter of choice except in so far as they preferred it to
the disaster which would otherwise have overtaken them in their more
exposed positions. As a retreat the movement could hardly have been
more successfully carried out; but the military distinction was marred
by moral disgrace. For destruction was pushed to the venomous length
of maiming for years the orchards of the peasantry in the abandoned
territory. The crime may have been no more than a characteristic
expression of militarist malevolence and stupidity; but it may also
have been calculated to bar the path to peace by agreement and to
force on the German people the choice, as a Junker expressed it later,
between victory and hell.
The success of the German withdrawal discounted our spring offensive,
not because any attack was designed on the Somme, but because the
Hindenburg lines and the desert before them gave that part of the
German front a security which enabled the German higher command to
divert reserves from its defence to that of the threatened wings. Here
preparations had been begun by both the French and the British before
the German retreat, and it had barely reached its limit when on Easter
Monday, 9 April, Haig attacked along the Vimy Ridge and in front of
Arras. Since 21 March a steady bombardment had been destroying the
German wire defences and harassing their back areas, and in the first
days of April it rose to the pitch which portended an attack in force.
Since the battle of Loos in September 1915 our front had sagged a
little, and points like the Double Crassier had been recovered by the
Germans. So, too, the French capture of the Vimy heights, which had
been announced in May that year, proved something of a fairy tale, and
in April 1917 our line ran barely east of Souchez, Neuville, and the
Labyrinth. It was held by Allenby's Third Army, which joined Gough's
Fifth just south of Arras, and by Horne's First, which extended
Allenby's left from Lens northwards to La Bassee. The Germans had
three lines of defences for their advanced positions, and then behind
them the famous switch line which hinged upon the Siegfried line at
Quéant and ran northwards to Drocourt, whence quarries and slag-heaps
linked it on to Lens (see Maps, pp. 79, 302). This line had not been
finished at the beginning of April, and hopes were no doubt
entertained that complete success in the battle of Arras, reinforced
by Nivelle's contemplated offensive on the Chemin des Dames, would
break these incomplete defences and thus turn the whole of the
Hindenburg lines.
At dawn on Easter Monday the British guns broke out with a bombardment
which marked another stage in the growing intensity of artillery fire,
and obliterated the first and then the second German line of trenches
along a front of some twelve miles. To the north the Canadians under
Sir Julian Byng carried the crest of the Vimy Ridge, and by nine
o'clock had mastered it all except at a couple of points. Farther
south troops that were mainly Scottish captured Le Folie farm, Blangy,
and Tilloy-lez-Mofflaines, while a fortress known as the Harp, and
more formidable than any on the Somme, was seized by a number of
Tanks. The greatest advance of the day was made due east of Arras,
where the second and third German lines were taken and Feuchy, Athies,
and Fampoux were captured. On the morrow the Canadians completed their
hold on the Vimy Ridge, and Farbus was taken just below it. On the
11th the important position of Monchy, which outflanked the end of the
Siegfried line, was carried after a fierce struggle; and on the 12th
and the following days the salient we had created was widened north
and south of Monchy. The capture of Wancourt and Heninel broke off
another fragment of the Siegfried line, while to the north our advance
spread up to the gates of Lens; the villages of Bailleul, Willerval,
Vimy, Givenchy-en-Gohelle, Angres, and Lievin, with the Double
Crassier and several of the suburbs of Lens, fell into our hands. The
Germans appeared to have nothing left but the unfinished
Drocourt-Quéant switch line between them and a real disaster.
The battle of Arras was the most successful the British had fought on
the Western front since the Germans had stabilized their defences. Our
bombardment was heavier than the enemy's, and was far more effective
against his wire entanglements and trenches than it had ever been
before; and the new method of locating hostile batteries by tests of
sound enabled our gunners to put many of them out of action. Nor
throughout the war was there a finer achievement than the Canadian
capture of the Vimy Ridge or the British five-mile advance in a few
hours to Fampoux. The German losses in men and guns also exceeded any
that the British had yet inflicted in a similar period; in the first
three days of the battle some 12,000 prisoners and 150 guns were
taken. The battle did not succeed in converting the war from one of
positions into one of movement; but if the Vimy position could be so
completely demolished in two or three days, there seemed little
prospect of permanence for any German stronghold in France, and a few
repetitions of the battle of Arras bade fair to make an end of the
Hindenburg lines and of the German occupation of French territory.
April along the Western front in 1917 wore a fair promise of spring.
Nor was it without its hopes in other spheres. Maude's conquest of
Baghdad produced other fruits in the East, including a welcome change
in the situation in Persia. The fall of Kut in the April before had
enabled the Turks to turn against the Russians and drive Baratov's
adventurous force back from Khanikin into the mountains and even east
of Hamadan; but Maude's advance cut the Turks off from their base at
Baghdad and threatened their line of retreat to Mosul. The Turks were
in a trap: Baratov resumed his advance from the north-east, while
Maude pushed up from the south-west: Khanikin was the trap-door, and
Halil, the Turkish commander, made skilful efforts to keep it open. A
strong screen of rearguards held up the Russians at the Piatak pass,
while other troops reinforced from Mosul barred Maude's advance at
Deli Abbas and on the Jebel Hamrin range. By the end of March the bulk
of Halil's forces were through, and Maude had to content himself with
linking up with the Russians at Kizil Robat and driving the Turks from
the Diala after their troops in Persia had escaped. Their junction
with those from Mosul enabled Halil to resume the offensive, but his
counter-attack was repulsed on 11-12 April, and Maude proceeded to
extend his defences far to the north and west of Baghdad. Feluja on
the Euphrates had already been occupied in March, and the Turks driven
up the river to Ramadie; and on 23 April Maude completed his advance
up the Tigris by the capture of Samara, where the section of the
railway running north from Baghdad came to an end. Hundreds of miles
separated it from the other railhead at Nisibin, and with his front
pushed out on the rivers to eighty miles from Baghdad, and with the
Russians in touch with his right and holding the route into Persia,
Maude might well rest for the summer content with the security of his
conquests. He had done single-handed what had been planned for a joint
Anglo-Russian campaign, with Russia taking the lion's share (see Map,
p. 177*).
In the spring of that year it looked, indeed, as though the British
Empire alone was making any headway against the enemy Powers. Even on
the cosmopolitan Salonika front offensive action was left to British
troops, and at no time during the war did any but troops of the
British Empire partake in the defence of its dominions and
protectorates. These were all safe enough by the middle of April 1917,
and those that were within reach of the enemy were being used as bases
for attack upon his forces. Maude, with his army based upon India had
now blocked the southern route into Persia, and Sir Archibald Murray
was advancing into Palestine. The capture of Rafa on the frontier was
followed on 28 February by that of Khan Yunus, five miles within the
Turkish border, and the Turks under their German general Kressenstein
withdrew to Gaza. There, on 26 March, they were attacked by Sir
Charles Dobell, of Cameroon fame, with three infantry and two mounted
divisions, including a number of Anzacs. The design was to surround
and capture the Turkish forces in Gaza, and the only chance of success
lay in the suddenness of the blow and its surprise. For Dobell's base
was distant, his men had to drink water brought from Egypt, and in
spite of the railway he had not at the front stores, equipment, or
troops for a lengthy struggle, while the Turks could bring up superior
reinforcements. A sea fog robbed him of two hours' precious time; and
although the Wady Ghuzze and other defences of Gaza were taken and a
force of Anzacs actually got behind Gaza and were fighting in its
northern outskirts at sunset, night fell with the task unfinished and
the British divisions out of touch on their various fronts. A
retirement was accordingly ordered, and on the morrow Kressenstein
counter-attacked. He was driven back with considerable losses, and
although Dobell had failed to take Gaza he had reached the Wady Ghuzze
and secured the means of bringing his railhead right up to the front
of battle. With a few weeks' respite for reinforcement and
reorganization, April might yet see the British well on the way to
Jerusalem; for Arras was not intended to stand alone, and in every
sphere of war the Allies had planned a simultaneous offensive (*see
Map, p. 352*).
But if hope was bright in the East, it was pallid compared with the
certainty of ultimate triumph which blazed from the West across the
Atlantic; for on the 5th of that April of promise the great Republic,
with a man-power, wealth, and potential force far exceeding those of
any other of Germany's foes, entered the war against her and made her
defeat unavoidable save by the suicide of her European antagonists. It
was not a sudden decision, for a people with such varied spiritual
homes as the American, spread over so vast a territory, and looking
some eastward across the Atlantic and others westward across the
Pacific, but all far removed from European politics and cherishing an
inherited aloofness from the Old World and a rooted antipathy to
imperialisms of every sort, could not easily see with one eye or
achieve unanimity in favour of a vast adventure to break with their
past and unite their fortunes with those of the Old World they had
left behind. We were accustomed to fighting in Europe against
overweening power; the United States had taken their stand on a
splendid isolation. Their first president had warned them against
entangling alliances, and their fifth had erected into the Monroe
Doctrine the principle of abstention from European quarrels. For a
century that principle had been the pole-star of American foreign
policy; no other people had such a wrench to make from their moorings
before they could enter the war, and no other people can understand
what it cost the Americans to cut themselves adrift from their haven
of democratic pacifism in order to fight for the freedom of another
world.
But Fate was too strong for schismatic tradition, and the two worlds
had merged into one. The shrinking of space and expansion of mind was
abolishing East and West, and the two hemispheres had become one
exchange and mart of commodities and ideas. They could not continue to
revolve on diverse political axes, and neither was safe without the
other's concurrence. To the German cry of weltmacht must sooner or
later respond the American cry of weltrecht; for the war was a civil
war of mankind, and upon its issue would hang the future of human
government. Intervention was inevitable, not so much because the
Kaiser had said he would stand no nonsense from America as because, if
America was to stand no nonsense from him after victory, she would
have to turn the New World into an armed camp like the Old and run the
same race to ruin. The old peace and isolation were in any case gone,
and the choice was between war for the time, with the prospect of
permanent peace on the one hand, and peace for the time, with the
permanent prospect of war on the other. There was no other way, and
Germany forced the American people to realize their dilemma.
President Wilson had seen it earlier than the majority of his
fellow-countrymen; but for a statesman a vision of the truth is an
insufficient ground for acting upon it. He is bound, indeed, not to
act upon it until he can carry with him the State he governs;
otherwise he ceases to be a statesman and sinks or rises into the
missionary. The zealot is ever ready to break his weapon upon the
obstacle he wishes to remove, but the statesman who destroys national
unity in his zeal for war does not help to win it; and American
intervention was both useless and impossible until the President could
act with his people behind him. Nor, as official head of the State,
could he play the irresponsible part of an advocate; if he believed
war to be inevitable in his country's interests, it was for him to
convince the people not by argument, but by his conduct of American
affairs. Idealism entered more largely into his policy than that of
most statesmen, but it was bound to American mentality and national
interests; for ideals which do not affect national interests do not
appeal to the majority in any nation, and the lawlessness which
trampled on Belgian neutrality made less impression across the
Atlantic than that which destroyed American lives and property.
A subsidiary cause of delay in American intervention was the
absorption of the United States in the presidential contest of 1916,
but President Wilson's re-election in November gave him a freer hand
than was possessed by any other democratic statesman. No American
president is ever elected for a third term of office, and Mr. Wilson
had no need to keep his eye on his prospects for 1920. He must,
indeed, secure the assent of Congress before war could be declared,
but in both Houses his party had secured a majority in November. The
decisive step was not, however, taken by President Wilson, but by the
German Government, and America was as much forced into war in 1917 as
we were in 1914; and in both cases it was their view of military
necessity which drove the Germans into political suicide. They could
not, they thought in 1914, cope with Russia until they had first
beaten France, and they could not beat France in time unless they
trampled a way through Belgium. So in the early days of 1917, not
foreseeing the fortune which the Russian revolution was to bring them,
they saw no prospect of victory save through the ruin of England by
means of their submarines. The Eastern and Western fronts were too
strong for a successful offensive against either, the military
situation was growing desperate, and their offers of peace had been
scorned; the war went on in their despite, and their real offensive
for 1917 was the submarine campaign. It was adopted because there was
no opening on land and no hope of success in a naval battle; and its
adoption justified those who held that the remedy was worse than the
disease and that unrestricted submarine warfare would bring the United
States into the war before it drove Great Britain out.
As late as 22 January, President Wilson, while depicting the sort of
peace which would commend itself to the American people, disavowed any
intention of helping to secure it by force of arms. But on the 31st
Germany revoked her promise given on 4 May 1916 that vessels other
than warships would not be sunk without warning, and announced her
resolve forthwith to wage submarine war without any restriction. Later
on Herr Bethmann-Hollweg stated that the promise had only been given
because Germany's preparations were incomplete, and was revoked as
soon as they were ready. The President's answer was prompt: on 3
February the German ambassador was given his passports and Mr. Gerard
was recalled from Berlin. But the invitation to other neutrals to
follow the President's lead was declined on this side of the Atlantic.
Switzerland, without any seaboard, was not concerned with submarine
warfare, and other neutrals were too much under the influence of
German blandishments or terror to risk war in defence of their rights;
they preferred to abandon their sailings to British ports.
At first the President contemplated no more than an armed neutrality,
and proposed to equip all American mercantile vessels for
self-defence. But the sinking of American ships and loss of American
lives began to rouse popular anger; sailings stopped at the ports, the
railways became congested with goods seeking outlet, and the remotest
inland districts felt the effects of the German campaign. In March,
too, the Russian revolution removed a stumbling-block to co-operation
with the Entente, for American public opinion had always been
sensitive to the iniquity of the old regime in Russia. At length the
President summoned a special session of Congress, and on 2 April
recommended a declaration of war. It was adopted in the Senate on the
4th by 82 votes to 6, and by the House of Representatives on the 5th
by 373 to 50. Of the ultimate issue of the war there could now be no
doubt. Time would be needed for the United States to mobilize its
resources and train its armies, and the extent to which they might be
required would depend upon the course of events in Europe. But the
Americans were not a people to turn back having put their hand to the
plough, and with their forces fully deployed they would alone be more
than a match for the German Empire. Victory might be delayed, but its
advent was assured, and the first fortnight of April saw the hopes of
the Allies rise higher than since the war began.