A history of the great war

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From the Library of

RALPH EMERSON FORBES
1866-1937

SACHU SETTS BOSTON LIBRARY~E

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A HISTORY OF
THE GREAT WAR

IN FOUR VOLUMES

r

VOLUME III

Marshal Ferdinand Foch
From a painting by Sir William Orpen, R.A.

A HISTORY OF

THE GREAT WAR

BY
JOHN BUCHAN

VOLUME III

BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
i923

UNIV. OF WUmCWJSSSSP
AT BOSTON - tWMUT

LVII. Brussilov in Galicia (June 3-August 11, 1916) .

Change in Russia's Plan — Condition of Austrian Armies—
Brussilov's five Battle-grounds — Fall of Lutsk and
Dubno — The Affair at Baranovitchi— Fall of Czerno-
vitz and Kimpolung— Capture of Brody— Results of the
Ten Weeks' Battle — Changes in Austrian Dispositions.

16

CONTENTS.

BOOK II. {Continued).

THE BELEAGUERED FORTRESS.

LIII. The British Line in the West (February 8- June
18, 1916)

Fighting around the Ypres Salient — The Canadians at-
tacked— The Training of the New Armies— The " Break-
ing-point " in War— The Prophylactics against Fear-
Death of the younger Moltke.

LIV. The Political Situation (February 10- June 24,
i9l6)

The Operation of the Military Service Act in Britain —
The British Budget of 1916 — Germany's Finances —
Death of Gallieni — Resignation of Tirpitz— America's
Ultimatum to Germany— The Easter Rebellion in Ire-
land.

LV. The Battle of Jutland (May 30- June 5, 1916) . 32

The British Grand Fleet on May 30 — Jellicoe's Prin-
ciples of Naval War— The German Fleet sighted— The
Battle-cruiser Action — Arrival and Deployment of Battle
Fleet — The Race southward — The Night Action — British
and German Losses— The Points in Dispute— Summary
of Battle — Death of Lord Kitchener.

LVI. The Austrian Attack in the Trentino (October

21, 1915-June 15, 1916) 55

The Winter Fighting in Italy, 1915-1916 — Plan of Aus-
trian Staff — Topography of the Asiago Plateau — The
Attack begins — Arrival of Reserves from Fifth Army —
The Attack dies away — Boselli succeeds Salandra as
Prime Minister.

66

viii CONTENTS.

BOOK III.

THE GREAT SALLIES.

LXXII. The Russian Coup d'£tat (December 29, 1916-

March 16, 1917) 379

Rasputin : his Career and Death — Protopopov — The
Quiet before the Storm — Revolt of Petrograd Garrison
— Formation of Provisional Government — The Petrograd
Soviet — Abdication of the Emperor — The House of
Romanov — The Gap to be filled — The Failure of the
Moderates.

LXXIII. The New Government in Britain (December

19, 1916-May 2, 1917) 4°3

Mr. Lloyd George — The War Cabinet — Problems of Men,
Food, and Raw Materials — The British Finances —
Labour.

LXXIV. The Breaking of America's Patience (Janu-
ary 22-April 6, 1917) 420

Effect on America of Germany's new Submarine Policy
— Diplomatic Relations suspended — American Mer-
chant Ships armed— The special Session of Congress — Mr.
Wilson's Message — America declares War.

LXXV. Germany shortens her Western Line (No-
vember 16, 1916-April 5, 1917) .... 432

The new Hindenburg Positions — Nivelle departs from
Joffre's Policv— Haig's Difficulties — The final Arrange-
ments— The British capture Serre — Beginning of German
Retreat — The New Line and its Pivots.

LXXVI. The Battle of Arras (April 4-June 6, 1917) 447

The Arras Neighbourhood — Haig's Problem and Dis-
positions— The Attack of Easter Monday — Difficulties
of Weather — Fighting on the Scarpe and at Bullecourt—
Summary of Battle.

LXXVII. The Second Battle of the Aisne (December

16, 1916-June 2, 1917) 465

Nivelle's new Strategy — Attitude of new French Cab-
inet— The Heights of the Aisne — Defects in French Plan
— The Attack begins — The Moronvillers Fighting —
Petain succeeds Nivelle — Foch Chief of General Staff-
Last Days of the Battle — The French Mutinies.

LXXVIII. Mesopotamia, Syria, and the Balkans (Janu-
ary 9-June 25, 1917) 482

Maude advances north of Bagdad — Escape of Turkish
13th Corps — Capture of Samara — Falkenhayn sent to
Turkey — The First and Second Battles of Gaza — Allenby
succeeds Murray — Sarrail's abortive Spring Offensive —
King Constantine abdicates, and Venizelos becomes
Prime Minister.

CONTENTS.

IX

LXX1X. The Russian Revolution (March 16-July 23,

1917) 5o6

The Weakness of Russia — The Origin of Bolshevism —
Lenin and Others — The Soviet Principle — Progress of
the Provisional Government — The last Russian Offen-
sive— Brussilov's initial Success — The Debdcle.

LXXX. The Italian Front in the Summer of 1917

(May 12-September 18, 1917) .... 530

The Capture of Monte Kuk and Monte Santo — The
Fight for Hermada — The Bainsizza Plateau won — The
Struggle for San Gabriele — Cadorna closes his Offensive.

LXXXI. The Third Year of War : the Change in the
Strategic Position (June 28, 1916-June 28,
1917) 546

The " Mathematical Certainty " of 1917 — The New
Factor — Tactical Developments — Landing of first
American Troops — The Year at Sea — Gravity of Sub-
marine Peril — America sends Destroyers — Revision of
War Aims — Economic Position of the Belligerents — A
New Europe.

LXXXII. The Third Battle of Ypres (June i-November

10, 1917) 57°

Haig's Flanders Policy — Sir Herbert Plumer — Battle of
Messines — The Preliminaries of Third Ypres — The " Pill-
boxes " — The Attack of 31st July — The Weather — The
Attack of 1 6th August — The September and October
Actions— Capture of Passchendaele — Summury of Battle.

ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME III

Marshal Ferdinand Foch Frontispiece

British Battleships in Action at Battle of Jutland
(About 6:30 p.m., May 31, 1916) 42

From a painting by Robert H. Smith

The Old German Front Line, 1916 152

From a painting by Charles Sims, R.A.

A Street in Arras 450

From a painting by John S. Sargent, R.A.

Admiral William Sowden Sims 556

A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR

CHAPTER LIII.

THE BRITISH LINE IN THE WEST.
February 8-June 18, 1916.

Fighting around the Ypres Salient — The Canadians attacked — The Training of the
New Armies — The " Breaking-point " in War — The Prophylactics against
Fear — Death of the younger Moltke.

WHEN the Imperial Crown Prince unleashed his attack on
Verdun one part of his purpose was to induce a British
counter-offensive. Hence the German lines were not thinned else-
where ; least of all on the British front, where the chief danger was
anticipated. The citadel on the Meuse soon became a maelstrom
which sucked in all free strategic reserves, and demanded the com-
plete attention of the German Staff. Elsewhere the war seemed to
stand still, while the world watched the most heroic and skilful
defence that history had known. Verdun was France's exclusive
business, and her generals chose to hold the line there with their
own troops, and to ask for no reinforcements from the British front.
Kitchener at once offered British divisions for the Meuse, but Joffre
gratefully declined them. Help, however, was given in another
way. The British armies took over the whole line from Ypres to the
Somme, and the French Tenth Army, which had held the line from
Loos to a point south of Arras, was released for the main battle
ground. This was not the only contribution made by the Allies
during that long struggle. On 20th April a contingent of Russian
troops, some 8,000 strong, landed at Marseilles. They had been
brought across Siberia, and then by sea from Dalny, by way of the
Suez Canal. Their number could represent no great accession to the

2 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Feb.

French field force, but their presence was a proof of the new attempt
at a unification of command among all the Allies which was needed
to give effect to their unity of purpose.

To the spectator it appeared that during the first half of 1916
the British army was stagnant in the West. The judgment was
in error. Its duty was the hard one of waiting — long months of
desultory trench fighting with no concerted movement, no great
offensive purpose, to quicken the spirit. It was a costly duty.
Frequently the daily toll was over 1,000 ; and if we take only an
average daily loss of 500, that gives a total in six months of 90,000
men. From it all there came, apparently, no military result of any
consequence. The British army was neither attacking nor seriously
on the defence, and those indeterminate weeks were for officers
and men among the hardest to bear in the whole campaign. Apart
from the steady normal bombardment, the main activities were
mining, and the enterprises which were known as " cutting-out
parties." Both had been going on all winter, but in the new year
they became a formula and a habit. Their chief use was to keep
the spirit of the offensive alive in our men, to harass the enemy,
and to provide information as to the exact German dispositions.
Everywhere from Ypres to the Somme such raids were attempted,
and on the whole we, who were the initiators of the adventures,
kept the lead in them. But the Germans retaliated with various
raids which, after their fashion, were more elaborately organized
than ours. Mobile batteries toured along their front, and at
different places opened a bombardment, under cover of which
their infantry raided our front line, and carried off prisoners. It
was remarked that these attempts were specially common south
of Arras. Places like Gommecourt, La Boisselle, and Carnoy were
frequently selected, as if the enemy had grown suspicious of that
section of front which had never yet been the theatre of any great
attack.

The only serious fighting in the first half of the year took place
in and around the Ypres Salient. There was no new Battle of
Ypres, as many expected ; but there was a long-drawn struggle
for certain points, which in the total wastage produced the results
of a great action. In that ill-omened Salient the Germans held
all the higher and better ground, and especially all the points
which gave direct observation for artillery. Our trenches were
for the most part in the water-logged flats, and when we reached
dry ground we were, as a rule, commanded from elevations in front
and flank. Further, all our communications were at the mercy

igi6] THE FIGHT FOR THE BLUFF. 3

of the enemy's shell fire. The trouble began on 8th February,
when the German guns opened a heavy bombardment, which
endured for several days. On the 12th, early in the morning, an
infantry attack was delivered at the extreme left of our line, near
the point, of junction with the French on the canal. Next day
the centre of interest moved to the other side of the Salient. At
Hooge the Germans had sapped out, and linked up their sap-heads
into a connected line 150 yards from our front. On the 13th their
guns obliterated our front trenches. On the 14th, in the afternoon,
the whole section was under an intense bombardment, a series of
mines were exploded, and infantry attacks were launched against
our positions at Hooge and at the north and south ends of Sanctuary
Wood. They failed, being checked by our rifle and machine-gun
fire long before they reached their objective.

Farther south the enemy had better fortune. On the north bank
of the Ypres-Comines Canal was a ridge, 30 to 40 feet high, which
owed its existence largely to the excavations for the channel. It
was part of that horseshoe of shallow upland which separated the
Ypres basin from the vale of the Lys, and connected in the south
with the ridge of Messines. This particular hillock was covered
with trees and was held by both sides, and to that eastern part of
it over which our line passed we gave the name of The Bluff. A
bombardment on the afternoon of the 14th all but obliterated our
trenches there, and the infantry rush which followed captured
them and their continuation to the north — in all, about 600 yards.
It was an awkward piece of ground to lose, and after two fruitless
attempts to recover it, we were compelled to sit down and wait for
a better chance. The opportunity came on 2nd March, after the
enemy had been in possession for seventeen days. To the 3rd
Division was entrusted the task of winning the ground back. For
several days we bombarded steadily, and at 4.30 on the morning of
2nd March our infantry, wearing for the first time their new steel
helmets, effected a complete surprise. They rushed the German
trenches and found the enemy with bayonets unfixed, and many
of them without rifles or equipment. The British right carried
The Bluff with ease. The centre pushed through the German front,
and took the third line, which they held long enough to enable the
main ground to be consolidated. The left was delayed at first,
but since those on its right could bring an enfilading fire to bear
on the enemy, it presently was able to advance to its objective.

At the end of the month the British again attacked. The
Ypres Salient now represented a shallow semicircle, beginning in

4 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

the north at Boesinghe, on the Ypres-Dixmude Canal, and ending
in the south at St. Eloi. At the latter point a small German salient
had encroached on our line, to the depth of about ioo yards on a
front of 600. It was resolved to get rid of this, and straighten our
front, the place being roughly defined by the crossroads south of
the village of St. Eloi, where the Messines and Warneton roads
branched off. The first step was the exploding, on 27th March, of
six large mines within the salient, a shock so colossal that it was
felt in villages far behind the battle ground. Half a minute later
the infantry — a brigade from the 3rd Division — were racing across
the open to the German trenches. Inside the salient there was
nothing but death and destruction ; but machine guns were busy
on the flanks, and the left of the attack did not reach its objective,
so that a way was left for the Germans to occupy one of the mine
craters. The next few days were spent in repelling counter-attacks
and endeavouring to oust the enemy from the crater which he held.
This was successfully accomplished on 3rd April, and we thus
gained the whole of our original objective — the German first and
second lines on a front of 600 yards.

Then followed some weeks of confused and difficult fighting.
The 3rd Division was relieved by the 2nd Canadian Division, whose
task was to consolidate the ground won. Little of the work had
been done ; little could have been done owing to the weariness of
the troops which had made the attack, and the water-logged soil,
now churned into glutinous mire by the shelling and the mine
explosions. The communication trenches had all been obliterated,
and the German second line beyond the crater, which we nominally
held, had never been properly converted, and was in any case
practically destroyed by our own artillery fire. There was a very
general doubt as to where exactly was the British front line, and
where was the German. In such conditions it was not difficult
for the enemy to push us out of his old second line. The Canadians
— especially the 6th Brigade — were now holding isolated craters
with no good communications between them. The near side of
each crater was under direct enemy observation and constant fire,
so that supplies and reliefs could only come up at night, and it was
all but impossible to evacuate the wounded. At any one moment
it was difficult to say what craters were held, and this uncertainty
led to mistakes in sending up reliefs and considerable losses. Mean-
time an incessant bombardment went on, and some of the craters
were reduced to mere mud holes in no-man's-land, incapable of
being held by either side. The Canadians occupied a demolished

1916] THE CANADIANS ATTACKED. 5

and much inferior position against greatly superior artillery, with
few chances of communication, and no cover for approach except
the darkness of the night. The general result was that we found
the gains of March 27th and 3rd April untenable, and gradually
loosened our hold on them.

April and May saw various local attacks in the Ypres Salient, at
Loos, and on the Vimy Ridge ; and in June these scattered activities
drew to a head in one section, as if to anticipate the great Allied
offensive now looming in the near future. The place was once
again the Salient, that section of it from Hooge to the Ypres-
Comines railway. It was held at the moment by the Canadians —
the 3rd Division, under Major-General Mercer. South of Hooge
lay the collection of broken tree trunks called Sanctuary Wood ;
then the flat watery fields around Zwartelen, where the Household
Cavalry made their dismounted charge at the First Battle of
Ypres ; then just north of the Ypres-Menin railway the mound
which was famous as Hill 60. Behind, between the British front
and Ypres, was the hamlet of Zillebeke, with its melancholy pond.
The area of the attack was nearly two miles in width, and being
the apex of a salient, the Germans were able to concentrate their
fire from three sides. At 9 o'clock on the morning of 2nd June a
bombardment was loosed on the British front trenches, and a
barrage was placed over the whole hinterland. The infantry attack,
in spite of heavy losses, had by the evening won the whole of our
old first line on a front of a mile and three-quarters, and during the
night pushed through our centre towards Zillebeke to a depth
of 700 yards. General Mercer was killed early in the day by shell
fire, and General Williams of the 7th Canadian Brigade was wounded
and made prisoner.

At seven o'clock on the morning of the next day, 3rd June,
the Canadians counter-attacked. They pressed on most gallantly,
and won back much of the lost ground. But they could not stay
in it, owing to the intensity of the German artillery fire, and they
were compelled to fall back from most of that shell-swept area,
which became a kind of extended no-man's-land. For two days
the battle was stationary, and then at midday on 6th June the
German guns opened again, concentrating on the front south and
north of the shattered village of Hooge. North of that place they
exploded a series of mines between three and four in the afternoon,
and presently their infantry had penetrated our first-line trenches.
This meant that the extreme point of the Ypres Salient had been
flattened in, that our front now ran behind what had once been

6 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

Hooge village, and that the enemy had advanced as far as the
Bellewaarde brook.

For a week the battle declined to an intermittent bombardment,
for infantry raids were impossible owing to the downpour of rain.
Then at 1.30 on the morning of 13th June a fresh Canadian division
— the 1st, under Major-General Currie — attacked on a front of
500 yards, extending from the south end of Sanctuary Wood to
a point 1,000 yards north of Hill 60. They found that the enemy
had not gone far in consolidating his gains, and they found, too,
that our previous bombardments had done great execution. They
occupied all his advanced line, and regained their original front
trenches in the most important part of the section, inflicting heavy
losses. Such gains in the marshes of the Salient were of little serious
value, but they were a proof that the enemy could not take posi-
tions there in which he could abide.

In spite of these episodes the first half of 1916 was for the

British field army a season of comparative quiet — a fortunate

circumstance, for it enabled Haig to complete his command and

perfect its training. Before midsummer the total of the British

army at home and abroad was nearly five million. The nation was

so prone to self-criticism that few realized and fewer admitted the

stupendous and unparalleled character of this military achievement.

There had been nothing like it in the history of any nation. With the

possible exception of France, Britain had mobilized for the direct

and indirect purposes of war a larger proportion of her population

than any belligerent country. Moreover, while engaged in also

supplying her Allies, she had furnished this vast levy with its

necessary equipment. She had jettisoned all her old theories and

calculations, and in a society which had not for a hundred years

been called upon to make a great effort against an enemy, a society

highly differentiated and industrialized, a society which lived by

sea-borne commerce, and so could not concentrate like certain

other lands exclusively on military preparation, she had provided

an army on the largest scale, and provided it out of next to nothing.

She had to improvise officers and staff, auxiliary services, munition-

ment — everything. She had to do this in the face of an enemy

already fully prepared. She had to do it, above all, at a time

when war had become a desperately technical and scientific business,

and improvisation was most difficult. It is possible to assemble

speedily hosts of spearmen and pikemen, but it seemed beyond

human capacity to improvise men to use the bayonet and machine

gun, the bomb and the rifle. But Britain had done it, and had done

igi6] THE TRAINING OF THE NEW ARMIES. 7

it for the most part by voluntary enlistment. It was easy to point
out defects in her organization. Some critics — notably Mr. Churchill
— argued that there was an undue proportion of ration strength
to fighting strength ; that half the total ration strength of the
army was still at home ; that of the half abroad, half fought and
half did not fight ; that of the half that fought, about three-quarters
were infantry in the trenches, on whom fell almost all the loss ;
that of every six men recruited at one end, only one infantry rifle
appeared over the parapets at the other ; and that some 2,000,000
soldiers had never been under fire. Undoubtedly there was room
for " combing-out " ; for the embusque existed in the British as
in other armies, and the staff at home had grown to a preposterous
size. But in modern war, with its intricate organization, it was
clear that an army must have a far greater proportion of men
behind the fine than in any former campaign. The apparatus was
so vast that the operative point must seem small in contrast to the
mechanism which produced it.

Meantime Haig was busy with the task for which he was qualified
above almost all living soldiers, the training of troops. He had now
received the balance of the New Army divisions from home as well
as various units released from Gallipoli, and to produce that homo-
geneity which is necessary in a field force much thought and time
had to be given to field training. The work was performed by the
Commander-in-Chief and his generals with infinite care, enthusiasm,
and judgment. " During the periods of relief," he wrote, " all
formations, and especially the newly created ones, are instructed
and practised in all classes of the present and other phases of
warfare. A large number of schools also exist for the instruction
of individuals, especially in the use and theory of the less familiar
weapons, such as bombs and grenades. There are schools for
young staff officers and regimental officers, for candidates for
commissions, etc. In short, every effort is made to take advantage
of the closer contact with actual warfare, and to put the finishing
touches, often after actual experience in the trenches, to the training
received at home." The British armies in the field during the first
half of 1916 were one great training school.

In these months the mind of the High Command was facing a
problem for the solution of which little data existed in past history.
A great attack was in prospect — the greatest effort as yet made by
the Allies in the campaign — and it must be made with a new type
of army. The old regular was a known quantity ; the new soldier,

8 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

representing every rank of life and variety of mind and tempera-
ment, was still to be assessed. He had physique, brains, energy,
and devotion, but he could not in the nature of things have that
instinctive discipline which is the product only of years of service.
Hence the effect of the new battle conditions upon the moral of the
fighting man became a question of extreme practical urgency. In
the last resort all wars depend upon the resisting power of five
or six feet of shrinking human flesh. The men who fought at
Marathon were not greatly different in physique and temperament
from those who fought in Champagne and Poland. A pressure
too great will overpower body and spirit. We have no scale by
which to measure that pressure ; but, whether it be produced
by clouds of arrows, by the swords of the legionaries, or by the
shells of great guns, it must at all times in history have been
approximately the same in quantity. There is always a breaking-
point for the mortal soldier.

The psychology of the fighting man in war had never as yet
been made the subject of a professorial treatise. It was a work
which might have been expected from the Teutonic genius, but it
may be that the difficulty of making laboratory experiments stood
in the way. Consequently the task had been left to the romancers,
who usually argued without data. But, since mankind will always
speculate upon a matter which so vitally concerns it, there was a
variety of working rules which every soldier knew, but which he
rarely formulated. The chief concerned the difficulty of sitting still
under heavy fire. That was why the men in the support trenches
which the enemy was shelling had a more difficult task than the
attack. The chance of movement was a relief, and the fact that a
definite job was before a man gave him something better to think
about than expectations of a speedy decease. That was why,
too, the officer, who had the problem of keeping his men together
and getting them somewhere, was less likely to be troubled with
nerves than the man whose business was merely to follow. To keep
the mind engrossed was the great prophylactic against fear.

The practical question was when the breaking-point would be
reached — after what proportion of losses the defensive or the
offensive would crumble. The question was really twofold, for
the problem in defence was different in kind from the problem in
attack. In the latter, to continue required a certain modicum of
hope and mental energy ; in the former there need be no hope,
but only a passive and fatalistic resistance. It was useless to
speculate about the breaking-point in a defence. Against savage

1916] THE BREAKING-POINT IN WAR. 9

enemies, when there was no hope of quarter, even ordinary troops
would resist desperately. Again, if men from pride of honour or
from any other cause were wholly resolved not to surrender, they
would perish to the last man. There was no man left of the
Spartans at Thermopylae, or Roland's paladins at Roncesvalles,
or the steel circle of the Scots nobles at Flodden. Yakub and the
defenders of the Black Flag were utterly destroyed at Omdurman.
There were no survivors of that portion of the 3rd Canadian Brigade
at the Second Battle of Ypres which held St. Julien. The men,
too, who found themselves in the last extremity, and were sup-
ported by a shining faith, would wait on death as on a bridal.
Gordon in his last days could write : " I would that all could look
on death as a cheerful friend, who takes us from a world of trial
to our true home." Or in another mood, with the exultation of
the mystic on the threshold of immortality : " Look at me now,
with small armies to command and no cities to govern. I hope
that death will set me free from pain, and that great armies
will be given me, and that I shall have vast cities under my
command."

But in attack the question of the breaking-point was pertinent.
After what losses would a unit lose its coherence and dissolve ?
The question, of course, only applied to corporate things like a
company, a squadron, or a battalion, which depend for their military
effect on training and discipline. A surge of individuals vowed
to death will perish to the last man. A rush of Ghazis, determined
to enter Paradise, will not cease so long as any are alive. Take
the charge of Ali-Wad-Helu's horsemen against the left of Mac-
donald's brigade at Omdurman. Mr. Churchill has described it.
" Many carrying no weapon in their hand, and all urging their
horses to their utmost speed, they rode unflinchingly to certain
death. All were killed and fell as they entered the zone of fire —
three, twenty, fifty, two hundred, sixty, thirty, five and one out
beyond them all — a brown smear across the sandy plain. A few
riderless horses alone broke through the ranks of the infantry."
There was no rule for such Berserker courage. The question was,
how far discipline would carry men who had no hankering for
Paradise.

In the eighteenth century it carried them very far. Those were
the days of a rigid and elaborate drill, and a discipline observed
with the punctiliousness of a ritual. It may have been inelastic
and preposterous, and destined to go down before a less mechanical
battle order, but it achieved miracles all the same. Military records

io A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

from Blenheim to Jena are starred with examples of the most
conspicuous fortitude. Napoleon and the armies of the Revolution
largely upset the old regime, but they, too, could achieve the im-
possible, and the last charge of the French Guard at Waterloo is
among the classic feats of history.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, when human life

began to be more highly valued, and philosophers looked forward

to the decline of war, there was a tendency to underestimate the

power of human endurance. Theorists took to fixing a maximum

loss in attack beyond which civilized troops could not keep cohesion.

The favourite figure was twenty-five per cent. ; but as a matter

of fact this was exceeded in many contemporary instances, such

as the charge of Pickett's Virginians at Gettysburg and Bredow's

Todtenritt at Mars-la-Tour, when of the 7th Magdeburg Cuirassiers

only 104 returned, and of the 16th Lancers only go. This maximum,

whatever justification it may have once possessed, ceased to have

much meaning as the conditions of fighting changed, and it was

altogether exploded by the performance of the Japanese at Port

Arthur. The truth is that no such figures could mean much, for

the power of a unit to advance after losses depended entirely upon

circumstances. For one thing, a cavalry charge was different

from an infantry attack. The swift, headlong movement of the

former deadened consciousness and the faculty of introspection,

and a mounted remnant might go on where foot soldiers would

slacken. Again, much depended upon the casualties among the

officers. Normally, if a high proportion of officers fell, the unit

would go to pieces, even though its total losses were not extravagant.

But even this rule had striking exceptions, such as the achievement

of the 7th Gloucesters at Gallipoli, who fought from midday till

sunset on 8th August without any officer, and the 19th London

at Loos, who, with their commissioned ranks practically out of

action, carried out their part in the advance without a hitch.

Again, the sense of winning, of being the spear-head of a successful

thrust, might add to corporate discipline the complete fearlessness

of the fanatic. The human spirit might be keyed up to such a point

that each man acquired a separate purpose distinct from the purpose

of his unit, and would go on, however badly his unit were mauled.

The 9th Black Watch at Loos, and more than one regiment in

Champagne, provided instances where a battalion continued to

advance successfully when it was little more than a company

strong. Or pride in a glorious record might in exceptional cases

inspire the wildest heroism, even when there was no hope of victory,

1916] PROPHYLACTICS AGAINST FEAR. n

as was proved by the performance of Irmanov's 3rd Caucasians in
their great fight at Jaslo, in the retreat from the Donajetz.

At first sight it seemed safe to say that the most modern con-
ditions of war must weaken the nerve power for an attack. The
shattering percussion of the great shells, the curtain of shrapnel,
the malign chatter of the machine guns, the heavy fumes of high
explosives, the deadly effect of trench mortars, and such extra
tortures as gas, asphyxiating shells, and lachrymatory bombs,
seemed to make up an inferno too awful for man to endure. Besides,
there was the maddening slowness of it all. In the old days battles
were over in a few hours, or, at the most, a day. An attack suc-
ceeded or failed, but did not stretch into endless stages, each
involving a new effort, and, in the intervals, the grimmest discom-
fort. Much can be done if there is good hope that it will soon be
over. But if the gain of one position only paved the way for an
attack upon a second, the nervous tension would not be relieved
by any such expectation. A man could not tell himself, " If I
live through the next half-hour I will be safe," for he knew that
even if he lived through the next half-hour there was every chance
that he would fall five minutes later. A modern attack was of
necessity lengthy, dogged, and sullen.

Yet it was doubtful if this increase in the terror of war had
lowered the breaking-point. To meet it, modern armies seemed
to have attained an increase in nerve power. The explanation,
perhaps, was that the carnival of violence carried with it its own
cure. After a little experience of it the senses and imagination
were deadened. The soldier revised his outlook, and the new terror
became part of the background, and so was half forgotten. If the
tension at any one time lasted too long, the deadening might stop,
and the tortured nerves be exposed again. But if the senses were
once blunted, and no opportunity was given for that awakening
when the wheel came full circle, the human soul would adapt
itself to the strangest conditions. That seemed to be one moral of
the campaign.

There were certain prophylactics against fear. The bellicosity of
the natural man stopped short at the modern apparatus of combat.
No sane man was born with a love of shell fire, and few sane men
have ever acquired a complete impassivity in face of it. Certainly
not the best soldiers. The first fact to be recognized was that the
ordinary man, however stout his patriotism, would want to run
away. The confession of the New York private in the American
Civil War was true of all wars and of the raw material of all armies.

12 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

" We heard all through the war that the army was eager to be led
against the enemy. It must have been so, for truthful correspondents
said so, and editors confirmed it ; but when you come to hunt
for this particular itch it was always the next regiment that had it.
The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree trunks, and
solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion
in the heart of the average man is to get out of the way. Between
the physical fear of going forward, and the moral fear of turning
back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness, from
which a hidden hole in the ground would be a wonderfully welcome
outlet." *

The first safeguard against fear was the sense of community.
That was the meaning of discipline, that the individual lost himself
in the unit, that he acquired the instinct to act in a certain way,
even when a fluttering heart and a shrinking body bade him
refrain. The man who with tight lips and a pale face advanced
and held his ground under fire might be acting from a sense of
duty or honour, but most commonly he was simply following an
acquired instinct. But to give this instinct full play there must
be the sense of companionship, and this was apt to be lost if the
individual were too isolated. That was why the Germans, who used
open order in 1870, had so many stragglers, and consequently in
later years tended to adopt mass formations, having to incorporate
in their ranks many partially trained and unwilling elements.
That was why a thin skirmishing line always demanded a fairly
high degree of training. In any case, whatever the experience of
the troops, to preserve the sense of community it was necessary
that they should have the consciousness that supports were not
far off. They should be aware that behind them were other troops
to reinforce them, and to profit by their efforts. This precept
was recognized in the disposition of the Roman legions^ and it was
one of Napoleon's chief maxims. We find it in the French regula-
tions of 1875, which provided for renforts, to fill up the gaps in the
firing line, and soutiens, who were meant to remain in the rear and
produce a moral effect on the striking force. An officer of the 1870
war, quoted by Colonel Colin, wrote : " Every man should be able
to see a little way behind him a body of troops which is following
him and backing up his movements. He gets great confidence in
that way, and will be brave far more readily. In several critical
situations I have heard the following reflection in the mouth of the
men : ' There is no one behind us ! ' The words circulated from
* Battles and Leaders 0/ the Civil War, Vol. II., p. 662.

1916] THE PROTECTION OF CUSTOM. 13

one to another, anxious heads were turned back, almost inevitably
dash faded away." *

A second safeguard was action. " Immobility, physical, moral,
and intellectual stagnation, surrender a man unreservedly to his
emotions ; whereas movement, work of any kind, tends to deliver
him from them." Movement was not always possible, but whenever
it could be permitted it was a great security against fear. The
Japanese knew this, and in the Manchurian war their speed of
advance was amazing. The latter part of the 1870 war was fought
by the French mainly with untrained troops, and whenever they
did well it was because they were taken forward at a brisk pace.
If movement was out of the question, shooting was a relief even
when it was ineffective. A famous student of the psychology of
war has called it " the safety-valve of fear."

But the greatest of all safeguards was simply custom. It was
the end to which the other safeguards were ancillary. Human
nature becomes case-hardened under the sternest trials. If troops
were " entered " skilfully to the terrors of war, it was amazing
what a protective sheath formed over the soldier's nerves. A
new battalion during its first day in the trenches might be restless
and " jumpy " ; in a week it was at ease, and most probably too
callous to the risks of the business. All men employed in dangerous
trades — fishermen, sailors, miners, railwaymen — have this happy
faculty. It is a Western form of kismet, a belief that till their hour
comes they are safe. If death at any moment may appear out
of the void it is useless to fuss about it, for nothing that they do
can prevent it. Once this stoicism was attained the men were
seasoned. War, instead of being a season of horrid tremors, be-
came a routine, even a dull routine. It seems strange to use the
word " dull " in connection with so hazardous a game, but such was
the fact. Seasoned troops adjusted themselves to their novel en-
vironment, and for one man who found it too nerve-racking ten
would find it monotonous.

With due preparation and careful treatment, it seemed certain
that even in modern war the breaking-point could be postponed
very far. The callous sheath, once it had formed, was hardy
enough. But it was important to make sure that it was given a
chance of forming. To use raw troops in a serious movement
before they had been broken to war was to court disaster, and to be
cruelly unfair to the troops themselves. And even with seasoned
men it had to be remembered that there was always a breaking-
* The Transformations of War, p. 80.

14 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

point. Armies are delicate things, and the finer their temper the
more readily will they be ruined by clumsy handling. The best
force in the world can be tried too high. A battalion which was
left too long in, or returned too often to, a bad section of trench
line was apt to lose heart. So with the use of troops in action.
It was a mistake to send in a unit too often and at too short
intervals, more especially if it was seriously depleted in strength.
The vigour of the offensive departed, and at the best was replaced
by the fatalism of the defensive.

The matter had a special urgency in relation to the future
offensive which occupied the minds of the Allies during the winter of
1915-16. It was becoming clear that every artillery " preparation "
must be limited in range, and that troops which advanced too far
under its cover would, sooner or later, be brought up against un-
broken defences. The natural conclusion was that any advance
must be by way of stages — the capture of one position by infantry,
and then an artillery concentration against the next position, fol-
lowed by a second infantry attack. But it was certain that troops
which were checked in their first impetus, and compelled to con-
solidate the ground won and beat off counter-attacks, would be
tried too high if, some days later, they were given the task of
assaulting the next position. In such tactics we might at any
moment stumble upon the breaking-point. The remedy was, obvi-
ously, the use of fresh troops for each stage of the advance, a con-
stant chain of reserves passing up for each movement. By such
a method every stage would have the advantage of a fresh impetus,
and the supreme trial of modern war — recurrent efforts in which
the spirit of the offensive must flag from sheer exhaustion — be
avoided save in the last necessity.

This note would be incomplete without a reference to that high
and sublimated battle spirit which is rare at the best of times,
but which in all armies is possessed by the fortunate few. " Joy
of battle " is a phrase too lightly used, and may well seem to most
men a grim misnomer. Yet it is a reality, a thing which comes
not from the deadening of feeling, but from its quickening and
transmutation. It belongs especially to youth, which finds in the
colossal hazards of war an enlarged vitality. It is not pugnacity,
for there is no rancour in it ; the Happy Warrior fights not because
he has much to hate, but because he has much to love. The true
type is the minstrel Volker of Alsace, in the " Lay of the Nibelungs,"
whose weapon was a sword-fiddlebow ; every blow he struck
went home, but every blow was also a note of music. Such souls

1916] DEATH OF THE YOUNGER MOLTKE. 15

have won not relief only, but joy ; not merely serenity, but exul-
tation. The glory of life is never felt more keenly than when the
next moment may see it quenched, for the greatest of its glories
is to be armed and mailed for the fray. In the ascending scale of
battle tempers we may place first acquiescence, then peace, and
last this positive glow and welcome. It found perfect expression
in the verses which Captain Julian Grenfell wrote before his death
at Second Ypres, when spring was flushing the Flanders meadows —
verses which may well come to be regarded as the chief of the war's
bequests to poetry.

On 18th June the younger Moltke died, at the age of sixty-
eight. As Chief of the German Staff at the opening of the war
he had been responsible for taking from its pigeon-hole the famous
plan which Germany had been working at for so many years.
That plan failed utterly at the Marne and Ypres, and Moltke was
succeeded by the younger and abler Falkenhayn, to whom fell the
difficult task of revising the whole German scheme and organizing
his country for that war of endurance of which she had never
dreamed. The death of this bearer of a famous name and ex-
ponent of the traditional German strategy had at the moment a
dramatic significance. It marked the end of the long second stage
of the war in the West, the stage in which Germany had held her
lines by virtue of a superior machine. For, while the Canadians
were struggling at Ypres for a few hundred yards of swamp, and
the tide of assault at Verdun was breaking on the bastion of the
French defence, in Picardy the Allied guns were massing, and great
armies were making ready for an implacable offensive.

CHAPTER LIV.

THE POLITICAL SITUATION.

February 10-June 24, 1916.

The Operation of the Military Service Act in Britain — The British Budget of 1916
— Germany's Finances — Death of Gallieni — Resignation of Tirpitz — America's
Ultimatum to Germany — The Easter Rebellion in Ireland.

During the early months of 1916 there was a more optimistic
temper abroad in the West than had been known since the pre-
ceding spring. Even the fall of Kut failed to shake this com-
posure— perhaps because the disasters of the second half of 1915
had driven most men to write off from the Allied assets the
various divergent operations in the East. The desperation of
Germany's offensives, her boasting — so loud that it suggested an
uneasy mind — her summons to her opponents to " look at the
map " and admit her victory, seemed to argue some loss of grip
on the situation. Public cheerfulness was increased by the superb
French stand at Verdun. Here was a case of Germany using all
her peculiar strength on one narrow section and failing to force it.
Her losses, even in the eyes of the most sceptical, were not far short
of those of the defence. If the mighty machine which had blown
up the Russian front on the Donajetz a year before could do no
better than this, it looked as if its days were numbered. The
Allies were now on a level with their enemy in materiel, and they
had the greater total number of men. They believed that the
fighting quality of their infantry was at least as good, and it ap-
peared that they had the saner strategical plan.

Part of the restored confidence — in Britain, at any rate — was
due to a better feeling towards the much-criticized civil Govern-
ment. The Cabinet had taken certain steps, long overdue, towards
making the nation a true partner in the war. Policy, so far as it
concerned the blockade, the war in the air, and the conduct of the
Navy, had been debated frankly in Parliament, and criticism,

since it was given a fair outlet, lost its danger and gained in prac-

10

1916] CIVILIAN STAFF WORK. 17

tical value. The passing of the new Military Service Act had satis-
fied the national conscience, though it was clear that its imperfec-
tions would have to be remedied by a more comprehensive measure.
The worst difficulties with Labour seemed to be over, and, broadly
speaking, the mind of the nation was occupied with certain definite
points of administrative reform rather than with a general feeling
of satiety towards its governors. Critics, to be sure, remained who
pounced upon the foibles of politicians and pleaded for a " clean
sweep." Their devotion to some strong, simple saviour of his
country made them dredge deep in political and non-political life
to find their ideal. But such an attitude was in reality a form of
mysticism, analogous to the old quest for a panacea. It was a
mood of imaginative rhetoric rather than of common sense. In
the name of practical politics they sought something which was
notably unpractical. For the man of destiny is the gift of God,
and is not to be found by painful seeking. When he comes it is
silently and without advertisement, and his own people commonly
know him not.

So far as the fighting services were concerned, the nation at
large looked with composure and confidence on the admirals at sea
and the generals in the field. It recognized that staff work had at
last been rated at its proper value, and the stalwart figure of Sir
William Robertson was a guarantee that empiricism should no more
rule our general strategy. But it was also becoming widely felt
that staff work was necessary too for civilian administration, and
was especially needful for those intricate problems which would
face the country at the conclusion of peace. The principles with
which the war had been entered upon were still unshaken in esteem ;
clamorous events had not yet called for a revision of war ideals.
The interest of the Allies was still centred upon practical needs,
but they now envisaged these needs as extending beyond hostilities.
One section in Britain seemed to hold the schoolboy view that all
that was required was to give Germany a beating, shake hands,
and live happily with her ever afterwards. That was not the view
of those most familiar with German methods, and it was certainly
not the view of the French. They knew that Germany would
never be so dangerous as in the period of apparent quiescence
produced by her defeat, and that much that was gained by war
might be lost to the Allies in the first twelve months after peace.
It was known that she had made far-reaching plans, after her
patient fashion, to meet the financial, economic, and political
difficulties that would confront her, and it was very certain that

18 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Feb.

Britain, absorbed in departmental activities, had no scheme to
counter these. Lord Haldane raised the question in the House of
Lords, and the Prime Minister promised that a " Peace Book " on
the analogy of the " War Book " of a General Staff would be pre-
pared. But no adequate machinery was provided for its prepara-
tion, and if the matter was to be left to the. odd men and the scanty
leisure of the various departments it was clear that the result would
be farcical. There was a real national anxiety that our unreadiness
for war should not be matched by a like unreadiness for peace.
A certain impulse in the direction of forethought and organization
was given by the visit of Mr. Hughes, the Prime Minister of the
Australian Commonwealth and the most prominent leader of
Labour in the Empire. In a series of speeches he warned his
countrymen to take heed that what was won by the valour of the
fleets and armies did not slip from slack civilian hands. The
warning was opportune and effective, for this was a fresh voice,
speaking an honest message very different from the plangent com-
monplaces of its later manner. Britain was weary of the kind of
thinking which is done only under the goad of an unlooked-for
necessity.

The coming into operation of the Military Service Act on
February 10, 1916, did not end the recruiting difficulties. The
work of granting exemptions lay with the local tribunals, and they
showed a wide latitude in the interpretation of their duties. In
some rural districts the able-bodied sons of farmers suddenly
appeared as shepherds and cowmen, demanding and receiving
exemption. The War Office was compelled to press for a revision
of the list of reserved occupations, and new instructions had to be
issued to the tribunals. There was trouble, too, with that typical
British product, the conscientious objector. Logically, his posi-
tion was impossible. He claimed the rights and declined the
most urgent duty of citizenship, and chose in effect to declare
himself an outlaw from the commonweal. Repugnance to military
service was to be expected from many ; but in order to provide a
respectable cloak for such shrinking, the obscure side-chapels of
religion and politics suddenly found their votaries many times
multiplied. It was no easy task to separate from such claimants
the bona fide objectors and the charlatans, and blunders and
hardships were inevitable. The brazen shirker often emerged
triumphant, while the man of honest, if invalidish, conscience
was penalized. The thing was presently to become a scandal,
which, because it affected the very few, was unrealized by the

i9i6] CONSCRIPTION. 19

nation. The genuine conscientious objector was, in many cases,
denied even his legal rights, and a number of sincere and
honourable, if abnormal, beings were subjected to a persecution
which could be justified on no conceivable grounds of law, ethics,
or public policy.

But at the moment the main trouble arose from the position of
the married men, who had registered in the Derby scheme under the
impression that no married men would be called up so long as any
single men remained unattested. In the rush and confusion of
that campaign, which had had something of the old electioneering
business about it, wild promises had been made by canvassers
which now recoiled on the Government's head. Lord Derby was
justified in claiming that his pledge to the married men had been
strictly fulfilled — the Military Service Act had been passed to
bring in the single men ; and the married men who had attested
had done so with full knowledge that they would be called up.
But it was difficult for a married man to see hordes of the single
creeping into reserved occupations, while he, owing to his patriot-
ism, was being put to a serious economic loss. The discontent
became so grave that the calling up of the married groups was
postponed, and the Cabinet was forced to find some way out of
the difficulty. There was the further fact that even the Military
Service Act would scarcely provide the numbers needed to raise
our field force to the desired level, and to keep it there. The
military authorities furnished a note of their requirements, and
declined to depart from it.

There was obviously no way of getting rid of the practical
injustice caused by the various tentatives of the past months
except by an impartial conscription of all men of military age,
whether married or single. But the Cabinet was slow to come to
this decision. They agreed upon a scheme of " contingent com-
pulsion," which meant that if after a certain period sufficient men
were not recruited by ordinary enlistment, Parliament would be
asked for compulsory powers. They also proposed to prolong the
service of time-expired men till the end of the war, to bring all
youths under the Military Service Act as soon as they reached the
age of eighteen, and to transfer men enlisted for territorial bat-
talions to any unit where they might be needed. At a two days'
secret session of the House of Commons these projects were sub-
mitted, and confidential information was given to members as to
the exact military requirements of the nation. But when, on 22nd
April, leave to introduce the new Bill was asked for, the scheme was

20 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

promptly rejected. The Labour members themselves disowned it
as unjust and feeble, and demanded, now that the necessity had
arisen, the straight course of " equal sacrifice." On 3rd May the
Prime Minister introduced a Bill to extend, as from 24th June,
the provisions of the Military Service Act to all unattested married
men. From that date every male British subject ordinarily
resident in Great Britain, and between the ages of eighteen and
forty-one, was to be deemed duly enlisted in the regular army for
the duration of the war. The third reading of the Bill was carried
by a majority of 250 to 35, and it received the Royal assent on
25th May. In a message issued on that day the King expressed
to his people his recognition of the patriotism and self-sacrifice
which had raised already by voluntary enlistment no less than
5,041,000 men — " an effort far surpassing that of any other nation
in similar circumstances recorded in history, and one which will be
a lasting source of pride to future generations."

Voluntary enlistment had, indeed, done marvels, and it was well
that the world should have seen so notable a proof of the British
temper. But its work was done, and, unless endless hardships were
to be caused, it must be replaced by a different system. The long
controversy was over, conscription was the law of the land, and the
sum total of British manhood was at the disposal of the State.
Moreover, the revolution was whole-hearted, and met with only
the slenderest opposition. Such a change, it is probable, could
not have been wrought by any sweeping or heroic measures in the
early days of the war. It needed time for opinion to ripen and the
necessities of the case to force themselves upon the public mind.
But it is very certain that the country was ready for the step long
before the Cabinet had screwed up its courage. In this matter
the leaders lagged behind their followers in nerve and seriousness.
The people of Britain surrendered what some chose to call their
" birthright " of voluntaryism not because the Government de-
manded the sacrifice, but because they forced it on the Govern-
ment. Had the rulers been a little closer to the nation many
heart-breaking delays would have been saved, and much needless
waste in money and men.

The Budget, which was introduced by the British Chancellor
of the Exchequer on 4th April, was mainly an increase in existing
taxes — a series of fresh cuts from the old joints. The expenditure
for the year 1915-16 had been 1,559 millions, 31 millions less than
the estimate ; the revenue was 337 millions, 32 millions in excess

I9i6] THE 1916 BUDGET. 21

of the estimate. This left a deficit of 1,222 millions, which had been
made good for the present by the various war loans, the sale of
Exchequer Bonds and Treasury Bills, and the Anglo-French-
American loan. For the coming year Mr. McKenna estimated the
total expenditure at 1,825 millions, the total revenue at 502 mil-
lions, leaving a deficit to be met by borrowing of 1,323 millions.
The new taxes included an impost on tickets of admission to various
amusements, and taxes on matches and mineral waters ; the rate
of income tax for earned and unearned incomes was increased ;
the duties on sugar, cocoa, and coffee were raised ; and the excess
profits tax was advanced from 50 per cent, to 60 per cent. This
enlarged taxation was boldly but not very scientifically conceived,
since it laid too great a share of the extra burden on the pro-
fessional and middle classes. There was justice in the complaint
that more of the revenue might have been raised by indirect taxa-
tion. But a time of war allows small leisure for fiscal reform, and
statesmen not unnaturally tend to follow what for the moment
is the line of least resistance.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer permitted himself a forecast
of the situation at the end of 1916-17. Our permanent revenue,
leaving out the temporary yield of the excess profits tax, would
then be 423 millions, our total indebtedness 3,440 millions, which,
deducting the 800 millions advanced to the Allies and Dominions,
left a net debt of 2,640 millions. Allowing for a sinking fund,
this meant an annual debt charge of 145 millions. These enormous
sums dazzled the eyes of the ordinary man, and left him giddy.
It was impossible to base any reasoned view of the financial posi-
tion on figures which so far transcended all past experience and
calculation. But it was none the less true that, in comparison with
former crises, and taking into account the total wealth and earning
capacity of the nation, the colossal expenditure was still within our
means. We were conducting our war finance generally on sound
principles. While Germany proposed to raise at the outside 24
millions by special taxation, we had obtained from the same source,
in the first twenty months of war, over 146 millions, and in 1916-17
we were raising over 300 millions. Our system of credit had stood
the unparalleled strain, and our banking methods were vindicated
beyond question in the eyes of the most querulous critic. The
balance against us in foreign trade remained our chief difficulty,
but we had done something in the past year to adjust it. One
remarkable phenomenon was the revival of our export trade, in
spite of the fact that our internal industries were being carried

22 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

on with less than half of their normal man-power. The economic
position of Britain, when it was remembered to how large an extent
she bore also the burdens of her Allies, was in many ways not the
least of the surprises of the war.

The student who turned to Germany found a very different
state of affairs. Her pre-war organization had made her financial
problem simple, but nothing could make the simplicity sound.
Her four ingeniously manipulated loans had raised a large sum on
paper, but she had provided scarcely any additional annual revenue
to meet the enormous debt charge. She had increased her paper
circulation by over 700 millions, while Britain had only found it
necessary to increase hers by 100 millions. She was importing
from neutrals, but she had few exports with which to pay for im-
ports. The decline in the value of the mark in neutral markets —
an average depreciation of 29 per cent. — showed that her industrial
output was shrinking, as more and more men were taken for the
field. The German Minister of Finance, Dr. Helfferich, made a
speech in the Reichstag on 16th March in which he endeavoured to
justify German methods. He took credit that his country had not
imitated the British practice of new taxation, but had followed
" the principles of orderly Imperial housekeeping," whatever these
might be. But in the next breath he pleaded for new taxes, since
" we cannot demand or accept milliards from a people which for
the fourth time, in ardent patriotism and confidence, offers its
savings to the Empire, unless we assure the due payment of in-
terest." On this it might have been observed that the amount of
new taxation proposed did not come within measurable distance
of paying that interest. He criticized the British fashion of short-
term debts, which he estimated at nearly 750 millions, including
in this sum Exchequer Bonds, which had a five-year currency, as
well as the American Loan. But Germany's own short-term debt
at the end of February exceeded 800 millions. Moreover, the
British system of continuous loans by bill or bond was a sound one :
it represented a real subscription of existing funds ; whereas the
big German long-term loan was largely a creation of artificial
bank credits. Finally, he boasted that Germany was only spending
half the sum that Britain spent daily on the war. In 1916 our
daily expenditure was close on 5 millions, that of France about
2\ millions, that of Russia just over 3 millions, and that of Italy
something under 1 million. But he omitted to mention the fact
that the British figures included separation allowances and loans
to the Allies, which the German did not, and these items between

i9i6] DEATH OF GALLIENI. 23

them came to little less than i£ millions per day. Germany had
to carry Austria, Bulgaria, and Turkey on her shoulders, and it
was probable that her daily outlay, direct and indirect, was nearly
equal to that of Britain.

The spring months of 1916 saw changes in the personnel of
various governments. In Russia Polivanov, whose liberal views
offended the autocracy, was succeeded as Minister of War by
General Schuvaiev ; M. Goremykin, the Premier, resigned, and
his place was filled by a comparatively unknown man, M. Boris
Sturmer. The Duma was reopened by the Emperor on 22nd
February after its long prorogation, and the occasion was remark-
able for a review of the situation in foreign affairs by M. Sazonov,
and eloquent expressions of the national resolution by the Presi-
dent, M. Rodzianko, and the new Prime Minister. In these
speeches an appeal was made to the different schools of politics
to let disputable questions of internal reform sleep for the mo-
ment, and close their ranks against the common enemy. But
there was something academic in the eloquence ; national unity
was spoken of as a thing substantially in existence, and national
strength as that which might be impaired but could never be
broken ; there were few to read the omens right, and to dread,
like Napoleon, the crows around the Kremlin. In France Gal-
lieni was compelled by ill-health to leave the Ministry of War.
On 27th May he died, and was mourned by his country as Britain
had mourned for Lord Roberts. He was pre-eminently the vet-
eran soldier of France, whose career made a continuous link be-
tween her deepest humiliation and her greatest glory. He had
fought in the war of 1870, and as the maker of French West Africa,
Tonkin, and Madagascar had won high honour during the decades
before 1914. When the great struggle came his health kept him
back from the actual battle-front ; but as Governor of Paris in
that hectic first week of September 1914 he had done much to
make possible the victory of the Marne, and his grave and single-
hearted courage had been an inspiration to his people.

In the early part of March there had been remarkable changes
at the German Marineamt. Tirpitz resigned on the nominal plea
of ill-health, and was succeeded by his former subordinate, Admiral
von Capelle. The news caused a sensation not only throughout
the rest of Europe, but in Germany itself. To the ordinary German
Tirpitz was the author and conductor of that submarine campaign
which atoned in the popular mind for the inertia of the High Sea

24 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

Fleet, and the exponent of that ruthlessness in maritime warfare
which must some day shatter the naval pride of Britain. The
reason for his fall was the character of the man. He was obstinate
and short-sighted, a hopeless colleague for a politique like the
Imperial Chancellor. He was a confirmed intriguer, and, like some
distinguished sailors elsewhere, had at his bidding an obedient
claque of journalists. As the situation with America grew more
difficult and delicate it was clearly impossible to have so reckless
and headstrong an administrator at the head of the most con-
troversial department in the service. The fall of Tirpitz was a
triumph for the more cautious Bethmann-Hollweg. But, as has
happened before in history, while the Minister went his policy
remained. The importance of submarine ruthlessness was so deeply
set in the popular mind that the Government dared not slacken in
their efforts. Two Dutch liners, the Tubantia and the Palembang,
were torpedoed without warning. Finally, on 24th March, came,
as we have already seen, one of the most flagrant outrages in the
history of the war — the sinking by a submarine of the Channel
steamer S^lssex. A number of American citizens were among the
victims, and Washington asked Berlin for explanations. The
German Government replied by casting doubt upon the origin of
the disaster — a doubt which America was soon in a position by
indisputable evidence to dispel.

On 19th April President Wilson made a speech in Congress
which trenchantly indicted the whole German policy of sub-
marine warfare. He returned to the thesis laid down in the
first Lusitania Note, and since then overlaid by special pleas,
that the submarine was not an admissible weapon for commerce
destruction. It was " grossly evident that warfare of such a
sort, if warfare it be, cannot be carried on without the most
palpable violation of the dictates alike of right and humanity.
. . . The use of submarines for the destruction of an enemy's
commerce is of a necessity, because of the very character of
the vessels employed and the very methods of attack which
their employment as of course involves, incompatible with the
principles of humanity, the long-established and incontro-
vertible rights of neutrals, and the sacred immunities of non-
combatants." He ended by declaring that he considered it
his duty to inform Germany that " unless the Imperial German
Government should now immediately declare and effect an aban-
donment of its present methods of warfare against passenger
and freight vessels, the Government can have no choice but to

1916] GERMANY'S SUBMARINE CONCESSION. 25

sever diplomatic relations with the Government of the German
Empire altogether." The night before a Note in these terms had
been sent by Mr. Lansing to Berlin.

Here was at last the true ultimatum, which admitted of no
misinterpreting. The Tirpitz policy of ruthlessness must be relin-
quished in theory and practice, or America would join the bellig-
erent Allies. The German reply, published on 4th May, was of the
familiar type — a plea in confession and avoidance. It claimed that
Germany had exercised a " far-reaching restraint " on her sub-
marine warfare, solely in the interests of neutrals. It declared that
this warfare could not be dispensed with, since it had been under-
taken " in self-defence against the illegal conduct of Britain while
fighting a bitter struggle for national existence." But it announced
a concession. The German naval force was to " receive the following
orders for submarine warfare in accordance with the general principle
of visit, search, and destruction of merchant vessels recognized by
international law. Such vessels, both within and without the area
declared as a naval war zone, shall not be sunk without warning,
and without saving human life, unless the ship attempt to escape
and offer resistance." In return for this favour Germany expected
that America " will now also consider all impediments removed
which may have lain in the way of neutral co-operation to-
wards the restoration of the freedom of the seas," and " will now
demand and insist that the British Government shall forthwith
observe the rules of international law universally recognized
before the war," in the matter of interference with sea-borne
commerce.

In the connection in which it was delivered the reply could only
be construed as a specific abandonment of the policy of " ruthless-
ness." It was so interpreted by the United States. In his reply
of 8th May, Mr. Wilson accepted the " Imperial Government's
abandonment of a policy which had so seriously menaced the good
relations of the two countries," and added that he relied upon its
" scrupulous execution." As for Germany's attempt to acquire
something in return for her concession the President did not
mince matters. " The Government of the United States notifies
the Imperial Government that it cannot for a moment enter-
tain, much less discuss, the suggestion that respect by the
German naval authorities for the right of citizens of the United
States upon the high seas should in any way, or in the slightest
degree, be made contingent upon the conduct of any other govern-
ment as affecting the rights of neutrals and non-combatants.

26 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

The responsibility in such matters is single not joint, absolute not
relative." *

A diplomatic correspondence is to be read in the light of its
attendant circumstances. Germany's reply and America's counter-
reply, made in a time of great international strain, and in precise
language, constituted something very different from the looser dis-
cussions of the previous year. The belief seemed to be justified that
the American President had spoken his last word, and that, if his
conditions were not fulfilled, a breach between the two Powers
would follow without further pourparlers. That Germany should
be willing to relinquish a policy so loudly proclaimed and so popular
with the nation at large, argued that the influence of the Imperial
Chancellor and the politiques was for the moment predominant,
and that he and his friends were beginning to envisage the future
with a certain sobriety.

But when we turn to the speeches of Bethmann-Hollweg during
these months, we shall find no abatement of intransigence nor
any just appraisement of the situation. He shrilly upbraided
the Allies for refusing to recognize when they were beaten. He
implored them to look at the map ; as if the extent of occupied
territory constituted a decision. The more far-flung the lines of
an army the greater its ultimate destruction if its strength fails.
He repeated the legend about Germany having entered upon war
solely for the protection of her unity and freedom. All she sought,
he said, was a Germany so strong that no one in the future would
be tempted to seek to destroy her. And then he preached his own
doctrine of nationality. Did any one suppose that Germany
would ever surrender to the rule of reactionary Russia the peoples
she had liberated " between the Baltic Sea and the Volhynian
swamps " ? As for Belgium, there could be no status quo ante.
" Germany cannot again give over to Latinization the long-oppressed
Flemish race." The British Prime Minister had declared that the
first condition of peace was the complete and final destruction of
the military power of Prussia. But that, said Bethmann-Hollweg,
is the same thing as our unity and freedom. The confession was
significant. It was precisely because Germany defined that unity
and freedom in terms of Prussian militarism that peace could only
come with the latter's destruction.

Some weeks later Sir Edward Grey, in an interview with an
American journalist, sketched another kind of freedom. " What

* The same principle had been laid down in the American reply to the German
Note of July 8, 1915.

i9i6] IRELAND. 27

we and our Allies are fighting for is a free Europe. We want
a Europe free, not only from the domination of one nationality by
another, but free from hectoring diplomacy and the peril of war ;
free from the constant rattling of the sword in the scabbard, from
perpetual talk of shining armour and War Lords. . . . What
Prussia proposes is Prussian supremacy. She proposes a Europe
modelled and ruled by Prussia. She is to dispose of the liberties
of her neighbours and of us all. We say that life on those terms
is intolerable. . . . Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg affirms that
Great Britain wants to destroy ' united and free Germany.' We
never were smitten with any such madness. We should be glad
to see the German people free, as we ourselves want to be free,
and as we want the other nationalities of Europe and of the world
to be free. It belongs to the rudiments of political science, it is
abundantly taught by history, that you cannot enslave a people
and make a success of the job — that you cannot kill a people's
soul by foreign despotism and brutality. We aspire to embark
upon no such course of folly and futility towards another nation.
We believe that the German people, when once the dreams of
world empire cherished by pan-Germanism are brought to nought,
will insist upon the control of its Government ; and in this lies
the hope of secure freedom and national independence in Europe.
. . . The Prussian authorities have apparently but one idea of
peace — an iron peace imposed upon other nations by German
supremacy. They do not understand that free men and free nations
will rather die than submit to that ambition, and that there can be
no end to war till it is defeated and renounced."

In a chronicle of war domestic politics are only to be touched
on in so far as they have a bearing on the campaign. But it is
necessary to devote a short space to one episode, the roots of which
lay deep in old political controversies — an adventure which, as it
happened, ended in a fiasco, but which in its inception was definitely
linked to the main struggle. Fruitless volumes might be written
in an endeavour to trace the full historical origin of the Irish
rebellion of Easter week, 1916. So far five hundred years of experi-
ments had failed to make Ireland an integral part of Britain.
There had been opportunities — golden opportunities some of them
— but they had been missed or declined. Till half a century ago
Ireland had been penalized ; since then she had been partly scolded
and partly coddled ; but the treatment had always been differential.
No opportunity had been given for the land to grow up into that

28 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

equal and like-minded partnership which means unity as well as
union. As a consequence Britain had grown weary of the subject,
and had almost relinquished the attempt in despair. The air had
become thick with paradox and sentiment ; the Irishman whom
Britain despaired of, the Englishman whom Ireland detested,
were alike creatures of an imaginative convention ; the realities of
national character could not be discerned through the mist of
propaganda. Sane men had reached the conclusion that any
course would be better than to leave Ireland to be angled for by
British political parties and made the gambling counter in a worth-
less game. If an incorporating union had failed, there might remain
the chance of a looser federal tie, under which the Irish people
could attain that national maturity which had hitherto been denied
them. But while it is hard to unite, it is often not less difficult
to disentangle, and with the first talk of a separatist policy it
became clear that Ireland was not, strictly speaking, a unit at all.
If three-fourths of the land were ready to renounce the incorporating
union, the strong and serious Scoto-Irish stock of the North was
not less resolved to cling to it.

As we have seen, the outbreak of the war with Germany called
a truce between the official combatants — a truce honourably ob-
served by the respective leaders. Sir Edward Carson and Mr.
Redmond flung themselves into the work of recruiting, and Ireland's
well-wishers hoped that the partnership of North and South in the
field might bring about a sense of a common nationality. Germany
had counted much on Irish disloyalty and disunion. Her merchants
had supplied arms on the most moderate terms to Ulstermen and
Nationalists alike, and when, at the end of July 1914, a riot broke
out in Dublin and British troops came into conflict with the mob,
one of her principal agents had telegraphed that the hour had struck.
As matters shaped themselves, her anticipation was falsified.
But as the months passed it became apparent that there were
certain smouldering ashes in Ireland which, judiciously fanned,
might kindle into a blaze. Treason was preached openly by word
and pen, and little notice was taken of it by the authorities. Recruit-
ing was obstructed with impunity to the obstructors. German
money was spent freely, and a nucleus of disaffection was found
in the organization called Sinn Fein, which owed no allegiance to
any of the recognized Irish parties.

Sinn Fein — which means " Ourselves " — was a body founded
some sixteen years before by a section of extreme Nationalists,
who had lost faith in the Irish Parliamentary party. It advocated

1916] ROGER CASEMENT. 29

as its aim something not unlike Austro-Hungarian dualism, and as
means passive resistance to all British interference, a boycott of
British goods, and — with a wiser inspiration — the development of
Irish crafts and industries and a distinctive Irish literature. For long
it was a harmless academic movement, much frowned on by the
politicians, and drawing its strength chiefly from the enthusiasts
of Irish art and poetry. In a loose and incoherent way it stood for
the same ideal as Sir Horace Plunkett, who urged his countrymen
to find salvation in their own efforts rather than in the caprices of
the parliamentary game. But after the outbreak of war it took
to itself sinister allies, the extremists came to the top, and the spirit
of the organization became definitely anti-British. The Irish
Government, in spite of repeated warnings, did little or nothing
to check the movement. Mr. Birrell, the Chief Secretary, had
consistently adopted the principle that till Home Rule arrived
no rule was the best substitute, and his Under-secretary shared
these enlightened views.

Sir Roger Casement, formerly a British consular officer, who had
before the war identified himself with the extreme Nationalist party,
presently left for Germany, where he hotly espoused the German
cause. He was given the task of going round the prisoners' camps
in the attempt to form an Irish Brigade, but to the eternal glory
of the Irish soldier his overtures met for the most part with scorn
and derision. Ultimately Germany grew tired of her ally, and
called on him to make good his promise of raising an Irish revolt.
She had no confidence in the success of the adventure, but she
hoped that sufficient din would be raised to attract a number of
British troops to Ireland, and she was prepared to support the
gambler's throw with a bombardment by her battle-cruiser squad-
ron at some point on the East Anglian coast. Casement was in a
tragic quandary. Futile and suspect, he was forced by his cynical
employers into an enterprise which he knew must fail, and in the
failure of which he would assuredly find his death.

Late on the evening of 20th April a German vessel, disguised
as a Dutch trader and laden with arms, together with a German
submarine, arrived off the Kerry coast, not far from Tralee. Every
detail of their voyage from the day they left Germany was known
to our Naval Intelligence Department. The vessel was stopped
by a British patrol boat and ordered to follow to Queenstown
harbour. On the way she hoisted the German flag and sank herself,
her crew being taken prisoners. Meantime Sir Roger Casement
and two companions were put ashore from the submarine in a

30 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

collapsible boat. The local Sinn Feiners failed to meet them, and
Casement was arrested early on Good Friday morning, 21st April,
and taken to England.*

The capture of their leader upset the plans of the rebels in
Dublin. On the Saturday the Easter manoeuvres of the Sinn Fein
Volunteers were hastily cancelled ; but so much incriminating evi-
dence was abroad that they decided that the boldest game was
the safest. On Easter Monday, while a half-hearted attack was made
on the Castle, armed bands seized St. Stephen's Green, the Post
Office, the Law Courts, and part of Sackville Street. Troops were
hastily brought in from the Curragh, field batteries shelled the
rebel headquarters, a cordon of soldiers was stretched round the
centre of the city, and martial law was proclaimed. On Wednes-
day a Territorial brigade, the 178th, consisting of battalions of
the Sherwood Foresters, arrived from England, and next day
Sir John Maxwell, who had returned from the command in Egypt,
was given plenary power to deal with the situation. Bit by bit
the rebels were driven out of their strongholds, and by Saturday
they were surrendering in batches. By Monday, 1st May, it was
announced that the revolt in Dublin was crushed, and the outbreaks
in Enniscorthy, Athenry, Clonmel, and other country districts
were dying down. Fifteen of the leaders were tried by court-
martial and shot, and a number of others condemned to varying
terms of imprisonment. The military casualties were 521 of all
ranks, including seventeen officers killed. There were nearly
800 civilian casualties — many of them insurgents — including at
least 180 dead.

This tragic episode had small bearing on the war. From the
start it was what Horace Walpole called the most futile of things,
a " rebellion on the defensive." Wearers of the British uniform,
some of them returning wounded from the front, were shot down
in cold blood, and there were, unhappily, instances of the childish,
light-hearted cruelty, not unknown in Irish history, in this tawdry
Commune. Not thus was the conduct of the Wild Geese who
fought in Clare's Brigade, or the Jacobites who followed the
Chevalier to Culloden. Sympathy and respect must be denied to
men who, however natural their estrangement from Britain, were
fighting in virtual alliance with a Power which had proclaimed
herself the enemy of all liberty and all nationality. But unhappily
the barbarism was not wholly on one side. The British Govern-

* He was ultimately tried for high treason and condemned to death, and was
hanged on 3rd August.

i9i6] THE EASTER REBELLION. 31

ment dabbled alternately in mercy and severity. Either the law
should have been strictly enforced, or — which would have been
the wiser plan — so pitiful an escapade should have been followed
by a generous amnesty, as in De Wet's rebellion. For the rising
contained in its ranks a large number of febrile and perverted
idealists, and it was partly the blame of Britain that such idealism
was not turned to noble uses. The corner-boy who sniped in the
Dublin streets was of the same stock as the men who forced the
Gallipoli landing. Owing partly to ancient and partly to recent
blunders, there was little chance of honest idealism being awak-
ened. While all the world was at war Ireland alone stood aside,
self-conscious and ashamed, and such a mood meant that the path
was clear for the visionary and the knave.

But while it is right to remember this plea in extenuation, it
cannot be pushed too far. The Sinn Feiner was not, indeed, the
whole of Ireland. Ulster was staunch as a rock, and there were
many thousands, drawn from every corner of the South and West,
who were true to their salt and fought in the British lines with a
rare gallantry and resolution. Forty-eight hours after the Dublin
rising began, the German troops opposite certain Irish bat-
talions in France exhibited notices announcing that the English
were shooting down their wives and brothers, and were answered
with " Rule Britannia ! " A company of the Munster Fusiliers
crossed no-man's-land that night, cut the enemy's wire, and
brought off the placard in triumph. It was the answer of the
best of Ireland, not only to Germany, but to those traitors who
would defile her honour at home. But that best was a minority ;
the bulk of the people stood sullenly aside ; Ireland as a whole
had dropped out of the brotherhood of nations. Those who would
excuse her apathy are faced with a cruel dilemma. Either she
approved the German creed and was at variance with the Allied
principles ; or, possessed with hatred of England and lacking in
political vision, she did not discern the meaning of those principles,
to which, had she grasped them, she would have assented. The
first hypothesis is unthinkable, and the historian is forced back
upon the second. The explanation of Ireland's action was not moral
obliquity, but blinded eyes and a dulled mind. She was politically
immature, and, whether we seek the reason in racial character
or historic mischance, in that fact lay her tragedy. She was at
variance, not with Britain, but with civilization.

CHAPTER LV

THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND.

May 30-June 5, 1916.

The British Grand Fleet on May 30 — Jellicoe's Principles of Naval War — Th«
German Fleet sighted — The Battle-cruiser Action — Arrival and Deployment
of Battle Fleet — The Race southward — The Night Action — British and Ger-
man Losses — The Points in Dispute — Summary of Battle — Death of Lord
Kitchener.

From the opening of the war British seamen had been sustained
by the hope that some day and somewhere they would meet the
German High Sea Fleet in a battle in the open sea. It had been
their hope since the hot August day when the great battleships
disappeared from the eyes of watchers on the English shores. It
had comforted them in the long months of waiting amid the winds
and snows of the northern waters. Since the beginning of the
year 1916 this hope had become a confident belief. There was no
special ground for it, except the assumption that as the case of
Germany became more difficult she would be forced to use every
asset in the struggle. As the onslaught on Verdun grew more
costly and fruitless, and as the armies of Russia began to stir with
the approach of summer, it seemed that the hour for the gambler's
throw might soon arrive.

The long vigil was trying to the nerve and temper of every
sailor, and in especial to the Battle Cruiser Fleet, which repre-
sented the first line of British sea strength. It was the business
of the battle cruisers to make periodical sweeps through the North
Sea, and to be first upon the scene should the enemy appear. They
were the advance guard, the corps de choc of the Grand Fleet ;
they were the hounds which must close with the quarry and hold
it till the hunters of the Battle Fleet arrived. Hence the task of
their commander was one of peculiar anxiety and strain. At any
moment the chance might come, so he must be sleeplessly watchful.
He would have to make sudden and grave decisions, for it was

1916] THE SWEEP OF 30th MAY. 33

certain that the longed-for opportunity would have to be forced
before it matured. The German hope was by attrition or some
happy accident to wear down the superior British strength to an
equality with their own. A rash act on the part of a British admiral
might fulfil that hope ; but, on the other hand, without boldness,
even rashness, Britain could not get to grips with her evasive foe.
So far Sir David Beatty and the battle cruisers had not been for-
tunate. From the shelter of the mine-strewn waters around Heli-
goland Germany's warships made occasional excursions, for they
could not rot for ever in harbour ; her battle cruisers had more
than once raided the English coasts ; her battleships had made
stately progresses in short circles in the vicinity of the Jutland
and Schleswig shores. But so far Sir David Beatty had been
unlucky. At the Battle of the Bight of Heligoland on August 28,
1914, his great ships had encountered nothing more serious than
enemy light cruisers. At the time of the raid on Hartlepool in
December of the same year he had just failed, owing to fog, to
intercept the raiders. In the Battle of the Dogger Bank on Jan-
uary 24, 1915, the damage done to his flagship had prevented him
destroying the whole German fleet of battle cruisers. It was clear
that the enemy, if caught in one of his hurried sorties, would not
fight unless he had a clear advantage. Hence, if the battle was
to be joined at all, it looked as if the first stage, at all events, must
be fought by Britain against odds.

On Tuesday afternoon, 30th May, the bulk of the British Grand
Fleet left its bases on one of its customary sweeps. On this occa-
sion it put to sea with hope, for the Admiralty had informed it that
a large German movement was contemplated. It sailed in two
sections. To the north were twenty-four Dreadnoughts of the Battle
Fleet under Sir John Jellicoe — the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Battle Squad-
rons ; one Battle Cruiser Squadron, the 3rd, under Rear-Admiral
the Honourable Horace Hood ; the 1st Cruiser Squadron, under
Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot ; the 2nd Cruiser Squadron,
under Rear-Admiral Heath ; the 4th Light Cruiser Squadron, under
Commodore Le Mesurier ; and the 4th, nth, and 12th Destroyer
Flotillas. Farther south moved the Battle Cruiser Fleet, under
Sir David Beatty — the six vessels of the 1st and 2nd Battle Cruiser
Squadrons, under Rear-Admiral Brock and Rear-Admiral Paken-
ham ; the 5th Battle Squadron, four vessels of the Queen Elizabeth
class, under Rear-Admiral Evan-Thomas ; the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd
Light Cruiser Squadrons; and the 1st, 9th, 10th, and 13th Destroyer
Flotillas. It will be noticed that the two sections of the Grand

34 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

Fleet were not sharply defined by battleships and battle cruisers,
for Sir John Jellicoe had with him one squadron of battle cruisers,
and Sir David Beatty had one squadron of the largest battleships.
On the morning of the last day of May the German High Sea Fleet
also put to sea, and sailed north a hundred miles or so from the
Jutland coast. First went Admiral von Hipper's battle cruisers,
five in number, with the usual complement of cruisers and destroyers.
Following them came the Battle Fleet, under Admiral von Scheer
— fifteen Dreadnoughts and six older vessels, accompanied by three
cruiser divisions and seven torpedo flotillas. With a few excep-
tions, all the capital ships of the German navy were present in
this expedition. We know the purpose of Scheer from his own
narrative. He hoped to engage and destroy a portion of the
British fleet which might be isolated from the rest, for German
public opinion demanded some proof of naval activity now that
the submarine campaign had languished.

Sir John Jellicoe, as early as October 1914, had taken into review
the new conditions of naval warfare, and had worked out a plan
to be adopted when he met the enemy's fleet — a plan approved
not only by his flag officers but by successive Admiralty Boards.
The German aim, as he forecast it, would be to fight a retreating
action, and lead him into an area where they could make the fullest
use of mines, torpedoes, and submarines. He was aware of the
weakness of his own fleet in destroyers and cruisers, and was
resolved not to play the enemy's game. Hence he might be forced
to give the appearance of refusing battle and not closing with a
retreating foe. " I intend to pursue what is, in my considered
opinion, the proper course to defeat and annihilate the enemy's
battle fleet without regard to uninstructed opinion or criticism.
The situation is a difficult one. It is quite within the bounds of
possibility that half of our battle fleet might be disabled by under-
water attack before the guns opened fire at all, if a false move is
made, and I feel that I must constantly bear in mind the great
probability of such attack and be prepared tactically to prevent
its success." The German methods had, therefore, from the start
a profound moral effect in determining the bias of the Commander-
in-Chief's mind. A second principle was always in his thoughts,
a principle derived from his view of the general strategy of the
whole campaign, for Jellicoe had a wider survey than that of the
professional sailor. It was no question of a partiality for the
defensive rather than the offensive. The British Grand Fleet, in
his view, was the pivot of the Allied strength. So long as it existed

BATTLE OF JUTLAND : THE AREA OF OPERATIONS.

&

W.

,R3qO TO A3flA 3HT : OMAJTUU TO 3JTTA8

1916] HIPPER SIGHTED. 35

and kept the sea, it fulfilled its purpose, it had already achieved
its main task ; if it were seriously crippled, the result would be
the loss not of one weapon among many, but of the main Allied
armoury. It was, therefore, the duty of a wise commander to
bring the enemy to battle — but on his own terms ; no considera-
tion of purely naval results, no desire for personal glory, must be
allowed to obscure the essential duty of his solemn trusteeship.
The psychology of the Commander-in-Chief must be understood,
for it played a vital part in the coming action.

The fourth week of May had been hot and bright on shore,
with low winds and clear heavens ; but on the North Sea there lay
a light summer haze, and on the last day of the month loose grey
clouds were beginning to overspread the sky. Sir David Beatty,
having completed his sweep to the south, had turned north about
2 p.m., according to instructions, to rejoin Jellicoe. The sea was
dead calm, like a sheet of glass. His light cruiser squadrons formed
a screen in front of him from east to west. But at 2.20 p.m. the
Galatea (Commodore Alexander-Sinclair), the flagship of the 1st
Light Cruiser Squadron, signalled enemy vessels to the east. Beatty
at once altered course to south-south-east, the direction of the
Horn Reef, in order to get between the enemy and his base.

Five minutes later the Galatea signalled again that the enemy
was in force, and no mere handful of light cruisers. At 2.35 the
watchers in the Lion saw a heavy pall of smoke to the eastward,
and the course was accordingly altered to that direction, and
presently to the north-east. The 1st and 3rd Light Cruiser Squad-
rons spread in a screen before the battle cruisers. A seaplane was
sent up from the Engadine at 3.8, and at 3.30 its first report was
received. Flying at a height of 900 feet, within two miles of
hostile light cruisers, it was able to identify the enemy. Sir
David Beatty promptly formed line of battle, and a minute later
came in sight of Hipper's five battle cruisers. Evan-Thomas and
the 5th Battle Squadron were at the time more than five miles
away, and, since their speed was less than that of the battle cruisers,
would obviously be late for the fight ; but Beatty did not wait,
considering, not unnaturally, that his six battle cruisers were
more than a match for Hipper.

I.

Of all human contests, a naval battle makes the greatest demands
upon the resolution and gallantry of the men and the skill and

36 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

coolness of the commanders. In a land fight the general may be
thirty miles behind the line of battle, but the admiral is in the
thick of it. He takes the same risks as the ordinary sailor, and, as
often as not, his flagship leads the fleet. For three hundred years
it had been the special pride of Britain that her ships were ready
to meet any enemy at any time on any sea. If this proud boast
were no longer hers, then her glory would indeed have departed.

At 3.30 that afternoon Sir David Beatty had to make a momen-
tous decision. The enemy was in all likelihood falling back upon
his main Battle Fleet, and every mile the British admiral moved
forward brought him nearer to an unequal combat. For the
moment the odds were in his favour, since he had six battle cruisers
against Hipper's five, as well as the 5th Battle Squadron, but
presently the odds might be heavily against him. He was faced
with the alternative of conducting a half-hearted running fight
with Hipper, to be broken off before the German Battle Fleet
was reached, or of engaging closely and hanging on even after the
junction with Scheer had been made. In such a fight the atmos-
pheric conditions would compel him to close the range and so lose
the advantage of his heavier guns, and his own battle cruisers as
regarded turret armour and deck-plating were far less stoutly
protected than those of the enemy, which had the armour of a
first-class battleship. Sir David Beatty was never for a moment
in doubt. He chose the course which was not only heroic, but
right on every ground of strategy. Twice already by a narrow
margin he had missed bringing the German capital ships to action.
He was resolved that now he would forgo no chance which the
fates might send.

Hipper was steering east-south-east in the direction of his base.
Beatty changed his course to conform, and the fleets were now
some 23,000 yards apart. The 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron took
station ahead with the destroyers of the 9th and 13th Flotillas ;
then came the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron, led by the Lion ; then
the 2nd ; and then Evan-Thomas, with the 5th Battle Squadron.
Beatty formed his ships on a line of bearing to clear the smoke —
that is, each ship took station on a compass bearing from the flag-
ship, of which they were diagonally astern. At 3.48 the action
began, both sides opening fire at the same moment. The range
was 18,500 yards, the direction was generally south-south-east,
and both fleets were moving at full speed, an average perhaps of
twenty-five knots. The wind was from the south-east, the visi-
bility for the British was good, and the sun was behind them.

1916] THE BATTLE-CRUISER ACTION. 37

They had ten capital ships to the German five. The omens seemed
propitious for victory.

In all battles there is a large element of sheer luck and naked
caprice. In the first stage, when Beatty had the odds in his
favour, he was destined to suffer his chief losses. A shot struck
the Indefatigable (Captain Sowerby) in a vital place, the magazine
exploded, and in two minutes she turned over and sank. The
German gunnery at the start was uncommonly good ; it was only
later, when things went ill with them, that their shooting fell off.
Meantime the 5th Battle Squadron had come into action at a
range of 20,000 yards, and engaged the rear enemy ships. From
4.15 onward for half an hour the duel between the battle cruisers
was intense, and the enemy fire gradually grew less rapid as ours
increased. At 4.18 the German battle cruiser third in the line was
seen to be on fire. Presently the Queen Mary (Captain Prowse)
was hit, and blew up. She had been at the Battle of the Bight of
Heligoland ; she was perhaps the best gunnery ship in the fleet ;
and her loss left Beatty with only four battle cruisers. Happily
she did not go down before her superb marksmanship had taken
toll of the enemy. The haze was now settling on the waters, and
all that could be seen of the foe was a blurred outline.

Meantime, as the great vessels raced southwards, the lighter
craft were fighting a battle of their own. Eight destroyers of the
13th Flotilla — the Nestor, Nomad, Nicator, Narborough, Pelican,
Petard, Obdurate, and Nerissa — together with the Moorsom and
Morris of the 10th, and the Turbulent and Termagant of the 9th,
moved out at 4.15 for a torpedo attack, at the same time as the
enemy destroyers advanced for the same purpose. The British
flotilla at once came into action at close quarters with fifteen
destroyers and a light cruiser of the enemy, and beat them back
with the loss of two destroyers. This combat had made some of
them drop astern, so a full torpedo attack was impossible. The
Nestor, Nomad, and Nicator, under Commander the Honourable
E. B. S. Bingham, fired two torpedoes at the German battle cruisers,
and were sorely battered themselves by the German secondary
armament. They clung to their task till the turning movement
came which we shall presently record, and the result of it was to
bring them within close range of many enemy battleships. Both
the Nestor and the Nomad were sunk, and only the Nicator regained
the flotilla. Some of the others fired their torpedoes, and appar-
ently the rear German ship was struck. The gallantry of these
smaller craft cannot be overpraised. That subsidiary battle,

38 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

fought under the canopy of the duel of the greater ships, was one
of the most heroic episodes of the action.

We have seen that the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron was scout-
ing ahead of the battle cruisers. At 4.38 the Southampton (Com-
modore Goodenough) reported the German battle fleet ahead.
Instantly Beatty recalled the destroyers, and at 4.42 Scheer was
sighted to the south-east. Beatty put his helm to port and swung
round to a northerly course. From the pursuer he had now become
the pursued, and his aim was to lead the combined enemy fleets
towards Sir John Jellicoe. The 5th Battle Squadron, led by
Evan-Thomas in the Barham, now hard at it with Hipper, was
ordered to follow suit. Meanwhile the Southampton and the 2nd
Light Cruiser Squadron continued forward to observe, and did
not turn till within 13,000 yards of Scheer's battleships, and under
their fire. At five o'clock Beatty 's battle cruisers were steering
north, the Fearless and the 1st Destroyer Flotilla leading, the 1st
and 3rd Light Cruiser Squadrons on his starboard bow, and the
2nd Light Cruiser Squadron on his port quarter. Behind him came
Evan-Thomas, attended by the Champion and the destroyers of
the 13th Flotilla.

It is not difficult to guess at the thoughts of Scheer and Hipper.
They had had the good fortune to destroy two of Beatty's battle
cruisers, and now that their whole fleet was together they hoped
to destroy more. The weather conditions that afternoon made
Zeppelins useless, and accordingly they knew nothing of Jellicoe's
presence in the north, though they must have surmised that he
would appear sooner or later. They believed they had caught
Beatty cruising on his own account, and that the gods had delivered
him into their hands. From 4.45 till 6 o'clock to the mind of the
German admirals the battle resolved itself into a British flight
and a German pursuit.

The case presented itself otherwise to Sir David Beatty, who
knew that the British Battle Fleet was some fifty miles off, and
that it was his business to coax the Germans towards it. He
was now facing heavy odds, eight capital ships as against at
least nineteen, but he had certain real advantages. He had the
pace of the enemy, and this enabled him to overlap their line and
to get his battle cruisers on their bow. In the race southwards
he had driven his ships at full speed, and consequently his squadron
had been in two divisions, for Evan-Thomas's battleships had not
the pace of the battle cruisers. But when he headed north he
reduced his pace, and there was no longer a tactical division of

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1916] JELLICOE ARRIVES. 39

forces. The eight British ships were now one fighting unit. It
was Beatty's intention to nurse his pursuers into the arms of
Jellicoe, and for this his superior speed gave him a vital weapon.
Once the northerly course had been entered upon the enemy could
not change direction, except in a very gradual curve, without
exposing himself to enfilading fire from the British battle cruisers
at the head of the line. Though in a sense he was the pursuer,
and so had the initiative, yet as a matter of fact his movements
were mainly controlled by Sir David Beatty's will. That the
British admiral should have seen and reckoned with this fact in
the confusion of a battle against odds is not the least of the proofs
of his sagacity and fortitude.

Unfortunately the weather changed for the worse. The British
ships were silhouetted against a clear western sky, but the enemy
was shrouded in mist, and only at rare intervals showed dim shapes
through the gloom. The range was about 14,000 yards. The two
leading ships of Evan-Thomas's squadron were assisting the battle
cruisers, while his two rear ships were engaged with the first vessels
of the German 3rd Battle Squadron, which developed an unex-
pected speed. As before, the lesser craft played a gallant part.
At 5.5 the Onslow and the Moresby, which had been helping the
Engadine with the seaplane, took station on the engaged bow of
the Lion, and the latter struck with a torpedo the sixth ship in
the German line and set it on fire. She then passed south to clear
the range of smoke, and took station on the 5th Battle Squadron.
At 5.33 Sir David Beatty's course was north-north-east, and he
was gradually hauling round to the north-eastward. He knew
that the Battle Fleet could not be far off, and he was heading the
Germans on an easterly course, so that Jellicoe should be able to
strike to the best advantage.

At 5.50 on his port bow he sighted British cruisers, and six
minutes later had a glimpse of the leading ships of the Battle
Fleet five miles to the north. He at once changed course to east
and increased speed, bringing the range down to 12,000 yards.
He was forcing the enemy to a course on which Jellicoe might
overwhelm him.

II.

The first stage was now over, the isolated fight of the battle
cruisers, and we must turn to the doings of the Battle Fleet itself.
When Sir John Jellicoe at the same time as Beatty took in the
Galatea's signals, he was distant from the battle cruisers between

4o A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

fifty and sixty miles. He at once proceeded at full speed on a
course south-east by south to join his colleague. The engine rooms
made heroic efforts, and the whole fleet maintained a speed in
excess of the trial speeds of some of the older vessels. It was no
easy task to effect a junction at the proper moment, since there
was an inevitable difference in estimating the rendezvous by " reck-
oning," and some of Beatty's messages, dispatched in the stress
of action, were obscure. Moreover, the thick weather made it
hard to recognize which ships were enemy and which were British
when the moment of meeting came. What a spectacle must that
strange rendezvous have presented, had there been any eye to
see it as a whole ! Two great navies on opposite courses at high
speeds driving toward each other : the German unaware of what
was approaching ; the British Battle Fleet, mile upon mile of steel
giants whose van was far out of sight of its rear, twelve miles
wrong in its reckoning, and so making contact almost by accident
in a drift of smoke and sea-haze !

The 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron, under Rear-Admiral Hood,
led the Battle Fleet. At 5.30 Hood observed flashes of gun-fire
and heard the sound of guns to the south-westward. He sent
the Chester (Captain Lawson) to investigate, and at 5.45 this ship
engaged three or four enemy light cruisers, rejoining the 3rd Battle
Cruiser Squadron at 6.5. Hood was too far to the south and east,
so he turned north-west, and five minutes later sighted Beatty.
At 6. 1 1 he received orders to take station ahead, and at 6.22 he
led the line, " bringing his squadron into action ahead in a most
inspiring manner, worthy of his great naval ancestors." He was
now only 8,000 yards from the enemy, and under a desperate fire.
At 6.34 his flagship, the Invincible, was sunk, and with her perished
an admiral who in faithfulness and courage must rank with the
nobler figures of British naval history. This was at the head of the
British line. Meantime the 1st and 2nd Cruiser Squadrons accom-
panying the Battle Fleet had also come into action. The Defence
and the Warrior had crippled an enemy light cruiser, the Wiesbaden,
about six o'clcok. The Canterbury, which was in company with
the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron, had engaged enemy light cruisers
and destroyers which were attacking the destroyers Shark, Acasta,
and Christopher — an engagement in which the Shark was sunk.
At 6.16 the 1st Cruiser Squadron, driving in the enemy light
cruisers, had got into a position between the German and British
Battle Fleets, since Sir Robert Arbuthnot was not aware of the
enemy's approach, owing to the mist, until he was in close prox-

1916] DEPLOYMENT OF BATTLE FLEET. 41

imity to them. The Defence perished, and with it Arbuthnot.
The Warrior passed to the rear disabled, and the Black Prince
received damage which led later to her destruction.

Meantime Beatty's lighter craft had also been hotly engaged.
At 6.5 the Onslow sighted an enemy light cruiser 6,000 yards off,
which was trying to attack the Lion with torpedoes, and at once
closed and engaged at a range from 4,000 to 2,000 yards. She
then closed the German battle cruisers, but after firing one torpedo
she was struck amidships by a heavy shell. Undefeated, she fired
her remaining three torpedoes at the enemy Battle Fleet. She was
taken in tow by the Defender, who was herself damaged, and in
spite of constant shelling the two gallant destroyers managed to
retire in safety. Again, the 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron, under
Rear-Admiral Napier, which was well ahead of the enemy on
Beatty's starboard bow, attacked with torpedoes at 6.25, the
Falmouth and the Yarmouth especially distinguishing themselves.
One German battle cruiser was observed to be hit and fall out
of the line.

The period between 6 o'clock and 6.40 saw the first crisis of the
battle. The six divisions of the Grand Fleet had approached in
six parallel columns, and it was Jellicoe's business to deploy as
soon as he could locate the enemy. A few minutes after six he
realized that the Germans were on his starboard side, and in close
proximity ; he resolved to form line of battle on the port wing
column on a course south-east by east, and the order went out at
6.16. His reasons were — to avoid danger in the mist from the
German destroyers ahead of their Battle Fleet ; to prevent the
Marlborough's division on the starboard wing from receiving the
concentrated fire of the German Battle Fleet before the remaining
divisions came into line ; and to obviate the necessity of turning
again to port to avoid the " overlap " which formation on the
starboard wing would give the enemy van. This decision has been
vehemently criticized, but without justification. It may well be
doubted whether to have formed line towards instead of away from
the enemy would have substantially lessened the time of closing
the enemy, and it would beyond doubt have exposed the British
starboard division to a dangerous concentration of fire. As it
was, the Hercules in the starboard division was in action within
four minutes. The movement took twenty minutes to perform,
and during that time the situation was highly delicate. But on the
whole it was brilliantly carried out, and by 6.38 Scheer had given up
his attempt to escape to the eastward, and was bending due south.

42 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

At 5.40 Hipper, under pressure from Evan-Thomas and the
destroyers, had turned six points to starboard ; at 5.55, being now
overlapped by Beatty, who had closed the range, he turned sharp
east ; at six he bent south ; at 6.12 he went about on a N.N.E.
course ; and about 6.15 he came in contact with Hood's battle
cruisers, and realized that Jellicoe had arrived. For a quarter of
an hour there was heavy fighting, during which his flagship, the
Lutzow, was badly damaged, and the Derfflinger silenced. By 6.33
he was steering due south, followed by Scheer. The turn on
interior lines gave him the lead of Beatty, who bent southward
on a parallel course. The 1st and 2nd Battle Cruiser Squadrons
led ; then the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron ; there followed the
six divisions of the Battle Fleet — first the 2nd Battle Squadron,
under Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Jerram ; then the 4th, under
Vice-Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee, containing Sir John Jellicoe's
flagship, the Iron Duke ; and finally the 1st, under Vice-Admiral
Sir Cecil Burney. Evan-Thomas's 5th Battle Squadron, which had
up to now been with Beatty, intended to form ahead of the Battle
Fleet, but the nature of the deployment compelled it to form
astern. The Warspite had her steering-gear damaged, and drifted
towards the enemy's line under a furious cannonade. For a little
she involuntarily interposed herself between the Warrior and the
enemy's fire. She was presently extricated ; but it is a curious
proof of the caprices of fortune in battle that while a single shot
at the beginning of the action sank the Indefatigable, this intense
bombardment did the Warspite little harm. Only one gun turret
was hit, and her engines were uninjured.

At 6.40, then, the two British fleets were united, the German
line was headed off on the east, and Beatty and Jellicoe were work-
ing their way between the enemy and his home ports. Scheer
and Hipper were now greatly outnumbered, and it seemed as if
the British admirals had won a complete strategic success. But
the fog was deepening, and the night was falling, and such condi-
tions favoured the German tactics of retreat.

III.

The third stage of the battle — roughly, two hours long — was
an intermittent duel between the main fleets. Scheer had no wish
to linger, and he moved southwards at his best speed, with the
British line shepherding him on the east. He was definitely declin-
ing battle. Beatty had succeeded in crumpling up the head of

British Battleships in Action at the Battle of Jutland
(about 6.30 p.m., May 31, 1916)

From a painting by Robert H. Smith

i9i6] THE CHASE SOUTHWARD. 43

the German line, and its battleships were now targets for the
majority of his battle cruisers. The visibility was becoming
greatly reduced. The mist no longer merely veiled the targets,
but often shut them out altogether. This not only made gunnery
extraordinarily difficult, but prevented the British from keeping
proper contact with the enemy. At the same time, such light as
there was was more favourable to Beatty and Jellicoe than to
Scheer. The German ships showed up at intervals against the
sunset, as did Cradock's cruisers off Coronel, and gave the British
gunners their chance.

Hipper and his battle cruisers were in serious difficulties. At
6.15 he was compelled to leave the Liitzow, and since by this time
neither the Derfflinger nor the Seydlitz was fit for flag duties, he
remained in a destroyer till a lull in the firing enabled him to board
the Molike. From seven o'clock onward Beatty was steering
south, and gradually bearing round to south-west and west, in
order to get into touch with the enemy. At 7.14 (Scheer having
ordered Hipper to close the British again) he sighted them at a
range of 15,000 yards — three battle cruisers and two battleships
of the Konig class. The sun had now fallen behind the western
clouds, and at 7.18 Beatty increased speed to twenty-two knots, and
re-engaged. The enemy showed signs of great distress, one ship
being on fire and one dropping astern. The destroyers at the head
of the line emitted volumes of smoke, which covered the ships
behind with a pall, and enabled them at 7.37 to turn away and pass
out of Beatty's sight. At that moment he signalled Jellicoe,
asking that the van of the battleships should follow the battle
cruisers. At 7.58 the 1st and 3rd Light Cruiser Squadrons were
ordered to sweep westwards and locate the head of the enemy's
line, and at 8.20 Beatty altered course to west to support. He
located three battleships, and engaged them at 10,000 yards range.
The Lion repeatedly hit the leading ship, which turned away in
flames with a heavy list to port, while the Princess Royal set fire
to one battleship, and the third ship, under the attack of the New
Zealand and the Indomitable, hauled out of the line heeling over
and on fire. Once more the mist descended and enveloped the
enemy, who passed out of sight to the west.

To turn to the Battle Fleet, which had become engaged during
deployment with the leading German battleships. It first took
course south-east by east ; but as it endeavoured to close it bore
round to starboard. The aim of Scheer now was escape and nothing
but escape, and every device was used to screen his ships from

44 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

British sight. Owing partly to the smoke palls and the clouds
emitted by the destroyers, but mainly to the mist, it was never
possible to see more than four or five enemy ships at a time. The
ranges were, roughly, from 9,000 to 12,000 yards, and the action
began with the British Battle Fleet in divisions on the enemy's
bow. Under the British attack the enemy constantly turned
away, and this had the effect of bringing Jellicoe to a position of
less advantage on the enemy's quarter. At the same time it put the
British fleet between Scheer and his base. In the short periods,
however, during which the Germans were visible, they received a
heavy fire and were constantly hit. Some were observed to haul
out of line, and at least one was seen to sink. The German return
fire at this stage was poor, and the damage caused to our battleships
was trifling. Scheer relied for defence chiefly on torpedo attacks,
which were favoured by the weather and the British position. A
following fleet can make small use of torpedoes, as the enemy is
moving away from it ; while the enemy, on the other hand, has
the advantage in this weapon, since his targets are moving towards
him. Many German torpedoes were fired, but the only battleship
hit was the Marlborough, which was, happily, able to remain in
line and continue the action.

The 1st Battle Squadron, under Sir Cecil Burney, came into
action at 6.17 with the 3rd German Battle Squadron at a range of
11,000 yards ; but as the fight continued the range decreased to
9,000 yards. This squadron received most of the enemy's return
fire, but it administered severe punishment. Take the case of
the Marlborough (Captain George P. Ross). At 6.17 she began by
firing seven salvos at a ship of the Kaiser class ; she then engaged
a cruiser and a battleship ; at 6.54 she was hit by a torpedo ; at
7.3 she reopened the action ; and at 7.12 fired fourteen salvos at
a ship of the Konig class, hitting her repeatedly till she turned
out of line. The Colossus, of the same squadron, was hit, but
only slightly damaged, and several other ships were frequently
straddled by the enemy's fire. The 4th Battle Squadron, in the
centre, was engaged with ships of the Konig and the Kaiser classes,
as well as with battle cruisers and light cruisers. Sir John Jelli-
coe's flagship, the Iron Duke, engaged one of the Konig class at
6.30 at a range of 12,000 yards, quickly straddled it, and hit it
repeatedly from the second salvo onwards till it turned away. The
2nd Battle Squadron in the van, under Sir Thomas Jerram, was
in action with German battleships from 6.30 to 7.20, and engaged
also a damaged battle cruiser.

I9i6] THE NIGHT BATTLE. 45

At 7.15, when the range had been closed and line ahead finally
formed, came the main torpedo attack by German destroyers. In
order to frustrate what he regarded as the most serious danger,
Jellicoe ordered a turn of two points to port, and presently a further
two points, opening the range by about 1,750 yards. This caused
a certain loss of time, and Scheer seized the occasion to turn well
to starboard, with the result that contact between the battle fleets
was presently lost. Jellicoe received Beatty's appeal at 7.54, and
ordered the 2nd Battle Squadron to follow the battle cruisers. But
mist and smoke-screens and failing light were fatal hindrances to
the pursuit, and even Beatty had soon to give up hope of sinking
Hipper's damaged remnant.

By nine o'clock the enemy had completely disappeared, and
darkness was falling fast. He had been veering round to a westerly
course, and the whole British fleet lay between him and his home
ports. It was a strategic situation which, but for the fog and the
coming of night, would have meant his complete destruction. Sir
John Jellicoe had now to make a difficult decision. It was impos-
sible for the British fleet to close in the darkness in a sea swarming
with torpedo craft and possibly with submarines, and accordingly
he was compelled to make dispositions for the night which would
ensure the safety of his ships and provide for a renewal of the
action at dawn. For a night action the Germans were the better
equipped as to their fire system, their recognition signals, and
their searchlights, and he did not feel justified in presenting the
enemy with a needless advantage. On this point Beatty, to the
south and westward, was in full agreement. In his own words :
" I manoeuvred to remain between the enemy and his base, placing
our flotillas in a position in which they would afford protection to
the fleet from destroyer attack, and at the same time be favourably
situated for attacking the enemy's heavier ships." He informed
Jellicoe of his position and the bearing of the enemy, and turned
to the course of the Battle Fleet.

IV.

Jellicoe moved the Battle Fleet on a southerly course, with its
four squadrons in four parallel columns a mile apart, so as to keep
in touch. The destroyer flotillas were disposed from west to east
five miles astern. The battle cruisers and the cruisers lay to the
west of the Battle Fleet ; the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron north
of it; and the 4th Light Cruiser Squadron to the south. The

46 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

main action was over, and Jellicoe was now wholly out of touch
with the enemy. His light craft were ordered to attend the
Battle Fleet and not to attempt to find touch ; hence he was
in the position of a warder in the centre of a very broad gate,
and an alert enemy had many opportunities of slipping past his
flanks.

The night battle was waged on the British side entirely by the
lighter craft. It began by an attack on our destroyers by German
light cruisers ; then at 10.20 an enemy cruiser and four light cruisers
came into action with our 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron, losing the
Frauenlob and severely handling the Southampton and the Dublin.
The 4th Destroyer Flotilla about 11.30 lost the Sparrowhawk, and
later the Tipperary, but at midnight sunk the old battleship Pom-
mem. The 12th Flotilla was in action between one and two in
the morning, and torpedoed two enemy battleships. The 9th
Flotilla lost the Turbulent, and after 2 a.m. the 13th Flotilla engaged
four Deutschlands. The German ships made good their escape,
but they lost in the process out of all proportion to the British
light craft. No ships in the whole battle won greater glory than
these. " They surpassed," wrote Sir John Jellicoe, "the very
highest expectations that I had formed of them." An officer on
one of the flotillas has described that uneasy darkness : " We
couldn't tell what was happening. Every now and then out of
the silence would come bang, bang, boom, as hard as it could go for
ten minutes on end. The flash of the guns lit up the whole sky
for miles and miles, and the noise was far more penetrating than
by day. Then you would see a great burst of flame from some poor
devil, as the searchlight switched on and off, and then perfect
silence once more." The searchlights at times made the sea as
white as marble, on which the destroyers moved " black," wrote
an eye-witness, " as cockroaches on a floor."

At earliest dawn on 1st June the British fleet, which was lying
south and west of the Horn Reef, turned northwards to collect its
light craft, and to search for the enemy. It was ready and eager
to renew the battle, for it had still twenty-two battleships un-
touched, and ample cruisers and light craft, while Scheer's command
was scarcely any longer a fleet in being. But there was to be no
second " Glorious First of June," for the enemy was not to be
found. He had slipped in single ships astern of our fleet during
the night, and was then engaged in moving homewards like a
flight of wild duck that has been scattered by shot. He was
greatly helped by the weather, which at dawn on 1st June was

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DIAGRAM SHOWING
TACTICS of the BATTLEFLEET

BATTLE OF JUTLAND

3J*r MAY. 1916 .

m ■■ i ■■ ■ Shows track of the "IRON DUKE "

or — .- ■-«-- * ••---■«-- fleet m single line ahead

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.-+.._ lions' track .

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1916] THE GERMAN CLAIMS. 47

thicker than the night before, the visibility being less than four
miles. About 3.30 a.m. a Zeppelin passed over the British fleet,
and reported to Scheer the position of the British squadrons.
All morning till eleven o'clock Sir John Jellicoe wa"ted on the
battleground, watching the lines of approach to German ports, and
attending the advent of the enemy. But no enemy came. " I
was reluctantly compelled to the conclusion," wrote Sir John,
" that the High Sea Fleet had returned into port." Till 1.15 p.m.
the British fleet swept the seas, picking up survivors from some
of our lost destroyers. After that hour waiting was useless, so
the fleet sailed for its bases, which were reached next day, Friday,
2nd June. There it fuelled and replenished with ammunition,
and at 9.30 that evening was ready for further action.

V.

The German fleet, being close to its bases, was able to publish
at once its own version of the battle. A resounding success was a
political necessity for Germany, for she needed a fillip for her new
loan, and it is likely that she would have claimed a victory if any
remnant of her fleets had reached harbour. As it was, she was
overjoyed at having escaped annihilation, and the magnitude of
her jubilation may be taken as the measure of her fears. It is of
the nature of a naval action that it gives ample scope for fiction.
There are no spectators. Victory and defeat are not followed, as
in a land battle, by a gain or loss of ground. A well-disciplined
country with a strict censorship can frame any tale it pleases, and
hold to it for months without fear of detection at home. Germany
claimed at once a decisive success. According to her press the
death-blow had been given to Britain's command of the sea. The
Emperor soared into poetry. " The gigantic fleet of Albion,
ruler of the seas, which, since Trafalgar, for a hundred years has
imposed on the whole world a bond of sea tyranny, and has sur-
rounded itself with a nimbus of invincibleness, came into the
field. That gigantic Armada approached, and our fleet engaged
it. The British fleet was beaten. The first great hammer blow
was struck, and the nimbus of British world supremacy disap-
peared." Germany admitted certain losses — one old battleship,
the Pommern ; three small cruisers, the Wiesbaden, Elbing, and
Frauenlob ; and five destroyers. A little later she confessed to the
loss of a battle cruiser, Liitzow, and the light cruiser Rostock, which
at first she had kept secret " for political reasons."

48

A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR.

[June

It was a striking tribute to the prestige of the British navy
that the German claim was received with incredulity in all Allied
and in most neutral countries. But false news, once it has started,
may be dangerous ; and in some quarters, even among friends of
the Allies, there was at first a disposition to accept the German
version. The ordinary man is apt to judge of a battle, whether
on land or sea, by the crude test of losses. The British Admiralty
announced its losses at once with a candour which may have
been undiplomatic, but which revealed a proud confidence in the
invulnerability of the navy and the steadfastness of the British
people. These losses were : one first-class battle cruiser, the Queen
Mary ; two lesser battle cruisers, the Indefatigable and Invincible ;
three armoured cruisers, the Defence, Black Prince, and Warrior ; and
eight destroyers, the Tipper ary, Ardent, Fortune, Shark, Sparrowhawk,
Nestor, Nomad, and Turbulent* More vital than the ships was the
loss of thousands of gallant men, including some of the most
distinguished of the younger admirals and captains.

Sir John Jellicoe at the time estimated the German losses as
two battleships of the largest class, one of the Deutschland class,
one battle cruiser, five light cruisers, six destroyers, and one
submarine. He overstated the immediate, and understated the
ultimate damage. The German account was formally accurate, but
her real loss was infinitely greater. The Seydlitz and the Derfflinger
limped home almost total wrecks ; the battleship Ostfriesland struck
a mine ; the Moltke and the Von der Tann took weeks to repair ;
almost every vessel had been hit, some of them grievously. Scheer
has declared that, apart from the two battle cruisers, the fleet
was ready to take to sea by the middle of August ; but the truth is
that it was never again a fighting fleet. Jutland, which had at

The class and displacement of the lost ships were as follows

I. Queen Mary

Battle cruiser

2. Indefatigable

*t tt

3. Invincible

,, „

4. Defence

Armoured cruiser

5. Black Prince

>» >>

6. Warrior

11 t>

7. Tipperary

Destroyer

8. Ardent

>> •

9. Fortune

»• •

10. Shark

ii • <

11. Sparrowhawk

i> • <

12. Nestor

11 • <

13. Nomad

11 • <

14. Turbulent

» • <

Tons.

27,000

18,750

17,250

14,600

i3,55o

13,550

1,430

935

935

935

935

1,000

1,000

1,430

Total .

. 113,300

1916] CRITICISMS ON ACTION. 49

first the colour of victory, was an irremediable disaster. After the
war was over, Captain Persius wrote in the Berliner Tageblatt :
" The losses sustained by us were immense, in spite of the fact
that luck was on our side, and on June 1, 1916, it was clear to
every one of intelligence that the fight would be, and must be, the
only one to take place." The fact was recognized by reasonable
minds everywhere, and it was only the ignorant who imagined
that the loss of a few ships could weaken British naval prestige.
There was much to praise in the German conduct of the action.
The German battle-cruiser gunnery was admirable ; Scheer's retreat
when heavily outnumbered was skilfully conducted, and his escape
in the night, even when we admit his special advantages, was a
brilliant performance. But the one test of success is the fulfilment
of a strategic intention, and Germany's most signally failed. From
the moment of Scheer's return to port the British fleet held the
sea. The blockade which Germany thought to break was drawn
tighter than ever. Her secondary aim had been so to weaken the
British fleet that it should be more nearly on an equality with her
own. Again she failed, and the margin of British superiority was
in no way impaired. Lastly, she hoped to isolate and destroy a
British division. That, too, failed. The British Battle Cruiser
Fleet remained a living and effective force, while the German
Battle Cruiser Fleet was only a shadow. The result of the battle
of 31st May was that Britain was more than ever confirmed in
her mastery of the waters.

Nevertheless the fact that the only occasion on which the main
fleets met did not result in the annihilation of the enemy was a
disappointment and a surprise to the British people, and criticism
has been busy ever since with the British leadership. It has been
asked why the Admiralty at 5.12 p.m. on 31st May ordered the
Harwich force to sea, and then cancelled the order for ten hours —
and this when Jellicoe had long before asked that all available
ships and torpedo craft should be ordered to the scene of the Fleet's
action as soon as it was known to be imminent. Beatty's dash
and resolution have been universally commended, but he has been
criticized for allowing Evan-Thomas's squadron to lag so far behind
that it scarcely joined in the first stages of the battle-cruiser action,
and for the lack of precision in his messages to Jellicoe before their
junction. But it is the conduct of the Commander-in-Chief which
has principally been called in question. He has been accused of a
lack of ardour in engaging the enemy, as shown in his deploying to
port instead of to starboard ; in his turning away between 7.15 and

50 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

7.30 p.m. on 31st May to avoid torpedo attacks ; and in his refusal
of a night battle. On the first and third of these points it would
appear that the bulk of expert naval opinion is on his side ; on
the second the arguments are more evenly balanced, and the
matter will long continue in dispute. Even had no turn away
been ordered, it is doubtful whether the range could have been
kept closed, owing to the bad light and Scheer's persistent turning
to starboard. But from the controversy there emerges a larger
issue, on which naval historians must eternally take sides. Was
Jutland fought in the true Trafalgar tradition ? Had the British
Commander-in-Chief the single-hearted resolve to destroy the
enemy at all costs, content to lose half or more than half his fleet
provided no enemy ship survived ? It is idle to deny that the
destruction of the High Sea Fleet would have been of incalculable
value to the Allies, for it would have taken the heart out of the
German people ; would have crippled, even if it did not prevent,
the submarine campaign which in the next twelve months was to
sink 25 out of every 100 merchantmen that left our shores; and
would have opened up sea communication with Russia and thereby
prevented the calamity of the following year. Was such a final
victory possible at Jutland had Jellicoe handled the Battle Fleet
as Beatty handled his battle cruisers ?

The answer must remain a speculation. It is probable, indeed,
that no risks accepted by the Commander-in-Chief would have
altered a result due primarily to weather conditions and the late
hour when the battle was joined. But the fact remains that
Jellicoe's policy was that of the limited offensive. He was con-
vinced that his duty was not to press the enemy beyond a point
which might involve the destruction of his own weapon. The
situation, as he saw it, had changed since the days of Trafalgar.
Then only a relatively small part of the British fleet was engaged ;
now the Grand Fleet included the great majority of the vessels upon
which Britain and her Allies had to rely for safety. There was
ever present to his mind, in his own words, " the necessity for not
leaving anything to chance in a Fleet action, because our Fleet was
the one and only factor that was vital to the existence of the Empire,
as indeed of the Allied cause. We had no reserve outside the Battle
Fleet which could in any way take its place should disaster befall
it, or even should its margin of superiority over the enemy be
eliminated." Moreover, the British navy had already achieved
its main purpose ; was any further gain worth the risk of losing
that victory ? It was a war of peoples, and even the most decisive

i9i6] DEATH OF KITCHENER. 51

triumph at sea would not end the contest, while a defeat would
strike from the Allied hands the weapon on which all others de-
pended. Such considerations are of supreme importance ; if it
be argued that they belong to statesmanship rather than to naval
tactics, it may be replied that the commander of the British Grand
Fleet should be statesman as well as seaman. A good sailor, of
proved courage and resolution, chose to decide in conformity with
what he regarded as the essential interests of his land and against
the tradition of the service and the natural bias of his spirit, and
his countrymen may well accept and respect that decision.

VI.

Following close upon the greatest naval fight of all history
came the news of a sea tragedy which cost Britain the life of her
foremost soldier. It had been arranged that Lord Kitchener
should undertake a mission to Russia to consult with the Russian
commanders as to the coming Allied offensive, and to arrange
certain details of policy concerning the supply of munitions. On
the evening of Monday, 5th June, he and his party embarked in
the cruiser Hampshire, which had returned three days before from
the Battle of Jutland. About 8 p.m. that evening the ship sank
in wild weather off the western coast of the Orkneys, having struck
a mine in an unswept channel. Four boats left the vessel, but
all were overturned. One or two survivors were washed ashore
on the inhospitable coast ; but of Kitchener and his colleagues no
word was ever heard again.

The news of his death filled the whole Empire with profound
sorrow, and the shock was felt no less by our Allies, who saw in
him one of the chief protagonists of their cause. The British army
went into mourning, and all classes of the community were affected
with a grief which had not been paralleled since the death of
Queen Victoria. Labour leader, trade-union delegate, and the
patron of the conscientious objector were as heartfelt in their
regret as his professional colleagues or the army which he had
created. He died on the eve of a great Allied offensive, and did
not live to see the consummation of his labours. But in a sense
his work was finished, for more than any other man he had the
credit of building up that vast British force which was destined to
be the determining factor in the war.

At the hour of his death he was beyond doubt the most dominant
personality in the Empire, and the greatest of Britain's public

52 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

servants. His popular prestige was immense, for he had about
him that air of mystery and that taciturnity which the ordinary
man loves to associate with a great soldier. His splendid presence,
his iron face, his silence, his glittering record, raised him out of
the ranks of mere notabilities to the select circle of those who even
in their lifetime became heroes of romance. He was a lonely
figure, with no talent for the facile acquaintanceships of the
modern world ; but few men have inspired a more ardent affection
among those who were admitted to the privilege of their friendship.
Popular repute is apt to be melodramatic and to simplify unduly.
Lord Kitchener was by no means the man of granite and iron whom
the public fancy envisaged. He was a stern taskmaster, inflexibly
just, and unfailingly loyal, but he had a deep inner fount of
kindliness. He did not cultivate the gift of expression ; but
now and then, as after the Vereeniging Peace Conference, he
showed something like a genius for the fitting word. He had
humour, too, of a kind which the world little realized — that
sense of the comedy of situation which keeps a man's perspective
true.

To his abilities it is likely that history will do ample justice.
He had behind him great positive achievements — the conquest
of the Sudan, the completion of the South African campaign, a
singularly successful administrative career in Egypt, and, above
all, the organization of Britain for her greatest war. But in his
own day the popular judgment was as wide of the mark as to the
exact quality of his genius as to the nature of his personality.
The capture of Omdurman and the eulogies of a famous war cor-
respondent had established him as the complete administrator, the
master of detail, the business man in excelsis. But the true bent
of his mind was not towards detail. He was by no means the per-
fect administrator, for he did not understand the art of delegating
duties to others, tending always to draw every task into his own
capable hands. He was fond of short cuts and summary methods,
and there were occasions when the result was confusion. His true
genius lay in his foresight and imagination. That is why he was
so brilliant an Oriental administrator, for he could read the native
mind. That is why, in August 1914, when most people expected
a short campaign, he declared that the war would last for three
years, and made his plans accordingly. There were men in the
British army, and there were men in the Allied forces, who ranked
above him as scientific soldiers, learned in the latest military art.
There were men who could have handled better than he a force

iqi6] HIS MIND AND CHARACTER. 53

in the field. There were those, too, who equally well could have
organized the business side of an army. But there was no man
living who saw the main issues so simply and clearly. He could
divine the essentials, though he might err over details. He had
the vision which is possible only to the rare few whose souls are of
the spacious and simple cast and are undistracted by the tumult
of petty absorptions. And with insight went balance. His mind
soberly and accurately discerned realities. In the apt words of his
biographer : " He saw all, not as in a picture with the illusions of
perspective, but as in a plan where dimensions and distances
figure as they are and not as they seem." In the art of war, said
Napoleon, the making of pictures is fatal ; a good soldier sees
objects exactly as they are, as if through a field-glass.

The last months had not been the happiest of his life. Many
of the day by day problems which he found himself called upon
to face were so unfamiliar to him that he handled them clumsily.
He did not understand, nor was he understood by, certain of his
colleagues. For politics in the ordinary sense he had no aptitude >
he did not comprehend their language, and he did not shine in that
business of discussion by which all normal government must be
conducted. On many matters he spoke with an uncertain voice,
for he was not quick at comprehending mere matter of detail, and
often his colleagues were driven to a justifiable irritation. After
the smooth mastery of his earlier career he was sometimes puzzled
and uneasy in the vortex in which he found himself. To his long-
sighted eyes the foreground was always apt to be a little dim. But
the vision remained, and if he could not foresee what the day was
to bring forth, he was right about the year.

More notable than his intellect were those gifts of personality
which dominated without effort those who came into contact
with him. No man of his time enjoyed a completer public confi-
dence, and he had won it without any of the arts of the demagogue.
A daimonic force radiated from him and affected millions who
had never seen him. Without being a politician, he had the
greatest of the politician's gifts — the power of creating a tradition
which, so to speak, multiplied his personality indefinitely, and made
the humblest and remotest recognize in him their leader. In the
dark days of August 1914 he was the one man to whom the nation
turned, and without the magic of his name Britain's stupendous
military effort could not have been made. His death was a fitting
conclusion to the drama of his life, since the great soldier of England
found peace beneath the waves to which England had anew estab

54 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

lished her title.* For epitaph let us set down words written of
a very different figure, but applicable to all careers of splendid
but unfinished achievement.

" His work was done ... all of his work for which the fates
could spare him time. A little space was allowed him to show at
least a heroic purpose, and attest a high design ; then, with all
things unfinished before him and behind, he fell asleep after many
troubles and triumphs. Few can ever have gone wearier to the
grave ; none with less fear. . . . Forgetful now and set free for
ever from all faults and foes, he passed through the doorway of
no ignoble death out of reach of time, out of sight of love, out
of hearing of hatred. ... In the full strength of spirit and of
body his destiny overtook him, and made an end of all his labours.
He had seen and borne and achieved more than most men on
record. He was a great man, good at many things, and now he
had attained his rest." f

* One of the finest tributes to his memory appeared in a journal published in the
French trenches. The following is a free translation : —

" Cypress nor yew shall weave for him their shade ;
Cypress nor yew shall shield his quiet sleep ;
Marble must crack, and graven names must fade-
He for his tomb hath won the changeless deep.
We mortal pilgrims bring our transient gift,

Fast-fading flowers, as garlands for his fame ;
But 'tis the tempest and the thunderous drift
That to eternity shall sound his name."

f Swinburne on Byron.

CHAPTER LVI.

THE AUSTRIAN ATTACK IN THE TRENT INO.
October 21, 1915-June 15, 1916.

The Winter Fighting in Italy, 1915-1916 — Plan of Austrian Staff — Topography of
the Asiago Plateau — The Attack begins — Arrival of Italian Reserves — The
Attack dies away — Boselli succeeds Salandra as Prime Minister.

The achievement of Italy during the first year of war was too little
appreciated by the world at large, and even her Allies were in some
doubt as to its precise character. Her difficulties from the start
had been very great. She began with a frontier so drawn at every
point as to give the advantage to the enemy. Her main thrust
could only be eastwards across the Isonzo ; but, alone of the
Allies, she had her flank and her communications directly threat-
ened should she pursue her natural line of offensive. Hence she
was compelled to fight hard and continuously on two fronts — to
press against the Isonzo barrier, and at the same time to win safety
in Carnia, the Dolomites, and the Trentino. Napoleon in 1798
and Massena in 1805 did not dare to cross the Isonzo till Joubert in
the one case and Ney in the other had forestalled the danger of an
enemy flank attack from the hills. Italy's battle-front was, there-
fore, not less than five hundred miles from the Stelvio in the north
to the sea at Monfalcone. Moreover, they were five hundred of
the most difficult miles in Europe. Beyond the Isonzo lay that
strange plateau of the Carso which had long been selected for the
Austrian defence. There trenches and shelters were hewn out of
the solid rock, since ordinary field entrenchments were impossible
in a land where there was no soil. The enemy had to be ousted
from his hold before any advance could be made, and the cam-
paign became in the strictest sense an attack upon a fortress.
North of the Carso was the town of Gorizia, a formidable entrenched
camp defended by 200,000 troops, and, with its flanking positions,
showing a width of over sixty miles. North and west of the Isonzo

56 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

was the long horseshoe of the mountain front. Every pass was,
to begin with, in Austria's hands, and to win security the enemy
had to be pressed back over the watershed. Moreover, on Italy's
left flank the ominous salient of the Trentino ran down into the
Lombard plain, and offered a choice of a hundred starting-points
for an Austrian assault upon the Italian rear. In strategical
anxieties and tactical difficulties the Italian battle-ground was cne
of the worst in the whole area of the campaigns.

These military drawbacks found a counterpart in the condition
of Italian politics. The great majority of the nation was on the
Allied side, but that majority was not prepared for a protracted
struggle. A short campaign of victory had been the general
anticipation. Again, war had only been declared against Austria-
Hungary, and Germany was nominally not yet an enemy. The
immense purchase which the latter had won by her control of
Italian commerce and finance made a breach with her unacceptable
to many classes. This partial avoidance of the main issue led to
some fumbling in Italian policy, and to the intrigues which always
attend indecision. Moreover, it prevented the army from being
what it was elsewhere, the whole nation in arms. During the long
and desperate winter struggle the troops, which held their own so
gallantly among Alpine snows and the floods of the Isonzo, did
not yet represent the true sum of Italy's fighting strength.

If we realize the Italian difficulties, we shall do justice to the
magnitude of her achievement. Her intervention, as we have
seen, was an invaluable contribution to the Allied strategical
purpose. She had drawn against her some of the best troops of
the Dual Monarchy. She had drawn them to a line where they
were more or less segregated from the rest of the Austrian forces,
for the Italian sector was not an extension of the main Eastern
front. Hence the Austrian Staff were placed in the position that
they could not, after the German manner, move rapidly reinforce-
ments to different parts of their line. Owing to the divergent
nationalities under their command, they were unable to treat their
armies as a homogeneous whole which could be moved solely
according to military considerations. The existence of the Italian
front, therefore, hampered that mobility on which the Central
Powers, holding the interior lines, chiefly relied.

During the winter there was a steady pressure along the whole
frontier, even in regions where the weather seemed to compel inac-
tion. October and November saw considerable activity against the
positions protecting Gorizia. On 21st October, after an artillery

1915] WINTER IN THE MOUNTAINS. 57

preparation of fifty hours, the third main assault since the declara-
tion of war was made on the Isonzo front. The fighting was fierce
along the rim of the Doberdo plateau and towards San Martino,
and some trenches were captured on the Podgora height. At
the same time, in the Trentino, troops descending from Monte
Altissimo cut the Austrian communications by the direct road
from Riva to Rovereto. The bombardment on the Isonzo con-
tinued for a fortnight, and much damage was done to Gorizia
itself. Further trenches were gained on Podgora, and on 20th
November the village of Oslavia, north-west of Gorizia, was carried,
while on the Carso ground was won on the north slopes of Monte San
Michele and south-west of San Martino. Till the end of the month
the struggle went on ; but the enemy was now reinforced, and in
the first days of December the battle died away. The Italians had
won a narrow strip along the western edge of the Carso, and had
improved their position at Podgora ; but they were still far from
bursting through the formidable Austrian defences.

For the main achievement of the winter campaign we must
look to the great hills. It is probable that history has never seen
such mountain warfare as was now waged from the Stelvio round
the skirts of the Trentino, among the limestone crags of Cadore
and Carnia, and down the dark gorges of the upper Isonzo. During
the summer and early autumn the main passes had been won by
Italy. The great Austrian lateral railway through the Pusterthal
was under the fire of the guns behind Cristallo. Far up into the
glaciers, and on the icy ridges, were Italian observation posts
directing the guns behind the cliffs, and the heavy guns them-
selves were often emplaced at heights usually reached only by the
mountaineer. There were batteries at an elevation of 9,000 feet,
of which each gun weighed eleven tons, the carriage five tons, and
the platform thirty tons. Many of the engineering and transport
feats almost surpass belief ; for not only did men and guns reach
unheard-of eyries, but they were able to maintain themselves there
during the winter storms. It was difficult enough in the summer,
when the Alpini in their scarpetti di gatta, or string-soled shoes,
climbed the smooth white precipices of Tofana and Cristallo ; but
in winter, when ice coated the rocks, and among the high peaks
of the western Trentino avalanches hung poised on every cliff,
it became the sternest trial of human endurance. He who has
mountaineered in the Alps in winter is aware that extraordinary
climbs may be made, given fair weather conditions ; but he knows
too that the day must be picked, and that Nature may not easily

58 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

be defied. But the work of Italy's mountain defenders went on
by day and night, and stayed not for the wildest weather. Food
and ammunition must be brought up to the high posts at whatever
cost. Much was done by the filorie, or aerial cables, on which a
load of half a ton could travel, in the same way as in Norway the
hay crop is sent down from the high saeter meadows to the deep-
cut valleys. But no mechanical device could seriously lessen the
constant difficulties and dangers. It must be remembered, too,
that in the mountains the Italian Alpini found no mean antagonists.
Whoever knows the hardy people of Tyrol will not underrate their
hillcraft and courage. There were desperate encounters in that
icy wilderness of which the tale has not been told, and when the
snow melted grim sights were to be seen. On Monte Nero one
morning the Italian line saw suddenly a new army on the hillside
standing in a strange attitude. They were 600 Austrian corpses,
frozen stiff, which the summer sun had rescued from the shroud
of snow.

In the middle of March 1916 the guns began to sound again
on the Isonzo. Gorizia and the Doberdo plateau were bombarded,
and for a week or two there were attacks and counter-attacks.
But the spring floods made progress difficult, and the only result
of the action was to inspire the Austrian Staff with a firm belief
that Cadorna contemplated an offensive in this quarter as soon
as summer had come. The chief activity of the early spring
was in the hill country. The night of 17th April saw one of the
great mining exploits of the campaign. West of the Falzarego
Pass, which runs from Cortina to Bozen, stands a bold, round-
topped spur, just inside the Austrian frontier, which commands
all the western road. It is called the Col di Lana, and in November
1915 its summit was taken bjr Colonel Peppino Garibaldi. But
the summit could not be held, and while the Italians controlled
the greater part of the mountain, the Austrians kept their foot-
hold on the northern slopes. It was resolved to blast the enemy
from his stronghold, and in the middle of January mining opera-
tions were begun under the guidance of a son of the Duke of Ser-
moneta. The tunnel took three months to complete. Before the
end the Austrians grew suspicious, and started counter-mining ;
but their direction was wrong. On the night of 17th April the
Italian mine was exploded, and the remnants of the Austrian posi-
tion were carried by infantry. The crater thus formed was 150
feet wide and 50 feet deep. About the same time a brilliant action
was fought far to the west, where the Adamello group separates the

i9i6] THE AUSTRIAN DISPOSITIONS. 59

upper waters of the Oglio from the streams that feed Lake Garda.
The Austrians held the crest, and the Italians were in position far
down on the great Adamello glacier, and on the rock ridges that
cut it. Colonel Giordano, commanding an Alpini detachment,
resolved to push the enemy from the crest. On the night of
nth April 300 Alpini left the Rifugio Garibaldi on skis, and
reached the glacier in a whirlwind of snow. The place is 10,000
feet above the sea, and in April its climate is arctic. After strug-
gling on through the night, they attacked the Austrian position
in the earty morning, and drove them from the rocks of the glacier.
This exploit was followed on 29th April by a bigger movement.
In a clear starlit night 2,000 Alpini followed the same route, forced
the Austrians from the main crest, and, after severe fighting, in
which they were assisted by a battery of 6-inch guns which had
been brought up to the very edge of the glacier, dominated the
head of the Val di Genova, and so won a position on the flank of
the Austrian lines in the Val Giudicaria. Giordano was promoted
major-general, and fell a few weeks later in the Trentino battles.

The Austrian front was now divided into three main sections.
From the sea to Tolmino lay the V. Army, under Boroevitch von
Bojna. North from Tolmino to Carni3 lay the X. Army, under von
Rohr ; and the 14th (Tirol) Corps defended the Pusterthal line to the
north of Cadore. In the Trentino itself lay two Austrian armies —
those of Dankl and von Kovess : the whole under the command of
the Archduke Charles, the heir to the Austrian throne. Between
them these forces probably aggregated a million men, with 600,000
combatants in line. Throughout the winter there had been a
gradual strengthening of one section of the front — that part of
the Trentino between the Val Lagarina and the Val Sugana. Large
numbers of batteries had been brought to the Folgaria and Lava-
rone plateaux south-west of the city of Trent. The infantry
strength was also increased during April by picked troops from
the whole Austrian front. The Italian Staff were aware of the
concentration, but they anticipated no more than a local counter-
attack, such as they had seen in April on the Isonzo. In that
view they erred, for the Archduke Charles was preparing one of
the major offensives of the war.

In the previous December, when the war on the Russian and
Balkan fronts had slackened for the time, the Austro-Hungarian
Staff had proposed a break-out from the Trentino salient against
the flank and rear of Cadorna's lines, in the hope of putting Italy
out of the war. Falkenhayn refused his consent, on the ground

60 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

that he could not spare German divisions to replace the troops
taken from the Galician front ; that if Cadorna were driven back
into the plains it would not mean the end of Italy's resistance ;
and that, even if it did, " England and Russia, the two pillars of
the Entente, would not be deeply grieved to see a partner who
did so little and asked so much out of the business altogether."
The proposal was therefore dropped for the moment, but it was
revived in the spring, and the Austro-Hungarian General Staff
determined to carry out the plan with their own resources. The
friction between the two Staffs was growing, and Austria was
resolved to do something to salve her wounded pride, and to ex-
ploit the weakness of Italy's strategic position. In the Trentino
she had accumulated a total of some 400,000 men, and out of
that she had a striking force of fifteen picked divisions. The
obvious objective for an enemy in the Trentino was the plain of
Venetia, through which ran the two railway lines which were the
main communications of the Isonzo front. The northern ran by
Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, and Castelfranco to Udine ; the southern,
by Mantua and Padua to Monfalcone. If one was cut, the Isonzo
army would be crippled and compelled to retreat ; if both fell, it
would be in deadly danger. As at Verdun, the army of attack
was to be commanded by the heir-apparent, for dynastic and
military interests were interwoven in Teutonic strategy.

At the beginning of May the Italian position in the southern
Trentino ran from a point just south of Rovereto in the Val Laga-
rina eastward up the Val Terragnolo, north of the mountain mass
called Pasubio. Thence it stretched north-eastward just inside the
Austrian frontier, facing the enemy lines on the Folgaria plateau.
From the hill called Soglio d'Aspio it went due east and then north,
just outside the old frontier line, to the Cima Manderiolo, from
which point it ran north across the valley of the Brenta to Monte
Collo, north-west of Borgo. Thence it passed north-east to the
Val Calamento. The front had elements of dangerous weakness.
On the extreme left the position at the north end of the Zugna
ridge — the peak called Zugna Torta — was a salient exposed to the
enemy's fire from three sides. The left centre and centre were
also precarious, being commanded by the admirable Austrian
gun positions on the Folgaria and Lavarone plateaux. The whole
front was really a string of advanced posts which any resolute
attack must speedily push in. The true Italian front was the second
line, which ran from the Zugna ridge to the Pasubio massif, along
the hills north of the Val Posina to the upper Astico, across the

I9i6] THE ASIAGO PLATEAU. 61

north and higher part of the Sette Communi plateau, reaching the
Val Sugana east of Borgo, at the glen of the little river Maso.
Here, again, the left centre was badly situated, for behind it there
were long bare slopes falling to the Fosina and Astico valleys.

Obviously the main peril was on the flanks, for in the Val
Lagarina and the Val Sugana there were roads and railways to
support an enemy advance. In these valleys the defensive posi-
tions were good ; but there was always the danger that they might
be turned by a thrust of the enemy's centre through the interven-
ing mountains. There were three roads along which troops and guns
could move. One — the best — ran from the Val Lagarina up the
Vallarsa to Chiese, and thence by a good pass to the town of Schio
just above the plain. Another ran from the Folgaria plateau down
the glen of the Astico to the little town of Arsiero. A third ran
from the Lavarone plateau down the Val d'Assa to the town of
Asiago. Schio, Arsiero, and Asiago were all connected by light
railways with the trunk line running through Vicenza, and Asiago
was only eight miles from Valstagna in the valley of the lower
Brenta. To get the Schio road the Austrians must carry Pasubio,
which commanded it. To win Arsiero was easier, but in order to
debouch from it they must get the ridge just south of it, the last
line of the mountain defence. In the same way, while Asiago
offered an easy prey, to make use of the gain they must clear the
Sette Communi plateau to the south of it — so called from its seven
villages, which long ago were a German settlement. In any great
assault these three points — Pasubio, the ridge south of the Val
Posina, and the Sette Communi upland — would form the last
rallying ground of the defence. If they fell, the road to the plains
was open.

In December Falkenhayn had told Conrad von Hoetzendorff
that in the Trentino he could not secure a strategic or tactical
surprise, since the deployment would be limited to a single railway.
In this view the German Chief of Staff was wrong, for Cadorna
was caught napping. The Italian Commander-in-Chief had staked
everything on a short war and a dash for Trieste, and when this
failed he seemed unwilling to evolve an alternative plan. A compe-
tent soldier of the old school, he was somewhat lacking in mental
elasticity, and new facts dawned but slowly on his mind ; a native
obstinacy made him tenacious of his own opinion and impatient of
advice, and commanders who differed from him were apt to be sum-
marily removed. He refused to admit the menace from the Tren-
tino, and treated the First Army which held that front so casually

62 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

that it became known as " the convalescent corps." Its com-
mander, Roberto Brusati, had warned him from February onward
of the impending danger; but Cadorna was deaf, and Brusati
suffered the fate of faithful counsellors, and was dismissed from
his command.* Nevertheless the High Command was not wholly
at ease, and the new commander, Pecori-Giraldi, was allowed to
strengthen the flanks of the First Army in the Val Lagarina and
Val Sugana, which were obviously the vital points. But the
repentance came too late, and before the work could be completed
the Archduke Charles had launched his attack.

The great bombardment began on 14th May. Over 2,000 guns,
of which at least 800 were heavies, opened on a front of thirty
miles. The Italian front line was blasted away, and from the
15-inch naval guns and the howitzers in the Folgaria and Lavarone
positions shells were thrown into Asiago itself. The Italian
advanced lines fell back at once in the centre, but resisted fiercely
on the flanks at Zugna and west of Borgo. On the 15th and 16th
there was a severe struggle on the Zugna ridge, and on the 17th
the Italian left retired from Zugna Torta towards the Coni Zugna
crest farther south. Next day all the section from Monte Maggio
to Soglio d'Aspio was abandoned ; and on the following day, the
19th, the centre in the upper glen of the Astico was driven from
the position Monte Toraro-Monte Campomolon-Spitz Tonezza.
Things went better on the right, but the defeat of the centre meant
that the Arsiero plateau must fall. That day the Italian line ran
from Coni Zugna over the Pasubio massif, and then — waveringly
— north of the Val Posina and across the Sette Communi table-
land to the Val Sugana.

On 20th May Cadorna decided to withdraw his centre to a
position well in the rear. The north side of the Val Posina was
no place to hold, so the Italians fell back to the southern ridge,
and to a line in the Sette Communi east of the Val d'Assa. This
withdrawal was completed by the 24th in good order ; but the
Austrian advance did not allow the defence time to prepare its
new ground. Many prisoners had been lost in the past days, and
the casualties were heavy, though the enemy had also suffered
severely whenever he came out from the shelter of his guns. By
the 25th the Austrians were violently attacking Coni Zugna and
Pasubio, and had made of the latter a salient, since they had
pushed up the Rovereto-Schio road between it and Coni Zugna

* For three years he carried the whole blame of the mischance, till his reputation
was completely cleared by the findings of a Commission of Inquiry.

1916] THE FIGHT FOR PASUBIO. 63

as far as the hamlet of Chiese under the Buole Pass. If the advance
continued, Pasubio must fall ; and if Pasubio fell, the whole Italian
centre south of the Val Posina was turned, and the way was open
to the Venetian plains.

Meantime Cadorna had summoned his reserves, a new army,
to assemble in and around Vicenza. This was the Fifth Army,
which had been already concentrated between the Tagliamento
and the Isonzo for the offensive against Gorizia. In ten days it
began to appear on the skirts of the hills — a total of little less than
half a million men. But it could not arrive in force before 2nd
June — and to be ready so soon was a real feat of organization and
transport — and it was necessary for Pecori-Giraldi to hold the fort
for the critical last week of May. Some local reserves were brought
to aid him, including one division which in a single night was
moved by motor from Carnia to Pasubio.

By the 25th, while Pasubio and the Posina position were threat-
ened, the Italian right in the Val Sugana had managed to retire
in good order east of Borgo to its prepared line on the east bank of
the Maso torrent. But the right centre in the Sette Communi was
in hard case. On the 25th and 26th it was driven off all the heights
east of the Val d'Assa. On the 27th the Austrians were south of
the Galmarara, a tributary of the Assa on the left bank. On the
28th they had occupied the mountain called Moschicce, just north
of Asiago.

While things were going thus ill on the right centre, the Italian
left was fighting the action which marked the critical point in the
battle. For days a desperate struggle raged for Coni Zugna and
Pasubio, and especially for the pass of Buole, which would give
the enemy access to the lower Adige. There, in spite of the Aus-
trian mastery in guns, the Italians managed to remain in their
makeshift trenches till they could get to grips with the bayonet.
Again and again the waves of attack rolled forward, broke, and
ebbed. On 30th May came the climax. The Austrian infantry
in masses assaulted the pass of Buole ; but the defence did not
yield one yard. On that day 7,000 Austrians fell, and in the
week's fighting some 40 per cent, of their effectives perished. By
their fortitude at this supreme moment the Italians had blunted
the point of the whole Austrian spear-thrust.

But the battle was still far from its end. The enemy now
endeavoured to take Pasubio, attacking on three sides — from the
ridge of Col Santo, from Chiese, and from the Val Terragnolo by
the Borcole Pass. His superiority in men was great, and in guns

64 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

greater. But the resolute defence did not break. For three weeks
in the snow of the ridges it battled heroically against odds, till the
assault slackened, weakened, and then died away. Meantime the
Italian centre was scarcely less highly tried. The battle-ground
lay in two sections — the left along the ridge which runs from
Pasubio south of the Posina, the right across the Sette Communi
tableland. On 25th May the Austrians took Bettale, on the Posina,
and the height of Cimone, which dominated Arsiero. On the
28th they were across the Posina, and fighting for the southern
ridge, the last line of defence before the plains. On 30th May
they won the peak of Pria Fora, one of the points on the ridge,
and to the east were on the heights just north of Arsiero. By
that day the Italians had evacuated both Arsiero and Asiago,
and at the latter place the enemy was east of the Val Campomolon,
and within four miles of the Val Sugana, well to the rear of the
Italian front in that valley. In the centre he was all but look-
ing down on Schio. On 1st June an Austrian army order in-
formed the troops that onty one mountain remained between them
and the Venetian plain. Three days later the Italians were driven
east of the Val Canaglia, to the south-east of Arsiero. The enemy
was only eighteen miles from Vicenza and the trunk line.

But he had exhausted his strength. He had been held on the
wings, and this nullified the success of his centre. Already, on
27th May, he had asked for a division from Prince Leopold's Army
Group, and Falkenhayn realized that the situation had grown
critical. On 3rd June Cadorna announced that the Austrian
offensive had been checked. He had got his new army ; more-
over, the troops already in line had taken the measure of the
enemy. The Italian position now ran from Zugna Torta to Pasubio,
then well south of the Posina to the Astico, south-east of Arsiero,
east of the Val Canaglia, along the southern rim of the Asiago
plateau to east of the Val Campomolon, and then north along the
edge of the tableland that drops to the Val Sugana. While the
new army was preparing its attack, a ceaseless struggle went on
on the Posina heights and in the Sette Communi. In the first
sector the enemy sought to reach Schio and the plains, and in the
second to turn the Italian right in the Val Sugana. If this fight-
ing represented the great effort of the Austrian offensive, it was
not less the supreme effort of the heavily tried defence. On the
night of 4th June Ciove, the last Italian position south of the
Posina, was violently assailed ; and again on 12th June, when the
whole ridge was blasted by the great guns. On the 13 th the

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I9i6] RESULTS OF BATTLE. 65

attack was renewed without success ; but the Italian brigade
which held the place lost 70 per cent, of its strength. In the Sette
Communi the main points of attack were Monte Cengio, the Val
Canaglia, and the Val Frenzele, where the enemy was within four
miles of Valstagna in the Val Sugana. On 15th June, and for the
two days following, the troops on Monte Pau, the southern edge
of the Sette Communi, repulsed what proved to be the last of
the great Austrian assaults. The action declined into an artillery
duel, and a week later Cadorna had begun to move forward in his
counter-stroke.

The Austrian attack in the Trentino had deferred — but not for
long — Italy's main offensive plan ; it had been costly to the de-
fence, and had shown some of the bloodiest combats of the war.
Shelling with great guns among those peaks was a desperate busi-
ness ; for whereas elsewhere there was deep soil to limit the effects
of the percussion, there among rock walls the result was as shatter-
ing as on the deck of a steel battleship. The test proved and tem-
pered the resolution of the Italian soldier. It awoke certain sec-
tions of the people, who were still apathetic, to the realities of war,
and — as is usual in a democracy when things go wrong — it led to
the formation of a new Ministry. Salandra fell from power, and
a Cabinet was formed under Signor Boselli, with Sonnino still in
charge of Foreign Affairs. Through the whole Italian army went
a wave of honest pride, which is the due of those who have suffered
much and held their ground. But the true moral — the inefficiency
of the military hierarchy at the top — was missed, and it was the
Prime Minister, who dared to criticize it, that suffered. For sixteen
months longer the valour of the troops was to be misused in blind
and ill-considered attacks, till a crushing disaster dispelled the
legend of infallibility which had too long shrouded the High
Command.

The vital consequences of Austria's attack were to be found
in the field of general strategy. She had crowded her men and
guns into a deep salient, served by few railways, and some hundreds
of miles from her main battle-ground. In grips there with a deter-
mined enemy, she could not easily or quickly break off the battle
should danger threaten elsewhere. And danger, deadly and un-
looked for, speedily threatened. For on Sunday, 4th June, the
day after Cadorna proclaimed the check of the invasion, Brussilov
had launched his thunderbolt on the Galician front.

CHAPTER LVII.

BRUSSILOV IN GALICIA.

June ^-August n, 1916.

Change in Russia's Plan — Condition of Austrian Armies — Brussilov's five Battle-
grounds— Fall of Lutsk and Dubno — The Affair at Baranovitchi — Fall of
Czernovitz and Kimpolung — Capture of Brody — Results of the Ten Weeks'
Battle — Changes in Austrian Dispositions.

Since the failure of the advance in the Lake Narotch region in
April quiet had reigned on the long front between the Gulf of
Riga and the Rumanian border. May brought the Austrian
irruption into Italy, but Alexeiev made no sign of movement. At
a time when Cadorna was sorely tried, and it looked as if the Arch-
duke Charles would reach the Venetian plains, the Power which had
not yet failed an ally at need remained inactive. Russia had her
own plan, and it took time to mature. She was making ready for
the great combined Allied offensive which was due as soon as
Germany should have spent her strength at Verdun and the new
British troops and guns were ready for action. It had taken her a
long winter to make her preparations, to drill her reserves, to im-
prove her communications, and to collect munitions. Ivanov's
Christmas attack on Czernovitz and Evert's spring offensive towards
Vilna had been only local assaults with a local purpose ; the coming
advance was conceived on a far greater scale, and with a far wider
strategic purpose. At a given signal, in conjunction with all her
allies, she would sweep forward, and that device of Germany's
which had hitherto checked her — the power of moving troops at
will by good internal lines — would be defeated. For if the Teu-
tonic League were attacked everywhere at once there would be
no troops to move.

But no great plan can be followed to the letter, and the man
who sticks too rigidly to a programme is not a soldier but a pedant.
The Russian offensive, as originallv planned, was to be undertaken

66"

i9i6] THE FRONTS IN GALICIA. 67

by Evert's western group west of Molodetchno with the Fourth,
the Tenth, and the new Guard Army. But during May it was be-
coming clear that Italy might be so hard pressed that she would
have to use in defence all the resources which she had allotted to
her share in the joint offensive. The date for the main movement
was not put forward. But it was resolved to use the new might of
Russia in a preliminary attack against the Austrian section of the
Eastern front to ease the pressure on Italy. At the same time all
was put in readiness to follow up any successes that might be gained,
and to merge, should it seem desirable, the preliminary attack in
the main operation.

On the first day of June the Austro-German armies south of
Pinsk lay on the following lines. From the small salient east of
that city their front ran nearly due south, following at first the
left bank of the Styr, but crossing to the right bank above Rafa-
lovka. East of Chartorysk it left that river, and ran south till
it cut the Lemberg-Rovno railway just east of Dubno. It crossed
the Galician frontier north of Tarnopol, which town was in Russian
hands, and followed the Strypa a few miles to the east of the
stream. It reached the Dniester west of Usciezko, where the
Russians held the river crossing, and then turned east along the
northern shore, curving round to the Rumanian frontier on the
Pruth a dozen miles from Czernovitz. This sector was held by
four armies. Astride the Pripet lay Linsingen, and south to the
Styr the Archduke Joseph's Austrian IV. Army. From just south
of Lutsk to west of Tarnopol lay Boehm-Ermolli's Austrian II.
Army. Thence Bothmer's Southern Army carried the front to the
Dniester; while south of it lay the VII. Austrian Army, under
Pflanzer-Baltin, down to the Rumanian frontier. It was the old
line which, with new dints at Usciezko and east of Czernovitz, they
had held throughout the winter. Opposite this force lay the Russian
South-Western Army Group, which till April was in the hands of
Ivanov. Recalled to staff duties at the Imperial Headquarters, he
was succeeded by Brussilov, who had commanded the Eighth Army
through the storm and shine of the Carpathian struggle of 1914-15.
Brussilov was one of the most war-worn of all the Russian command-
ers, for he had been continually in action since the first day of the
campaign. But he was born, if ever man was, with a " faculty
for storm and turbulence," and twenty-two months of conflict had
left no mark on his eager spirit. He was recognized by all as an
incomparable leader of troops, but doubts had been expressed as
to whether he had the capacity for controlling large and complex

68 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

operations ; whether his talents were not more suited for a cavalry
dash or a stone-wall retreat than for the methodical stages of scien-
tific warfare. He had four armies in his charge : on his right his
old Eighth Army — now under General Kaledin, who, like his fore-
runner, was a cavalryman ; next, the Eleventh, under Sakharov —
once Kuropatkin's Chief of Staff in Manchuria ; then the Seventh,
under Tcherbachev ; and lastly the Ninth, under Lechitski, ex-
tending to the Rumanian border.

Certain misconceptions were prevalent at this time in the West
with regard to the nature of the Austro-German front in Volhynia,
Galicia, and the Bukovina. It was assumed to be a fluid and
make-shift affair in contrast with the serried fortifications of the
West. This much was true, that in large tracts where the line
extended through the woods and swamps of Poliesia there was no
continuous front, any more than there was a continuous front in
the marshes of the Somme. That was inevitable from the nature
of the country. Nor was there anything like that consistent and
intricate strength which two years of labour had produced in France
and Flanders, since at the most this Eastern line had been estab-
lished for eight months. But it would be an error to regard the
Austrian sector as mere improvised field shelters. The trench
lines were numerous and good, the dug-outs deep and commodious,
the wire entanglements on a liberal scale. There were well-
constructed, if not always well-sited, reserve positions. The com-
munications were admirable — far better than anything behind the
Russian front. New roads and a great number of light railways
connected the firing trenches with the trunk lines of Galicia. In
mechanical industry the Austrians showed themselves apt pupils
of their German masters. Nothing was left undone to ensure the
comfort of the officers. Commodious subterranean dwellings and
elegant cabins embowered in the woods amazed the oncoming
Russians with evidences of a luxury which was unknown in their
hardy lives. Like the Germans on the Somme, the Austrians
behaved as if their front had grown stable and could not be broken,
and they were resolved to make it a pleasant habitation. The
fault of Austria did not lie in negligent fatigue work, but in an
underestimate of the enemy before her. She did not believe that
Russia could move yet awhile, and she had depleted her long front
of both men and guns. The strongest fortifications on earth can-
not be held against a resolute foe unless there is also a superior
artillery behind them, and infantry adequate in quality and num-
bers to man them. There were no strategic reserves left to meet

I9i6] BRUSSILOV'S PLAN. 69

tLn attack, and too many batteries had gone west to the Trentino.
Above all, the Austrian infantrymen had not the fighting value
of the Russian. There were good troops on the Galician front,
but the average was not equal to that of their opponents. There
was not the same national impetus behind them, and there was
a strange lack of touch between the higher and the regimental
commands, and between officers and men. Armies bundled about
like pawns at the bidding of an alien staff could not have the dash
or the tenacity of men who fought for a cause they understood,
under the command of tried and trusted leaders.

We must conceive of Brussilov's plan as in the first instance
strictly a reconnaissance — a reconnaissance made on an immense
scale and with desperate resolution, but still a reconnaissance
rather than a blow at a selected objective. His strategy was not
yet determined. Behind the enemy's front lay vital points like
Kovel and Lemberg and Stanislau ; but the way to each was long,
and might be hopeless. His business was to test the strength of
the enemy lines on a front of nearly 300 miles between the Pripet
and Rumania. When he knew its strength he would know his
own purpose. He was like a man beating at a wall to discover
which parts are solid stone and which are lath and plaster. But
each blow was to be delivered with all his might, for this was a
test of life and death.

May had been a month of heavy rains, and the wet lowlands
south of the Pripet and around the lower Styr made a bad campaign-
ing ground. It was better southward among the sandy fields and
the oak woods of Volhynia, and on the Galician plateau summer
conditions reigned. On Sunday, 4th June, a steady, methodical
bombardment opened along the whole of Brussilov's front. It
appeared to be directed chiefly on the wire entanglements and not
on the trenches, and at first the hinterland was scarcely touched.
The " preparation " was intense and incessant, but it bore no rela-
tion to the overwhelming destruction which had preluded Neuve
Chapelle and the Donajetz, Loos, and Verdun. It seemed rather
like the local bombardments which preceded the trench raids of
the winter — only it fell everywhere ; and when, late on the Satur-
day, the Austrian High Command realized this, they grew puzzled,
and cast about for an explanation.

They were not left long in doubt. The work of the Russian
guns was short — twelve hours only in some places, and nowhere
more than twenty hours. The Austrian trenches had been little

7o A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

damaged, but alleys had been ploughed in the wire before them.
On the morning of Monday, 5th June, between the Pripet and the
Pruth, punctually to the hour, the waves of Russian infantry
crossed their parapets.

It will be convenient, in considering a series of actions of the
first order in magnitude and complexity, to take the different
sections of the battle-ground in sequence, and carry the narrative
of the events in each to the close of the first stage of the forward
movement. The sections were five in number — that from Kolki
northwards to the Pripet, where Kaledin's right was engaged with
Linsingen ; that between Kolki and Dubno, the Volhynian Triangle,
where Kaledin's left and Sakharov's right faced the Austrian
IV. Army ; that between Dubno and Zalostse, where Sakharov's
left was in conflict with Boehm-Ermolli ; that between Zalostse
and the Dniester, where, in front of Tarnopol, Tcherbachev engaged
Bothmer ; and the corridor between the Dniester and the Pruth,
where Lechitski faced Pflanzer-Baltin. It was in the second and
fifth of these sections that the first fortnight of June showed the
chief results.

North of Kolki, where the brimming swamps still made progress
difficult, little impression was made on Linsingen's front. It was
different in the area of the Volhynian Triangle. Between Lutsk
and Rovno lies a district some thirty miles long from north to
south, which is defined on these sides by the river Ikva, a con-
fluent of the Styr, and the river Putilovka, a tributary of the
Goryn. Here the armies of Kaledin and Sakharov made their
great effort. About the centre lies the village of Olyka, in the
midst of a rolling, treeless country. For the attack the Russians
had the good Rovno-Lutsk and Rovno-Brody railways, besides the
main Rovno-Lutsk highroad. From Olyka they pressed due west,
and farther south they advanced down the Ikva valley along the
Dubno-Lutsk road. By noon of the first day the Austrian front
was completely gone. The bayonets of the Russians swept over
the parapets, while the barrage cut off all communication with
the rear. The result was that the elaborate Austrian trenches
and deep dug-outs proved the veriest trap. Troops were packed
and huddled in them without any means of escape, and were cap-
tured in thousands by the triumphant Russian infantry. The
Cossacks went through and rounded up those who had escaped
the barrage. That day in Lutsk the birthday of the Archduke
Joseph was being celebrated, when news came that the front had
been driven in, and that the enemy was sweeping towards the

1916] FALL OF LUTSK. 71

Styr. Confidence was placed for a moment in the great strength
of the Lutsk defences ; but there comes a stage in demoralization
when no fortifications seem adequate. On Tuesday, 6th June,
Kaledin was at its gates, and in the afternoon the Austrian army
commander sought safety in flight. At twenty-five minutes past
eight in the evening the Russian vanguard entered the town, and
found an amazing booty. Batteries of heavy guns and vast stores
of shells and material fell to the conqueror, and since there had
been no time to evacuate the hospitals, many thousands of Austrian
wounded were added to the total of prisoners.

Lutsk was taken and the Styr and Ikva crossed, but it was
necessary to broaden the wedge if an acute salient was not to be
the result of the victory. Accordingly the next few days were
spent in advancing north and south of Lutsk, and especially in
winning the points where the Rovno-Lutsk and the Rovno-Brody
railways crossed respectively the Styr and the Ikva. On 8th June
these two points, Rojitche and Dubno, were the scene of heavy
fighting. Next day both fell, thus giving Russia the third and last
of the Volhynian fortresses. The Ikva was also crossed at Mlynov,
and the advance pushed west and south-west till by the 13th
Kozin, a village half-way between Dubno and Brody, had been
taken, as well as Demidovka to the north-west, and all the forest
land between. West of Lutsk the Cossacks were ranging the
country far and wide, and by the 13th had reached Zaturtsy, half-
way to Vladimir Volynsk, while farther north they were on the
upper streams of the Stokhod. Kaledin and Sakharov had cut
a semicircle out of the enemy front, of which the radius was nearly
forty miles. Farther north Kaledin's right wing was now making
some progress. Kolki itself fell on 13th June, and since the line
of the upper Styr was gone, and the enemy driven back behind
the Stokhod, Svidniki, on the latter stream, was taken after a
violent battle, and in the crossing of the river a complete German
battalion was captured by Siberian troops. South of the main
battle-ground the Russian front was pushed down to the Galician
border near Radzivilov and Alexinietz.

By 16th June, after twelve days of fighting, Kaledin, with the
assistance of Sakharov's right wing, had advanced some fifty miles
from his original line. He had captured Lutsk and Dubno, he had
reached the Galician frontier, and was at one point within twenty-
five miles of Kovel. He had taken prisoner over 1,300 officers
and 70,000 men, and had captured fifty- three guns and colossal
quantities of every type of war material. After the long months

72 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

of trench contests this sudden and dazzling sweep restored to the
world its old notions of war.

It was time to call a halt and await the counter-stroke.
When the torrent first fell on the Austrian front, Hindenburg sent
from the north such reserves as he was able to spare. Certain
Landwehr and Landsturm regiments came from Prince Leopold's
army in the marshes, and several German divisions from the Dvina
front. Ludendorff was dispatched post-haste to straighten out
the tangle, and the Volhynian part of Boehm-Ermolli's command
was put under Linsingen. But after 16th June more formidable
reinforcements began to appear. Austrian troops were coming
from Tyrol and the Balkans, and German divisions were hurried
from France. How great was the urgency may be judged from
the fact that a German corps moved from Verdun to Kovel in six
days. These reserves were not fresh troops, and some of them
had been severely ground in the Verdun mill, but they were the
best that the emergency could produce. Kovel was the danger-
point, for if Kovel fell the main lateral communications would be
cut between Lemberg and Brest Litovsk, between the Armies of the
Centre and the Armies of the South. For the defence of Kovel,
accordingly, every available man was brought into line, the new
German army of manoeuvre under Linsingen taking to itself the
area of the Styr and Stokhod, and the Austrians the sections from
Vladimir Volynsk to the Bug.

Linsingen's counter-attack opened on 16th June, and was
pressed with gradually ebbing vigour till the end of the month.
He did not fight with all the reinforcements he had expected, for
on 13th June Evert, on the Russian centre, had attacked north
of Baranovitchi ; and though he failed to break the German front,
his thrust detained there divisions which would otherwise have
been marching south.

We may here conveniently summarize the various actions on
the northern and central sections of the Russian front which were
fought during the great Southern offensive. Baranovitchi stood
on the plateau close to the watershed between the river Servech,
which joined the Niemen, and the Shara, which flowed to the
Pripet. It was an important railway junction, where the Vilna-
Rovno line met the railway from Smolensk to Brest Litovsk. The
possession of the place by the Germans should have cut the lateral
communication of the Russian armies, but a switch line had been
constructed behind their front to link up the broken part. Bara-
novitchi, therefore, did not mean a great deal to Russia, but it

i9i6] BARANOVITCHI. 73

represented an immense amount to Germany, for it was a nodal
point of the whole railway system between Vilna and Brest Litovsk.
Hence any attack on the place was sure to be strongly resisted,
and to draw in all adjacent reserves. Moreover, in the event of
success, any gain in this region would pave the way for a converg-
ing attack by Evert and Brussilov on Brest Litovsk. In the
beginning of June the Russian Fourth Army, under General Ragoza,
was facing the army group under Woyrsch. Ragoza's attack was
most elaborately prepared by sapping up to within close distance
of the enemy. On the morning of 13th June the bombardment
opened, and at four in the afternoon the Russian infantry attacked
on the front along the upper Shara. Presently the battle line
extended farther south towards the Oginski Canal, and north to
the upper streams of the Servech. In the early days of July,
when Lesch and Kaledin were preparing their second offensive,
Ragoza renewed his efforts. On 2nd July the German trenches
received a baptism of fire which had scarcely been paralleled in
the campaign. To the Russians it was their revenge for the Dona-
jetz. " All the bitterness," wrote one officer, " the sufferings,
with which was strewn the long path of our retreat, were poured
out in this fire." But Woyrsch's men resisted stubbornly ; by
4th July Ragoza had penetrated the enemy's lines to a depth of
two miles on a front of twelve, but by 9th July it was clear that
the advance had reached its limit. On 14th July Woyrsch at-
tempted a counter-stroke without success, and thereafter the battle
died away. It had fulfilled its purpose, for at a critical moment
in Brussilov's movement it had disorganized the enemy's plan
and divided his forces of resistance. The result was assisted by
the attack of Radko Dmitrieff on 16th July with the Twelfth
Army from the Riga bridgehead — a holding battle which lasted
till the end of the month.

Linsingen's aim east of Kovel was to check the enemy and wrest
from him the initiative — to achieve a counter-stroke which would
give a breathing space to the rest of the shattered front. In this
object he partially succeeded, for during the fortnight Kaledin's
triumphant course was stayed. The counter-stroke was delivered
by three enemy groups — in the south of the salient, on the line
Lokatchy-Gorokhov ; in the centre, between the Vladimir Volynsk-
Lutsk road and Svidniki on the Stokhod ; and from the north,
against the Rojitche-Kolki sector of the Styr line.

The immediate result was that Kaledin had to retire from
Svidniki and the western bank of the Stokhod. The action was

74 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

now joined on the west bank of the Styr, on a line dipping south-
west to Kisielin, at the Stokhod source. At Gadomitchi, on the
Styr, just west of Kolki, the fighting was especially furious, and
the place changed hands several times in the course of one day.
At the other end of the line the village of Vorontchin, north-east
of Kisielin, was the chief centre of the struggle. South of the
Vladimir Volynsk road, below Lokatchy and Gorokhov, the Aus-
trians made their main effort, attacking in massed formations and
winning some successes. Kaledin withdrew his front on his left
centre a matter of some five miles to the line Zaturtsy-Bludov-
Lipa. On his right centre, apart from the retreat from Svidniki,
he held more or less the ground he had gained. The counter-attack
died down about 20th June, to revive with redoubled violence in
the last days of the month. But the second effort was less success-
ful than the first. It kept the Kovel road blocked for Kaledin,
but it was not that crushing counter-stroke which Hindenburg
had hoped would take the edge off the Russian temper and cripple
the impetus of Brussilov's attack. Germany was aware that the
offensive was only beginning in the East, and that presently the
fires would blaze on the Western front. She strove to scotch the
menace in one vital sector while yet there was time, but only
succeeded in postponing it for a fortnight.

Going south from Lutsk, we reach the sector Dubno-Zalostse,
where Sakharov faced Boehm-Ermolli. There, with a low water-
shed between them, run the Ikva and the Sereth, in a country of
insignificant hills patched with oak woods and wide marshy valleys.
Sakharov's right wing, as we have seen, had pushed far on the
road to Brody along the railway from Dubno, and had almost
reached the frontier station of Radzivilov. For the moment its
role was secondary. It supported the army to the north of it,
but did not press on towards Brody, its main objective, since
Tcherbachev in the south had found his advance seriously
checked.

South of the Tarnopol-Lemberg railway the ground rises from
the low downs of Volhynia in the great lift of the Podolian table-
land, where the rivers flow south to the Dniester in deep-cut wooded
canons. There the Austrian front followed for a little the course
of the Sereth, and then struck westward to the glen of the Strypa,
on the eastern bank of which it ran till it reached the Dniester.
It was a countryside made by nature for defence against an enemy
coming from the east. The approaches were open and unsheltered.

1916] LECHITSKI'S ATTACK. 75

and the positions themselves offered endless chances for concealing
guns and pe.-fecting redoubts.

Tcherbachev made his attack at three main points. The first
was between the Tarnopol-Lemberg line and Zalostse, the second
at the lift of the plateau around Burkanov, and the third along the
Buczacz-Stanislau railway. In the first he was firmly held by
Bothmer, who had rightly argued that any attack would follow
the Tarnopol railway. At Burkanov things went better, and the
enemy were driven in many places across the Strypa. The left
wing of the Russian Seventh Army at Buczacz had a success com-
parable with the great events in Volhynia. On 8th June Buczacz
was carried, the Strypa was crossed, and the advance pushed well
to the west of the stream. But it was clear that on no grounds
of strategy could an army move too far forward in this section
with Bothmer's centre unbroken to the north of it. In front of
it lay the Dniester and the strong bridgehead of Halicz ; on its
left lay the rugged Dniester defile with an unconquered country
on the other bank. An advance ran the risk of being driven south-
ward and pinned aga'nst a dangerous river line. Tcherbachev
accordingly was compelled to stay his hand and wait upon develop-
ments in the Bukovina.

The corridor between the Dniester and the Pruth, which is
the main entrance from the east into the Bukovina, afforded no
easy access to an invader, as Ivanov had found to his cost in his
offensive of Christmas 1915. For it is a corridor blocked by a
range of hills, which only in the north break down into the little
plain between Dobronovstse and the Dniester — a plain, moreover,
which is itself blocked from the Bessarabian side by subsidiary
foothills. At Christmas Lechitski had attempted to force the
hills by a frontal assault, and had failed. On the north the Dniester
formed a strong barrier, and of the three main bridgeheads, the
two most important, Zalestchiki and Ustsie Biskupie, were in
Austrian hands. The third, Usciezko, was Russia's, but the sur-
rounding country did not permit of its serving as a base for a
crossing in force. The Bukovina seemed triply armoured against
attacks from east and north.

Lechitski's plan was to concentrate on the dubious gap between
Dobronovstse and Okna, for if this were once forced the line of
the Dniester at Zalestchiki and the range of hills would both be
turned. He had the advantage of surprise, for the result of the
Christmas battle seems to have convinced Pflanzer-Baltin that
his position was impregnable. The Russian general aimed at

76 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

attacking the Okna-Dobronovstse line simultaneously from the
east through the corridor, and from the north across the Dniester,
where the Russian position on the left bank commanded the lower
southern shore. On 2nd June the bombardment began, and on
the evening of 4th June — the same day which saw Kaledin sweep-
ing upon Lutsk — the Russian infantry crossed the river towards
Okna and the foothills towards Dobronovstse. It was now clear
to Pflanzer-Baltin that a desperate crisis had come upon him.
He had under his command many of the picked troops of Hungary,
and they were flung wildly into the breach. But they were blasted
out of their positions by the Russian guns, and forced back in grim
hand-to-hand struggles by the terrible Russian bayonets. By 9th
June the Dobronovstse line had gone, and Lechitski had taken
347 officers, including one general, 18,000 other ranks, and ten guns.

Pflanzer-Baltin fell back along the little branch lines which led
to Czernovitz and Kolomea, with the enemy close at his heels.
Zalestchiki was now turned, and the Russians on 12th June had
the bridgehead, and had pushed west to Horodenka, a great road
junction which lies some twenty miles north-west of Czernovitz.
With the enemy pouring across the Dniester and through the
corridor, Pflanzer-Baltin's position was hopeless. His force began
to break up. Most of it retreated south across the Pruth, but
detachments went west along the road to Kolomea. On 13th
June Lechitski was in Sniatyn, and was descending on Czernovitz
from the north, whence Austrian officials and German professors
were fleeing like the household of Lot from the Cities of the Plain.
The Austrians had evacuated Sadagora, on the Czernovitz-Zalest-
chiki road, and were now across the Pruth, attempting to hold the
low ridge of hills on the southern bank. In nine days Lechitski
had taken 757 officers, 37,832 other ranks, and forty-nine guns.

On 16th June the Russians crossed the Pruth, and that night
the military evacuation of Czernovitz began. Next day, at four
in the afternoon, the conquerors entered the city. Pflanzer-Baltin
was now in full retreat through southern Bukovina towards the
Carpathians, leaving behind him masterless detachments at Stanis-
lau, Kolomea, and along the Dniester. He seems to have hoped
to make a stand on the Sereth, the Bukovina river of that name
which flows into the Danube. But Lechitski gave him no time to
halt. The day after Czernovitz fell he was across the Sereth, and
on the 21st was thirty miles south of the capital. Columns were
meanwhile moving westward, and were presently in Kuty and
Pistyn, on the outskirts of Kolomea. On 23rd June Kimpolung,

igi6] END OF FIRST STAGE. 77

the most southerly town of the province, was taken, together with
sixty officers and 2,000 men. The " country of the beech woods "
was once again in Russian hands.

On this date, 23rd June, closed the first stage of what had been
one of the most rapid and spectacular advances in the history of
the war. In three weeks a whole province had been reconquered ;
Lutsk and Dubno had been retaken ; the advance was within
twenty-five miles of Kovel, and within ten of Brody ; the prisoners
captured numbered 4,031 officers and 194,041 of other ranks ; 219
guns and 644 machine guns had been taken, besides vast quantities
of all war material. Strategically, the first stages had been won
in the attack upon the three vital places behind the enemy front
— Kovel, Lemberg, and Stanislau. The Austrian line had been
pierced and shattered over wide stretches, and the campaign in
these areas translated from the rigidity of trench warfare to some-
thing like the freedom of manoeuvre battles. For the first time
since the beginning of the war the Russians were, as regards artil-
lery and munitions, on terms of an approximate equality with their
foe, and the decision lay with their incomparable foot and cavalry.
In another matter they were on level terms — in Volhynia and at
Buczacz they had railways to support their advance equal to those
of their opponents. Brussilov had made brilliant use of his newly
acquired advantages, and had conducted his vast operations with
the skill of a master. Only the first step had been taken ; the
movement was still far from having won a strategic decision ; but
loss, vast and irreparable, had already been caused to the shrinking
man-power of Austria.

June had been a month of signal successes, but these successes
were incomplete. Brussilov had pushed out two great wedges in
Volhynia and the Bukovina, but he could not rest on his laurels.
A wedge is liable to the counter-stroke unless its flanks are guarded
by natural obstacles, and this was not the case in Volhynia, where
the Stokhod line had not yet been won, and in the south there was
a perpetual menace from the direction of Brody and Lemberg.
In the Bukovina the Carpathians gave security to Lechitski's left
when the time came that he had gained the foothills ; but Both-
mer's army held the crossings of the middle Dniester, and till it
was forced to retreat it prevented any advance from Buczacz
towards Halicz. The position of Bothmer was, indeed, the crux
of the whole matter. The Russians had found, during their great
retreat in the summer of 1915, that in eastern Galicia they might

78 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

be hopelessly outflanked to south and north, and yet be able to
retire at their leisure. The parallel river canons running to the
Dniester provided an ideal set of successive positions, and now
Bothmer had the advantage of them. Brussilov's immediate duty,
therefore, before moving towards his ultimate objective, was to
straighten his front. He must carry the line of the Stokhod and
rest his right flank on the marshes of the lower Styr and the Pripet.
Similarly, he must take Brody, and advance his left wing in Vol-
hynia. Above all, Bothmer must be forced back from the Strypp
to the same longitude as the advance south of the Dniester. It
was in such a purpose, rather than in a violent struggle for Lemberg
or Kovel, that we must look for the motive which dominated
Brussilov's strategy of the second stage.

The first task was to carry forward the right flank to a position
of safety. So soon as the German counter-attack on the Stokhod
in the second half of June had begun to ebb, preparations were
made for broadening the Volhynian wedge. The left wing of
Evert's central group was the Third Army, under Lesch, the general
who had taken over the command from Radko Dmitrieff in the
beginning of the Great Retreat, and had distinguished himself by
his resolute holding battles on the south flank of the Warsaw
salient. This army was brought south from the Pripet marshes
and put under Brussilov's charge. Kaledin drew in his right, and
the new force lay along the Styr astride of the Kovel-Sarny railway,
facing Linsingen.

On 2nd July, in the Baranovitchi area, Evert's right wing, as
we have seen, struck a second time against Woyrsch. It was an
attack in force, supported with a good weight of artillery, and on
a broad front the enemy's first line was carried and some thousands
of prisoners taken. But Hindenburg was not to be caught nap-
ping, and presently the advance, was checked with heavy Russian
losses, and Evert's impetus died away. This thrust of the Russian
right centre was in itself a substantive operation, designed to test
the enemy's strength in a vital theatre. It failed to break his
front, but it had one beneficent effect on the operations south of
the marshes — it prevented any further reinforcement of Linsingen
in front of Kovel at the critical moment when Lesch was about to
strike.

That moment came at dawn on 4th July. From Kolki to
lorth of Rafalovka stretches a wide, wooded plain between the
Styr and the Stokhod. In the south near Kashovka there are
low ridges, but all to the northwards is as flat as the Libyan desert.

1916] LESCH REACHES THE STOKHOD. 79

Coarse grasses and poppies cover the dunes, and between them
there are stretches of swamp and great areas of melancholy pine-
woods. North of Rafalovka the marshy region of the Pripet
begins, where there could be no continuous front, but only isolated
forts on the knuckles of dry ground, connected by precarious
trenches among the lagoons. On this marshy region Lesch had no
designs. It was the protection he desired for his flank. His aim
was the sandy plain beyond which, thirty miles to the west, crawled
the sluggish Stokhod. The brilliant weather of June had dried up
most of the swamps, and given him the one chance which might
occur in the twelvemonth.

The action began with such an artillery preparation as had
not yet been seen on the Russian side. The guns opened on a
front of more than thirty miles, pounding the Austrian positions
east of the Styr between Kolki and Rafalovka. Soon the air was
clouded with dust as the sand of the entrenchments was scattered
by shell. The two main attacks were at Kolki and just north of
Rafalovka, the salient formed by the Chartorysk position being
cut in upon on its two flanks. By the night of 4th July Lesch
was over the Styr north of Rafalovka, and had pushed his right
as far as Vulka Galuzyiskaya, some twelve miles from the river
line. Next day the latter position, defended by three lines of
barbed-wire entanglements fitted with land mines, was carried,
the stubborn resistance of the Bavarians at Kolki was broken
down, and the river bridged. The following day, 6th July, Kos-
tiukhnovka, west of Kolodye, was won, and Raznitse, north of
Kolki. That marked the end of the Chartorysk salient. The
apex fell back in disorder, and by the evening of 7th July the Rus-
sian cavalry were in Manievitche station, on the Kovel-Sarny rail-
way, about half-way between the Styr and the Stokhod, and the
two wings of Lesch's advance had joined hands. Moreover, on his
extreme right, on the very fringe of the marshes, he had pushed
forward from Yeziertsky and had reached the Stokhod at Novo
Tcherevisghe. The highroad from the latter place to Kolki by
way of Manievitche was now wholly in his hands. On 8th July,
in conjunction with Kaledin's right, he crossed the upper Stokhod
at Ugly and Arsenovitche, where the river makes a sharp bend to
the east. The Russians were now upon the Stokhod line between
the Kovel-Rovno and the Kovel-Sarny railways.

After the first stern grapple the enemy's retreat had become
almost a flight. Through the dry bent of the dunes and the shat-
tered pinewoods the Russian infantry swept forward like men

80 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

possessed. Nothing stayed their remorseless progress. The enemy
fired the villages as he retreated, and in that blazing midsummer
weather Lesch advanced through a land cloudy by day and flaming
skyward by night. And always in the van went the grey Cossack
cavalry, clinging to the rear and flanks of the broken infantry.
In four days Lesch had advanced twenty-five miles on a front of
forty. He had taken 300 officers, including two regimental com-
manders, over 12,000 unwounded men, forty-five guns, including
some heavy batteries, and large quantities of machine guns, am-
munition, and military stores. Above all, he had won his imme-
diate strategic purpose. The right flank of the Volhynian wedge
was secured against any counter-stroke.

But now that the Stokhod was reached, the problem became
harder. Kovel, that vital centre, was only some twenty odd miles
distant, and on it converged the two railways which had been the
Russian lines of supply. It was clear that Linsingen would fight
desperately to cover his citadel. The Stokhod was a marshy
stream with wide beds of reeds on either side, and on the western
bank the ground rose slightly, so as to give the defence better
observation. An alternative position had been prepared there
during the previous autumn, and every nerve was now strained
to make it impregnable. Though the river had been crossed at
various points, yet the river line was far from being won, and about
the middle of July the Russian advance had begun to stagnate
into ordinary trench warfare.

It was about this time that the Russian High Command saw
fit to announce to the world their intention. " On the issue of
these battles," so ran the communique, " undoubtedly depends not
only the fate of Kovel and its strongly fortified zone, but also to
a great degree all the present operations on our front. In the event
of the fall of Kovel, new and important perspectives will open out
for us, for the road to Brest Litovsk, and in some degree the roads
to Warsaw, will be uncovered." This was not the usual language
of the Russian Staff, nor was it the language of a prudent general
who did not desire to share his secrets with the enemy. It is diffi-
cult to regard the announcement as other than a ruse. Brussilov
wished Hindenburg to believe that he intended to break his teeth
on Kovel as the Crown Prince had broken his on Verdun, and
thereby to delude him as to the direction of the next effort. For,
after his fashion, the Russian commander was making plans elsewhere.

So far the Russian Eleventh Army, under Kuropatkin's old
Chief of Staff, had played a lesser role than those of Kaledin and

1916] LINSINGEN'S COUNTER-STROKE. 81

Lechitski. Its right wing had, indeed, crossed the Ikva and col-
laborated with Kaledin in the thrust south of Lutsk to the Galician
border. But now it was cast for a major part, for against the south
side of the Lutsk salient Linsingen proposed to institute a great
offensive, which should do more than counterbalance the Russian
gain on the Stokhod. The Austrian line, held by Boehm-Ermolli's
left wing, ran — after the Russian withdrawal of the second half of
June — from the village of Shklin by Ugrinov and Mikhailovka to
the Styr, and then south across the little Plashevka through wooded
hills to the frontier town of Radzivilov. It was served by the
many roads leading from Lemberg, by the Lemberg-Brody railway,
and, so far as concerned its left wing, by the Lemberg-Stoyanov
line. There, in the second week of July, fresh divisions were in
process of concentration, some brought from as far afield as the
Dvina, Verdun, and the Trentino. An attack in force would, it
was hoped, drive back Kaledin behind Lutsk and Dubno, force
Lesch to retreat from the Stokhod, and wipe out Brussilov's Vol-
hynian gains. The date of the great effort was fixed for 18th July.

Brussilov got wind of the plan, and resolved to strike hard and
quick before the danger had time to mature. Sakharov began to
move during the night of 15th July. During the next two days
he forced Boehm-Ermolli's centre back upon the upper Styr. At
the same time he struck against the line Bludov-Zlotchevka,
farther north. On 16th July, pivoting on Bludov, he turned the
Austrian flank, and shepherded it southward for seven miles. At
Mikhailovka on that day he took three huge ammunition dumps
which Linsingen had prepared for his army's offensive. The enemy
in this sector was back at Gorokhov, where he endeavoured in vain
to regain ground by counter-attacks. On that one day, 16th July,
Sakharov took 317 officers, 12,637 men, and thirty guns.

Then the dry weather broke, and torrential rains fell, as at the
same date they fell on the Somme. But in spite of the difficult
country Sakharov did not halt. He was advancing in a half-moon,
forcing the enemy from the north against the Lipa, and from the
east against the Styr. On 20th July he attacked and carried
Berestechko, where, in the seventeenth century, John Casimir,
King of Poland, had routed the invading Tartars ; and next day
he crossed the Styr, having in this action taken 300 officers and
12,000 men. He had driven a wedge between the Austrian IV.
Army and Bothmer by his defeat of Boehm-Ermolli, and was
now in effect swinging south to operate against the left wing of
Bothmer's army on the Sereth and the Strypa.

82 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

By 22nd July the Austrians began to evacuate Brody, remem-
bering the fate of Lutsk. It was a place which might have been
stoutly defended, for Boehm-Ermolli had his left on the Styr, and
in front of his centre had the curve of the river Slonovka, a broad
marsh, and more than a hundred square miles of forest. On his
right he had the wooded hills at the source of the Ikva. Sakharov
began his attack early on the morning of 25th July. The
Russian infantry, creeping through the dark before the summer
dawn, crossed the swamp of the Slonovka and forded the stream.
In the centre they fought their way yard by yard through the
dense forest west of Radzivilov, and after six attempts took the
village of Opariptse. On the morning of 27th July the centre and
right came into line, and by the evening had carried the Klekotov
position five miles from Brody. Meantime the Russian left wing,
which had met with less opposition, emerged from the forests
south-east of the town. The fate of the place was now sealed,
and at 6.30 on the morning of 28th July Sakharov entered Brody,
which had been Boehm-Ermolli's headquarters. The battle, one
of the bloodiest and sternest fought in the campaign, had been
planned out in every detail beforehand by the Russian commander,
and Brody fell within twenty-four hours of the scheduled time.
In the three days' fight the Eleventh Army took 210 officers and
13,569 men, bringing the total of its captures since 16th July to
940 officers and 39,152 of other ranks. Forty-nine guns were part
of the immense miscellaneous booty.

Even then Sakharov did not rest. The railway running south-
ward from Brody to Lemberg joins at the town of Krasne the
great trunk line which runs south-east through Tarnopol to Odessa.
The new Russian front between Brody and Zalostse ran roughly
parallel with that line, which was Bothmer's main avenue of com-
munication— some twenty miles distant at Brody, and only ten
at Zalostse. But to reach it a tangled region of forest and mere
had to be crossed, where the Styr, the Bug, the Sereth, and the
Strypa had their springs. All these valleys with their enclosing
ridges ran at right angles to any Russian advance, and would give
the enemy an endless series of strong alternative positions. Only
one road crossed the wilderness, that from Brody to Zloczow ;
another farther east stopped short half-way at Pienaki.

The Austrians seem to have expected that Sakharov would
move towards Krasne on the way to Lemberg. Instead he advanced
due south, crossing the ridges east of the most difficult country, to
the Pienaki-Podkamien line. This brought his front parallel to

1916] THE FAILURE OF THE GUARD ARMY. 83

Bothmer's main communications. On 4th August he attacked
the line Nushche-Zagozhe, while Tcherbachev's right from Zalostse
attacked also towards the Sereth. By the next evening Sakharov
had won all the villages around the upper Sereth, and the following
day, 6th August, was as far south as Reniov, not eight miles from
the Tarnopol line. In three days he had taken 166 officers and
8,415 men. On 10th August he was in Nesterovtse, less than
five miles from the railway. Bothmer's flank had been com-
pletely turned.

Meantime in Poliesia the new Guard Army, under Bezobrazov,
had been brought south and placed between Lesch and Kaledin.
On 28th July, just after midday, it attacked along the upper Stok-
hod. In the first hours of the fighting it broke through the enemy
position, and took thirty-eight guns and 4,000 prisoners, mostly
German. The river was crossed at many points, the cavalry
went through, and two days later at one place the Russians were
more than five miles west of the Stokhod. Linsingen was forced
to relinquish the bend of the river at Kashovka, and fell back
to a fresh set of prepared positions. But he was now on the alert,
and the defence, laboriously constructed since the opening of
the offensive on 4th June, proved too strong to be broken. On
2nd August the Russians were on the line Sitovitche-Yanovka,
and next day made a desperate attack on the German position
at the village of Rudka Mirynska. They carried the place, but it
formed so acute a salient that, under pressure of counter-attacks,
they were compelled to relinquish it. This action was the one
serious failure in the operations — a failure due to imperfect recon-
naissance and a complete lack of co-ordination. By the evening
of 9th August 532 officers and 54,770 rank and file had fallen, and
these the elite of the Russian armies.

The control of the Bukovina, which Lechitski had won in June,
had little direct effect upon the campaign in Galicia. The province
was strategically self-contained, or rather its importance lay in
relation to Rumania, since it possessed all the gates into Moldavia.
Its road and railway system was in no way vital to the Galician
armies, as was proved in the previous year, when Russia held nearly
all Galicia and most of the Carpathian passes without control of
the Bukovina. But any advance from the east pushed to the west
of Kolomea must bring Lechitski into contact with Bothmer's
most indispensable communications. Above Halicz the Dniester
flows through wide belts of marsh, and below Nizniov it enters

84 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

a rugged canon ; the good crossings — two railways and three roads
— were all between these two towns. The southern Galician trunk
line ran from Stry to Stanislau and Buczacz, and was the main
feeder of Bothmer' s right wing. Moreover, one of the principal
connections with Hungary was the line running from Stanislau
by Delatyn to Maramaros Sziget, crossing the Jablonitza Pass. If
Lechitski took Kolomea, he would cut one of the loops of the
Hungarian line which ran from Delatyn by Kolomea to Stanislau ;
if he reached Delatyn, he could cut the line altogether ; if he took
Stanislau, he would cut the Stry-Buczacz railway ; and if he forced
the Dniester crossings between Halicz and Nizniov, he would
turn Bothmer's southern flank, and make his position on the Strypa
wholly untenable.

Part of the debris of Pflanzer-Baltin's army retreated, as we have
seen, in the direction of Stanislau, and passed under Bothmer's
command, so that Bothmer's right wing was now holding the
Dniester crossings from Halicz to Nizniov. Lechitski's first busi-
ness was to take Kolomea. On 28th June he attacked the Austrians
east of that town on the line Niezviska-Pistyn, stretching from the
Dniester to the Carpathians. Partly owing to a brilliant flanking
movement in the north by the Russian cavalry, the Austrian
position collapsed like sand, and that evening 221 officers and 10,285
men were added to the total of prisoners. The following day, 29th
June, the Russians entered Kolomea, to find that the enemy had
retreated in such haste that the six railways and six highroads
which converge there were scarcely damaged.

The next stroke must be against the Maramaros Sziget-Stanislau
railway ; but it proved impossible to march up the Pruth valley
straight on Delatyn. Accordingly Lechitski's left wing moved
southward over the wooded hills around Berezov, while his right
wing, in conjunction with Tcherbachev's troops north of the
Dniester, advanced against Tlumatch. On the last day of June
the latter place was carried, principally by a brigade of Circassian
cavalry, who charged the trench lines without any previous artillery
preparation. This success compelled Bothmer on the north bank
to fall back several miles to conform to the Austrian withdrawal.
The Russians were now within ten miles of the vital Dniester cross-
ings, and the enemy made a desperate effort to stay their progress.
On 2nd July, Bothmer, having received German reinforcements,
counter-attacked, and compelled Lechitski to give a little ground
and relinquish Tlumatch. The advance of his right wir-g was for
the moment stayed.

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BRUSSILOVS ADVANCE IN GALICIA.

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1916] CAPTURE OF STANISLAU. 85

Meantime his left flank and centre were carrying all before them.
On 30th June the left wing was in Pistyn and Berezov ; on 3rd
July it was only six miles from the Maramaros Sziget-Stanislau
railway, and next day it cut the line. The centre pressed on against
Delatyn itself, and on 8th July the place was captured. The first
vital strategic objective of Lechitski's advance had been attained.
During the fighting between 23rd June and 7th July he had taken
prisoner 674 officers and 30,875 men, and had captured eighteen
guns.

The July rains were now beginning. The Dniester and the
Pruth were in roaring flood, and all the country south of Stanislau
was under water. In such conditions a halt had to be called in the
most ardent advance, and only the left wing of the Russians, now
among the Carpathian heights, could find dry ground on which
to operate. For nearly a month the lull continued, and then on
7th August Lechitski struck again. This time it was on his right
wing, towards Stanislau and the Dniester crossings. That day he
recaptured Tlumatch, and reached the Dniester close to Nizniov.
Next day Tcherbachev, north of the river, crossed the Kuropiets
and came into line. On 9th August Khryplin, the railway junction
south of Stanislau, was taken, and the Austrians evacuated the
latter town. On 10th August Lechitski entered Stanislau. Next
day, too, Tcherbachev was across the Zlota Lipa north of Nizniov.

Bothmer's position was now very grave. Sakharov, in the
north, was close to the Lemberg-Tarnopol railway, which fed his
left wing ; Lechitski had cut the Maramaros Sziget line, and by his
capture of Stanislau had cut also the Stry-Buczacz line, which fed
his right wing. Moreover, Tcherbachev was actually round his
flank north of Nizniov. There was nothing for it but retreat.
The army which had made so stalwart a stand must bend its
neck at last. Bothmer's right fell back from the Strypa upon
the Zlota Lipa, his centre to Brzezany, and his left to behind
Zborov, on the Lemberg-Tarnopol railway. With this retirement
the second phase of Brussilov's offensive ended. It left the enemy
in an awkward position, with both Kovel and Lemberg menaced
by unbroken armies, and with Lechitski south of the Dniester,
well on Bothmer's right rear.

The significance of the ten marvellous weeks which had elapsed
since Brussilov launched his thunderbolt was not to be computed
in mere gain of ground. Alexeiev played for a great stake, and had
no care for petty reconquests. It was not the regaining of the

86 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

Volhynian fortresses or the Bukovina that mattered, but the fact
that the enemy in his retreat had been compelled to lengthen his
front by at least two hundred miles, and was left with fewer men to
hold it. A retreat in most cases shortens a line ; in the East the
German-Austrian front was straight to begin with, and retirement
made it sag and dip so that its total length was greatly increased.
Over 300,000 prisoners had been taken, and the dead and badly
wounded may have amounted to twice as many again.

How desperate was the crisis may be judged by the steps which
Hindenburg took to meet it. During June, while the front on the
West was quiet except at Verdun, Germany transferred thence
four complete divisions and a number of odd battalions, making a
total of some seventy-three battalions. When the Somme battle
began, her power of reinforcement was seriously crippled ; but
the necessity was urgent, and she continued to send divisions —
exhausted divisions, whose fighting value was gravely reduced.
In July, for example, she transferred from West to East three
divisions and some odd battalions, making a total of thirty-seven
battalions. The process continued during August and September.
To anticipate — if we take the period between 4th June and the
middle of September, we find that Germany sent in the way of
reinforcements to the line north of the Pripet an infantry division
from the West, and to the line south of the Pripet sixteen infantry
divisions and three cavalry divisions from north of the Pripet,
fifteen divisions from the West, and one division from the Balkans.
Austria brought to the area south of the Pripet seven divisions
from the Italian front — divisions ill to spare, since Cadorna was
busy with his counter-offensive. Finally, two Turkish divisions,
the 19th and 20th, were brought west and given to Bothmer.
There can be no difference of opinion as to the vigour and resource
which the German Staff, with their ally almost out of action,
showed in meeting the danger. But the rushing of wearied troops
across the breadth of Europe was an expedient such as no sane
commander would contemplate except in the last necessity.

Austria's disasters led to a complete revision of the Eastern
commands. A new army, called at first the XII. and afterwards
the III., was formed to take position between Bothmer and Pflanzer-
Baltin. From 30th July Hindenburg was put in command of the
whole Eastern front, except the three southernmost armies, which,
as a solace to Austrian sentiment, were made a group-command for
the heir-apparent, the Archduke Charles, a young gentleman of
twenty-nine. The Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, commanding the

1916] REARRANGEMENT OF ENEMY FRONT. 87

Austrian IV. Army, and Pflanzer-Baltin, commanding the VII.
Army, vanished into obscurity. Von Tersztyansky took the Arch-
duke Joseph's place, and a new VII. Army was formed under von
Kirchbach. The front was thus apportioned between crabbed age
and youth. The Austro-German dispositions were now from north
to south : Eichhorn's group, comprising his own X. Army, the
German VIII. Army (Otto von Below), and Scholtz's detachment ;
Prince Leo; old's group, comprising the German XII. Army (Fabeck),
and the German IX. Army (Woyrsch) ; Linsingen's group, compris-
ing his own army of the Bug, the Austrian IV. Army (Tersztyansky),
and the Austrian II. Army (Boehm-Ermolli). All these were under
Hindenburg. In the south the Archduke Charles had in his group
Bothmer's Army, the Austrian III. Army (Kovess), and the Aus-
trian VII. Army (Kirchbach). The point had all but been reached
when the supreme command of the Central Powers would be
formally vested in Germany's hands.

As against these kaleidoscopic changes the Russian battle-front
remained the same as on 4th June, save that in August Kuropatkin
became Governor-General of Turkestan, and Russki returned once
again to the Northern Command. Ten weeks of constant fighting
had welded the armies into a formidable weapon. The new thing,
the tremendous fact which emerged from the battle, was that Russia
had shown that she could adapt herself to modern warfare, and
could create a machine to put her manhood on even terms with
the enemy. The staff work, too, had been admirable, and the
patient sagacity of the leadership beyond praise. Alexeiev,
Brussilov, and each of the four army commanders had revealed
conspicuous military talent. The battles were generals' battles
as much as soldiers' battles — they were won in the brain of the
High Command before they were won in the field. But the effort
had stretched her powers to their extreme limits ; it was her flood-
mark, which could not be passed — which, unhappily, could not be
reached again.

CHAPTER LVIII.

THE BATTLE OF VERDUN — SECOND STAGE.
May 3-August 8, 1916.

Position at Verdun in May — Loss of Mort Homme — The French attack Douau-
mont — Loss of Fort Vaux — The last German Attacks at Fleury and Thiau-
mont — End of the Main Battle.

The first stage of the Battle of Verdun ended on 9th April with the
defeat of the German purpose. Defeat, indeed, had befallen the
Imperial Crown Prince weeks before, ever since the merciless usury
of Petain had forced his enemy to pay a price in excess of any pos-
sible gain. Verdun had long ago passed out of the sphere of pure
strategy into that of politics. It had become a fatal magnet,
drawing to itself the German strategic reserves, not for military
ends, but because the High Command had burned its boats and
could not retire. They had staked their reputation on the capture
of the little city, and without grave loss of credit could not break
off the action. Towards the end of April the French Staff believed
that the battle was virtually over ; but they overestimated the
capacity of their opponents for the rigour of the game. Germany
dared not take the heroic course — her commitments were too
deep ; and a second battle was about to begin, not less desperate
than the first, in which her sole purpose was, by blind blows on a
narrow front, to wear down the French strength. The significance
of Verdun itself had long since gone. It mattered very little for
the main interests of the campaign whether or not a German
soldier set foot in its shattered streets. Germany's own hope was
to weaken what she still believed to be the waning man-power of
France, and to forestall the combined Allied attack which since
Christmas had been her nightmare.

In April Petain succeeded Langle de Cary as commander of the
central secteur, from Soissons to Verdun. His promotion to one
of the three group commands was a well-deserved tribute to his
superb achievement. He was succeeded in the command of the

igi6] THE FRENCH LINE IN MAY. 89

Second Army by Nivelle, who, like Petain, had at the outbreak of
war been only a colonel. As we have seen, during April there was
no great action in the Verdun section, but only minor attacks and
counter-attacks and an intermittent bombardment. At the end
of the month the French line lay as follows : — From Avocourt, in
the west, it ran through the eastern fringes of the Avocourt Wood
covering the famous redoubt, along the slope of Hill 287, and across
the northern slopes of Hill 304 ; dipped into the ravine of the
Esnes branch of the Forges brook ; climbed the western slopes of
Mort Homme, covering the summit ; then fell back to the south
of the Goose's Crest, and reached the Meuse at Cumieres. On the
right bank of the river the line ran on the south side of the Cote du
Poivre, through the Wood of Haudromont, along the south side of
the Douaumont ridge, just short of the crest ; dipped into the Vaux
glen, passing through the western skirts of Vaux village, and then
ran south along the eastern scarp of the Heights of the Meuse,
covering Vaux fort.

The position on the left bank was curious. At Hill 304 the
French front was in the shape of a horseshoe facing north, with
the ends in Avocourt Wood and in the gully of the Esnes brook
and the centre flung well forward on the north side of the ridge.
East of Mort Homme the position was reversed. There the German
front was the horseshoe facing south, having one end in the Esnes
gully, and the other north of Cumieres, while the centre bulged
over the crest well into the Wood of Cumieres. Obviously this
position, in the shape of the letter S lying on its side, exposed
both combatants to the danger of flanking attacks, and it was the
object of the German Command to straighten it out. Such a
straightening would give them Hill 304 and Mort Homme, which
had been the key-points of the first battle in this section. But at
the end of April these had not the importance they bore in early
March. The main French position was now well behind, towards
the Charny ridge. It should be remembered that on the left bank
of the Meuse the Germans were still fighting for positions correspond-
ing to those which they had won on the right bank in the first week
of the battle. The Hill 304-Mort Homme line was paralleled on
the east by the Louvemont ridge. Charny was the line parallel to
Douaumont.

The second stage of the Battle of Verdun divides itself naturally
into three main episodes. First came the attempt of the German
right wing to carry Hill 304 and Mort Homme, and press the French
back on their last position — an attempt which succeeded in its

90 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

immediate but failed in its ultimate purpose. The second, simul-
taneous with the first operation, was a vigorous counter-attack by
the French on the Douaumont ridge. The third — the last phase
of the battle — was a concentrated German assault from Douau-
mont against the last line covering Verdun, which gave them the
fort of Vaux, the work of Thiaumont, and for a moment the village
of Fleury, and brought them within four miles of the walls of Verdun.

I.

After a week of inaction there began on the 3rd of May a steady
and violent bombardment of the north slope of Hill 304, more than
a hundred German batteries concentrating on the narrow front.
Not only were the French first lines bombarded, but the crest of
the slope behind them became one mass of spouting volcanoes,
which resulted in changing the shape of the sky-line to an ob-
server looking north from Verdun. All that night the fire con-
tinued ; the trenches were obliterated, and the defence sheltered
as best it could in shell holes. There was a lull on the morning
of the 4th, and then the artillery began again, and continued
with increasing fury till the afternoon. At four o'clock recon-
noitring parties of German infantry advanced, and were beaten
back by French rifle fire. At five o'clock the enemy made a massed
attack. Most of the French advanced troops had been buried,
their rifles broken, and their machine guns put out of action by
the bombardment. The result was that the Germans occupied a
considerable stretch of the first line north of Hill 304. That same
day the French had themselves attacked at Mort Homme, and
pushed their left horn forward.

On the night of the 4th there was a brilliant French counter-
attack at Hill 304, which pressed the enemy back at the point
of danger which he. held just above the Esnes ravine. On the
5th the German bombardment moved a little westward, and
attacked the ragged little coppice called the Camard Wood, just
south of the Haucourt-Avocourt road. There lay the French
66th Regiment of Infantry, one of whose captains has described
that devastating fire. It began at four o'clock in the morning,
and lasted till 3.30 p.m. " The dug-out in which I was was hewn
out of solid rock, but it swayed like a boat on a stormy sea, and
you could not keep a candle alight in it. The Camard Wood that
morning had had the appearance of a wood, though all tattered and
broken ; but by the evening it had lost all semblance of anything

1916] FIGHT FOR MORT HOMME. 91

but a patch of earth." At 3.30 p.m. the enemy's infantry attacked ;
but the heroic 66th and 32nd Regiments had still a sting left in
them. With their rifle fire they halted the advancing waves, and
then small parties of gallant men leaped from the wreckage of
their trenches and charged with the bayonet. It was sufficient
to check the enemy's advance. That night and the next day
there was a lull, except for the steady bombardment.

On Sunday, 7th May, came a more formidable assault. It was
delivered on all three sides of Hill 304 — from the Wood of Avocourt,
from the direction of Haucourt, and in the ravine of the Esnes
stream between Hill 304 and Mort Homme. An intense bombard-
ment began at dawn, and a barrage cut off all communication with
the rear. The Germans attacked with the equivalent of an army
corps, by far the most considerable attempt yet made in this part
of the front. Five times during that Sunday they advanced, and
five times they were thrown back. In the last attack they carried
the communication trench east of Hill 304, and pushed up the
ravine. The French promptly counter-attacked, and after a stern
struggle lasting well into the darkness they recovered the communi-
cation trench, and by the morning of the 8th were able to consoli-
date their line. But that day's fighting had altered the position.
The crest of Hill 304 was so bare and shell-swept that it could not
be retained, and the French line now ran just south of it, though
they had advanced posts still on the summit ridge. That same day
there was an action on the right bank of the Meuse, between Haudro-
mont Wood and Douaumont, where the Germans won a slight
advantage. North of Thiaumont farm they carried the French first
line for 500 yards on both sides of the Fleury-Douaumont road.

Thereafter for some days the fighting on the left bank became
desultory. On 17th May the Germans, after their usual fashion,
having failed in their frontal attack on Hill 304, set themselves to
turn it from the direction of Avocourt Wood. The action began
at six in the evening, and soon it spread over the whole front from
Avocourt to the Meuse. On the 18th there were repeated attacks
on the west flank ot Hill 304, and also on the north-east from the
Esnes glen. On the 20th the bombardment became especially
severe on Mort Homme. It will be remembered that while the
Germans held Hill 265 the French held the true summit, Hill 295,
but held it as a salient, for their flanks fell back sharply on both
sides of it. About two in the afternoon the German infantry at-
tacked the salient from north-east and north-west, and carried
the French front lines. In the eastern part they were driven out

92 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

again ; but in the west they held their ground, and pushed on
towards the French second line along the slopes of Mort Homme
directly overlooking the Esnes brook. These attacks were delivered
with great resolution, with large numbers of men, and with utter
recklessness of loss. By Sunday, 21st May, the summit of Mort
Homme had passed from French hands, and their line now lay
along the southern slopes. That same day the enemy made
stupendous efforts to push his way up the Esnes glen. But the
impetus had slackened, and the French were comfortable enough
in their new positions.

That fight for Mort Homme was one of the most costly incidents
of the whole battle. The Germans between Avocourt and Cumieres
used at least five divisions, partly drawn from the famous 1st
Bavarian Corps, which had lately been on the British front. Their
losses were enormous. The ravine of the Esnes was cumbered
with dead, and there were slopes on Hill 304 and on Mort Homme
where the ground was raised several metres by mounds of German
corpses. The two crests were lost, but their value had largely
gone. The French main position now was the front Avocourt-
Esnes-Hill 310-the Bois Bourrus-Marre, and their lines on the
southern slopes of the much-contested ridges were only advanced
posts. The German success had brought them half a mile nearer
Verdun ; but every yard of that advance had been amply paid for.

II.

But stern as the conflict had been, it was to become sterner
still. From 21st February to 20th May the French artillery had
fired 9,795,000 shells ; in the next twenty-five days they were to
expend 4,200,000. We turn to the right bank of the Meuse, where
Douaumont was once more to become the scene of grim fighting.
The time had arrived for a French counter-attack to ease the pres-
sure on the western flank. They began their bombardment some
time on Saturday, the 20th. On the 21st they won ground on both
flanks, capturing the Haudromont quarry, and taking a trench near
Vaux. These attacks were designed to divert the attention of
the enemy from the massing of troops on the French centre,
opposite Douaumont fort. The troops chosen for the principal
attack were the 5th Division of the 3rd Corps, who on 3rd April
had retaken the Caillette Wood. It was one of the most famous
of French divisions, commanded by Mangin, who had been with
Marchand on his great African journey ; had fought under Lyautey

1916] FRENCH ATTACK ON DOUAUMONT. 93

in Morocco ; and had won great honour at every stage since the
retreat from the Sambre. On 21st April he had issued an order
to his men : " You are about to re-form your depleted ranks.
Many of you will return home, and will bear with you to your
families the warlike ardour and the thirst for vengeance which
inspire you. But there is no rest for us French so long as the
barbarous enemy treads the sacred soil of our fatherland. There
is no peace for the world till the monster of Prussian militarism
has been laid low. Therefore prepare yourselves for new battles,
when you will have full confidence in your superiority over an enemy
whom you have so often seen to flee and surrender before your
bayonets and grenades. You are certain of that now. Any
German who enters a trench of the 5th Division is dead or a pris-
oner ; any ground seriously attacked by the 5th Division is cap-
tured ground. You march under the wings of Victory."

The assault was fixed for Monday, 22nd May. As the sun rose
the German kite balloons appeared in regular lines over the horse-
shoe of upland. But at 8 a.m. a French airplane squadron was
seen hovering above the German " sausages." They had with
them a bomb, now used for the first time, which in falling burst
into a shower of lesser bombs, each of which in turn gave out minute
particles of a burning chemical. In a few minutes six of the German
kite balloons had exploded in flames. The infantry, waiting in
the trenches, watched the spectacle with joy. " We have now
bandaged the Boche's eyes," said one to another. The Germans,
scenting the new peril, kept up a ceaseless fire of shrapnel, to which
the French replied, till the firmament twanged like a taut fiddle-
string. At ten minutes to twelve precisely the men of the 10th
Brigade of the 3rd Division rose from their trenches.

The whole operation had been most skilfully planned. The
French were close up to the fort, only some 350 yards distant.
The Germans had dug trench lines south of it, but it would appear
that these and the wire entanglements had been largely destroyed
by the French fire. The 129th Regiment of Infantry was directed
against the fort itself, while on the left the 36th Regiment and on
the right the 74th Regiment moved in support. The French
streamed from their cover in open order, and with unfaltering
resolution made straight for the fort. The 129th Regiment in ten
minutes was inside the south-west angle of the defence. At noon
precisely a Bengal light was burned, and the watchers behind
knew that the centre had won its objective.

On the left the 36th Regiment stormed all the German trenches

94 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

up to the Douaumont-Fleury road. Inside the fort the 129th
pushed on, righting from yard to yard of the honeycombed debris.
It took all the western and southern parts, and the north side
up to the northern angle. Engineers were put in to organize the
defence, and machine-gun battalions were brought up to hold the
captured positions. In the first hour over a hundred prisoners
were sent back from the fort. The only hitch was on the right,
where the 74th Regiment found a harder task. Its left had
advanced rapidly ; but its right was hung up by the cross-fire
from the German trenches, where the bombardment had been
less effective. The result was that the Germans were able to
maintain themselves in the north-eastern corner.

All day the fighting in the fort went on. The French by the
evening held two-thirds of the position, and had consolidated their
defence. The counter-attack did not come till darkness had fallen.
About 10 p.m. great masses of German troops assembled east of
Hardaumont Wood, and a furious bombardment was directed on
the French lines west of the fort. An infantry attack followed,
which made a little ground. In the fort itself the new garrison
won some yards during the darkness. From daybreak on the 23rd
there was a steady bombardment, and many infantry attacks on
the position. But the 129th Regiment, though losing heavily,
clung to their gains, and when next morning the whole brigade was
relieved, it had the proud consciousness that it had yielded not
an inch of the ground it had won. On that day, however, two
fresh Bavarian divisions came up in the cover of the ravines in the
Wood of La Vauche and the Bezonvaux glen, and attacked in
front and in flank. It was not Nivelle's plan to continue a costly
struggle beyond the point which in his eyes marked the profitable
limit. The fort was retaken by the Germans, but the French
managed to retain on its east and west flanks some of the trenches
they had won.

Meantime the battle had waxed hotter on its western flank.
On Tuesday, 23rd May, the Germans made a great effort to debouch
from the new positions they had gained at Mort Homme, and to
straighten their front. Under a terrific curtain fire from the French
heavy guns they attempted to push their left wing into Cumieres
between the Meuse and the hill, and to advance their right wing
up the Esnes ravine. Again and again they failed, for they could
not establish themselves close enough to the French to forbid the
latter the use of their high-explosive barrage. But at last, in the
Esnes glen, largely by means of liquid fire, they managed to carry

i9i6] LOSS OF MORT HOMME. 95

the French front trenches. During the night the German left, de-
bouching from the woods of Cumieres and Caurettes, and pushing
along the Meuse bank, managed to gain a footing in Cumieres
village. This, it will be remembered, they had temporarily
achieved before in the great attack of gth April. The place became
a slaughter-house, and the day of Wednesday, 24th May, was one
of the bloodiest since the opening of the battle. By the evening the
enemy had won all Cumieres, and had pushed his infantry along
the railway line almost to Chattancourt station. A French counter-
attack drove him back to Cumieres, and the fighting became
desperate in the thickets and the low ground between the railway
and the river. The French main position was now defined as
Chattancourt-the south slopes of Hill 304-Avocourt. Both
Mort Homme and Hill 304 were lost.

Till the end of the month the struggle continued. On the even-
ing of Friday, the 26th, the French, attacking from the east, got
into the skirts of Cumieres village. On Sunday evening, the 28th,
there was an abortive German attack from the Crows' Wood against
the French trenches on the south slopes of Mort Homme. After
that there came a great bombardment, which lasted through most
of Monday, the 29th — the hundredth day of the battle. At three
in the afternoon of that day German forces attacked all along the
front between Avocourt and the river, in a great attempt to drive
the French from their position on the south slopes of Hill 304 and
Mort Homme. There were now five fresh divisions in action —
two of them being from the general reserve at Cambrai, and two
from the VI. Army — and the enemy's immediate aim was to carry
the salient between Mort Homme and Cumieres. It was the last
great effort on the western side of the river, and it won only the
ground which artillery fire had made untenable. The French first-
line trenches south of the Caurettes Wood were obliterated. There
was also a big attack from Cumieres towards Chattancourt, which
French counter-attacks drove back to its old line. In those days
there was seen what was up to date the heaviest bombardment
of the whole campaign. Both in number of shells and in casualties
in a limited area all records were surpassed. But no result was
obtained. On the last day of May the French position was un-
broken ; they had not even been forced back upon their main
defences ; and the road to Verdun by the left bank of the Meuse
was as firmly held as when, on 2nd March, the guns first opened
from the Wood of Forges.

96 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

III.

The battle was to end as it had begun — on the Heights of the
Meuse. While the struggle had been furious at Mort Homme the
Germans had made certain useful gains on the right bank. On
25th May they had recaptured Haudromont quarry and extended
their hold across the upper part of Thiaumont ravine. On the 27th
they pushed their right wing to the south-west border of that part
of the big Haudromont Wood which was called variously the Wood
of Thiaumont and the Wood of Nawe. On Monday, the 29th, the
heavy guns began near Vaux a " preparation " which warned
Nivelle of what was coming. With mathematical exactness the
German effort had swung from flank to flank, and the failure which
was presently announced on the left bank meant a new effort on
the right. There they were within five miles of Verdun, and the
recapture of Douaumont fort and their possession of the rest of
the Douaumont crest gave them direct observation over all the
intervening ground. From about the same position which they
held on 26th February they were to make, after a hundred days,
their final effort to gain what they had promised themselves to win
in four. One-sixth of the whole artillery of the German army was
assembled there, and the Emperor had ordered that Verdun should
fall by 1 6th June.

The German plan was an advance in front and flank to turn the
inner fortified line which defended the city, and to make the flank-
ing movement possible they must first carry the fort of Vaux.
That fort — obsolete, declassed and dismantled, and now a mere
point d'appui in the field line — had, since Douaumont was lost,
become the key-point of the French defence on the plateau. It
covered the glen of Vaux, and all the eastern approaches to the
great fort of Souville. For twenty-six hours the enemy guns
played on the French lines, and then on 1st June their infantry
carried the remains of the Caillette Wood, won the ground south of
Vaux pond, and fought their way into the Fumin Wood. At the
same time an attack was delivered from Damloup in the east,
a village from which the French were compelled to retire. The
German aim was to make two converging assaults — from the north-
west along the ridge from the Fumin Wood, and from the south-east
up the gully from Damloup.

All the day of Friday, the 2nd, and Saturday, the 3rd, the con-
test continued. Wave after wave of Bavarian infantry surged up
the hillsides, only to be mown down by the French fire. The fort

igi6] FORT VAUX. 97

had long ago been smashed by the heavy guns, for since March the
enemy had directed on it a daily average of 8,000 shells ; but in
the deep cellars the little garrison, under Major Raynal,* continued
their resistance. The place was as bare and open as a target buoy
at sea, and after the 2nd, when the Germans won the Fumin ridge,
there was no direct communication between the defence and the
French lines. This isolation had not been achieved without a
desperate struggle. Scattered sections of trench, which till occu-
pied prevented complete envelopment, were held by detachments
of the 101st Regiment for three days, under torrents of bombs
and a fire of high explosives which observers likened to a tropical
downpour. It was not till 9 p.m. on 5th June that this gallant
remnant retired from a fight which began early on the morning
of 1st June.

By the 2nd, as we have seen, the fort was cut off from news,
for no dispatch-bearer could cross the zone of death. The defence
tried to establish a system of signals, but the troops a mile away
could not see them. A volunteer managed to make his way out,
and, by shifting the position of the signallers at the other end,
established some kind of communication. Another most gallant
man, a stretcher-bearer of the 124th Division called Vanier, worked
patiently among the wounded, dressing their wounds and hiding
them in crevices among the ruins. When there were no more
wounded to tend he went out to fetch water, for thirst was the
supreme torment. Four hundred men had taken refuge in the
fort, and the garrison numbered 150 ; the air was thick with fumes
and dust ; every throat was parched, and every drop of water had
to be brought from a distance through a land churned b}' great shells
into the likeness of a yeasty sea.

For five days Raynal and his men performed the patently
impossible. Presently the enemy won the outer walls ; but the
main building was still defended, and a machine gun in every
cranny made it death for the invaders to enter the courtyard. The
fight was now largely subterranean. The enemy let down baskets
of grenades to a level with the loopholes, and tried to swing them
through the openings so as to explode inside. The limit of human
endurance came on Tuesday, the 6th. Raynal sent his last mes-
sage : " We are near the end. Officers and men have done their
whole duty. Vive la France ! " Vanier, that incomparable
brancardier, managed to escape with a few wounded through a

* He had only returned from sick leave on the night of 20th May. His story of
the defence, Journal du Commandant Raynal : Le Fort de Vaux, 1919, is one of the
best narratives produced by the war.

98 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

grating ; and, after perilous adventures while crawling through the
enemy's ground, most of the party reached the French lines. That
was the last news from the fort. Raynal was removed to Mainz,
and permitted by his captors to retain his sword. He was made
Commander of the Legion of Honour by the French Republic,
and at a special review at the Invalides the insignia of his new
honour were conferred upon his wife.

The capture of Vaux fort saw the beginning of a furious German
assault upon the whole section from Thiaumont eastwards. The
direct objective was Fort Souville, which had now become the main
outwork of Verdun. The French front on 7th June ran from Hill
321, below the C6te du Poivre and the C6te de Froide Terre, through
the fortin of Thiaumont, along the slopes defined by the woods of
Chapitre, Fumin, and Laufee, and then south along the fringes of
the hills east of Eix. Between the C6te de Froide Terre and the
plateau where stood the forts of Souville and Tavannes was a deep-
cut hollow, down which ran the road from Vaux to Verdun. The
village of Fleury lay on the western lip of this ravine. The easiest and
most open approach to Souville was by way of Fleury and the west-
ern ridge, for on the east the woods gave strong defensive positions.

For four days there was a lull. Petain, who knew what was
coming, warned Joffre of the gravity of the case and begged him
to expedite the great attack on the Somme ; but the Commander-
in-Chief replied that at all costs Verdun must be defended. Then
on the night of Sunday, the nth, after a bombardment, the enemy
managed to gain a little ground in the Fumin Wood. Next day
the assault was on the other flank, delivered by a division and a
half of Bavarian and Pomeranian troops. A bit of the French line
on Hill 321 west of Thiaumont was captured, and the enemy was
within 3f miles of Verdun. All through the week Thiaumont and
the adjacent slopes of Hills 321, 316, and 320 were the theatre of
heavy fighting. The great effort came on Friday, 23rd June. At
eight o'clock in the morning nineteen regiments, drawn from seven
different divisions, were flung against a front of three miles. The
French right stood firm, but the left was driven back between Hill
320 and Hill 321, and Thiaumont fort fell. Meantime the German
centre, coming down the ravine from the Wood of Caillettes,
attacked Fleury village, and got into its outskirts ; but a French
counter-attack, admirably timed, drove back the invaders. The
position in the evening was that the German centre stood out in
a wedge towards Fleury, some eight hundred yards in advance of
their general front.

THE BATTLE OF VERDUN-
SECOND STAGE.

g •* y

htvei

I9i61 THE BATTLE EBBS. 99

That evening Nivelle issued an order to his army : " The hour
is decisive. The Germans, hunted down on all sides, are launching
wild and furious attacks on our front, in the hope of reaching the
gates of Verdun before they themselves are assailed by the united
forces of the Allies. You will not let them pass, my comrades.
The country demands this further supreme effort. The army of
Verdun will not allow itself to be intimidated by shelling, or by
the German infantry whom for four months it has beaten back.
The army of Verdun will keep its fame untarnished." His con-
fidence was not misplaced ; but the last week of June saw a mad
crescendo in the German assault. The situation was so grave that
Petain, while ordering resistance at all costs, had made every prep-
aration for evacuating the right bank of the Meuse. On 24th June
the enemy again got into Fleury, and the two sides faced each other
in its streets. Meantime the advance from Hills 320 and 321 on
the Froide Terre ridge was firmly held, and the French made some
small progress towards Thiaumont. On the last day of the month,
about ten in the morning, with a brilliant effort they pushed through
the German barrage, regained Thiaumont fort, and held it against
all counter-attacks.

The rest of the story may be briefly told. During July and
August the Verdun volcano had moments of eruption, but the
storm-centre had moved elsewhere. The Germans at the beginning
of July were still in Fleury, and on the nth of the month their
centre delivered an attack on a 3,000 yards front from Fleury to
the Chapitre Wood with the effectives of six regiments, and gained
a little ground at the Chapelle St. Fine, 1,000 yards north-west of
Souville. On Tuesday, 3rd August, it was the turn of the French
to counter-attack. On the 5th they regained Fleury village,
pushed their left well along Hill 320 to the south-east of Thiaumont,
and increased the number of prisoners captured since 1st August
to 1,750. This meant that the German central wedge was now
flattened in. During August the fighting swayed backwards and
forwards, and on 8th August the Germans were back in small
parts of Thiaumont, and a day or two later again entered Fleury.
From the latter place they were promptly ejected, and from
Thiaumont they were ousted a few days later. The initiative was
now wholly in the hands of Nivelle. Whatever the enemy won
he won at great cost, and he held his gains only so long as the
French cared to permit him.

The recapture of Thiaumont work on the last day of June,

ioo A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

the 130th day of the struggle, may be taken as the logical end of
the Battle of Verdun. The fighting which followed was the back-
wash of the great action, the last desperate efforts of a baffled
enemy who had lost all strategic purpose, and the first forward
movement of the triumphant defence. The battle had served its
purpose. It had grievously depleted the manhood of France, and
the thirty-nine divisions which Foch had destined for the Somme
had shrunk to sixteen. But it had compelled Germany, between 21st
February and 21st August, to use up fifty divisions. It had sucked
in and destroyed the bulk of her free strategic reserves. It had
tided over the months of waiting while France's allies were
completing their preparations. The scene was about to change
from the shattered Verdun uplands to the green hills of Picardy,
and the main battle was on the eve of transference from the Meuse
to the Somme. Even as the weary and dusty fantassins scrambled
over the debris of Thiaumont, a hundred miles to the north-west
on a broad front the infantry of France and Britain were waiting
to cross their parapets.

The citadel by the Meuse had been for Germany a will-o'-the-
wisp to lead her to folly and death. But as the weeks passed it
became for France also a watchword, an oriflamme to which all
eyes could turn, a mystic symbol of her resolution. It was a sacred
place, and its wardenship was the test of her devotion. Mankind
must have its shrines, and that thing for which much blood has been
spilled becomes holy in its eyes. Over Verdun, as over Ypres,
there will brood in history a strange aura, the effluence of the su-
preme sacrifice, the splendid resolution, the unyielding fortitude
of the tens of thousands who died before her gates. Her little hills
are consecrated for ever by the immortal dead.

" Heureux ceux qui sont morts sur un dernier haut lieu
Parmi tout l'appareil des grandes funerailles ;
Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour les cites charnelles,
Car elles sont le corps de la cite de Dieu." *

• Charles Peguy.

CHAPTER LIX.

THE SECOND YEAR OF WAR! A RETROSPECT.
June 28, K)i$-June 28, 1916.

Contrast of Situation at Midsummer 1915 and 1916— The Test of Military Success
—Political Movements in Germany— Murder of Captain Fryatt— Economio
Policy and Position of the Allies— The Neutrals— Summary of Year.

As the narrative approaches the end of the second year of war,
and reaches the second anniversary of those murders at Serajevo
which opened the floodgates, it is desirable to halt again and
review the position. Only in this way can a campaign whose
terrain was three continents and every sea, and whose battle-
fronts were reckoned in thousands of miles, be seen in its full
purpose and its right perspective.

At the end of June 1915 Germany's arms to a superficial observer
seemed to be everywhere crowned with success. It was true that
her original scheme had failed, and that she had been compelled to
revise her views, and adopt a plan for which she had small liking.
But with admirable patience she had performed the revision, and
the new policy had won conspicuous triumphs. She held the
Allies tightly in the West, held them with the minimum of men
by virtue of an artillery machine to which they could not show
an equal, and fortifications of a strength hitherto unknown to
the world. Using her main forces in the East, she had driven
Russia from post to pillar, had won back Galicia, had penetrated
far into Poland, and had already in her grip the great fortresses, the
loss of which meant for Russia not only a crushing loss in guns
but an indefinite further retreat. She held vast tracts of enemy
soil in Belgium and France, and so far these gains had not dimin-
ished. The Central Powers had a unified command, and all their
strength could be applied with little delay and friction to the
purpose of the German General Staff. Nor was the full tale of

the Allied misfortunes yet told. Bulgaria, though the fact was

101

102 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

still secret, was about to enter the Teutonic League, and that
must presently mean the annihilation of Serbia, and German
dominion in the Balkans. Turkey had so far held the Allied
advance in Gallipoli, and was soon to bring it to a melancholy
standstill. There were tragedies waiting to be enacted in Meso-
potamia. What had the Allies to show as against such spectacular
triumphs ? The conquest of one or two outlandish German colonies,
a few miles gained on the Isonzo and in the Alps, the occupation
of the butt-end of a Turkish peninsula, an advance up the Tigris,
where the difficulties loomed greater with every league, a defensive
action in Egypt, and one or two costly failures on the Western
front. To the German observer it seemed a mirage as contrasted
with the solid earth.

The prospect was not more pleasing when viewed with another
eye than the strategist's. In the struggle of military bureaucracies
against democracies, it would seem that the bureaucracies must
win. Fifty years before Abraham Lincoln had said, " It has long
been a grave question whether any government, not too strong
for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its
existence in great emergencies." That question seemed to have
been answered against the democracies. Germany and her allies
looked abroad, and saw Britain still perplexed with old catchwords,
still disinclined to turn a single mind to the realities of war. The
air was full of captious criticism. Her people had willed the end,
no doubt, but they were not wholly inclined to will the means.
Again, while the Teutonic command was single and concentrated,
the Allies were still fumbling and wasting their strength on diver-
gent enterprises. There seemed to be no true General Staff work
done for the Alliance as a whole. Each unit fought its own cam-
paign, and was assisted by its colleagues only when disaster had
overtaken it. Their assets, potentially very great, could not be
made actual. They had more men, but those men could not
be made soldiers in time. They had a great industrial machine,
but that machine would not adapt itself quickly enough to military
needs. They commanded the sea, but their fleets could not destroy
Germany's unless Germany was willing to fight. Their blockade,
while it might annoy, could not seriously cripple the energies of
Central Europe, which in the greater matters was economically
self-sufficing. As for moral, had not a bureaucracy shown that it
could elicit as steely a resolution and as whole-hearted an enthu-
siasm as those Powers which worshipped the fetish called popular
liberty ?

IQI6] THE CHANGED SITUATION. 103

Nevertheless an impartial critic, looking around him in June
1915, might have noted chinks in the Teutonic panoply. So far
the Allied blockade had had no very serious effects ; but might
it not be tightened ? Germany had occupied much land ; but
could she hold it ? She was spending herself lavishly and bran-
dishing her sword far afield in the hope of intimidating her enemies ;
but what if those enemies declined to be intimidated ? Unless
Germany achieved her end quickly, it was possible that the Allies
might set their house in order. They were fighting for their
national existence, and they saw no salvation save in a complete
and unquestionable victory. Was it not possible that, as the
urgency of the need sank into their souls, there might come such
a speeding up and tightening of energies that Germany's offensive
would be changed to a defensive ? For the one hope of Germany
lay in a successful offensive which would break up the Alliance
by putting one or other of its constituent armies out of action.
If this was not done speedily, could it be done at all ?

Let us suppose that a man, wounded at the close of June 1915,
had been shut off from the world for the space of a year. As he
became convalescent he asked for news of the war. Was the
Russian army still in being ? and if so, in what ultimate waste,
far east of Petrograd and Moscow, did it lie ? for in the absence
of Russian equipment the German advance could not have been
stayed short of those famous cities ? To his amazement he was
told that Hindenburg's thrust had first weakened, and then died
away, and that the winter in the East had been stagnant. More,
Russia had had her breathing space, and was now advancing.
All the Bukovina had been recovered, and the Volhynian Triangle,
and Brussilov was well on the road to Lemberg, with three-quarters
of a million Austrians out of action. In the Balkans, Serbia and
Montenegro had been overrun, and Bulgaria had joined the Central
Powers ; but an Allied army — French, British, Serbians, Russians,
and Italians — was holding the Salonika front, and waiting for the
signal to advance. The Gallipoli adventure had failed/ but the
force had been extricated, and was now in France and Egypt and
Mesopotamia. Egypt had laughed at the threat of invasion, and
had easily subdued the minor ferments on her borders. On the
Tigris one British fort had fallen, and a weak division had been
made prisoner ; but it had detained large Turkish forces, and
allowed the Grand Duke Nicholas in Transcaucasia to take Erzerum,
Trebizond, and Erzhingian, and to threaten the central Anatolian
plain. Italy had flung back the invader from the Trentino, and

104 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

was now beginning her revanche. In the West there had been one
great effort to pierce the German front, and after its failure the
Allies had sat down to perfect their equipment and increase their
armies. The convalescent heard with amazement of the tornado
that had swept on Verdun, and of the stand of the thin French
lines. He was told of the desperate assault then being delivered
against Fleury and Thiaumont, but he was told also of the great
Allied armies mustered on the Somme for the counter-stroke.
Above all, he heard of the miraculous work of Britain, of ample
munitions, of seventy divisions in the field, and great reserves behind
them. He heard, too, of a growing unity in strategical and eco-
nomic purpose among the Allies, of attacks conceived and directed
with a single aim. As the manifold of these facts slowly shaped
itself in his consciousness, he realized that he had awakened to
a different world. The Allies had passed from the defensive to
the offensive.

What is the test of military success ? The question has often
been asked, and the popular replies are innumerable ; but the
soldier knows only one answer. The test is the destruction of
the enemy's power of resistance, and that power depends upon
his possession of an adequate field army. Success is not the occu-
pation of territory, or of successive enemy lines, or of famous
enemy fortresses. These things may be means, but they are not
in themselves the end. And if these things are won without the
end being neared, the winner of them has not only not advanced,
he has gone backward, since he has expended great forces for an
idle purpose, and is thereby crippled for future efforts. Early in
1916, when the German press was exulting in the study of the
map of Europe, Hindenburg was said to have described Germany's
military position as " brilliant, but without a future." If the
veteran field-marshal was correctly reported, he showed in the
remark an acumen which observers would not necessarily have
deduced from his exploits in the field.

Strategically, in the strict sense of that word, Germany had
long ago failed. Her original purpose was sound — to destroy one
by one the Allied field armies. Her urgent need was a speedy and
final victory. The Marne and First Ypres deprived her of this
hope, and she never regained it. The Allies took the strategical
offensive, and, by pinning her to her lines and drawing round her
the net of their blockade, compelled her to a defensive war. In
the largest sense the Allied offensive dated from the beginning of
1915. But it was an offensive which did not include the tactical

i9i6] GERMAN MISCALCULATIONS. 105

initiative. So long as the Allies were deficient in equipment
Germany was able to take the tactical offensive. Instances were
the Second Battle of Ypres and the great German advance in
the East — movements which were undertaken largely in the
hope that tactical success might gradually restore the strategic
balance. This hope was doomed to disappointment. Victories,
indeed, were won, brilliant victories, but they led nowhere. By-
and-by came the last attempts, the onslaughts on Verdun and
the Trentino ; and the failure of these prepared the way for the
Allies themselves to take the tactical initiative. Germany was
tactically as well as strategically on her defence. Now the essence
of German tactics was their reliance upon guns. For them artillery
was the primary and infantry the secondary arm. They looked
to win battles at long range, confident in an elaborate machine
to which their opponents could provide no equivalent. The calcu-
lation miscarried ; but at the beginning of the war there was some
ground for their confidence. To improvise an equivalent machine
might reasonably have been considered beyond the power of France
and Russia. But three things combined to frustrate the hope —
the stubborn fight against odds of all the Allies, their command
of the sea which allowed them to import munitions till their own
producing power had developed, and the industrial capacity of
Britain which enabled her to manufacture for the whole Alliance.
Faced with an artillery equipment of equal strength, the German
tactics were ineffective ; and when the day came that the Allies
had a stronger munitionment than their enemy, they were both
futile and perilous. The Battle of Verdun may be taken as the
final proof of their breakdown. They were intrinsically wrong ;
they could only have succeeded if the whirlwind fury of the first
German assault had immediately achieved its object ; and, so soon
as Germany was reduced to a strategical defensive, they became
a signal danger.

The miscalculation of Germany at this stage did not lie only
with the General Staff, but with all the German authorities,
civil, naval, and military, and with the German people. Since
she was clearly on the defence, it would have been well to take
the measures proper to a defensive campaign. She was holding
far-flung lines with too few men, and the path of wisdom was
obviously to shorten them. But in the then state of German
opinion it was impracticable. When the people had been buoyed up
with hope of a triumphant peace and a vast increase of territory,
when the fanatics of Pan-Germanism were publishing details of

106 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

how they intended to use the conquered areas, when the Imperial
Chancellor was lyrically apostrophizing the map, a shortening of
the lines in East and West would have tumbled down the whole
edifice of German confidence. She could not do it ; her political
commitments were too deep ; her earlier vainglory sat like an
Old Man of the Sea on her shoulders. Yet beyond doubt it was
her best chance. Had she, before the Allied offensive began,
drawn in her front to the Vistula and the Meuse, she would have
had an immensely strong line, and adequate numbers wherewith
to hold it. She would have offered the Allies the prospect of an
interminable war, under conditions which they had fondly hoped
they had made impossible. Her one chance was to weaken the
Alliance internally, to weary this or that Power, to lengthen out
the contest to a point where the cost in money and lives would
induce a general nervelessness and satiety. Moreover, by shorten-
ing her lines her food problem would have become far less urgent,
and the deadliness of the blockade would have been lessened. But
she let the moment for the heroic course slip by, and when the
first guns opened in the combined Allied advance that course had
become for ever impossible.

The position at sea in midsummer 1916 had not in substance
changed from that of the preceding year. The waterways of the
world were still denied by the Allies to the enemy, and used by
them for their own military purposes. There had been several
bursts of submarine violence, already chronicled in these pages,
but it is fair to say that the submarine as a serious weapon had
during the year decreased in importance. Its brutality was en-
hanced, but its efficiency had declined. Its moral effect in the way
of shaking the nerves of British merchant seamen was nil. The
result of the year's experience had been to induce a high degree of
popular confidence in the measures taken to meet the under-water
danger — a confidence not wholly justified, and, as we shall see,
soon to be rudely shaken. One great incident had broken the
monotony of the maritime vigil. The German High Sea Fleet
had been brought to action, and in the battle of 31st May off the
Jutland coast had been driven back to harbour. But that great
sea-fight did not change the situation ; it only confirmed it. " Be-
fore Jutland, as after it," in Mr. Balfour's words, " the German
fleet was imprisoned ; the battle was an attempt to break the bars
and burst the confining gates ; it failed, and with its failure the
High Sea Fleet sank again into impotence."

The British navy, viewing the position while they swept the

rgi6] GERMAN HOME POLITICS. 107

North Sea and the bells rang in Berlin and Hamburg to celebrate
Scheer's return, were convinced that they would see the enemy
again. They had reason for a view which facts were nevertheless
to refute. The Battle of Jutland was fought because politics
demanded that the German fleet should do something to justify
its existence in the eyes of the German people. That demand
must be repeated. As the skies darkened over Germany it seemed
certain that Scheer would make further efforts, and the nearer
came the day of final defeat the more desperate those efforts would
be. For the navy of a Power is like a politician who changes
sides : it counts two on a division. If the Power is conquered,
its fleet will be the spoil of the conqueror. Far better that the
German battleships should go to the bottom, with a number of
British ships to keep them company, than that they should be
doled out ignobly to increase the strength of the Allied victors.

While Germany's military and naval situation had a certain
clearness, it was far otherwise with her domestic affairs. If differ-
ences of opinion were rumoured within her General Staff, there
were open and flagrant antagonisms among her civilian statesmen.
Two main streams of opinion had long been apparent. One was
that held by the Emperor, by the Imperial Chancellor, and by
the bulk of the civilian ministers. They believed — with occasional
lapses into optimism — that the contest must end in a stalemate,
and they were willing to abate their first arrogance and play for
safety. Above all, they were anxious to avoid any conflict with
the more powerful neutrals, for they knew that only by neutral
help could Germany set her shattered house in order. They still
talked boldly about victory, but these utterances were partly a
concession to popular taste, and partly a desire to put their case
high in order to enhance the value of future concessions. These
people were the politiques, and they were not agreed on the details
of their policy, some looking towards a rapprochement with France
or Britain, others seeing in Russia a prospective ally. But they
differed from their opponents in being willing to bargain and con-
cede, and in allowing prudential considerations to temper the old
German pride.

Arrayed against them were the fanatics of Pan-Germanism of
the Reventlow-Tirpitz school, who still clung to the belief in a
complete victory, and were prepared to defy the whole round earth.
To this school Prince Biilow had by a curious metamorphosis
become attached. Neck or nothing was their maxim. They were
advocates of every extreme of barbarism in method, and refused

ro8 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Junb

to contemplate any result of the war except one in which Germany
should dictate to beaten foes. They had a considerable following,
including the bulk of the naval and military staffs, and they
used the name of Hindenburg as their rallying-cry, because he
loomed big in the popular imagination as the strong, imperturbable
soldier.

We can trace the strife of these two schools through German
speeches and writings till the late spring of 1916. And then some-
thing happened which convinced both that their forecasts were
wrong — which took from the politique* their hope of bargaining,
and from the fanatics their certainty of triumph. Suddenly, with
one of those queer illuminations which happen now and then to
the most self-satisfied, the masters of Germany realized that their
case was growing desperate. They saw that the Allied command
was now in the way to be unified, and that the Allied efforts were
about to be quadrupled. They saw that the Allies would accept
no terms but unconditional surrender. And they saw, moreover,
that the contest could not end with the war, for their enemies were
preparing a conjoint economic policy which would ensure that their
gains in battle should not be lost in peace. They saw at the same
time that their military position was losing its brilliance, and had
even less future than when Hindenburg coined his epigram. The
alternative now was not between a complete victory and an hon-
ourable draw, but between victory and annihilation — Weltmacht
oder Niedergang.

This sudden realization induced a new temper. The people
had been deluded, but there must some day be a stern awakening.
Let that awakening come from the enemy, was the decision of
the German High Command. The nation must learn that their
foes would not stop short of their utter destruction, the ruin not
only of Germany's imperial dream, but of that laborious industrial
and economic system which brought grist to the humblest mill.
The boldest course was the safest. Concessions to humanity
brought no reward, so let rigour rule unchecked. It was only on
the grim resolution of the whole nation that they could count for
the life-and-death struggle before them, and the nation must be
brought to this desperate temper by the proof that their leaders
possessed it. The following of the politiques shrank in number,
and the voice of discretion was hushed. Germany proceeded
accordingly to burn her boats.

The first evidence of this calculated insanity was the murder
of Captain Fryatt. Early in June 1916 the Great Eastern steamer

igib] MURDER OF CAPTAIN FRYATT. 109

Brussels, plying between Harwich and Holland, was captured in
the North Sea by a German torpedo boat and taken to Zeebrugge.
Captain Fryatt was imprisoned at Bruges, and brought to trial
as z.franc-tireur, on the ground that in an encounter with a German
submarine on March 28, 1915, he had defended himself by trying
to ram his enemy, and had compelled her to dive. He was con-
demned to death on Thursday, 27th July, and shot that evening.
The German press, instructed for the purpose, broke into a chorus
of approval. " The necessity," wrote the Cologne Gazette, " of
protecting honourable and chivalrous combatants against perfidious
and murderous attacks compels the military command to visit all
illegal attacks with the strongest punishment. The captain who
beneath a harmless mask flashes a dagger on an unsuspecting person
is a bandit." The incident roused in the people of Britain a cold
fury similar to that which followed the murder of Miss Cavell.
The Prime Minister in the House of Commons gave renewed warn-
ing that it would be the first business of the Allies, when the proper
season arrived, to punish such crimes ; that the criminals would
be brought to justice, whatever their station ; and that the man
who authorized the system which permitted such deeds might well
be held the most guilty of all. About the same time the German
military authorities in north-eastern France organized a general
shifting of sections of the population. In the neighbourhoods of
Lille, Roubaix, and Tourcoing, women, young and old, were moved
wholesale to other districts, where they were compelled to work at
the dictation of their masters. The transference and the coercion
which followed were attended with much revolting inhumanity.

Germany in both cases put forth in defence of her conduct a
number of contradictory pleas. Captain Fryatt had not been
defending himself, she said ; he had been attacking. In any case
resistance on the part of a civilian was a violation of the laws of
war. The French deportations were justified on the ground of
the force majeure of necessity. They were a deliberate breach of
Germany's own undertakings at the Hague, but she argued that
she must do the best for herself in a life-and-death struggle. The
legal arguments on the first case need not delay us ; there were
none on the second. It is an old rule of war among civilized
peoples that a merchant vessel may lawfully defend herself against
an enemy attempt at her capture or destruction. This rule became
more reasonable than ever when German submarines were scouting
the seas with instructions to torpedo British merchantmen at sight.
It had been laid down by Lord Stowell and Chief Justice Marshall ;

no A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

it had been embodied in the naval codes of most countries ; it had
been approved by the chief German jurists ; it had even appeared
in the German Naval Prize Regulations, which were in effect at
the time when Captain Fryatt was alleged to have tried to ram
the submarine. Germany, it is true, had shown herself restless
under that doctrine before the war, and had made various attempts
to have it set aside ; and since August 1914 she had simply disre-
garded it, as she had disregarded all other bonds which checked her
freedom. The captain of a trawler who tried to ram a submarine
which was endeavouring to sink him, the householder who fired
a rifle at a Zeppelin which was engaged in destroying his town-
ship, the peasant who carried a pistol to protect his family from
the last outrage, were all alike, under this curious creed, bandits
and murderers.

It is idle to discuss the question on legal grounds, for Germany
had none which serious men could consider. But, if we neglect
the sphere of legality, there would still seem to remain certain
fetters to unbridled license imposed by elementary human decency.
Even these Germany now spurned, as she had spurned them before
in the horrors of her first invasion of France and Belgium. Had
the affair not been so tragic, there would have been comedy in
the unplumbed childishness of a Power which still worshipped the
leaden idols, the creation of her own vanity, when the earth was
cracking beneath her feet. If the German leaders desired to impress
upon the nation the implacableness of their foes, then they assuredly
succeeded. In France and Britain the desire to wage the war d
outrance was blown to a white heat of resolution. It found expres-
sion in the words of the Allied statesmen, and it was soon to find
a more deadly expression in the deeds of the Allied armies.

At the end of June the economic situation of the Central Powers
was becoming serious. The immediate food stringency was the
least part of it. That stringency was already great, and till the
harvest could be reaped in August it would continue to increase.
A Director of Food Supplies was appointed ; but no rationing and
no ingenious manipulation of stocks could add to an aggregate
which was too small for the comfort of the people. The British
blockade had been greatly tightened, and every day saw its effect-
iveness growing. In June the unfortunate Declaration of London
had been totally and finally abandoned. However good the German
harvest, it could not make up all the deficit, and its results would
cease early in 1917 ; nor could it supply the animal fats, the lubri-
cating oils, and the many foreign necessaries which the British

1916] GERMAN'S COMMERCIAL OUTLOOK. in

navy had forbidden. As for finance, further loans might be raised
on the security of the Jutland " victory," though such loans were
at the mercy of some sudden popular understanding of the true
position. But the darkest part of the picture was the situation
which must face Germany after war, assuming that a crushing
victory was beyond her. Her great commercial expansion had
been largely due to the system of favourable treaties which under
Capri vi and Biilow she had negotiated with foreign countries.
Even before the war it was clear that the signatory nations would
seek to recover their freedom, and a tariff struggle was in prospect
at the end of 1916 when the treaties were liable to denunciation.
Now not only was there no hope of their renewal on good terms,
but there was the likelihood that all the Allies after the war would
unite in boycotting Germany and developing commercial relations
between themselves. At a Conference held in Paris in the middle of
June 1916 it was agreed that in the reconstruction period the enemy
Powers should be denied " most-favoured-nation " treatment, that
enemy subjects should be prevented from engaging in vital indus-
tries in Allied countries, and that provision should be made for
the conservation and exchange of the Allied natural resources. It
was further resolved to render the Allied countries independent
of the enemy countries in raw materials and essential manufactured
articles. Unless Germany won the power to dictate treaties to her
foes, as she had dictated to France in 1871, it looked as if the self-
sufficiency of which she had boasted would be all that was left
to her.

How nervous was Germany's temper on this subject was shown
by the popular joy which greeted the voyage of a German sub-
marine to America, and its safe return. On 9th July the U boat
Deutschland arrived at Baltimore from Bremen with 280 tons of
cargo, mostly dye-stuffs, and an autograph letter from the Emperor.
She had sailed under a commercial flag, and, being held by the
American authorities to be technically a merchantman, was allowed
to leave, and returned safely to Germany. It was a bold perform-
ance, and no one grudged the crew and captain their meed of
honour ; but the voyage involved no naval difficulty, its com-
mercial results were infinitesimal, and the popular joy in Germany
was based upon the erroneous idea that a means had been found
of meeting the British blockade. She hoped that she had re-estab-
lished trading relations with the chief neutral Power. It was a
vain whimsy ; there was nothing which the British navy more
desired than that a hundred Deutschlands would attempt to repeat

ii2 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

the enterprise. A submarine or two in the vast expanse of the
Atlantic might escape detection, but a submarine service would
be gently and steadily drawn into their net.

The one hope for Germany — and it was slender at the best —
was that dissension would creep into the Allied councils. She
could not look to draw any one of her foes to her side, but she
might weaken their affection for each other, and so lessen their
united striking power. She used her press and her connections
in neutral countries to play the part of the sower of tares in the
Allies' vineyard. France was praised for her gallant exploits, and
was advised not to count on the alliance of perfidious Britain.
It was hinted that the Channel ports would never be restored to
her ; that Normandy had once been joined to England, and that
history might repeat itself. What, it was asked, had become of
the British during the long Verdun struggle ? The overgrown
improvised armies of Britain were simply mobs, too untrained to
influence the war. The legend of Britain's commercial ambitions
was zealously preached. Russia was warned that after the war
she would soon pray to be delivered from her friends. This game
was destined to fail for two reasons. It was most blunderingly
played, for German diplomacy was a clumsy thing, and her back-
stairs efforts were betrayed by the tramping of her heavy feet.
Again she underrated the depth and gravity of the Allied purpose,
which was faced with far too desperate an issue to have time for
pettishness and vanity. There was rivalry, indeed, between the
Allies, but it was an emulation in gallantry and sacrifice.

When we turn to the position of Germany's opponents, we find
by midsummer 1916 that in every respect the year had shown a
change for the better. Britain had enormously increased her
levies, and had provided the machinery for utilizing her total
man-power. France, though she had suffered a terrible drain at
Verdun, had all her armies in being, and, with the assistance of
Britain, who had taken over a large part of the front, would be
able to supply the necessary drafts for a considerable time. Russia
had trained huge numbers of her new recruits, and was stronger
in men than before her great retreat began. In munitionment the
change was amazing. France was amply provided for, Russia had
at least four times greater a supply than she had ever known,
and Britain, though still far from the high-water mark of her
effort, had performed the miraculous. In a speech in the House
of Commons, Mr. Montagu, who had succeeded Mr. Lloyd George

igi6] THE BRITISH MUNITIONS OUTPUT. 113

as Minister of Munitions, drew a contrast between the situation
in June 1915 and June 1916. The report of the work of the depart-
ment read like a fairy tale. In shells the output, which in 1914-15
it took twelve months to produce, could now be supplied from home
sources in the following times : field-gun ammunition, 3 weeks ;
field-howitzer ammunition, 2 weeks ; medium shells, 11 days ;
heavy shells, 4 days. Britain was now manufacturing and issuing
to the Western front weekly as much as the whole pre-war stock
of land-service ammunition in the country. In heavy guns the
output in the year had increased sixfold, and would soon be doubled.
The weekly production of machine guns had increased fourteen-
fold, and of rifles threefold — wholly from home sources. In small-
arm ammunition the output was three times as great, and large
reserve stocks were being accumulated. The production of high
explosives was 66 times what it had been in the beginning of 19 15,
and the supply of bombs for trench warfare had been multiplied
by 33- These figures were for British use alone, but we were also
making colossal contributions to the common stock. One-third of
the total British manufactures of shell steel went to France, and
20 per cent, of our production of machine tools we sent to our
Allies. Such a record was a triumph for the British workman,
who in his long hours in dingy factories was doing as vital service
to his country as his brothers in the trenches of France and Salonika,
on the sands of Mesopotamia and Egypt, or on the restless waters
of the North Sea.

The economic heart of the Alliance was Britain, and on her
financial stability depended its powers of endurance till victory.
We have seen in earlier chapters how complex was her problem.
All the Allies had to make vast purchases abroad, and these had
to be supported by British credit. The foreign exporter had to
be paid for his goods in the currency which he would accept, and
Britain had to find large quantities of gold or marketable securities
for her daily purchases. So far as internal finance was concerned,
her position was sound. In a speech in the House of Commons
on 10th August, the Chancellor of the Exchequer calculated that
by March 31, 1917, if the war lasted so long, our total indebted-
ness would almost equal the national income, " a burden by no
means intolerable to contemplate," and that our national indebted-
ness would be less than one-sixth of the total national wealth.
But the question of foreign payments — something between one and
two millions a day — remained an anxious one, and was yet far
from a settlement. In some respects the situation had improved.

114 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

Owing to the policy of restriction of imports, and owing also to a
remarkable increase in British exports — n£ millions higher for
July 1916 than for the same month in the previous year — our
adverse trade balance was being reduced. In July 1916, for
example, it was 22^ millions as against 31^ millions for July 1915.
But ahead of our statesmen loomed the old difficulty : we were
paying for American imports for ourselves and our Allies mainly
out of " dollar securities " — those American bonds which British
owners had lent or sold to the Treasury. At the present rate we
should have exhausted this form of currency before midsummer
1917, and we might then be faced with a real crisis. It was urged
with great reason that it would be well to adopt at once some
drastic method of reducing unnecessary imports, and so lessening
foreign payments, if we did not wish to find our military effort
crippled at the moment when it should have been gathering power
for the coup de grace.

Economy in this respect could only be effected by the Allies
jointly, since British credit had to cover all purchases ; and it was
now made possible by the unification which we have seen in progress
in the Allied staff work. The pooling of resources was in theory
complete. Frequent conferences, economic, political, and strategic,
seemed to give assurance that every atom of strength would be
directed to a single end. The whole Allied force now held one
great battle-front — from Riga to the Bukovina ; then, after a
gap, from the Gulf of Orfano to west of the Vardar ; then from
the Isonzo to the Stelvio Pass ; and, lastly, from Belfort to the
North Sea. The Russians were the right wing, the Salonika army
the right centre, the Italians the centre, the French the left centre,
and the British the left wing. The military Conference in Paris
in May 1916 had for the first time prepared for the whole front
one common strategic plan. The Central Powers, who had won
what they had won by their superior unity, seemed to be now
confronted with an Alliance no longer loose and divergent, but
disciplined and directed. This sense of energy better guided in-
duced in all the Allied peoples a new confidence and peace of mind.
France, keyed to a high pitch by her marvellous deeds at Verdun,
was in no mind to criticize her colleagues, and still less to find
fault with her leaders. In Britain the mist of suspicion grew
thinner between the Government and the people. Critics forsook
their quest for a man of destiny, and were content to help fallible
statesmen to make the best of things. In Russia the popular
temper was fired by the great sweep of Brussilov and his armies.

igi6] THE EUROPEAN NEUTRALS. 115

though the first sun of success seemed to be about to wake into
activity the host of parasites which preyed upon her, and which
had been driven to hibernate during the chill winter of the long
retreat. It was the dawn of the Allied offensive, which, if con-
ducted with resolution, seemed to make victory mathematically
certain during the coming year. But these calculations were based
on the hypothesis that the world would remain substantially as it
was in 1914, and that no new factor would enter into the problem.
A freak of fortune might still give the enemy a fresh lease of life,
and alter the whole character of the war.

The position of neutrals had in certain respects changed materi-
ally during the past year. Bulgaria had entered the war on the
side of the Central Powers. The British blockade had revolu-
tionized the oversea commerce of those Powers which still stood
aloof from the contest. No neutral save Portugal had joined the
Alliance ; but, so far as could be judged, no other neutral was
likely to join the enemy. Rumania was still waiting with a single
eye to her own territorial interests, but every mile that Brussilov
advanced in the north increased the chances of her intervention
on the Allied side. Greece had attempted to play the same game,
but in each move had shown a singular folly. Bulgaria's invasion
of her territory had roused a national feeling which the Court and
Army chiefs, blinded by the spell of Germany, could neither under-
stand nor in the long run control. M. Venizelos, the leader of
Greek nationalism, bided his time, and watched, with shame and
melancholy, as did all well-wishers of Hellas, the huckstering
policy of the Athens Government. The Grceculus esuriens was
not dead. Still, as of old, he tended to be too clever, and, from
his absorption in petty cunning, to wreck the greater matters
of his own self-interest. Spain remained aloof from the struggle,
her hierarchy and the bulk of her upper classes leaning in sympathy
towards Germany, and the mass of her people favouring the Allies.
Holland and the Scandinavian states preserved a strict neutrality,
and, as the German star grew dimmer, Sweden found less to admire
in her trans-Baltic neighbour. On these states, who were in close
proximity to Germany, the restrictions of the British blockade
bore very hard. On the whole they faced the difficulties with
good temper and good sense, and their collaboration in the " ration-
ing " system was of inestimable advantage to the Allies. Switzer-
land had, perhaps, the hardest fate of all. The war had greatly
impoverished her, and the two widely different strains in her popu-
lation kept her sympathies divided between the belligerents. To

n6 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

her eternal honour she played a diligent and kindly part in facili-
tating the exchange of prisoners on both sides, and in giving hospi-
tality in her mountain health resorts to the badly wounded. The
country which had originated the Red Cross service was faithful
to her high tradition in the works of mercy.

The attitude of the United States had not altered since we last
reviewed it. Her triumph over Germany on the submarine ques-
tion— real in principle but trivial in results — gave to Mr. Wilson's
Government a stock of credit in foreign policy which carried them
through the summer. America's interest was presently absorbed
by her coming Presidential election, when Mr. Wilson was to be
opposed from the Republican side by Mr. Hughes, assisted by
Mr. Roosevelt and the Progressives. This meant that foreign
affairs would be considered mainly from the electioneering stand-
point. Neither side wished to alienate the German electors, both
sides wished to appear as the champions of American interests,
and at the same time Mr. Wilson, whose trump card was that he
had kept America out of the war, was unwilling to embroil himself
with either the Central Powers or the Allies. The British blockade
had made some kind of " Black List " necessary, in order to
penalize neutral firms that were found trading with the enemy.
This step naturally roused great discontent in America ; much
strong language was used, and the President was given drastic
powers of retaliation. But, till the elections were over, relations
with the United States had a certain unreality. Her statesmen
were bound to speak and act with one eye on the facts and the
other on the hustings.

The year had not brought to light any new great figure in
politics or war. " This is a war of small men," Herr Zimmermann
had observed early in the struggle, and the phrase was true in the
main of all the belligerents. Mackensen was probably the best
fighting general in the highest command that Germany possessed,
and in Falkenhayn and Ludendorff she had two conspicuously able
staff officers. Hindenburg was coming to be generally recognized
as one of those favourites of fortune who acquire popular repute
beyond their deserts. He was a grim and impressive figure, and
he could strike a hammer-blow, but in professional skill he ranked
below more than one of his colleagues. On the Allied side one
reputation had been greatly enhanced. Alexeiev, the Russian
Chief of Staff, had shown in the retreat a military genius which
it was hard to overpraise. No less remarkable was his judgment

igi6] THE LEADERS. 117

during the long winter stagnation, and his power to seize the
psychological moment when the hour for the offensive struck.
Of the other Russian generals, Yudenitch in Transcaucasia and
Brussilov in Galicia had increased their fame. In the West a new
fighting man had revealed himself in Petain, whose discretion was
as great as his resolution and fiery energy.

In civil statesmanship the French Premier, M. Briand, had
shown qualities which made him an admirable leader of his nation
in such a crisis. His assiduity and passion, his power of concilia-
tion, his personal magnetism, and his great gift of speech enabled
him to interpret France to the world and to herself. In Britain
the death of Lord Kitchener had removed the supreme popular
figure of the war — the man who played for the British Empire the
part of Joffre among the French people. He was succeeded at
the War Office by Mr. Lloyd George, the only British statesman
who possessed anything like the same power of impressing the
popular imagination. The year had brought one notable discovery.
Lord Robert Cecil, the Minister of Blockade, had perhaps the most
difficult department in the Government, and in it he revealed much
of the patience and coolness, the soundness of judgment, and the
capacity for the larger view which had characterized his father.
He now ranked among the foremost of those ministers whose repu-
tation was not measured by parliamentary dialectic or adroitness
in party management, but by administrative efficiency and the
essentials of statesmanship.

But at this stage to look only at prominent figures was to
misread the picture. It was a war of peoples, and the peoples
were everywhere greater than their leaders. The battles were
largely soldiers' battles, and the civilian effort depended mainly
upon the individual work of ordinary folk whose names were
unknown to the press. Everywhere in Britain, France, and
Italy there was a vast amount of honest efficiency, and on this
hung the fortunes of the Allies. Many of the ablest business and
professional men were now enlisted in the service of the State. It
was the work of the middle-class German in production and admin-
istration, far more than that of Falkenhayn or Helfferich, that
kept Germany going, and it was the labour of the same classes
among the Allies that enabled them in time to excel the German
machine.

CHAPTER LX.

AFFAIRS IN THE NEAR AND MIDDLE EAST

April i%-Augnst 25, 1916.

Capture of Erzhingian — Condition of Persia — Baratov joins Hands with British on
the Tigris — Germany and Islam — Revolt of the Grand Sherif of Mecca — The
Action at Romani — The Policy of Greece; — Surrender of Fort Rupel — Partial
Allied Blockade — The Bulgarian Armies attack.

During the summer of 1916 the Near and Middle East had lost
the position which they had held for a little as the centre of interest
in the world-war. While the tides of battle were flowing strongly
in Poland and Galicia, in the Trentino and on the Somme, the
Transcaucasian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian theatres — nay, even
the Balkan area— tended to be forgotten. But if they lacked the
strategic importance which they held a year before, they were
none the less the scene of much desperate and intricate fighting.
For Turkey remained the incalculable and unknown quantity in
the strife of the two alliances. Her position dominated alike the
Balkan and South Russian battle-grounds, and in her direction
Germany looked mainly for those rewards which she was deter-
mined at all costs to extract from the struggle.

Constantinople during the summer again changed its character.
Its people seemed to have lost heart in their manifold sufferings,
and whereas in the spring it would have been dangerous for German
troops to parade in its streets, by July only German and Austrian
soldiers were visible, since the Turkish infantry had gone east and
west to the firing line. The Christian troops of the Ottoman
Empire, whom the authorities distrusted, were busy fortifying the
European side of the Bosphorus, and erecting defences at Angori
and Konieh. The city was congested with thousands of starving
refugees. Business was everywhere at a standstill, and the steps
taken by the Turkish Government to regulate commerce were

us

1916] CAPTURE OF ERZHINGIAN. 119

probably the most perverse and whimsical economic measures ever
adopted by a modern state. Towards the end of July the strain
was slightly eased by the arrival of the new harvest from central
Anatolia, as well as by the receipt of food supplies from Rumania.
But in the provinces things were no better. In Syria especially
starvation stalked at large through the land. Germany filled the
place with her engineers and surveyors, and strained every nerve
to complete the gaps in the Bagdad line ; she made some slight
efforts, in her own interest, to fight the cholera which was appear-
ing among the Turkish troops ; but for the rest she plundered the
country wholesale, and had no eye for anything but her military
purpose. Her emissary, well fed and well doctored, made his
camp everywhere from the Marmora to Jerusalem, and worked
at his railways and reservoirs ; while the wretched country-folk,
dully resentful of an invasion which they did not comprehend,
were dying in thousands at his gates.

The fall of Trebizond on the 18th of April left the way open
for the advance of the Grand Duke Nicholas through the last
ramparts of that mountain land which defended the cornlands
of Sivas. The position of Yudenitch was precarious. His wings
were thrown out well ahead of his centre. His right was beyond
Trebizond ; his left, having occupied Mush and Bitlis, was moving
on Diarbekr ; while his centre was still fighting its way through
the narrow hill glens towards Baiburt and Erzhingian. At this
moment the new strength of the Turks had not yet been tried on
their opponents. Trebizond had fallen to the efforts of an isolated
wing, and it was certain that the troops brought from Gallipoli
and those released by the British failure at Kut would make a
desperate effort to hold up the Russian advance along the central
highroads which led to the Anatolian granary.

By the end of May the Russian front was close on Baiburt,
on the Trebizond road, and had occupied Mamakhatun, half-way
between Erzerum and Erzhingian. On the last day of the month
a strong Turkish offensive developed in the Baiburt region and on
the Erzhingian road, with the result that in the latter area the
Russians were forced to evacuate Mamakhatun after destroying
the bridge. For a month there was a lull in the fighting, and then
on 1 2th July Yudenitch's centre again advanced, and recaptured
Mamakhatun, taking nearly two thousand prisoners. Three days
later his right centre took the important town of Baiburt, and his
left wing drove the enemy from his position south-west of Mush.
Yudenitch pressed on, and by the morning of the 25th was within

120 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

ten miles of Erzhingian itself. That evening the Russian cavalry
occupied the fortress— the most important gain in this theatre
since the fall of Trebizond. The ancient Armenian town was the
headquarters of the 4th Turkish Corps, and had been the advanced
base of the enemy in the campaign since the loss of Erzerum. It
was on the edge of the hill country, and was therefore the last out-
post of the Turkish defence in front of the central Anatolian valleys.

The enemy replied with a vigorous diversion against the Russian
left wing. It began in the early days of August, a fortnight after
the fall of Erzhingian, at a time when Yudenitch's main forces
were on his centre, and his left wing from Lake Van to Mush and
Bitlis was lightly held. From his base at Diarbekr the enemy
thrust northward against Mush and Bitlis, took the towns, and
forced the Russians some thirty miles back to a point not quite
fifty miles from Erzerum itself. The danger of the attack was
that Erzhingian was a hundred miles distant, separated by wild
mountains with few communications, and there was a risk that,
before reserves could be brought up to the threatened flank, the
enemy might win his way to the east of Erzerum, cut the Russian
front in two, and drive the halves apart towards the Black Sea
and Lake Van. At the same time the extreme Turkish right,
comprising the 4th Division, supported by troops from Mush,
struck east of Lake Van in the direction of Rayat. The Russian
reply came on 18th August, being directed from south of Lake
Urmiah against Rayat, and from west of Lake Van against Mush
and Bitlis. It reached its head on the 25th, when, near Rayat,
the 4th Turkish Division was utterly dispersed. Bitlis had already
been taken, and that same evening Mush was recaptured. The
danger to Erzerum had now gone, the Russian front was recon-
stituted, and Yudenitch resumed his slow movement westward
between the Black Sea and the Tigris watershed.

Meantime in western Persia a curious campaign had been going
on during the summer months. In December 1915 a Russian force
under General Baratov had entered the country from the north,
and had driven the mixed levies of Turks, gendarmerie, and Persian
insurgents west through the passes which bordered Mesopotamia.
During the early months of 1916 this force, scarcely more than an
infantry division in strength, supported by cavalry, had a series
of considerable successes. Hamadan was theirs in January, and
when Turkish supports arrived from Bagdad and concentrated in
the Kermanshah region, Baratov smote them heavily, and drove
them back through the mountain passes. For three months the

I9i6] BARATOV'S COSSACKS. 121

bold enterprise prospered well. The Persian loyalists raised their
heads, and the rebels lost adherents daily. Sir Percy Sykes arrived
at Bundar Abbas in March, and proceeded to organize a military
police for southern Persia, to rid the country of German and
Turkish bands and the rebel gendarmerie. On 12th March Baratov
occupied Karind, fifty miles west of Kermanshah, and some sixty-
four miles from the Turkish frontier at Khanikin. By 6th May he
was thirty miles nearer Khanikin. By 15th May he reached the
frontier, and was less than 120 miles from Bagdad ; while 160 miles
farther north another force, which may be regarded as an extension
of Yudenitch's left wing, captured Rowanduz, some eighty miles
east of Mosul. Unfortunately, this speed could not be maintained.
Baratov's southern force had long and precarious communications
behind it, and was out of touch with the main army of the Grand
Duke Nicholas. Even at Kermanshah it was a full 250 miles from
its base at Kasvin. Its bold sally towards the Tigris valley came
too late to turn the tide at Kut, and it all but led to its own undoing.
For early in June Turkey sent reinforcements to the Persian border,
and Baratov was steadily driven back. His retreat was as gallant
and skilful as his advance. He fell back from Khanikin, and then
from Kermanshah, then across the passes, and finally from Hamadan
itself. The fires of revolt once more flamed up throughout Persia,
wavering tribesmen went over to the rebel side, and the position
of the Shah and his ministers and the various British officers grew
daily more difficult. Russia had flown, after her generous fashion,
to the relief of her ally, and was paying the price of her devotion
to the common cause.

But before the dark days fell a bold adventure brought a breath
of romance into the tale. A sotnia of Baratov's Cossacks succeeded
in joining hands with the British on the Tigris. The incident had
little military significance, but it was an exploit requiring supreme
audacity and skill. On the night of 8th May the squadron, con-
sisting of five officers and no troopers, left Mahidasht, twenty
miles west by south of Kermanshah. They rode south through
the wild Pusht-i-Kuh hills, crossing passes some of them 8,000 feet
high, where the snow still lay deep. They started with three days'
rations, and when these were finished depended on local supplies.
So swift was their ride that they met with no opposition except
stray shots at long range. The distance to be covered was 180
miles, and they travelled at the rate of twenty-four miles a day,
halting for two and a half days at the court of the Wali of Pusht-i-
Kuh. After nightfall on 18th May they reached the British camp

122 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

at Ali Gharbi, on the Tigris, and were warmly welcomed by our
men. The tough horsemen, though their last stage had been
thirty miles long, spent the evening with song and dance, and
declined to go to bed till the small hours.

The day after the arrival of the Cossacks Gorringe's force made
an important advance. On 19th May the Turks evacuated their
position at Beit Eissa, on the right bank of the river, a little in
rear of the Sanna-i-yat line, on the left bank. Following up the
enemy, Gorringe carried the Dujailah redoubt, the key of the Es
Sinn position, which Aylmer had assailed in vain on 8th March.
Next day the whole of the southern bank of the Tigris was cleared
as far as the Shatt-el-Hai, and from the south we were facing Kut,
though the other bank was still held by the Turks as far as Sanna-i-
yat. The advance, had it been possible a month before, would
have led to Townshend's relief, but now it had no fruitful conse-
quences. Our troops were weary, and suffered much from a
temperature which was never less than 100 degrees in the shade.
Moreover, the floods were out, and would continue well into July.
The summer campaign in Mesopotamia resolved itself into a dull
and arduous watching of the enemy. But if military operations in
the strict sense were thus suspended, a vast deal of work was done
by Sir Percy Lake in preparing for the next cold-weather campaign.
Two new railways were under construction, the shallows of the
river were dredged, and at Basra wharves were completed where
ocean-going steamers could unload. Embankments were built to
protect the main camping-grounds at the advanced base against
floods. Huts were erected on a large scale, and hospital accommo-
dation was enormously increased. In January 1916 there had
been only 4,700 beds, in May there were over 9,000, and in July
nearly 16,000. In August Sir Percy Lake relinquished the chief
command in Mesopotamia to Lieutenant-General F. S. Maude.

II.

The beaver-like activity of German engineers on the Bagdad
and Syrian railways, and the accumulation of stores at various
points from Alexandretta to Beersheba, presaged still another effort
against Egypt and the Suez Canal. The Committee, and still more
its German masters, had never lost the hope of striking at Britain
in that vital part, and their ardour grew as the chances of success
diminished. The stagnation in Mesopotamia and at Salonika in
the early summer enabled certain reserves to be freed for the enter-

i9i6] THE ARAB REVOLT. 123

prise, and Germany supervised the preparation of material. For
the crossing of the canal and for water transport reliance was no
longer to be placed on floats of kerosene tins. Great tanks and
pontoons were brought from Germany by the Bagdad railway,
and carted over the gap in the line through the Amanus mountains.
The British commander in Egypt was fully alive to this activity
and its meaning, and waited with confidence on the issue. The
period of waiting was beguiled by a brilliant exploit of our air-
planes against the big Turkish aerodrome five miles south of El
Arish. On 19th June eleven machines crossed the hundred miles
of desert, and bombed the ten hangars. Two were set on fire and
wholly destroyed, four others were hit repeatedly, and at least five
enemy airplanes were put out of action. Besides the aerodrome,
enemy camps and troops were attacked with bombs and machine-
gun fire. Preparation was steadily going on for that advance
beyond the desert which was the true defensive policy for Egypt.

Meantime an event had occurred of profound significance for
the future of the Moslem world. Arabia had never been truly
conquered by the Turks. It had remained the stronghold of the
aristocracy of the faith, and had at the best only tolerated the
Turkish guardianship of the Holy Places, since Turkey was the
chief Mahommedan state, and had still the prestige of the conquer-
ing days of Islam. But many movements, inspired by a desire to
return to the old ways, had risen like dust storms amid the sands
of the desert. More than a century ago the Wahabis had driven
the Turks from the Holy Places, from all Arabia, and even from
Kerbela, the Mesopotamian city which holds the tomb of Hussein,
and is the object of pilgrimage to pious Shiahs. In 1872 the Turks
attempted the conquest of Yemen, but failed, and in those parts
the writ of the Sultan never ran. Since 1907 the province of Asir,
under Said Idrissi, had been in revolt. In 1913 the great Wahabi
chieftain, Ibn Saud, drove the Turks out of El Hasa, the province
of eastern Arabia which borders on the Persian Gulf. The Arab
had never wholly bowed to the Osmanli, and once the Osmanli
fell under the spell of the unbeliever it was certain that the con-
servative theologians of the peninsula would assert themselves.
They could not endure to see the shrines of their creed in the hands
of men who daily by word and deed flouted the mysteries of
Islam.

On the outbreak of war the Aga Khan issued a message to
Indian Moslems in which he pointed out that, since Turkey had
shown herself to be no more than a tool in German hands, she

124 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

had lost her position as trustee of Islam. " The Kaiser's Resi-
dent will be the real ruler of Turkey, and will control the Holy
Cities." The wiser brains in Constantinople had long before the
war foreseen trouble with Arabia, and Abdul Hamid, who was no
fool, had built the Hedjaz railway that he might be able to pour
troops southward to meet the first threatenings of revolt. But
the new masters were less alert. They contented themselves
with vapourings about a jehad, while they continued to outrage
every Islamic sanctity, and in Syria and Arabia grossly mal-
treated the Arab population. As against such anarchy the grim
chiefs of southern Arabia looked with friendly eyes towards the
Allies. If there could be degrees of merit among unbelievers, the
latter were clearly the better friends of the faithful. Both Britain
and France ruled over millions of contented Moslems, and safe-
guarded them in the practice of their religion. In November 1914
the Government of India had announced that the Holy Places
of Arabia, including the Holy Shrines of Mesopotamia and the
port of Jeddah, would be immune from attack or molestation from
the British naval and military forces so long as there was no inter-
ference with pilgrims from India to the shrines in question ; and
at Britain's request the Governments of France and Russia gave
similar assurances.

The Grand Sherif of Mecca was a powerful — perhaps the most
powerful — prince of western and central Arabia. He was the real
ruler of Mecca, and, along with his able sons the Emirs Feisul
and Abdullah, exercised a unique authority due to his temporal
possessions and his religious prestige as sprung from the blood of
the Koreish. On 9th June, supported by the Arab tribes of the
neighbourhood, he proclaimed Arab independence of Turkey, and
took prompt steps to make good his challenge. He occupied
Mecca and — with the help of the British navy — the port of Jeddah,
as well as the town of Taif to the south-east ; captured the Turkish
garrisons, taking in Jeddah alone 45 officers, 1,400 men, and six
guns ; and laid siege to Medina. He cut and destroyed parts of
the Hedjaz railway, to prevent reinforcements coming from the
north. The revolt spread fast. The Emir Nuri Shalan, who had
already refused to support Djemal, joined the Grand Sherif, and
presently the Said Idrissi of Asir took up arms, and captured the
Red Sea port of Kunfidah, 150 miles south of Mecca. The policy
of the Arab leaders was to refrain from shedding Moslem blood,
and to invest the Turkish garrisons till they surrendered. On
27th July Yambo, the port of Medina, fell ; and in Medina itself

igi6] THE GRAND SHERIF OF MECCA. 125

the Turkish troops were closely besieged, while the fires of revolt
spread northward among the Arabs all the way to Damascus.

Constantinople could not sit still under a blow which threatened
the little religious prestige that remained to her. Troops were
hurried south, and part of the forces destined for the invasion of
Egypt were diverted to the new theatre of war. The Grand Sherif
had no easy task before him, for he had to fight a modern army with
levies whose equipment and discipline belonged to another age.
But his action had pricked the bubble of Pan-Islamism which
Germany had sought to use for her own ends. In August he issued
a striking Proclamation to the Moslem world to explain his action.
He and the princes of his race, he said, had acknowledged the
Turkish Government because they desired to strengthen the House
of Islam and preserve the rule of the House of Osman. But the
Committee of Union and Progress had ground down the true
believer, had forgotten the precepts of the Koran, had insulted
the Khalifate, and had despised the Corner-stone of the Faith. It
was open to all men to see that the rulers of Turkey were Enver
Pasha, Djemal Pasha, and Talaat Bey, who were doing whatsoever
they pleased. In such a state of things he could not leave the life
and religion of his own Arab people to be the plaything of the godless.
" God has shown us the way to victory, and has cut off the hand
of the oppressors, and cast out their garrison from our midst. We
have attained independence from the rest of the Ottoman Empire,
which is still groaning under the tyranny of the enemy. Our in-
dependence is complete and absolute, and will not be affected by
any foreign influence or aggression. Our aim is the preservation of
Islam and the uplifting of its standard in the world. We fortify
ourselves in our noble religion, which is our only guide. In the
principles of the administration of justice we are ready to accept
all things in harmony with the Faith, and all that leads to the
Mountain of Islam, and particularly to uplift, so far as we have the
strength, the mind and spirit of all classes of the people. This we
have done according to the dictation of our creed, and we trust that
our brethren in all parts of the world will each do the duty that
is incumbent upon them, that the brotherhood of Islam may be
confirmed."

The Hedjaz revolt delayed but did not prevent the attack upon
Egypt. This came in the first week of August, and was promptly
scattered to the winds. Sir Archibald Murray had all his prepara-
tions made, and, as was expected, the enemy advanced and fol-
lowed the old northern route which had been taken before the Katia

126 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug,

engagement in April. He knew that we had thinned our forces
in Egypt and had sent several divisions to the West, and he hoped
to find the desert front weakly held. He was mistaken, for since
April the Katia front had been strongly entrenched, admirable
communications had been established, and we had advanced our
flanking posts in every adjacent oasis. The Turkish force, which
included many German officers, was under the command of the
German general Kress von Kressenstein, and numbered some
18,000 men. It was elaborately equipped with many light moun-
tain batteries, and a great supply of water-tanks carried on camels.
It hoped, apparently, by timing its attack for the hottest season
of the Egyptian summer, to get the benefit of surprise.

On the evening of Thursday, 3rd August, the British force —
the 52nd Division of Territorials from the Scottish Lowlands,
under Major-General the Hon. H. A. Lawrence — was drawn up on
a line some seven miles long from Romani, twenty-three miles
east of the Canal, to the Mediterranean. Its left flank was pro-
tected by British monitors in the Bay of Tinah, and on the right lay
General Chauvel's Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division.
About midnight on the 3rd the Turks delivered their attack, and
the fighting lasted through the whole of the 4th. The Lowland
infantry stood firm, while the cavalry on the right slowly withdrew,
entangling the enemy in a maze of sand-dunes. By the afternoon
reinforcements had come up — the Warwickshire and Gloucester
Yeomanry, and a brigade of Lancashire Territorials from the 42nd
Division. About five o'clock our whole front advanced to the
counter-attack, and before the dusk fell the enemy line was hope-
lessly broken. The defeat was soon changed to a rout. From day-
light on the 5th our cavalry were harassing the Turkish retreat,
and sweeping up prisoners and guns. On a wide front, with mounted
troops on their flanks, our infantry pressed on through weather
that in the daytime was ioo° in the shade. By Monday, the 7th,
the fleeing enemy was nineteen miles east of the battlefield. On
the 9th he attempted a stand, but was driven on by our cavalry.
Then, and not till then, we called a halt, and counted our spoils.
We had taken some 4,000 prisoners, including 50 officers, and the
wounded and dead we estimated at at least 5,000, so that half the
total force of the invaders had been accounted for. The action
was one of the most successful and conclusive in the campaign.
The fighting quality of the Anzac troopers and the British Terri-
torials was worthy of their great Gallipoli record, and there could
be no higher praise.

1916] THE POSITION OF GREECE. 127

III.

But it was in the Balkan peninsula, and especially in connection
with Greece, that, outside the main battle-grounds, lay the chief pre-
occupation of the Allies. In the modern world the state, like the
individual, cannot live to itself alone. Nationalism in any robust
sense implies internationalism, and a hermit people, pursuing with
complete absorption a domestic purpose, is an anachronism des-
tined to a speedy disappearance. With the greater and more
solidly founded nations this interconnection of interests may lead
to a richer civic life, since only in co-operation and international
fraternity is to be found security for legitimate national develop-
ment. But the smaller states may find in it their undoing. Un-
able to rank as honourable rivals, they are apt to attach themselves
as suitors to some nation or group of nations, and to play in inter-
state policy the part rather of courtiers than of statesmen. The
position is inevitable, and it leads to a certain pettiness of inter-
national outlook. They do not hope to sway the councils of the
world by wealth or armed strength, so they seek their advantage
by adroitness and diplomacy. Absorbed in their local ambitions,
they cannot take the wider view of the future of a continent, and,
being compelled to play by petty methods, they become petty in
their conception even of their own interests. The trees are always
before their eyes, but the wood escapes their vision.

Greece shared to the full in this drawback of all little peoples,
and she had other disadvantages due to her past history and her racial
character. That she was in a true sense a nation no man could
doubt. Her long bondage to Constantinople, her heroic struggle
for freedom, her laborious rectification of her borders, her victories
in the Balkan Wars, had given her nationhood. But it was
a nationhood somewhat narrow and unintelligent in its outlook
on affairs beyond its frontiers. She had no very clear ambitions.
Turkey was the secular enemy, Bulgaria an ancient rival. The
Balkan Wars had given her territorial enlargement towards the
north somewhat beyond her deserts, and in Europe her only un-
realized aim concerned the boundaries of Epirus and the chameleon-
like fortunes of Albania. She aspired to rule all the islands of the
^Egean, and her wiser citizens, remembering ancient Hellas, looked
forward to a great domination of the Anatolian coast which should
revive the glories of classic Ionia. But nowhere was there any
clearly defined objective, such as Bulgaria and Serbia possessed,
and in default of a clear aim Greece was doomed to a policy of

128 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

waiting, in the hope of snatching some casual advantage from the
European conflagration.

To an impartial observer it seemed that there were two estab-
lished facts which must dominate the Greek outlook. One was
Turkey, who was the eternal foe. At Turkey's expense alone could
Greece enlarge her boundaries in the one direction where enlarge-
ment was possible. The second was that Greece was a maritime
nation, trading throughout the whole eastern Mediterranean, and
her obvious alliance was, therefore, with the great Sea Powers.
It would be suicidal if she ever joined a national group which
included Turkey, and arrayed herself against the British navy.
Moreover, the German dream of Eastern empire was in direct
conflict not only with her legitimate aspirations, but with her
continued national independence. These truths were perceived
by the abler minds among Greek statesmen ; they were perceived
most clearly by M. Venizelos ; but they were scarcely present to
the nation at large, owing partly to an imperfect education in
foreign politics, and partly to the fact that they were negative things,
and had not the appeal of a direct territorial objective.

Hence there was no widespread popular conviction to counter-
act the fatal tendency to trim and hesitate which was the Greek
tradition in foreign affairs, and had become a second nature to
the common politician. The Court at Athens had strong German
affinities ; the Greek army, like most other armies, was under the
spell of Prussian methods ; and its Staff was avowedly dubious as to
the Allies' chances of victory. Let it be said that the Allies had
given Greece small reason for confidence in their military wisdom.
The attack on Gallipoli had justified most of the Greek objections
to their policy. Mesopotamia had not increased their reputation,
and their efforts in the Balkans had failed to avert Serbia's destruc-
tion. Not unnaturally, with the fate of Belgium, Serbia, and
Montenegro before her eyes, Greece hesitated to league herself in
the field with Powers who had so far proved themselves broken
reeds for the little nations to lean on.

In such circumstances the inclination — supported by the whole
tradition of past policy — was to wait till the success of one side
in the struggle was beyond question. The attitude was not heroic,
but it is hard to condemn it as unreasonable. Moreover, it must
be remembered that to a considerable section of the Greek people
the larger ideals for which the Allies fought had small attraction.
The country was an incomplete democracy. The Court had more
sympathy with the Prussian doctrine than with the liberalism of

1916] FORT RUPEL SURRENDERED. 129

France and Britain. Russia in occupation of Constantinople was
a bugbear even to many Greeks who otherwise would have been
ranged on the Allied side. The Western Powers were apt to as-
sume that their own views of the European situation must appeal
overwhelmingly to any land that possessed some kind of popular
government. They forgot the difference that local atmosphere
may make in the colouring of facts. Germany was not slow to
take advantage of the uncertain elements in the Greek polity.
Her agents worked unceasingly to present the Allied case as the
effort of Powers, militarily inferior, to cloak a self-seeking purpose
with dishonest rhetoric.

The charge against the Government of Greece was not that they
followed a prudential course and waited, for the world is not en-
titled to demand quixotry from any people. It was that, when
Greece's own territorial rights were infringed, they still wavered, and
that they blanketed popular opinion and violated the free constitu-
tion of the country. An appeal to the people in the summer of 1915
had restored Venizelos to power. Early in October his proposal to
carry out Greece's obligations to Serbia under her treaty of alliance
was vetoed by the King, and he was compelled to retire from office.
Thereafter constitutional government disappeared from the pen-
insula. Irregular elections were held, from which the Venizelists
abstained, and for eight months the land was governed by a
camarilla who had no popular sanction, and were clearly unrepre-
sentative of the Hellenic people. Greek policy was, therefore,
during this period the policy not of the nation, but of a bureaucracy
who were legally usurpers. Worse still, the King and his advisers
were prepared to sacrifice a portion of Greek soil if they were only
left in peace. The Bulgarian occupation of Fort Rupel on May 26,
1916, was not the result of superior armed forces, but of connivance
on the part of the Athens Government. Timidity had in this case
brought statesmen into naked treason. There was no parallel
between such an occupation and the permission to Sarrail's army
to hold the Salonika zone. The latter had the assent of the Greek
people through their constitutional mouthpiece, and it was accorded
to the Powers who had won and guaranteed Greece's freedom.*
The former was a gift of territory to an avowed enemy, who had

* Art. 5 of Protocol No. i of the Treaty of 1830 provided that " no troops be-
longing to one of the contracting Powers shall be allowed to enter the territory of the
new Greek state without the consent of the two other Courts who signed the treaty."
This clause implied that the Protecting Powers were entitled to send troops to Greece
provided they were in agreement with each other and had Greece's assent.

T30 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

always claimed the land, and would not willingly depart from
what she had once occupied.

For this new aberration of Greek policy the King was mainly
responsible. King Constantine had deserved well of his country,
and had hitherto enjoyed considerable popular prestige. But he was
too slight a character for the rough times in which his lot was cast.
Well-meaning and amiable, he had a mind incapable of grasping
a new and complex situation, but tenacious of the small dogmatic
stock-in-trade with which the lesser type of monarch is provided.
He hankered after the absolutist air of Prussia, salubrious to
minor royalties, and he dreaded the vast and incalculable forces
which he felt around him. He believed firmly — it was the sum
of his convictions — that Germany would win. Fear was at the
root of his attitude, fear of the unknown, fear of the known in the
shape of Germany, fear of a false step which might cost him his
throne, fear of everything and everybody. And like many another
weak soul before him, he was as obstinate as he was timid. His
policy became a kind of fanatical impassivity.

The surrender of the forts roused in Greece a storm of popular
protest. The Venizelist journals appeared with black borders,
and among the Greeks in Salonika there were impassioned demon-
strations. It was announced that the Athens Government had
protested formally to Berlin and Sofia, but the Allied Powers were
not misled by this device. They deemed it necessary to take
strong precautionary measures, for their position at Salonika was
impossible with a treacherous Government in their rear, and on
their flank mobilized Greek forces who might any hour receive
orders hostile to the Allied plan. On 8th June the British Foreign
Office announced that from 7 a.m. on 6th June certain restrictive
orders had been put in force regarding the export of coal to Greece
and Greek shipping in British ports with the object of preventing
supplies reaching the enemy. The result was virtually a pacific
blockade,* similar to that which had been proclaimed during the
Salonika dispute in the previous November.

The Allies' action gave Athens food for reflection. Greece was
at the mercy of the Powers which held the sea, and the British and
French warships at the Pirseus were cogent arguments. On 9th

* A pacific blockade is one of the forms of persuasion known to international
law which do not imply an absolute warlike rupture. " They are supposed to be
used," says Hall, " when an injury has been done . . . for which a State cannot
get redress by purely amicable means, and which is scarcely of sufficient magnitude
tc be the motive of immediate war." Greek ports had already been pacifically
blockaded by the Great Powers in 1827, 1886, and 1897.

I9i6] THE ALLIED ULTIMATUM. 131

June M. Skouloudis announced in the Chamber a partial demobiliza-
tion of the army. Twelve classes would be disbanded, and the rest
given leave, the object being to prove to the Allies that the Greek
Government were without aggressive designs. But there were
elements in the bureaucracy which had no thought of concessions.
On Monday, 12th June, the secret police organized a military fete
in Athens, after which bands of hooligans paraded the streets and
insulted the Allied Embassies with complete impunity. There-
upon the Allied Governments presented their ultimatum. Greece
in regard to them was not in the position of an ordinary neutral.
France, Britain, and Russia were the Protecting Powers of the
State, according to the Treaties of 1863 on which Hellenic liberties
were founded, and had the right to insist as trustees that these
liberties were not infringed, and that their ward was not plotting
mischief. They were in the strictest sense the guarantors of the
Hellenic commonweal ; and the King, though they had chosen to
make the throne hereditary, was their agent, put there to " give
effect to the wishes of the Greek nation." If he chose to neglect
his task, it was the duty as well as the right of the trustee Powers
to call him sharply to order. The Allied Note, after reciting the
offences of the Greek Government, demanded an immediate and
real demobilization of the Greek army ; the installation of a new
ministry which should give guarantees for benevolent neutrality ;
the dissolution of the Chamber, followed by new elections ; and
the dismissal of certain police officials.

On 21st June it was announced that the Premier, M. Skouloudis,
would retire, and that his place would be filled by M. Zaimis, a
friend of the Allies, who had succeeded M. Venizelos on October 4,
1915. That day, on behalf of the King, the new Prime Minister
accepted the Allied demands, and set about forming that " business
Cabinet devoid of any political prejudice " for which the Note had
stipulated. So far the situation seemed easier, but it was a false
peace. Baron Schenk and the other German agents were as busy
as ever, and among the disbanded soldiers the Royalists formed
Reservists' Leagues, which were openly anti-popular and anti-
Ally. The one hope lay in the promised appeal to the people,
for it was certain that fresh elections after demobilization would
restore M. Venizelos to power. But events were soon to happen
which made an appeal to the electorate impossible.

The military situation at Salonika during June and the first
half of July showed little change from that of the early summer.
The Bulgarian raid of May had given them the forts of Rupel and

i32 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June-Aug.

Dragotin, the keys of the Struma valley. During May the Austro-
German troops were for the most part withdrawn from the Salonika
front, being urgently needed elsewhere. The centre army was,
indeed, still known as the XI. German Army under General von
Winckler, but it contained at the most one German division. The
right wing was held by the Bulgarian I. Army under Gueshov,
and the left wing by the Bulgarian II. Army under Todorov.
These three parts of the enemy force corresponded to the three
natural divisions of the front. The zone west of the Vardar,
where lay the road to Monastir, was mainly mountainous ; that
between the Vardar and the Struma, a plain criss-crossed by low
hills till the Belashitza range was reached north of Lake Doiran ;
the eastern zone was mountainous in the north, and guarded from
the sea by coastal ranges. The Allied battle-front was held on
the right by the main British contingent, under General Milne ;
the centre by the French and the British left wing ; and the western
zone, the hundred miles between the Vardar and Albania, by the
Serbian army, which had now taken its position in the line. The
dispositions were wise, for they gave Monastir as the objective to
the men of the Crown Prince Alexander, who at the end of July
assumed the command, and so brought them at once within view
of the frontiers of their native land. On the extreme left an
Italian force, based on Avlona, was preparing to strike through
Albania as a covering detachment on the flank, and an Italian con-
tingent was also present with the Serbians. The whole composite
Allied army was still numerically smaller than the Bulgarian and
German forces opposed to them, and the latter had every advan-
tage of position.

As we have seen in an earlier chapter, to advance from Salonika
was no easy task. A certain gain of ground could be achieved at
once, and as a matter of fact was achieved during the summer,
when the Allied centre pushed north to a line a little south of
Doiran station. The enemy had not drawn in close to the Salonika
defences, but had kept his front on a wide semicircle commanding
the entrance to the difficult part of the Vardar valley. The Vardar
and Struma routes were alike almost impracticable as avenues to
the heart of Bulgaria. Only on the west was there any reasonable
objective, and Monastir could not be taken without hard and dif-
ficult campaigning. Its importance lay not in its strategic so
much as its political value. It lay in an isolated pocket among
mountains, and gave no ready access to the central Serbian terrain.
But its possession had been one of Bulgaria's chief objects in enter-

1916] THE BULGARIAN ADVANCE. 133

ing the war, and its loss would undoubtedly so exasperate the
Bulgarian people that they might well prove refractory to Germany's
orders. The true meaning, however, of the Allied activity was to
be found in connection with the Rumanian situation. The Gov-
ernment of Bucharest was now committed to the Allied cause ;
and in order to protect Rumania's mobilization against Austria,
it was necessary to make certain that Bulgaria did not strike first
upon her flank. The object of the Allies was, therefore, to hold
as large a Bulgarian force as possible on the line between Ostrovo
and the Gulf of Orphani. Their principal purpose would be achieved
if they detained the bulk of the Bulgarian army, even though their
advance were inconsiderable.

Sarrail, who was now in command of the whole Allied forces
in the Balkans, was perplexed with contradictory orders. On
15th July he was told to occupy the attention of the Bulgarians at
once ; then he was bidden wait until three days after the signature
of the agreement with Rumania. On the morning of 10th August
the French heavy guns began a bombardment of the town of
Doiran, thirty-five miles west-north-west of Salonika, close to the
junction of the Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian frontiers. Next
day the French troops occupied Doiran station, on the Salonika-
Seres railway, and a height south of the town. Doldjeli, south-
west of Doiran, was presently carried. And then, on 15th August,
the situation was completely changed, for the enemy himself took
the offensive. The movement had no direct connection with the
Rumanian crisis. It was sanctioned by Falkenhayn to enable
the Bulgarian left wing to push forward to the same latitude as
that of the right, and so shorten the line. The demobilization
of the Greek army made the plan practicable.

On 17th August the Bulgarians struck in three sectors, and their
main effort was very properly on their flanks. They did not con-
template a frontal attack on Salonika, but they believed that they
could count on an easy advance in the two flanking wedges of
Greek territory, defended nominally by Greek troops, the more
especially as the occupation of Fort Rupel had given them the key
of the lower Struma and Kavala. On the east Todorov flung patrols
across the Mesta east of Kavala, and pushed south and west
towards the left bank of the Struma. In the centre Winckler
attacked the French and British at Doldjeli, but failed to advance.
In the west Gueshov occupied Fiorina, a little town in Greek
territory seventeen miles south of Monastir which was held by
Serbian outposts, and advanced upon Banitza, west of the Ostrovo

134 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

lake. During the next few days the centre stood fast around
Doiran; and the Serbians in the west, retiring slowly towards
Ostrovo, held the enemy in check, and inflicted considerable losses.
But east of the Struma Todorov moved swiftly towards Kavala,
and on the 19th was within seven miles of the town. French and
British detachments were east of the Struma as far as the railway
south of Demir Hissar, but the Kavala area was held only by
Greek troops, who were without instructions. Bulgaria saw her
way to an easy triumph, much needed for domestic comfort, at
the expense of her southern neighbour and with the connivance
of that neighbour's king.

Presently Todorov was on a line two miles east of the Struma,
between Lakes Tahinos and Butkova, while the Allies held the
main bridges. Banitza was now in Bulgarian hands, but the line
west of Lake Ostrovo was stoutly maintained, and farther north
in the Moglena mountains the Crown Prince Alexander made good
progress towards the Cerna valley. Meanwhile, on the east,
Todorov was advancing on Seres and was at the gates of Kavala.
On 25th August the Bulgarians occupied the forts of the latter
town, and were shelled by British warships. The occupation was
a breach of a direct promise given to Greece by Germany at the
opening of hostilities.

These events complicated beyond hope the already sufficiently
complex position in Greek politics. Eastern Macedonia was largely
in Bulgaria's hands, and the question of the fate of the Greek
troops there — more than two divisions — was fraught with extraor-
dinary difficulty. The Greek people were beginning to stir. A
fort or two might be overlooked, but now they had lost a province,
and lost it without striking a blow. The Athens Government in
their perplexity hastened to conciliate the Allies. Dousmanis, the
Chief of Staff, was dismissed, and his place taken by General Moscho-
poulos, the commander of the 3rd Corps at Salonika, and a friend of
France and Britain. But the problem could not be solved by the
sacrifice of a staff officer. The general election, on which alone a
true settlement depended, could not take place when a large district
was occupied by the enemy, and the position of the Greek troops
in the occupied territory must lead to a split in the army itself.
It looked as if the Greek situation was approaching the point when
relief could only be won by some act of revolution.

At this moment, when the whole Balkan front was astir, and the
Greek Government were fixed on the horns of a dilemma. Rumania
entered the war on the Allied side.

CHAPTER LXI.

RUMANIA ENTERS THE WAR.

August 4, 1914-September 1, 1916.

Early History of Rumania — Centres of Teutonic Influence — King Carol — Bra-
tianu's Tactics — The Rumanian Army — The Cabinet decides for War — The
King's Message — Germany's Calculations — Hindenburg and Ludendorff suc-
ceed Falkenhayn.

During two years of war Rumania, under great difficulties and
amid manifold temptations, had steered a course of strict neutrality.
To the resolution come to at the Crown Council of August 4, 1914,
she had scrupulously adhered. The first Russian successes in
Galicia had appeared to sway her towards the Allies ; but the Rus-
sian retreat in the summer of 1915 corrected the balance. Italy's
entrance into the war shook her ; and the alliance of Bulgaria with
Germany and the Serbian debacle for a moment seemed about to
force her to draw the sword, whether she willed it or not. War is
a maelstrom into which the most resolute neutral may be drawn,
and during the early summer of 1916 it became apparent to the
world that both external and internal pressure would soon force
the court of Bucharest to cast in its lot with one or other of the
belligerent sides. Brussilov's resounding successes in the north
brought the moment of decision very nigh.

Rumania was only indirectly a Balkan state, and her situation,
half Latin half Slav, as an outpost of the West at the gateway of
the East, gave the little country at this crisis of the war a profound
significance. The territory inhabited mainly by the Rumanian
people, if constituted into a national state, would have formed
a square block based upon the lower Danube, and embracing
the actual Rumania, the Austrian district of Bukovina, the Hun-
garian province of Transylvania, and the Russian province of
Bessarabia. It was the ancient Dacia, conquered by Trajan, and
lost to Rome early in the Barbarian invasions. But so strong had
been the impress of that mighty Power that the tradition of Rome

136

136 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR.

continued ; the Rumanians had in their veins, along with a large
Slav admixture, the blood of the old Roman colonists, and their
speech was still in its essentials a Romance tongue. Rumania,
as the world knew it, consisted of two provinces widely different in
character, into which projected from the west the wedge of Tran-
sylvania. The eastern, Moldavia, watered by the streams of the
Pruth and Sereth, was a region of black steppe earth, highly fertile,
which made it one of the granaries of Europe. The western,
Wallachia, lay between the southern Carpathians and the Danube ;
the northern part being a broad upland sloping from the hills, and
the southern the alluvial plain of the river. Both provinces were
rich in agricultural, pastoral, and mineral wealth.

The mediaeval history of Wallachia and Moldavia was the tale
of border states between the Turk, the Hungarian, and the Slav —
a tangled tale of savage and incessant war. In 1241 the principate
of Wallachia was founded by the first feudal army which crossed
the Carpathians. Then came the Turkish conquest, and the land
became part of the Turkish Empire ; but the province was ruled,
after the Turkish fashion, with a measure of autonomy by local
chiefs. Now and then patriots arose, such as Stephen the Great
and Michael the Brave, who raised fleeting standards of independ-
ence, and were on the verge of founding a Rumanian nation. In
a country so situated it was inevitable that the system should be
aristocratic. The government was in the hands of the great land-
owners, the boyars, who were partly of native and partly of Phan-
ariot — that is, Byzantine Greek — origin, and the peasants tilled
the soil as serfs. These boyars elected the princes, who ruled the
provinces as feudatories of Turkey, and held their office on a seven
years' tenure. Till 1821 the hospodars, or princes, were mainly
Phanariots, but after that date came a succession of native rulers
and a new consciousness of nationality.

The modern history of Rumania began with the war of 1828-9
and the Treaty of Adrianople, when the provinces passed under the
suzerainty of Russia, and the hospcdars, being now elected for life,
began to change from the chiefs of a nationality to something of the
status of kings. The country shared in the European democratic
movement of 1848, when a revolution broke out under C. A. Rosetti
and the two Bratianus — a revolution which was quickly suppressed,
and led to the re-establishment of the power of the boyars. Dur-
ing the Crimean War Russia occupied Rumania, but evacuated it
after the successful resistance of the Turks on the Danube, and it
was held by Austria under an agreement with France and Britain

PRINCE CAROL. 137

The Treaty of Paris in 1856 re-established the Turkish suzerainty,
but granted a form of autonomy to the two provinces under elected
princes chosen for life. A strong movement began for national
union, and in 1859 Colonel Cuza was elected prince of both Moldavia
and Wallachia— the first ruler of a united Rumania. Turkey
accepted the situation, on condition that Prince Cuza had a separate
ministry and administration for each province. In 1861 he estab-
lished a common ministry and an assembly of representatives at
Bucharest ; and in the following year the union of the principalities
was sanctioned by the Sultan, and modern Rumania came into
being.

Prince Cuza was a vigorous ruler, who introduced democratic
reforms by the methods of despotism, but. had little skill in handling
the machinery of politics and party government. The people
at large were on his side, but the ruling classes, who formed the
Liberal and Conservative parties, would have none of him. The
Conservatives objected to his new land law, which abolished serf-
dom, and to his introduction of universal suffrage ; and the Lib-
erals, whatever they thought of his measures, disapproved of the
means by which he enforced them. The national finances fell
into confusion, and a revolution, supported by the army, drove him
to abdicate in 1866. The Rumanians, looking round for a suc-
cessor, applied first to Count Philip of Flanders, the brother of
Leopold, King of the Belgians. On his refusal, the principality
was offered, mainly on the advice of Napoleon III., to a prince of
the Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns, Charles of Hohenzollern-
Sigmaringen, whose sister was the wife of Philip of Flanders and
the mother of King Albert of Belgium. Charles accepted, and
was installed at Bucharest on May 22, 1866, recognized by Turkey,
and adopted by a specially summoned Constitutional Assembly.
The same Assembly drew up a constitution which, with a few
emendations introduced later, was that of modern Rumania.

Prince Carol — to adopt the Rumanian version of his name —
proved a wise and efficient ruler. He introduced order into the
finances, developed the railway system and the Danube ports,
and started his country, hitherto very backward, on a new era
of prosperity. Not unnaturally, he leaned heavily on Germany,
and it was German capital and German advisers that he used in
his reforms, while he took Bismarck as his mentor in external
politics. Following the advice of that far-seeing statesman, he
kept on good terms with Russia, since through Russia alone could
come the realization of his dream of true independence. Meantime

138 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR.

he set to work to give the country a modern army. The old prov-
inces had never had more than a rude kind of militia, and Prince
Carol found the existing forces badly armed and disciplined. Him-
self an ex-officer of the Prussian Guard, he introduced the Prussian
system of organization, increased the numbers, and drew upon
Krupp for a new artillery. With an efficient army at his back he
waited on his chance to use it.

The chance came with the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. On
24th April of that year he signed a military convention with Russia,
granting, with the connivance of Austria, free passage to the Rus-
sian army through Rumania, which thus became the advanced
base for the invasion of Turkey. A month later, on 22nd May,
he declared his independence of the Porte. After the first Russian
failure at Plevna, he crossed the Danube with 30,000 men, and
greatly distinguished himself on the northern front. In the grand
assault on Plevna, on nth September, the Rumanians carried No.
1 Grivitsa Redoubt, the only one of the Turkish works which was
stormed and permanently held. For such service Rumania looked
for an adequate reward, but the results were below her expectations
and her deserts. The Congress of Berlin did, indeed, recognize
her complete independence, but with territorial changes which
deprived the gift of most of its charm. That part of Bessarabia
which Russia had ceded to Moldavia under the Treaty of Paris
was restored to the Russian Empire, though it had a large Rumanian
population. As compensation, Rumania received the bulk of the
Turkish province of the Dobrudja, whose treeless steppes and
riverine swamps seemed a poor exchange for the rich Bessarabian
plains.

The result was an abiding grudge against Russia, her old ally
in the field. In 188 1 Prince Carol was proclaimed king, and, in
spite of the secular grievance of Transylvania, the country began
to tend towards a rapprochement with Austria-Hungary. The
common people were vehemently anti-Hungarian, and among the
politicians the extreme Right was Russophil and the extreme Left
Francophil ; but the bulk of the aristocracy and the middle classes
were in favour of the policy of the King. In 1883 a meeting took
place with Bismarck and the Austrian Count Kalnoky, and a secret
agreement was concluded, under which the Rumanian army in
certain contingencies was to be at Austria's disposal. Rumania
had become a real, if publicly unacknowledged, member of the
Triple Alliance. Under the aegis of the King, the Austro-German
influence spread and ramified during the succeeding thirty years.

RUMANIA'S GRIEVANCES. 139

To understand Rumania's position on the outbreak of the European
War, it is necessary to remember her territorial ambitions, her
economic interests, and the state of her internal politics. These
three elements conditioned the problem which faced her statesmen
and the diplomatists of Europe from August 1914 to the beginning
of August 1916.

The difficulty of all the small countries of south-eastern Europe,
as we have already seen, was that their territorial did not correspond
to their racial boundaries. The Turkish wars had dislocated the
natural frontiers of races, and each state saw numbers of her own
" nationals " under an alien and frequently oppressive rule. The
" unredeemed " areas of Rumania were Transylvania and Bes-
sarabia, notably the former. Under the Dual Monarchy, in the
Bukovina, in the Banat of Temesvar, and above all in Transylvania,
lived some four millions of Rumanian blood. Transylvania had
been handed over to Hungary by Francis Joseph in 1867, and though
the Government of Budapest the following year bound themselves
to respect the rights, language, and religion of their Rumanian
subjects, Hungarian nationalism speedily made the pact a dead
letter. The Rumanian schools were Magyarized, the language
proscribed, and the elections gerrymandered. On a basis of popu-
lation the Rumanians should have had sixty-nine representatives
in the Hungarian Parliament ; they never had more than four-
teen, and in 1910 were reduced to five. The Rumanians of Tran-
sylvania, penalized and discontented, appealed naturally to their
kinsfolk across the mountains, and the appeal did not fall on heed-
less ears. A new state is sensitively conscious of its racial affilia-
tions, and the case of the Rumanians in Transylvania and the
Vlachs in Macedonia profoundly affected popular opinion. Kings
and Cabinets may follow a course of enlightened opportunism and
make alliances with ancient foes, but the common people think
in simpler terms and have longer memories. Leagues were estab-
lished in the Rumanian capital to watch over the interests of their
" nationals " beyond the frontier, and though this popular feeling
might remain long quiescent, there was always the chance that at
a moment of crisis it might break into flame and destroy the work
of a passionless diplomacy.

Rumania had, therefore, causes of grievance against both Russia
and Austria-Hungary. She had, too, a natural ambition to en-
large her territories so as to make them correspond to racial dis-
tribution. Finally, as the years passed, she began to realize the
strategic value of her geographical position. As the far-reaching

140 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR.

policy of the Central Powers slowly took shape it was obvious that
Rumania, on the flank of the Drang nach Osten, acquired a peculiar
significance. Her alliance would safeguard on the north that route
to Constantinople which was the pilgrims' way of German dreams.
If Russia, again, was ever to secure her desires and control the exits
from the Euxine to the iEgean, Rumanian friendliness would be an
invaluable aid. Finally, whatever course Balkan politics might
take, whether in the direction of union or of continued rivalry,
the land north of the Danube must play a vital part. At the same
time, Rumania well understood that her strategic assets were also
strategic disadvantages. In a quarrel with her powerful neighbours
she offered too many avenues for assault. It behoved her, therefore,
to go warily, and take no step without due thought, for only by
circumspection could she hope to win her national ambitions and
avoid — what was never outside the sphere of the possible — national
dissolution.

These considerations affected Rumanian action in the first
great crisis that faced her after the war of 1877, the two Balkan
Wars. She refused to join the Balkan League, having no par-
ticular grievance against Turkey ; while on Macedonian questions
she had never seen eye to eye with Greece and Bulgaria. She con-
tented herself with warning the belligerents that she could not
permit any one of them to become predominant in the Balkans,
and mobilized her army to watch events. When Bulgaria's sudden
attack on her former allies precipitated the Second Balkan War,
Rumania was forced to act. The event had been foreseen, and a
provisional arrangement had been made with Serbia and Greece.
To the world at large it looked as if King Carol's conduct was
based merely on the desire to fish in troubled waters, but in reality
there were sound reasons of policy behind it. Bulgaria had upset
all hopes of a Balkan equilibrium as a result of the First WTar, and
her success would give her a Balkan hegemony most dangerous to
Rumanian interests. It was Russia who took the severest view
of Bulgarian wrong-doing, and King Carol consulted and secured
the assent of Petrograd before he intervened. He crossed the
Danube at two points, occupied Silistria, threatened Sofia, and
received as his reward a larger slice of the Dobrudja. This meant
a rift in the thirty-years-old entente with Austria — a rift widened
by Hungarian intransigence over Transylvania, which was now
deeply concerning the Rumanian people. It meant, too, increas-
ingly friendly relations with Russia, and there was talk of a mar-
riage between the Crown Prince's eldest son and a daughter of the

RACIAL MAP OF RUMANIA AND
NEIGHBOURING STATES.

GERMANY'S COMMERCIAL INFLUENCE. 141

Tsar. But King Carol did not allow the estrangement from Austria
to affect his friendship with Austria's senior partner. Telegrams
were exchanged between him and the German Emperor in which
the latter was thanked as the only begetter of peace. The situa-
tion, therefore, on the eve of the Great War was that politically
Rumania had long leaned to the Central Powers, and had been a
virtual member of the Triple Alliance ; but that during 1913 and
the early months of 19 14, though her friendliness to Germany
continued, relations with Austria were becoming strained, while
Bucharest and Petrograd were once again feeling their way to-
wards co-operation and understanding.

The real centre of Teutonic influence in Rumania was to be
found less in statecraft and diplomacy than in the sphere of finance
and commerce. King Carol, in calling upon Germany for aid in
developing his land, had, like the housewife in the fairy tale, in-
voked a sprite which could not easily be laid. From the early
eighties Germany had set herself resolutely to capture Rumanian
trade. She and Austria soon secured the lion's share of imports.
Her agents were in every town ; she controlled the chief industries ;
by long credit and goods exactly suited to the market she ousted
both native and foreign competitors ; and she made use of the large
German-Jewish section of the commercial community to further her
ends. The Deutsche Bank and the Disconto-Gesellschaft estab-
lished themselves, and financed all new undertakings, as well as
floating Government loans. Presently Rumania's public debt
was largely in German hands. Germany built the railways and
improved the ports ; she ousted British and American financiers
from the control of the great oilfields ; all the electrical industries
were in her charge, and the rich forests were largely in her power.
These successes were won by genuine enterprise and the most
painstaking assiduity. She had consuls to watch her interests in
every centre, and if a foreign merchant wished a reliable report on
some Rumanian question, he was compelled to go for it to German
sources. Such a condition of things could not have come about
had there not been reasons for it in the economics of Rumania's
position. She was a non-industrial country, whose exports must
always be mainly raw materials, mineral and agricultural. She
therefore needed a highly industrialized country as her chief cus-
tomer. She could not find this in Turkey or the Balkan States,
or in Russia, who was herself in a like position. The natural trade
channels ran westward towards Austria and Germany. Hence
there was a reason for keeping on good terms with the Central

142 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR.

Powers far stronger than any treaty, a reason based on the liveli-
hood of the humblest citizen. They represented for Rumania her
bread and butter. A breach would only come if a crisis arose so
tremendous that prudential considerations were forgotten, or an
ally was found who could provide her with a more excellent way
of life.

For the feeling of the people, in which the various problems of
foreign policy and economics are reflected, and by which they are
ultimately decided, we must look to the condition of Rumanian
politics from the accession of King Carol onwards. The traditional
parties were the Liberals and the Conservatives, the " Reds " and
the " Whites," representing respectively the trading and profes-
sional classes and the landed aristocracy. At the beginning of
King Carol's reign the National Liberals, under the elder Bratianu,
were in power, and it was the Liberal Prime Minister who played
a chief part in effecting the Austrian alliance of 1883. During his
twelve years' term of office he aimed at extending the area of
government control and building up a bureaucracy. Among the
Conservatives a group of Tory democrats, called Junimists, arose,
including men like Carp, Majorescu, and Marghiloman, who stood
for individual liberty, and were, on the whole, more democratic
than any section of the Liberal ranks. From 1891 onward the
opposition between the two tended to become stereotyped and
artificial, the ordinary game of the " ins " and " outs." But in
19 10, when the younger Bratianu became head of the Liberal
party, the Conservatives woke into life, and, under Take Jonescu,
revived the old creed of the Tory democrats. The Cabinet which
conducted the war with Bulgaria had a Junimist — Majorescu —
as Premier, and two others, Take Jonescu and Marghiloman, as
members. It fell from power in 19 14, largely through its failure
to secure any concessions from Hungary on the subject of Tran-
sylvania, and the Liberals, under Bratianu, took office with large
majorities in both chambers.

So far there was no serious division between the parties on the
question of foreign policy. The National Liberals, representing
largely the commercial classes, were well alive to the value, and
indeed the necessity, of the Austro-German connection. Among
the Conservatives the Junimists were mainly pro-German, espe-
cially the leaders, Carp, Marghiloman, and Majorescu. Of the
old Conservatives, men like Filipescu and Lahovary had leanings
towards Russia, and a deep friendship for France. Take Jonescu
stood by himself. He was convinced that great events were

ACCESSION OF KING FERDINAND. 143

preparing, and he looked further into the future than his colleagues.
He envisaged a situation in which Rumania's course must be deter-
mined on other grounds than the traditional attachments of poli-
ticians. On the eve of war we may say that the general tendency
of the politicians was conservative — to cling to the old Teutonic
alliance, but that the Balkan Wars and the growing friendliness with
Russia had somewhat weakened that alliance. They were for the
most part in the mood to judge a new situation on its merits, and
follow that tradition of realpolitik which forty years before King
Carol had learned from Bismarck.

The first days of August 19 14 brought Rumania face to face
with the great decision. King Carol alone had no doubts. His
German training and antecedents, and his lifelong friendship
with the Central Powers, arrayed his sympathies on the Teutonic
side. Moreover, he considered Rumania bound by the treaty of
1883 to intervene on Austria's behalf. His Government took a
different view. They argued, as Italy argued in a similar case,
that the occasion provided for by the terms of the agreement had
not arisen, since they had had no notice of the sudden and violent
procedure of Vienna, and Austria-Hungary must be considered the
party attacking and not the attacked. It was clear that popular
opinion was not in favour of intervention, and accordingly the
King summoned on 4th August a special advisory Council, to
which the Ministers and the leaders of the Opposition were alike
invited. The question put to the members was that of immediate
intervention on behalf of the Central Powers, and the King's policy
had Carp as its sole supporter. Majorescu and Marghiloman pre-
ferred to wait, and to intervene only when Germany had made her
victory certain. By an overwhelming majority the Council decreed
in favour of neutrality, and the army, when appealed to, gave the
same decision. The King, who believed that the verdict was
against Rumania's interests and a stain on Rumania's honour,
was compelled to acquiesce. Two months later, on the 10th of
October 1914, he died.

His successor was his nephew Ferdinand, who had married a
granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The new King had not the
German leanings of his predecessor, and could consider his country's
interests with an undivided mind ; while the Queen made no secret
of her sympathy with the Allied cause. For the better part of
two years, with the eyes of the world on her, Rumania suspended
her judgment, swayed now hither now thither by the turn of events,
while her press and her platforms were filled with propagandist.

144 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR.

strife. The only alternatives were continued neutrality or entry
into war on the Allied side. Never since the first month of the
campaign had there been any real chance of her joining the Central
Powers. Germany's performance in Belgium, her declaration of
arrogant aims, and the plans for the Near East which she had
loudly proclaimed, could have no attraction for a people which
cherished its national independence. Moreover, the appearance
of France, Russia, and Italy in the field awakened the sentiment
and memories of a race which was part Latin and part Slav, but
in no way Teuton.

With the first Russian successes the contest began between
those Rumanians who clamoured for immediate union with the
Allies, those who advocated delay, and those who were frankly on
the German side. Of the first party were Take Jonescu and Fili-
pescu ; of the second, the Prime Minister, Bratianu ; and of the
third, Carp, Majorescu, and Marghiloman. Negotiations began
with Russia, but it remained to be seen whether Petrograd would
be in a position to fulfil its promises. The Government paid little
attention to the assiduous overtures from the Central Powers and
the appeals of the Marghilomanist press, but kept its eyes fixed on
the northern frontier, where Ivanov was moving towards Cracow.
In January 1915 Lechitski's advance into the Bukovina seemed to
bring Rumania's day of action near. Britain lent her £5,000,000,
the reserves were called up, and Bratianu threw out hints in Par-
liament of a " decisive " hour approaching. Negotiations were
proceeding with Russia as to Rumania's territorial rewards —
difficult negotiations, for Rumania put her claims high, and, having
already received the promise of much for neutrality alone, wanted
a large addition in return for alliance. Moreover, before she
could intervene effectually she must have munitions ; and since
these could only come from the Western Allies, the road into the
Black Sea must be cleared. The British guns then sounding at
the Dardanelles were part of the inducement to Rumania to move.
But everything miscarried : the British naval attack on the Dar-
danelles failed, and the landing of 28th April promised at the best
a slow and difficult campaign. Presently Mackensen struck on
the Donajetz, and Russia began her great retreat. The day of
Rumanian intervention had been indefinitely postponed.

Bratianu had now an intricate game to play. He could not
afford to quarrel with the triumphant Central Powers ; and though
he refused to allow munitions of war for Turkey to pass through
his country, he was compelled to speak Germany fair, and suffer

THE RUMANIAN ARMY. 145

Austria to purchase part of the Rumanian wheat crop. With re-
markable steadfastness he resisted Austro-German blandishments
and threats, and bided his time. He saw Bulgaria take the plunge
and Serbia destroyed, and his country's strategic position grow
daily graver. If she joined the Allies she would be hopelessly
outflanked, with a hostile Bulgaria to the south and Pflanzer-
Baltin in Czernovitz. Besides, she had as yet no munitions, and
hard-pressed Russia could not help her on that score. Meantime
popular feeling was kindling, and might soon be beyond control.
The Conservative party had split in two, and a pro-Entente group
had been formed, with first Lahovary and then Filipescu as its
leader. The League of National Unity was active, student demon-
strations filled the capital, and the inaction of the Government was
attacked alike by the Interventionists under Take Jonescu and the
pro-Germans under Marghiloman. Few statesmen have been
placed in a more difficult position than Bratianu during the winter
of 1915-16. He did the only thing possible in the circumstances,
and played for time. He allowed the sale of cereals both to Britain
and to Austria-Germany. It was clear that his policy of " ex-
pectant neutrality " had the support of the great mass of the
Rumanian people, as was shown by the vote of confidence which
he received in both Chambers when Parliament met.

During the early summer of 1916 a fusion took place between
Take Jonescu's Young Conservatives and Filipescu's group. More
and more Take Jonescu, brilliant alike as an orator and a writer,
was becoming the interpreter of the national ideal. Fabian tactics
may be wise, but they cannot last for ever. It was his business to
organize and make explicit that popular feeling which would turn
the balance with the cautious Bratianu. But arguments were
preparing more potent than the eloquence of the popular leaders.
On 4th June Brussilov struck his first blow. On 18th June Lechit-
ski entered Czernovitz. By the end of the month the Bukovina
was in Russian hands, and on the 1st of July the Allied armies of
France and Britain advanced on the Somme.

In 1875, when King Carol was still busy with his reorganization,
the Rumanian army numbered 18,000 regulars and 44,000 Ter-
ritorials. By the law of 1872 men were enlisted for eight years,
though large numbers were passed into the reserve before they had
served their term. After the Russo-Turkish War the army was
increased ; and in 1882 the German system of localized corps,
drawing all their recruits from one district, was introduced. Four
army corps were then created. By the law of 1891 a closer

146 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR.

connection was established between the standing army and the
Territorial force. The infantry were formed into thirty-four
regiments, each with one regular and two Territorial battalions;
while the Militia represented the second line, and a third line
was available in the levee en masse. Territorials were trained for
ninety days in their first year of service, and for thirty days in
subsequent years. In 1902 the regular army was about 60,000
strong, with 75,000 Territorials. By increasing the available
equipment, and calling up each year larger numbers of the annual
class, the numbers grew rapidly, and a fifth army corps was pres-
ently formed. The declaration of war against Bulgaria in 1913,
the seizure of Silistria, and the advance on Plevna afforded a good
test of Rumania's capacity for mobilization. In 1914 the army
was organized in three main divisions — Active, Reserve, and
Militia. There were five corps, each of two divisions, with five
more divisions formed of surplus reservists. Rumania could mobi-
lize a first-line force of 220 battalions, 83 squadrons, 124 batteries,
and 19 companies of fortress artillery — a strength of 250,000 rifles,
18,000 sabres, 300 machine guns, and about 800 field guns and
howitzers, of which three-fourths were pieces of a recent pattern.
These figures by no means represented the total available forces.
In 1913, when the five army corps were mobilized against Bulgaria,
no less than 200,000 recruits were sent back from the depots without
being embodied. When the Great War began preparations were
at once made for marshalling the whole force of the country in
case of need. Cadres were formed for reserve battalions, and the
aim was an eventual mobilization of a first-line army of ten corps
— five active corps, and a reserve corps for each. This would pro-
vide an effective fighting force of between 500,000 and 600,000
men. The infantry were armed with the Mannlicher, the field guns
and field howitzers came from Krupp, and the mountain batteries
and heavy pieces from Creusot. Munitions were obviously a
difficulty, for the Krupp supply would be cut off, and the country
had no large steel works. A considerable supply of shells, however,
had been accumulated, and Rumania, with Russia's aid, had en-
deavoured to make herself independent of Germany. She had no
navy to speak of, only a small river and coast flotilla, with vessels
conspicuously inferior to the Austrian Danube fleet. Her General
Staff were for the most part good professional soldiers, who had
imbibed much of the latest German teaching, but they suffered
from the fact that few had had any experience of operations in
the field under war conditions.

NEGOTIATIONS WITH RUSSIA. 147

The strategic position, if she joined the Allies, involved a war
on two fronts. Political considerations would, no doubt, impel
her to cross the Carpathian passes, then weakly guarded by Austrian
Landsturm, and occupy Transylvania. There it was difficult to
believe she would be forestalled. But Bulgaria, at the bidding
of Germany, was certain to strike, either by an advance into the
Dobrudja, towards the Tchernavoda bridge which carried the line
from Constanza to the capital, or by a crossing of the Danube.
The river line made a formidable barrier on the south ; but it had
been crossed before, and might be crossed again. Rumania must,
therefore, use her forces to protect her southern borders on the
Danube and in the Dobrudja, as well as to press through the passes
into Transylvania. This the whole Rumanian people took for
granted, and the wiser strategy — to hold the Carpathian passes
as a defensive flank, and concentrate on cutting the railway to
Constantinople — had little chance of consideration. Austria had
been desperately depleted of men by Brussilov's offensive, and it
was believed that she could not summon any great force to hold
Transylvania. It was rather in the direction of Bulgaria that
danger seemed to lie. Two Bulgarian armies were held by Sarrail
at Salonika, while another watched the northern and north-eastern
frontiers. If the last were reinforced by German or Turkish
troops, a dangerous invasion of the Dobrudja was possible.

Hence Rumania, having made up her mind on her strategical
purpose, required certain assurances before she could put it into
execution. In the first place, Brussilov must continue his pressure
between the Pripet and the Carpathians, so that Germany and
Austria should have no troops to spare to reinforce the Tran-
sylvanian front. In the second place, Sarrail must initiate a vigor-
ous offensive from Salonika, to keep Bulgaria's attention fixed on
that quarter. In the third place, Russia must send an army to
the Dobrudja, to co-operate with the Rumanian forces there.
Finally, she must see her way to adequate munitions and a con-
tinuous future supply. This could only come by way of Russia
from the Western Allies. The first trainload of shells which crossed
the Moldavian border would be a warning to the Central Powers
of an imminent declaration of war.

Early in June Russia pressed for a Rumanian advance to
coincide with Brussilov's movements. It was the psychological
moment for a successful entrance into the war, but Bucharest
was not yet ready. On 17th July Filipescu and Take Jonescu
spoke at a great Interventionist demonstration. They asked for

148 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Auc.

national union, an amalgamation of all parties such as France had
seen ; and they appealed to the King to prove himself " the best of
Rumanians." Bratianu said nothing, but he was busy negotiating
with the Allied Powers — negotiating not only on the objective of
the coming campaign, but on Rumanian rewards and the safe-
guards for her future. By the middle of July the matter was
decided in principle, and the details of the supply of munitions from
Russia had been settled. A provisional date was fixed for inter-
vention, but the exact moment had to wait upon the fulfilment of
certain preliminary guarantees. The Central Powers knew per-
fectly well what was happening at Bucharest ; but excellent though
their intelligence system was, they could not fix the date of the
rupture. Bratianu conducted the game with consummate finesse.
He saw the Austrian and German Ministers, and left on them the
impression that his mind was not yet made up. The King, as late
as 25th August, received in audience Majorescu, who had just
returned from Germany. He followed the example of his prede-
cessor, for it was announced on 26th August that the King desired
to hear in Council the views not only of his Ministers, but of all
the party leaders. The meeting was fixed for 10 a.m. on the
following day, 27th August.

The Council, in spite of the protests of Marghiloman, Carp, and
Majorescu, ratified by a great majority the decision of the Cabi-
net. That evening a Note was handed to the Austro-Hungarian
Minister containing a declaration of war. That Note set forth the
reasons for Rumania's breach with the Triple Alliance. It referred
to the long-standing grievance of Transylvania and the ill-treatment
of the Transylvanian people. The Central Powers, it declared,
had flung the world into the melting-pot, and old treaties had dis-
appeared along with more valuable things. " Rumania, governed
by the necessity of safeguarding her racial interests, finds herself
forced to enter into line by the side of those who are able to assure
her the realization of her national unity." To the army the King
sent a message in the name of the heroes of the past. " The shades
of Michael the Brave and Stephen the Great, whose mortal remains
rest in the lands you march to deliver, will lead you to victory as
worthy successors of the men who triumphed at Rasboieni, at
Calugareni, and at Plevna." To the people at large he also
appealed : —

" The war, which now for two years has hemmed in our position
more and more closely, has shaken the old foundations of Europe
and shown that henceforth it is on a national foundation alone that

igi6] THE DECLARATION OF WAR. 149

the peaceful life of its peoples can be assured. It has brought the
day which for centuries has been awaited by our national spirit — the
day of the union of the Rumanian race. After long centuries of
misfortune and cruel trials our ancestors succeeded in founding the
Rumanian state, through the union of the Principalities, through the
War of Independence, and through indefatigable toil from the time
of the national renaissance. To-day it is given to us to render endur-
ing and complete the work for a moment performed by Michael the
Brave — the union of Rumanians on both sides of the Carpathians.
It is for us to-day to deliver from the foreign yoke our brothers beyond
the mountains and in the land of Bukovina, where Stephen the Great
sleeps his eternal sleep. In us, in the virtues of our race, in our courage,
lives that potent spirit which will give them once more the right to
prosper in peace, to follow their ancestral customs, and to realize their
aspirations in a free and united Rumania from the Theiss to the sea."

The formal breach was with Austria-Hungary alone, and for
a moment Bratianu seems to have toyed with the idea of following
Italy's earlier example, and limiting the war. The Allies made no
objection. They knew that such a limitation was impracticable,
and their forecast was right. For on 28th August Germany
declared war on Rumania, and on 1st September Bulgaria followed
suit. Fourteen nations were now engaged in the campaigns.

The entry of Rumania had been for some months expected
and prepared for by Germany ; and as early as 29th July Falken-
hayn had made his dispositions. On the surface it gave the Allies
a powerful recruit. It lengthened the Teutonic battlefield in the
East by several hundred miles ; it added more than a quarter of a
million trained soldiers to the Allied strength ; and above all it
gave them control of economic assets which the Central Powers
had counted on in their resistance to the British blockade. All
these things were solid gains ; and yet, paradox as it may seem,
it is certain that the German High Command did not find the breach
with Rumania wholly unwelcome.

Germany's most serious danger lay in the growing unification
of the Allies' command, and its concentration upon the main
theatres. Her situation in these theatres was very grave. Every-
where her offensive had failed ; everywhere she was strategically
and tactically on the defence. Her assets were dwindling, and if
the Allied pressure continued relentlessly, the day must come,
sooner or later, when her field strength must crumble. Her single
hope was for disunion and divergency once more among her ene-
mies. She believed that if their efforts were concentrated they

150 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

could outlast her ; but if by some fortunate chance they should
begin again to dissipate their energies, then the Central Powers,
with their unity of purpose and uniformity of organization, might
prove the stronger. Her desire was for a return of those happy
days when the main fronts in Europe were stagnant, and at Gallipoli
and in the Balkans France and Britain wasted themselves in vain
adventures.

The appearance of Rumania in the war seemed to promise
such a chance. The German Staff knew to a decimal Rumania's
strength, and knew, too, that she would not play the game of war
in its true rigour. She had her eyes fixed on her unliberated
kinsfolk, and would advance forthwith on Transylvania. For this
blunder she would be made to pay dearly, and with good fortune
Bucharest might go the way of Belgrade and Brussels. But the
Allies could not permit her to suffer the fate of Serbia. Her posi-
tion was strategically too vital, and their honour was too deeply
committed. Therefore in the event of a Rumanian debacle Russian
armies would hasten to her aid, and Sarrail at Salonika would be
reinforced by troops destined for the Western battlefield. If this
happened, the concentration of the Allied purpose would be weak-
ened, and the unity of the Allied command might go to pieces.
Brussilov must slacken his efforts, and the deadly acid in the West
would cease to bite. Out of an apparent misfortune the Teutonic
League might win a final triumph.

The calculation was shrewd, as this narrative will show. When
the Rumanians crossed the passes they marched not to victory
but to disaster. But the chronicle of their campaign must be post-
poned while we turn to the great offensive which, since the first
day of July, the armies of France and Britain had been conduct-
ing in the West. Meanwhile the German High Command had
found a new chief. On 28th August the Emperor sent for Hinden-
burg, and on the following day Falkenhayn resigned. The victor
of Tannenberg had never seen eye to eye with the Chief of the
General Staff, and might fairly claim the disasters of the summer
on the Russian front as proof that he had been in the right. From
these disasters had sprung Rumanian intervention, and against
Falkenhayn were also debited the costly failure at Verdun, and —
what seemed to Germany its consequences — the desperate struggle
on the Somme, of which the end could not be foreseen. The crisis
demanded a change of authority, and at the helm was placed the
old soldier who had the greatest prestige among his countrymen,
while beside him was set Ludendorff, who had shown himself the

i9i6] FALKENHAYN RESIGNS. 151

ablest organizer of campaigns. It was to prove a formidable
partnership in the succeeding two years. Falkenhayn, the most
intellectual of Germany's commanders, had not the character or
temperament for the kind of war which was now forced upon her.
A more patient, if a slower, mind, a tougher fortitude, a more des-
perate laboriousness in the conserving of every atom of national
strength, were the gifts demanded ; and these, joined with supreme
popular confidence, were possessed by the new duumvirate.

CHAPTER LXII.

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME.
June 24-Sepiember 9, 1916.

The Somme Region — The Strategy and Tactics of the projected Battle — German
and Allied Dispositions — The Bombardment — The First Day — The Attack of
14th July — The French Advance — The Crest of the Uplands won.

I.

From Arras southward the Western battle-front left the coalpits
and sour fields of Artois and entered the pleasant region of Picardy.
The great crook of the upper Somme and the tributary vale of
the Ancre intersect a rolling tableland, dotted with little towns
and furrowed by a hundred shallow streams. Nowhere does the
land rise higher than 500 feet, but a trivial swell— such is the
nature of the landscape — may carry the eye for thirty miles. There
were few detached farms, for it was a country of peasant culti-
vators who clustered in villages. Not a hedge broke the long roll
of cornlands, and till the higher ground was reached the lines of
tall poplars flanking the great Roman highroads were the chief land-
marks. At the lift of country between Somme and Ancre copses
patched the slopes, and sometimes a church spire was seen above
the trees from some woodland hamlet. The Somme winds in a
broad valley between chalk bluffs, faithfully dogged by a canal—
a curious river which strains, like the Oxus, " through matted
rushy isles," and is sometimes a lake and sometimes an expanse
of swamp. The Ancre is such a stream as may be found in Wilt-
shire, with good trout in its pools. On a hot midsummer day the
slopes are ablaze with yellow mustard, red poppies, and blue
cornflowers ; and to one coming from the lush flats of Flanders,
or the " black country " of the Pas de Calais, or the dreary levels
of Champagne, or the strange melancholy Verdun hills, this land

152

The Old German Front Line, 191 6
From a painting by Charles Sims, R.A.

1916] THE SANTERRE. 153

wore a habitable and cheerful air, as if remote from the oppres-
sion of war.

The district is known as the Santerre. Some derive the name
from sana terra — the healthy land ; others from sarta terra — the
cleared land. Some say it is sancia terra, for Peter the Hermit was
a Picard, and the piety of the Crusaders enriched the place with a
thousand relics and a hundred noble churches. But there are
those — and they have much to say for themselves — who read the
name sang terre — the bloody land ; for the Picard was the Gascon
of the north, and the countryside was an old cockpit of war. It
was the seat of the government of Clovis and Charlemagne. It
was ravaged by the Normans, and time and again by the English.
There Louis XI. and Charles the Bold fought their battles ; it
suffered terribly in the Hundred Years' War ; it was the " tawny
ground " which Shakespeare's Henry V. discoloured with blood ;
German and Spaniard, the pandours of Eugene and the Cossacks
of Alexander marched across its fields ; from the walls of Peronne
the last shot was fired in the campaign of 1814. And in the greatest
war of all it was destined to be the theatre of a struggle com-
pared with which its ancient conflicts were like the brawls of a
village fair.

Till midsummer in 1916 the Picardy front had shown little
activity. Since that feverish September when Castelnau had
extended on the Allies' left, and Maud'huy beyond Castelnau, in
the great race for the North Sea, there had been no serious action.
Just before the Battle of Verdun began the Germans made a feint
south of the Somme and gained some ground at Frise and
Dompierre. There had been local raids and local bombardments,
but the trenches on both sides were good, and a partial advance
offered few attractions to either. Amiens was miles behind one
front, vital points like St. Quentin and Cambrai and La Fere were
far behind the other. In that region only a very great and con-
tinuous offensive would offer any strategic results. In July 1915
the British took over most of the line from Arras to the Somme,
and on the whole they had a quiet winter in their new trenches.
This long stagnation led to one result : it enabled the industrious
Germans to excavate the chalk hills on which they lay into a
fortress which they believed to be impregnable. Their position
was naturally strong, and they strengthened it by every device
which science could provide. Their High Command might look
uneasily at the Aubers ridge and Lens and Vimy, but it had no
doubts about the Albert heights.

154 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

The German plan in the West, as we have seen, after the first
offensive had been checked at the Marne and Yprcs, was to hold
their front with abundant guns but the bare minimum of men,
and use their surplus forces to win a decision in the East. This
scheme was foiled by the steadfastness of Russia's retreat, which
surrendered territory freely but kept her armies in being. During
the winter of 1915-16 the German High Command was growing
anxious. It saw that the march to the Dvina and the adventure
in the Balkans had failed to shake the resolution of its opponents.
It was aware that the Allies had learned with some exactness the
lesson of eighteen months of war, and that even now they were
superior in men, and would presently be on an equality in muni-
tions. Moreover, the Allied Command was becoming concentrated
and shaking itself free from its old passion for divergent operations.
Its generals had learned the wisdom of the order of the King of
Syria to his captains : " Fight neither with small nor great, but
only with the King of Israel ; " and the King of Israel did not
welcome the prospect. Now, to quote a famous saying of Foch,
" A weakening force must always be attacking," and from the
beginning of 1916 the Central Powers were forced into a continuous
offensive. Their economic strength was draining steadily. Their
people had been told that victory was already won, and were
asking for the fruits of it. They feared greatly the coming Allied
advance, for they knew that it was meant to be simultaneous on all
fronts, and they cast about for a means of frustrating it. That
was the main reason of the great Verdun assault. Germany hoped
so to weaken the field strength of France that no future blow would
be possible, and the French nation, weary and dispirited, would in-
cline to peace. She hoped, in any event, to lure the Allies into
a premature counter-attack, so that their great offensive might
go off at half-cock and be defeated piecemeal.

None of these things happened. Petain at Verdun, as we know,
handled the defence like a master, and the place became a trap
where Germany was bleeding to death. Meanwhile, with the full
assent of Joffre, the British armies made no movement. They
were biding their time. Early in June the Austrian attack on the
Trentino had been checked by Italy, and suddenly — in the East
— Russia swung forward to a surprising victory. Writhin a month
nearly half a million Austrians had been put out of action, and the
distressed armies of the Dual Monarchy called on Germany foi
help. Falkenhayn grappled as best he could with the situation,
and such divisions as could be spared were dispatched from the

i9i6] THE WESTERN SALIENT. 155

West. At this moment, when the grip was tightening in the East,
France and Britain made ready for a supreme effort. The plan
had been settled between the two commands at Chantilly as early
as 14th February.

Germany's position was intricate and uneasy. She had no
large surplus of men immediately available at her interior depots.
The wounded who were ready again for the line and the young
recruits from the 19 17 class were all needed to fill up the normal
wastage in her ranks. She might create new divisions, but it would
be mainly done by skimming the old. She had no longer any great
mass of free strategic reserves. Most had been sucked into the mael-
strom of Verdun or dispatched east to Hindenburg. In the West
she was holding a huge salient — from the North Sea to Soissons,
and from Soissons to Verdun. If a wedge were driven in on one
side, the whole apex would be in danger. The Russian field army
could retire safely from Warsaw and Vilna, because it was mobile
and lightly equipped, but an army which had been stationary
for eighteen months and had relied mainly upon its fortifications
would be apt to find a Sedan in any rapid and extensive retirement.
The very strength of the German front in the West constituted
its weakness. A breach in a fluid line may be mended, but a breach
in a rigid and elaborate front is difficult to fill unless there are large
numbers of men available for the task or unlimited time. There
were no such large numbers, and it was likely that the Allies would
see that there was no superfluity of leisure.

Yet, in spite of some weakness in the strategic situation, the
German stronghold in the West was still formidable in the extreme.
From Arras southward they held in the main the higher ground.
The front consisted of a strong first position, with firing, support,
and reserve trenches, and a labyrinth of deep dug-outs ; a less
strong intermediate line covering the field batteries ; and a second
position some distance behind, which was of much the same strength
as the first. Behind lay fortified woods and villages which could
be readily linked up with trench lines to form third and fourth
positions. They were well served by the great network of rail-
ways which radiated from La Fere and Laon, Cambrai and St.
Quentin, and many new light lines had been constructed. They
had ample artillery and shells, endless machine guns, and con-
summate skill in using them. It was a fortress to which no front
except the West could show a parallel. The Russian soldiers
who in the early summer were brought to France stared with amaze-
ment at a ramification of trenches compared with which the lines

156 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

in Poland and Galicia were like hurried improvisations. The Ger-
man purpose in the event of an attack was purely defensive. It
was to hold their ground, to maintain the mighty forts on which
they had spent so many months of labour, to beat off the assault
at whatever cost. In that section of their front, at any rate, they
were resolved to be a stone wall and not a spear point.

The aim of the Allied Command must be clearly understood.
It was not to recover so many square miles of France ; it was not
to take Bapaume or Peronne or St. Quentin ; it was not even in
the strict sense to carry this or that position. All these things
were subsidiary and would follow in due course, provided the main
purpose succeeded. That purpose was simply to exercise a steady
and continued pressure on a certain section of the enemy's front.

For nearly two years the world had been full of theories as to
the possibility of breaking the German line. Many months before
critics had pointed out the futility of piercing that line on too
narrow a front, since all that was produced thereby was an awk-
ward salient. It was clear that any breach must be made on a
wide front, which would allow the attacking wedge to manoeuvre
in the gap, and prevent reinforcements from coming up quickly
enough to reconstitute the line behind. But this view took too
little account of the strength of the German fortifications. No
doubt a breach could be made ; but its making would be desper-
ately costly, for no bombardment could destroy all the defensive
lines, and infantry in the attack would be somewhere or other
faced with unbroken wire and unshaken parapets. Gradually it
had been accepted that an attack should proceed by stages, with,
as a prelude to each, a complete artillery preparation, and that,
since the struggle must be long drawn out, fresh troops should be
used at each stage. The policy was that of " limited objectives,"
but it did not preclude an unlimited objective in the event of some
local enemy weakness suddenly declaring itself. These were the
tactics of the Germans at Verdun, and they were obviously right.
Why, then, did the attack on Verdun fail ? In the first place,
because after the first week the assault became spasmodic and the
great plan fell to pieces. Infantry were used wastefully in hopeless
rushes. The pressure was relaxed for days on end, and the defence
was allowed to reorganize itself. The second reason, of which the
first was a consequence, was that Germany, after the initial on-
slaught, had not the necessary superiority either in numbers or
moral or guns. At the Somme the Allies did not intend to relax
their pressure, and their strength was such that they believed that,

1916] THE GERMAN DISPOSITIONS. 157

save in the event of abnormal weather conditions, they could keep
it continuously at a high potential.

A strategical problem is not, as a rule, capable of being presented
in a simple metaphor, but it may be said that, to the view of the
Allied strategy, the huge German salient in the West was like an
elastic band drawn very tight. Each part of such a band has lost
elasticity, and may be severed by friction which would do little
harm to the band if less tautly stretched. That represented one
element in the situation. Another aspect might be suggested by
the metaphor of a sea-dyke of stone in a flat country where all
stone must be imported. The waters crumble the wall in one sec-
tion, and all free reserves of stone are used to strengthen that part.
But the crumbling goes on, and to fill the breach stones are brought
from other sections of the dyke. Some day there may come an
hour when the sea will wash through the old breach, and a great
length of the weakened dyke will follow in the cataclysm.

There v/ere two other motives in the Allied purpose which may
be regarded as subsidiary. One was to ease the pressure on Verdun,
which during June had grown to fever pitch. The second was to
prevent the transference of large bodies of enemy troops from the
Western to the Eastern front, a transference which might have
worked havoc with Brussilov's plans. Sir Douglas Haig would
have preferred to postpone the offensive a little longer, for his
numbers and munitionment were still growing, and the training
of the new levies was not yet complete. But the general situation
demanded that the Allies in the West should not delay their stroke
much beyond midsummer.

The German front in the Somme area was held by the right wing
of the II. Army, formerly Billow's, but now under Fritz von Below.
This army's area began just south of Monchy, north of which lay
the VI. Army under the Bavarian Crown Prince. At the end of
June the front between Gommecourt and Frise was held as follows :
North of the Ancre lay the 2nd Guard Reserve Division and the
52nd Division. Between the Ancre and the Somme lay two units
of the 14th Reserve Corps, in order, the 26th Reserve Division and
the 28th Reserve Division, and then the 12th Division of the 6th
Reserve Corps. South of the river, guarding the road to Peronne,
were the 121st Division, the nth Division, and the 36th Division,
belonging to the 17th Corps.

The British armies, as we have seen in earlier chapters, had in
less than two years grown from the six divisions of the old Expe-
ditionary Force to a total of some seventy divisions in the field,

158 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

leaving out of account the troops supplied by the Dominions and
by India. Behind these divisions were masses of trained men to
replace wastage for at least another year. The quality of the result
was not less remarkable than the quantity. The efficiency of the
supply and transport, the medical services, the aircraft work, was
universally admitted. The staff and intelligence work — most diffi-
cult to improvise — was now equal to the best in the field. The
gunnery was praised by the French, a nation of expert gunners.
As for the troops themselves, we had secured a homogeneous army
of which it was hard to say that one part was better than the other.
By June 19 16 the term New Armies was a misnomer. The whole
British force in one sense was new. The famous old regiments of
the line had been completely renewed since Mons, and their drafts
were drawn from the same source as the men of the new battalions.
The only difference was that in the historic battalions there was a
tradition already existing, whereas in the new battalions that tradi-
tion had to be created. And the creation was quick. If the Old
Army bore the brunt of the First Battle of Ypres, the Territorials
were no less heroic in the Second Battle of Ypres, and the New
Army had to its credit the four-mile charge at Loos. It was no
patchwork force which in June was drawn up in Picardy, but the
flower of the manhood of the British Empire, differing in origin
and antecedents, but alike in discipline and courage and resolution.

Munitions had grown with numbers. Any one who was present
at Ypres in April and May 1915 saw the German guns all day
pounding our lines, with only a feeble and intermittent reply. It
was better at Loos in September, when we showed that we could
achieve an intense bombardment. But at that date our equip-
ment sufficed only for spasmodic efforts, and not for that sustained
and continuous fire which was needed to destroy the enemy's
defences. Things were very different in June 1916. Everywhere
on the long British front there were British guns — heavy guns of
all calibres, field guns innumerable, and in the trenches there
were quantities of trench mortars. The great munition dumps,
constantly depleted and constantly replenished from distant bases,
showed that there was food enough and to spare for this mass of
artillery, and in the factories and depots at home every minute saw
the reserves growing. We no longer fought against a superior
machine. We had created our own machine to nullify the enemy's
and allow our man-power to come to grips.

The coming attack was allotted to the Fourth Army, under
General Sir Henry Rawlinson, who had begun the campaign in

i9i6] THE BRITISH DISPOSITIONS. 159

command of the 7th Division, and at Loos had commanded the
4th Corps. His front ran from south of Gommecourt across the
Ancre valley to the junction with the French north of Maricourt.
In his line he had five corps — from left to right, the 8th, under
Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston — 31st, 4th, and
29th Divisions ; the 10th, under Lieutenant-General Sir T. L. N.
Morland — 36th and 32nd Divisions ; the 3rd, under Lieutenant-
General Sir W. P. Pulteney — 8th and 34th Divisions ; the 15th,
under Lieutenant-General Home — 21st and 7th Divisions ; and
the 13th, under Lieutenant-General Congreve, V.C. — 18th and 30th
Divisions. A subsidiary attack on the extreme left at Gommecourt
was to be made by Allenby's Third Army — the 7th Corps, under
Sir T. Snow, containing the 46th and 56th Divisions. Behind
in the back areas lay the nucleus of another army, called first
the Reserve, and afterwards the Fifth, under General Sir Hubert
Gough, which at this time was mainly composed of cavalry divisions.
It was a cadre which would receive its complement of infantry when
the occasion arose.

The French striking force lay from Maricourt astride the Somme
to opposite the village of Fay. It was the Sixth Army, once
Castelnau's, and now under General Fayolle, one of the most dis-
tinguished of French artillerymen. Verdun had made impossible
the array of thirty-nine divisions which Foch had contemplated,
and Fayolle mustered only sixteen, including the three divisions
of the famous 20th Corps. Petain's wise plan of allowing no for-
mation to be used up now received ample justification. The units
allotted to the new offensive were all troops who had seen hard
fighting, but the edge of their temper was undulled. South of
Fayolle lay the Tenth Army, once d'Urbal's, but now commanded
by General Micheler. Its part for the present was to wait ; its
turn would come when the time arrived to broaden the front of
assault.

II.

About the middle of June on the whole front held by the
British, and on the French front north and south of the Somme,
there began an intermittent bombardment of the German lines.
There were raids at different places, partly to mislead the enemy
as to the real point of assault, and partly to identify the German
units opposed to us. During these days, too, there were many
fights in the air. It was essential to prevent German airplanes

160 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

from crossing our front and observing our preparations. Our
own machines scouted far into the enemy hinterland, recon-
noitring and destroying. On Saturday, 24th June, the bombard-
ment became intenser. It fell everywhere on the front ; German
trenches were obliterated at Ypres and Arras as well as at Beau-
mont Hamel and Fricourt. There is nothing harder to measure
than the relative force of such a " preparation," but had a dis-
passionate observer been seated in the clouds he would have noted
that from Gommecourt to a mile or two south of the Somme the
Allied fire was especially methodical and persistent. On Wed-
nesday, 28th June, from any artillery observation post in that
region it seemed as if a complete devastation had been achieved.
Some things like broken telegraph poles were all that remained of
what, a week before, had been leafy copses. Villages had become
heaps of rubble. Travelling at night on the roads behind the
front from Bethune to Amiens, the whole eastern sky was lit
up with what seemed fitful summer lightning. But there was
curiously little noise. In Amiens, a score or so of miles from the
firing-line, the guns were rarely heard, whereas fifty miles from
Ypres they sounded like a roll of drums and woke a man in the
night. The configuration of that part of Picardy muffles sound,
and the country folk call it the Silent Land.

All the last week of June the weather was grey and cloudy,
with a thick fog on the uplands, which made air work unsatis-
factory. There were flying showers of rain and the roads were
deep in mire. At the front — through the haze — the guns flashed
incessantly ; troops were everywhere on the move, and the shifting
of ammunition dumps nearer to the firing-line foretold what was
coming ; there was a curious exhilaration, too, for men felt that
the great offensive had arrived, that this was no flash in the pan,
but a movement conceived on the grand scale as to guns and men
which would not cease until a decision was reached. But, as the
hours passed in mist and wet, it seemed as if the fates were unpro-
pitious. Then, on the last afternoon of June, there came a sudden
change. The pall of cloud cleared away and all Picardy swam in
the translucent blue of a summer evening. That night the orders
went out. The attack was to be delivered next morning three
hours after dawn.

The first day of July dawned hot and cloudless, though a thin
fog, the relic of the damp of the past week, clung to the hollows.
At half-past five the hill just west of Albert offered a singular view.
It was almost in the centre of the section allotted to the Allied

IQI6] THE BOMBARDMENT. 161

attack, and from it the eye could range on the left up and beyond
the Ancre glen to the high ground around Beaumont Hamel and
Serre ; in front to the great lift of tableland behind which lay
Bapaume ; and to the right past the woods of Fricourt to the valley
of the Somme. Every slope to the east was wreathed in smoke,
which blew aside now and then and revealed a patch of wood or
a church spire. In the foreground lay Albert, the target of an
occasional German shell, with its shattered Church of Notre Dame
de Bebrieres and the famous gilt Virgin hanging head downward
from the campanile. All along the Allied front, a couple of miles
behind the line, captive kite balloons glittered in the sunlight.
Every gun on a front of twenty-five miles was speaking, and
speaking without pause. In that week's bombardment more light
and medium ammunition was expended than the total amount
manufactured in Britain during the first eleven months of war,
while the heavy stuff produced during the same period would not
have kept our guns going for a single day. Great spurts of dust
on the slopes showed where a heavy shell had burst, and black
and white gouts of smoke dotted the middle distance like the
little fires in a French autumn field. Lace-like shrapnel wreaths
hung in the sky, melting into the morning haze. The noise was
strangely uniform, a steady rumbling, as if the solid earth were
muttering in a nightmare, and it was hard to distinguish the deep
tones of the heavies, the vicious whip-like crack of the field guns,
and the bark of the trench mortars.

About 7.15 the bombardment rose to that hurricane pitch of
fury which betokened its close. It was as if titanic machine guns
were at work round all the horizon. Then appeared a marvellous
sight, the solid spouting of the enemy slopes — as if they were lines
of reefs on which a strong tide was breaking. In such a hell it
seemed that no human thing could live. Through the thin summer
vapour and the thicker smoke which clung to the foreground there
were visions of a countryside actually moving — moving bodily in
debris into the air. And now there was a fresh sound — a series
of abrupt and rapid bursts which came gustily from the first lines.
These were the new Stokes trench mortars — wonderful little engines
of death. There was another sound, too, from the north, as if
the cannonading had suddenly come nearer. It looked as if the
Germans had begun a counter-bombardment on part of the
British front line.

The staff officers glanced at their watches, and at half-past
seven precisely there came a lull. It lasted for a second or two.

162 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

and then the guns continued their tale. But the range had been
lengthened everywhere, and from a bombardment the fire had
become a barrage. For, on a twenty-five mile front, the Allied
infantry had crossed the parapets.

III.

The point of view of the hill-top was not that of the men in
the front trenches. The crossing of the parapets was the supreme
moment in modern war. The troops were outside defences,
moving across the open to investigate the unknown. It was the
culmination of months of training for officers and men, and the
least sensitive felt the drama of the crisis. It was the first great
action fought by the New Armies of Britain in their full strength.
Most of the troops engaged had twenty months before been em-
ployed in peaceable civilian trades. In their ranks were every
class and condition — miners from north England, factory hands
from the industrial centres, clerks and shop-boys, ploughmen and
shepherds, Saxon and Celt, college graduates and dock labourers,
men who in the wild places of the earth had often faced danger,
and men whose chief adventure had been a Sunday bicycle ride.
Nerves may be attuned to the normal risks of trench warfare and
yet shrink from the desperate hazard of a charge into the enemy's
line. But to one who visited the front before the attack the most
vivid impression was that of quiet cheerfulness. There were few
shirkers and not many who wished themselves elsewhere. One
man's imagination might be more active than another's, but the
will to fight, and to fight desperately, was universal. With the
happy gift of the British soldier they had turned the ghastly business
of war into something homely and familiar. Accordingly they took
everything as part of the day's work, and awaited the supreme
moment without heroics and without tremor, confident in them-
selves, confident in their guns, and confident in the triumph
of their cause. There was no savage lust of battle, but that far
more formidable thing — a resolution which needed no rhetoric to
suppoit it. Norfolk's words were true of every man of them —

" As gentle and as jocund as to jest
Go I to fight. Truth hath a quiet breast."

The British aim in this, the opening stage of the battle, was
the German first position. In the section of assault, running from
north to south, it covered Gommecourt, passed east of Hebuterne,

1916] GOMMECOURT AND THIEPVAL. 163

followed the high ground in front of Serre and Beaumont Hamel,
and crossed the Ancre a little to the north-west of Thiepval. It
ran in front of Thiepval, which was strongly fortified, east of
Authuille, and just covered the hamlets of Ovillers and La Bois-
selle. There it ran about a mile and a quarter east of Albert. It
then passed south round the woodland village of Fricourt, where
it turned at right angles to the east, covering Mametz and Mont-
auban. Half-way between Maricourt and Hardecourt it turned
south again, covered Curlu, crossed the Somme at the wide marsh
near the place called Vaux, covered Frise and Dompierre and
Soyecourt, and passed just east of Lihons, where it left the sector
with which we are now concerned. In the British area the main
assault was to be delivered between Maricourt and the Ancre ;
the attack from that river to Gommecourt was meant to be
subsidiary.

It is clear that the Germans expected the movement of the
Allies, and had made a fairly accurate guess as to its terrain. They
assumed that the area would be from Arras to Albert. In all
that stretch they were ready with a full concentration of men and
guns. South of Albert they were less prepared, and south of the
Somme they were caught napping. The history of the first day
was therefore the story of two separate actions in the north and
south, in the first of which the Allies failed and in the second of
which they brilliantly succeeded. By the evening the first action
had definitely closed, and the weight of the Allies was flung wholly
into the second. That is almost inevitable in an attack on a very
broad front. Some part will be found tougher than the rest, and
that part having been tried will be relinquished ; but it is the stub-
bornness of the knot and the failure to take it which are the price
of success elsewhere. Let us first tell the tale of the desperate
struggle between Gommecourt and Thiepval.

The divisions in action there had to face a chain of fortified
villages — Gommecourt, Serre, Beaumont Hamel, and Thiepval —
and enemy positions which were generally on higher and better
ground. The Ancre cut the line in two, with steep slopes rising
from the valley bottom. Each village had been so fortified as
to be almost impregnable, with a maze of catacombs, often two
stories deep, where whole battalions could take refuge, under-
ground passages from the firing-line to sheltered places in the
rear, and pits into which machine guns could be lowered during
a bombardment. On the plateau behind, with excellent direct
observation, the Germans had their guns massed.

164 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

It was this direct observation and the deep shelters for machine
guns which were the undoing of the British attack from Gomme-
court to Thiepval. As our bombardment grew more intense on
the morning of ist July, so did the enemy's. Before we could
go over the parapets the Germans had plastered our front trenches
with high explosives, and in many places blotted them out. All
along our line, fifty yards before and behind the first trench, they
dropped 6-inch and 8-inch high-explosive shells. The result was
that our men, instead of forming up in the front trench, were
compelled to form up in the open ground behind, for the front
trench had disappeared. In addition to this there was an intense
shrapnel barrage, which must have been directed by observers,
for it followed our troops as they moved forward.

As our men began to cross no-man's-land, the Germans
seemed to man their ruined parapets, and fired rapidly with auto-
matic rifles and machine guns. They had special light musketon
battalions, armed with machine guns and automatic rifles, who
showed marvellous intrepidity, some even pushing their guns into
no-man's-land to enfilade our advance. Moreover, they had
machine-gun pits far in front of their parapets, connected with
their trenches by deep tunnels secure from shell fire. The British
moved forward in line after line, dressed as if on parade ; not a
man wavered or broke rank ; but minute by minute the ordered
lines melted away under the deluge of high-explosive, shrapnel,
rifle, and machine-gun fire. There was no question about the
German weight of artillery. From dawn till long after noon they
maintained this steady drenching fire. Gallant individuals or
isolated detachments managed here and there to break into the
enemy position, and some even penetrated well behind it ; but
these were episodes, and the ground they won could not be held.
By the evening, from Gommecourt to Thiepval, the attack had
been everywhere checked, and our troops — what was left of them
—were back again in their old line. They had struck the core of
the main German defence.

In that stubborn action against impossible odds the gallantry
was so universal and absolute that it is idle to select special cases.
In each mile there were men who performed the incredible. Nearly
every English, Scots, and Irish regiment was represented, as well
as Midland and London Territorials, a gallant little company of
Rhodesians, and a Newfoundland battalion drawn from the hard-
bitten fishermen of that iron coast, who lost terribly on the slopes
of Beaumont Hamel. Repeatedly the German position was pierced.

i9i6] THE ULSTER DIVISION. 165

At Scire fragments of two battalions pushed as far as Pendant
Copse, 2,000 yards from the British lines. Troops of the 29th
Division broke through south of Beaumont Hamel, and got to
the Station Road beyond the Quarry, but few ever returned. One
Scottish battalion entered Thiepval village. North of Thiepval the
Ulster Division broke through the enemy trenches, passed the crest
of the ridge, and reached the point called The Crucifix, in rear
of the first German position. For a little they held the strong
Schwaben Redoubt, which we were not to enter again till after
three months of battle, and some even got into the outskirts
of Grandcourt. It was the anniversary day of the Battle of
the Boyne, and that charge when the men shouted " Remember
the Boyne," will be for ever a glorious page in the annals of
Ulster. The splendid troops, drawn from those volunteers who
had banded themselves together to defend their own freedom,
now shed their blood like water for the liberty of the world.

That grim struggle from Thiepval northward was responsible
for by far the greater number of the Allied losses of the day. But
though costly it was not fruitless, for it occupied the bulk of the
German defence. It was the price which had to be paid for the
advance on the rest of the front. For while in the north the living
wave broke vainly and gained little, in the south " by creeks and
inlets making " the tide was flowing strongly shoreward.

The map will show that Fricourt formed a bold salient ; and it
was the Allied purpose not to assault this salient but to cut it off.
An advance on Ovillers and La Boisselle and up the long shallow
depression towards Contalmaison, which our men called Sausage
Valley, would, if united with the carrying of Mametz, pinch it so
tightly that it must fall. Ovillers and La Boisselle were strongly
fortified villages, and on this first day, while we won the outskirts
and carried the entrenchments before them, we did not control the
ruins which our guns had pounded out of the shape of habitable
dwellings, though elements of one brigade actually penetrated into
La Boisselle and held a portion of the village.

Just west of Fricourt the 21st Division was engaged, the division
which had suffered grave misfortunes at Loos. That day it re-
covered its own, and proved once again that an enemy can meet no
more formidable foes than British troops which have a score to
wipe off. It made no mistake, but poured resolutely into the angle
east of Sausage Valley, carrying Lozenge Wood and Round Wood,
and driving in a deep wedge north of Fricourt. Before evening

i66 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

Mametz fell. Its church stood up, a broken tooth of masonry
among the shattered houses, with an amphitheatre of splintered
woods behind and around it. South of it ran a high road, and
south of the road lay a little hill, with the German trench lines on
the southern side. Opposite Mametz our assembly trenches had
been destroyed by the enemy's fire, so that the attacking infantry
had to advance over 400 yards of open ground. The 7th Division
which took the place was one of the most renowned in the British
Army. It had fought at First Ypres, at Festubert, and at Loos.
Since the autumn of 19 14 it had been changed in its composition,
but there were in it battalions which had been for twenty months
in the field. The whole division, old and new alike, went forward
to their task as if it were their first day of war. On the slopes of
the little hill three battalions advanced in line — one from a southern
English county, one from a northern city, one of Highland regulars
They carried everything before them, and to one who followed
their track the regularity of their advance was astonishing, for the
dead lay aligned as if on some parade.

Montauban fell early in the day to the 30th Division. The
British lines lay in the hollow north of the Albert-Peronne road,
where stood the hamlet of Carnoy. On the crest of the ridge
beyond lay Montauban, now, like most Santerre villages, a few
broken walls set among splintered trees. The brickfields on the
right were expected to be the scene of a fierce struggle, but, to our
amazement, they had been so shattered by our guns that they were
taken easily. The Montauban attack was perhaps the most perfect
of the episodes of the day. The artillery had done its work, and
the 6th Bavarian Regiment opposed to us lost 3,000 out of a total
strength of 3,500. At that point was seen a sight hitherto unwit-
nessed in the campaign — the advance in line of the troops of Britain
and France. On the British right lay the 20th Corps — the corps
which had held the Grand Couronne of Nancy in the feverish days
of the Marne battle, and which by its counter-attack at Douaumont
on that snowy 26th of February had turned the tide at Verdun.
It was the 39th Division, under General Nourrisson, which moved
in line with the British — horizon-blue beside khaki, and behind
both the comforting bark of the " 75 's."

From the point of junction with the British for eight miles
southward the French advanced with lightning speed and complete
success. From Maricourt to the Somme the country was still
upland, but lower than the region to the north. South of the
marshy Somme valley an undulating plain stretched east to the

I9i6] THE SECOND DAY. 167

great crook of the river beyond which lay Peronne, a fortress
girdled by its moat of three streams. Foch had planned his advance
on the same lines as the British, the same methodical preparation,
the same limited objective for each stage. North of the Somme
there was a stiff fight on the Albert-Peronne road, at the cliff abut-
ting on the river called the " Gendarme's Hat," and in front of
the villages of Curlu and Hardecourt. Of these on that first day
of July the French reached the outskirts, as we reached the out-
skirts of Fricourt and La Boisselle, but had to postpone their
capture till the morrow. South of the river the Colonial Corps,
whose attack did not begin till 9.30 a.m., took the enemy com-
pletely by surprise. Officers were captured shaving in their dug-
outs, whole battalions were rounded up, and all was done with the
minimum of loss. One French regiment had two casualties ; 800
was the total of one division. Long ere evening the villages of
Dompierre, Becquincourt, and Bussu were in their hands, and five
miles had teen bitten out of the German front. Fay was taken
the same day by the French 35th Corps. Between them the Allies
in twelve hours had captured the enemy first position in its entir-
ety from Mametz to Fay, a front of fourteen miles. Some 6,000
prisoners were in their hands, and a great quantity of guns and
stores. In the powdered trenches, in the woods and valleys behind,
and in the labyrinths of ruined dwellings, the German dead lay
thick. " That is the purpose of the battle," said a French officer.
" We do not want guns, for Krupp can make them faster than we
can take them. But Krupp cannot make men."

Sunday, the 2nd of July, was a day of level heat, when the
dust stood in steady walls on every road behind the front and in
the tortured areas of the captured ground. The success of the
Saturday had, as we have seen, put the British right wing well in
advance of their centre, and it was necessary to bring forward the
left part of the line from Thiepval to Fricourt so as to make the
breach in the German position uniform over a broad enough front.
The extreme British left was now inactive. A new attack in the
circumstances would have given no results, and the Ulster Division —
what remained of its advanced guard — fell back from the Schvvaben
Redoubt to its original line. The front was rapidly getting too
large and intricate for any single army commander to handle, so
it was resolved to give the terrain north of the Albert-Bapaume
road, including the area of the 4th and 8th Corps, to the Reserve
or Fifth Army, under Sir Hubert Gough.

All that day a fierce struggle was waged by the British 3rd

168 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

Corps at Ovillers and La Boisselle. Two new divisions — the 12th
and the 19th— had entered the line. At Ovillers the 12th carried
the entrenchments before it, and late in the evening the 19th
succeeded in entering the labyrinth of cellars, the ruins of what
had been La Boisselle. The 34th Division on their right, pushing
across Sausage Valley, came to the skirts of the Round Wood.
As yet there was no counter-attack. The surprise in the south
had been too great, and the Germans had not yet brought up
their reserve divisions. All that day squadrons of Allied air-
planes bombed depots and lines of communications in the German
hinterland. The long echelons of the Allied " sausages " glittered
in the sun, but only one German kite balloon could be detected.
We had found a way — the Verdun way — of bombing those fragile
gas-bags and turning them into wisps of flame. The Fokkers
strove in vain to check our airmen, and at least two were brought
crashing to the earth.

At noon on Sunday Fricourt fell ; the taking of Mametz and
the positions won in the Fricourt Wood to the east had made its
capture certain. The 21st Division took Round Wood ; the 17th,
brought up from corps reserve, attacked across the Fricourt-
Contalmaison road ; and the 7th carried the village. During the
night part of the garrison had slipped out, but when our men entered
it, bombing from house to house, they made a great haul of prisoners
and guns. Early that morning the Germans had counter-attacked
at Montauban, and been easily repulsed, and during the day our
patrols were pushed east into Bernafay Wood. Farther south
the French continued their victorious progress. They destroyed
a German counter-attack on the new position at Hardecourt ;
they took Curlu ; and south of the river they took Frise and the
wood of Mereaucourt beyond it, and the strongly fortified village
of Herbecourt. They did more, for at many points between the
river and Assevillers they broke into the German second position.
Fayolle's left now commanded the light railway from Combles to
Peronne, his centre held the big loop of the Somme at Frise, and
his right was only four miles from Peronne itself.

On Monday, 3rd July, Fritz von Below issued an order to his
troops, which showed that he had no delusion as to the gravity of
the Allied offensive. " The decisive issue of the war," he said,
" depends on the victory of the II. Army on the Somme. . . . The
important ground lost in certain places will be recaptured by our
attack after the arrival of reinforcements. The vital thing is to
hold on to our present positions at all costs and to improve them.

iqi6] THE NEW FRONT. 169

I forbid the voluntary evacuation of trenches." He had correctly
estimated the position. The old ground, with all it held, must
be rewon if possible ; no more must be lost ; fresh lines must be
constructed in the rear. But the new improvised lines could be
no equivalent of those mighty fastnesses which represented the
work of eighteen months; therefore those fastnesses must be
regained. We shall learn how ill his enterprise prospered.

For a correct understanding of the position on Monday, 3rd
July, it is necessary to recall the exact alignment of the new British
front. It fell into two sections. The first lay from Thiepval to
Fricourt, and was bisected by the Albert-Bapaume road, which
ran like an arrow over the watershed. Here Thiepval, Ovillers,
and La Boisselle were positions in the German first line. Contal-
maison, to the east of La Boisselle, was a strongly fortified village
on high ground, which formed, so to speak, a pivot in the German
intermediate line — the line which covered their field guns. The
second position ran through Pozieres to the two Bazentins and on
to Guillemont. On the morning of 3rd July the British had not
got Thiepval nor Ovillers ; they had only a portion of La Boisselle ;
but south of it they had broken through the first position and were
well on the road to Contalmaison. All this northern section con-
sisted of bare undulating slopes — once covered with crops, but now
powdered and bare like some alkali desert. Everywhere it was
seamed with the scars of trenches and pock-marked with shell-
holes. The few trees lining the roads had been long razed, and
the only vegetation was coarse grass, thistles, and the ubiquitous
poppy and mustard. The southern section, from Fricourt to
Montauban, was of a different character. It was patched with
large woods, curiously clean cut like the copses in the park of a
country house. A line of them ran from Fricourt north-eastward
— Fricourt Wood, Bottom Wood, the big wood of Mametz, the
woods of Bazentin, and the wood of Foureaux, which our men
called High Wood ; while from Montauban ran a second line, the
woods of Bernafay and Trdnes, and Delville Wood around Longue-
val. Here all the German first position had been captured. The
second position ran through the Bazentins, Longueval, and Guille-
mont, but to reach it some difficult woodland country had to be
traversed. On 3rd July, therefore, the southern half of the British
line was advancing against the enemy's second position, while the
northern half had still for its objective Ovillers and La Boisselle
in the first position, and the intermediate point Contalmaison.
It will be convenient to take the two sections separately, since

170 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

their problems were different, and see the progress of the British
advance in each, preparatory to the assault on the enemy's second
line. In the north our task was to carry the three fortified
places, Ovillers, La Boisselle, and Contain) aison, which were on a
large scale the equivalent of the fortius, manned by machine guns,
which we had known to our cost at Festubert and Loos. The
German troops in this area obeyed to the full Below's instructions,
and fought hard for every acre. On the night of Sunday, 2nd
July, La Boisselle was penetrated, and all Monday the struggle
swayed around that village and Ovillers. La Boisselle lay on the
right of the highroad ; Ovillers was to the north and a little to
the east, separated by a dry hollow which we called Mash Valley.
On Monday the 12th Division attacked south of Thiepval, but
failed to advance, largely because its left flank was unsupported.
All night the struggle see-sawed, our troops winning ground and
the Germans winning back small portions. On Tuesday, the 4th,
the heat wave broke in thunderstorms and torrential rain, and
the dusty hollows became quagmires. Next morning La Boisselle
was finally carried, after one of the bloodiest contests of the battle,
and the attack was carried forwards toward Bailiff Wood and
Contalmaison.

That day, Wednesday, the 5th, we attacked the main defences
of Contalmaison from the west. On Friday, 7th July, came the
first big attack on Contalmaison from Sausage Valley on the south-
west, and from the tangle of copses north-east of Fricourt, through
which ran the Fricourt-Contalmaison highroad. On the latter side
good work had already been done, the enemy fortius at Birch Tree
Wood and Shelter Wood and the work called the Quadrangle
having been taken on 3rd July, along with 1,100 prisoners. On
the Friday the attack ranged from the Leipzig Redoubt, south of
Thiepval, and the environs of Ovillers to the skirts of Contal-
maison. About noon the infantry of the 19th Division, after
carrying Bailiff Wood, took Contalmaison by storm, releasing a
small party of Northumberland Fusiliers, who had been made
prisoners four days earlier. The 3rd Guard Division — the famous
" Cockchafers " — were now our opponents. They were heavily
punished, and 700 of them fell as prisoners into our hands. But
our success at Contalmaison was beyond our strength to main-
tain, and in the afternoon a counter-attack forced us out of the
village. That same day the 12th and the 25th Divisions had
pushed their front nearly half a mile along the Bapaume road,
east of La Boisselle, and taken most of the Leipzig Redoubt.

i9.6] THE WOOD OF MAMETZ. 171

Ovillers was now in danger of envelopment. One brigade had
attacked in front, and another, pressing in on the north-east flank,
was cutting the position in two. All that day there was a deluge
of rain, and the sodden ground and flooded trenches crippled the
movement of our men.

Next day the struggle for Ovillers continued. The place was
now a mass of battered trenches, rubble, and muddy shell-holes,
and every yard had to be fought for. We were also slowly con-
solidating our ground around Contalmaison, and driving the Ger-
mans from their strongholds in the little copses. Ever since 7th
July we had held the southern corner of the village. On the night
of Monday, the 10th, pushing from Bailiff Wood on the west side
in four successive waves, with the guns lifting the range in front
of them, a brigade of the 23rd Division broke into the north-west
corner, swept round on the north, and after bitter hand-to-hand
fighting conquered the whole village. As for Ovillers, it was now
surrounded and beyond succour, and it was only a question of days
till its stubborn garrison must yield. It did not actually fall till
Sunday, 16th July, when the gallant remnant — two officers and
124 Guardsmen — surrendered to the 25th Division. By that time
our main battle had swept far to the eastward.

To turn to the southern sector, where the problem was to clear
out the fortified woods which intervened between us and the Ger-
man second line. From the crest of the first ridge behind Fricourt
and Montauban one looked into a shallow trough, called Cater-
pillar Valley, beyond which the ground rose to the Bazentin-
Longueval line. On the left, toward Contalmaison, was the big
Mametz Wood ; to the right, beyond Montauban, the pear-shaped
woods of Bernafay and Trones. On Monday, the 3rd, the ground
east of Fricourt Wood was cleared, and the approaches to Mametz
Wood won. That day a German counter-attack developed. A
fresh division arrived at Montauban, which was faithfully handled
by our guns. The " milking of the line " had begun, for a bat-
talion from the Champagne front appeared east of Mametz early
on Monday morning. Within a very short time of detraining at
railhead the whole battalion had been destroyed or made prisoners.
In one small area over a thousand men were taken.

Next day, Tuesday, 4th July, we had entered the Wood of
Mametz, 3,000 yards north of Mametz village, and had taken the
Wood of Bernafay. These intermediate positions were not acquired
without a grim struggle. The woods were thick with undergrowth
which had not been cut for two seasons, and though our artillery

172 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jui.y

played havoc with the trees it could not clear away the tangled
shrubbery beneath them. The Germans had filled the place with
machine-gun redoubts, connected by concealed trenches, and in
some cases they had machine guns in positions in the trees. Each
step in our advance had to be fought for, and in that briery laby-
rinth the battle tended always to become a series of individual
combats. Every position we won was subjected at once to a heavy
counter-bombardment. During the first two days of July it was
possible to move in moderate safety almost up to the British
firing-lines, but from the 4th onward the enemy kept up a steady
bombardment of our whole new front, and barraged heavily in all
the hinterland around Fricourt, Mametz, and Montauban.

On Saturday, 8th July, the 30th Division made a lodgment in
the Wood of Trdnes, assisted by the flanking fire of the French guns.
On that day the French on our right were advancing towards
Maltzhorn Farm. For the next five days Trones Wood was the
hottest corner in the southern British sector. Its peculiar situa-
tion gave every chance to the defence. There was only one covered
approach to it from the west — by way of the trench called Trones
Alley. The southern part was commanded by the Maltzhorn ridge,
and the northern by the German position at Longueval. Around
the wood to north and east the enemy second line lay in a half-
moon, so that they could concentrate upon it a converging artillery
fire, and could feed their own garrison in the place with reserves
at their pleasure. Finally, the denseness of the covert, cut only
by the railway clearings and the German communication trenches,
made organized movement impossible. It was not till our pressure
elsewhere diverted the German artillery fire that the wood as a
whole could be won. Slowly and stubbornly we pushed our way
northwards from our point of lodgment in the southern end. Six
counter-attacks were launched against us on Sunday night and
Monday, and on Monday afternoon the sixth succeeded in winning
back some of the wood. These desperate efforts exactly suited
our purpose, for the German losses under our artillery fire were
enormous. The fighting was continued on Tuesday, when we
recaptured the whole of the wood except the extreme northern
corner. That same day we approached the north end of Mametz
Wood. The difficulty of the fighting and the strength of the defence
may be realized from the fact that the taking of a few hundred
yards or so of woodland meant invariably the capture of several
hundred prisoners.

By Wednesday evening, 12th July, the 21st Division had taken

1916] FAYOLLE'S ADVANCE. 173

virtually the whole of Mametz Wood. Its two hundred odd acres,
interlaced with barbed wire, honeycombed with trenches, and
bristling with machine guns, had given us a tough struggle, espe-
cially the last strip on the north side, where the German machine-
gun positions enfiladed every advance. Next day we cleared this
corner and broke out of the wood, and were face to face at last
with the main German second position. Meantime the Wood of
Trdnes had become a Tom Tiddler's Ground, which neither antag-
onist could fully claim or use as a base. It was at the mercy of
the artillery fire of both sides, and it was impossible in the time
to construct shell-proof defences.

In the French sector the advance had been swift and con-
tinuous. The attack, as we have seen, was a complete surprise ;
for, half an hour before it began on 1st July, an order was issued
to the German troops, predicting the imminent fall of Verdun,
and announcing that a French offensive elsewhere had thereby
been prevented. On the nine-mile front from Maricourt to Estrees
the German first position had been carried the first day. The heavy
guns, when they had sufficiently pounded it, ceased their fire ; then
the " 75 's " took up the tale and plastered the front and com-
munication trenches with shrapnel ; then a skirmishing line ad-
vanced to report the damage done ; and finally the infantry moved
forward to an easy occupation. It had been the German method
at Verdun ; but it was practised by the French with far greater
precision, and with better fighting material.

On Monday, 3rd July, they had broken into the German second
position south of the Somme. Twelve German battalions were
hurried up from the Aisne, only to be destroyed. By the next
day the Foreign Legion in the Colonial Corps had taken Belloy-
en-Santerre, a point in the third line. On Wednesday the 35th
Corps had the better part of Estrees, and were within three miles
of Peronne. Counter-attacks by the German 17th Division, which
had been brought up in support, achieved nothing, and the German
railhead was moved from Peronne to Chaulnes. On the night of
Sunday, 9th July, Fayolle took Biaches, a mile from Peronne, and
the high ground called La Maisonnette, and held a front from there
to north of Barleux — a position beyond the German third line.
There was now nothing in front of him in this section except the
line of the upper Somme. This was south of the river. North of
it he had attained points in the second line, but had not yet carried
it wholly from Hem northwards.

The deep and broad wedge which their centre had driven towards

174 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

Peronne gave the French positions for a flanking fire on the enemy
ground on the left. Their artillery, even the heavies, was now far
forward in the open, and old peasants beyond the Somme, waiting
patiently in their captivity, heard the guns of their countrymen
sounding daily nearer. In less than a fortnight Fayolle had, on a
front ten miles long, with a maximum depth of six and a half
miles, carried 50 square miles of fortifications, and captured 85
guns, vast quantities of war material, 236 officers, and 12,000 men.
The next step was for the British to attack the enemy second
position before them. It ran, as we have seen, from Pozieres
through the Bazentins and Longueval to Guillemont. On Thurs-
day, 13th July, we were in a condition to begin the next stage of
our advance. The capture of Contalmaison had been the indis-
pensable preliminary, and immediately following its fall Sir Douglas
Haig issued his first summary : " After ten days and nights of
continuous fighting, our troops have completed the methodical
capture of the whole of the enemy's first system of defence on a
front of 14,000 yards. This system of defence consisted of numer-
ous and continuous lines of fire trenches, extending to various
depths of from 2,000 to 4,000 yards, and included five strongly
fortified villages, numerous heavily wired and entrenched woods,
and a large number of immensely strong redoubts. The capture
of each of these trenches represented an operation of some impor-
tance, and the whole of them are now in our hands." The
summary did not err from overstatement. If the northern part
of our front, from Thiepval to Gommecourt, had not succeeded,
the southern part had steadily bitten its way into as strong a
position as any area of the campaign could show. The Allies had
already attracted against them the bulk of the available German
reserves, and had largely destroyed them. The strength of their
plan lay in its deliberateness and the mathematical sequence of
its stages.

IV.

At dawn on Friday, the 14th, began the second stage of the
battle.

The most methodical action has its gambling element, its
moments when a risk must be boldly taken. Without such hazards
there can be no chance of surprise. The British attack of 14th
July had much of this calculated audacity. In certain parts — as
at Contalmaison Villa and Mametz Wood — we held positions
within a few hundred yards of the enemy's line. But in the sec-

i9i6] THE SECOND STAGE. 175

tion from Bazentin-le-Grand to Longueval there was a long advance
— in some places almost a mile — before us up the slopes north of
Caterpillar Valley. On the extreme right the Wood of Tr6nes
gave us a somewhat indifferent place of assembly. " The decision,"
wrote Sir Douglas Haig, " to attempt a night attack of this magni-
tude with an army, the bulk of which had been raised since the
beginning of the war, was perhaps the highest tribute that could
be paid to the quality of our troops." The difficulties before the
British attack were so great that more than one distinguished
French officer doubted its possibility.

The day of the attack was of fortunate omen, for the 14th of
July was the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the fete-day of
France. In Paris there was such a parade as that city had not
seen in its long history — a procession of Allied troops, Belgians,
Russians, British infantry, and last of all, the blue-coated heroes
of France's incomparable line. It was a shining proof to the
world of the unit)' of the Alliance. And on the same day, while
the Paris crowd was cheering the Scottish pipers as they swung
down the boulevards, the British troops in Picardy were breaking
through the German line, crying Vive la France ! in all varieties
of accent. It was France's Day in the eyes of every soldier, the
sacred day of that people whom in farm and village and trench
they had come to reverence and love.

The front chosen for attack was from a point south-east of
Pozieres to Longueval and Delville Wood, a space of some four
miles. Incidentally, it was necessary for our right flank to clear
the Wood of Trones. Each village in the second line had its
adjacent or enfolding wood — Bazentin-le-Petit, Bazentin-le-Grand,
and at Longueval the big Wood of Delville. In the centre, a mile
and more beyond the German position, the Wood of Foureaux,
which we called High Wood, hung like a dark cloud on the sky line.

The British plan was for the 3rd Corps on the left to form a
defensive flank, pushing out patrols in the direction of Pozieres.
On its right the 15th Corps moved against Bazentin-le-Petit Wood
and village, and the slopes leading up to High Wood. On their
right, again, the 13th Corps was to take Bazentin-le-Grand, to
carry Longueval and Delville Wood, and to clear Trdnes Wood and
form a defensive flank. In the event of a rapid success the occa-
sion might arise for the use of cavalry, so cavalry divisions were
put under the orders of the two corps. The preceding bombard-
ment was to be assisted by the French heavy guns firing on Ginchy,
Guillemont, and Leuze and Bouleaux Woods. In order to distract

176 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

the enemy, the 8th Corps north of the Ancre attacked with gas
and smoke, as if there was to be the main area of our effort.

At 3.25 a.m., when the cloudy dawn had fully come, the infantry
attacked. So complete was the surprise that in the dark the bat-
talions which had the farthest road to go came within 200 yards of
the enemy's wire with scarcely a casualty. When the German
barrage came it fell behind them. The attack failed nowhere. In
some parts it was slower than others — where the enemy's defence
had been less comprehensively destroyed ; but by the afternoon
all our tasks had been accomplished. To take one instance. The
two attacking brigades of the 3rd Division were each composed
of two battalions of the New Army and two of the old Regulars.
The general commanding put the four new battalions into the first
line. The experiment proved the worth of the new troops, for a
little after midday their work was done, their part of the German
second line was taken, and 662 un wounded men, 36 officers (in-
cluding a battalion commander), 4 howitzers, 4 field guns, and
14 machine guns were in their hands. The 21st Division had
Bazentin-le-Petit Wood and village, and the 7th was far up the
slopes towards High Wood, after taking Bazentin-le-Grand Wood ;
the 3rd Division had Bazentin-le-Grand, and the 9th had all but
a small part of Longueval. Trones Wood had been cleared, and a
line was held eastward to Maltzhorn Farm. By the evening we
had the whole second line from Bazentin-le-Petit to Longueval, a
front of over three miles, and in the twenty-four hours' battle we
took over 2,000 prisoners, many of them of the 3rd Division of the
German Guard. The audacious enterprise had been crowned with
a miraculous success.

The great event of the day fell in the late afternoon. The 7th
Division, pushing northward against the 10th Bavarian Division,
penetrated the enemy's third position at High Wood, having their
flank supported by cavalry. It was 6.15 when the advance was
made, the first in eighteen months which had seen the use of our
mounted men. In the Champagne battle of 25th September, the
French had used some squadrons of General Baratier's Colonial
Horse in the ground between the first and second German lines to
sweep up prisoners and capture guns. This tactical expedient was
now followed by the British, with the difference that in Champagne
the fortified second line had not been taken, while in Picardy we
were through the two main fortifications and operating against a
more or less improvised position. The cavalry used were a troop
of the 7th Dragoon Guards and a troop of the Deccan Horse.

i9i6] DELVILLE WOOD. 177

They made their way up the shallow valley beyond Bazentin-le-
Grand, finding cover in the slope of the ground and the growing
corn. The final advance, about 8 p.m., was made partly on foot
and partly on horseback, and the enemy in the corn were ridden
down, captured, or slain with lance and sabre. The cavalry then
set to work to entrench themselves, to protect the flank of the
advancing infantry in High Wood. It was a clean and workman-
like job, and the news of it exhilarated the whole line. That cavalry
should be used at all seemed to forecast the end of the long trench
fighting and the beginning of a campaign in the open.

On Saturday, 15th July, we were busy consolidating the ground
won, and at some points pushing farther. Our aircraft, in spite of
the haze, were never idle, and in twenty-four hours they destroyed
four Fokkers, three biplanes, and a double-engined plane, without
the loss of a single machine. On the left the 19th Division fought
its way to the skirts of Pozieres, attacked the Leipzig Redoubt,
south of Thiepval, and continued the struggle for Ovillers. The
23rd Division advanced against the new switch line by which
the Germans had connected the uncaptured portion of the second
position with their third. The 7th Division lost most of High Wood
under the pressure of counter-attacks by the German 7th Division,
and next day we withdrew all troops from the place. They had
done their work, and had formed a screen behind which we had
consolidated our line.

On the right, around Longueval and Delville Wood, was being
waged the fiercest contest of all. The position there was now an
awkward salient, for our front ran on one side westward to Pozieres,
and on the other southward to Maltzhorn Farm. The 9th Division
concerned had on the 14th taken the greater part of the village,
and on the morning of the 15th its reserve brigade (the South
African under Brigadier-General Lukin) was ordered to clear the
wood. The struggle which began on that Saturday before dawn
was to last for thirteen days, and to prove one of the costliest
episodes of the whole battle. The situation was an ideal one for
the defence. Longueval lay to the south-west of the wood, a
straggling village with orchards at its northern end where the
road climbed towards Flers. Delville itself was a mass of broken
tree trunks, matted undergrowth, and shell holes. It had rides
cut in it, running from north to south and from east to west, which
were called by such names as " The Strand " and " Princes Street,"
and along these were the enemy trenches. The place was terribly
at the mercy of the enemy guns, and on the north and south-east

178 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

sides the Germans had a strong trench line, some seventy yards
from the trees, bristling with machine guns. The problem for the
attack was far less to carry the wood than to hold it ; for as soon
as the perimeter was reached, our men came under machine-gun
fire, while the whole interior was incessantly bombarded.

The South African Brigade carried the wood by noon on the
15th, but the other brigades did not obtain the whole of Longueval,
and the enemy, from the northern end of the village, was able
to counter-attack and force us back. The South Africans tried
again on the 16th, but they had no chance under the hostile fire,
and a counter-attack of the German 8th Division forced them
in on the central alley. Again on the 17th they endeavoured to
clear the place, and again with heavy losses they failed. But
they clung desperately to the south-west corner, and it was not
until the 20th that they were relieved. For four days the heroic
remnant, under Lieutenant-Colonel Thackeray of the 3rd Bat-
talion, along with the Scots of the other brigades, wrestled in hand-
to-hand fighting such as the American armies knew in the last
Wilderness Campaign. Their assault had been splendid, but their
defence was a greater exploit. They hung on without food or
water, while their ranks were terribly thinned, and at the end,
when one battalion had lost all its officers, they repulsed an attack
by the German 5th Division, the corps d 'elite of Brandenburg. In
this far-flung battle all parts of the empire won fame, and not
least was the glory of the South African contingent.*

On Sunday, 16th July, Ovillers was at last completely taken
after a stout defence, and the way was prepared for a general
assault on Pozieres. That day, too, on our right we widened the
gap in the German front by the capture of Waterlot Farm, half-
way between Longueval and Guillemont. The weather broke
from the 16th to the 18th, and drenching rain and low mists made
progress difficult. The enemy had got up many new batteries,
whose positions could not be detected in such weather by our
aircraft. He himself was better off, since we were fighting on
ground he had once held, and he had the register of our trench
lines and most of our possible gun positions. Our situation at
Longueval was now an uncomfortable salient, and it was necessary
to broaden it by pushing out towards High Wood. On the 20th,
accordingly, the 7th Division attacked again at High Wood, and

* Delville Wood was not wholly in our hands till the attack of 25th August.
The story of the South Africans' stand may be read in the present writer's History
of the South African Forces in France, 1920.

1916] THE GERMAN SECOND POSITION. 179

carried all of it except the north part. A trench line ran across
that north corner, where the prospect began to open towards
Flers and Le Sars. This position was held with extraordinary
resolution by the enemy, and it was two months from the first
assault before the whole wood was in our possession.

The next step was to round off our capture of the enemy second
position, and consolidate our ground, for it was very certain that
the Germans would not be content to leave us in quiet possession.
The second line being lost from east of Pozieres to Delville Wood,
the enemy was compelled to make a switch line to connect his
third position with an uncaptured point in his second, such as
Pozieres. Fighting continued in the skirts of Delville, and among
the orchards of Longueval, which had to be taken one by one.
Apart from this general activity, our two main objectives were
Pozieres and Guillemont. The first, with the Windmill beyond it,
was part of the crest of the Thiepval plateau. Our aim was the
crown of the ridge, the watershed, which would give us direct
observation over all the rolling country to the east. The vital
points on this watershed were Mouquet Farm, between Thiepval
and Pozieres ; the Windmill, now only a stone pedestal, on the
highroad east of Pozieres ; High Wood ; and the high ground
directly east of Longueval. Guillemont was necessary to us before
we could align our next advance with that of the French. Its
special difficulties lay in the fact that the approach to it from
Trones Wood lay over a perfectly bare and open piece of country ;
that the enemy had excellent direct observation from Leuze Wood
in its rear ; that the quarry on its western edge had been made
into a strong redoubt ; and that the ground to the south of it
between Maltzhorn and Falfemont Farms was broken by a three-
pronged ravine, with Angle Wood in the centre, which the Ger-
mans held in strength, and which made it hard to form a defensive
flank or link up with the French advance. Sir Douglas Haig has
summarized the position : " The line of demarcation agreed upon
between the French commander and myself ran from Maltzhorn
Farm due eastward to the Combles valley, and then north-eastward
up the valley to a point midway between Sailly-Saillisel and Morval.
These two villages had been fixed upon as the objective respectively
of the French left and of my right. In order to advance in co-
operation with my right, and eventually to reach Sailly-Saillisel,
our Allies had still to fight their way up that portion of the mair
ridge which lies between the Combles valley on the west and the

180 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Julv

river Tortille on the east. To do so, they had to capture in the
first place the strongly-fortified villages of Maurepas, Le Forest,
Rancourt, and Fregicourt, besides many woods and strong systems
of trenches. As the high ground on each side of the Combles
valley commands the slopes of the ridge on the opposite side it
was essential that the advance of the two armies should be simul-
taneous and made in the closest co-operation."

The weather did not favour us. The third week of July was rain
and fog. The last week of that month and the first fortnight of
August saw blazing summer weather, which in that arid and dusty
land told severely on men wearing heavy steel helmets and carrying
a load of equipment. There was little wind, and a heat-haze lay
low on the uplands. This meant poor visibility at a time when air
reconnaissance was most vital. Hence the task of counter-bom-
bardment grew very difficult, and the steps in our progress became
for the moment slow and irregular. A battle which advances
without a hitch exists only in a staff college kriegspiel, and the wise
general, in preparing his plans, makes ample allowance for delays.

On 19th July there came the first attempt on Guillemont from
Tr6nes Wood, an attack by the 18th Division which failed to
advance. On the 20th the French made good progress, pushing
their front east of Hardecourt beyond the Combles-Clery light
railway, and south of the Somme widening the gap by carrying
the German defence system from Barleux to Vermandovillers.
For the two days following our guns bombarded the whole enemy
front, and on the Sunday, 23rd July, came the next great infantry
attack. That attack had a wide front, but its main fury was
on the left, where Pozieres and its Windmill crowned the slope
up which ran the Albert-Bapaume road. The village had long
ere this been pounded flat, the Windmill was a stump, and the
trees in the gardens matchwood, but every yard of those devas-
tated acres was fortified in the German fashion with covered
trenches, deep dug-outs, and machine-gun emplacements.

The assault was delivered from two sides — the 48th Division
(South Midland Territorials) moving from the south-west in the
ground between Pozieres and Ovillers, and the 1st Australian
Division from the south-east, advancing from the direction of
Contalmaison Villa. The movement began about midnight, and
the Midlanders speedily cleared out the defences which the Germans
had flung out south of the village to the left of the highroad, and
held a line along the outskirts of the place in the direction of Thiep-
val. The Australians had a difficult task ; for they had first to take

1916] THE AUSTRALIANS AT POZIERES. 181

a sunken road parallel with the highway, then a formidable line of
trenches, and finally the high road itself which ran straight through
the middle of the village. The Australian troops then and after-
wards were second to none in the new British Army. In the
famous landing at Gallipoli and in a dozen desperate fights in that
peninsula, culminating in the great battle which began on August
6, 1915, they had shown themselves incomparable in the fury of
assault and in reckless personal valour. In the grim struggle now
beginning they had to face a far heavier fire and far more formidable
defences than anything that Gallipoli could show. For their task
not gallantry only but perfect battle discipline and perfect coolness
were needed. The splendid troops were equal to the call. They
won the highroad after desperate fighting in the ruined houses,
and established a line where the breadth of the road alone separated
them from the enemy. A famous division of British regulars on
this flank sent them a message to say that they were proud to
fight by their side.

On Monday and Tuesday the battle continued, and by the
evening of the latter day most of Pozieres was in our hands. By
Wednesday morning, 26th July, the whole village was ours, and
the Midlanders on the left were pushing northward and had taken
two lines of trenches. The two divisions joined hands at the
north corner, where they occupied the cemetery, and held a portion
of the switch line. Here they lived under a perpetual enemy
bombardment. The Germans still held the Windmill, which was
the higher ground and gave them a good observation point. The
sight of that ridge from the road east of Ovillers was one that no
man who saw it was likely to forget. It seemed to be smothered
monotonously in smoke and fire, while wafts of the thick heliotrope
smell of the lachrymatory shells floated down from it. Out of the
dust and glare would come Australian units which had been relieved,
long, lean men with the shadows of a great fatigue around their
deep-set, far-sighted eyes. They were perfectly cheerful and com-
posed, and no Lowland Scot was ever less inclined to expansive
speech. At the most they would admit in their slow, quiet voices
that what they had been through had been " some battle."

Meantime there had been heavy fighting around Longueval
and in Delville Wood.* On Thursday, the 27th, the wood was
cleared all but its eastern side, and next day the last enemy out-

• The German troops employed in the defence of Longueval and Delville Wood
since 14th July were successively the 6th Regiment of the ioth Bavarian Division,
the 8th Division of the 4th Corps, and the 5th Division of the 3rd Corps.

182 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug,

post in Longueval village was captured by the 3rd Division.
At the same time the 51st Division (Highland Territorials) was
almost continuously engaged at High Wood, where in one week it
made three fruitless attempts to drive the enemy out of the northern
segment. On 23rd July we attacked Guillemont from the south
and west, but failed, owing to the strength of the enemy's machine-
gun fire. Early on the morning of Sunday, the 30th, the Aus-
tralians attacked at Pozieres towards the Windmill, and after a
fierce hand-to-hand struggle in the darkness, advanced their front
to the edge of the trench labyrinth which constituted that position.
Next morning we attacked Guillemont from the north-west and
west, while the French pushed almost to the edge of Maurepas.
Troops of the 30th Division advanced right through Guillemont,
till the failure of the attack on the left compelled them to retire,
with heavy losses. Our farthest limit was the station on the light
railway just outside Guillemont village.

Little happened for some days. The heat was now very great,
so great that even men inured to an Australian summer found it
hard to bear, and the maddening haze still muffled the landscape.
We were aware that the enemy had strengthened his position,
and brought up new troops and batteries. The French were
meantime fighting their way through the remnants of the German
second line north of the Somme between Hem Wood and Monacu
Farm. There were strong counter-attacks against Delville Wood,
which were beaten off by our guns before they got to close range.
Daily we bombarded points in the enemy hinterland, and did much
destruction among their depots and billets and heavy batteries.
And then on the night of Friday, 4th August, came the final attack
at Pozieres.

We had already won the German second position up to the top
of the village, where the new switch line joined on. The attack
was in the nature of a surprise. It began at nine in the evening,
when the light was still strong. The 2nd Australian Division
advanced on the right at the Windmill, and the 12th Division on
the left. The trenches, which had been almost obliterated by our
guns, were carried at a rush, and before the darkness came we had
taken the rest of the second position on a front of 2,000 yards.
Counter-attacks followed all through the night, but they were
badly co-ordinated, and achieved nothing. On Saturday we had
pushed our line north and west of the village from 400 to 600
yards on a front of 3,000. Early on Sunday morning the Germans
counter-attacked with liquid fire, and gained a small portion of

i9i6] THE GERMAN RESISTANCE WEAKENS. 183

the trench line, which was speedily recovered. The position was
now that we held the much-contested Windmill, and that we ex-
tended on the east of the village to the west end of the switch,
while west of Pozieres we had pushed so far north that the German
line was drooping like the eaves of a steep roof. We had taken
some 600 prisoners, and at last we were looking over the watershed.

The following week saw repeated attempts by the enemy to
recover his losses. The German bombardment was incessant and
intense, and on the high bare scarp around the Windmill our troops
had to make heavy drafts on their fortitude. On Tuesday, 8th
August, the British right, attacking at 4.20 a.m. in conjunction
with the French, closed farther in on Guillemont. At Pozieres,
too, every day our lines advanced, especially in the angle toward
Mouquet Farm, between the village and Thiepval. We were
exposed to a flanking fire from Thiepval, and to the exactly ranged
heavy batteries around Courcelette and Grandcourt. Our task
was to break off and take heavy toll of the many German counter-
attacks, and on the rebound to win, yard by yard, ground which
made our position secure.

In the desperate strain of this fighting there was evidence that
the superb German machine was beginning to creak and falter.
Hitherto its strength had lain in the automatic precision of its
ordering. Now, since reserves had to be hastily collected from all
quarters, there was some fumbling in the command. Attacks made
by half a dozen battalions collected from three divisions, battalions
which had never before been brigaded together, were bound to
lack the old vigour and cohesion. Units lost direction, staff work
was imperfect, and what should have been a hammer-blow became
a loose scrimmage. It was the fashion in Germany at this time
to compare the Somme offensive of the Allies with the German
attack on Verdun, very much to the advantage of the latter. The
deduction was false. In every military aspect — in the extent of
ground won, in the respective losses, in the accuracy and weight of
artillery, in the quality of the infantry attacks, and in the precision
of the generalship — the Verdun attack fell far short of the Picardy
battle. The Verdun front, in its operative part, had been narrower
than that of the Somme, but at least ten more enemy divisions
had by the beginning of August been attracted to Picardy than had
appeared between Avocourt and Vaux up to the end of April.
The Crown Prince at Verdun speedily lost the initiative in any
serious sense ; on the Somme, Below and Gallwitz never possessed
it. There the enemy had to accept battle as the Allied will imposed

184 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

it, and no counter-attack could for a moment divert the Allied
purpose.

The French, by the second week of August, had carried all
the German third position south of the Somme. On Saturday,
12th August, after preparatory reconnaissances, they attacked the
third line north of the river from the east of Hardecourt to opposite
Buscourt. It was a well-organized assault, which on a front of
over four miles swept away the enemy trenches and redoubts to
an average depth of three-quarters of a mile. They took the
cemetery of Maurepas and the southern slopes of Hill 109 on the
Maurepas-Clery road, and reached the saddle west of Clery village.
By the evening over 1,000 prisoners were in their hands. Four
days later, on Wednesday, 16th August, they pushed their left
flank — that adjoining the British — north of Maurepas, taking a
mile of trenches, and south of that village captured all the enemy
line on a front of a mile and a quarter. Except for a few incon-
siderable sections the enemy third position opposite the French
had gone.

The British to the north were not yet ready for their grand as-
sault. They had the more difficult ground and the stronger enemy
forces against them, and for six weeks had been steadily fighting
uphill. At points they had reached the watershed, but they had
not won enough of the high ground to give them positions against
the German third line on the reverse slopes. The following week
was therefore a tale of slow progress to the rim of the plateau,
around Pozieres, High Wood, and Guillemont. Each day saw
something gained by hard fighting. On Sunday, the 13th, it was
a section of trench north-west of Pozieres, and another between
Bazentin-le-Petit and Martinpuich. On Tuesday it was ground
close to Mouquet Farm. On Wednesday it was the west and south-
west environs of Guillemont and a 300-yards advance at High Wood.
On Thursday there was progress north-west of Bazentin-le-Petit
towards Martinpuich, and between Ginchy and Guillemont.

On Friday, 18th August, came the next combined attack.
There was a steady pressure everywhere from Thiepval to the
Somme. The main advance took place at 2.45 in the afternoon,
in fantastic weather, with bursts of hot sunshine followed by
thunderstorms and flights of rainbows. On the left of the front
the attack was timed for 8 a.m. South of Thiepval, in the old
German first line, was a strong work, the Leipzig Redoubt, into
which we had already bitten. It was such a stronghold as we had

1916] THE WATERSHED REACHED. 185

seen at Beaumont Hamel, a nest of deep dug-outs and subterranean
galleries, well stocked with machine guns. As our front moved
east to Pozieres and Contalmaison we had neglected this corner,
which had gradually become the apex of a sharp salient. It was
garrisoned by Prussians of the 29th Regiment, who were confident
in the impregnability of their refuge. They led an easy life, while
their confederates on the crest were crowding in improvised trenches
under our shelling. Those not on duty slept peacefully in their
bunks at night, and played cards in the deep shelters. On Friday,
after a sharp and sudden artillery preparation, two British bat-
talions rushed the redoubt. We had learned by this time how to
deal with the German machine guns. Many of the garrison fought
stubbornly to the end ; others we smoked out and rounded up
like the occupants of a gambling-house surprised by the police.
Six officers and 170 men surrendered in a body. In all, some
2,000 Germans were caught in this trap by numbers less than
their own. There was no chance of a counter-stroke, for we got
our machine guns in position at once, and our artillery caught
every enemy attempt in the open.

Elsewhere on the front the fighting was harder and less success-
ful. In the centre the 15th Division pushed closer to Martinpuich,
and from High Wood southward we slightly advanced our lines.
We also carried the last orchard at Longueval, and pressed towards
the eastern rim of Delville Wood. Farther south we took the stone
quarry on the edge of Guillemont after a hand-to-hand struggle
of several hours, but failed to hold it. Meantime the French car-
ried the greater part of Maurepas village, and the place called
Calvary Hill to the south-east. This last was a great feat of arms,
for they had against them a fresh division of the Prussian Guard
(the 2nd), which had seen no serious action for many months.*

We were now fighting on the watershed. At Thiepval we held
the ridge that overlooked the village from the south-east. We
held all the high ground north of Pozieres, which gave us a clear
view of the country towards Bapaume, and our lines lay 300 yards
beyond the Windmill. We had all the west side of High Wood
and the ground between it and the Albert-Bapaume road. We
were half-way between Longueval and Ginchy, and our pincers
were encircling Guillemont. At last we were in position over
against, and in direct view of, the German third line.

The next week was occupied in repelling German attempts to

* The whole of the ist Guard Corps — the 1st and 2nd Divisions — was now
facing the French north of the Somme.

186 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

recover lost ground, and in efforts to sharpen still further the Thiep-
val salient and to capture Guillemont. Thiepval, it should be
remembered, was a point in the old German first line on the left
flank of the great breach, and Guillemont was the one big position
still untaken in the German second line. On Sunday, the 20th,
the Germans shelled our front heavily, and at about noon attacked
our new lines on the western side of High Wood. They reached
a portion of our trenches, but were immediately driven out by our
infantry. Next day, at High Wood and at Mouquet Farm, there
were frequent bombing attacks which came to nothing. On
Tuesday, 22nd August, we advanced steadily on our left, pushing
our line to the very edge of what was once Mouquet Farm as well
as to the north-east of it, and closing in to within 1,000 yards of
Thiepval. On Wednesday night and Thursday morning a very
severe counter-attack on our position at Guillemont, pressed with
great determination, failed to win any ground. That afternoon,
24th August, we advanced nearer Thiepval, coming, at one point,
within 500 yards of the place. In the evening, at five o'clock, the
French carried Maurepas, and pushed their right on to the Combles
railway, while the British 14th Division succeeded at last in clearing
Delville Wood. Next day the French success enabled us to join
up with our Allies south-east of Guillemont, where our pincers
were now beginning to grip hard.

The following week was one of slow and steady progress, the
most satisfactory feature of which was the frequency of the
German counter-attacks and their failure. On 26th August, for
example, troops of the 4th Division of the Prussian Guard, after
a heavy bombardment, attacked south of Thiepval village, and
were completely repulsed by the battalions holding that front.
On Thursday evening, 31st August, five violent and futile assaults
were made on our front between High Wood and Ginchy. It
looked as if the enemy was trying in vain to anticipate the next
great stage of our offensive which was now imminent.

On Sunday, 3rd September, at twelve noon, the whole Allied
front pressed forward. The 4th Australian and the 25th and
49th British divisions attacked on the extreme left — near Mouquet
Farm and towards Thiepval, and against the enemy position just
north of the Ancre. In their task they encountered the 1st Guard
Reserve Division, and took several hundred prisoners. They car-
ried various strong positions, won ground east of Mouquet Farm,
and still further narrowed the Thiepval salient. Our centre took
High Wood in the afternoon, but pressed on too far, and had to

igi6] MICHELER ATTACKS. 187

give ground before a German counter-attack. On their right the
7th Division took and lost Ginchy, while the 20th Division swept
through Guillemont to the sunken road, 500 yards to the east.
The fall of Guillemont meant that we now held the last point in the
old German second position between Mouquet Farm and the junc-
tion with the French. It had been most gallantly defended by
the enemy for twenty-five days without relief.* Farther south
we attacked but failed to capture Falfemont Farm. Meantime
the French — the 1st Corps — had marched steadily from victory
to victory. Shortly after noon, on a 3I miles front between
Maurepas and the Somme, they had attacked after an intense
artillery preparation. They carried the villages of Le Forest and
Clery, and north of the former place won the German lines to the
outskirts of Combles.

The advance was only beginning. On Monday, 4th September,
all enemy counter-attacks were beaten off, and further ground won
by the British near Falfemont Farm. That night, in a torrent of
rain, our men pressed on, and before midday on Tuesday, 5th
September, they were nearly a mile east of Guillemont, and well
into Leuze Wood. That evening the whole of the wood was taken,
as well as the hotly disputed Falfemont Farm, and the British were
less than 1,000 yards from the town of Combles, on which the
French were pressing in on the south.

Meantime, about two in the afternoon, a new French army came
into action south of the Somme on a front of a dozen miles from
Barleux to south of Chaulnes. This was General Micheler's Tenth
Army, with nine divisions in line, which had been waiting for two
months on the order to advance. At a bound it carried the whole
of the German first position from Vermandovillers to Chilly, a
front of nearly three miles, and took some 3,000 un wounded pris-
oners. Next day the French pressed on both north and south of
the river, and in the former area reached the west end of the Anderlu
Wood, carried the Hopital Farm, the Rainette Wood, part of the
ridge on which ran the road from Bouchavesnes to Clery, and the
village of Omiecourt.

From Wednesday, 6th September, to the night of Friday, the
8th, the Germans strove in vain to win back what they had lost.
On the whole thirty miles from Thiepval to Chilly there were
violent counter-attacks which had no success, though four divi-
sions of the Prussian Guard shared in them. The Allied artillery

* By the German 27th Division. Its commander, Otto von Moser, received the
Order of Merit.

188 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

broke up the massed infantry in most cases long before they reached
our trenches. On Saturday, gth September, the 16th (Irish)
Division carried Ginchy. The attack was delivered at 4.45 in the
afternoon, on a broad front, but, though highly successful in this
one area, it failed elsewhere. We made no progress in High Wood,
we were checked east of Delville, and, most important of all, we
did not succeed in carrying the work east of Ginchy called the
Quadrilateral, which at a later day was to prove a thorn in
our side.

Nevertheless the main objects had been attained. The Allied
front was now in a symmetrical line, and everywhere on the highest
ground. Combles was held in a tight clutch, and the French
Tenth Army was within 800 yards of Chaulnes Station, and was
holding 2 1 miles of the Chaulnes-Roye railway, thereby cutting
the chief German line of lateral communication. The first ob-
jective which the Allies had set before themselves on 1st July had
been won. By the 10th of September the British had made good
the old German second position, and had won the crest of the
uplands, while the French in their section had advanced almost
to the gates of Peronne, and their new army on the right had begun
to widen the breach. That moment was in a very real sense the
end of a phase, the first and perhaps the most critical phase of the
Somme battle. The immense fortifications of her main position
represented for Germany the accumulated capital of two years.
She had raised these defences when she was stronger than her
adversaries in guns and in men. Now she was weaker, and her
capital was gone. Thenceforth the campaign entered upon a new
stage, new alike in strategical and tactical problems. From
Thiepval to Chaulnes the enemy was in improvised positions.
The day of manoeuvre battles had not come, but in that section
the rigidity of the old trench warfare had vanished. Haig's aim
was to push eastward till he secured a good defensive position,
and then turn north against the flank and rear of the German
positions beyond the Ancre. It looked as if he were soon to attain
the first half of his purpose.

CHAPTER LXIII.

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME (continued).
September g-November 18, 1916.

The Attack of 15th September — Raymond Asquith — The Attack of 25th September
—The Weather breaks — The October Fighting — The French reach Sailly-
Saillisel — The Battle of the Ancre — Summary of whole Action — Ludendorff's
Admissions.

The capture of Guillemont on 3rd September meant the end of the
German second position on the whole front between Thiepval and
Estrees. The Allies were faced with a new problem, to understand
which it is necessary to consider the nature of the defences still
before them and the peculiar configuration of the country.

The advance of 1st July had carried the first enemy lines on
a broad front, but the failure of the attack between Gommecourt
and Thiepval had made the breach eight miles less than the original
plan. The advance of 14th July gave us the second line on a still
narrower front — from Bazentin-le-Petit to Longueval. The danger
now was that the Allied thrust, if continued, might show a rapidly
narrowing wedge which would result in the formation of a sharp
and precarious salient. Accordingly, Sir Douglas Haig broadened
the breach by striking out to left and right, capturing first Pozieres
and the high ground at Mouquet Farm, and then — on his other
flank — Guillemont and Ginchy. These successes made the gap
in the second position some seven miles wide, and brought the
British front in most places to the highest ground, from which
direct observation was obtainable over the lower slopes and valley
pockets to the east. We did not yet hold the complete crown of
the ridge, though at Mouquet Farm and at High Wood we had
positions which no superior height commanded.

The German third position had at the beginning of the battle
been only in embryo. Before the attack of 14th July it had been
more or less completed, and by the beginning of September it had

189

igo A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

been greatly elaborated and a fourth position prepared behind it.
It was based on a string of fortified villages which lay on the reverse
slopes of the main ridge — Courcelette, Martinpuich, Flers, Les-
bceufs, and Morval. Behind it was an intermediate line, with Le
Sars, Eaucourt l'Abbaye, and Gueudecourt as strong positions in
it ; and farther back a fourth position, which lay just west of the
Bapaume-Peronne road, covering the villages of Sailly-Saillisel and
Le Transloy. This was the line protecting Bapaume ; the next
position, at this moment only roughly sketched out, lay well to
the east of that town.

Since the battle began the Germans had, up to the second week
in September, brought sixty-one divisions into action in the Somme
area ; seven had been refitted and sent in again ; on 14th Sep-
tember they were holding the line with fifteen divisions — which
gives fifty-three as the number which had been used up. The
German losses throughout had been high. The French casualties
had been comparatively light — for they had fought economically
under close cover of their guns, and had had, on the whole, the easier
tactical problem to face. The British losses had been, beyond
doubt, lower than those of the enemy, and our most conspicuous
successes, such as the advance of 1st July south of Thiepval and
the action of 14th July, had been achieved at a comparatively
small cost. Our main casualties arose from the failure north of
Thiepval on the first day, and the taking of desperately defended
and almost impregnable positions like Delville Wood and Guiile-
mont.

In the ten weeks' battle the enemy had shown many ups and
downs of strength. At one moment his whole front would appear
to be crumbling ; at another the arrival of fresh batteries from
Verdun and new troops would solidify his line. The effort had
strained his capacity to its full. On 5th September Hindenburg
and Ludendorff paid their first visit to the West, and the narrative
of the latter witnesses to their grave view of the case.* They
found that the German infantry, relying too much upon fortifications
and artillery, were losing their power of taking the offensive. They
resolutely faced the crisis, drastically revised the tactical methods,
and reorganized the whole Western front. Early in the battle
the old I. Army — which had been in abeyance since the preceding
spring — was revived north of the Somme and placed under Fritz
von Below, while the II. Army, now under Gallwitz, held the line
south of the river. An army group was created, under Prince

* See Ludendorfi's My War Memories, I., p. 265, etc

1916] THE NEW BRITISH OBJECTIVE. 191

Rupprecht of Bavaria, comprising his own VI. Army, the I. and
II. Armies, and the hitherto ungrouped VII. Army of Schubert.
Strenuous efforts were made to create a reserve, for Germany in
her defence had already used the best fighting material she pos-
sessed. During those ten weeks almost all her most famous units
had appeared on the Somme— the cream of the Bavarian troops,
the 5th Brandenburgers, and every single division of the Guard
and Guard Reserve Corps.

In the early days of September the Allied Command had
evidence that the enemy was in no very happy condition. The
loss of Ginchy and Guillemont had enabled the British to come
into line with the left wing of Fayolle's great advance, while the
fall of certain vital positions on the Thiepval Ridge gave us ob-
servation over a great space of country and threatened Thiepval,
which was the pivot of all the German defence in the northern
section of the battle-ground. The Allied front north of the Somme
had the river as a defensive flank on its right, and might presently
have the Ancre to fill the same part on its left. Hence the situation
was ripe for a further thrust which, if successful, might give our
advance a new orientation. If the German third line could be
carried, it might be possible to strike out on the flanks, repeating
on a far greater scale the practice already followed. Bapaume
itself was not the objective, but a thrust north-eastward across the
upp^r Ancre, to get behind the great slab of unbroken enemy
positions from Thiepval northwards. That would be the ultimate
reward of a complete success ; in the meantime our task was to
break through the enemy's third line and test his powers of re-
sistance.

It seemed a propitious moment for a concerted blow. The
situation on the whole front was good. Fayolle's left wing had won
conspicuous successes and had its spirits high, while Micheler
was moving his pincers towards Chaulnes and playing havoc with
the main German lateral communications. Elsewhere in Europe
things went well for the Allies. On 28th August Rumania had
entered the war, and her troops were pouring into Transylvania.
As it turned out, it was a premature and fruitless movement, but
it compelled Germany to take instant steps to meet the menace.
There had been important changes in the German High Command,
and it might reasonably be assumed that Hindenburg and Luden-
dorff were not yet quite at ease in the saddle. Brussilov was still
pinning down the Austro-German forces on the Russian front, and
Sarrail had just begun his offensive in the Balkans. In the event

192 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

of a real debacle in the West the enemy might be hard pressed
to find the men to fill the breach. Every action, it should be re-
membered, is a packet of surprises. There is an immediate local
objective, but on success any one of twenty consequences may
follow. The wise commander cannot count on any of these
consequences, but he must not neglect them in his calculations.
If the gods send him good fortune he must be ready to take it, and
he naturally chooses a season when the gods seem propitious.

I.

On Tuesday, 12th September, a comprehensive bombardment
began all along the British front from Thiepval to Ginchy. The
whole of Rawlinson's Fourth Army was destined for the action,
as well as the right corps — the 1st Canadian — of the Fifth Army,
while on the left of the battle to the nth Division was allotted a
preliminary attack, which was partly in the nature of a feint and
partly a necessary preparatory step. The immediate objective
of the different units must be clearly noted. On the left of the
main front the 2nd Canadian Division was directed against Cour-
celette. On their right the 15th (Scottish) Division had for its
task to clear the remains of the old Switch line and encircle Martin-
puich, but not — on the first day at any rate — to attempt the capture
of what was believed to be a most formidable stronghold. Going
south, the 50th and 47th Divisions had to clear High Wood. On
their right the New Zealanders had Flers as their objective, while
the 41st and 14th Divisions had to make good the ground east
and north of Delville Wood. Next to them the Guards and the
6th Division were to move north-east from Ginchy against Les-
bceufs and Morval, while on the extreme right of the British front
the 56th Division was to carry Bouleaux Wood and form a defen-
sive flank. It had been agreed between Haig and Foch that
Combles should not be directly attacked, but pinched by an advance
on both sides of it. This movement was no easy task, for,
in Haig's words, " the line of the French advance was narrowed
almost to a defile by the extensive and strongly fortified wood of
St. Pierre Vaast on the one side, and on the other by the Combles
valley." The closest co-operation was necessary to enable the
two commands to solve a highly intricate tactical problem.

The British force to be employed in the new advance was for
the most part fresh. The Guards had not been in action since Loos
the previous September, the Canadians were new to the Somme

i9i6] THE TANKS. 193

area, while it was the first experience of the New Zealanders
on the Western front. In this stage, too, a new weapon was
to be used. The " tanks," officially known as " Machine Gun
Corps, Heavy Section," had come out from home some time
before, and had been parked in secluded spots at the back of the
front. The world is now familiar with those strange machines,
which, shaped like monstrous toads, crawled imperturbably over
wire and parapets, butted down houses, shouldered trees aside,
and humped themselves over the stoutest walls. They were
an experiment which could only be proved in practice, and the
design in using them at this stage was principally to find out
their weak points, so as to perfect their mechanism for the future.
Their main tactical purpose was to clear out redoubts and nests
of machine guns which, as we had found to our sorrow at Loos,
might hang up the most resolute troops. For this object they
must precede the infantry attack, and the task of assembling them
before the parapets were crossed was fraught with difficulty, for
they were neither silent nor inconspicuous. The things had been
kept a profound secret, and until the very eve of the advance few
in the British army had even heard of them. On 14th September,
the day before our attack, some of them were seen by German
airplanes, and the German troops were warned that the British
had some strange new engine. Rumours also seem to have reached
Germany five or six weeks earlier, for orders had been issued to
supply the soldiers with a special kind of armour-piercing bullet.
But of the real nature of the device the enemy had no inkling.

On the night of Thursday, the 14th, the Fifth Army carried
out its preliminary task. On a front of a thousand yards south-
east of Thiepval the nth Division stormed the Hohenzollern
trench and the strong redoubt which the Germans called the
" Wunderwerk," taking many prisoners and themselves losing
little. The fame of this enterprise has been somewhat obscured
by the great advance which followed, but it was a most workmanlike
and skilful performance, and it had a real effect on the subsequent
battle. It deceived the enemy as to the exact terrain of the main
assault, and it caused him to launch a counter-attack in an area
which was part of the principal battle-ground, with the result that
our left wing, after checking his attack, was able to catch him on
the rebound.

The morning of Friday, 15th September, was perfect autumn
weather, with a light mist filling the hollows and shrouding the
slopes. At 6 a.m. the British bombardment, which had now lasted

194 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

for three days, rose to the fury of hurricane fire. The enemy had
a thousand guns of all calibres massed against us, and his defences
consisted of a triple line of entrenchments and a series of advanced
posts manned by machine guns. Our earlier bombardment had
cut his wire and destroyed many of his trenches, besides hampering
greatly his bringing up of men, rations, and shells. The final
twenty minutes of intense fire, slowly creeping forward with our
infantry close under its shadow, pinned him to his positions and
interfered with his counter-barrage. At twenty minutes past six
our men crossed the parapets and moved forward methodically
towards the enemy. The Germans, manning their trenches as
our guns lengthened, saw through the thin mist inhuman shapes
crawling towards them, things like gigantic slugs, spitting fire
from their mottled sides. They had been warned of a new weapon,
but what mortal weapon was this terror that walked by day ?
And ere they could collect their dazed wits the British bayonets
were upon them.

On the left and centre the attack was instantly successful.
The Canadians, after beating off the German counter-attack,
carried Courcelette in the afternoon. In this advance French-
Canadian troops played a distinguished part in winning back some
miles of French soil for their ancient motherland. On their right
the 15th Division, which had already been six weeks in line, per-
formed something more than the task allotted it. The capture
of Martinpuich was not part of the programme of the day's opera-
tions, but the Scots pushed east and west of the village, and at
a quarter-past five in the evening had the place in their hands.
Farther south there was fierce fighting in the old cockpit of High
Wood. It was two months since we had first effected an entrance
into its ill-omened shades, but we had been forced back, and for
long had to be content with its southern corner. The strong German
third line — which ran across its northern half on the very crest of
the ridge — and the endless craters and machine-gun redoubts made
it a desperate nut to crack. We had pushed out horns to east and
west of it, but the northern stronghold in the wood itself had defied
all our efforts. It was held on that day by troops of the 2nd Bav-
arian Corps, and the German ranks have shown no better fighting
stuff. Our first attack failed, but on a second attempt the 47th
Division, a little after noon, swept the place clear, though not
without heavy losses. Beyond them the New Zealanders, with
the 41st Division on their right, carried the switch line and took
Flers with little trouble. They were preceded by a tank, which

1916] BATTLE OF 15th SEPTEMBER. 195

waddled complacently up the main street of the village, with the
enemy's bullets rattling harmlessly off its sides, followed by cheer-
ing and laughing British troops. Farther south we advanced our
front for nearly a mile and a half. The 14th Division, debouching
from Delville Wood, cleared Mystery Corner on its eastern side
before the general attack began, and then pushed forward north
of Ginchy in the direction of Lesbceufs.

Only on the right wing was the tale of success incomplete.
Ginchy, it will be remembered, had been carried on gth September,
but its environs were not yet fully cleared, and the enemy held
the formidable point known as the Quadrilateral. This was
situated about 700 yards east of Ginchy, at a bend of the Morval
road, where it passed through a deep wooded ravine. The 6th
Division was directed against it, with the Guards on its left and the
56th Division on its right. The business of the last-named was
to carry Bouleaux Wood and form a defensive flank north of
Combles, while the Guards were to advance from Ginchy on Les-
bceufs. But the strength of the Quadrilateral foiled the plan.
The Londoners did indeed enter Bouleaux Wood, but the 6th Divi-
sion on their left was fatally hung up in front of the Quadrilateral,
and this in turn exposed the right flank of the Guards. The brigades
of the latter advanced, as they have always advanced, with perfect
discipline and courage. But both their flanks were enfiladed ;
the fron of attack was too narrow ; the sunken road before them
was strongly held by machine guns ; they somewhat lost direction ;
and, in consequence, no part of our right attack gained its full
objective. There, and in High Wood, we incurred most of the
casualties of the day. The check was the more regrettable since
complete success in this area was tactically more important than
elsewhere.

But after all deductions were made the day's results were in a
high degree satisfactory. We had broken in one day through three
of the enemy's main defensive systems, and on a front of over six
miles had advanced to an average depth of a mile. It was the
most effective blow yet dealt at the enemy by British troops.
It gave us not only the high ground between Thiepval and the
Combles valley, but placed us well down the forward slopes. " The
damage to the enemy's moral," said the official summary, " is prob-
ably of greater consequence than the seizure of dominating positions
and the capture of between four and five thousand prisoners."
Three famous Bavarian divisions had been engaged and com-
pletely shattered, and the whole enemy front thrown into disorder.

196 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

The tanks had, for a new experiment, done wonders. Some
of them broke down on the way up, and, of the thirty-two which
reached their starting-points, fourteen came to grief early in the
day. The remainder did brilliant service, some squatting on enemy
trenches and clearing them by machine-gun fire, some flattening
out uncut wire, others destroying machine-gun nests and redoubts
or strong points like the sugar factory at Courcelette. But their
moral effect was greater than the material damage they wrought.
The sight of those deliberate impersonal engines ruthlessly grinding
down the most cherished defences put something like panic into
troops who had always prided themselves upon the superior merit
of their own fighting " machine." Beyond doubt, too, the pres-
ence of the tanks added greatly to the zeal and confidence of our
assaulting infantry. An element of sheer comedy was introduced
into the grim business of war, and comedy is dear to the heart of
the British soldier. The crews of the tanks seemed to have ac-
quired some of the light-heartedness of the British sailor. Penned
up in a narrow stuffy space, condemned to a form of motion com-
pared with which that of the queasiest vessel was steady, and at
the mercy of unknown perils, these adventurers faced their task
with the zest of a boy on holiday.

In the achievements of the day our aircraft nobly co-operated.
They destroyed thirteen hostile machines and drove nine more in
a broken condition to ground. They bombarded enemy head-
quarters and vital points on all his railway lines. They destroyed
German kite balloons, and so put out the eyes of the defence.
They guided our artillery fire, and they brought back frequent
and accurate reports of every stage in the infantry advance.
Moreover, they attacked both enemy artillery and infantry with
their machine-gun fire from a low elevation. In the week of the
action on the whole Somme battle-ground only fourteen enemy
machines managed to cross our lines, while our airplanes made
between two thousand and three thousand flights far behind the
German front.

In the Guards' advance, among other gallant and distinguished
officers, there fell one whose death was, in a peculiar sense, a loss
to his country and the future. Lieutenant Raymond Asquith,
of the Grenadier Guards, the eldest son of the British Prime Min-
ister, died while leading his men through the fatal enfilading fire
from the corner of Ginchy village. In this war the gods took toll
of every rank and class. Few generals and statesmen in the Allied
nations but had to mourn intimate bereavements, and Castelnau

1916] RAYMOND ASQUITH. 197

had given three sons for his country. But the death of Raymond
Asquith had a poignancy apart from his birth and position, and
it may be permitted to an old friend to pay his tribute to a heroic
memory.

A scholar of the ripe Elizabethan type, a brilliant wit, an ac-
complished poet, a sound lawyer — these things were borne lightly,
for his greatness was not in his attainments but in himself. He
had always borne a curious aloofness towards mere worldly success.
He loved the things of the mind for their own sake — good books,
good talk, the company of friends — and the rewards of common
ambition seemed to him too trivial for a man's care. He was of
the spending type in life, giving freely of the riches of his nature,
but asking nothing in return. His carelessness of personal gain,
his inability to trim or truckle, and his aloofness from the facile
acquaintanceships of the modern world made him incomprehensible
to many, and his high fastidiousness gave him a certain air of cold-
ness. Most noble in presence, and with every grace of voice and
manner, he moved among men like a being of another race, scorn-
fully detached from the common struggle ; and only his friends
knew the warmth and loyalty of his soul. At the outbreak of war
he joined a Territorial battalion, from which he was later trans-
ferred to the Grenadiers. More than most men he hated the loud
bellicosities of politics, and he had never done homage to the deities
of the crowd. His critical sense made him chary of enthusiasm,
and it was no sudden sentimental fervour that swept him into the
army. He saw his duty, and though it meant the shattering of
every taste and interest, he did it joyfully, and did it to the full.
For a little he had a post on the Staff, but applied to be sent back
to his battalion, since he wished no privileges. In our long roll of
honour no nobler figure will find a place. He was a type of his
country at its best — shy of rhetorical professions, austerely self-
respecting, one who hid his devotion under a mask of indifference,
and, when the hour came, revealed it only in deeds. Many gavtj
their all for the cause, but few had so much to give. He loved his
youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant
and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows
not age or weariness or defeat.

Meanwhile the French had not been idle. On Wednesday,
13th September, two days before the British advance, Fayolle
carried Bouchavesnes, east of the Bapaume-Peronne road, taking
over two thousand prisoners. He was now not three miles from

198 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

the vital position of Mont St. Quentin — the key of Peronne — ■
facing it across the little valley of the Tortille. Next day the
French had the farm of Le Priez, south-east of Combles, and on
the afternoon of Sunday, the 17th, south of the Somme their right
wing carried the remainder of Vermandovillers and Berny, and
the intervening ground around Deniecourt. The following day
Deniecourt, with its strongly fortified park, was captured. This
gave them the whole of the Berny-Deniecourt plateau, commanding
the lower plateau where stood the villages of Ablaincourt and
Pressoire, and menaced Barleux, the pivot of enemy resistance
south of the river.

For the next week there was a lull in the main operations
while the hammer was swung back for another blow. On the
16th the Canadians were counter-attacked at Courcelette, and the
6th Bavarian Division, newly arrived, struck at the New Zealanders
at Flers. Both efforts failed, and south of Combles the fresh troops
of the German 18th Corps succeeded no better against the French.
The most vigorous counter-strokes were those which the Canadians
received, and which were repeated daily for nearly a week. Mean-
time, on Monday, the 18th, the Quadrilateral was carried — carried
by the division which had been blocked by it three days before.
It was not won without a heavy fight at close quarters, for the
garrison resisted stoutly ; but we closed in on it from all sides,
and by the evening had pushed our front five hundred yards be-
yond it to the hollow before Morval.

The week was dull and cloudy, and from the Monday to the
Wednesday it rained without ceasing. But by the Friday it had
cleared, though the mornings were now thick with autumn haze,
and we were able once more to get that direct observation and aerial
reconnaissance which is an indispensable preliminary to a great
attack. On Sunday, the 24th, our batteries opened again, this
time against the uncaptured points in the German third line like
Morval and Lesboeufs, against intermediate positions like Gueude-
court, and especially against Thiepval, which we now commanded
from the east. The plan was for an attack by the Fourth Army
on Monday the 25th, with — on its left wing — small local objectives ;
but, on the right and centre, aiming at completing the captures
which had been the ultimate objectives of the advance of the 15th.
The following day the right wing of the Fifth Army would come
into action, and it was hoped that from Thiepval to Combles the
enemy would be driven back to his fourth line of defence and our
own front pushed up well within assaulting distance.

1916] CAPTURE OF COMBLES AND THIEPVAL. 199

The hour of attack on the 25th was fixed at thirty-five minutes
after noon. It was bright, cloudless weather, but the heat of the
sun had lost its summer strength. That day saw an advance
the most perfect yet made in any stage of the battle, for in almost
every part of the field we won what we sought. The extreme left
of the 3rd Corps was held up north of Courcelette, but the remaining
two divisions carried out the tasks assigned to them. So did the
centre and left divisions of the 15th Corps, while part of the 21st
Division, assisted by a tank and an airplane, took Gueudecourt.
The 14th Corps succeeded everywhere. The Guards, eager to
avenge their sufferings of the week before, despite the heavy losses
on their left, swept irresistibly upon Lesboeufs. South of them the
5th Division took Morval, the village on the height north of Combles
which, with its subterranean quarries and elaborate trench system,
was a most formidable stronghold. Combles was now fairly be-
tween the pincers. It might have fallen that day, but the French
attack on Fregicourt failed, though they carried the village of
Rancourt on the Bapaume-Peronne road.

By the evening of the 25th the British had stormed an enemy
front of six miles between Combles and Martinpuich to a depth of
more than a mile. The fall of Morval gave them the last piece of
uncaptured high ground on that backbone of ridge which runs
from Thiepval through High Wood and Ginchy. The next day
the French took Fregicourt, and Combles fell. The enemy had
evacuated it, and though great stores of material were taken in its
catacombs, the number of prisoners was small.

Meantime, on the British left, on the 26th, the success was not
less conspicuous. The nth and 18th Divisions of the Fifth Army,
advancing at twenty-five minutes after noon under the cover of
our artillery barrage, had carried Thiepval, the north-west corner
of Mouquet Farm, and the Zollern Redoubt on the eastern crest.
The German pivot had gone, the pivot which they had believed
impregnable. So skilful was our barrage that our men were over
the German parapets and into the dug-outs before machine guns
could be got up to repel them. Here the prisoners were numerous,
for the attack was in the nature of a surprise.

On the evening of 26th September the Allied fortunes in the
West had never looked brighter. The enemy was now in his
fourth line, without the benefit of the high ground, and there was
no chance of retrieving his disadvantages by observation from the
air. Since 1st July the British alone had taken over twenty-six
thousand prisoners, and had engaged thirty-eight German divi-

200 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

sions, the flower of the army, of which twenty-nine had been with-
drawn exhausted and broken. The enemy had been compelled to
use up his reserves in repeated costly and futile counter-attacks
without compelling the Allies to relax for one moment their
methodical pressure. A hundred captured documents showed
that the German moral had been shaken, and that the German
machine was falling badly out of gear. In normal seasons at least
another month of fine weather might be reasonably counted on,
and in that month further blows might be struck with cumulative
force. In France they spoke of a " Picardy summer " — of fair
bright days at the end of autumn when the ground was dry and the
air of a crystal clearness. A fortnight of such days would suffice
for a crowning achievement.

The hope was destined to fail. The guns were scarcely silent
after the great attack of the 26th, when the weather broke, and
October was one long succession of tempestuous gales and drenching
rains.

II.

To understand the difficulties which untoward weather imposed
on the Allied advance, it is necessary to grasp the nature of the
fifty square miles of ground which three months' fighting had
given them, and over which lay the communications between
their firing line and the rear. From a position like the north end
of High Wood almost the whole British battle-ground on a clear
day was visible to the eye. To reach the place from the old Allied
front line some four miles of bad roads had to be traversed. They
would have been bad roads in a moorland parish, where they suf-
fered only the transit of the infrequent carrier's cart ; for at the
best they were mere country tracks, casually engineered, and with
no solid foundation. But here they had to support such a traffic
as the world had scarcely seen before. Not the biggest mining
camp or the vastest engineering undertaking had ever produced
one tithe of the activity which existed behind each section of the
battle line. There were places like Crewe, places like the skirts
of Birmingham, places like Aldershot or Salisbury Plain. It has
already been pointed out that the immense and complex mechanism
of modern armies resembles a series of pyramids which taper to a
point as they near the front. Though all modern science had gone
to the making of this war, at the end, in spite of every artificial
aid, it became elementary, akin in many respects to the days of
bows and arrows. It was true of the whole front, but the Somme

1916] THE VIEW FROM HIGH WOOD. 201

battle-ground was peculiar in this, that the area of land where the
devices of civilization broke down was far larger than elsewhere.
Elsewhere it was denned more or less by the limits of the enemy's
observation and fire. On the Somme it was defined by the previous
three months' battle. It was not the German guns which made
the trouble on the ground between the Albert-Peronne road and
the British firing line. Casual bombardments vexed us little. It
was the hostile elements and the unkindly nature of Mother Earth.

The country roads had been rutted out of recognition by endless
transport, and, since they never had much of a bottom, the toil
of the road-menders had nothing to build upon. New roads were
hard to make, for the chalky soil was poor, and had been so churned
up by shelling and the movement of guns and troops that it had
lost all cohesion. Countless shells had burst below the ground,
causing everywhere subsidences and cavities. There was no stone
in the countryside and little wood, so repairing materials had to
be brought from a distance, which still further complicated the
problem. To mend a road you must give it a rest, but there was
little chance of a rest for any of those poor tortured passages. In
all the district there were but two good highways — one running at
right angles to our front from Albert to Bapaume, the other parallel
to our old front line from Albert to Peronne. These, to begin with,
were the best type of routes nationales — broad, well-engineered,
lined with orderly poplars. By the third month of the battle even
these were showing signs of wear, and to travel on either in a motor
car was a switchback journey. If the famous highroads declined,
what was likely to be the condition of the country lanes which rayed
around Contalmaison, Longueval, and Guillemont ?

Let us assume that early in October we have taken our stand
at the northern angle of High Wood. It is only a spectre of a wood,
a horrible place of matted tree trunks and crumbling trench lines,
full of mementoes of the dead and all the dreadful debris of battle.
To reach it we have walked across two miles of what once must
have been breezy downland, patched with little fields of roots
and grain. It is now like a waste brickfield in a decaying suburb,
pock-marked with shell-holes, littered with cartridge clips, equip-
ment, fragments of wire, and every kind of tin can. Over all the
area hangs the curious, bitter, unwholesome smell of burning —
an odour which will always recall to every soldier the immediate
front of battle. The air is clear, and we look from the height over
a shallow trough towards the low slopes in front of the Transloy
road, behind which lies the German fourth line. Our own front

202 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

is some thousands of yards off, close under that hillock which is
the famous Butte de Warlencourt. Far on our left is the lift of
the Thiepval ridge, and nearer us, hidden by the slope, are the ruins
of Martinpuich. Le Sars and Eaucourt l'Abbaye are before us,
Flers a little to the right, and beyond it Gueudecourt. On our
extreme right rise the slopes of Sailly-Saillisel — one can see the
shattered trees lining the Bapaume-Peronne road — and, hidden
by the fall of the ground, are Lesbceufs and Morval. Behind us
are things like scarred patches on the hillsides. They are the
remains of the Bazentin woods and the ominous wood of Delville.
The whole confines of the British battle-ground lie open to the eye,
from the Thiepval ridge in the north to the downs which ring the
site of Combles. Look west, and beyond the dreary country we
have crossed rise green downs set with woods untouched by shell —
the normal, pleasant land of Picardy. Look east, beyond our front
line and the smoke puffs, across the Warlencourt and Gueude-
court ridges, and on the sky-line there also appear unbroken woods,
and here and there a church spire and the smoke of villages. The
German retirement in September had been rapid, and we have
reached the fringes of a land as yet little scarred by combat. We
are looking at the boundaries of the battlefield. We have pushed
the enemy right up to the edge of habitable and undevastated
country, but we pay for our success in having behind us a strip of
sheer desolation.

There were thus two no-man's-lands. One was between the
front lines ; the other lay between the old enemy front and the
front we had won. The second was the bigger problem, for across
it must be brought the supplies of a great army. This was a
war of motor transport, and we were doing what the early Vic-
torians pronounced impossible — running the equivalent of steam
engines not on prepared tracks, but on highroads, running them
day and night in endless relays. And these highroads were not
the decent macadamized ways of England, but roads which would
be despised in Sutherland or Connaught.

The problem was hard enough in fine weather ; but let the rain
come and soak the churned-up soil, and the whole land became a
morass. There was no pave, as in Flanders, to make a firm cause-
way. Every road became a watercourse, and in the hollows the
mud was as deep as a man's thighs. An army must be fed, troops
must be relieved, guns must be supplied, and so there could be no
slackening of the traffic. Off the roads the ground was a squelching
bog, dug-outs crumbled in, and communication trenches ceased

I9i6] TOPOGRAPHY OF BATTLE-GROUND. 203

to be. In areas such as Ypres and Festubert, where the soil was
naturally water-logged, the conditions were worse ; but at Ypres
and Festubert we had not six miles of sponge, varied by mud tor-
rents, across which all transport must pass.

Weather is a vital condition of success in operations where
great armies are concerned, for men and guns cannot fight on air.
In modern war it is more urgent than ever, since aerial reconnais-
sance plays so great a part, and Napoleon's " fifth element," mud,
grows in importance with the complexity of the fighting machine.
Again, in semi-static trench warfare, where the same area remains
for long the battlefield, the condition of the ground is the first fact
to be reckoned with. Once we grasp this, the difficulty of the
October campaign, waged in almost continuous rain, will be ap-
parent. But no words can convey an adequate impression of the
Somme area after a week's downpour. Its discomforts had to be
endured to be understood.

The topography of the immediate battle-ground demands a
note from the point of view of its tactical peculiarities. The British
line at the end of September ran from the Schwaben Redoubt,
1,000 yards north of Thiepval, along the ridge to a point north-
east of Courcelette ; then just in front of Martinpuich, Flers,
Gueudecourt, and Lesbceufs to the junction with the French.
Morval was now part of the French area. From Thiepval to the
north-east of Courcelette the line was for the most part on the
crest of the ridge ; it then bent southward and followed generally
the foot of the eastern slopes. But a special topographical feature
complicated the position. Before our front a shallow depression
ran north-west from north of Sailly-Saillisel to about two thousand
yards south of Bapaume, where it turned westward and joined
the glen of the Ancre at Miraumont. From the main Thiepval-
Morval ridge a series of long spurs descended into this valley, of
which two were of special importance. One was the hammer-
headed spur immediately west of Flers, at the western end of which
stood the tumulus called the Butte de Warlencourt. The other
was a spur which, lying across the main trend of the ground, ran
north from Morval to Thilloy, passing 1,000 yards to the east of
Gueudecourt. Behind these spurs lay the German fourth position.
It was in the main a position on reverse slopes, and so screened
from immediate observation, though our command of the higher
ground gave us a view of its hinterland. Our own possession of the
heights, great though its advantages were, had certain drawbacks,
for it meant that our communications had to make the descent

204 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

of the reverse slopes, and were thus exposed to some extent to the
enemy's observation and long-range fire.

The next advance of the British army had therefore two
distinct objectives. The first — the task of the Fourth Army —
was to carry the two spurs, and so get within assaulting distance
of the German fourth line. Even if the grand assault should be
postponed, the possession of the spurs would greatly relieve our
situation, by giving us cover for our advanced gun positions and
a certain shelter for the bringing up of supplies. It should be
remembered that the spurs were not part of the German main
front. They were held by the enemy as intermediate positions,
and very strongly held — every advantage being taken of sunken
roads, buildings, and the undulating nature of the country. They
represented for the fourth German line what Contalmaison had
represented for the second ; till they were carried no general as-
sault on the main front could be undertaken. The second task —
that of the Fifth Army — was to master the whole of the high ground
on the Thiepval ridge, so as to get direct observation into the Ancre
glen and over the uplands north and north-east of it.

The month of October provided a record in wetness, spells of
drenching rain being varied by dull, misty days, so that the sodden
land had no chance of drying. The carrying of the spurs — meant
as a preliminary step to a general attack — proved an operation so
full of difficulties that it occupied all our efforts during the month,
and with it all was not completed. The story of these weeks is
one of minor operations, local actions with strictly limited objec-
tives undertaken by only a few battalions. In the face of
every conceivable difficulty we moved slowly up the intervening
slopes.

At first there was a certain briskness in our movement. From
Flers north-westward, in front of Eaucourt l'Abbaye and Le Sars,
ran a very strong trench system, which we called the Flers line,
and which was virtually a switch connecting the old German
third line with the intermediate positions in front of the spurs.
The capture of Flers gave us the south-eastern part of this line,
and the last days of September and the first of October were
occupied in winning the remainder of it. On 29th September
a single company of the 23rd Division carried the farm of Destre-
mont, some 400 yards south-west of Le Sars and just north of the
Albert-Bapaume road. On the afternoon of 1st October we ad-
vanced on a front of 3,000 yards, taking the Flers line north of
Destremont, while the 47th Division occupied the buildings of the

igiS] THE STRUGGLE IN THE MUD. 205

old abbey of Eaucourt, less than a mile south-east of Le Sars
village. Here for several days remnants of the 6th Bavarian
Division made a stout resistance. On the morning of 2nd October
the enemy had regained a footing in the abbey, and during the
whole of the next day and night the battle fluctuated. It was not
till the morning of the 4th that we finally cleared the place, and on
6th October the mill north-west of it was won. On the afternoon
of 7th October — a day of cloud and strong winds, but free from
rain — we attacked on a broader front, while the French on our
right moved against the key position of Sailly-Saillisel. After a
heavy struggle the 23rd Division captured Le Sars and won posi-
tions to the east and west of it, while our line was considerably
advanced between Gueudecourt and Lesbceufs.

From that date for a month we struggled up the slopes,
gaining ground, but never winning the crests. The enemy now
followed a new practice. He had his machine guns well back in
prepared positions and caught our attack with their long-range
fire. We wrestled for odd lengths of fantastically named trenches
which were often three feet deep in water. It was no light job to
get out over the slimy parapets, and the bringing up of supplies
and the evacuation of the wounded placed a terrible burden on
our strength. Under conditions of such grievous discomfort an
attack on a comprehensive scale was out of the question, the more
when we remember the condition of the area behind our lines.
At one moment it seemed as if the Butte had been won. On 5th
November we were over it, and holding positions on the eastern
side ; but that night a counter-attack by fresh troops of the 4th
Guard Division — who had just come up — forced us to fall back.
This was the one successful enemy counter-stroke in this stage of
the battle. For the most part they were too weak, if delivered
promptly ; and when they came later in strength they were broken
up by our guns.

The struggle of those days deserves to rank high in the records
of British hardihood. The fighting had not the swift pace and the
brilliant successes of the September battles. Our men had to strive
for minor objectives, and such a task lacks the impetus and exhilara-
tion of a great combined assault. On many occasions the battle
resolved itself into isolated struggles, a handful of men in a mud
hole holding out and consolidating their ground till their post was
linked up with our main front. Rain, cold, slow reliefs, the absence
of hot food, and sometimes of any food at all, made those episodes
a severe test of endurance and devotion. During this period the

206 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

enemy, amazed at his good fortune, inasmuch as the weather had
crippled our advance, fell into a flamboyant mood and represented
the result, as a triumph of the fighting quality of his own troops.
From day to day he announced a series of desperate British assaults
invariably repulsed with heavy losses. He spoke of British corps
and divisions advancing in massed formation, when, at the most,
it had been an affair of a few battalions. Often he announced an
attack on a day and in a locality where nothing whatever had
happened. It is to be noted that, except for the highly successful
action of 21st October, presently to be recorded, there was no
British attack during the month on anything like a large scale,
and that the various minor actions, so far from having cost us
high, were among the most economical of the campaign.

Our second task, in which we brilliantly succeeded, was to
master completely the Thiepval ridge. By the end of September
the strong redoubts north-east of the village — called Stuff and
Zollern — were in our hands, and on the 28th of that month we
had carried the southern face of Schwaben Redoubt. It was
Schwaben to which the heroic advance of the Ulster Division
had penetrated on the first da}' of the battle ; but next day the
advanced posts had been drawn in, and three months had elapsed
before we again entered it. It was now a very different place
from 1st July. Our guns had pounded it out of recognition ; but
it remained — from its situation — the pivot of the whole German
line on the heights. Thence the trenches called Stuff and Regina
ran east for some 5,000 yards to a point north-east of Courcelette.
These trenches, representing many of the dominating points of the
ridge south of the Ancre, were defended by the enemy with the
most admirable tenacity. Between 30th September and 20th
October, while we were battling for the remainder of Schwaben,
he delivered not less than eleven counter-attacks against our front
in that neighbourhood — counter-attacks which in every case were
repulsed with heavy losses. His front was held by the 26th Reserve
Division and by Marines of the Naval Division, who had been
brought down from the Yser, and who gave a better account of
themselves than their previous record had led us to expect. A
captured German regimental order, dated 20th October, emphasized
the necessity of regaining the Schwaben Redoubt. " Men are to be
informed by their immediate superiors that this attack is not merely
a matter of retaking a trench because it was formerly in German
possession, but that the recapture of an extremely important point
is involved. If the enemy remains on the ridge, he can blow our

igi6] SCHWABEN REDOUBT. 207

artillery in the Ancre valley to pieces, and the protection of the
infantry will then be destroyed."

From 20th to 23rd October there came a short spell of fine
weather. There was frost at night, a strong easterly wind dried
the ground, and the air conditions were perfect for observation.
The enemy was quick to take advantage of the change, and early
on the morning of Saturday, 21st October, delivered that attack
upon the Schwaben Redoubt for which the order quoted above
was a preparation. The attack was made in strength, and at all
points but two was repulsed by our fire before reaching our lines.
At two points the Germans entered our trenches, but were promptly
driven out, leaving many dead in front of our positions, and five
officers and seventy-nine other ranks prisoners in our hands.

This counter-stroke came opportunely for us, for it enabled us
to catch the enemy on the rebound. We struck shortly after noon,
attacking against the whole length of the Regina Trench, with the
39th, 15th, and iSth Divisions on our left and centre and the 4th
Canadian Division on our right. The attack was completely suc-
cessful, for the enemy, disorganized by his failure of the morning,
was in no condition for prolonged resistance. We attained all our
objectives, taking the whole of Stuff and Regina trenches, pushing
out advanced posts well to the north and north-east of Schwaben
Redoubt, and establishing our position on the crown of the ridge
between the upper Ancre and Courcelette. In the course of the
day we took nearly 1,100 prisoners at the expense of less than
1,200 casualties, many of which were extremely slight.

There still remained one small section of the ridge where our
position was unsatisfactory. This was at the extreme eastern end
of Regina Trench, just west of the Bapaume road. Its capture was
achieved on the night of 10th November, when the 4th Canadian
Division carried it on a front of 1,000 yards. This rounded off
our gains and allowed us to dominate the upper valley of the Ancre
and the uplands beyond it behind the unbroken German first line
from. Beaumont Hamel to Serre.

Meantime, during the month, the French armies on our right
had pressed forward. At the end of September they had pene-
trated into St. Pierre Vaast Wood, whose labyrinthine depths
extended east of Rancourt and south of Saillisel. The immediate
object of the forces under Foch was to co-operate with the British
advance by taking the height of Sailly-Saillisel, and so to work
round Mont St. Quentin, the main defence of Peronne on the north.
On 4th October they carried the German intermediate line between

208 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

Morval and St. Pierre Vaast Wood, and on 8th October— in a
splendid movement — they swept up the Sailly-Saillisel slopes and
won the Bapaume-Peronne road to a point 200 yards from its
northern entry into the village. On 10th October Micheler's
Tenth Army was in action on a front of three miles, and carried
the western outskirts of Ablaincourt and the greater part of the
wood north-west of Chaulnes, taking nearly 1,300 prisoners. On
the 15th Fayolle pushed east of Bouchavesnes, and on the same
day, south of the Somme, Micheler, after beating off a counter-
attack, carried a mile and a quarter of the German front west of
Belloy, and advanced well to the north-east of Ablaincourt, taking
some 1,000 prisoners. This brought the French nearer to the ridge
of Villers-Carbonnel, behind which the German batteries played
the same part for the southern defence of Peronne as Mont St.
Quentin did for the northern.

Next day Sailly-Saillisel was entered and occupied as far as the
cross-roads, the Saillisel section of the village on the road running
eastwards being still in German hands. For the next few days
the enemy delivered violent counter-attacks from both north and
east, using liquid fire ; but they failed to oust the garrison, and
that part of the village held by the Germans was mercilessly pounded
by the French guns. On the 21st the newly arrived 2nd Bavarian
Division made a desperate attack from the southern border of
Saillisel and the ridge north-east of St. Pierre Vaast Wood, but
failed with many losses. There were other heavy and fruitless
counter-strokes south of the Somme in the regions of Biaches and
Chaulnes. The month closed with the French holding Sailly but
not Saillisel ; holding the western skirts of St. Pierre Vaast Wood,
and south of the river outflanking Ablaincourt and Chaulnes.

III.

On 9th November the weather improved. The wind swung
round to the north and the rain ceased, but owing to the season
of the year the ground was slow to dry, and in the area of the
Fourth Army the roads were still past praying for. Presently
frost came and a powder of snow, and then once more the rain.
But in the few days of comparatively good conditions the British
Commander-in-Chief brought the battle to a further stage, and
won a conspicuous victory.

On the first day of July, as we have seen, our attack had failed
on the eight miles between Gommecourt and Thiepval. For four

iqi6] THE FRONT NORTH OF THE ANCRE. 209

months we drove far into the heart of the German defences farther
south, but the stubborn enemy front before Beaumont Hamel and
Serre remained untried. The position was immensely strong, and
its holders — not without reason — believed it to be impregnable.
All the slopes were tunnelled deep with old catacombs — many of
them made originally as hiding-places in the Wars of Religion —
and these had been linked up by passages to constitute a subter-
ranean city, where whole battalions could be assembled. There
were endless redoubts and strong points armed with machine guns,
as we knew to our cost in July, and the wire entanglements were
on a scale which had never been paralleled. Looked at from our
first line they resembled a solid wall of red rust. Very strong, too,
were the sides of the Ancre, should we seek to force a passage
that way, and the hamlets of Beaucourt and St. Pierre Divion,
one on each bank, were fortresses of the Beaumont Hamel stamp.
From Gommecourt to the Thiepval ridge the enemy positions were
the old first-line ones, prepared during two years of leisure, and not
the improvised defences on which they had been thrown back
between Thiepval and Chaulnes.

At the beginning of November the area of the Allied pressure
was over thirty miles, but we had never lost sight of the necessity
of widening the breach. It was desirable, with a view to the winter
warfare, that the enemy should be driven out of his prepared
defences on the broadest possible front. The scheme of an assault
upon the Serre-Ancre line might seem a desperate one so late in
the season, but we had learned much since 1st July, and, as com-
pared with that date, we had now certain real advantages. In
the first place our whole tactical use of artillery had undergone a
change. Our creeping barrage, moving in front of advancing
infantry, protected them to a great extent against the machine-
gun fusillade from parapets and shell holes which had been our
undoing in the earlier battle, and assisted them in keeping direc-
tion. In the second place our possession of the whole Thiepval
ridge seriously outflanked the German front north of the Ancre.
In the dips of the high ground behind Serre and Beaumont Hamel
their batteries had been skilfully emplaced in the beginning of
July, and they had been able to devote their whole energy to the
attack coming from the west. But now they were facing south-
ward and operating against our lines on the Thiepval ridge, and
we commanded them to some extent by possessing the higher
ground and the better observation. If, therefore, we should
attack again from the west, supported also by our artillery fire

210 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

from the south, the enemy guns would be fighting on two fronts.
The German position in July had been a straight line ; it was
now a salient.

We had another asset for a November assault. The slow
progress of the Fourth Army during October had led the enemy
to conclude that our offensive had ceased for the winter. Drawing
a natural deduction from the condition of the country, he argued
that an attack on a grand scale was physically impossible, especially
an attack upon a fortress which had defied our efforts when we
advanced with fresh troops and unwearied impetus in the height
of summer. But the area from Thiepval northward did not
suffer from transport difficulties in the same degree as the southern
terrain. Since we would be advancing from what was virtually
our old front line, we would escape the problem of crossing five
or six miles of shell-torn ground by roads ploughed up and broken
from four months' traffic.

It is necessary to grasp the topographical features of the new
battle-ground. From north of the Schwaben Redoubt our front
curved sharply to the north-west, crossing the Ancre 500 yards
south of the hamlet of St. Pierre Divion, and extending northward
along the foot of the slopes on which lay the villages of Beaumont
Hamel and Serre. From the high ground north-west of the Ancre
several clearly marked spurs descended to the upper valley of that
stream. The chief was a long ridge with Serre at its western ex-
tremity, the village of Puisieux on the north, Beaucourt-sur-Ancre
on the south, and Miraumont at the eastern end. South of this
there was another feature running from a point a thousand yards
north of Beaumont Hamel to the village of Beaucourt. This
latter spur had on its south-west side a shallow depression up which
runs the Beaucourt-Beaumont Hamel road, and it was defined
on the north-east by the Beaucourt-Serre road. All the right bank
of the Ancre was thus a country of slopes and pockets. On the
left bank there was a stretch of flatfish ground under the Thiepval
ridge extending up the valley past St. Pierre Divion to Grandcourt.

On Sunday, 12th November, Sir Hubert Gough's Fifth Army held
the area from Gommecourt in the north to the Albert-Bapaume
road. Opposite Serre and extending south to a point just north of
Beaumont Hamel lay the 31st, 3rd, and 2nd Divisions. In front
of Beaumont Hamel was the 51st (Highland Territorial) Division.
They had been more than eighteen months in France, and at the
end of July and the beginning of August had spent seventeen days
in the line at High Wood. On their right, from a point just south

i9i6] BEAUMONT HAMEL. 211

of the famous Y Ravine to the Ancre, lay the 63rd (Naval) Division,
which had had a long record of fighting from Antwerp to Gallipoli
but now for the first time took part in an action on the Western
front. Across the river lay the 39th and 19th Divisions. The
boundary of the attack on the right was roughly defined by the
Thiepval-Grandcourt road.

The British guns began on the morning of Saturday, the nth,
a bombardment devoted to the destruction of the enemy's wire
and parapets. It went on fiercely during Sunday, but did not
increase to hurricane fire, so that the enemy had no warning of
the hour of our attack. In the darkness of the early morning of
Monday, 13th November, the fog gathered thick — a cold, raw vapour
which wrapped the ground like a garment. It was still black
darkness, darker even than the usual moonless winter night, when,
at 5.45 a.m., our troops crossed the parapets. The attack had
been most carefully planned, but in that dense shroud it was hard
for the best trained soldiers to keep direction. On the other hand
the enemy had no warning of our coming till our men were surging
over his trenches.

The attack of the British left wing on Serre failed, as it had
failed on 1st July. That stronghold, being farther removed from
the effect of our flanking fire from the Thiepval ridge, presented all
the difficulties which had baffled us at the first attempt. South
of it and north of Beaumont Hamel we carried the German first
position and swept beyond the fortress called the Quadrilateral —
which had proved too hard a knot to unravel four months earlier.
This gave us the northern part of the under feature which we have
noted as running south-east to Beaucourt. Our right wing had a
triumphant progress. Almost at once it gained its objectives.
St. Pierre D'vion fell early in the morning, and the 39th Division
engaged there advanced a mile and took nearly 1,400 prisoners
at a total cost of less than 600 casualties. By the evening they
were holding the Hansa line, which ran from the neighbourhood
of Stuff Trench on the heights to the bank of the river opposite
Beaucourt.

But it was on the doings of the two centre divisions that the
fortune of the day depended. The Highland Territorials — a kilted
division except for their lowland Pioneer battalion — had one of
the hardest tasks that had faced troops in the battle, a task com-
parable to the taking of Contalmaison and Guillemont and Delville
Wood. They had before them the fortress-village of Beaumont
Hamel itself. South of it lay the strong Ridge Redoubt, and south

212 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

again the Y Ravine, whose prongs projected down to the German
front line and whose tail ran back towards Station Road south
of the Cemetery. This Y Ravine was some 800 yards long, and
in places 30 feet deep, with overhanging sides. In its precipitous
banks were the entrances to the German dug-outs, completely
screened from shell-fire and connecting farther back by means of
tunnels with the great catacombs. Such a position allowed rein-
forcements to be sent up underground, even though we might be
holding all the sides. The four successive German lines were so
skilfully linked up subterraneously that they formed virtually a
single line, no part of which could be considered to be captured till
the whole was taken. The first assault took the Scots through the
German defences on all their front, except just before the ends of
the Y Ravine. They advanced on both sides of that gully and
carried the third enemy line shortly after daybreak. There was
much stern fighting in the honeycombed land, but early in the
forenoon they had pushed right through the German main position
and were pressing beyond Station Road and the hollow where the
village lay towards their ultimate objective — the Beaucourt-Serre
road. The chief fighting of the day centred round Y Ravine. So
soon as we had gained the third line on both sides of it our men
leaped down the steep sides into the gully. Then followed a
desperate struggle, for the entrances to the dug-outs had been
obscured by our bombardment, and no man knew from what
direction the enemy might appear. About mid-day the eastern
part of the ravine was full of our men, but the Germans were in the
prongs. Early in the afternoon we delivered a fresh attack from
the west and gradually forced the defence to surrender. After
that it became a battle of nettoyeurs, small parties digging out
Germans from underground lairs — for the very strength of his
fortifications proved a trap to the enemy once they had been
breached.

On their right the Naval Division advanced against Beaucourt,
attacking over the ground which had been partly covered by the
left of the Ulster Division on 1st July. On that day the British
trenches had been between 500 and 700 yards from the German
front line, leaving too great an extent of no-man's-land to be
covered by the attacking infantry. But before the present action
the Naval Division had dug advanced trenches, and now possessed
a line of departure not more than 250 yards from the enemy.
Their first objective was the German support line, their second
Station Road — which ran from Beaumont Hamel to the main

igi6] THE NAVAL DIVISION AT BEAUCOURT. 213

Albert-Lille railway — and their third the trench line outside Beau-
court village. The wave of assault carried the men over the first
two German lines, and for a moment it looked as if the advance
was about to go smoothly forward to its goal. But in the centre of
our front of attack, in a communication trench between the second
and third German lines and about 800 yards from the river bank,
was a very strong redoubt manned by machine guns. This had not
been touched by our artillery, and it effectively blocked the centre
of our advance, while at the same time flanking fire from the slopes
behind Beaumont Hamel checked our left. Various parties got
through and reached the German support line and even as far as
Station Road. But at about 8.30 the situation, as reviewed by
the divisional commander, bore an ominous likeness to what had
happened to the Ulstermen on 1st July. Isolated detachments had
gone forward, but the enemy had manned his reserve trenches behind
them, and the formidable redoubt was blocking any general progress.
At this moment there came news by a pigeon message of the
right battalion. It had gone clean through to the third objective,
and was now waiting outside Beaucourt village for our barrage
to lift in order to take the place. Its commander had led his men
along the brink of the river to Station Road, where he had collected
odd parties of other battalions, and at 8.21 had reached Beaucourt
Trench — a mile distant from our front of assault. All that day a
precarious avenue of communication for food and ammunition was
kept open along the edge of the stream, under such shelter as the
banks afforded. A second attack on the whole front was delivered
in the afternoon by the supporting brigade of the Naval Division,
but this, too, was held up by the redoubt, though again a certain
number got through and reached Station Road and even the slopes
beyond it. That night it was resolved to make a great effort to
put the redoubt out of action. Two tanks were brought up, one
of which succeeded at dawn in getting within range, and the garri-
son of the stronghold hoisted the white flag. The way was now
clear for a general advance next morning, to assist in which a
brigade of another division was brought up in support. Part of
the advance lost direction, but the result was to clear the German
first position and the ground between Station Road and Beaucourt
Trench. At the same time the right battalion, which had been
waiting outside Beaucourt for twenty-four hours, assisted by a
Territorial battalion and by details from its own division, carried
the place by storm. The success was an instructive proof of the
value of holding forward positions even though flanks and rear

214 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

were threatened, if there was any certainty of supports. Like the
doings of the 15th Division at Loos, it pointed the way to a new
form of tactics, but the lesson was read more correctly by the enemy
than by the Allies.

By the night of Tuesday, 14th November, our total of prisoners
on the five-mile front of battle was well over 5,000. The German
counter-attack of the 15th failed to win back any ground. Just
east of Beaumont Hamel there was an extensive no-man's-land,
for Munich Trench could not be claimed by either side, but in the
Beaucourt area we steadily pressed on. On Thursday, the 16th,
we pushed east from Beaucourt village along the north bank of
the Ancre, establishing posts in the Bois d'Hollande to the north-
west of Grandcourt. Frost had set in, and it was possible from the
Thiepval ridge or from the slopes above Hamel to see clearly the
whole new battlefield, and even in places to follow the infantry
advance — a thing which had not been feasible since the summer
fighting. By that day our total of prisoners was over 6,000. On the
17th we again advanced, and on Saturday, the 18th, in a downpour
of icy rain, the Canadians on the right of the Fifth Army, attacking
from Regina Trench, moved well down the slope towards the river,
while the centre pushed close to the western skirts of Grandcourt.

It was the last attack, with which concluded the Battle of
the Somme. The weather had now fallen like a curtain upon the
drama. The final stage was a fitting denouement to the great
action. It gave us three strongly fortified villages, and practically
the whole of the minor spur which ran from north of Beaumont
Hamel to Beaucourt. It extended the breach in the main enemy
position by five miles. Our front was now far down the slopes
from the Thiepval ridge and north and west of Grandcourt. We
had taken well over 7,000 prisoners and vast quantities of material,
including several hundred machine guns. Our losses had been
comparatively slight, while those of the enemy were — on his own
admission — severe. Above all, at the moment when he was
beginning to argue himself into the belief that the Somme offen-
sive was over, his calculations had been upset by an unexpected
stroke. We had opened the old wound and undermined his moral
by reviving the terrors of the unknown and the unexpected.

IV.

Before 1st July Verdun had been the greatest continuous battle
fought in the world's history ; but the Somme surpassed it both

,

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME.

•I- '.'

9 ■• •. RflBA

'

i9i6] SUMMARY OF BATTLE. 215

in numbers of men engaged, in the tactical difficulty of the objec-
tives, and in its importance in the strategical scheme of the cam-
paign. Its significance may be judged by the way in which it
preoccupied the enemy High Command. It was the fashion in
Germany to describe it as a futile attack upon an unshakable
fortress, an attack which might be disregarded by her public
opinion while she continued her true business of conquest in the
East. But the fact remained that the great bulk of the German
troops and by far the best of them were kept congregated in this
area. In November Germany had 127 divisions on the Western front,
and no more than 75 in the East. Though Brussilov's attack
and Falkenhayn's Rumanian expedition compelled her to send
fresh troops eastward, she did not diminish but increased her strength
in the West. In June she had fourteen divisions on the Somme , in
November she had in line or just out of it well over forty.

By what test are we to judge the result of a battle in modern
war ? In the old days of open fighting there was little room for
doubt, since the retreat or rout or envelopment of the beaten army
was too clear for argument. Now, when the total battle-front was
3,000 miles, such easy proofs were lacking ; but the principle
remained the same. A battle is final when it ends in the destruc-
tion of the enemy's fighting strength. A battle is won — and it
may be decisively won — when it results in achieving the strategic
purpose of one of the combatants, provided that purpose is, on
military grounds, a wise one. Hence the amount of territory
occupied and the number of important points captured are not
necessarily sound criteria at all. The success or defeat of a strategic
purpose, that is the sole test. Judging by this, Tannenberg was
a victory for Germany, the Marne for France, and the First Battle
of Ypres for Britain. The Battle of the Somme was no less a
victory, since it achieved the purpose of the Allies.

In the first place, it relieved Verdun, and enabled Nivelle to
advance presently to a conspicuous success. In the second place,
it detained the main German forces on the Western front. In
the third place, it drew into the battle, and gravely depleted, the
surplus man-power of the enemy, and struck a shattering blow at
his moral. For two years the German behind the shelter of his
trench-works and the great engine of his artillery had fought with
comparatively little cost against opponents far less well equipped.
The Somme put the shoe on the other foot, and he came to know
what the British learned at Ypres and the French in Artois —
what it meant to be bombarded out of existence, and to cling to

216 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

shell-holes and the ruins of trenches under a pitiless fire. It was
a new thing in his experience, and took the heart out of men who,
under other conditions, had fought with skill and courage. Further,
the Allies had dislocated his whole military machine. Their cease-
less pressure had crippled his staff work, and confused the organi-
zation of which he had justly boasted. Haig's sober summary
was true. " The enemy's power has not yet been broken, nor is
it yet possible to form an estimate of the time the war may last
before the objects for which the Allies are fighting have been
attained. But the Somme battle has placed beyond doubt the
ability of the Allies to gain these objects. The German army is
the mainstay of the Central Powers, and a full half of that army,
despite all the advantages of the defensive, supported by the
strongest fortifications, suffered defeat on the Somme this year.
Neither the victors nor the vanquished will forget this ; and,
though bad weather has given the enemy a respite, there will
undoubtedly be many thousands in his ranks who will begin the
new campaign with little confidence in their ability to resist our
assaults or to overcome our defence."

Let it be freely granted that Germany met the strain in a
soldierly fashion. She set herself at once to learn the lessons of
the battle and to revise her methods where revision was needed.
She made drastic changes in her High Commands. She endeav-
oured still further to exploit her already much-exploited man-
power, and combed out even from vital industries every man who
was capable of taking the field. Her effort was magnificent —
and it was war. She had created since ist July some thirty odd
new divisions, formed partly by converting garrison units into
field troops, and partly by regrouping units from existing forma-
tions— taking a regiment away from a four-regiment division,
and a battalion from a four-battalion regiment, and withdrawing
the Jager battalions. But these changes, though they increased
the number of her units, did not add proportionately to the
aggregate of her numerical strength, and we may take 100,000
men as the maximum of the total gain in field troops from this
readjustment. Moreover, she had to provide artillery and staffs
for each of the new divisions, which involved a heavy strain
upon services already taxed to the full. Her commissioned classes
had been sorely depleted. " The shortage," so ran an order of
Hindenburg's in September, " due to our heavy casualties, of
experienced, energetic, and well-trained junior officers is sorely
felt at the present time."

1916] MORAL EFFECT IN GERMANY. 217

The Battle of the Somme had, therefore, fulfilled the Allied
purpose in taxing to the uttermost the German war machine. It
tried the command, it tried the nation at home, and it tried to
the last limit of endurance the men in the line. The place became
a name of terror. Though belittled in communiques, and rarely
mentioned in the press, it was a word of ill-omen to the whole
German people, that " blood-bath " to which many journeyed and
from which few returned. Of what avail their easy conquests on
the Danube when this deadly cancer in the West was eating into
the vitals of the nation ? Winter might give a short respite —
though the Battle of the Ancre had been fought in winter weather
— but spring would come, and the evil would grow malignant again.
Germany gathered herself for a great effort, marshalling for com-
pulsory war work the whole male population between seventeen
and sixty, sending every man to the trenches who could walk on
sound feet, doling out food supplies on the minimum scale for the
support of life, and making desperate efforts by submarine war-
fare to cripple her enemies' strength. She was driven to stake her
last resources on the game.

In every great action there is a major purpose, a reasoned and
calculated purpose which takes no account of the accidents of
fortune. But in most actions there come sudden strokes of luck
which turn the scale. For such strokes a general has a right to
hope, but on them he dare not build. Marengo, Waterloo, Chan-
cellorsville — most of the great battles of other times — showed these
gifts of destiny. But in the elaborate and mechanical warfare of
to-day they come rarely, and at the Battle of the Somme they
did not fall to the lot of Foch or Haig. They did what they set
out to do ; step by step they drove their way through the German
defences ; but it was all done by hard and stubborn fighting,
without any bounty from capricious fortune. Germany had claimed
that her line was impregnable ; they broke it again and again.
She had counted on her artillery machine ; they crippled and out-
matched it. She had decried the fighting stuff of the new British
armies ; we showed that it was a match for her Guards and Bran-
denburgers.* The major purpose was attained. Like some harsh
and remorseless chemical, the waxing Allied energy was eating into
the German waning mass. Its sure and methodical pressure had
the inevitability of a natural law. It was attrition, but attrition

* Between ist July and 18th November the British on the Somme took just
over 38,000 prisoners, including 800 officers, 29 heavy ?uns, 96 field guns, 136 trench
mortars, and 514 machine guns.

2i8 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

in the acute form — not like the slow erosion of cliffs by the sea,
but like the steady crumbling of a mountain to which hydraulic
engineers have applied a mighty head of water. And it was a
law of life and of war that the weakness of the less strong would
grow pari passu with the power of the stronger.

The tactics and strategy of the Allies at the Somme were those
natural to armies which had a great preponderance in men and
munitions. The method of laborious attrition presupposed the
continuance of the war on two fronts. Should Russia fall out of
line, the situation would be radically changed, and the plan would
become futile against an enemy with a large new reservoir of
recruitment. But at the time of its inception, uninspired and
expensive as it might be, it was a sound plan, and ceteris paribus
would have given the Allies victory before the end of 19 17. Even
as things befell, the battle was not fought in vain, for it struck a
blow at the heart of Germany's strength from which she never
wholly recovered. Let Ludendorff himself describe the situation
at the close : " Our position was uncommonly difficult, and a way
out hard to find. We could not contemplate an offensive our-
selves, having to keep our reserves available for defence. ... If
the war lasted our defeat seemed inevitable." *

• My War Memories (Eng. trans.), I., p. 307.

CHAPTER LXIV.
Rumania's campaign.

August 2j-December 6, 1916.

Rumania's strategical Problems— Her mistaken Policy— The Advance into Transyl-
vania— Falkenhayn prepares his Counter-stroke — Mackensen in the Dobrudja
— The Rumanians fall back across the Mountains — Last Stage of Brussilov's
Attack— Mackensen crosses the Danube — German Occupation of Wallachia —
Fall of Bucharest.

The Rumanian declaration of war, issued at nine o'clock on the
evening of 27th August, was accompanied by an order for a general
mobilization. This was no more than a formality to recall officers
and men still on leave, and to summon second-line troops to guard
the railways. For months mobilization had been in progress, and
such strength as Rumania possessed was ready to her hand when,
her harvest over, she made the great decision. Next day, 28th
August, at eighteen points her troops had crossed the Transylvanian
border.

Before entering on the details of her campaign we must note
the nature of the military problem now presented to her, and the
resources which she possessed to meet it. Her immediate and con-
tiguous enemies were Austria and Bulgaria, and the first point to
consider is the nature of her frontier. That frontier fell naturally
into three sections. From Dorna Watra in the north to Orsova
on the Danube the Transylvanian plateau, rimmed by a range of
mountains, jutted out like a huge bastion into her territory, almost
dividing Moldavia from Wallachia. Here the border line, nearly
four hundred miles in length, followed for the most part the crest
of the hills. Of these the northern part is known as the Southern
Carpathians and the southern as the Transylvanian Alps, but it
is all one mountain system. On the Rumanian side the heights fall
steeply to the wooded foothills, but on the west the slopes are easier
towards the plateau. The chief peaks are from 7,000 to 8,000 feet
in height, and the passes are for the most part deep winding ravines.

219

220 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug

These passes, which were to play a great part in the campaign,
are numerous ; but only ten may be considered of military impor-
tance. Four of these are on the Moldavian front — the Tolgyes,
served by a highway from the Austrian railhead at Toplitza ; the
Bekas, traversed by a bad mountain road ; the Gyimes, carrying
a road and a railway from Okna in Moldavia to Czik Szereda in
Transylvania ; and the Oitoz, with a road from Okna to the head
of an Austrian branch line. Of the four all were close to the
railway on the Austrian side, but only two had good Rumanian
railway connections. At the angle of the salient is the Buzeu or
Bodza Pass, with a railhead on the Rumanian side and a good road
running to Kronstadt. Going west, follow in order the Bratocea,
the Predeal or Tomos, and the Torzburg Pass, all the communica-
tions of which radiate from Kronstadt. Of these the Predeal
carried the main road and railway from Kronstadt to Bucharest,
and the Torzburg a road from Kronstadt to the Rumanian rail-
head at Kampolung. Farther west lies the Rotherthurm or Red
Tower Pass, the best in the range, through which ran the road and
railway from Hermannstadt to Bucharest. It is traversed by the
river Aluta, which, rising close to the source of the Maros, the
other great Transylvanian stream, flows south and west inside the
rim of the salient, and then at the Rotherthurm breaks through
the Transylvanian Alps to the Wallachian plains. Last comes the
Vulkan, a road pass with a railhead at each end of it. On the
Transylvanian side it gave access to the mining district of Petroseny
and Hatszeg, and on the Wallachian side it opened upon the wide
cornlands around Crajova.

From Orsova to near Turtukai, a distance of some 270 miles,
the Rumanian frontier was the Danube. From the Iron Gates to
the Delta the northern shore of the river is lower than the southern,
and, being subject to constant inundations, is for the most part a
chain of swamps, lakes, and backwaters. The patches of firm land
can be picked out even on a small-scale map by noting the points
where a town or village on the Rumanian shore faces a town or
village on the Bulgarian side. These pairs of towns mark the places
where for centuries there have been ferries across the river. Several
were railheads, provided with wharves and facilities for handling
cargo in river traffic. Below Orsova the Danube is rarely less than
a mile broad, and on this stretch of frontier it was clear that military
operations could not be immediately undertaken.

The last section ran from the Danube to the Black Sea across
the arid plateau known as the Dobrudja. To reach it Rumania

igi6] RUMANIA'S STRATEGIC POSITION. 221

had the good river crossings at Turtukai and Silistria, and the
great bridge of Tchernavoda — the only bridge between Neusatz-
Peterwardein in Hungary and the mouth of the Danube. The
Dobrudja, which may be regarded as a tongue of the Balkan
uplands projecting to the north-east, is a barren steppe of sand-
covered limestone, unwatered and treeless. It abuts on various
crossings of the Danube delta, and so has for centuries been the gate
of invasion from the north, since the Goths and Slavs first swept
down upon Byzantium. Those invasions have left their trail upon
it, and to-day it is still inhabited by the debris of forgotten races,
the flotsam and jetsam of history. Her new frontier, now pushed
forty miles southward by the Treaty of Bucharest, gave Rumania
a position on the flank of Bulgaria which, if she remained on the
defensive, would endanger any Bulgarian attempt to cross the
Danube, and, if she took the offensive, might enable her to threaten
the main line of communications between Constantinople and
Vienna.

Stated, therefore, in geographical terms, the situation of Ru-
mania in a war with the Teutonic League was that on west and
south she was enclosed by hostile territory. The Danube front might
for the moment be neglected, and the Dobrudja front seemed to her
safe from any serious attack. The main danger, in her view, lay
in the Transylvanian salient. Her frontier there was in the shape
of the curve of a capital D, a bad defensive line at the best, and
impossible for her to hold strongly with the forces at her command.
Her first interest was to shorten it. If she could reach the upright
line of the D — a position represented by the central Maros valley
between Maros Vasarhely and Broos — she would be safe from any
serious enemy counter-offensive, and would be able either to wait
with an easy mind on the development of the Russian campaign
farther north, or to strike southward against the Ottoman Railway.

But in modern war a strategic position is not determined by
geography alone, but mainly by those means of communication
through which the industry of man has supplemented nature. In
railways Rumania was far behind her enemies. Her own lines had
been built largely with Austria's assistance at a time when she was
Austria's ally, and at no point had their construction been devised
in the light of military needs. On the western side of the mountains
Austria was well supplied. A number of railways, including four
first-class lines, converged on Transylvania. There were sufficient
cross lines, and all were linked together by the frontier railway,
which curved round the border just inside the mountains, thereby

222 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

permitting of concentration at any point for the defence of the
passes, while another cross line served for concentration along the
Maros valley. Besides the line at the Iron Gates, two good lines
ran into the Wallachian plains, and a third into Moldavia. The
whole system enabled operations to be conducted on the inside of
a curved salient. The defect of the Rumanian system was that
there were few lines for through movements ; that the branch lines
were short lengths ending in railheads near the river or the moun-
tains ; that, since most of the tracks were single, traffic capacity
was limited ; and that, since there was a paucity of alternative routes
to any point, traffic backwards and forwards had to be carried
over the one line. A Rumanian army operating against Transyl-
vania was compelled to use a railway system which in the military
sense was entirely on exterior lines, and the length of movement
required to reinforce any point was excessive. Whereas the
Austrians had a lateral railway between twenty and thirty miles
from the frontier, the only lateral connection in Moldavia was fifty
miles away, and in Wallachia still farther. From the Predeal Pass
to the Rotherthurm Pass troops could be moved on the Austrian
side by a railway journey of eighty miles, but the same problem
for Rumania meant a detour of nearly three hundred.

The situation elsewhere on the border was little better. No
railway line could follow the swampy northern shore of the Danube.
In the Dobrudja Rumania had the new railway from Tchernavoda
to Dobritch ; but she had no lateral line, for the main Tchernavoda-
Constanza railway was sixty miles inside the new frontier. Bul-
garia, on the other hand, had the Rustchuk-Varna line close at
her back for offence and defence. It may fairly be said, therefore,
that the natural strategic difficulties of Rumania's geographical
situation were increased in every theatre by railway communica-
tions vastly inferior to those of her enemies.

The second part of her problem was the military strength at
her disposal. She had, roughly, half a million of men ; but her
armies, while containing abundance of good human material, were,
except in the older units, imperfectly trained and very imperfectly
armed. For two years she had contemplated war ; but since she
was dependent for new materiel on foreign imports by way of
Russia, the supply had naturally fallen far short of the demand.
The standard of equipment which she had set herself before declar-
ing war had been too modestly conceived. She was desperately
short of heavy guns, of aircraft, of machine guns, even of rifles,
and she had no great reserve of ammunition. The Vetterli rifle

I9i6] HER RELIANCE ON RUSSIA. 223

had just been served out to her troops — a weapon which Italy had
discarded twenty years before. In every branch of equipment
she was far below the level of the Teutonic League. Moreover,
she was not rich in trained officers or experienced generals. Few,
even of her senior commanders, had had actual experience of war,
save as boys in the Russo-Turkish campaign forty years before.
She was preparing not for a war of positions, where strong natural
and artificial defences may give a chance to the weaker side, but
for a war of movement, where skilful leadership and sound organ-
ization are all in all. She was entering, moreover, upon a cam-
paign against an enemy who fought largely with his guns, and she
had only a trifling artillery to meet the gigantic " machine " which
had now been elaborated through two years of unceasing effort.
Her four armies — each no more than a group of half a dozen infantry
divisions ill supported by artillery— had to guard an awkward
frontier of over seven hundred miles. She could not expect to
succeed unless she had the help of her allies in guidance and leader-
ship, in strategical diversions, and above all in equipment. She
counted especially on Russia — on Lechitski's progress in the Car-
pathians to embarrass the Austrian left wing in Transylvania.
She counted, too, on Sarrail's advance in the Balkans to distract
the attention of Bulgaria. She reckoned upon a steady flow of
munitions across the Russian border. In all these hopes, as we
shall see, she was disappointed. She was left to make her decisions,
and for the most part to fight her battles, alone.

The blame for the Allies' failure to support Rumania is hard
to apportion. Partly it was the fortune of war. Sarrail failed to
advance from Salonika, not from lack of good will, but from lack
of strength. Lechitski, in the Carpathians, with an army tired
by four months' fighting, could not play the part assigned to him.
Russia, at the moment of Rumania's entry, was coming to the end
of her mighty effort from sheer exhaustion of men and munitions.
Her General Staff had tried to induce Rumania to declare war in
June, when Brussilov's advance was beginning, but she had deferred
the step to so late a date that the impetus of the Galician movement
was all but exhausted. The great soldier who was Chief of the
Russian Staff now deprecated Rumania's adventure, and in this,
as in many other things, Alexeiev was right. When the debacle
came, he and his colleagues did their best to step into the breach,
but the chance of success had long passed. Yet it must be remem-
bered that it was Petrograd especially which forced King Ferdinand's
decision, and on the civil Government of Russia must rest no small

224 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

part 01 the blame for what followed. They had offered Rumania
extravagant terms, in the shape of territorial annexations, and
Sturmer and his camarilla had guaranteed an ample munitionment.
This last and most vital promise was never fulfilled — was never
attempted to be fulfilled. There were strange tales of consign-
ments of munitions for Rumania side-tracked and delayed by
direct orders from Petrograd, and there is some reason to believe
that Sturmer had deliberately planned a Rumanian defeat as part
of his scheme for a separate peace with Germany. Such treason
was confined to the civilians, and was wholly alien to the mind of
the Russian soldiers. The latter did what they could, but Fate
and Hindenburg were the stronger.

Since, therefore, in the details of the campaign, Rumania
followed her own counsels, it remains to consider the wisdom of
the strategy she adopted. Assuming that the Allied assistance
which she counted on had been forthcoming, was her plan of
action the best in the circumstances ? During the winter of 19 16
she was severely criticized in the West both in military and civil
circles, and the criticisms were mainly directed to her initial strat-
egy. What was this strategy, and wherein did it fall short of
common sense ?

Of her four armies she directed three against Transylvania,
with, as their ultimate objective, the central valley of the river
Maros. The fourth army was left on the defensive in the Dobrudja,
to cover the Bulgarian frontier ; and small detachments from it
were scattered along the Danube valley to watch the crossing-
places. The Austrian Danube flotilla held all the middle river, and
the Rumanian river-craft were unable to leave the lower reaches.
Rumania's strategic aim may, therefore, be set out as follows :
She stood on the defensive against Bulgaria with small forces,
hoping that Sarrail in the south would keep the attention of that
enemy sufficiently occupied. With her main armies she aimed at
cutting off the Transylvanian salient and holding the line of the
Maros — partly, for political reasons, to free her Transylvanian
kinsmen ; partly to give herself a short and straight defensive line
instead of the long curve of the mountain barrier ; partly to turn
the right wing of the Austrian forces opposed to Lechitski, and so,
in the event of a Russian advance, to prepare a complete enemy
debacle in eastern Hungary. The current criticism upon her action
was that she sacrificed strategy to politics ; that, preoccupied with
the desire to win Translyvania, she entered it prematurely, when
she was too weak to hold it ; and that she missed a supreme chance

i9 16] HER STRATEGIC BLUNDER. 225

of striking a deadly blow at the enemy by cutting the communica-
tions between Germany and Turkey. The proper course, it was
argued, was for Rumania to have stood on the defensive in the
mountain passes, and thrown her main weight through the Dobrudja
against Bulgaria and the Ottoman Railway.

Such reasoning in the light of after events is clear and con-
vincing ; but the problem which Rumania had to solve in those
last days of August was by no means simple. Undoubtedly the
desire to vindicate their decision by the occupation of Transylvania
was strong among the members of M. Bratianu's ministry ; but
there was some justification for Rumania's plan on military grounds
alone. Her main enemy lay in the west, and sooner or later the
Austro-German armies would move against her. How was she to
hold the long curve of the hills and the many passes with slender
forces, with a perfect railway system in front of her, and the worst
conceivable at her back ? Every pass could be turned on its
flanks, and the German Alpine troops would find a way over the
goat tracks.* For the moment she had a great chance. The
enemy was hotly engaged farther north, and there was nothing in
Transylvania but a few weak divisions. She had the initiative,
and the advantage of surprise ; if she could once reach the line of
the middle Maros she would have won a strong strategical position,
far better for defence than the line of the frontier, and she would
have the good Austrian railways for her own use. Considered
purely as a defensive measure, it seemed wise to cut off the difficult
western salient and win a shorter and easier line. Moreover, such
a plan might have also a high offensive value. Rumania at the
moment believed with the rest of the world that Brussilov's advance
had still far to go. She thought that presently Lechitski would be
across the Carpathians. If that happened, the presence of her
troops on the enemy's flank might turn a retreat into a wholesale
disaster. Alexeiev proposed that Russian troops should be trans-
ferred to Transylvania, and that Rumania's line of defence in the
west should be in the foothills short of the main ranges. Rumania
refused the advice, largely because she feared that Russia's tem-
porary occupation of Transylvania might become permanent.
On the other hand, she anticipated no danger from the side of
the Dobrudja. Sarrail's offensive had been part of the bargain
with the Allies, and, even if it did not advance far on the road to

* The argument is stated as it may have appealed to the Rumanian General Staff.
But as a matter of fact, with depleted forces the Rumanian army did succeed in
holding Falkenhayn for weeks in the foothills, after he had won the main divide.

226 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

Sofia, she believed that it would keep the three Bulgarian armies
busily engaged. Further, at first she seems to have even hoped
that Bulgaria would refrain from a declaration of war — a political
miscalculation in the circumstances not altogether unnatural. In
any case, if she had to choose between two dangers, the menace
from Transylvania loomed far the greater. To the Western world
it seemed as if Rumania at the outset embarked on a rash offensive.
It would be truer to say that her generals — whatever may have
been the case with her politicians — thought principally of the best
defence.

They thought about it too much, and therein lay the secret of
her failure. Her plan was not conceived in the general interests
of the whole Alliance, but with regard chiefly to her own security.
From the Allies' point of view the occupation of Transylvania
mattered little ; but the cutting of the Ottoman Railway would
have struck deep at the roots of German power. Had Rumania
played the " long game " she would have risked everything in the
west, and struck hard from the Dobrudja at the German highway
to the east. It is difficult to believe that she would not have suc-
ceeded, and the blow would have altered the whole course of the
campaign in Eastern Europe. For her the bold path would also have
been the path of safety. " He that saveth his life shall lose it,"
is a maxim not only of religion but of war.

I.

The breach with Austria found three Rumanian armies waiting
to cross the Transylvanian frontier. The First Army, under Gen-
eral Culcer, was the left wing of the invasion, and its front of 120
miles extended from Orsova to east of the Rotherthurm Pass.
Obviously half a dozen divisions could not operate continuously
on such a front, so the advance fell into three groups — the left
against the Orsova-Mehadia railway, the central against Hatsze£
by way of the Vulkan Pass, and the right through the Rotherthurm
Pass against Hermannstadt. East of the First Army lay the
Second Army, under General Averescu, the ablest of Rumanian
generals, who had risen from the ranks to be Chief of Staff in the
invasion of Bulgaria in 19 13. Averescu's force extended as far
north as the Oitoz Pass, and was the main army of assault, whose
object was the seizure of the central Maros valley, assisted by the
flanking forces on the south. North of Averescu lay the Army of
the North, the Fourth Army, under General Presan, whose right

igi6] TRANSYLVANIA ENTERED. 227

wing was in touch with Lechitski's left in the Dorna Watra region.
The Third Army guarded the Danube and the Dobrudja frontier.

At the moment the Austrian strength in Transylvania was small
— five divisions, under General von Arz von Straussenberg. Nor
was their quality high, for they consisted partly of Landwehr and
partly of troops which had suffered severely in Brussilov's attack.
The Rumanians, strung out on a 400-mile frontier, and advancing
through passes separated often by forty miles of rocky mountain,
were obviously in a precarious position against a strong enemy.
Their hope of success was to break through the feeble resistance
speedily, and win their objective before the enemy could gather
his supports. If Rumania was to succeed, she must succeed at
once, or, with her poor communications and widely scattered units,
she would find herself checked on a line where she could not abide.

The Rumanian armies were in motion on the evening of 27th
August, and next day were pouring across the passes towards the
frontier railway in the upper glens of the Maros and the Aluta.
They moved fast, and found little opposition. In the Tomos Pass
a regiment drawn from the Magyars of Transylvania offered some
resistance, but was driven in with heavy losses. In the Tolgyes a
Czech regiment went over bodily to the invader. During that
week the bulletins posted up in Bucharest were cheerful reading.
On 29th August the town of Kezdi Vasarhely, west of the Oitoz
Pass, was occupied, as well as Kronstadt, north of the Predeal,
and Petroseny, north of the Vulkan. This gave them most of the
upper Aluta valley, and the lands held by the Saxon and Magyar
immigrants. On 2nd September, on the extreme right, a column,
descending from the Tolgyes Pass, occupied the town of Borsok,
and sent out cavalry patrols to get in touch with Lechitski on the
Bukovina front. On the 4th the Rumanians, advancing from the
Rotherthurm Pass, were close upon the important town of Hermann-
stadt. On the same day the advance from the right over the Bekas
Pass reached the frontier railway. By the 9th, from Toplitza
southward the whole frontier valley, between the outer and inner
walls of Transylvania, was in Rumanian hands. Next day Her-
mannstadt was evacuated, and the enemy withdrew to the northern
hills. The advance was slowest just north of the Vulkan Pass,
where the defence fought hard for the vital junction of Hatszeg,
but by 1 2th September three-fourths of the distance had been
covered by the invader. On the extreme left a Rumanian division
had carried the Cerna line, and entered Orsova. Within a fort-
night from the declaration of war the Saxon and Magyar peoples

228 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

of south eastern Transylvania were in full flight westward ; the
invasion had penetrated in some places to a depth of fifty miles ;
all the passes, the strategic frontier railway, and most of the frontier
towns had been occupied, and nearly a quarter of the country was
in Rumanian possession.

It was a dazzling success ; but it was fairy gold which could
not endure. The enemy had fallen back upon a shorter and safer
line, and the real struggle had not begun. The Rumanians, with
their armies and groups far apart and often unable to communicate,
were immeshed in a difficult country of divergent valleys, with many
strong positions to take before they reached the comparative security
of the middle Maros. Moreover, the enemy was preparing a deadly
counter-stroke, though the invaders, with hardly an airplane to
serve their needs, were ignorant of his preparations. As early as
29th July a plan had been agreed upon, for which Germany under-
took to provide five infantry and two cavalry divisions. When
Falkenhayn ceased to be Chief of the General Staff, the Emperor
had announced that he was destined presently to take up an im-
portant command. This command was the new Austro-German IX.
Army, even now assembling in the lower Maros valley. It was
intended to strike hard at the left of the straggling Rumanian front,
and open the passes leading to the Wallachian plain. Another army
under Mackensen was being assembled south of the Danube to
clear the Dobrudja of the enemy, and be ready, when Falkenhayn
had stormed the passes, to cross the river and join hands with him
in an enveloping movement upon Bucharest. At first Conrad von
Hoetzendorff would have brought Mackensen directly across the
Danube against the Rumanian capital, but Falkenhayn insisted
that the Dobrudja must first be won, and he was supported by
Ludendorff and Hindenburg. It was a bold and subtle scheme,
the true type of that offensive which is the best defence, and it
was based upon a correct judgment of Rumania's weakness and
Russia's preoccupations. Its success was certain from the moment
when the main forces of Rumania were poured across the Car-
pathians rather than over the Dobrudja frontier.

The first move came from Mackensen. He was in the Balkans
when Rumania declared war, and during the four days which
elapsed before Bulgaria followed suit he had concentrated his mixed
forces with unprecedented speed. He could count on three Bulgarian
infantry divisions, two Bulgarian cavalry divisions, and the better
part of a German corps, while two Turkish divisions were on their

1916] MACKENSEN IN THE DOBRUDJA. 229

way to reinforce him. Above all, he disposed of a far greater weight
of artillery than his opponents. The problem before him had the
simplicity of an illustration to a staff lecture on strategy. The new
frontier in the Dobrudja was 100 miles long. But the Dobrudja
narrows as it runs northward, and it is only thirty miles wide where
the main line runs from the bridge of Tchernavoda to Constanza.
Every mile he advanced, therefore, made his front shorter. Further,
if he could cut off the Rumanian bridgeheads at Turtukai and Silis-
tria, he would get rid of any danger of a flank attack on Bulgaria
across the Danube. He would advance with his flanks resting
securely on the river and the sea. If he could win the Tcherna-
voda-Constanza line, he would be master of all the Dobrudja, and
would cut off Rumania from any connection with Russia by sea.
Finally, the Dobrudja won, he would have a safe starting-point
for the passage of the Danube and the flanking movement against
Bucharest.

On 1st September Bulgarian troops crossed the Dobrudja border,
striking on the eastern flank against the railway which links
Dobritch and Baltchik. The Rumanian frontier guards fell back,
and on the 4th the enemy had Dobritch, Baltchik, and Kavarna.
This gave Mackensen a good strategic front on his right, and he
proceeded to wheel his left against Turtukai and Silistria. Each
of these places was held by an isolated Rumanian division. Had
Rumania possessed an adequate air service the perils of Mackensen's
movement would have been discerned, and the divisions withdrawn.
But only the German armies had " eyes."

Turtukai was little more than a large village, and owed its
importance solely to the ferry across the Danube between it and
Oltenitza, which stands on a tongue of hard ground between the
marshes of the northern bank and is the starting-point of a road
to Bucharest. Since 1913, when it became a frontier post, it had
been provided with extensive barracks, and defended by forts and
entrenchments. On 2nd September two Bulgarian divisions ad-
vanced from the south against the forts, while a Bulgarian-German
force, with heavy guns, came down the river from the west by the
Rustchuk road. By the morning of the 5th the place was invested,
and that evening an attempt by the general commanding at Silistria
to send supports was easily frustrated. Next day, the 6th, the
garrison of Turtukai was compelled to surrender, and 100 guns and
the better part of two infantry divisions fell into Mackensen's
hands. It was a serious disaster for Rumar ia to suffer on the tenth
day of her campaign.

230 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

The detachment at Silistria, warned by the fate of Turtukai,
did not linger. The place was evacuated, and on o,th September
was occupied by the Bulgarians. Mackensen's problem was now
to bring up his centre to the level of his left wing, and to form a
front on the line Silistria-Dobritch-Kavarna. This was presently
accomplished, and once more he swung forward his left, till on the
nth he held the front Karakioi-Alexandria-Kara Agach. Here
the Rumanian resistance stiffened ; but the German general
pressed on, till, on the 16th, he was in contact with the main
Rumanian position a dozen miles south of the Tchernavoda rail-
way, running from Rashova, on the Danube, to Tuzla, on the
Black Sea.

Rumania, engrossed in her Carpathian advance, had perforce
to turn her attention to a menace which she had ruled out as
unlikely. She saw her gains of 1913 disappearing, and her com-
munications with her main seaport in jeopardy. The measures
she took to meet the crisis showed her bewilderment. Three
divisions were hurried eastward from the Transylvanian front, and
Averescu was recalled from the command of the Second Army to
take charge of the Army of the Danube. The Russian general
Zayonchovski was placed in command of the whole defence, and the
Russian contingent present included a division composed of Southern
Slavs taken prisoner by Russia, who had asked to be led against
the enemies of their race. The Russo-Rumanian army in the
Dobrudja was now concentrated, not so much by any design of
its commander as because one of its outlying divisions had been
destroyed and two more driven back upon it. The opposing forces
were approximately equal in numbers, and the Rumanians were
fighting on interior lines with slightly the better communications
behind them. This advantage, however, such as it was, was
more than neutralized by the fact that Mackensen had many more
guns and a far greater munitionment.

For the moment the defence proved the stronger. The rolling
barrens of the Dobrudja presented no obstacle to movement so
long as the weather was dry, and Mackensen was in a hurry to win
his objective before the weather broke. On 16th September he
struck with his left, and for four days there was bitter fighting,
during which Zayonchovski held his ground. On the 20th the
latter received reinforcements and opened a counter-offensive
against the enemy's right in the neighbourhood of Toprosari, east
of the Dobritch-Megidia railway. By the 23rd Mackensen was
forced back at least ten miles behind the line which he had

igi6] FALKENHAYN ADVANCES. 231

held on 14th September. It was a fine achievement, and the
heroic Southern Slav division played no small part in it. It is
clear that Mackensen's initial supply of shells had run short, and
that in ordinary infantry fighting his men were not the superiors
of the defending force. But he had the means to procure a further
stock, and his opponents had none. Had Zayonchovski had
reserves to fling in at the critical moment, it is possible that he might
have turned the retreat into a rout, pushed the enemy beyond the
Dobrudja border, and carried an offensive far into Bulgaria. But
his men were weary, and he had no supports. He was compelled
to wait on Mackensen's next move, in the painful knowledge that
though his enemy had failed as yet to attain his main objective,
he had forced Rumania to conform to his strategy, had nullified
two avenues of communication for a Dobrudja campaign, and had
compelled at a critical moment the weakening of the Transylvanian
front.

For in Transylvania the skies were already darkening. The
two northern armies, indeed, still continued to progress after the
middle of September. Presan's army advanced from the glen of
the upper Maros over the Gorgeny mountains, and approached the
upper Kokel valley, with its important railway line. The Second
Army — now under General Crainiceanu — crossed the Geisterwald,
and on the 16th took the historic town of Fogaras on the Aluta.
But the First Army, engaged around Hermannstadt and in the
Striu valley on the way to Hatszeg, was already feeling the first
effects of Falkenhayn's new concentration.

It was commonly supposed in the West that the Teutonic
League, being accroche on the Somme and in Galicia, would have
no surplus troops for a Rumanian expedition. What Hindenburg
did was precisely what he had already begun to do in the West.
He took infantry regiments from four-regiment divisions, and
battalions from four-battalion regiments. His main trust, new
as ever, was in artillery, and on all the fronts, while he kept the
guns up to strength, he provided a smaller complement of men.
For Rumania he relied mainly on his guns, the service in which
his opponents were weakest ; but he also provided Falkenhayn
with some admirable infantry units. The northern sector, facing
the Rumanian Fourth Army, was taken over by the right wing of
the Austrian VII. Army, and the Rumanian First and Second
Armies were faced by the Austrian I. Army, under von Arz, and
Falkenhayn's new IX. Army. The latter had with it the Alpine

232 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

Corps, which had hitherto been with the Imperial Crown Prince at
Verdun — men drawn from the Bavarian Highlands, and familiar
with every branch of mountain fighting.

General Coanda, commanding that part of the First Rumanian
Army which was operating west of the Vulkan Pass, was getting
dangerously near to Hatszeg and the main line from the Austrian
bases ; so on him fell the first brunt of the German counter-attack.
He was now astride the Striu valley, and on 15th September he
encountered a German force under the Bavarian general, von
Staabs. Coanda, after a gallant fight, made a skilful retirement.
The Hatszeg range of mountains lay between him and the frontier,
and the railway by which he retreated circled round the eastern end
of the range, and then turned south to the Vulkan Pass. Pivoting
upon his left, he resisted the effort of von Staabs to outflank him in
the Hatszeg mountains, and swung his front round parallel to the
frontier. On the 20th he evacuated Petroseny, and by the 22nd
his right was back at the Vulkan Pass. That night he counter-
attacked, and took many prisoners, while his left threatened to
cut the German railway communications. Staabs was forced back
to a position astride the Striu valley at Merisor, and his gains
of the week were lost. Coanda maintained his ground till the
disastrous events farther east compelled him to fall back through
the Vulkan into Wallachia.

Falkenhayn's main thrust was delivered against the section
of the First Army known as the " Aluta Group," which at the
moment held a line from Porumbacu in the Aluta valley, by the
heights north of Hermannstadt, to Orlat in the tributary valley
of the Sibiu. This, the right of the First Army, was separated by
a space of some fifteen miles from the left of the Second Army near
Fogaras. Ten miles of rough mountain lay between it and the
frontier range ; it had no supports in flank, and it had no rearguard
to speak of at the Rotherthurm Pass. The position was fated to
be turned, and Falkenhayn grasped the opportunity. He disposed
his forces in three columns. The western, consisting of the Bavarian
Alpine Corps, was directed to cross the intervening hills, and cut
the line of retreat through the Rotherthurm Pass ; the eastern to
march through the gap between the First and Second Armies ;
and the central to attack in front the line Orlat-Porumbacu.

The Bavarian Jagers, under General Krafft von Delmensingen,
started on the 22nd, and, crossing ridges 5,000 feet high, reached
the southern base of Mount Cindrelul on the night of the 23rd.
After that their path became more difficult, and they had several

1916] THE ROTHERTHURM PASS. 233

encounters with Rumanian pickets ; but by the 26th they were
close to the Rotherthurm Pass. That day they attacked the pass,
won both its ends and the adjoining peaks, and cut the railway
line from Hermannstadt to Wallachia. They took large quantities
of material on its way to the Rumanian forces, and on a rock at
the Rumanian end of the pass clamped great letters of iron com-
memorating their success. It was an operation which for its speed
and secrecy well deserved the grandiose memorial.

Had the rest of Falkenhayn's scheme proceeded with the pre-
cision of the part entrusted to the Bavarians, the Aluta group must
have suffered complete destruction. His left succeeded in cutting
any communication with the Second Army by forcing the passage
of the Aluta east of Porumbacu, but it failed to execute a true
flanking movement. On the 26th, the day the Rotherthurm Pass
fell, the main German force opened a furious bombardment on the
Rumanian front at Hermannstadt. The Rumanians were now
aware of their imminent danger, and they met the crisis in the
spirit of soldiers. Since the Rotherthurm Pass was closed to them,
they must retreat south-eastward and cross the frontier range by
goat paths and difficult saddles. To cover such a retreat, the
rearguards offered a stout resistance, and every village was the
scene of bitter fighting. Next day their main force was at Talmesh,
and during the following week they fought their way back over the
border crest. The Second Army did what it could by an advance
west to Porumbacu, and a contingent from Wallachia kept the
Bavarians busy in the Rotherthurm Pass. The retiring troops
lost heavily, but the amazing thing is that their losses were not
greater. The Germans claimed no more than 3,000 prisoners and
thirteen guns, and the main booty was laden wagons and rolling-
stock intercepted on the Hermannstadt railway. It was faulty
generalship which led to the surprise of 26th September, but both
leaders and men showed at their best in their efforts to retrieve the
disaster. Hermannstadt was an undeniable defeat, but it was
never a rout, and the retreat over the range will rank as one of the
most honourable achievements in the story of Rumanian arms.

But Falkenhayn had won his end. He was now free to turn
eastward against the flank of the Second Army. Crainiceanu was
pushing towards Schassburg in spite of the misfortunes of his
western neighbours, and the Fourth Army was moving down the
valley of the Great Kokel towards the same objective. These
operations were admirably conducted, and had they taken place
at the beginning of September instead of at its close, the line of the

234 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

central Maros might have been won. On 3rd October the position
occupied was astride the valleys of the two Kokels, and within a
dozen miles of both Schassburg and Maros Vasarhely. It was the
high-water mark of Rumanian success in Transylvania, for on 4th
October Falkenhayn's sweep to the east had begun, and Fogaras
was evacuated. The pressure proved irresistible, and the Second
and Fourth Armies began to fall back on divergent lines to the
frontier, the former towards the Torzburg and Buzeu Passes, the
latter towards the Gyimes and the Oitoz.

On 6th October the Bucharest official reports for the first time
abandoned their tone of confidence, and announced that " in the
south of Transylvania the Rumanian army is retiring before superior
forces." The retirement was about to become universal. The tide
had turned, the invasion had ended in failure, and everywhere,
except in the extreme north, Rumania was being forced back to
defend her frontier passes. South of the Rotherthurm, indeed, the
campaign was already being fought on Rumanian soil.

II.

The closing stages of Brussilov's attack in the north had so
vital an influence on the Rumanian campaign, that they may be
most logically grouped with it. Stanislau fell on 10th August,
and by the 15th Bothmer's army had drawn back towards the
Zlota Lipa. The first two phases of Brussilov's advance had been
crowned by a brilliant success. The Russian offensive had, indeed,
attained its main object, since two Austrian armies had been shat-
tered, over 350,000 prisoners taken, and little short of a million
men put out of action. There remained six weeks of good cam-
paigning weather in which to complete the work begun on the 4th
of June by the taking of some enemy key-point like Kovel or Lem-
berg. The past two months seemed to warrant such hopes, and
the entry of Rumania into the war promised a grave distraction
for Hindenburg on his southern flank.

But Germany had not been slow to perceive and prepare against
the danger. The whole of the Eastern commands had been
transformed. The Archduke Charles took formal charge of the
forces against Rumania and his former group passed to Boehm-
Ermolli, the supreme direction of all troops north of the Car-
pathians being vested in German Headquarters. The de facto
German control, which had existed since the first day of war, was
now officially proclaimed and extended to the smallest details.

1916] BRUSSILOV'S THRUST FOR LEMBERG. 235

The Austrian regiments were moved about like pawns on a chess-
board, without regard to the wishes of their nominal commanders.
They did not complain, for the Prussian handling was efficient,
and that of their own leaders had been chaotic. Now, at any rate,
they were decently fed, and their transport well organized ; but
they perceived that they were regarded by their new masters as
mere " cannon fodder," and their love did not increase for their
allies. " We are beasts to be sent to slaughter," wrote one Austrian
officer. " When it is necessary to attack we go in front. When
enough of us are killed, the Germans advance under cover of our
dead." But till the moment of need arrived the cannon fodder
was well cared for. The Magyar regiments were for the most part
brought southward to the Transylvanian front, where they would
be defending Hungarian territory from invasion. Everywhere
along the depleted Austrian line German troops were introduced,
and the German commanders, even when they had only divisional
rank, became the true directors of operations. For the most part
Austrians were left in charge of the corps, and from the Pripet
marshes southward all the army commanders, with the exception
of Bothmer, were Austrians. But both corps and army had ceased
to be important units. The true field units were now the divisions,
and we find, as on the Western front, that groups of divisions tended
to replace the old corps, and groups of armies the old armies.
Almost every group commander was a German, and it was with
Linsingen, Bothmer, and Falkenhayn that there lay the direction
of the Eastern campaigns.

Brussilov's main objective in August was twofold — to push
towards Lemberg, and to fling his left wing beyond the Carpathians
so as to keep touch with the right of the now imminent Rumanian
advance. This dual aim meant a dislocation of his offensive front,
for there could be no strategic relation between the Carpathian
campaign and that north of the Dniester. Accordingly we find
Lechitski's Ninth Army definitely assigned to the Carpathian area,
and given a south-west alignment, while Tcherbachev extended his
left across the river, and took over the whole Dniester front. The
bat+le-ground for Russia had become two self-contained terrains,
where the forces in one could render no assistance to those in the
other. Had Lechitski's aim been merely to form a defensive flank
it would have been different, but he had a heavy offensive duty
laid upon him. It is in this inevitable divergence of purpose that
we must look for the cause of the check which Brussilov's advance
was presently to suffer. Russia was approaching the limits of her

236 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

accumulation of reserves and munitions, and could not sustain at
the old pitch two campaigns conducted in two wholly distinct areas.
If Brussilov had been able to concentrate his main energies on the
movement towards Lemberg he might well have succeeded ; if he
had remained idle on the Zlota Lipa and put all his force into the
Carpathian attack he might have turned the enemy flank in Tran-
sylvania, and frustrated Falkenhayn's march on Bucharest. But
in the middle of August the situation was still too obscure to allow
Alexeiev to forecast the true centre of gravity, and Tcherbachev
was committed to the advance on Halicz before the importance of
the Carpathian flank had revealed itself.

We left the army of Bothmer with the main feeders of its right
wing cut by Lechitski, and with Tcherbachev across the Zlota
Lipa north of Nizniov, and so threatening to turn its flank.
Brussilov's new position north of the Dniester was now well estab-
lished. His right wing on the Stokhod and his hold on Brody
safeguarded his flanks in Volhynia, while in the south he had the
Dniester itself to cover his swing towards Lemberg. He had three
railways along which to advance — that from Tarnopol by Zborov
and Krasne, that by Brzezany, and that by Halicz — all three con-
verging on the Galician capital. It was his aim to strike at Halicz
and Brzezany, while at the same time the army of Sakharov pushed
south-westward from Volhynia against the northern side of Both-
mer's salient. The immediate key-point was Halicz, the import-
ance of which was due to a number of quite different reasons. The
town stood on the right bank of the Dniester, commanding the
chief road-bridge in that neighbourhood. The Stanislau-Lemberg
railway crossed the river at Jezupol, a few miles farther down.
If Halicz fell, then the southernmost of the lines running east
from Lemberg was lost for the purpose of Bothmer's retirement,
and, moreover, the valuable lateral line up the valley of the Nara-
jovka would be rendered useless. Again, the westernmost of the
river ravines running south to the Dniester was that of the Gnila
Lipa. The loss of Halicz meant that this, the last strong defensive
position before Lemberg was reached, would be turned on its right
flank. Finally, Halicz was an important depot where large stores
had been accumulated, stores which could not be easily moved
in the disorganization of a general retreat. If Lemberg was to be
saved it was clear that Halicz must stand.

Under Tcherbachev's pressure Bothmer fell back from the
Strypa towards the Zlota Lipa, twenty miles to the west. His

igi6] BOTHMER'S STAND. 237

position \v is curious, for while his centre and left were on a straight
line, his right was bent sharply back, since the Russians, assisted
by Lechitski's advance south of the river, had crossed the Kuro-
piets by 8th August, and were over the Zlota Lipa close to its
junction with the Dniester by nth August. On the 13th they
had taken Miriampol, some ten miles from Halicz itself. Else-
where Bothmer's retirement was more leisurely. The Russian
right was at Tseniov on the 13th, and the centre not far from
Zavalov. They had marched fast so long as their route lay over
the treeless plateau just west of the Strypa, but the country be-
came more formidable as they approached the broken hills and
the forests around the Zlota Lipa. Moreover, Bothmer had fallen
back upon a prepared position, and had received large reinforce-
ments for its defence.

By 20th August, when his retreat had definitely halted, Both-
mer's fifty-mile front lay from south of Zborov, in the north, to
the Dniester, east of Halicz. On his left across the Tarnopol-
Krasne railway lay the right wing of Boehm-Ermolli's Austrian II.
Army. Bothmer lay from Koniuchy along the river Tseniovka
to the Zlota Lipa, at the important junction of Potutory — a line
of marshy valley supported by the hills, half crag, half forest,
which protected Brzezany on the east. Thence he continued down
the broad, swampy vale of the Zlota Lipa to Zavalov, where his
position was on the hills on the eastern bank, with Tcherbachev
in close contact. South of Zavalov, the German-Austrian wing
bent back at a sharp angle to form a defensive flank with the
Dniester, for south of that the Zlota Lipa line had gone. The front
in this area roughly followed the wooded hills south of the Zavalov-
Halicz highway, and reached the Dniester a little west of Miriampol.
Tcherbachev's great effort began on Tuesday, 29th August.
He struck first against Bothmer's right centre at Zavalov, and by
the evening had pushed it off the hills east of the Zlota Lipa, and
forced it across the river. Next day the Russian left came into
action towards the Dniester, and for four days the battle raged on
a fifteen-mile front from Nosov to Miriampol. On Sunday, 3rd
September, the enemy's resistance broke. Jezupol with its railway
bridge fell to the Russian extreme left, and there was desperate
fighting among the wooded hills south of the Halicz-Zavalov high-
road. Late in the day Bothmer's defensive flank was pierced,
with the result that the whole of his right and right centre
had to retreat in some confusion. The Russian cavalry were sent
in, and over 4,000 prisoners were taken. Next day, 4th September,

238 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

the Russian centre forced the passage of the Zlota Lipa, routing
a Turkish division at Bozhykov, while in the south the railway
between Jezupol and Halicz was taken, and the banks of the Gnila
Lipa reached. Bothmer had now a singular line. He still pos-
sessed the town of Halicz, but not the station on the north bank
of the Dniester. Thence his front followed the valley of the Nara-
jovka to Lipnitsa Dolna, and then struck almost due east across
wooded hills to the Zlota Lipa. North of that it followed the
valley of the Tseniovka to Zborov and Pluhov. The Russian drive
towards Halicz had thus made of Brzezany a fairly pronounced
salient, a sub-salient, so to speak, or under feature of the greater
salient formed by Sakharov's possession of Brody and Tcher-
bachev's position outside Halicz.

The situation was critical, and reinforcements were hurried up
to Bothmer's front. He got back what was left of the 3rd Guard
Division and two other German divisions from the Somme, while
his Austrian troops were also added to, so that presently his army
was stronger than it had ever been since its creation — seven
German divisions and fragments of two others, three and a half
Austrian, and two Turkish. Moreover, these divisions had mostly
been brought up to strength, so that the fifty miles of front were
held with not less than a quarter of a million men — a density
familiar in the West, but novel in the looser fighting of the Eastern
battle-ground.

Meantime Tcherbachev's right had begun its struggle for Brze-
zany. On Friday, 1st September, he attacked on the east bank of
the Tseniovka, some half-dozen miles from Brzezany, and the
battle extended south past the junction of Potutory. Between
the Tseniovka and the Zlota Lipa stood a ridge called Lysonia,
which dominated Brzezany. On 2nd September the Russian guns
bombarded the enemy position on this height, and played havoc
with the crumbling outcrops of rock which lined the crest like a
South African kranz. Next day the infantry attacked across the
Tseniovka, and carried the ridges which the artillery had rendered
untenable. For a moment it looked as if Brzezany must fall.
But the place was too vital for the Germans to relinquish it, and
a counter-attack by fresh Bavarian troops early on the morning
of 4th September won back most of the Lysonia crest. The Rus-
sians remained west of the Tseniovka, but they no longer held
the high ground. In the four days' fighting they had taken nearly
3,000 prisoners. Then during the rest of September the battle
stagnated, though Potutory fell into Russian hands. It was a

i9r6] END OF RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE. 239

clear stalemate ; both sides were so evenly matched that progress
was permitted to neither.

On 5th September Tcherbachev made a bold bid for Halicz.
He strengthened his hold on the east bank of the Gnila Lipa and
the adjacent northern shore of the Dniester. Bothmer's right
wing fell back, blowing up the Halicz bridge, and the town itself
was cleared of military stores, and the civil population evacuated.
But no progress was possible in this direction until the German
centre on the Narajovka was broken. On 7th September Tcher-
bachev had crossed the Narajovka south of Lipnitsa Dolna, win-
ning a height on the west bank. His position there now formed
a sharp salient, which it was the endeavour of the Russians to
enlarge and the Germans to destroy. All through September and
well into October the struggle continued on the line of this little
river, and the Russian attack, though gallantly sustained, was
unable to make any real progress. The third stage of Brussilov's
offensive perished in the early days of October from sheer in-
anition. It had no longer the weight of artillery and trained
reserves to succeed.

The failure of the Podolian campaign made fruitless Sakharov's
supplementary thrust from Volhynia. It was directed south-
westward from the Sviniukhy-Bludov line on a front of some six
miles in a district of forests and marshy valleys. Ground was
gained in the first fight on 1st September, and in the second main
action of 20th September. But Tcherbachev's check made its
success difficult, and deprived of strategic value even such advance
as was made. October saw the Volhynian terrain reduced to the
stagnation of the Halicz front.

There remains the final section of this third phase of Brussilov's
offensive — the Carpathians, where Lechitski faced the Austrian
III. and VII. Armies. The entry of Rumania gave this area a very
real importance, but Russia, deeply involved farther north, was
unable, as we have seen, to increase her forces there to the strength
which the strategic position demanded. On 15th August the
crest of the Jablonitza Pass was won, and by the 17th the Rus-
sians were holding part of Mount Kapul and the Kirilibaba Pass,
at the southern apex of the Bukovina. The accession of Rumania
on 27th August gave Lechitski a new orientation, and henceforward
his main efforts were directed against the passes of the eastern
Carpathians in order to co-operate with his allies. His front ex-
tended for nearly one hundred miles from north of the Jablonitza

240 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

to Dorna Watra. At first this mountain warfare went well. Be-
tween 30th August and 6th September Lechitski reported the
capture of 15 officers, 1,889 other ranks, 2 mountain guns, and
26 machine guns. On Monday, nth September, his left in the
Dorna Watra region got into touch with the Rumanian right.
On that day, too, Mount Kapul was carried in its entirety, a peak
5,000 feet high above the Kirlibaba Pass, and nearly a thousand
prisoners were taken. During these days the Rumanians were
pouring into Transylvania, and about the 22nd had reached the
farthest limit of their advance. Lechitski formed their defensive
flank ; but he could do little more, for about the middle of Sep-
tember the snow began to fall and crippled his movements among
the high peaks, and he had never that superiority in men and
guns which would have allowed him to win the western debouch-
ments of the passes and drive down on the left rear of the Austrian
defence in Transylvania.

When the tide of Rumanian invasion turned, and Falkenhayn
began his sweep across the Carpathians, Russia's position in the
theatre of her summer triumphs, while safe against attacks, did
not promise any further success in the near future. Tcherbachev
was held at Halicz, on the Narajovka, and opposite Brzezany,
and the offensive in Volhynia had come to nothing. Lechitski
had captured various outlying parts of the mountain barrier be-
tween Hungary and the Bukovina, but he had not broken the
defence. Germany's immense effort had for the moment closed
the gaps in that Austrian front which in July had seemed to be
crumbling. To stabilize their line certain changes were made in
the Russian dispositions. A new " Special Army," consisting
mainly of the Guard Corps, was formed under Gourko, and placed
on Brussilov's right wing, and the Eighth Army was moved south-
ward between the Seventh and the Ninth.

Russia entered upon the winter with very different prospects
from those which had faced her a year before. Then she lay weary
at the end of her great retreat ; now she had behind her a summer
of successes which, if they had cost her a million men, had yet
inflicted irreparable losses upon her enemies, and had proved con-
clusively that, given anything like a fair munitionment, she could
break the front of the invader. The grandiose schemes proclaimed
a year before of the capture of Petrograd and Kiev and Odessa
had faded out of the air. She was secure on her front, and seemed
to need only a period of recuperation, during which she could
complete the training of her reserves and accumulate supplies of

1916] OMENS FOR THE WINTER. 241

shells, in order to resume her deadly offensive. As before, her
problems centred in munitions. There was still no easy way of
access for these from her Western Allies. Archangel was still the
neck of the bottle, though the new Murman line from the ice-free
port of Alexandrovsk was in sight of completion, and she had
enormously increased her domestic production. But her moral
gains were conspicuous, and her troops had won confidence in
themselves and their commanders. Their resolution on the defen-
sive was now supplemented by that assurance of prowess in attack
which is necessary to produce the true fighting edge.

There were, indeed, two dark spots in her outlook. The suc-
cess of the summer had weakened that political unanimity which
had characterized the dark days of the Retreat. Reactionary
elements appeared in the ministerial appointments, and the Duma
and the Government drew apart. The omens in Russian internal
politics in the autumn of 19 16 were not propitious for a harmoni-
ous winter. In the second place, it was clear that Germany would
struggle desperately to put Rumania out of action, and to make
her share the fate of Serbia and Belgium. Succour could come
only from Russia, for the Allies at Salonika were too weak and
too far away to affect the situation. In that event Alexeiev might
find himself involved in a defensive campaign in Wallachia and
Moldavia — a campaign which lay outside his plans — and would
spend in a barren terrain the strength which he wished to reserve
for the spring advance. Germany might follow on the Eastern
front the policy which in the spring of 1916 she had followed in
the West, and the line of the Rumanian Sereth might play the part
of Verdun.

III.

The check to Brussilov's advance, more especially the un-
success of his left wing, was soon to be followed by disastrous con-
sequences to the Rumanian offensive. If Bothmer and Kirchbach
could hold their opponents among the Dniester canons and the
Carpathian defiles, the way was clear for Falkenhayn to force
the weak armies of the invader back over the mountains, and
to use the awkward strategic position of the country for a crushing
counter-attack. We have seen that the situation on 3rd October
might be regarded as the high-water mark of Rumania's success.
Thereafter the decline began, like the thaw of a snowfield in spring
■ — a slow shrinkage and declension, which grew quicker as it neared
the day of cataclysm.

242 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

At first Falkenhayn's counter-thrust was well parried. As the
enemy pushed against the left flank of the Second Army,
Crainiceanu fell back from Fogaras on 4th October, his line of
retreat being towards Kronstadt and the Torzburg, Predeal, and
Buzeu Passes. The Fourth Army must inevitably lose connection
with the Second, for its route of retirement was the eastern passes
leading into Moldavia. On the night of 5th October the Geister-
wald was lost, and the left wing of Crainiceanu's army was forced
back to the frontier mountains. On the 7th the enemy was in
Kronstadt, though the place was not finally evacuated without
some stubborn street fighting by the Rumanian rearguards.
Three days later the Rumanian Second Army was everywhere
back at the Transylvanian gates of the passes. Presan's Fourth
Army, though much less hardly pressed, was compelled to con-
form, and on the same day stood close to the frontier on the upper
streams of the Maros and the Aluta.

The great adventure was over, and Rumania was now forced
to a hopeless defence. She had taken over 15,000 prisoners during
her six weeks' attack, but beyond that had gained nothing ; while
the strength of her half-trained soldiery had been gravely tried by
the Transylvanian raid. Bad as her intelligence system was, she
had by this time some inkling of the strength and of the intentions
of the enemy, and she braced herself resolutely to meet them.
Averescu was recalled from the Dobrudja, and placed again at the
head of the Second Army, which had imposed upon it the most
critical part of the frontier defence. General Culcer, commanding
the First Army, was replaced by General Dragalina, who had
distinguished himself in the Orsova section. Moreover, General
Berthelot had arrived in charge of a French Military Mission to
supply the Rumanian General Staff with advice based on a long
understanding of German methods in war.

There could be no hesitation in Falkenhayn's mind about the
exact nature of the task before him. He had to drive his enemies
back to their borders, and regain control of the frontier railways.
That done, he would be on the inside of a curve of 300 miles with
a dozen passes to choose from, and able to strengthen rapidly
his troops at every point ; while his opponents, with slender forces
and no good communications for a sudden concentration, would
have to watch all the inlets and string their armies along the outer
line of the Transylvanian salient. Moreover, there was Mackensen
in the Dobrudja, held tight for the moment, but likely, as the
stress in the west increased, to free himself from his difficulties.

igi6] THE FORCING OF THE PASSES. 243

and win a line which he could hold lightly, thereby releasing his
main troops to cross the Danube and take Rumania in flank.
Once Rumania had failed to occupy the central Maros valley,
and Falkenhayn's IX. Army had taken the field, it was obvious
that the Austro-Germans had all the cards in their hands. The
only drawback lay in the weather. Snow had begun to fall in
the Carpathians before the end of September, and it was possible
that winter in the mountains might interfere with the transit of
the great guns and their full munitionment. What was to be
done must be done quickly.

To win a complete victory at the earliest possible moment it
was necessary to force the passes in the centre of the arc of frontier
— the passes, that is to say, between the Torzburg and the Buzeu.
If that had been achieved and the railway junctions of Ploeshti
and Buzeu seized, Rumania would have been split in two, Wal-
lachia would have been separated from Moldavia, and the Ru-
manian First Army and a large part of the Second would have
been cut off. It would have given Falkenhayn the great oil region
before it could be destroyed, and the Wallachian harvest before
there was time to remove it. He therefore began by driving hard
against the passes south of Kronstadt, while Mackensen supported
him by an advance in the Dobrudja. The Rumanian Staff were
alive to the danger. They successfully held the eastern outlets of
the central passes, and when the line gave way it was farther
west, where the consequences, serious as they were, proved less
disastrous than those which would have followed upon an early
debouchment from the Torzburg and Predeal Passes. But gallant
as the defence showed itself, it was doomed from the start. It
might avert the worst results, but it could do no more than play
for time. For a strong concentration, if it held the central passes,
involved the weakening of, or at any rate the inability to reinforce,
the defence in north-western Wallachia. The gates into Rumania
were opened when, towards the close of September, her troops came
to a standstill far beyond her borders before they had reached the
only objective that spelled security.

We have seen that south of Kronstadt three chief passes, the
Torzburg, Predeal, and Buzeu, and two lesser ones, the Altschanz
and Bratocea, open into the Wallachian foothills. These passes
are narrow denies, and on the Wallachian side it is many miles
before the glens of the rivers, bounded by steep, pine-clad hills,
open out into the plains. For obvious reasons it was necessary
for the Rumanians to fight as near as possible to their railheads.

244 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct

so they did not attempt to stand on the main divide, but had
their principal defensive positions nearer the southern debouch-
ments. With the loss of many prisoners and a few guns, by the
middle of October they had been forced back through most of
the passes. The first blow was delivered at the Torzburg. By
14th October the defence was on the main road from Kronstadt
to Kampolung, six miles inside the frontier. Here the enemy,
failing to force the road by a frontal attack, devoted himself to
outflanking movements by the subsidiary valley of the Dambo-
vitsa on the east, and Lireshti on the west. He made no progress,
and the Rumanians stood firm in front of Kampolung, on the line
Lireshti-Dragoslavele. Farther east, the railway pass of the Pre-
deal was the scene of severe fighting. The frontier ridge was won
by Falkenhayn as early as 14th October, and the border town of
Predeal was destroyed by shell fire. It fell on 25th October, and,
fighting for every mile, the Rumanians fell back through the wooded
glens towards the summer resort of Sinaia. In this section the
defence was especially brilliant, and by the first days of November
the enemy, though he had carried the main range and some of
the lateral foothills, had not advanced more than four miles inside
the frontier. Meantime Presan and the Fourth Army were holding
with equal resolution the gates of Moldavia. He had been com-
pelled to divide his forces into two detachments, one watching the
Bekas and Tolgyes Passes and the routes to the upper Bistritza
valley, and the other holding the railway pass of Gyimes and the
subsidiary Uz and Oitoz Passes, which give access to Okna. The
first assaults failed to carry the last-named passes, but by 17th
October the enemy was through the Gyimes and some seven miles
inside the frontier down the Trotus valley. There he was held
and driven back, and by the first days of November had made no
headway in this section. Farther north Presan's right wing was
no less successful. It held the frontier between the Tolgyes and
the Bekas, till it was relieved in early November by an extension
southward of Lechitski's left. From that date the Rumanian
front was bounded by the Gyimes Pass, and the defence of north-
west Moldavia was handed over to that stubborn Russian corps
which had been the spearhead of Lechitski in the summer campaign
in the Bukovina. Its counter-attack drove the enemy back across
the Tolgyes, and in this section regained the initiative.

Meantime a serious situation had begun to develop in the
Dobrudja. We have seen that by 24th September Mackensen's
advance had been checked, and he had been driven south some

t9i6] FALL OF CONSTANZA. 245

fifteen miles from the line Rashova-Tuzla. There for nearly a
month little happened. At one or two points the Rumanians
pushed the enemy farther back and took prisoners, and there was
an attempt by each side to cross the Danube. The German effort
was made on 30th September at Corabia, a port and railhead on
the Rumanian bank of the Danube, some miles west of the point
where the Aluta enters the main stream. The port was bom-
barded and a few small craft sunk, but the landing came to nothing.
The Rumanian attempt next day was more ambitious. It took
place at Rahovo, a little east of Rustchuk, where there is an island
on the north side of the river. Some fifteen battalions crossed —
too large a force for a mere reconnaissance — and occupied several
villages and a tract of land some ten miles wide and four deep.
The attacking force was weak in artillery, and, being assailed on
both flanks, it was driven back across the river with consider-
able loss. By the middle of October the pressure on the western
frontier precluded all hopes of a Russo-Rumanian offensive in the
Dobrudja.

But Mackensen had not been idle. He had received large
reinforcements of guns and munitions, and had got two new divi-
sions from Turkey and one from Germany. On 19th October,
after a heavy preliminary bombardment, he resumed the offensive,
especially against the Rumanian left. Tuzla fell next day, and
on the 21st the central position of Toprosari was evacuated, while
Mackensen's right pushed within six miles of Constanza. On the
railway the Rumanian right-centre was driven back from Copa-
dinu, and before night fell the Tchernavoda-Constanza railway
had been cut some twenty miles from the coast. Constanza,
bombarded on flank and front, could not be held. On the 22nd
its evacuation began, and its stores of oil and wheat were burned.
Under cover of the fire of a Russian flotilla in the Black Sea the
Rumanian troops withdrew, and in a wild rainstorm Bulgarian
cavalry entered the place on the 23rd. They found little booty
except some hundreds of empty railway trucks and a few loco-
motives. But Rumania had lost her principal seaport, and one
of her main lines of communication with her Russian ally. Sak-
harov, formerly in command of the Russian Eleventh Army, had
arrived to take charge of the defence, but the Russian divisions
were poor in discipline and fighting quality. In a stern order to
his troops he warned them that " they had been sent to conquer,
or at any rate to fight, and not to see who could run the fastest."

Events now moved swiftly, for against the fire of Mackensen's

246 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

guns Sakharov's ill-supplied army could make no stand. On the
23rd Megidia fell, the station on the line half-way between Tcher-
navoda and Constanza, while the Rumanian right was driven
back from Rashova. The great bridge was doomed. Constructed
twenty years before by a French company, it was more than 1,000
yards long, built of steel on stone piers, and carried at a height
of one hundred feet above the river. The Rumanian bank was
low-lying, a wide stretch of swamp and lagoon, and over the bad
ground the railway was carried by ten miles of causeway and
viaduct. The importance of the spot was not as a crossing-place,
for such a crossing could be opposed by a small force on the hard
ground about Feteshti, on the northern shore, beyond the marsh
belt, and the invaders would have to advance by a long, open
defile exposed for miles to gunfire. Mackensen had several better
crossings higher up the river, and his attack on the bridge was
only the last step in taking possession of the Constanza railway.
Once he had secured it and driven Sakharov northwards into bad
country with no railway communications, he could afford to en-
trench himself on the ground he had won, and prepare to invade
Rumania across the Danube, so soon as Falkenhayn was through
the mountains.

On the 25th the small Rumanian force which held the bridge
retired across it, and blew up one of the spans. On that day the
Bulgarians entered the town of Tchernavoda. On the 26th Sakha-
rov was twenty-four miles north of the railway, and by the 29th he
was on the line Ostrov-Babadag. Here the pursuit was stayed,
and presently the counter-offensive began. But the centre of
gravity was now in the west, where the Rumanian defence of the
hills was beginning to crumble.

We left Falkenhayn held at the debouchments of the central
passes. The winter snows had begun, and it looked as if he had
missed his stroke. But farther west the Rumanian First Army,
holding the Rotherthurm and the Vulkan Passes, was less for-
tunate than Averescu and the troops of the Second. From the
Rotherthurm Pass the Aluta flows for some thirty miles in a narrow
gorge, accompanied by a road and a railway — a gorge from its
nature impregnable to direct assault. The southern end is the
village of Rimnic Valcea, and fifteen miles east of the place is the
town of Curtea de Argesh, the terminus of one of the two railways
which ran from Piteshti to the hills. If Curtea de Argesh could be
won by way of the Aluta and Kampolung by way of the Torzburg,
the path would be prepared for the capture of Piteshti, the most

i9i6] THE FIGHTING IN THE ALUTA VALLEY. 247

important strategic point in Wallachia. Falkenhayn, therefore,
aimed at Piteshti by a converging attack through the Torzburg
and the Rotherthurm.

The Bavarian Alpine Corps, as we have seen, secured the south-
ern end of the Rotherthurm on 26th September. During early
October that force prepared for the next step, and on 15th October
began its advance in three columns. On the east a brigade was to
cross the high Moscovul Pass, and descend the glen of the Topologu
against Salatrucul. In the centre the Bavarians followed the road
which runs along the ridge between the Topologu and the Aluta.
On the west a brigade was to take the high ground of Pietroasa
and the Veverita mountain towards the tributary glen of the
Lotru. From the start all went ill. The eastern force by 18th
October had reached the hills directly north of Salatrucul, when
the Rumanians closed in on its flanks from the Aluta and Argesh
valleys, and but for a heavy snowstorm would have wholly de-
stroyed it. So, too, the western brigade was caught on the Pietroasa
massif, and flung back with heavy losses. The disasters to the
wings compelled Krafft von Delmensingen to hold up the attack
of his Bavarian centre.

For a week there was a respite, and then at the close of October
the offensive was renewed. On the 28th a fresh German division
won positions on the hills between the Aluta and the Topologu.
By this time the Aluta group of the Rumanian First Army had
been reinforced by some of Presan's troops from the Fourth Army,
released by the extension of Lechitski's front ; but the enemy was
also strengthened, and, since his campaign in the Torzburg and
Predeal Passes was checked, and he was about to make his main
effort through the Vulkan Pass, it was necessary to pin down the
Aluta group to a defence which would preclude it from sending
reinforcements westward. By 1st November the Germans had
reached the Titeshti valley, which enters that of the Aluta from the
east. A week later they had mastered the heights on both sides
of the Topologu, and the massif of Cozia which commands the
mouth of the Lotru glen. By this time events south of the Vulkan
had compelled the Rumanians to send thither every man they could
spare, and the Aluta group, thus weakened, was forced to fall back.
By the middle of November the Germans had won the Aluta valley
as far as Calimaneshti and the Topologu valley as far as Suitsi,
and controlled the road which linked up the two places. They
were only ten miles from the vital railhead of Curtea de Argesh.

We come now to the section where the defence finally broke —

248 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

the Vulkan Pass through which ran the road down the Jiu valley
to the railhead at Targul Jiu. After beating off the attack in the
Striu glen, the Rumanians, about the middle of October, were
compelled to give way before the nth Bavarian Division, and
retire through the Vulkan. The enemy advanced in four columns,
aiming at an ultimate concentration in the Jiu valley between
Targul Jiu and Bumbeshti. General Dragalina, now in command
of the Rumanian First Army, had inferior forces and no reserves.
He took his stand on the lines which the enemy had marked for
his objective, and borrowed a detachment from the division at
Orsova and one from the Aluta group. With great tactical skill
he made his dispositions, and on 27th October succeeded in check-
ing the enemy attack, and taking many prisoners. Up to 1st
November the Rumanians advanced, and drove the enemy back
to the mountain ravines by which he had come. This first battle
of Targul Jiu was the most conspicuous success of the campaign,
achieved as it was by forces inferior both in numbers and artillery.
Unluckily it was paid for by the life of the gallant commander.
General Dragalina died of his wounds on 9th November, and was
succeeded in command of the First Army by General Petale, while
the actual fighting on the Jiu was placed under General Vasilescu.

In the beginning of November, though things had gone ill in
the Dobrudja, the Rumanian defence in the west had succeeded
beyond expectation. The invaders were still held in the foothills,
and had nowhere won the debouchments to the plains. Falken-
hayn accordingly revised his plans, and resolved to make his supreme
effort in the Jiu valley. He knew the smallness of Vasilescu's
force, and he knew, too, that there the lateral communications
were worst of all, and least permitted the speedy dispatch of
reinforcements. Accordingly General Kuhne was put in charge of
a strong group, which included four infantry divisions, and a cavalry
corps under Count Schmettow. Falkenhayn himself was present
in this theatre to watch the fortunes of the new attack. To support
it and prevent reinforcements reaching the meagre Rumanian First
Army, Krafft von Delmensingen was ordered to press hard on the
Aluta, and General von Morgen in the Torzburg and Predeal
section.

The heavy guns having been got through the passes, the new
offensive began on 10th November with an attack by the two
central German divisions against the position on both banks of
the Jiu. Ground was won on the heights, and at the same time
a German force from the west pressed into the upper Motru glen.

ig i6] MACKENSEN CROSSES THE DANUBE. 249

By the 13th the enemy was astride the Jiu valley some six miles
north of Targul Jiu, and this place, the terminus of the railway
from Crajova, fell on the 15th. The Rumanian position now lay
from Copaceni, west of the Jiu, to the river Gilort, down whose
valley ran the Crajova line. The situation was desperate, and
reinforcements were hurried westward from the Aluta group.
They were fated to arrive too late, for on 17th November the second
battle of the Jiu was fought, and the whole Rumanian defence
crumbled before superior numbers and a far superior weight of
guns. Kuhne was advancing on a wide front, flinging Schmettow's
cavalry far out on his flanks, and by the 19th he had reached
Filiasa, the junction where the line from Targul Jiu joins the main
railway from Bucharest to Budapest by way of Orsova. This put
the Rumanian division at Orsova, under Colonel Anastasiu, in dire
jeopardy.

The retreat of the First Army was now eastward instead of
southward. Its first hope was to prevent its left flank being turned,
and to fall back on the pivot of the Aluta group, and hold the line
of that river. On 21st November German troops entered Crajova,
which the Rumanians had evacuated. Kuhne was now well into
the Wallachian plains, and his progress became rapid. His next
objective was the line of the Aluta, and two days later he was in
touch with its defence on the front between Dragashani and Cara-
calu. The attack on the centre at the railway bridge of Slatina
failed, but Schmettow's cavalry managed to cross the river at Cara-
calu. The position was turned, the railway bridge and the gran-
aries of Slatina were blown up, and by the 27th the Aluta line
was abandoned. It was not a moment too soon, for in the north
the group of Krafft von Delmensingen was threatening the right
flank south of the Rotherthurm Pass, and in the south the left
flank was already turned. For on the 23rd Mackensen had begun
to cross the Danube.

Sakharov on 9th November had recaptured Hirshova, on the
Danube, and pushed back Mackensen in the centre as far as Muslu.
On that day, too, a Rumanian attack from Feteshti, on the northern
shore of the river, gave them the riverside station of Dunarea, at
the north end of the Tchernavoda bridge. Pushing on, by the
middle of the month Sakharov was in position from a point on the
Danube some seven miles north of Tchernavoda to the shore of
the Black Sea fifteen miles north of Constanza. But he never
reached the railway, being held by the strong lines which the enemy
had constructed for its defence ; and before he could attack them

250 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

in force the debacle in the west had put a further offensive in the
Dobrudja out of the question.

Early in November Mackensen, having entrusted the task of
watching Sakharov to Prince Boris of Bulgaria, turned to his main
objective, the crossing of the Danube. In late autumn the river
is not a formidable obstacle to an army operating from the south
bank. The stream is at its lowest — not more than ten feet deep
between Nicopoli and Silistria, and the current is from eight to
ten miles an hour. The south bank, as we have seen, is a high bluff
with in many places, when the river is low, a beach beneath it ;
while the northern shore is for the most part swamp and back-
water. Holding the high bank, an army with modern guns could
sweep the northern shore for three or four miles inland, and com-
mand the narrow strips of hard ground between the marshes. In
addition to this advantage, Mackensen had at his command a
powerful river flotilla of monitors and gunboats, which could lie
hidden behind the shrubby islets. So soon as the fall of Orsova
and Turnu Severin had opened the way from the upper waters,
long trains of barges came downstream, bringing abundant bridg-
ing material.

He selected for his first crossing-places Islaz, opposite the Bul-
garian railhead of Somovit, and Sistova-Simnitza, the very place
where the Russians had crossed in 1877. These points were chosen
in order to turn the new Rumanian line of defence on the Aluta.
At both places the bridging of the river would be facilitated by
the islands in the stream ; and since the Sistova crossing in peace
times was one of the busiest ferries on the river, there were good
landing arrangements on both banks. On 19th November the
preliminary German bombardment began to clear the north shore.
A thick haze hung over the stream, and under its cover on the night
of the 22nd-23rd the enemy river craft swarmed out from the
shelter of the creeks and islands. In 1877 tne Russians had taken
thirty-three days to cross ; Mackensen did the main work in
eighteen hours. The first troops crossed in steam ferries, and when
they had seized the opposite bank pontoon bridges were constructed
with amazing speed. There was practically no opposition, for the
enemy's overwhelming superiority in guns made it impossible for
the Rumanian river guards to make even a show of resistance.
By the 26th Mackensen was able to report that he had an army
group under General Kosch on the northern bank ; that he had
cleared the country for twenty miles inland ; and that his van
was close on Alexandria. Presently at every Danube ferry the

i9i6] THE ORSOVA DIVISION. 251

enemy was crossing. Bulgarian cavalry were over the stream at
Corabia, and in the east a Bulgarian detachment from Rustchuk
sacked Giurgevo.

The end had now fairly come. The Rumanian left flank on
the Aluta was turned, and events in the north put the pivot on
which they swung in danger. The enemy was still held at the
Predeal, but von Morgen entered Kampolung on 29th November.
At the same time Krafft von Delmensingen was pressing hard
from the Rotherthurm. On the 25th he reached Rimnic Valcea,
and on the 27th took Curtea de Argesh. On the 29th Piteshti
fell, and the invaders' line ran by way of Dragenesti to Giurgevo
— within thirty miles of Bucharest.

Before this sweep the Rumanian groups of the Jiu and the
Aluta had fallen back in fair order. But two of the frontier forces
were in dire straits. One — the Orsova division — was already
beyond hope. Under its gallant leader, Colonel Anastasiu, it had
left Orsova on 25th November, and attempted to retreat south-
eastward to the Aluta. After three weeks' wild adventures it
reached the valley, only to find it held by the enemy. On 7th
December, two days after the capital fell, the remnant of the 7,000
surrendered at Caracalu, having extorted from the Germans admira-
tion for their undaunted valour. The Kampolung group, after the
fall of Piteshti, was compelled to move south-east over difficult
country, and eventually reached Targovishta and the Dambovitsa
valley, where it joined the main Rumanian forces.

The situation now was that from the Predeal Pass eastward
and northward the mountain position was still held, and the Rus-
sians in the Moldavian passes were successfully counter-attacking
the enemy. But from the Predeal westward all the passes had
gone, the upper Argesh valley was lost, and in the south Mackensen
had pushed between the capital and the Danube. Averescu, now
in supreme command of the Rumanian forces, attempted one last
stand before Bucharest. A Russian division had arrived in sup-
port, and north-west lay what was left of the First Army. South
and south-west Presan commanded a group formed of troops from
what had once been the Third and Fourth Armies to hold the
line of the lower Argesh. On 30th November the Germans forced
the passage of the little river Nealovu, only sixteen miles from the
capital. On 1st December Presan attempted a counter-stroke with
the object of driving a wedge between Mackensen and the German
centre under Kuhne. He almost succeeded, for he flung the enemy
back over the Nealovu, taking thirty guns and 1,000 prisoners.

252 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

Unfortunately the expected reserves came too late, and the enemy
was reinforced before Presan could press his victory home. The
success of ist December was changed on the 2nd and 3rd to disaster,
and Presan's broken forces were driven in upon Bucharest. Mean-
time farther north the remains of the First Army could not bar
the roads down the upper Argesh and the Dambovitsa. The vital
junction of Titu fell, and Targovishta, the border-town of the great
oilfields, passed into enemy hands.

Since the line of the Argesh and Dambovitsa could not be held,
it was clear that Bucharest was doomed. In the days before the
war the Rumanian capital ranked as one of the great fortresses of
Europe. Around the city the land is a flat plain, open, treeless,
and highly fertile, broken only by a slight rise between the Argesh
and the Dambovitsa. Such country was considered ideal for a
modern fortress, and more than thirty years ago the Rumanian
Government accepted the suggestion of Brialmont, the Belgian
engineer, to make of the place an entrenched camp like Antwerp.
In those days the dreaded enemy was Russia, and Brialmont
intended that Bucharest should be the central point for the defence
against the Russians advancing towards the Danube, its works
being supplemented by an entrenched line on the lower Sereth
from Galatz to Focsani. Brialmont's forts, nineteen in number,
were arranged in an irregular oval at a distance of from six to
nine miles from the centre of the city, connected by a circular
railway linked up by three junctions with the existing lines. The
forts were of the same type as those of Liege and Namur, a mass
of concrete covering a vaulted underground structure, and forming
the glacis for armoured steel turrets mounting heavy guns. But
in 1914 the first months of war showed that, under the fire of the
latest siege artillery, the turret fort, with its steel armour and con-
crete glacis, was futile. Five millions sterling had been expended
on the forts of Bucharest ; for this campaign the money was as
utterly wasted as if it had been thrown into the Black Sea. It
needed 120,000 men to man the defences, and to shut up these
numbers in the place would have been to make a present of them
to the enemy. The Rumanian Staff had long recognized this truth,
and the most they could do was to fight a delaying action on the
Argesh to cover the evacuation. That had begun towards the end
of November, when Mackensen first crossed the Danube. By ist
December the Ministers, the banks, and the Allied Legations had
moved to Jassy, in Moldavia. On 5th December the Arsenal was
blown up. On 6th December Mackensen entered the city.

Reference
AustrwGermBn tines of advance

._».-.. francs.- .. ■■

Land over 3000 feet shorn that

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THE RUMANIAN CAMPAIGN.

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MCIA^MA;

igi6] THE RETREAT TO JASSY. 253

Meantime, in the north, Falkenhayn was approaching Ploeshti,
the centre of the oil region. As he moved east from Targovishta
he had before him, like the Israelites in the desert, a pillar of smoke
by day and a pillar of fire by night. The air was rank with the fog
and fumes of burning oil. The headworks of the wells, the wells
themselves, the refineries, the stores, the tanks — all were ablaze
as the Rumanians retreated. The destruction was largely the
work of a British Member of Parliament, Colonel Norton Griffiths,
assisted by the many American engineers employed in the oilworks,
and millions of pounds' worth of property was destroyed in a few
days. In front of the German armies moved a crowd of fugitives
of every class and condition. Roads and railways were congested
with traffic. In the towns on the line of the retreat there was
little shelter and scanty fare. It was a starved and frozen crowd
that struggled into Jassy and Galatz.

The advance of Falkenhayn to Ploeshti had compelled the
Rumanians to abandon the defence of the Predeal. Sinaia, the
summer residence of King Ferdinand, among the pine-woods of
the Prahova valley, was occupied on the same day as the capital.
The German line now ran from the Predeal through Sinaia, Ploeshti,
and Bucharest to the Danube, where Oltenitza had been abandoned,
and a new Bulgarian force was crossing from Turtukai. Wallachia
had gone, and the defence was confined to the short front between
the apex of the Transylvanian salient at the Buzeu Pass and the
river. North of the Buzeu the mountain frontier was still un-
broken. The Rumanian army had suffered no Sedan ; but it had
lost heavily, and the remnant was broken and weary. It was
clear that the defence of Moldavia must for the present rest
mainly with the Russian reinforcements.

Contemporary history is rarely just to failure. Only when the
mists have cleared and the main issues have been decided can the
belligerents afford to weigh each section of a campaign in a just
scale. Rumania's entry into the war had awakened baseless hopes
among her Allies ; her unsuccess — her inexplicable unsuccess, as
it seemed to many — was followed by equally baseless criticism and
complaint. The truth is, that when Brussilov and Sarrail had once
failed to achieve their purpose, her chances of victory were gone.
She attempted a strategic problem which only a wild freak of fortune
could have permitted her to solve. Her numbers from the start
were too small, too indifferently trained, and too weakly supplied
with guns. Nevertheless, once she stood with her back to the wall,

254 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

this little people, inexpert in war, made a stalwart resistance.
Let justice be done to the skill and fortitude of the Rumanian
retreat. Her generals were quick to grasp the elements of danger,
and by their defence of the central passes prevented the swift and
utter disaster of which her enemies dreamed. After months of
fighting, during which his armies lost heavily, Falkenhayn gained
Wallachia and the capital ; but the plunder was not a tithe of
what he had hoped for. The Rumanian expedition was, let it
be remembered, a foraging expedition in part of its purpose, and
the provender secured was small. The ten weeks of the retreat
were marked by conspicuous instances of Rumanian quality in
the field, and the battles of Hermannstadt and the Striu valley,
the defence of the Predeal, Torzburg, and Rotherthurm Passes,
the first battle of Targul Jiu, and Presan's counter-stroke on the
Argesh were achievements of which any army might be proud.
And the staunch valour of the Roman legionaries still lived in the
heroic band who, under Anastasiu, cut their way from Orsova to
the Aluta.

CHAPTER LXV.

THE ITALIAN COUNTER-ATTACK.

June lb-November 21, 1916.

Preparations for new Isonzo Battle — Fall of Gorizia — Italy declares War on Ger-
many— The Autumn Campaign in the Carso — Death of the Emperor Francis
Joseph.

The Austrian threat in the Trentino had, according to General
Cadorna, exhausted itself by the 3rd day of June. But this ex-
haustion did not involve an immediate relinquishment of the
struggle for the road to the Venetian plains. The Italian position
lay from the Coni Zugna, in the Val Lagarina, to the massif of
Pasubio, where they held the crests ; then south of the Posina to
a point south-east of Arsiero ; and thence along the southern and
eastern rims of the Asiago plateau to the Val Sugana. For a
fortnight the enemy fought hard against the Italian centre and
right, in the first theatre to break through the Posina heights
and reach Schio, and in the second to turn the Italian flank on
the Brenta. The splendid defence of Cadorna's left in the Pasubio
and Buole region, where the Alpini fought half buried in snow,
slept in snow, and had two hundred cases of frost-bite daily, had
defeated the dangerous turning movement from the Vallarsa, and
the only chances left to the enemy were in the centre and on the
east.

The actual Italian counter-offensive may be said to have begun
on Friday, 16th June, when, on the extreme right, two columns
of Alpini drove two Austrian regiments from Monte Magari, a
peak of 5,000 feet above the Val Sugana, which forms the northern
buttress of the Sette Communi plateau. Cadorna had begun to
reascend the staircase down which the enemy had moved half-way.
In spite of a stubborn defence, the Italian right began to close
in on Asiago. On the 20th the centre advanced on the heights

265

256 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

south of the Posina, and on Monte Cengio. Meantime Brussilov's
pressure in Volhynia was beginning to make itself felt, and by
the 25th the Italians had begun to force the pace of withdrawal.
Their artillery pounded the enemy positions, and between the
Brenta and the Adige they won ground everywhere, in some places
only half a mile, in others as much as four miles. On the 25th
Monte Cengio was stormed, and Monte Cimone, north of Arsiero,
was carried. Next day squadrons of Sicilian horse rode into
Asiago, and on the 27th Arsiero was recovered. On the Italian
left ground was won north of Coni Zugna, and the whole centre
advanced across the Posina. The deep bulge between the Adige
and the Brenta was being pressed in, and the enemy fell back
only just in time. He had no reserves remaining, for his last
division had been flung in to cover the difficult retirement of his
left. In two days the Austrians had lost more than half the ground
they had gained in their six weeks' offensive.

Presently the enemy's front was behind the Posina and the
Assa, and there for the time being he remained. He held a strong
position in the centre on the mountain ridges of Maggio, Torano,
Campomolon, and Spitz Tonnezza, and even on his flanks he had
advanced from his old line, for he held Borgo in the east and Zugna
Torta in the west. He had certain definite territorial gains to
show for an enormous expenditure of shells, and losses which were
not less than 130,000. Moreover, his retreat was skilful, for he
lost few prisoners and few heavy guns. As he retired he contracted
his front, and so could make up for the absence of the divisions
which had gone eastwards against Brussilov. But when all
has been said, the Trentino offensive was, from Austria's point of
view, a grave failure. It had not reached its main objective —
the Venetian plains and the railway communications of the Isonzo
front. It had weakened Austria's strength, and lowered her
power of resistance to Brussilov's attacks. It had inspired her
with the false notion that she had crippled Cadorna and prevented
any Italian offensive that year. Finally, it had taught the Italians
their business. It had forced them to improve their communica-
tions, and to grapple with transport difficulties of the first magni-
tude. Italy's materiel was immensely increased, and her success-
ful resistance not only gave her confidence and enthusiasm, but
a certain suppleness in movement and a new technical aptitude.
If Cadorna could bring reinforcements swiftly and secretly from
the Isonzo to the Trentino, he might carry them back again with
the same speed and silence. The penalty for Austria's failure

I9l6] THE ISONZO FRONT. 257

was not Italy's counter-stroke of June in the Trentino, but her
August assault on Gorizia.

As we have seen, the fifty-mile front on the Isonzo was one of
the most difficult and complex of all the European battle-grounds.
In July the Italian position was as follows : At Tolmino their
left flank was east of the river, and established on the hills north
of the town, while they held strongly the heights on the western
bank. The town remained in Austrian hands, and the area offered
no very good opportunities for an advance, since the railway from
Gorizia to Villach by the Wochein tunnel was already cut, and a
flank march on Gorizia from Tolmino was an almost impracti-
cable undertaking. Fifteen miles south the Italian left centre
held the bridgehead of Plava, which offered a possible route for
an attack upon Monte Santo, the defence of Gorizia on the north.
The enemy, however, held the heights east of the river in great
strength, and such a plan, since the asset of surprise was lost,
would have involved a cost wholly disproportionate to any con-
ceivable gain. It had been tried on July 2, 1915, and had failed.
An attack from this side was not possible till a more sheltered
road could be made down into the Plava bottom which would
escape the attentions of the enemy from Monte Kuk.

The Italian centre lay in front of Gorizia itself. The city lay
in a pocket of plain defended on all sides by ramparts of hills.
West of the Isonzo the Austrians held the line of lower heights,
Sabotino, Oslavia, and Podgora, on the first and last of which
the Italians had formerly effected a lodgment. North ran the
Ternovanerwald, with its main positions of Monte Santo, Monte
San Gabriele, and Monte Santa Caterina. South lay the northern
edge of the Carso plateau. Finally, the Italian right wing lay
along the western rim of the Carso itself— that bleak, stony upland,
without soil or vegetation, where every acre is a virtual fortress.
The map will show that it projects well to the west into the great
loop of the Isonzo. The chord of the arc so formed is the dry
valley called the Vallone, which runs almost from the plain of
Gorizia to the Adriatic. It was that part of the Carso west of
the Vallone which formed the key of the southern defences of
Gorizia. The valley itself was like a vast lateral communication
trench, providing a sheltered road for the movement of troops
behind the front line. The Italians held the greater part of this
butt-end of the Carso, and in the centre reached almost to the
Vallone ; but in the north Monte San Michele, and in the south

258 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June-Aug.

the line of heights between Sei Busi and Cosich, had defied their
efforts. The vital point was San Michele, for it dominated the
Gorizian plain.

In any assault upon Gorizia there were two alternatives before
the Italian commander. Merely to master the heights on the
western bank would not give him the city. He must win them,
and also carry in support either the northern defences at Santc
or the southern at San Michele. The reason was that with the
enemy on San Michele or Santo, the Podgora line, even if won,
could not have been used as a position from which to assault the
actual river crossing. Cadorna chose the latter of the two alter-
natives— to carry the western bank, and at the same time take
the defence on its southern flank by winning San Michele.

During the winter Italy had made a great effort in the pre-
paration of munitions and heavy guns, and her General Staff had
worked out in detail the plans for the Isonzo attack. The Tren-
tino business upset the time-table, but it did not change the essen-
tials of the scheme. Cadorna spent May and June with one eye
on the Sette Communi and the other on Gorizia and the Carso,
where Boroevitch sat in fancied security. Even in the heat of
the last defensive effort in the Trentino there was a steady winning
of minor positions in the Gorizian area. For example, on the
evening of 14th June a Neapolitan brigade captured by a sur-
prise attack the enemy trenches east of Monfalcone, taking seven
machine guns and nearly five hundred prisoners. On the 29th
a sudden gas attack almost drove the Italians off the Carso, and
in repelling it Colonel Gandolfi was the first soldier to receive
the gold medal al valore otherwise than as a posthumous honour.
Towards the end of June certain movements had already begun
for transferring troops and guns from the Trentino to the Isonzo.
The Italian Staff divided its operations under this head into three
stages. From 29th June to July 27th the work was only pre-
liminary, consisting of the transport of reserve units and of drafts
for the existing Isonzo forces, as well as a certain amount of mate-
rial. From 27th July to the eve of the grand assault the great
guns and trench mortars were moved, and the principal new units,
who received their orders while on the journey. After the attack
began there was a rapid movement of reserves, which the railways,
reorganized under the strain of the Trentino defence, handled
with conspicuous speed and precision.

Cadorna desired to take the enemy unawares. He intended to
feint hard with his right wing against the Monfalcone end of the

I9i6] CADORNA'S PLAN. 259

Carso position, and so induce the Austrians, under fear of being
outflanked, to mass their local reserves there. At the same time,
they would assume that it was merely a local effort, and would
not hurry such strategic reserves as they might possess to that
point from the more distant parts of their line. Then, when the
main enemy strength was massed opposite Monfalcone, he intended
to strike with his chief forces against Gorizia itself on the front
from Sabotino to San Michele. His strategy was assisted by the
confidence into which Boroevitch had been lulled. That com-
mander believed that the Trentino offensive had, even in its failure,
crippled Italy for months. Once again, as in Volhynia in June,
Austria had underrated the recuperative power of her opponents.

From the 1st day of August the Italian artillery bombarded the
whole Isonzo front from Sabotino to the Adriatic. The " prepara-
tion " was so uniform that the defence could not forecast an in-
fantry attack in any one section from the special violence of the
shelling. On Friday, 4th August, came the Monfalcone feint. The
Bersaglieri, who had long made this their fighting ground, carried
two hills to the east of the Rocca, in their assault upon the strong
Austrian flank positions on Monte Cosich. The Austrians left
numbers of asphyxiating bombs in their abandoned trenches,
which did terrible havoc among the attackers. Presently a counter-
stroke drove back the Bersaglieri to their original line. But
Cadorna's purpose had been secured, for Boroevitch promptly rein-
forced the Monfalcone section.

On Sunday, 6th August, the Italian bombardment was resumed,
this time with redoubled fury along the front from Sabotino to
San Michele. Presently it was reported that the Austrian first
position had been destroyed, and at four in the afternoon the in-
fantry crossed their parapets. Against Gorizia itself moved the
right wing of the Second Army, the enlarged 6th Corps, under
General Capello, whose chief of staff, Badoglio, had planned the
details of the battle. On the right against San Michele and the
north edge of the Carso was the left wing of the Duke of Aosta's
Third Army.

The great battle of that day and the following which determined
the fate of Gorizia falls naturally into two parts — the northern,
where the Italians aimed at mastering the heights between Sabotino
and Podgora ; and the southern, where the objective was San
Michele. Sabotino and San Michele may be regarded as the two
lateral buttresses of the Gorizian bridgehead, the fall of which
must involve its conquest. On the extreme left troops of the

260 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

45th Division were directed on Sabotino. The mountain had been
tunnelled to within ninety feet of the Austrian trenches, and in
that tunnel the first wave of the assault assembled. At the signal
they swept up the broken hillside among the blazing scrub with
such splendid gallantry that they were through the enemy first
position before he had begun his barrage. In twenty minutes the
first three trench lines were carried, and within an hour the Italians
had the redoubt on the summit, fifteen hundred feet above the
river, had captured the whole garrison, and were swarming down
the farther side. Before the dark fell the 45th Division held the
line San Valentino-San Mauro, within half a mile of the river.
Just south of Sabotino a brigade of the 43rd Division assaulted the
hill marked 188, and carried it. On their right the Abruzzi Brigade
of the 24th Division stormed at dusk the strong line of Oslavia.
South, again, a brigade of the nth Division advanced against
Podgora. This key-position, so long contested, was not taken
without desperate fighting. The crest was won in patches, and
the Italians advanced down the farther slope ; but for two days
small garrisons of brave men resisted on the summit. An Austrian
major with forty men made such a gallant stand that when he was
finally overpowered the Italian commander ordered his men to
present arms to the prisoners. Austria's fighting record in the
campaign was so consistently belittled by her German allies that
it is worth while remembering that both against Italy and Russia
certain of her troops showed a fighting quality which was never
excelled and not often equalled in the German ranks. Finally, to
complete the tale of this section, the 12th Division carried Monte
Calvaria, and had advanced by nightfall against the enemy's final
position between the southern end of Podgora and the river.

Not less were the achievements of the Third Army against
San Michele. Had it been possible for the Bersaglieri on the 4th
to have carried the Sei Busi-Cosich position, the Italian right might
have swung northwards against the southern flank of the mountain.
As it was, the place had to be taken by direct assault. The four
peaks, three of which had once been in Italian hands, seemed to
offer a task too hard for mortal valour. Nevertheless it was com-
pleted, but not without heavy loss. The enemy fought from
cavern to cavern and from redoubt to redoubt ; but he could not
be reinforced, and step by step during the 6th and 7th the Italians
won their way to the rim overlooking Gorizia and forced the defence
northwards.

By midday on Tuesday, 8th August, the whole of the heights

Igi6] FALL OF GORIZIA. 261

on the western bank of the river had fallen to Cadorna, and the
key-point of San Michele on the eastern shore. The moment had
now come for the assault upon Gorizia itself. Trench line after
trench line had to be carried in the riverside flats, but before the
darkness came no Austrians remained on the western bank. The
bridges had been damaged, and must be repaired before the army
could cross, and for this task it was necessary to get an advance
guard over to hold a covering line. At dusk troops of the Casale
and Pavia Brigades forded the stream, and entrenched themselves
on the farther side, while detachments of cavalry and Bersaglieri
cyclists pursued and kept touch with the retreating enemy. That
day, too, the right wing won more ground on San Michele, occupy-
ing Boschini on its extreme northern edge. By the morning of
the 9th the bridges were ready, and the main army crossed the
stream. Before noon it entered Gorizia, no longer the pleasant
city among orchards which had once made it the Austrian Nice,
but a dusty, shell-scarred memorial of a year of war. Meantime
the Italian cavalry was pressing eastwards to the line of the little
river Vertoibizza, and the hills which on the east bound the Gorizian
plain. Already over 12,000 prisoners were in Cadorna's hands,
and the casualties of the defence were little less than 80,000.

With the fall of Gorizia Cadorna's offensive entered on its
second phase. Trieste was now the direct objective, and as a
first step the enemy must be driven beyond the Vallone depression,
since as long as he held any part of the western side he menaced
Gorizia, and barred progress on the Carso itself. On Thursday,
10th August, began the advance on the Vallone. That day the
whole Doberdo plateau was cleared, the Sei Busi-Cosich knot of
hills was taken, and the enemy was flung eastward across the
valley. At one point in the south, at Debeli, near Monfalcone,
the Austrians held their ground for two days longer ; but on Satur-
day, the 12th, their resistance was broken, and the whole of the
western butt-end of the Carso was in Cadorna's hands. He pressed
on east of the Vallone, took the village of Oppacchiasella, the hill
called Nad Logem, and positions on the west side of Monte Pecinka.
North-east of Gorizia he won Tivoli, on the slopes of Monte Santa
Caterina. But it was clear that the San Gabriele and Santo heights
could not be taken without a simultaneous attack from Plava
or Monte Kuk. Moreover, it was necessary to rearrange the front
after the fortnight's fighting, and about 15th August the advance
slowed down. It had made invaluable gains. Gorizia and the
Gorizian plain were won, and a vital part of the Carso, the line

262 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

now lying several miles east of the Vallone. The Austrians, as in
Galicia, had been compelled by their repulse not to shorten but
to lengthen a front already inadequately held. The whole southern
Isonzo defence system had disappeared, and between Cadorna and
Trieste lay a country, difficult indeed, but lacking such elaborately
prepared fortifications as those which had made the Isonzo line so
stubborn a problem. Between 4th and 15th August he had taken
18,758 prisoners, 393 of them officers, 30 heavy guns, 62 pieces of
trench artillery, 92 machine guns, and huge quantities of every
kind of war materiel.

The August battles roused in Italy a strong emotion of joy and
pride. Only those who have seen the steep wooded hills west of
Gorizia, and viewed the intractable landscape of the Carso, can
realize how great was the Italian achievement. The Carso in
especial might be claimed with truth as the most terrible battle-
field in Europe. Waterless and dusty, scorching by day and icy
by night, it was one giant natural redoubt. There was nothing to
soften the shattering percussion of projectiles among the acres of
rock and boulders, and wounds which elsewhere might have been
slight became deadly injuries. Further, Austria had used all the
laborious talent of certain classes of her people to turn the natural
strength of the place to the best advantage. In this uncanny
fighting Italy was developing special troops distinguished by a
desperate ardour and an extreme endurance. She had always
been famous for her corps d'elite, and to the great names of
Alpini and Bersaglieri there were soon to be added those of Arditi
and Granatieri. New leaders also had emerged in the struggle,
and of Capello and Badoglio the world was to hear much in the
future.

The fall of Gorizia was for Italy like the extra chemical whose
addition to a compound dissolves certain intractable elements.
The new enthusiasm for the war brought her into exact line with
her Allies. On May 23, 1915, she had broken with Austria-Hun-
gary, and the Triple Alliance was at an end ; on 20th August of
the same year she had declared war on Turkey, and on 19th October
on Bulgaria ; but with Germany she still remained formally at
peace. Her reasons for this anomalous situation were mainly
domestic, and no Ally questioned their validity, the more especially
as against one member of the Teutonic League she was waging a
whole-hearted struggle. But the financial and ecclesiastical diffi-
culties which stood in the way of a final break with Germany
gradually disappeared during the first year of war. Germany was

igi6] WAR WITH GERMANY DECLARED. 263

the supreme fount of offence, and a contest with any one of her
allies must bring a nation face to face with that Prussian creed
which civilized Europe had vowed to destroy. Nor was she her-
self slow to give Italy specific grounds for hostility. She surrendered
to Austria Italian prisoners of war who escaped to German soil ;
she directed her banks to regard Italian subjects as alien enemies,
and to postpone all payments owing to them ; she suspended the
payment of pensions due to Italian workmen. By the summer of
1916 the nominal peace was the merest comedy. It was Germany
who supplied Austria, Italy's direct opponent, with her chief
munitions of war ; it was German officers and German soldiers
and sailors who largely directed every operation against Italy ; it
was only by Germany's assistance that the Archduke Charles had
been able to concentrate for the Trentino offensive. The contrast
between the situations de facto and de jure had become too glaring
to continue. Cadorna's success cleared the air. The new national
spirit demanded that truth should be spoken and facts recognized.
Accordingly, on 27th August the Government declared in the
King's name that Italy considered herself as from 28th August in
a state of war with Germany, and begged Switzerland to convey
the intimation to Berlin. So completely farcical had been the
previous peace that the declaration involved no single change in
the conduct of the campaign.

The capture of Gorizia was an important step, but the nature
of the country made it no more than a first step, and those who
spoke glibly of a dash for Laibach or Trieste had small acquaint-
ance with the intricate landscape. North of Gorizia the Isonzo
runs in a deep trench, its eastern bank rises in sharp wooded
ridges to the height of nearly 2,000 feet, and from its crest runs
north-east the great Bainsizza plateau between the Isonzo and the
Val Chiapovano. South of this last glen, and at right angles to
the main river, the southern rim of the Ternovanerwald stretches
eastward, with its peaks of Monte San Gabriele and Monte San
Daniele defending the Gorizian plain from the north. Till these
were mastered, there could be no advance from Gorizia along the
railway to Trieste. East of the city the Austrians held the low
wooded ridge of San Marco, and the east bank of the Vertoibizza
up to the edge of the Carso, along whose foot flowed from the east
the little river Vippacco. The western Carso had already been
won, but the Carso east of the Vallone was a harder problem. Deso-
late and stony in the interior, it had shaggy wooded fringes — the

264 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

ridge above the Vippacco in the north, and in the south Hermada
and the coast foothills. Its tableland was tilted towards the
north-east, where it ascended from the Vallone in a great stair-
case to the crest called the Iron Gates, south of Dornberg.

It is necessary to recapitulate this topography that the strength
of the Austrian position may be understood. Two facts must be
kept in mind. The first is, that no advance eastwards through the
Gorizian plain was practicable till Santo, Gabriele, and Daniele,
the rim of the Ternovanerwald, had been won, and that to win
these points the Italians must first scale the steep ridge east of
the Isonzo and carry the Bainsizza plateau. The second is, that
for the same advance the Carso must be carried, and that with
every mile the place became a stronger fortress. To force the ridge
of the Iron Gates by direct attack was impracticable, and the best
chance was a turning movement by the south. But to block this
rose Hermada, one labyrinth of tunnels and trenches, and bristling
with guns. The task before Cadorna was a slow and formidable
one, and could only be performed by patient stages. Moreover, it
must be performed by alternate blows — now at the Santo ridge,
now on the Carso, for each demanded a full concentration. Till
Gabriele and Daniele were won in the north and Hermada on the
south, the Austrians in Trieste might sleep secure.

The Carso was fixed as the theatre of the next movement, and
something like a month was occupied in preparation. The Italian
line — the Third Army — now ran from the Vippacco, east of the
hill called Nad Logem, east of Oppacchiasella, west of the hamlet
of Nova Vas, east of the lake of Doberdo, and thence to the coast
marshes about Porto Rosega. On the morning of 14th September
a great bombardment began between the Vippacco and the sea,
in which the bombarda, the giant 11-inch trench mortar, played a
chief part. Just after midday a thunderstorm broke on the Carso,
and when, in the early afternoon, the Italian infantry advanced it
was in a downpour of rain. In the centre, east of Nad Logem,
they succeeded at once, and took large numbers of prisoners. On
the right there was desperate fighting around Nova Vas and Hill
208 to the south, and no impression was made on the extreme
right, where Hills 144 and jy were supported by the guns from
Hermada. On the left the Italians surrounded the little hill where
stood San Grado di Merna.

All night thunderstorms rattled among the stony scarps, and
with the wet dawn the batteries began again. At midday on the
15th came the next attack, which gave the Italians San Grado as

i9i6] THE CARSO CAMPAIGN. 265

well as some gains at Lokvica * and Oppacchiasella. Next day,
the 16th, the line was farther advanced, and on the following
day Austrian counter-attacks were decisively repulsed. So far,
in the four days' battle, the Duke of Aosta had taken between
4,000 and 5,000 prisoners, but he had not won any vital position.
The Austrians showed the most dogged tenacity in defence, and
they were well served by the nature of their fortifications. To
quote from an Italian communique : " Their new trenches had
been prepared months ago, and had been strengthened and deep-
ened as soon as the Italian offensive which resulted in the taking
of Gorizia began. Many of these were blasted out of the rock to
the depth of about six feet, faced with a low parapet of sandbags,
and protected with steel shields, as experience had taught the
Austrians not to use stones in the construction of their breast-
works, and to avoid offering even the smallest target to the Italian
artillery and trench mortars. Moreover, caverns and deep dug-
outs protected the defenders during bombardment. The undulat-
ing ground, broken by innumerable crater-like holes in the lime-
stone, and here and there covered by small woods, lends itself
admirably to obstinate resistance with concealed emplacements
and hidden machine guns. Everywhere they had barbed-wire
entanglements, much of which, being concealed, escaped destruc-
tion."

Once more the Italian bombardment was renewed, and with
it came the rain. Low mists hung over the plateau, observation
from the air was impossible, and it was not till 10th October that
the next attack was made. The infantry of the Third Army
advanced at 2.45 p.m. in a thin fog, and were immediately suc-
cessful. They straightened out the kinks which had been left
from the September battle, winning notably the remainder of the

* A short list may be given of the chief place-names which are spelled differ-
ently on Austrian and on Italian maps : —

A ustrian. Italian.

Flitsch. Plezzo.

Tolmein. Tolmino.

Gorz. Gorizia.

Wippach. Vippacco (sometimes Frigido).

Volkovnjak. Vugognacco.

Fajti Hrib. Faiti or Dosso Faiti.

Kuk. Monte Kuk, Cucco, Coceo,

Nova Vas. Villanova.

Kostanjevica, Castagnevizza.

Hudi Log. Boscomalo.

Lukatic. Locati.

Hermada. Querceto.

Lokvica. Locvizza.

266 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

Hill 208 position, and Hill 144 east of Lake Doberdo. The Italian
front now ran nearly straight from Hill 144 to the Vippacco, and
included the whole of the old Austrian front which had been at-
tacked in September. Next morning, nth October, the Austrians
counter-attacked in dense fog, especially against the Italian left.
In the afternoon, when the weather had cleared, the Italians again
advanced, and during that night and the following day there was
a fierce struggle for Sober and the new line on Hill 144. At Sober
alone, on a single battalion front, 400 dead were counted. That
afternoon the Italians carried the hill of Pecinka in the centre,
and got into the outskirts of the villages of Lokvica and Hudi
Log, more than a mile east of Nova Vas. Once more the line
was as serrated as it had been in September.

On the 13th, in wild weather, the Duke of Aosta's left pushed
north of Sober to the Gorizia-Prvacina road, and brought their
capture of prisoners up to 8,000. But the continuing tempest —
the same chain of gales which dislocated the British plans on the
Somme — forced the battle to a standstill, and compelled the Italians
to withdraw a little from Pecinka, Lokvica, and Hudi Log. For
a fortnight the rains continued, and then very slowly the mists
began to rise, and a chill, the first hint of winter, crept into the
air. On 30th October the skies were clear, and from dawn to
dusk there was such a bombardment as even the Carso had not
seen. Fog had settled on the ridges again, but it was the fog of
powdered earth, splintered stone, and the fumes of the great shells.
The guns roared all night, and on the morning of the 31st, at ten
minutes past eleven, the Italian infantry crossed the parapets, to
be met with a hurricane of shrapnel as soon as they showed in
the open. On the left the nth Corps won back all the ground
that had been relinquished, carried Pecinka and Lokvica, and within
an hour, by a brilliant flanking movement, had the summit of
Veliki Hrib. Thence they swept on to the hill named 376.
The Italian centre south of Lokvica moved along the Oppac-
chiasella-Kostanjevica road, and came within a thousand yards
of the latter place. The right wing, operating along the southern
rim of the Carso plateau, took Hill 238 and the village of Jamiano,
but could not maintain itself against the fire from the Hermada
guns. That hollow east of Hill 144, the southern end of the Val-
ione, became a nether pit of smoke and death.

The day had been for the Third Army a remarkable victory,
for on a front of more than two miles, between the north edge of
the Carso and the Oppacchiasella-Kostanjevica road, the Austrian

1916] CAPTURE OF FAJTI HRIB. 267

line had been shattered. A large number of enemy batteries were
taken, and nearly 5,000 prisoners, including 132 officers. But a
pronounced salient had been created, and a salient is always liable
to a counter-stroke. The Austrians had been so roughly handled
that it was not till 2nd November that their guns woke. All the
ground won by the Italian centre was plastered with shells, and
since the Italians were largely in the open, the old trenches having
been destroyed, their sufferings were severe. Of the Bersaglieri
brigade which had taken Pecinka there is told a fine tale. All
night the brigadier and the commanders of the 6th and 12th Regi-
ments walked up and down the front line to give confidence to
their men, and in the morning of the three only one was left. About
midday the enemy launched his infantry against Pecinka and Hill
308, in order to drive a wedge into the salient. He failed, and the
Italians again swept forward, taking Hill 399 and the crowning
position of Fajti Hrib.

Fajti Hrib is the highest point of the step of the great stair-
case which runs from the Vippacco to Kostanjevica. It commanded
the last-named village and also the road which ran to the east
from north to south across the plateau. The situation was grave
for the enemy's centre, but for the moment he had to content
himself with fruitless counter-attacks on the flanks. The Italian
salient was now as deep as it was broad — some two miles each
way — and the danger of a counter-attack at the re-entrants was
great. But on 3rd November a division moved downhill from the
rim of the Carso and occupied the line of the Vippacco west of
Biglia, and so protected the northern flank of the salient. Farther
south during the same day other troops occupied Hill 291, and
came within 200 yards of Kostanjevica. In the three days' fight-
;ng the Third Army had taken 8,750 prisoners, including 270
officers.

The Austrians were now back everywhere on their third line.
Part of it, from the Vippacco to Kostanjevica, was an improvised
line constructed during the September attack. But from Kostan-
jevica south it was largely the old first line, made long before
Gorizia fell, and moreover its strength was increased by the for-
midable concealed batteries on Hermada. It was clear that Her-
mada was the real obstacle, and that no progress could be made
till a way was found of taking order with it. This meant a great
concentration of guns and a halt for preparations ; but meantime
the winter closed down, and, though all through December Cadorna
waited in readiness hoping for fine weather, about Christmas he

268 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

had to abandon his plan, and postpone the next effort to the spring.
During November and December the rain fell in sheets : every
ravine was a torrent, and every depression a morass. The bora
scourged the bleak uplands, and with the new year came frost and
snow, so that the Isonzo front was scarcely less arctic than the
glacier posts in Trentino or the icy eyries in the Dolomites. It
was a bitter winter for the front lines ; but through it all a per-
petual toil went on to improve positions, to contrive gun emplace-
ments, to complete a network of communication trenches, in
preparation for the campaign which the next season would bring.
The troops could look back upon four months of brilliant achieve-
ment. But Italy was now at war with Germany as well as with
Austria, and her High Command had little doubt that 1917 would
prove a supreme test of their country's valour and resolution.

On Tuesday, 21st November, the Emperor Francis Joseph died.
He was in his eighty-sixth year — the oldest sovereign in the world.
He had reigned for sixty-eight years, having begun his active
political life just after the fall of Metternich. He had fought
many wars, and had nearly always been beaten ; he had had to
yield time and again his most cherished convictions ; he had suf-
fered the deepest public and private sorrows ; and in the end he
had come to be regarded as one of the permanent things in Europe
from his sheer length of life and tenacity in suffering. He was
the last believer in the old theory of the divine right of monarchs
(for the German Emperor held a more modern variant), and his
passionate faith gave him strength and constancy. To this creed
everything was sacrificed — ease, family affection, private honour,
the well-being of individuals and of nations — until he became an
inhuman monarchical machine, grinding out decisions like an
automaton. His age and his afflictions persuaded the world to
judge him kindly, and indeed the tragic loneliness of his life made
the predominant feeling one of pity. But if we try him by any
serious standard, we cannot set him among the good sovereigns
of the world, and still less among the great. He gravely misruled
the peoples entrusted to his care, he brought misfortunes upon
Europe, and in the end he left his country ruined, bleeding, and
bankrupt. The cause he fought for was not noble or wise, but
only a sumptuous egotism. At no time in his career had he any
true perception of the forces at work in the world. He broke
his head against new powers which he did not foresee, and then
sat in the dust to be commiserated. The tragedy lay in a mind

i9i6] DEATH OF FRANCIS JOSEPH. 269

so sparsely furnished being charged with the control of such
mighty destinies. He was a self-deceiver, living in a fanciful
world of his own to which he feebly sought to make facts con-
form. He had the dignity and patience of his strange house, and
in the fullest degree the essential Hapsburg weakness.

His successor on the throne was his great-nephew, the Arch-
duke Charles Francis Joseph, the son of that Archduke Otto who
was the younger brother of the murdered Francis Ferdinand. He
was in his thirtieth year, and had lately been commanding in
chief on the southern section of the Eastern front. The new Em-
peror had some of the characteristics of his father, and shared in
his personal popularity. He was known as a good sportsman
and a young man of frank and engaging manners ; but he had
scarcely the education to fit him to sit on the most difficult throne
in Europe. He was reported to have shared the trialist views of
his uncle, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his two years of
campaigning had done something to sour his temper towards the
martinets of Berlin. He wished to safeguard the remains of his
sovereignty, and it was believed that he might show a certain
independence in policy. If he accepted Mitteleuropa, it would be
because of the interests of Austria-Hungary and not from sub-
servience to his German ally.

CHAPTER LXVI.

THE WINTER OF 1916 IN EASTERN AND SOUTH-
EASTERN EUROPE.

August 25, 1916-January 29, 1917.

The Allies advance in Macedonia — Capture of Monastir — Venizelos leaves Athens
for Salonika — Disorders in Athens and Submission of Greek Government —
Difficulties in Way of Allied Pi licy — Falkenhayn reaches the Sereth — Ru-
manian Coalition Government at Jassy — Meeting of Russian Duma — Miliu-
kov's Indictment of the Government.

We left the narrative of the Salonika campaign at the close of
August, when the Bulgarian offensive had carried the troops of
Todorov's II. Army to the gates of Kavala. The northern forts
were occupied on 25th August, and on 14th September the invaders
entered the town itself. Then followed strange doings. The
bulk of the 4th Greek Corps, stationed in the place, along with one
Colonel Hatzopoulos its commander, surrendered itself without a
blow to the enemy, and was carried to Germany as " guests " of
the German Government. One portion, the 6th Division, under
Colonel Christodoulos, succeeded in making its way by Thasos to
Salonika, to join the Allied forces. The Athens Government
repudiated the action of the commander of the 4th Corps, alleging
that he had strict orders, in case of necessity, to transport his
tioops to Volo. But over these instructions, as over the similar
case of the surrender of Fort Rupel, there hung a mist of doubt and
suspicion, a doubt which has since been turned into a damning
certainty by the publication of the correspondence between Athens
and Berlin. The surrender was not only acquiesced in, but invited.
Rumania had begun her campaign, and it behoved Sarrail to
play his part in detaining her enemies. But the events of August
had made it very clear to him that no offensive could succeed by
way of the Vardar and Struma valleys. The enemy was too strongly

270

igi6] THE BRITISH SALONIKA FRONT. 271

in force, and the country was too difficult. His one hope lay in
he west, where, not too remote from the Allied lines, lay Monastir,
the most cherished of Bulgaria's gains — a city which the enemy
might be trusted to fight hard to retain. In that quarter was to
be found a possible objective in the military sense, and at the same
time a certain means of engaging Bulgaria's attention. Accord-
ingly the bulk of Cordonnier's French force, the Serbian Corps
under Mishitch, and the Russian contingent were allocated to the
advance west of the Vardar. By the last day of August, except
for a French mounted detachment, the whole front from the
Vardar eastwards was in British hands.

The task of General Milne was that of controlling the Bulgarian
II. Army so that it should not send reinforcements to the I. Army
in the Monastir section. His methods were artillery bombard-
ments and well-organized raids into the enemy lines. He slowly
made ground, till by the end of the year he had advanced the
British front east of the Struma, and had prepared a position
secure from assault, and formidable enough to detain large enemy
forces. On 10th September the Struma was crossed at five places
above Lake Tahinos, and a number of villages occupied. Five
days later there was a second successful crossing in the same area,
and yet another on the 23rd, when the sudden rising of the river
made operations difficult. Between nth and 13th September the
Bulgarian front between the Vardar and Lake Doiran was heavily
bombarded at a point where it formed a salient, and the subsequent
infantry attack inflicted severe losses on the enemy. Towards the
close of the month, in order to co-operate with the impending
attack on Fiorina, preparations were made for a more prolonged
effort beyond the Struma. Bridges were improvised between
Orljak and Lake Tahinos, and on the night of 29th September
our infantry crossed. On the 30th one brigade carried various
villages, beat off counter-attacks, and by 2nd October had consoli-
dated its position. On the 3rd another brigade won the village of
Yenikoi, on the main road from Seres to Salonika. The Bulgarians
counter-attacked desperately during the afternoon and evening,
but by the following morning our ground was secure. On the 5th,
Nevolien, a hamlet north of the highroad, was taken, and on the 7th
we flung forward a cavalry reconnaissance which located the enemy
on the railway between Demir Hissar and Seres. Presently we
were astride the line, and the Bulgarians took up strong positions
on the high ground to the eastward. On 1st November we captured
Barakli Djuma, six miles south-west of Demir Hissar, taking over

272 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

three hundred prisoners, and strengthened our hold on the railway
north of Seres. But the floods of the Struma, the wintry weather,
and the strength of the enemy prevented us from undertaking
any larger movement. In artillery work we had shown ourselves
conspicuously superior to the Bulgarians, and our activity of the
autumn won us immunity from attack during the winter trench
warfare. The British had performed the task assigned to them,
and immobilized Todorov while Sarrail's left wing was creeping
nearer to Monastir.

At the end of August the Bulgarian I. Army was still advancing,
and there was fierce fighting on the northern shore of Lake Ostrovo.
By the last day of the month that offensive had been definitely
checked, and on 7th September the Allied attack began. On the
extreme left, in Albania, the Italians were in motion east of Avlona.
The main front directed against Monastir was held by the Serbian
Corps on the right, and by the French and Russians on the left.
The city lies at the mouth of a gorge on the western side of the
Pelagonian plain. East of it the river Tcherna flows southward,
and then turns to the north in a wide curve, containing in its loop
a number of minor ridges of hills. The Salonika road and railway
ran south also, west of the Tcherna curve, to the Greek border and
Fiorina, crossed the watershed, and turned along the north shore
of Lake Ostrovo. Between that lake and the Tcherna loop lies the
Moglena range of mountains, close on 8,000 feet high, which sepa-
rates Greece from south-western Macedonia. Against an enemy
advancing from the south-east Monastir was well protected. Who-
ever held the Moglena crest could bar all access to the plain ; and
even when the frontier was passed, strong lines of defence were
possible by means of the various tributaries entering the Tcherna
from the west. Sarrail's plan was simple. The Serbians were
directed from the Vodena-Lake Ostrovo line against the Moglena
ridge, while farther west the French and Russians moved on Fiorina
and the southern entrance to the Monastir plain. If the moun-
tains were won and the advance pushed beyond them, it was
clear that any defensive position in the south of that plain would
be turned on its eastern flank, and once the hills in the Tcherna
loop were carried the city would fall.

The Serbians began their main advance on 7th September, at
a time when the valleys were yellow with ripening millet, and the
orchards around the little villages were heavy with fruit. West
and north of Lake Ostrovo they progressed in a series of bounds,
making brilliant use of their field guns, and storming the enemy

1916] THE DEFENCES OF MONASTIR. 273

trenches on the slopes with hand grenade and bayonet. They
were fighting for revenge, and every foot gained brought them
nearer to their native soil. Their left wing moved towards Banitsa,
and their centre and right against the massif of Kaymakchalan,
the highest point of the Moglena range. On the 14th they took
Ekshisu, on the railway between Ostrovo and Fiorina, by a dashing
cavalry charge, and pushed their front well up the steep ridge to
the north. On the 16th the Franco-Russian force, sweeping in
a wide curve south-west of Lake Ostrovo, was close on the Greek
town of Fiorina, which the Bulgarians had taken a month before.
Four days later the Serbians stormed the summit of Kaymak-
chalan, and there for the first time re-entered their native land.
That morning also, after a battle which lasted all the previous day
and night, the Franco-Russian troops carried Fiorina by assault.
The Allies were now in the Monastir plain, their left moving
up the railway, their centre approaching the Tcherna loop, and
their right on the top of the flanking mountains. The men on the
hilltops were looking over the empty fields and yellowing vineyards
to the red roofs and shining white walls and minarets of the most
ancient of Balkan cities.

To defend Monastir there were three main lines of entrench-
ments. One ran north of Fiorina and south of the Greek frontier ;
a second lay from the western hills through the village of Kenali
to the loop of the Tcherna ; while a third followed the little river
Bistritza just south of the city itself. The key to the whole posi-
tion was Kaymakchalan, and to regain this the Bulgarians made
many desperate and fruitless counter-attacks. On the 26th at
dawn came such a venture, which was broken before the sun rose.
Late on the night of the 27th four different assaults were launched,
one of which succeeded in taking the advanced Serbian line on the
northern slope ; but the crest remained in the Allied hands. Two
days later Mishitch made another bound forward, and pushed his
front one and a quarter miles north of Kaymakchalan, spreading
also down the slopes towards the Tcherna. The result was to out-
flank the first Bulgarian position for the defence of the Monastir
plain, and to drive the enemy back to the Kenali lines, only ten
miles from the city.

While the French and Russians faced Kenali from the plain,
it was the task of Mishitch to continue the outflanking movement
by crossing the Tcherna and winning the ridges in the loop of the
river. The bridges had been destroyed, but by 5th October the
river had been crossed in the region of Brod and Dobraveni. The

274 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.-Nov.

Serbians now held twenty-five miles of frontier, and had regained
ninety square miles of their own land, including seven villages.
Ludendorff was compelled to take action. He had already had
friction with the Bulgarian Headquarters, and he now insisted that
the armies on that front should be made a group under German
command, and Otto von Below was brought south from Courland
for the task. The Kenali position was virtually impregnable to a
frontal attack, and it was hoped to hold Mishitch among the ridges
inside the loop once the river was crossed.

The next great assault came on 14th October. After a heavy
artillery preparation the infantry went into action at one o'clock
in the morning all along the line. But the position was too strong
to be carried by a frontal assault, and little was achieved. On
the 17th the Serbians attacked north of the Tcherna, and forced
their way well into the loop, getting behind the main alignment
of the Kenali position. On the 19th they were nearly four miles
north of Brod. Then on 21st October the weather broke, and Sar-
rail had to endure the same obstacles from rainstorms which were
at the moment delaying the British advance on the Somme. In
drenching wet and fog the fighting in the Tcherna hills slowed
down. The opportunity was taken by Winckler to strengthen his
front and bring up his reserves, and for a little it looked as if the
chance of the Allies had gone for the year. The new arrivals
counter-attacked on the 22nd, but Mishitch held his ground in the
loop, and in some places advanced his line. During the last week
of October these attacks were many times repeated, while the
French and Russians bombarded their fourteen-mile front, aim-
ing especially at preventing the movement of troops from one
bank of the Tcherna to the other.

On 14th and 15th November Mishitch struck again. He moved
forward in the loop, taking 1,000 prisoners, mostly Germans, and
reaching a point only a dozen miles from Monastir. This victory
spelled the doom of the Kenali lines, now hopelessly outflanked.
Violent counter-attacks failed to delay the Allied progress, for on
the 14th the French and Russians broke into the Kenali front
fighting in a sea of mud, and early on the 15th it was found that
the enemy had evacuated the position and fallen back to the
Bistritza, less than four miles from Monastir. The Bulgarian line
now ran in the loop of the Tcherna through Jaratok and Iven,
with the Serbians close on their trail.

The city was all but won, for if the Kenali lines which Macken-
sen had prepared a year before could not be held, there was little

THE SALONIKA FRONT.

igi6] FALL OF MONASTIR. 275

hope for those on the Bistritza, which were only a month old.
Thursday, the 16th, was a day of rain and fog, and the Serbians,
who now, as before, had the vital task, could not make progress.
But Friday was clear and bright, and after severe fighting Mishitch
carried before evening Hill 1,212, north of Jaratok. One height
only remained, that marked in the map 1,378, before the Serbians
would be masters of all the high ground in the Tcherna loop, and
be able to descend upon the Prilep road north of Monastir, and cut
off the retreat of the enemy forces. On Saturday, the 18th, late
in the evening, Hill 1,378 fell, and at daybreak on the 19th the
Serbians were in Makovo and Dobromir, and so well to the north-
east of Monastir.

Winckler retreated while yet there was time. At 8.15 a.m. on
Sunday, the 19th, the last German battalion hastened out along
the Prilep road, and at 8.30 French cavalry were in the streets.
At nine came the first French infantry, and then a Russian bat-
talion, and then an Italian detachment which had come in on the
extreme left. Later in the day from across the Tcherna the
Serbians arrived in their recovered city. To them the fall of
Monastir was mainly due, for by their brilliant flanking move-
ments, first at Kaymakchalan and then in the Tcherna loop, they
had rendered futile the enemy's long-prepared defences. It was an
auspicious omen that they entered Monastir on the anniversary of
the day on which, four years before, their troops had wrested it
from the Turks.

The enemy had fallen back a dozen miles towards Prilep. He
was not pursued, for at that season of the year advance was diffi-
cult. The snowy Babuna mountains barred the northern exits
from the plain. The country around Monastir was cleared, how-
ever, in a wide radius, and on 27th November the hill marked
1,050, between Makovo and the Tcherna, which if held by the
enemy would have been a thorn in the side of the Allies, was bril-
liantly carried by French Zouaves. There were minor actions during
December, but by the end of the year the fighting on the whole
Salonika front had returned to the normal conditions of trench
warfare. The campaign, though it did not bring relief to Rumania,
had not wholly failed. It had compelled Ludendorff to divert
to Macedonia several Jager battalions that had been destined
for Orsova. It had restored to Serbia a famous city as an earnest
of greater things, and it had proved to the world, if proof were
needed, the heroic steadfastness of her exiled sons. The cautious
and nerveless strategy of Sarrail crippled the genius of the Serbian

276 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

commander, for had Mishitch been given the free use of the
reserves, Prilep also might have fallen to his hand.

During the operations in the north the political situation in
Greece was marching steadily to a deeper confusion. We have
seen that the surrender of Fort Rupel had been succeeded on 6th
June by an Allied blockade of Greek shipping, and that the unsatis-
factory partial demobilization which M. Skouloudis's Government
announced had been followed by an Allied ultimatum which led
to the formation of a " Service " Cabinet under M. Zaimis. The
new Government was non-party in character, and was pledged
to carry out in their entirety the Allied demands. Its intention
was to proceed with new elections so soon as the army had been
demobilized, and it seemed probable that these elections would
take place in the middle of August. But the activity of the
Reservists' Leagues all over the land made it necessary to retard
the elections, which on 16th August were definitely fixed for 8th
October. Then came the Bulgarian invasion, and the occupation
of the better part of eastern Macedonia. The loss of so large a
slice of Greek territory put any general election out of the ques-
tion. The surrender of the 4th Corps to the enemy, and the open
approval given by the military authorities to the extension of the
Reservists' Leagues had brought things to a pass where normal
constitutional machinery had little meaning.

On 27th August M. Venizelos addressed a mass meeting in
Athens to protest against the Government's attitude towards the
Bulgarian invasion. He declared that the only policy which could
save Greece would be for the King to put himself at the head of the
nation, to remove his evil counsellors, and to take into his full
confidence the Prime Minister, on whom the Venizelist party were
willing to bestow their complete trust. The appeal met with no
response from the King, who refused to receive a Venizelist depu-
tation, or from the anti-Venizelist parties, which continued to
organize Royalist demonstrations. M. Zaimis found the task too
hard for him. Surrounded by pitfalls, and staggered by the
situation in Macedonia, he contented himself with doing nothing.
His hesitation played into the hands of the more extreme element
among the Venizelists, and on 30th August a revolution broke
out at Salonika. The Cretan gendarmerie and the Macedonian
volunteers were the chief movers, and a Committee of National
Defence was formed, under the presidency of Zimbrakakis, an
artillery colonel, and the Venizelist deputy for Seres. After some

1916] THE SITUATION IN ATHENS. 277

disorder General Sarrail interposed to prevent bloodshed, and the
troops of the Greek 9th Division, quartered at Salonika, either
joined the movement or allowed themselves to be disarmed. Those
officers who refused to join were permitted to go to Athens, where
they were received by the King and publicly thanked for their
loyalty.

Meantime, on 1st September, an Allied squadron, consisting of
twenty-three warships and seven transports, had arrived from
Salonika, and anchored four miles outside the Piraeus. The Allies
demanded the arrest and deportation of Baron Schenk and the
other German agents whose propaganda was exercising a malign
influence, and the instant suppression of the Reservist Leagues.
Enraged by these demands, a body of Reservists on 9th September
demonstrated against the Allies in the gardens of the French
Legation. M. Zaimis promised satisfaction for the outrage, but
found himself unable to cope with the anarchical movements now
breaking out everywhere in the land. On nth September he
handed in his resignation. He was an honourable and patriotic
man, who in 1897 had concluded the peace with Turkey, and in
1906 had succeeded Prince George as High Commissioner of Crete.
But his sixty-five years lay heavy on him, and his character was
not masterful enough for so fierce a crisis.

The King sent for M. Dimitrakopoulos, who had been in the
Venizelos Cabinet in 1912, and had since then led a small independ-
ent party. He attempted to form an ordinary political Ministry,
but this the Allies were unable to accept. On 16th September
the anti-Venizelist deputy, M. Kalogeropoulos, was invited to con-
struct a Government. His selection included M. Rouphos, an
Achaean deputy and a violent anti-Venizelist, and the Minister of
Foreign Affairs was M. Karapanos, whose sympathies had always
been anti-Ally. The new Cabinet was, in fact, purely partisan,
and therefore a defiance of the Note of 21st June. M. Kalogero-
poulos promised the Allies a policy of " very benevolent neutral-
ity," declared that as soon as might be he would transform his
Cabinet into a " Service " Ministry, and disavowed the perform-
ance of the 4th Corps at Kavala. But in spite of his professions
the Allies refused to recognize him.

Meantime the Venizelist movement was taking on a new char-
acter. On 22nd September M. Venizelos told an interviewer at
Athens : " If the King will not hear the voice of the people, we
must ourselves devise what it is best to do. I do not know what
that will be ; but a long continuation of the present situation

278 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.-Oct.

would be intolerable. Already we have suffered all the agonies
of a disastrous war, while remaining neutral." That same day
a battalion of the Greek Revolutionary Army at Salonika left for
the front. " You are going," Zimbrakakis told them, " to fight
and expel the enemy who has invaded our native soil." On the
24th a revolution broke out at Candia, and in ten days the insurgent
forces, estimated at 30,000, were in complete control of Crete.
Elsewhere among the islands, at Mytilene and Samos and Chios,
there were similar movements. Some of the leading Greek gen-
erals notified the King of their view that the country's interests
demanded immediate war with Bulgaria. Some seventy deputies,
till then anti-Venizelist, presented a memorial in favour of inter-
vention. Late on the night of the 24th M. Venizelos took action.
He left Athens, like some new Aristides, that he might the better
return. Accompanied by Admiral Kondouriotis, the Commander-
in-Chief of the Greek Navy, and many of his followers, he crossed
to Crete. " I am leaving," he said, " in order to proceed to the
Greek islands to head the movement which has already begun for
action against the Bulgarian invader. ... Do not think I am
heading a revolution in the ordinary sense of the word. The move-
ment now beginning is in no way directed against the King or his
dynasty. It is one made by those of us who can no longer stand
aside and let our countrymen and our country be ravaged by the
Bulgarian enemy. It is the last effort we can make to induce the
King to come forth as King of the Hellenes, and to follow the path
of duty in protection of his subjects. As soon as he takes the reins
we, all of us, shall be glad and ready at once to follow his flag, as
loyal citizens led by him against our country's foe." On 30th
September a triumvirate, consisting of M. Venizelos, Admiral Kon-
douriotis, and General Danglis, was chosen to direct the destinies
of the National movement which was soon to become a Provisional
Government.

M. Kalogeropoulos's Ministry, now the most embarrassed of
phantoms, continued to plead for recognition. It even promised,
under certain conditions, intervention in the war. But the Allies
remained obdurate, and on 5th October M. Kalogeropoulos gave
up the hopeless task. Three days later a non-party " Service "
Cabinet was constructed under Professor Lambros, who was no
politician and not even a deputy. It was sworn in on 9th October,
and on that day M. Venizelos, after a visit to some of the islands,
arrived at Salonika, to be received with enthusiasm. He pro-
ceeded to form a Cabinet to direct the work of the National move-

1916] THE LAMBROS MINISTRY. 279

ment, and at a Conference held by the Allies at Boulogne ten days
later, his Provisional Government was granted a qualified recogni-
tion. From that moment Greece was practically, though not
theoretically, divided into two hostile nations. All the conditions
of civil war existed, save that the Allies were interposed between
the combatants.

The Lambros Ministry had still to satisfy the demands of the
Powers. On nth October the French admiral Dartige du Fournet,
commanding the Allied fleet, presented an ultimatum, demanding,
as a precautionary measure, the handing over of the entire Greek
fleet, with the exception of three vessels, by one o'clock in the
afternoon, as well as the control of the Piraeus-Larissa railway.
The demands were complied with, and in order to preserve order
while the terms were being fulfilled, it was found necessary on the
16th to land parties of Allied bluejackets to occupy points in the
capital. French officers were also appointed to assume control of
the Greek police. The affair passed off without disorder, and pres-
ently the sailors were re-embarked, but the King and his Cabinet
were still far from an understanding with the Powers. The de-
mobilization went slowly on, but there was much haggling over
the surrender of munitions. About 25th October the decision of
the Boulogne Conference was announced in Greece — a decision
which satisfied neither party, though both claimed that their point
of view had been recognized. The Venizelist Government in
Salonika at once declared war on Bulgaria in conformity with what
they conceived to be their position as allies of the Entente Powers.
The Lambros Government, on the other hand, traded on its recog-
nition by the Powers in order to refuse or delay the full satisfac-
tion of the Powers' demands. One incident increased the bitter-
ness. Two Greek ships were torpedoed outside the Piraeus by a
German submarine, and many lives were lost. Some of the pas-
sengers were Venizelists, and Germany announced her intention
of sinking any ships carrying adherents of the Provisional Govern-
ment. In that she was perfectly within her rights, and M. Lam-
bros's Ministry seemed to accept the explanation as sufficient.

During November the position became daily more strained.
On the 24th of the month Admiral du Fournet's patience was
exhausted. He asked peremptorily for the surrender by 1st
December of ten mountain batteries, and for the handing over of
the remaining war material by 15th December. Failing com-
pliance, he promised to take summary steps to enforce his orders.
The long delay had bred a dangerous spirit in the Royalists, who

280 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

had come to believe that they could bluff the Allies indefinitely.
On the last day of November nothing had been done, and during
the early morning of ist December French, British, and Italian
troops were landed at the Piraeus. The King had assured the
Allied commanders that no disorder need be expected, so the
contingents were small. They found the capital held in force
by a Greek corps. The two sides came into collision, and with
considerable bloodshed the landing-parties were borne back by
weight of numbers. On this the Allied warships opened fire on
the Greek positions, whereupon the King proposed an armistice,
on condition that the bombardment ceased and the troops were
re-embarked, offering also to hand over six batteries instead of
the ten stipulated for in the Note. After some haggling the
armistice was agreed upon. Meantime the Royalists, flushed by
what they regarded as a victory, proceeded to insult the Allied
Legations, and to rout out, maltreat, and in many cases murder
the principal adherents of M. Venizelos in the city. The prisons
were choked with innocent victims, and for a day or two mob rule
was rampant in Athens. It was noted that many highly placed
personages seemed to be personally superintending the campaign
of outrage. A legend was invented later of a Venizelist plot —
the common pretext of malefactors to cover their crimes.

The situation had become both farcical and tragic. The Allies
had suffered a severe rebuff, and had allowed themselves to be
fooled by an insignificant Court, a handful of Germanophil staff
officers, and a rabble of discharged soldiers. A strict blockade
of the Greek coasts was announced on 7th December. On the
afternoon of 14th December an ultimatum was presented which
required a reply within twenty-four hours. The Note demanded
the withdrawal of the entire Greek force from Thessaly, and the
transfer to the Peloponnesus of a large proportion of the Greek
army. Failing compliance, the Allied Ministers were instructed
to leave Greece, when a state of war would begin. The Greek
Government, realizing that this time the Allies were not to be
trifled with, accepted the ultimatum, but after their fashion began
to quibble about the construction of the terms.

On 31st December a second Allied Note was delivered, contain-
ing the demands for military guarantees, and for reparation on
account of the events of ist and 2nd December. The Greek forces
outside the Peloponnesus were to be reduced to the number ab-
solutely required to maintain order, and the surplus disbanded.
All armaments and munitions beyond the amount required for

i9i6] THE BREAKING OF THE ALLIES' PATIENCE. 281

this reduced force were to be transported to the Peloponnesus, as
well as all machine guns and artillery of the Greek army. The
situation thus established was to be maintained as long as the
Allied Governments deemed it necessary. Civilians were for-
bidden to carry arms, and all Reservist meetings were prohibited
north of the isthmus of Corinth. All political prisoners were to
be immediately released, and the sufferers from the events of 1st
and 2nd December were to be indemnified. The general respon-
sible for the action of the 1st Corps on these dates was to be super-
seded. Finally, the Greek Government was to apologize to the
Allied Ministers, and the British, French, Italian, and Russian flags
were to be formally saluted in a public square in Athens in the
presence of the Minister of War and the assembled garrison. Mean-
time the blockade would continue till every jot and tittle of the
demands had been fulfilled.

Again the Athens Government quibbled, adopting the method
of pleading known to English law as confession and avoidance.
The anti-Venizelist persecution went on, and the Reservists con-
tinued their meetings. An evasive reply was delivered, and this
brought a second ultimatum, based upon the decisions reached at
the Rome Conference in the first week of 1917. King Constantine
judged shrewdly that he had now arrived at the end of the Allied
patience. He had been in constant correspondence with Berlin,
and hoped that the situation would be saved by a German advance
which would drive Sarrail into the sea. But Germany's obligations
elsewhere did not permit of a Salonika offensive, and the King
accordingly accepted the Allies' terms. On January 20, 1917, the
transfer of the Greek forces to the Peloponnesus began. On 24th
January the Greek Government formally apologized to the Allied
Ministers. On Monday, 29th January, in front of the Zappeion,
the Allied flags were solemnly saluted by soldiers and sailors repre-
senting all the Greek units left in Athens. The Reservist societies
at the same time were dissolved by a legislative decree.

The Allied handling of the Greek problem had never been bril-
liant, but during the last months of 1916 it seemed to most ob-
servers in the West to reach a height of fatuity not often attained
by mortal statecraft. Blunders there were without doubt, but
facile criticism scarcely recognized the extreme difficulty in which
the Allies were placed. Their one object was to win the war, to
prevent any addition to the German resources, and to avoid
burdening themselves with troublesome problems not germane to
their military purpose. A united Greece as an ally was beyond

282 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.

hope : the blunders of 1915 had made that impossible. The most
they could look for was some arrangement which would protect
their Salonika army from an assault in rear. They wished to keep
Greece quiescent, to avoid having to fight a campaign in Thessaly
or Attica as well as in Macedonia. It was too often forgotten by
their critics that a state of civil war in Greece would be more trouble-
some from a military point of view than a Greek declaration of
war against the Allies, for it would not be possible to use the fleets
as a weapon. On the top of their grave preoccupations the Allies
did not wish to have the ordering of the domestic affairs of a country
none too easy to order.

This desire was intelligible and politic. The Allied policy in
its details may well be criticized — ultimata which were not ulti-
mate, pin-pricks which did not pierce the skin, Admiral du
Fournet's landing-parties which were so ill-judged and ineffective.
But when one plays a trimming game one is apt to wear the appear-
ance of inefficiency. The Allies sought to keep the peace at almost
any cost ; they accepted two de facto Greek Governments ; at the
Rome Conference they tried to stereotype the arrangement and
prevent either side from increasing its power. The whole situation
was farcical, but let us recognize that the policy in the main suc-
ceeded. At the cost of the loss of every kind of international
dignity official Greece was kept uneasily neutral.

There were many who advocated a more heroic course. Veni-
zelos, they said, was the friend of the Allies, and the declared
enemy of the Teutonic League. He had 30,000 men under arms,
and, if allowed to make a levy in Greece, might soon have 100,000.
Let the Allies do as Admiral Noel did in Crete — train their ships'
guns on the Royal Palace, and compel an abdication. Let Veni-
zelos be brought to Athens as Regent, and the Provisional Gov-
ernment established there. Let King Constantine retire to the
Peloponnesus with his following, and let the isthmus of Corinth
be an impassable barrier between north and south. Or, if such
things were impossible, let Venizelos be acknowledged as the true
ruler of Greece, the Allied legations removed to one of the islands,
and Athens and south Greece left to dree their weird under a
strict blockade. If either course were taken, it was argued, every
Hellene worthy of the name would be fighting actively on the
Allied side, and the King and his counsellors would be reduced to
the impotence which was their proper destiny.

The objection to these heroic courses did not lie in any ten-
derness to the royal cause. King Constantine, trebly forsworn,

1917] THL ACHIEVEMENT OF VENIZELOS. 283

deserved small consideration. It reposed on two uncontroverted
facts. In the first place, the Allies were not yet agreed in their
estimate of Venizelos. France was his passionate defender, Britain
his staunch admirer ; but many elements in Italy looked askance
on one whose ambitions for his country might presently conflict
with Italian aspirations, and the Government then in power in
Russia was naturally hostile to the man who had challenged a
monarchy. In the second place, the Venizelists were by no means
the whole of the Greek nation ; by this time it was not even certain
that they were the larger part. Too much was made of the Ger-
manophilism of anti-Venizelist Greece. Except in the Court, a
handful of politicians and the General Staff, there was little love
for Germany. The opponents of Venizelos were partly his political
opponents— the narrow politicians who could not look beyond
parochial ends; they were partly the middle classes, who were
afraid of bold ventures ; they were very largely the Reservists,
who strongly objected to be made to fight. They were all the
creeping things that infest a court. They were simple conservatives,
with a leaning to royalty. They were the ignorant and super-
stitious peasants who had that semi-religious veneration for a
king which is common in the Orthodox Church. Anti-Venizelism
included the baser elements in the nation ; but it involved also
elements, narrow and self-centred, indeed, but wholly respectable
and honest. Venizelos drew to his standard all that was bold and
generous and far-seeing in Hellenic life ; but such men are rarely
the majority in a nation. He preached a counsel of perfection
which was a stumbling-block to commonplace minds. For the
Allies at that moment to have definitely espoused his cause and
set him up in power, would have rent the nation in two and
delivered it over to civil war. If peace at all costs had to be
preserved, a temporizing policy was the only course left to the
embarrassed Allied statesmen.

A recognition of this truth need not blind us to the greatness
of Venizelos's part and the exceeding dignity and resolution of
his character. He was called to a harassing work— to make bricks
without straw, to make war under bonds, to govern and at the
same time to serve. He could not attack the dynasty, since he
sought above all things Hellenic unity ; but he had to wait in
silence while that dynasty oppressed and murdered his supporters.
He had to content himself with a half-hearted recognition by the
Allies. He had to submit to restrictions on the natural increment
of his following. He had to obey often what he thought was the.

284 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

starkest folly. Yet at all times he took the larger view, and showed
a patience and a noble absence of vanity which few leaders in
history have excelled. " I have tried," to quote his own words,
" not to cause any difficulties for my friends. I am told to evacuate
Katerini — I evacuate Katerini. I am told to abandon Cerigo —
I abandon Cerigo. A neutral zone is imposed on me — I respect
the neutral zone. I am asked to bring my movement to a stand-
still— I bring it to a. standstill." He was above all things a prac-
tical statesman, never losing sight of the end, but ready to change
his means as the occasion demanded. He had seen unmoved the
failure of his Cretan rising in 1897, and had promptly set himself
to achieve his purpose by other methods. He had served the
dynasty when Greece needed it ; he was ready to oppose it when
it played false to Greece. A passionate patriot, there was nothing
parochial in his love for his country ; he saw it as part of Europe,
and no man was ever a better European. Others have had imagina-
tion and adventurous courage, but few have joined to these qualities
the surest flair for the practicable and an unearthly patience.
The vision and the fact, the poetry and the prose of life — it is not
often that they find union in a single human soul.

II.

When Falkenhayn forced the line of the Aluta, and Bucharest
and Ploeshti fell, the eyes of Rumania turned naturally to the line
of the Sereth, which for forty years had been the foundation of
her strategy of defence. She had originally devised the position
as a bar to a Russian invasion — a defence of Wallachia, should
Moldavia be overrun. The situation was now reversed. Wallachia
had gone, the enemy was coming from the west, and the river was
the last bulwark of Moldavia. The fortifications which she had
raised there were out of date, and in any case their front was in
the wrong direction ; but the natural strength of the Sereth line
remained the same. Its flanks rested securely on the Carpathians
in the north and the marshy Danube delta in the south. The right
wing of the defenders must hold the mountain glens which descend
from the Oitoz and Gyimes passes, the centre the open valley east
of Focsani, while the left wing had a strong position behind the
swamps of the lower river between Nomoloasa and Galatz. Such
a position involved the evacuation of the whole of the Dobrudja,
and it required that the Moldavian passes from the Gyimes north-
ward should stand intact. For the northern extension of the

ig i6] THE ENEMY ADVANCE TO THE SERETH. 285

Sereth line was the Trotus valley, running from the Gyimes to
Okna ; if that were forced, the position would be turned and
Moldavia would be at the mercy of the invader.

By the end of the first week of December Falkenhayn and
Mackensen,* now operating together on a front of less than a
hundred miles between the Buzeu Pass and the Danube, were
moving eastward against the line of the Buzeu River and the lower
Jalomitza. Their extreme right wing in the Dobrudja, the Bul-
garian III. Army, had for its object the clearing of that district,
the ultimate crossing of the Danube below Galatz, and the invasion
of Bessarabia. On their left the Austrian I. Army was to attempt
the forcing of the passes north of the Oitoz. The Rumanian cam-
paign had now a very direct bearing upon the whole Russian posi-
tion in the Bukovina and Galicia. If the Moldavian passes were
forced, Lechitski would be outflanked and compelled to retire
from the Bukovina, and the gains of the summer south of the
Dniester would be lost. This fact, combined with the extreme
fatigue of the Rumanian forces, meant that the campaign must
now be in Russia's hands. Her reinforcements had at last arrived
— reinforcements which, if they had come earlier, might have pre-
vented the loss of Wallachia. Gourko, who was acting as Chief
of Staff during Alexeiev's illness, did his best ; but he had much
leeway to make up, and the Rumanian railways were utterly disor-
ganized. Lechitski's left wing, a reserve corps under Denikin,
had, since the beginning of November, taken over the defence
of the Moldavian passes. Sakharov was in command on the
Danube ; and after the fall of Bucharest was entrusted with the
defence of the Sereth line, since the bulk of the Rumanians were
withdrawn behind the front, to be reorganized under Averescu
and Presan, now his Chief of Staff. The Rumanian sector had
become the fourth division of the long Russian front.

The enemy movement was a wheel to the north-east, the left
wing, under Falkenhayn, advancing slowly along the railway from
Ploeshti to Rimnic Sarat, while Kosch moved faster in the region
towards the river, and the Bulgarians in the Dobrudja swung due
north against Sakharov. The weary Rumanian detachment which
had been fighting in the Predeal district made its escape, not
without heavy losses, from the Prahova valley, and fought a stout
rearguard action east of Ploeshti, on the Cricovul River. But
only delaying actions were possible. By 14th December Falken-

* Mackensen was now in command of a group, Kosch taking over the Danube
army.

286 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.

hayn was in the town of Buzeu, and Kosch was across the Jalomitza.
On the 17th the former had passed the river Buzeu on a wide front,
and the latter was just south of Filipeshti. That same day, in
the Dobrudja, Sakharov had fallen back thirty miles to a line
running through the town of Babadag.

The immediate enemy objectives north of the Danube were
the towns of Rimnic Sarat and Braila, the only two Wallachian
centres still uncaptured. Mackensen resolved to avoid a direct
attack on Braila, and to carry it by a turning movement in the
Dobrudja. He concentrated his main strength on Rimnic Sarat,
and after a four days' battle, beginning on 22nd December, en-
tered the town on 27th December, taking many prisoners. On
Christmas Day Kosch carried Filipeshti, and the victory at Rimnic
Sarat compelled the defence in that region to fall back to Peri-
chora. The next move was with the Bulgarians in the Dobrudja.
By 23rd December Sakharov's left had reached the Danube
delta, and had crossed by the pontoon bridges at Tulcea and
Isaccea to the Bessarabian shore. Beyond that there could be
no movement, for the vast floating marshes of the delta, which
are neither land nor water, defied the enemy. That same day
Sakharov's remaining troops were concentrated in the extreme
north-west corner of the district in front of the town of Machin.
Machin lies at the point where the right branch of the river, which
breaks off north of Hirshova, turns sharply to the west to join the
left branch. It is only six miles from Braila, and formed its natural
defence from the east. But such a position, with no good avenues
of retreat, could not be safely held by Sakharov's remnant. On
January 4, 1917, Machin was evacuated, and the Dobrudja was
now wholly in the enemy's hands. The Rumanian retreat had
here been most skilfully managed, for though it traversed a des-
perate country in the depths of winter, a country with scarcely
a road and with a broad river to pass at the end, it lost no more
than 6,000 men. The Bulgarian guns now opened against Braila,
and since that place formed no part of the Sereth position, it was
evacuated. On 5th January Kosch from the west and the Bul-
garians from across the Danube joined hands in its streets. That
same day the first German troops reached the Sereth east of the
mouth of the Buzeu. The invaders were now in front of the final
defences.

Falkenhayn, farther north, had still to come into line. Pivot-
ing on Kosch's new position, he swung north-eastward towards
Focsani. The strength of the Sereth line was known, and it was

1917] THE PLUNDERING OF WALLACHIA. 287

on the left wing in the foothills, under Krafft von Delmensingen,
that the success of the greater operations must depend. Before
the Trotus valley is reached a number of lesser streams flow east-
ward to the Sereth ; and the Trotus itself receives on its right
bank various small affluents. Each of these glens formed a defen-
sive outpost for the main Trotus line. Here Falkenhayn's extreme
left was operating in conjunction with the right of the Austrian
I. Army. The defence had not only to face the enemy advancing
from the south-west, but also flanking attacks from the west and
north through the high passes. For a fortnight — the first fort-
night of 1917 — a swaying battle was waged among the foothills.
On 8th January Falkenhayn entered Focsani, and from Neneshti
for thirty miles northward occupied the banks of the Sereth. But
the limit had been reached, and the advance was stayed. We
may take 15th January as the date at which the Rumanian re-
treat definitely ended. Wallachia had gone, but Moldavia was
intact, and a line had been found on which the defence could
abide.

It was not till the end of the month that Mackensen desisted
from his efforts. On 19th January he attempted to force the
centre opposite Fundeni, but after a bloody battle failed to do
more than clear the west bank of the river. Such a frost had set
in as the oldest peasant in Rumania could not remember. The
temperature stood below zero for weeks on end, and the Bul-
garians in the Dobrudja attempted to turn the weather to their
advantage. On the morning of 23rd January, in a thick fog, they
pushed through the frozen marshes of the Danube delta, and
managed to cross the channel of the river north of Tulcea. It
was a barren exploit, for the Rumanians fell upon and annihilated
the detachment. The frost, which put the left flank of the de-
fence in peril, was the salvation of the right flank in the moun-
tains. Mackensen could not force the centre, and was compelled
to depend upon his wings ; but Krafft von Delmensingen and the
Austrian I. Army found that the Carpathian winter immobilized
them more effectively than any entrenchments of their opponents.
A winter peace fell upon the hills.

The invader wreaked his vengeance upon hapless Wallachia.
Disappointed in his hopes of great stores of grain and oil, he con-
tented himself with introducing the methods of administration
with which he had experimented in Belgium and Poland. He
requisitioned everything, and left the people to starve. He com-
pelled the whole civilian population between eighteen and forty-

288 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.

two to work for him. He drove the embassies of neutral nations
from Bucharest, that there might be no witnesses of his doings.
He levied great sums as indemnities. He dispatched to Germany
many members of the chief families as hostages, and used them
as hostages have always been treated by a barbarous enemy. The
Rumanian Government at Jassy could only look on in impotent
wrath, and in its heart add new counts to the long reckoning.
Meanwhile the Rumanian Parliament had met at Jassy on 22nd
December, and King Ferdinand in his speech from the throne had
endeavoured to encourage his people. " Our army has sustained
the struggle according to the glorious traditions of our ancestors,
and in a way which justifies us in regarding the future with perfect
confidence. So far the war has imposed upon us great hardships
and profound sacrifices. We shall bear them with courage, for
we maintain a complete trust in the final victory of our allies ;
and in spite of difficulties and sufferings, we are determined to
struggle by their side with energy unto the end. . . . Before the
common peril we must all show an added patriotism and unity
of heart and mind."

On the 24th a proof was given of the national unity by the
formation of a Coalition Government, which included M. Take
Jonescu and some members of his party. The old Conservatives
had disappeared from practical politics. Carp, still living in dread
of Russia, frankly announced that, since Rumania's victory must
be Russia's victory, he desired Rumania to be beaten. Marghi-
loman refused Bratianu's offer to join the National Ministry, and
remained in Bucharest, where he hobnobbed with his country's
enemies. Meantime the Government at Jassy most wisely set
about the reform of certain domestic abuses, the existence of which
had crippled Rumania in war. A scheme of universal and direct
suffrage was drawn up to replace the old electoral college system,
under which the peasants and working classes had been virtually
defranchised. Even more urgent was the question of land reform,
for the Rumanian system of land tenure was still mediaeval. Ab-
sentee landlords and speculative middlemen had divorced the
peasant from the soil of his country. A scheme was prepared to
give a large grant of Crown lands and to purchase vast areas com-
pulsorily from the chief landowners, with the result that the per-
centage of the country under peasant proprietorship would rise
from 53 to 85. Such reforms were an immediate necessity if the
rank and file were to be sustained under their crushing burdens,
and they were of vital import to the whole Alliance. They ex-

igi7J THE WINTER IN RUSSIA. 289

tended the principles of democracy within the ranks of those who
were democracy's champions.

When, in the beginning of 1917, the Austro-German threat
against the Sereth line was made manifest, Russia, according to
the rules of sound strategy, attempted a diversion on another part
of the front. Russki pushed westward from Riga on 5th January
over the frozen marshes, and carried the village of Kalntsem, west
of the great Tirul marsh, taking some 800 prisoners and sixteen
guns. He was immediately counter-attacked, but managed to
hold the ground won. On the 9th a second Russian attack was
made about fifteen miles north of Dvinsk, and the island in the
Dvina east of Glaudan was captured. The battle in the Riga
sector continued for some days, and altogether thirty-two guns
were taken. On the 24th a violent German counter-attack re-
covered some of the ground lost, taking about 1,000 prisoners.
A second followed on the 30th, in the sector between Kalntsem
and Lake Babit, and again there was a slight withdrawal. During
the same month there was some fighting in the corner of the Buko-
vina between Dorna Watra and Kimpolung ; but the divided
command on that wing made success impossible, for Lechitski
reported to Brussilov, the Rumanian armies to their King, and
Sakharov direct to Alexeiev. All these actions were subsidiary to
the Rumanian campaign, and meant no more than that Russia,
when she believed that a bit of the enemy front had been weakened
by the withdrawal of divisions to Mackensen, took the opportunity
of testing its strength. In that fierce weather no large movement
could be contemplated. A frozen marsh might give her the chance
of a local attack, but the front as a whole was bound in the rigours
of a Russian winter.

Even had the weather been favourable, it is doubtful whether
Russia could have done more than devise here and there a small
diversion. She was busy rearranging her forces for the conjoined
Allied offensive of the new year, and had accumulated a reserve
of some sixty fresh divisions. She had already sustained over
four million casualties, and at the moment was maintaining about
ten million men under arms. Alexeiev and Gourko were straining
every nerve to complete the armament and training of the new
troops. There was also another reason. For some months it
had been growing fatally clear that the Government and the so-
called governing classes were not the equal of the nation and the
army. There were elements there of scandalous corruption ; there

2go A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

were sections whose sympathies were avowedly with German
bureaucracy rather than with Russian freedom ; there were many
who feared democracy as a foul skin dreads cold water ; there were
sinister influences at work whose power lay in the erotic and neuro-
tic mysticism of the East. All these dark things, fearing daylight
and the will of a liberated people, had affinities with Germany,
and could not face with comfort the defeat of the great absolutist
Power. It was to such elements that Germany appealed in her
attempts at a separate peace. The first was in the summer of
1915, when the reactionary ministers, Sukhomlinov, Shcheglovitov,
and Maklakov, fell from power. That attempt was frustrated by
the influence of the army and the Duma, which grew as the skies
darkened during the Great Retreat. But the sun of prosperity
in 1916 brought the parasites to life again. M. Boris Sturmer
became Prime Minister in succession to M. Goremykin, and in
August M. Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, and in many ways
Russia's ablest civilian statesman, was dismissed, and his portfolio
taken over by the Premier. Once again Germany made a bid,
and with some hope of success.

The terms suggested as a basis for discussion embraced the
opening of the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, the offer to Russia
of Armenia and Persia, Eastern Galicia, the Bukovina, and part
of Moldavia, an independent Poland with a Russian Grand Duke
as king, and certain special rights for Germans in Lithuania and
in the Baltic provinces. The proposals were reasonable and at-
tractive, for Germany very seriously meant business. But there
was never for one moment a chance of a separate peace. Had
the Russian Government accepted any such overtures, there would
have been a revolution next morning — a revolution both bloodless
and final, for the Army would have engineered it. But the pur-
blind eyes of the bureaucrats were not open to this certainty.
There was a serious risk that they might commit themselves to
some folly, and, in dread of popular reprisals, attempt to stir up
an abortive revolt, which they could use as an excuse for stern
reactionary measures. M. Protopopov was added to the Ministry,
with the portfolio of the Interior, and this kindled the suspicions
of patriotic Russia. He had been Vice-President of the Duma, an
Octobrist and a member of the Progressist bloc ; but for some
unknown reason he had changed his side, apparently on his return
from his visit to Britain in the spring, and had become an ally of
the reactionaries.

On Tuesday, 14th November, the Duma met. It was a stormy

1916] MILIUKOV ATTACKS THE GOVERNMENT. 291

sitting, and the Ministry was torn to shreds by the Progressist
critics. In especial, M. Miliukov, the leader of the Cadets, at-
tacked the Premier in one of the most outspoken speeches ever
made on Russian soil. He accused him of corruption and anti-
patriotism, and he did not hesitate to name the dark forces behind
him. Patriotic members of every group supported the Cadet
leader, and M. Sturmer was left with the alternatives of dissolving
the Duma or resigning. The Emperor refused to permit the first
course, and accordingly the Premier went out of office, though
not out of power, for he was immediately given a high Court
appointment. His fall was brought about not only by M. Miliu-
kov's speech, but by his mishandling of the food question and the
Rumanian situation, and by the fact that the Army chiefs were to
a man his opponents. He was succeeded by M. Trepov, who as
Minister of Communications had done good work in the construc-
tion of the new railways. M. Trepov was a strong conservative,
and far removed in sympathy from the bloc ; but he was a Nation-
alist and an honest man, and he earnestly desired to come to a
working agreement with the Duma, for he realized that on such
an alliance Russia's military efficiency in the near future would
largely depend. He was a statesman of the Stolypin type, who
believed that somehow or other the work of Government must
be carried on.

His aim was a Ministry of experts and business men, a mobili-
zation of the best national talent. But he was handicapped from
the start, for he was compelled to retain the deeply suspect M.
Protopopov at the Interior. When the Duma met again on 2nd
December after ten days' adjournment the situation was little
easier. The new Premier was able to announce for the first time
in public the agreement of 1915 between Russia, France, Britain,
and Italy, which definitely established Russia's right to Constanti-
nople and the Straits. He made an eloquent appeal to all parties
to close up their ranks, and promised various domestic reforms ;
but he was heard impatiently, for so long as M. Protopopov re-
mained in the Cabinet there could be no co-operation even with
the conservative elements in the Duma. The demand of all the
Nationalist parties was now the same — for Ministers who had the
confidence of the nation. It was men and not measures that were
sought ; a Cabinet of single-minded statesmen who in civil life
could reproduce something of the clean and steadfast purpose of
the soldiers. It was an aim endorsed not only by the Duma but
by the Council of the Empire and by the Congress of the Nobility.

2Q2 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.

With the new year it became plain to the world that Russia's
political life was approaching a crisis. All her commands, both
civil and military, seemed to be in the melting pot. General
Schuvaiev, who had been Minister of War since March 1916, and
had the complete confidence of the Duma, was removed in January,
and his place given to a comparatively obscure soldier, General
Bieliaev, who had the favour of the Court. At the same time an
epidemic of ill-health fell upon other ministers, and three — the
Ministers of Finance, Commerce, and Foreign Affairs — were granted
sick leave. M. Trepov, having held the office of Premier for just
six weeks, retired, and gave place to Prince N. D. Golitzin, an
undisguised reactionary ; and Count Ignatiev, the only Liberal
member of the Ministry, was removed from the Department of
Education. There were signs that the sinister influence of M.
Protopopov, the Minister of the Interior, was growing. The Em-
peror, in a rescript to Prince Golitzin, outlined the duties of the
Government — a procedure which had not been adopted since 1905,
and which seemed to foreshadow a still further weakening of con-
stitutional government and a relapse into autocracy. The food
question, too, was growing serious. It had been scandalously
mismanaged, and in a great grain-producing country like Russia
food was scarcer among the people than with grain-importing
belligerents who had all the difficulties of oversea transport. A
dangerous spirit was rising in all classes of society, for it seemed
clear that such a result could not have come about without cor-
ruption and bungling in high quarters. Finally, the armies at
the front had much to complain of in the way of faulty transport
and inadequate supplies.

The Emperor in his rescript touched upon these matters. " At
the present moment," he wrote, " when the tide of the Great War
has turned, all the thoughts of all Russians, without distinction
of nationality or class, are directed towards the valiant and glorious
defenders of our country, who with keen expectation are awaiting
the decisive encounter with the enemy. In complete union with
our faithful Allies, not entertaining any thought of a conclusion
of peace until final victory has been secured, I firmly believe that
the Russian people, supporting the burden of war with self-denial,
will accomplish their duty to the end, not stopping at any sacrifice.
The national resources of our country are unending, and there is
no danger of their becoming exhausted, as is apparently the case
with our enemies." This, said the ordinary Russian, was very
well in its way ; but the armies were not well supported, the poor

1917] THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM. 293

were not fed, and the blame for this did not lie upon the Russian
people, who had no real say in the government. The events of
January caused a dark shadow of doubt to creep over the face
of the State. The people saw strange forces at work which they
could not interpret, but which they profoundly mistrusted. The
Government, patched and tinkered at by the autocracy, was
inadequate to the temper of the nation. Russia was notoriously
a slow and patient country, and shrewd observers on the spot
about this time, while admitting that revolt some day was in-
evitable, considered that it would be postponed till peace. But
those familiar with the incalculable ways of revolutions refrained
from prophesying. They knew that during a period of apparent
calm some chance event — a speech, a manifesto, a street riot, a
sudden death — may bring the bolt from the lowering sky.

CHAPTER LXVII.

THE FRENCH ADVANCE AT VERDUN.

October 21-December 18, 1916.

Charles toangin — Nivelle's Dispositions — Capture of Douaumont and Vaux — The
December Battle — Losses and gains.

It is a feature of great campaigns that certain places arrogate to
themselves an importance which is not their due under the strict
laws of strategy. They may have acquired this significance for
military reasons, but they are apt to retain it when those reasons
have gone. A spell hangs over them which sways unconsciously
the minds of men. Once they may have been fortresses or sally-
ports or ganglia of communications ; but the fortress may be
battered to earth, the sally-port blocked, and the routes of traffic
diverted, and they will stil possess an illogical but compelling
power. The tides of battle may flow in far other channels, but
neither side can cut itself loose from the old battle-ground. Ypres
was such a case, and Verdun was another. To Germany the latter
was in very truth a damnosa hareditas. Her success had been
so triumphantly advertised, that for very shame's sake she was
fain to keep up the show of consummating it. When the Somme
offensive was unleashed, she still continued her efforts to break
the Froideterre-Fleury-Souville line of defence. She tried desper-
ately on nth July, and again on 1st August. On 21st July the
Imperial Crown Prince told his troops : " The French count on
our relinquishing our pressure on Verdun now that they have
begun their attack on the Somme. We will show them that they
are deceived." But the showing did not come. August saw
Fleury firmly in French hands, and with the abortive attempt of
3rd September to advance from the Bois du Chapitre the enemy's
strength seemed to be exhausted. By that date the grim Picardy
struggle had drawn to it every spare battery and battalion on his
Western front.

1916] THE SPELL OF VERDUN. 295

Germany would fain have let the Meuse uplands fall into the
stagnation of the Vosges and the Aisne, but she was not permitted
to cry out of the contest she had set. For France had taken up
the gage in deadly earnest. For her, too, Verdun had become a
test of prowess, a palladium not to be valued by common standards.
It was not enough to have stood fast ; the time had come to advance.
No triumphs on the Somme could wholly divert her eyes from that
awful battlefield where she had won a glory not excelled by the
victories of Austerlitz and Marengo. Verdun was the predestined
soil on which, above all other spots, the enemy must reap the
bitter harvest he had sown. In such a resolve there was something
antique and splendid, some touch of that far-reaching imagination
and poetry with which France has so often astonished the world.
It was a strange land on which to set one's affections. The map
might show the names of woods and villages and ravines, but these
features were no longer there. From Fort Souville, looking north,
the eye saw nothing but desert, pitted and hummocked as by the
eruption of gigantic earthworms. No tree or masonry broke the
desolation. The very gullies and glens, the quarries and the
crests, had been beaten out of their old shapes. There were
hundreds of thousands of men in the landscape, burrowing below
that fretted soil, but there was no sign of them. Only the naked
ridges of Douaumont, Froideterre, and Vaux were left of what had
once been a pleasantly diversified countryside. But in every
square yard of that landscape lay France's dead.

The fighting at Verdun from October 24 to December 18, 1916,
may be regarded as a distinct and complete episode in the campaign.
Beyond weakening the enemy's man-power and moral it had no
direct bearing upon the main strategy. The terrain was self-con-
tained, and the offensive — conducted as it was in wintry weather
— did not spread to other areas. But as an episode it may well
be regarded by the historian as one of the greatest in the war. It
was a thing perfect alike in conception and execution, like some
noble lyric interpolated in a great drama. At Verdun all that
had been learned during the two years of war, and in especial the
lessons of the Somme, were put into practice. The use of stand-
ing and creeping barrages, the new trench weapons, the art of
consolidating ground, the nettoyage of captured trenches, the rela-
tion of missile to cold steel — in these and a thousand other problems
the Allied view was brilliantly vindicated. The test was a hard
one, for the enemy was prepared ; he was equal in numbers to
the actual attacking force ; and the advance was a frontal one

296 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

made over a country as bald and exposed as the granite top of a
mountain.

A new figure enters into the list of France's soldiers. Petain
had held the fort in the dark days of the spring of 1916, and Nivelle
had borne the burden of the long summer battles. The latter still
commanded the Second Army from the Argonne to Lorraine, but
the coming attack was entrusted to a group of divisions under
Charles Mangin. A man of fifty, Mangin was one of that great
brotherhood of colonial generals which included Joffre, Gallieni,
Lyautey, Gouraud, and Passaga. Born of a distinguished Lorraine
family, which for generations had been eminent in the law and the
army, he had served since his twenty-fourth year in Tonkin and
in every part of northern Africa, and had been one of Marchand's
companions in the great march from the Congo to the Nile. He
had made himself the first authority on colonial campaigning, and
had written a famous book on the fighting stuff which France pos-
sessed in her dark-skinned subjects. He was at home at the out-
break of the Great War, and was given command of the 8th Brigade
in the Fifth Army, that army which took the shock of the first
German onset at Charleroi. At the Marne he led the 5th Division
in the 3rd Corps ; he was heavily engaged at the First Battle of
the Aisne ; he was in the Artois fighting in the summer of 1915 ;
and early in 1916 was in the Frise area south of the Somme. At
the end of March 1916 he came with his division to Verdun, and
led his men to the recapture of La Caillette Wood, and on 22nd
May to the glorious and short-lived reconquest of Douaumont. In
June he received a corps, the new 3rd Colonial Corps, and was
given charge of the crucial sector on the right bank of the Meuse.
In appearance he was a typical soldier of France, with his dark,
stiff thatch of hair, his skin tanned by African suns, his iron jaw,
his piercing black eyes that held both humour and fire. There
was thought in his face as well as ardour and resolution, and he
had that first requisite of great captains, imagination and an insight
into the hearts of his troops. No man could speak more appositely
that word which nerves the soldier to desperate ventures.

Since the land from Haudromont to Damloup was without cover,
and was commanded by the enemy on the high ground at Douau-
mont and Fort Vaux, it was clear that a series of local actions
would not avail. Any position won by these would be at once
rendered untenable, and only a grand assault pushed forward to
the main objectives would serve the French purpose. But since
this would mean a frontal attack over difficult country, it demanded

i9i6] MANGIN'S PLAN. 297

for its success the most meticulous preparation. Mangin proposed
to make the attempt with three divisions in line — three divisions
which had already held the sector and knew every inch of it. These
were the 38th Division under Guyot de Salins, composed of Zouaves,
Colonial infantry, and those Moroccan and Algerian troops which
had first won their spurs at Dixmude ; and the 133rd and 74th
Divisions of Passaga and Lardemelle, composed of chasseurs and
infantry of the line from every district of France. One division
was taken out of the line at the end of August, and the other two
at the end of September, and withdrawn to a back area for training
and rest. That training was carried out on a piece of ground
modelled to reproduce the actual terrain, and in especial an exact
counterpart of Fort Douaumont was constructed, so that every
man of the attacking force should know the work assigned to him.
Moreover, the training included practice in the new tactics of as-
sault learned on the Somme, which had not yet been tried in the
Verdun area. As regards materiel, there was a great increase in bat-
teries and stores of shells, and much road-making and laying of light
railways to ensure the rapid passage of munitions. Two divisions
were left in the sector of assault, and for twenty days in the inces-
sant rain of October these had a heavy time preparing trenches, dug-
outs, headquarter posts, dressing-stations, and cover for the guns.

In October the enemy held the front between Avocourt and
Les Eparges with fifteen divisions, of which seven were in first
line. Between Haudromont and Damloup battery he had twenty-
one battalions in front line, seven in support, and ten in reserve.
After the battle the Germans, following their familiar practice,
announced that they had long resolved to evacuate the positions
they had lost, and were in the act of doing so when the French
attacked. Captured documents told a different tale. One com-
mander enlarged on the immense importance of Douaumont, and
the necessity of safeguarding the German hold on it. An army
order of Lochow, dated 18th September, enjoined the strengthen-
ing of the front and the preparation of reserve positions. As late
as 23rd October we find the German commanders perfectly alive to
the imminence of a French attack, and making plans to meet it,
while urging their men to hold their ground at all costs. Mangin's
intentions were well known to his opponents, and his attack had
nothing of the nature of a surprise. They had no inclination to
cede anything, least of all the vital Douaumont ; and they believed
that they were strong enough to beat him off, for on the ground
they had over 200 batteries and equal numbers of men.

298 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

On Saturday, 21st October, the French guns opened, directed
by kite balloons and airplanes, in the one brief spell of clear weather
which October showed. Mangin had 289 field and mountain
pieces, and 314 heavy guns. Methodically from hour to hour the
enemy lines were pounded to atoms. The Verdun area, like the
Somme, was losing its old nomenclature, and becoming a tangle
of uncouth trench names. The enemy had been busy since mid-
summer, and had a vast number of new trenches — on the skirts
of the woods of Chenois and Chapitre, and the neck of ridge which
links the Souville and Douaumont uplands, and in and around the
quarries of Haudromont. Every little ravine which cut the slopes
had become a nest of dug-outs. On all these new works the French
artillery played night and day, till the quarries and gullies were
choked with rubble. On Sunday, the 22nd, a heavy shell landed
in Douaumont fort, and there was the glare of a great fire. That
same day a feint of the infantry obliged the enemy to reveal his
new batteries, and many of them were marked down and shelled.
That night a captured German pigeon message showed that things
were in a bad way in the enemy's front line. Instant relief was
begged for, and a hundred deserters came over, including an
officer, who was rash enough to prophesy. " You will never retake
Douaumont," he said, " any more than we shall take Verdun."

On the 23rd the three divisions of assault moved up to take
their places in the assembly trenches, relieving the muddy and
weary troops who for three weeks had been preparing the ground.
The frontage was, roughly, seven kilometres, and the French posi-
tion extended from the Wood of Haudromont just south of the
quarries, skirting the Wood of Nawe, covering Fleury village, to
the south edge of the Chemin Wood north of Laufee fort. It had
been decided to conduct the operation in two stages. The first
objective was a line formed by the Haudromont quarries, the ridge
north of the Ravin de la Dame, the trench north of Thiaumont
farm, the Fausse C6te battery, the north-east side of Chapitre
Wood, the Viola trench in the Fumin Wood, and the Steinmetz
trench before Damloup battery. After consolidating on this line
the troops would advance to their final objective— the ridge north
of the Couleuvre ravine, Douaumont village and fort, the north
and east sides of the Fausse C6te ravine, the pond of Vaux, the
Siegen trench west of the Fumin ravine, and Damloup battery.
On the French left was the division of Guyot de Salins, directed
upon Haudromont, Thiaumont, and Douaumont ; in the centre
Passaga's division, moving upon the Wood of La Caillette ; and

1916] CAPTURE OF DOUAUMONT FORT. 299

on the right Lardemelle's division, with before it the Fumin,
Chapitre, and Chenois woods, and the battery of Damloup. Be-
tween the divisions there was a noble emulation. " On your
left," Passaga told his men, " you have the famous Africans.
You are disputing for the honour of retaking Fort Douaumont.
Let them know that they can count on us to support them, to
open the door for them, and to share their glory."

By the morning of Tuesday, 24th October, while the guns still
thundered, the clear weather had gone, and a thick autumn fog
hung over the uplands. The valley of the Meuse was hidden, and
even the next ridge a quarter of a mile away. The hour fixed for
the assault was late, to enable the light to improve ; and at ten
minutes to twelve, when the troops went over the parapets, the
haze was lifting, and the French airplanes were droning in the sky.
Through the muddy fringes of the old woods and along the back
of Froideterre went the three divisions, methodically, calmly, and
with perfect certitude. It was like the ground round cavalry
pickets, where every yard is churned and trodden. But here it
was as if the trampling had been done by cohorts of mammoths
and mastodons.

Success came at once. At Mangin's headquarters Joffre, Nivelle,
and Petain had arrived to watch the fortunes of the day, and
presently through the raw October weather came telephone mes-
sages of a surprising and economical triumph. It was clear that
the plan of the two stages must be forgone, for the three divisions
were making one mouthful of the whole objective. Hordes of
grey-clad prisoners came running back through the mist till, to the
troops in reserve, it seemed that the men surrendering must far
outnumber the attackers. At half-past two in the afternoon the
wind rose and dispersed the haze, and from the observation posts
near Souville the French infantry were seen moving up the slopes
of Douaumont. At three came the news from the aircraft that
they were in the fort. Before the dark fell every objective had
been gained, and over 4,500 prisoners, including 130 officers, were
on their way to the French rear.

Let us examine the progress of the day. On the extreme left
the nth Regiment attacked the Haudromont quarries, which had
been turned into a gigantic fort. The place was encircled and
mastered after a fierce struggle with grenades in the main quarry,
and an enemy counter-attack beaten off. On their right the left
wing of Guyot de Salins moved through the relics of the Wood of
Nawe on the Ravin de la Dame as their first objective, and the

300 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

Couleuvre ravine as their second. These two gullies lay on the south-
ern side of the depression into which the Douaumont-Bras road
dipped after leaving the tableland. The 4th Regiment of Zouaves
and the colonial tirailleurs had won their second objective by two
o'clock, and patrols had pushed as far as the Helly ravine north
of the Bras road. In the deeper dug-outs some of the enemy
remained, ignorant of what was happening above ground. That
night a French sergeant wandering among the shell-holes was taken
prisoner by a party of Germans, and pushed into a subterranean
chamber where dinner was being served. He asked where he was,
and was told " The Ravin de la Dame." In return, he told them
that Thiaumont and Douaumont had fallen, and had the satis-
faction of taking back to his line 200 prisoners and six machine
guns.

Guyot de Salins's right had a like success. A Moroccan
battalion carried Thiaumont fort and farm, and a Zouave bat-
talion coming after them flung themselves on Douaumont village.
There now remained only Douaumont fort, a grim hump on
the crest seen dimly through the fog. Its conquest had been
reserved for two battalions of the Moroccans. One, under
Commandant Modat, launched the assault, and carried the first
objective. Then they halted to organize, and through them passed
Commandant Croll's men, whose duty it was to turn the defence
of the fort on right and left. Behind them came the spearhead,
the battalion under Commandant Nicolay, which was destined for
the actual storm. They were all picked men, and for weeks had
been practised upon this very problem, till each man knew every
yard of the objective like his own name. For a moment, but only
for a moment, they lost direction in the mist. Then the brume
opened, and disclosed their goal ; and, after a second's halt, while
each man gazed with reverence at a place so famous and so long
in mind, they swept upon it through the German barrage, one of
their own airplanes flying low above them. They scrambled over
the fosse, carried the outer works, and bombed the remaining
garrison out of the chambers. It was only three hours since they
had left their parapets.

The centre division, under Passaga, had the longest road to
travel. Advancing from Fleury, it had to cross the Bazil ravine,
where ran the railway from Verdun to Vaux, and beyond that
the Wood of La Caillette, honeycombed with trenches. It had a
difficult starting-place, for at that point the enemy front formed a
small salient, and accordingly the rate of advance of the different

1916] CAPTURE OF FORT VAUX. 301

units had to be nicely calculated. General Ancelin, commanding
the left brigade, fell early in the day, and was replaced by Colonel
Hutin, who had won fame in the Cameroons fighting. In fifty-
eight minutes the division had attained its two objectives, and held
a line from just east of Douaumont fort to the slopes north of the
Fausse C6te ravine and west of Vaux pond. There, as the mist
lightened, they watched with wild excitement the Colonials on
their left carry Douaumont.

The fiercest fighting fell to the right division, under Lardemelle.
The shoulder of hill crowned by Vaux fort was a difficult problem
in itself, and it had been defended by the enemy with a perfect
spider's web of trenches. The terrain was bounded on the left
by the Souville-Vaux road descending the Fontaines ravine, and
on the right by the Damloup battery on the steep overhanging
the VVoevre. The intervening space was occupied with the debris
of three woods and a number of little ravines. The Germans
had constructed a strong front line from just north of Souville
to the La Gayette ridge above Damloup, including the trenches
named Moltke, Clausewitz, Mudra, Steinmetz, and Werder. Be-
hind was an intermediate line with as points in it the work called
Petit Depot and the battery of Damloup. The second line, a
kilometre or more behind the front line, ran from the place where
the Fontaines ravine begins to open into the Vaux valley, and
included the trenches of Hanau, Siegen, de Saales, and Damloup
village. Lardemelle's men were troops of the line and chasseurs,
in large part contingents brought from Dauphine and Savoy. Their
first rush took them into most of the first objective ; but Clause-
witz trench held out till three o'clock. The intermediate line
followed, but it was eight o'clock before it was all captured, the
Petit Dep6t being the last point to fall. Early in the day Dam-
loup battery had been brilliantly carried by the 30th Regiment.
But the second line was not touched, and all through the night
there was fierce fighting, where the Savoyards of the 230th Regi-
ment were engaged in the Wood of Fumin and the east side of
the Fontaines ravine. In such a war as this night brought no
peace to either side, and through the mud and the darkness the
battle continued. The combat had now centred itself on the
Vaux ridge. On the morning of Wednesday, the 25th, the last
survivors of the garrison of Douaumont surrendered ; and next
day there were heavy German counter-attacks against the fort,
which were broken up by the French fire. There the line remained
firm, while on the Vaux ridge it was creeping inexorably round

302 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

the ruins which in June the gallantry of Raynal could not save
from German hands.

The great struggle was for the German second line — the
trenches Gotha, Siegen, and de Saales, and Damloup village ; for
if these fell the fort of Vaux must go. On the 26th they were
bitterly contested, and that day a French patrol got close to the
south and east angles of the fort itself. Another reconnaissance
descended the northern slope of the Fumin Wood, and found touch
with Passaga's right at Vaux pond. The weather had become
foul again, and it was clear that a continued attack on the fort
by Lardemelle would be too high a trial. Accordingly the troops
were slightly retired, and the guns opened in a new and furious
bombardment of the bald hill-top. On the 28th General And-
lauer's 9th Division relieved Lardemelle, and Arlabosse relieved
Passaga.

On the morning of Thursday, 2nd November, the French
observers reported that part of the fort, where the explosions
had been most frequent, was in process of evacuation by the enemy.
When night fell a company of the n 8th Regiment went forward
to reconnoitre the ground beyond the fort, while a company of
the 298th — Raynal's old regiment — were told off to enter the
ruins. They had some difficulty in finding a way in, so whole-
sale had been the destructive work of the French guns ; but when
they effected an entrance, they found that the garrison had not
stayed upon the order of their going. Large quantities of military
supplies, not to speak of a recent army order enjoining the strength-
ening of the defence, gave the lie to the German tale that the
evacuation had been decided on long before, and that the French
had been forcing an open door. Vaux fort had been claimed by
the enemy as far back as 9th March, and had finally fallen on 7th
June. Its recapture forced the Germans in this section off the
heights into the marshy plain, and, combined with the retaking
of Douaumont, gave the French the vantage in observation.

Next day, Friday, 3rd November, Andlauer's division pushed
beyond Vaux fort to the edge of the plateau overhanging Vaux
glen. On the Saturday they cleared the Germans off the northern
slopes, crossing at one point the Vaux-Damloup road : but the
enemy still held the Hardaumont ridge in strength. Later in
the day Arlabosse's division pressed in from the Fumin Wood on
the west side of the hamlet, and Andlauer's men on the eastern
side carried their line well up the Hardaumont slopes. Vaux
village was now in French hands. At the same time, on the right,

1916] THE LOUVEMONT PLATEAU. 303

the village of Damloup was won back. In ten days Mangin had
wiped out the German gains during eight months of battle. The
French line now stood as it had stood on February 26, 1916, the
sixth day of the Crown Prince's offensive. At a cost of under
6,000 casualties he had taken more than that number of German
prisoners, many guns, and vast quantities of supplies, and had
put out of action the equivalent of two enemy divisions.

Before the first phase was concluded Nivelle had made his plan
for a second and bolder effort. The great October attack had
not been pushed to the limits of the French strength. The troops
had been deliberately halted, in accordance with Nivelle's cautious
plan, when they might have gone farther. The French Command
took an artistic pride in their actions, rounding off neatly their
set objectives, but not straggling beyond them ; moreover, they
desired to fight economically, and operations prolonged at random
are costly. But the situation after the fall of Douaumont and
Vaux had certain drawbacks. The enemy had lost his principal
observation posts, but he had others nearly as good, such as Hill
342, on the C6te du Poivre, and Hill 378, between Louvemont
and the farm of Chambrettes. The Louvemont plateau too, with
its hollows and deep-cut ravines, gave him good gun positions,
and so long as he held it the access to Douaumont was meagre
and difficult. To complete the October victories, it was necessary
to push the Germans back from the high ground between Louve-
mont and Bezonvaux.

The enemy line after the fall of Douaumont lay from the Meuse,
just south of Vacherauville, and covering that village, along the
south side of the crest of the C6te du Poivre ; through the Wood
of Haudromont on the north side of the glen where ran the Bras-
Douaumont road ; just north of Douaumont fort and village, and
along the south slopes of the Wood of Hardaumont, above Vaux,
to the flats of the Woevre. It was a strong line, and the Germans,
alarmed by the events of October, had greatly strengthened it.
The front bristled with redoubts, many new trenches had been
dug, and advantage had been taken of the ravines to form strong
points to take any advance in flank. The task of the attackers
was harder than in October. Then, once the first-line crust
had been broken, the affair was to a large extent over, and the
troops promenaded to victory ; now there was a series of crusts,
each one of which must be pierced by stern fighting. The Germans
had on the ten kilometres of front five divisions. They held

304 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

their first line with fifteen battalions — between 8,000 and 9,000
bayonets ; they had the same number in immediate reserve, and
the rest in quarters within easy call. Four other divisions were
at hand in support.

Mangin had four divisions of attack — those of Passaga and
Guyot de Salins, which had come back out of the line for rest at
the end of October ; the 37th of Gamier du Plessis, which had
been one of those to bear the brunt of the spring battles of Verdun ;
and the 126th of Muteau, which was new to the terrain. As before
the earlier operations, all were trained upon a model of the ground
they were destined to win. Nothing was left to chance ; every
detail was scrutinized, and every contingency foreseen. The
troops, already a corps d' elite, were strung to the highest pitch of
enthusiasm by memories of past successes, and the consciousness
that France waited with hushed breath on the issue of the new
adventure. Their commanders knew how to speak the decisive
word. " From the heights of Hardaumont," said Passaga, " the
enemy still sees a corner of that famous place where he thought
to decide the fate of our country and of civilization. To you has
been given the honour of winning that height. . . . You will push
your bayonets well beyond it. You will add to the glory of your
flag by the lustre of another unforgettable day." Muteau told
his troops, still unentered in the Verdun contest : " You will
justify the honour that has been done you. The enemy still clings
to the C6te du Poivre, whence he insults Verdun with his greedy
eyes. You will hurl him off it. A I'heure dite, haut les cceurs !
Et en avant pour notre chere France ! "

The beginning of December saw ill weather — high winds, rains,
and flurries of snow. The artillery preparation, due to start on
the 2nd, had to be postponed for a week. But on the nth the
air was clear, though the skies were still grey and threatening.
Winter warfare can only be conducted in the pauses of storms,
and a commander must snatch any interval of calm. At dawn
on that day the French airplanes were humming over the plateau,
and the guns opened. It was a moment most critical and dramatic
in the history of the war. Germany was launching her peace
proposals, and next day the Imperial Chancellor told the world
that his country had given proof of her indestructible power by
gaining victories over adversaries superior in numbers, and that
her unshakable line still resisted the incessant attacks of her foes.
Some answer was needed, and France was preparing one more
eloquent than any diplomatic note. A change, too, had come

1916] THE ADVANCE OF 15th DECEMBER. 305

about in the French High Command. Nivelle, the commander
of the Second Army, had been nominated Commander-in-Chief in
the West, and this was his last fight before he took up his new
duties. Into it he had put every atom of his vigorous energies.
He told the Cabinet in Paris of his plans, and forecast with
amazing accuracy the extent of his successes. " Prepare," he said,
" to receive good news. Before the evening of December 15th I
will send you a telegram giving details of this and that success."
No operation of war was ever more dramatically staged, and it is
a proof of the complete confidence of Nivelle in his troops that he
should have thus ventured to tempt fate and boldly prophesy.

The grand bombardment began on the nth, but ceased during
the afternoon owing to bad weather. During the 12th, 13th, and
14th it continued — a far more difficult operation than that of
October. The short winter days, the fog, and the rain made aerial
observation uncertain, and on the air depends the virtue of the
guns. The target, too, was less easy than in October, for the
enemy's front was cunningly grooved and recessed in the maze
of ravines and little glens. The French were suffering also from
what had been the greatest obstacle to the British in the winter's
fighting on the Somme — the necessity of bringing up ammunition
across an old battlefield. All the ground between Souville and
Douaumont had been fought over, and though miles of new roads
and light railways had been constructed, the transport of heavy
shells was an arduous labour. Nevertheless, from the nth onward,
the strong points on the German front were scientifically blotted
out — the Hardaumont Wood, and the ruined villages of Vacherau-
ville, Louvemont, and Bezonvaux, now turned into underground
fortresses. The French barrage cut off all communication, and
for three days the German defence, cowering in dug-outs under a
ceaseless tornado, went hungry. Deserters dribbled across the
line — broken men who fled from the wrath to come.

Friday, the 15th, dawned grey and chilty, with snow showers
and a lowering sky, but without the baffling fog. The French
divisions of attack crossed their parapets at ten in the morning.
On the left Muteau's division had for its main objective the hill
called 342 on the C6te du Poivre ; next to it Gu}^ot de Salins struck
at Louvemont ; on his right Gamier du Plessis had the area be-
tween Chambrettes farm and Bezonvaux ; while Passaga, on his
right flank, aimed at the fortressed labyrinth which was once the
Wood of Hardaumont. The task of the divisions varied much in
difficulty. The whole movement was a swing forward of the right

306 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

wing pivoting on the C6te du Poivre ; so that while Muteau on
the left had less than a mile, though a difficult mile, to cover, the
troops on the right had a two-mile advance before them.

Muteau had an instant success. His men, infantry of the line,
were for the most part reservists with thirty years behind them.
On the extreme left Woillemont's brigade attacked Vacherauville
and the crest of the Cdte du Poivre. At seven minutes past ten
they had won the crest, and five minutes after the 112th Regiment
was in the village. Twenty minutes later the crowning position
of Hill 342 was carried, and the intricate German defences, elabo-
rated during eight weeks, had passed into other hands, together
with 1,200 prisoners. That fierce half-hour was one of the most
brilliant strokes of the campaign. Nothing stopped the fury of
the assault, not uncut wire or machine guns in pockets or un-
foreseen strongholds ; that thunderous charge swept aside all
hindrances like stubble. Vacherauville had been made a strong
place, but its strength was futile against the swift encircling
tactics of the French and their tempestuous surge inwards. On
Muteau's right the brigade under Steinmetz which took Hill 342
evoked the admiration of Guyot de Salins's proud Colonials, who
were stern judges of an assault. " Tell your commander, with
our compliments," so ran the message, " that for linesmen that
was pretty well done."

East of Muteau the Moroccan brigade of the Colonials attacked
from the Wood of Haudromont against Louvemont village, which
lay in the slight dip of the plateau where ran the highway from
Vacherauville to Ornes. There Nicolay's battalion, the victors of
Douaumont, had a desperate struggle in the first-line trenches,
called Prague and Pomerania ; and there fell Nicolay himself,
shot through the forehead by a sniper who picked out the tall
figure of the commandant. His death maddened his followers,
and Louvemont, encircled on three sides, speedily fell. The right
of the division was no less successful. In the ravine of Helly the
Zouaves repeated their October exploit in the Ravin de la Dame.
In three-quarters of an hour they were on the crest of Hill 378 —
after Douaumont the highest point of the neighbourhood ; and
at twenty minutes past one the farm of Les Chambrettes was in
their hands.

On their right the division of Gamier du Plessis had a long
and stubborn task. Its first difficulty was with the work called
the Camp of Attila, at the head of the Helly ravine, which was
stubbornly defended by a Grenadier battalion from Posen, whose

THE FRENCH ADVANCE
AT VERDUN.

1:3V ~r ' c

i9 if>] LES CHAMBRETTES. 307

officers themselves served the machine guns, and whose colonel
fought most gallantly to the end. One part of the division was
able to push on almost to the edge of the Wood of Caurieres, where
they were in touch with the Zouaves in Les Chambrettes. But
the rest, after brilliantly carrying the enemy's first line, were held
up in the second by the trenches called Weimar and Chemnitz,
which lined the crest on the west side of the Hassoule ravine,
which descends to Bezonvaux glen. This position also checked
the advance of Passaga, who in the morning had brilliantly carried
the trenches and ravines in the Wood of Hardaumont. When
the December dark fell the French line was as follows :— From
Vacherauville to Louvemont the whole Cdte du Poivre was in their
hands, except a pocket on the crest which was reduced during the
night. East of Louvemont they held the higher ground as far
as Les Chambrettes farm, from which, owing to the enemy bom-
bardment, they had slightly withdrawn. Thence the front curved
sharply back, running through the woods of La Vauche and Har-
daumont, and reaching the edge of the uplands just south of the
little fort of Bezonvaux.

Next day, 16th December, it was the task of du Plessis's divi-
sion to make good the Weimar and Chemnitz trenches. Till this
happened, Passaga on the right was held, and the Zouaves of de
Salins at Les Chambrettes were awkwardly enfiladed. Indeed the
latter formed a sharp salient, and all night long had to struggle
against attacks from the Wood of Caurieres. Little could be done
in the darkness, for the moon was in its last quarter, and the blasts
of snow made the obscurity profound. At the first light the ad-
vance began. Two battalions of Passaga's right brigade forced
their way into Bezonvaux village, while a battalion on his left
took in flank the Deux-Ponts trench, which was a continuation
of the more famous Weimar. Large numbers of prisoners were
taken ; but the French had no time to look after them, and their
multitude of captives was almost their undoing. For some six
hundred, wandering back without an escort, and seeing that the
attacking force at this point was a mere handful, recovered their
arms, and, skulking in trenches and in shell-holes, opened fire
from the back. The chasseurs were between two foes, and disaster
might have followed but for the fact that the Zouaves on the left
were busy executing a similar flanking movement, and had carried
the ridge in the rear of the Weimar trench. They saw what was
happening farther east, and dispatched a company to the aid of
the hard-pressed chasseurs. The Weimar defence was now hope-

308 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

lessly turned, and du Plessis's men swept over the debateable ground,
through the Wood of Caurieres, and carried the line to the scarp
of the plateau. The French front now lay where it had been on
24th February, the fourth day of the great battle.

The German counter-attacks came fast, and their main object
was the little salient at Les Chambrettes. All the afternoon of
the 16th they kept up a continuous bombardment on de Salins's
right, which for two days went through the extreme of human
misery. To win ground is easy compared with the task of holding
it — holding it through the long winter nights in mud and snow and
bitter cold, with no dug-outs, no hot food, no shelter, no rest from
an overpowering fatigue. For six days a Zouave battalion, under
Lieutenant-Colonel Richard, held the Les Chambrettes sector. On
the 17th the Germans counter-attacked, and managed to recover
the ruins of the farm, the last point from which observation was
possible towards Douaumont and the Chauffour Wood. The
Zouaves refused to be relieved till they had won it back. On
Monday, the 18th, at three o'clock in the afternoon, win it back
they did, and such an attack has rarely been witnessed by mortal
eyes. Every man was a muddy ghost, weary to death, and
chilled to the bone. Long ago, in Marlborough's wars, the cry
of " En avant les gants glacis ! " had attended the charge of
the Maison du Roi. Now it was " En avant les pieds geles ! "
that the leader shouted. The frozen feet did not fail him. Men
crawled on their knees, men used rifles as crutches ; but, limping
and stumbling, they swarmed over Les Chambrettes and made it
theirs.

The action fought between 15th and 18th December was, con-
sidering its short duration, perhaps the most remarkable Allied
success since the campaign opened in the West. The prisoners
taken numbered 11,387, including 284 officers ; 115 guns were
captured or destroyed ; 44 trench mortars, 107 machine guns, and
much other material were taken ; four villages, five forts, many
redoubts, and innumerable trenches were occupied ; and the better
part of six enemy divisions was destroyed. The French losses for
the first day were in the neighbourhood of 1,500 ! In the later
days the total mounted higher, thereby supporting Nivelle's point :
for he had argued that it was only when the line grew stationary
that losses came, and that an attack kept up continuously must
be economical — a view which, as we shall see, was to play an im-
portant part in the next stage of French strategy. Moreover, it
was no sudden gift from fortune, but a result foreseen and planned

1916] FRANCE'S ANSWER TO GERMANY. 309

— a triumph of generalship and calculation as well as of fighting
prowess. The event came at an auspicious moment. It was for
Nivelle a spectacular farewell to his old army, and an eloquent
message to his countrymen on his assumption of the highest com-
mand. Above all, it was France's reply to Germany's manoeu-
vring for a false peace. " To her hypocritical overtures," Mangin
told his men, " you have answered with the cannon mouth and
the bayonet point. You have been the true ambassadors of the
Republic. You have done well by your country."

CHAPTER LXVIII.

THE POSITION AT SEA AND IN THE AIR.

August ig-November 28, 19 16.

The German High Sea Fleet — The Dover Patrol — Germany's Submarine Successes
— The " Submarine Cruiser " — British Methods of Defence — Jellicoe becomes
First Sea Lord — The Year's Work in the Air — Controversy as to Administra-
tion of British Air Force — The Zeppelin Raids on Britain — The first Raiding
Airplane.

The second half of the year 1916 brought no great sea battle to
break the monotony of the vigil of the British Navy. The events
which led to the Battle of Jutland were not repeated. Movements
there were both in the North Sea and the Baltic, but none was
followed by an engagement of capital ships. The autumn was
indeed a period of high significance in naval warfare, but the
struggle was waged below the surface. The face of the northern
waters saw no encounter which deserved the name of a serious
battle.

For a moment in August there was hope of better things. On
Saturday, the 19th, the German High Sea Fleet came out,
preceded by a large number of scouting craft and accompanied
by Zeppelins. They found the British forces in strength, and
deemed it wiser to alter course and return to port. In searching
for the enemy we lost two light cruisers by submarine attack —
the Nottingham * (Captain C. B. Miller) and the Falmouth f
(Captain John D. Edwards) — but happily the loss of life was
small. One German submarine was destroyed, and another
rammed and damaged. That same day the British submarine
E23 attacked a German battleship of the Nassau class, and hit
her with two torpedoes. The enemy vessel was last seen, in a

• The Nottingham had a displacement of 5,400 tons and 25 knots. She had
been in the Battles of the Dogger Bank and Jutland.

f The Falmouth, which was also at the Battle of Jutland, had 5,250 tons and
35 knots.

BIO

1916] RAIDS FROM ZEEBRUGGE. 3"

precarious condition, being escorted back to harbour by de-
stroyers.

There was no further incident till the close of October, when
destroyers of the German flotilla, which had its base at Zeebrugge,
placed a bold exploit to their credit. The safety of the mighty
Channel ferry, which had carried millions of our troops safely
backward and forward between France and England, had become
almost an article of faith with the British people. In spite of
drifting mines and submarine activity our lines of communication
had remained untouched, and Sir Reginald Bacon, the admiral
commanding the Dover patrols, was able to report in his dispatch
of 27th July 19 16 that not a single life had been lost in the vast
transport operations of two years. The night of Thursday, 26th
October, was moonless and stormy', and, under cover of the
weather, ten German destroyers slipped out of Zeebrugge and made
their way down Channel. Air reconnaissance had given them the
exact location of our minefields and our main cross-Channel route.
Creeping along inshore in the dark, they managed to elude the
vigilance of the British patrols. They fell in with an empty
transport, The Queen, which they promptly torpedoed. The
vessel kept afloat for six hours, and all her crew were saved. Six
of our drifters were also sunk, and then British destroyers came
on the scene. One of them, the Flirt* was surprised at close
quarters by the enemy and sunk, while another, the Nubian,^
was torpedoed while attacking the invaders, and went aground,
her tow having parted in the heavy weather. The enemy made
off without apparently suffering any losses from our gun or torpedo
fire ; but there was evidence that two of his destroyers afterwards
struck mines and perished. Such were the bare facts of an
incident which, for the moment, agitated public opinion and in-
creased the uneasiness as to our naval position which the growth
of submarine activity had already engendered. In itself it was a
small affair — a bold enterprise which had every chance in its
favour, for the confusion and darkness made its success almost
certain. The wonder was not that it happened, but that it had
not happened before. Major Moraht and others had long been
pointing out the importance of the Channel ferry for Britain,
and it would have been little short of miraculous if nothing had
ever occurred to threaten that line of communication. The Ger-

* The Flirt belonged to " C " class, and had 380 tons and 30 knots.

t The Nubian was of the " F " group, and had 985 tons and 33 knots. Both
nad been engaged in the operations off the Belgian coast under Rear-Admiral Hood
in the autumn of 1914.

312 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

man adventure was to be expected so long as the nest of pirates
at Zeebrugge was not smoked out or hermetically sealed up, and
such tme preventive measures were both difficult and dangerous
so long as the main German Fleet was not out of action.

Three more incidents of what may be called open fighting
fell to be recorded before the close of the year. On the night of
ist November the Oldambt, a. Dutch steamer, was captured by
German destroyers near the North Hinder Lightship, a prize crew
was put on board, and the vessel was making for Zeebrugge.
Early next morning she was overtaken by British destroyers,
and the prize crew made prisoners. Five German destroyers
which came up as escort were engaged and put to flight. On
7th November a British submarine, under Commander Noel
Laurence, fell in with a German squadron off the coast of Jutland,
and hit two battleships of the Kaiser class. Three days later
German torpedo craft of the latest and largest type, under cover
of fog, attempted a raid on the entrance to the Gulf of Finland.
They were engaged by Russian destroyers, and driven off in con-
fusion, losing from six to nine vessels.

The main German successes during these months were won
against liners and hospital ships. With regard to the latter Ger-
many followed her familiar method. She attacked vessels which
bore conspicuously the mark of their non-belligerent mission,
attacked them often in broad daylight, and then, to justify herself,
invented the legend that they were laden with ammunition and
war material.* On 21st November there was a flagrant instance
in the torpedoing of the Britannic in the Zea Channel off the south-
east point of Attica. The Britannic, which in gross tonnage was the
largest British ship afloat, was carrying over 1,000 wounded sol-
diers from Salonika, most of whom were saved, the total death-roll
being only about fifty. The outrage took place in the clear morn-
ing light, when the character of the great vessel was apparent
to the most purblind submarine commander. On 6th November
the P. and O. liner Arabia, a sister ship to the India and the Persia,
which had been previously destroyed, was torpedoed without
warning in the Mediterranean, all the passengers and the majority
of the crew being saved.

Since the war began the most striking fact in naval warfare
had been the development of the range of action of the submarine.
At first it was believed in Britain that an enemy submarine could

• The military purpose was, of course, to compel Britain to draw upon her
scanty supply of destroyers to act as escorts to such vessels.

1916] THE OCEAN-CRUISER SUBMARINE. 313

do little more than reach the British coast, and the torpedoing of
the Pathfinder on 5th September and of the three Cressys off the
Hook of Holland on September 22, 1914, came as an unpleasant
surprise to popular opinion. In December of that year Tirpitz
himself announced that the larger under-water boats could remain
out for as much as fourteen days at a time. Two months later
the U boats were in the Irish Channel, and in May 1915 they
were in the Mediterranean. There, to be sure, they were assisted
by depots en route, and the full extent of a submarine's range
was not understood till, in July 1916, the Deutschland reached
the American coast. This exploit so heartened Germany that
she announced a long-range blockade of Britain, and promised in
October to begin operations. The Allied Governments protested
to neutral states against the extension to submarines of the ordi-
nary rule of international law which permits a warship to enjoy
for twenty-four hours the hospitality of foreign territorial waters.
They urged that any belligerent submarine entering a neutral port
should be detained there, on the ground that such vessels, being
submersible, could not be properly identified at sea, and must
escape the normal control and observation of other types of
warships.

On Saturday, 7th October, the German U53 (Captain Rose)*
arrived at Newport, Rhode Island. She did not take in supplies,
but she received certain information, and presently departed.
During the next two days she sank by torpedo or gun-fire eight
vessels in the vicinity of the Nantucket Lightship, including one
Dutch and one Norwegian steamer. There was no life lost, owing
to the prompt appearance of American destroyers. The per-
formance created something like a panic in American shipping
circles, and for a day or two outgoing ships were detained. But
it was soon obvious that talk of a blockade of the American coast
would awaken a very ugly temper in the United States, and could
not be defended by the wildest stretch of the rules of international
law. Submarines which took at least a month coming and going
from German waters could not institute any effective blockade
without illegal assistance on the American side, and the Govern-
ment of Washington was determined that the temptation should
not arise. Accordingly the performance of U53 remained unique.
The Deutschland arrived on its second voyage on 1st November,

* This was perhaps the most advertised of all German submarines, and thougn
eagerly pursued was never destroyed by the Allies. It was, however, crippled for
good by an American subchaser about two months before the end of the war.

314 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

and the occasional transit of other submarines continued ; but the
Nantucket doings were not repeated, and the talk of long-range
blockade was suddenly dropped.*

But in the Eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and in
all the waters adjacent to the British and German coasts, the
autumn saw a determined revival of Germany's submarine cam-
paign. The comparative immunity which had endured throughout
the summer was violently broken, and the tale of Allied and neutral
losses quickly mounted to a dangerous figure. Germany was
operating now with the large boats laid down in the spring of
1915 — boats with a radius of 12,000 miles, carrying deck guns
with a range of 6,000 yards, with strong upper works capable of
resisting hits by six-pounders, and with a surface speed of twenty-
five knots, and a submerged speed of twelve. In the last six months
of 1916 she completed not less than eighty new craft. Her
promise to President Wilson of May 1916 was utterly disregarded.
Vessels were torpedoed without warning, and without provision
being made for the safety of the passengers. The Marina, for
example, which was destroyed off the Irish coast at the end of
October with considerable loss of life, had many Americans on
board ; but Berlin gambled on the preoccupation of the American
people with the Presidential election. Swedish, Danish, and
Dutch vessels suffered heavily, and the Norwegian merchant
navy was a special target owing to Norway's refusal to permit
German submarines inside her territorial waters. The U-boats be-
came insolent in their daring, and in the beginning of December
one of them shelled the town of Funchal, Madeira, in broad day-
light, and sank several ships in her harbour. The barbarity of
the enemy grew with his successes. The Westminster was tor-
pedoed without warning on 14th December, and sunk in five min-
utes. As the crew tried to escape, the submarine shelled them at
3,000 yards range, sinking one of the boats, and killing the master
and chief engineer. By the end of the year Germany claimed
that the Allied tonnage was disappearing from the sea at the rate
of 10,000 tons a day ; and though the figure was considerably
overstated, yet beyond doubt a maritime situation had arisen,
the gravest which had yet faced the Allies since the beginning of
the war.

The reason of Germany's success was not far to seek. So long

* The ocean-cruiser type of submarine had a crew of 70 and a displacement
approaching 3,000 tons. But they were slow to submerge and difficult to handle,
and on the whole played a very small part in the war.

i9i6] THE ALLIED PLAN OF DEFENCE. 3*5

as the U-boats confined themselves to the Narrow Seas we could
by nets and other devices take heavy toll of them, and nullify their
efforts. But all our normal defensive measures were idle when
they extended their range and operated in the open waters of the
Atlantic. A new problem had arisen, to be met by new methods.
Germany was attempting to meet the British blockade by a counter-
blockade— to cripple the sea-borne trade which brought food to
the people of Britain and munitions of war to all the Allies. Our
available merchant tonnage was shrinking daily, and, with labour
already taxed to its utmost, it looked as if it might be difficult
to replace the wastage. An extravagant rise in prices, a genuine
scarcity of food, even the crippling of some vital section of the
Allied munitionment, were possibilities that now loomed not too
remotely on the horizon.

To cope with the German campaign there seemed at the mo-
ment to be three possible plans — two practicable, but inadequate ;
one summary and final, but hard to achieve. Of a fourth — to
make the sea no place for submarines — the possibility was not yet
envisaged. The first was to arm all merchantmen. This would not
prevent torpedoing, but it would make destruction by bombs or
deck-guns more difficult, and since no submarine could carry a large
stock of torpedoes, the power of mischief of the under-water boat
would be thereby limited. Such arming of merchantmen had the
drawback that it would absorb a large number of guns for which
there was other and urgent use, or in the alternative would compel
munition factories to switch off from their normal work to ensure
their production. It would also induce the Germans to revive
wholesale their practice of sinking without warning. The second
plan was to revive an old fashion, and make all merchantmen
sail in convoy. This method was unpopular among shipowners
because of its inconvenience and delay, and it had the further
objection that it would give the enemy submarines an easy target,
assuming that they eluded the vigilance of the escorting warships.
Moreover, the type of fast lighter craft required for escort could
only be provided by a large amount of new construction, or by
withdrawing that type from its duties with the main battle squadrons.
Both of the plans were confessed to be palliatives rather than cures,
and both made further demands upon the already severely taxed
reserve of British labour.

The one final policy against submarines was to carry our mine-
fields up to the edge of the German harbours, and to pen the
enemy within his own bases. But clearly this aggressive cam-

316 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

paign was most hazardous so long as the main German Fleet re-
mained in being. It would be impossible, while the enemy's High
Sea Fleet was still intact, to utilize a large part of our fleet in mining
operations in his home waters without running the risk of a division
of strength and a sudden disaster. The true remedy for the sub-
marine menace was a naval victory which would destroy the better
part of the capital ships. This did not mean that Sir John Jellicoe
was forthwith to run his head against the defences of Wilhelms-
haven, and risk everything in an attempt to bring the enemy
to action ; but it did mean that the last word, as always, lay with
the main fleets, and that to rest on our laurels because the German
High Sea Fleet was more or less immobilized was to repose upon a
false security. The truth was that our command of the sea was
far from absolute. We had not neutralized the enemy's fleet so
long as it remained above water, and the development of sub-
marine warfare had impaired the safety of our ocean-borne trade.
We possessed a conditional superiority, but we could not make it
actual and reap the fruits of it till we had won a decisive sea battle.
This truth was obscured during the autumn of 19 16 by some
unfortunate publications of Mr. Winston Churchill, who, having
returned from the front, and being without official responsibility,
was free to indulge in comments on the situation. " The primary
and dominant fact," he wrote, " is that from its base in Scottish
waters the British Fleet delivers a continuous attack upon the
vital necessities of the enemy, whereas the enemy, from his home
bases, produces no corresponding effect upon us." He urged the
country to rest satisfied with this " silent attack," and criticized
the Battle of Jutland as an " audacious but unnecessary effort "
to bring the enemy to action. No necessity of war, he argued,
obliged us to accept the risk of fighting at a distance from our
bases and in enemy waters. Apart from the fact that Mr. Churchill's
view was in conflict with principles that had always governed our
sea policy, his conclusion was wholly unwarranted by the facts. The
German Fleet, by the mere fact that it existed intact, did " exercise
a continuous attack upon our vital necessities." It crippled our
efforts to overcome the very real submarine menace. A successful
general action, so far from being a luxury and a trimming, was the
chief demand of the moment, for only by the shattering of Scheer
could the U-boats be corralled, blinded, and effectively checkmated.
The anxiety of the nation was presently reflected in certain
important changes made in the high naval commands. For some
time it had been urged that the post of First Sea Lord was the most

1916] JELLICOE BECOMES FIRST SEA LORD. 317

vital in the Navy, and that the man who held it should be one
who had large experience of actual service under modern condi-
tions. For twenty-eight months Sir John Jellicoe had been con-
tinuously at sea. He had been aforetime a successful Admiralty
official, and understood headquarters procedure ; but, above all,
he had learned at first hand the problems of the hour. It is desir-
able during any campaign that the man with first-hand knowledge
of realities should be given the directing power at home. The
main duty was to cope with the enemy submarine, and to solve
that conundrum needed the fullest experience of the enemy's
methods. The policy had been followed when Sir William Robert-
son was brought back from France as Chief of the Imperial General
Staff, and the same course was now taken with the Commander-in-
Chief at sea. On 4th December Sir John Jellicoe was gazetted
First Sea Lord in place of Sir Henry Jackson, while Sir David
Beatty assumed command of the Grand Fleet.

The new appointments were welcomed by the nation, and
did something to appease the critics. The crying needs of the
moment were that our naval policy should be considered not
as a thing by itself, but as a part of the whole strategic plan of
the Allies, and that the administration at headquarters should be
in the closest touch with the requirements of the fighting line.
Sir John Jellicoe was not only a great sea-captain, but a trained
administrator and a man of statesmanlike width and foresight,
and he brought to his new office an unequalled experience of active
service. Moreover, the mere change of duties was in itself desir-
able, for an unrelieved vigil of twenty-eight months must tell
upon the strongest constitution and the stoutest nerve. In all
human enterprises some readjustment of personnel is periodically
necessary, if only to ensure that variation of tasks which is the
best rest and refreshment to men of action. The new Commander-
in-Chief was the man to whom fate had granted the widest experi-
ence of actual fighting. In two and a half years Sir John Jellicoe
had been no more than two and a half hours within range of the
enemy. Sir David Beatty had had better fortune, for he had
been at the Battle of the Bight of Heligoland, at the battle of
January 24, 1915, and had been in action through the whole of
the Battle of Jutland. At the age of forty-six he succeeded to
the highest fighting command in the British Navy, and those who
believed that there was no final settlement of our sea difficulties
except in a decisive victory over the main enemy fleet rejoiced that
in Sir David Beatty the spirit of the offensive was incarnate.

318 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June-Nov.

The summer and autumn of 1916 saw no such spectacular
revival of German aeronautics as marked the close of 1915. The
Fokker — for some months a defence so formidable that the Allied
air offensive came almost to a standstill — had found its level,
and though Germany struggled hard to create new types, she did
not again steal a march upon the Allied construction. Moreover,
the opening of the Somme offensive saw an immense advance in
the tactical use of airplanes by the Allies, an advance marked by
such boldness and ingenuity that the question of aerial supremacy
seemed to be clearly decided. The French and British airmen
had beyond doubt won the initiative. This was recognized by the
enemy, and captured letters were full of complaints of the in-
adequacy of the German reply. The Battle of the Somme in its
later stages showed, indeed, something of the old see-saw, and
there came moments when the German airmen recovered their
nerve and made a stout defence. The popular phrase, the "mastery
of the air," was in those days apt to be misused. There were
weeks when the Allies' total of loss seemed to be higher than that
of their adversaries, and pessimists complained that our mastery
had gone. Mastery in the absolute sense never existed. The Allied
squadrons still ventured much when they crossed the enemy lines,
and they paid a price, sometimes a heavy price, for their successes.
But they maintained continuously the offensive. Daily they did
their work of destruction and reconnaissance far inside the enemy
territory, while the few German machines that crossed our lines
came at night, and at a great elevation. Hourly throughout the
battles they gave to the work of the infantry a tactical support
to which the enemy could show no parallel. If the Allied losses
had been consistently higher than the Germans' the superiority
would still have been ours, for we achieved our purpose. We
hampered the enemy's reserves, destroyed his depots, reconnoitred
every acre of his hinterland, and shattered his peace of mind.
For such results no price could have been too high, for our air work
was the foundation of every infantry advance. As a matter of
sober fact, the price was not high ; it was less than Germany paid
for her inadequate defence.

During the later Verdun battles and the great offensive on the
Somme, the four main aerial activities were maintained. Our
airplanes did long-distance reconnoitring work, they " spotted "
for the guns, they bombed important enemy centres, and they
fought and destroyed enemy machines. The daily communiques
recorded the destruction of enemy dumps and depots and railway

rgi6] CONTACT PATROLS. 319

junctions, and a long series of brilliant conflicts in the air, where
often a German squadron was broken up and put to flight by a
single Allied plane. To a watcher of these battles the signs of
our superiority were, manifest. Constantly at night a great glare
behind the lines marked where some German ammunition store had
gone up in flames. The orderly file of Allied kite balloons glittered
daily in the sun ; but the German " sausages " were few, and
often a wisp of fire in the heavens showed that another had fallen
victim to an Allied airman. A German plane was as rare a sight
a mile within our lines as a swallow in November, but the eternal
crack of anti-aircraft guns from the German side told of the per-
sistency of the Allied inroads.

The most interesting development brought about by the Somme
action was that of " contact patrols." The machines used were
of the slowest type, and it was their business to accompany an
infantry advance and report progress. In the intricate trench
fighting of the modern battle nothing was harder than to locate
the position at any one moment of the advancing battalions.
Flares might not be observed in the smoke and dust ; dis-
patch runners might fail to get through the barrage ; the supply
of pigeons might give out or the birds be killed en route — and the
general behind might be unable in consequence to give orders to
the guns. With the system of " creeping barrages " it was vital
that the command should be fully informed from time to time
of the exact situation of the infantry attack. The airman, flying
low over the trenches, could detect the whereabouts of his own
troops and report accordingly. Again and again during the
Somme, when the mist of battle and ill weather had swallowed up
the advance, airplanes brought half-hourly accurate and most
vital intelligence. A check could in this way be made known,
and the guns turned on to break up an obstacle ; while an advance
swifter than the time-table could be saved from the risk of its own
barrage. Curiously enough, except for rifle and machine-gun
fire from the German trenches, these flights were not so desperately
risky. They were made usually at a height of something under
500 feet, and the German anti-aircraft guns, made to fire straight
into the air, and usually mounted on the crests of the ridges, could
not be trained on the marauders. These airplanes did not content
themselves with reconnaissance. They attacked the enemy in
the trenches with bombs and machine-gnn fire, and on many
occasions completely demoralized him. There was one instance
of a whole battalion surrendering to an airplane. Bouchavesnes

320 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR [June-Nov.

was taken largely by French fire from the air, and the last trench
at Gueudecourt fell to a British airman.

The air, as we have seen, was the realm for individual prowess,
and slowly from the multitude of combatants figures began to
emerge of an epic greatness ; men who steadily added to their
tale of destruction, till in the world's eyes their work took the
appearance of a grim rivalry. The Germans and the French
made no secret of their heroes, but rather encouraged the adver-
tisement of their names ; but the Royal Flying Corps, true to its
traditions, contented itself with a bare recital of the deed, till an
occasional V.C. lifted the veil of anonymity. Germany possessed
the great twin-brothers Boelcke and Immelmann, who rose to
fame during the Verdun struggle. Immelmann was the chief
exponent of the Fokker, and had eighteen victims to his credit
when, on 18th June, he was shot down by Second Lieutenant
McCubbin, who was still in his novitiate in the Royal Flying
Corps. On 28th October Boelcke, who the day before had de-
stroyed his fortieth Allied plane, perished in a collision. It is
pleasant to record that these heroes of the air had the respect
of their foes as well as the admiration of their friends, and the
Allied airmen sent memorial wreaths to their funerals. The chief
French champions were Guynemer and Nungesser, who survived
the winter, in spite of adventures where every risk on earth was
taken. In September, for example, Guynemer's machine was
struck by a shell at an altitude of 10,000 feet. He made vain
efforts to hold it up, but it dropped 5,000 feet, and was then caught
by an air current and driven over the French lines. It crashed to
earth and became an utter wreck ; but the airman, though stunned,
was unhurt. All records, however, were excelled by the British
airman, Captain Albert Ball, formerly of the Sherwood Foresters.
When not yet twenty he had taken part in over a hundred aerial
combats, and had accounted for over thirty German machines.
His life was fated to be as short as it was heroic, for he perished in
the spring offensive of 1917, after having destroyed for certain
forty-one enemy planes, with ten more practically certain, and
many others where the likelihood was strong. No greater marvel
of skill and intrepidity has been exhibited by any service in any
army in any campaign in the history of the world.*

During the better part of the Somme battle the Allied machines
were at least equal to the German in pace and handiness. The

* Captain Ball received the Victoria Cross posthumously. He had already won
the D.S.O. and the Military Cross.

i9i6] THE ALLIED RAIDS. 321

little Nieuport scouts, in especial, dealt death to the kite balloons,
and the Martinsyde and de Havilland fighting planes were more
than a match for the Fokker. In October, however, the enemy
produced two new types — the Spad and the Halberstadt — both
based on French models and possessing engines of 240 h.p. With
them his airmen could work at a height of 20,000 feet and swoop
down upon British machines moving at a lower altitude. Hence
there came a time, at the close of the Somme operations, when
the see-saw once again slightly inclined in the Germans' favour.
The moment passed, and long before the 1917 offensive began
the arrival of new and improved British types had redressed the
balance.

The aerial warfare of 1916, as summarized by the French
Staff, showed that 900 enemy airplanes had been destroyed by
the Allies, the French accounting for 450, and the British for 250.
Eighty-one kite balloons had been burned, fifty-four by the French,
and twenty-seven by the British. Seven hundred and fifty bom-
bardments had taken place, of which the French were responsible
for 250 and the British for 180. Apart from tactical bombard-
ments immediately behind the fighting line, the record of the year
was least conspicuous in the matter of bomb-dropping. Experi-
ence had shown that the German public were peculiarly sensible
to this mode of attack ; but the preoccupation of the Allies with
great battles limited the number of machines which could be spared
for that purpose. Nevertheless some of the raids undertaken
were singularly bold and effective, as a few examples will show.
On 12th October a Franco-British squadron of forty machines
attacked the Mauser rifle factory at Oberndorf on the Neckar,
dropped nearly a thousand pounds' weight of projectiles, and
fought their way home through a hornets' nest of enemy craft.
On 22nd September two French airmen, Captain de Beauchamp
and Lieutenant Daucourt, in a Sopwith biplane, visited and bombed
the Krupp works at Essen — a tour de force rather than a work of
military importance, for Essen did not suffer much from the
limited number of bombs which could be carried on a 500-mile
journey. On 17th November Captain de Beauchamp in the same
machine flew over Friedrichshafen to Munich, which he bombed,
and then crossed the Alps and descended in Italy. But the most
sensational achievement was that of Second Lieutenant Marchal
on a special type of Nieuport monoplane, who on the night of
20th June flew over Berlin, dropping leaflets. He was making
for Russia ; but unfortunately he had trouble with his machine.

322 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June-Nov.

and came down at Cholm, in Poland, where he was taken prisoner.
He was then only sixty-three miles from the Russian trenches,
and had travelled 811 miles.

The controversy raised by unofficial writers as to the administra-
tion of the British air service, which had sprung up originally
when the first Zeppelin raids gave the civilian people of Britain
food for thought, raged intermittently through 1916. It was a
topic where the critic was at an advantage, for the ordinary man
had no expert knowledge to test his criticism, and it was frequently
impossible for the authorities to make reply, since that would have
involved the publication of details valuable to the enemy. Any
considerable increase in flying casualties brought the question to
the fore, and the natural anxiety of the British citizen to make
certain of the efficiency of a service on which he depended for his
safety was buttressed by the grievances of private aircraft makers
against the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough. The private
maker was indeed in a difficult case. His market must be with
the Government ; to the Government he looked for recompense
for the toil and money he had spent in new production ; and
jealousy was inevitable of a State business which seemed to take
the bread out of the mouth of a deserving industry.

In August a committee was appointed to consider the state
of affairs at Farnborough, when various faults were discovered,
and a scheme of reorganization proposed. Another committee
sat throughout the summer, investigating the charges brought
by press and parliamentary critics against the administration
and command of the Royal Flying Corps. The inquiry was a
personal triumph for the Director-General of Military Aeronautics,
Sir David Henderson, who had no difficulty in disposing of the
foolish charges, based on hearsay evidence or no evidence at all,
which had been showered on his organization. At the same time,
many unsatisfactory points were revealed, and the committee
recommended that the Royal Aircraft Factory should be regarded
rather as an experimental centre than as a manufacturing estab-
lishment, and urged that the efficiency of the service required
that the fighting command should be separated from the respon-
sibility for supplying equipment. The latter task should belong
to a special department, which should meet the demands both of
the Army and the Navy.

This last recommendation exposed one of the main difficulties
of the question. The Navy and the Army were in perpetual
competition, and the Air Board formed under the presidency of

igi6] THE COMING OF THE ZEPPELINS. 323

Lord Curzon in May 1916 could not control the quarrel. When
Lord Curzon in December went to the War Cabinet he was
succeeded at the Air Board by Lord Sydenham, who presently
resigned. Mr. Lloyd George some weeks later attempted to
solve the problem by reconstituting the Air Board with Lord
Cowdray in charge, and appointing Commander Paine to be
the air member of the Board of Admiralty, as Sir David Hen-
derson was air member of the Army Council. The production
of machines for both the naval and military services was handed
over to the Ministry of Munitions. The change was an improve-
ment, but few people believed that it was a final solution of the
problem. The administration of a new and swiftly developing
service is more intricate at home than in the field. The demands
of two separate organizations had to be faced — the Navy and
the Army — organizations that differed largely in their requirements.
The private makers had to be kept in touch with the needs of the
fighting services ; they had to be controlled and advised, and at
the same time their initiative in research and experiment must not
be crippled. Finally, the executive command of the service must
not be confused with the duty of supplying materiel, for the two
tasks were poles apart. The Air Service had from small beginnings
grown rapidly to great dimensions, and the need for differentiation
of functions had risen. That is never an easy matter to settle,
and it was not made easier by the pressure of instant war needs.

Beginning in August 1915, the British people saw a series of
Zeppelin visitations which grew bolder as the winter advanced.
On the last day of March 1916 for the first time a Zeppelin came
down within sight of eyes watching from British soil. Our de-
scendants will look back upon the era of those raids as one of
the most curious in the history of the country. The face of the
land was changed. Lighting restrictions plunged great cities into
gloom, and London became as dim as in the days of Queen Anne,
and vastly more dangerous for the pedestrian, owing to a speed of
traffic undreamed of in the eighteenth century. Never had the
metropolis looked more beautiful than on moonless nights, when
small sparks of orange light gave mystery to the great thorough-
fares and the white fingers of searchlights groped in the heavens.
But never had it been a more uncomfortable habitation. The
busy life of the capital had to adapt itself to the conditions of a
remote and backward country town.

It cannot be said that the raids had any real effect upon the
good spirits and confidence of our people. Indeed at first they were

324 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May-Sept.

taken too lightly, and regarded by the ordinary citizen rather as
curious variety shows than as incidents of ruthless war. The
first Zeppelin visits found us unprepared, and our only security
lay in the unhandiness of the weapon employed. As the months
passed we perfected our scheme of defence, and realized more
clearly the limitations of the menace. Zeppelin attacks were largely
blind. The great airships rarely knew where they were, and were
compelled to drop their bombs on speculation, and the German
reports of damage done had seldom much relation to the facts.
Our anti-aircraft defences were largely increased, but we realized
from the start that the true anti-Zeppelin weapon was the airplane,
as Mr. Churchill had long before prophesied. To use it our pilots
must practise the difficult task of making ascents and descents in
the darkness. Once they had attained proficiency in night-work
there was every reason to hope that the Zeppelins would no longer
reach our shores unscathed. The early autumn of 19 16 made
these hopes a certainty.

Early in May, in a spell of bad weather, five German airships
visited the north-east coast of England and the east coast of Scot-
land. Little damage was done, and one of them, L20, was wrecked
on its return voyage. At the end of July the weather grew warm
and still, and the raids became frequent. On the night of 28th
July three airships visited the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire coast,
but they lost their way in the summer fog, and dropped their
bombs in the sea and on empty fields. On the night of the 31st
they came again, this time seven in number, and their area of
attack stretched from the Thames estuary to the Humber. Their
aim seemed to be to drop incendiary bombs among the growing
crops, but little damage was done, and no lives were lost. On 3rd
August eight appeared on the east coast, after attacking British
trawlers out at sea. Again they lost their way, and after killing
some live-stock were driven home by our guns. A week later a
bolder attack was made, A flotilla, variously estimated at from
seven to ten in number, appeared on the east coast of England
and Scotland. A number of towns were attacked, half a dozen
people were killed and some fifty injured, but no material damage
was done. Then came a lull, during the August moonlight, and
it was not till the night of 24th August that the raiders came
again. There were six of them, and five were driven away by our
gun-fire from the sea-coast town which they attacked. One
succeeded in getting as far as London and dropped bombs in a
working-class suburb, killing and wounding a number of poor

I9I6] ZEPPELIN v. AIRPLANE. 325

people, mostly women and children. It was the last raid under
the old regime. Henceforth the Zeppelin was to meet a weapon
more powerful than itself.

Saturday, 2nd September, was a heavy day, with an overcast
sky, which cleared up at twilight. The situation on the Somme was
becoming desperate, and Germany resolved to send against Britain
the largest airship flotilla she had yet dispatched. There were
ten Zeppelins, several of the newest and largest type, and three
Schutte-Lanz military airships, and their objective was London
and the great manufacturing cities of the Midlands. The Zep-
pelins completely lost their way. They wandered over East Anglia,
dropping irrelevant bombs, and received a warm reception from
the British guns. The military airships made for London. Ample
warning of their coming had been given, and the city was in deep
darkness, save for the groping searchlights. The streets were full
of people, whose curiosity mastered their prudence, and they were
rewarded by one of the most marvellous spectacles which the war
had yet provided. Two of the marauders were driven off by our
gun-fire, but one attempted to reach the city from the east. After
midnight the sky was clear and star-strewn. The sound of the guns
was heard, and patches of bright light appeared in the heavens where
our shells were bursting. Shortly after two o'clock in the morning
of the 3rd, about 10,000 feet up in the air, an airship was seen
moving south-westward. She dived and then climbed, as if to
escape the shells, and for a moment seemed to be stationary. There
came a burst of smoke which formed a screen around her and hid
her from view, and then far above appeared little points of light.
Suddenly the searchlights were shut off and the guns stopped.
The next second the airship was visible like a glowing cigar, turning
rapidly to a red and angry flame. She began to fall in a blazing
wisp, lighting up the whole sky, so that country folk fifty miles off
saw the portent. The spectators broke into wild cheering, for
from some cause or other the raider had met his doom. The cause
was soon known. Several airmen had gone up to meet the
enemy, and one of them, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson,
formerly of the Worcester Regiment, a young man of twenty-
one, had come to grips with her. When he found her, he was
2,000 feet below her, but he climbed rapidly and soon won the
upper position. He closed, and though the machine gun on
the top of the airship opened fire on him, he got in his blow in
time. No such duel had ever been fought before, 10,000 feet up
in the sky, in the view of hundreds of thousands of spectators over

326 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

an area of a thousand square miles. The airship fell blazing in a
field at Cuffley, near Enfield, a few miles north of London, and the
bodies of the crew of sixteen were charred beyond recognition.
Lieutenant Robinson received the Victoria Cross, for he was the
first man to grapple successfully with an enemy airship by night,
and to point the way to the true line of British defence. It was
no easy victory. Such a combat against the far stronger armament
of the airship, and exposed to constant danger from our own
bursting shells, involved risks little short of a forlorn hope in the
battlefield.

On the night of 23rd September the raiders came again.
Twelve Zeppelins crossed the eastern shore line, making for London.
Almost at once they were scattered by gun fire, and only two
pursued their journey to the capital, where they succeeded in drop-
ping bombs in a suburb of small houses. Of the others one attacked
a Midland town. The total British casualties were thirty killed
and no injured. But they paid dearly for their enterprise. One,
L33, was so seriously damaged by our anti-aircraft guns that she
fled out to sea, and then, realizing that this meant certain death,
returned to land, and came down in an Essex field. Her men,
twenty-two in number, set her on fire, and then marched along
the road to Colchester till they found a special constable, to whom
they surrendered. The destruction was imperfectly done, and the
remains gave the British authorities the complete details of the
newest type of Zeppelin. A second, L32, was attacked by two
of our airmen. The end was described by a special constable
on duty. " In the searchlight beams she looked like an in-
candescent bar of white-hot steel. Then she staggered and swung
to and fro in the air for just a perceptible moment of time. That,
no doubt, was the instant when the damage was done, and the
huge craft became unmanageable. Then, without drifting at
all from her approximate place in the sky, without any other pre-
liminary, she fell like a stone, first horizontally — that is, in her
sailing trim — then in a position which rapidly became perpendicular,
she went down, a mass of flames."

Germany had begun to fare badly in the air, but popular clamour
and the vast sums sunk in Zeppelin manufacture prevented her
from giving up the attempt. On the night of Monday, 25th Sep-
tember, seven Zeppelins crossed the east coast, aiming at the
industrial districts of the Midlands and the north. The wide
area of the attack and the thick ground-mist enabled them to
return without loss, after bombing various working-class districts.

I9i6] THE END OF THE ZEPPELIN LEGEND. 327

The Germans claimed to have done damage to the great munition
area, and even to have " bombarded the British naval port of
Portsmouth." As a matter of fact, no place of any military im-
portance and no munition factory suffered harm. The losses
were among humble people living in the flimsy houses of in-
dustrial suburbs. A more formidable attempt was made on 1st
October. It was a clear, dark night when ten Zeppelins made
landfall on their way to London. But they found that the capital
was ringed by defences in the air and on the ground which made
approach impossible. The attack became a complete fiasco.
About midnight one Zeppelin, L31, approached the north-east
environs, and was engaged by a British airplane. The watching
thousands saw the now familiar sight— a glow and then a falling
wisp of flame. The airship crashed to earth in a field near Potter's
Bar. The crew perished to a man, including the officer in charge,
Lieutenant-Commander Mathy, the best-known of all the Zep-
pelin pilots. He it was who had commanded the raiding airships
in September and October 1915. He had always ridiculed the
value of airplanes as an anti-Zeppelin weapon ; but by the irony of
fate he was to fall to a single machine, guided by a young officer
of twenty-six.

During the wild weather of late October and early November
there was a breathing space. The next attempt, warned by past
experiences, steered clear of London, and aimed at the north-east
coast, which, it was assumed, would be less strongly defended.
It came on the night of 27th November, in cold, windless weather.
One airship, after dropping a few bombs in Durham and Yorkshire,
was engaged by a plane off the Durham coast. Once again came
the glow and then the wisp of flame; the airship split in two
before reaching the sea; the debris sank, and when day broke
only a scum on the water marked its resting-place. Another
wandered across the Midlands on its work of destruction, and in
the morning steered for home, closely pursued by our airplanes
and bombarded by our guns. It left the land going very fast at
a height of 8,000 feet, but nine miles out to sea it was attacked by
four machines of the Royal Naval Air Service, as well as by the
guns of an armed trawler. The issue was not long in doubt, and
presently the Zeppelin fell blazing to the water.

The year 1916 was disastrous to the Zeppelin legend. The loss
of twelve of these great machines, each costing from a quarter to
half a million pounds to build, was admitted by the enemy, and
beyond doubt there were other losses unreported. The Zeppelin

328 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

fleet was now sadly reduced in effectives, and it had lost still more
in repute. A way had been found to meet the menace, and it was
improbable that any future adaptation of the Zeppelin could break
down the new defence. But the peril from the air was not over,
as some too rashly concluded. Throughout the year there had
been a number of attacks by German airplanes, which rarely ex-
tended beyond the towns in the south-eastern corner of England.
Such attacks were not formidable, the raiders being as a rule in a
desperate hurry to be gone. But it occurred to many, watching
the advent of the new Spad and Halberstadt machines on the
Western front, that in that quarter lay a threat to England more
formidable than the airship. An airplane with a 240-h.p. engine,
which could fly at a great speed at a height of close on 20,000 feet,
could travel in broad daylight, and pass unchallenged to its goal.
If we had not the type of machine to climb fast and operate at the
same altitude, such a raider would be safe from attack alike by
plane and gun fire. On the 28th of November a German machine,
flying very high, dropped nine bombs on London. The raider
was brought down in France on its way home, and among its
furniture was a large-scale map of London. The incident was
trifling in itself, but in many minds it raised unpleasing reflections.
Our planes had beaten the invading Zeppelin. We might still have
to face the invading airplane.

CHAPTER LXIX.

POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS.

October 13-Decetnber 7, 1916.

Effect of Battle of the Somme in Germany— Slave Raids in Belgium— German
Auxiliary Service Bill — Proclamation of an independent Poland — M. Briand and
his Cabinet — Jofire superseded by Nivelle — Mr. Lloyd George becomes Prime
Minister.

The closing months of 1916 were remarkable for a series of political
upheavals and transformations among all the belligerents such as
attend inevitably the advanced stages of a great struggle. The
first optimism is succeeded by discouragement, which is followed in
turn by a fatalistic resolution. But the stauncher this resolution
grows, and the more certain the assurance of ultimate victory,
the less tolerant will a nation be of supineness and blundering
in its governors. If a man is called upon to make extreme sacri-
fices he will not readily permit any class of his fellows to escape
more easily, and if his doings are tried by a hard test he will apply
a rigorous touchstone to the performance of his betters. Again,
if a Ministry at such a stage is apt to be sternly judged, its task has
also very special intrinsic difficulties. The nearer the decisive
moment approaches the more urgent becomes the duty of pre-
vision, and the more difficult its fulfilment. All the ancient land-
marks and guide-posts have gone ; the old world which endured
into the first year of war has now vanished ; and, if the statesmen
are still the same as those who administered that lost world, they
are handicapped by irrelevant memories. Lastly, war weariness
will have overtaken many who started on the road with a brisk
step and a purposeful eye, and a nation, rising slowly towards
a supreme effort, will be impatient of leaders who seem to falter
and fumble.

In Germany the ferment stopped short of its natural effect.
No Minister fell from power, but the Government was driven into
strange courses. Happily for itself it had to deal with a docile

«9

330 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

people — a credulous people who accepted incredible things, an
obedient people who swallowed with scarcely a grimace unpalatable
medicines. Yet even in Germany public opinion could not be
wholly neglected, and the policy of the German Government was
directed not less to explaining away the crisis which faced them
than to taking steps to meet it.

The Battle of the Somme, as we have seen, had profoundly
affected German popular opinion. No official obscurantism could
conceal its ravages ; indeed the very silence of the newspapers,
and the minimizing tone which they adopted in their infrequent
comments, increased the mystery and awe which cloaked that
front. The plain man knew only that the place was thick with
his kinsfolks' graves, and all who possessed any influence struggled
to have their friends sent eastwards rather than to that ill-omened
angle of France. Instructed military opinion was aware that for
the first time the German machine had been utterly outmatched,
and that France and Britain had prepared their own weapon,
growing daily in strength, which, unless a miracle happened, must
sooner or later break down the German defence. In Ludendorff's
ominous words, " If the war lasted our defeat seemed inevitable."
The storms of the autumn had given a brief respite, but the blow
had not been parried, but only deferred. A horror of the place
fell on the German people, from the simplest peasant to the most
exalted commanders. More and more they saw advancing from
Picardy the shadows of catastrophe —

" The darkness of that battle in the West
Where all of high and holy dies away."

In such a time of depression Falkenhayn's Rumanian success
came as a blessed stimulant to the national spirit. A hungry
people was promised a bounty of Rumanian corn and oil ; the swift
campaign seemed to show German arms as resistless as ever ; the
fate of Rumania was a warning to any neutral that might dare to
draw the sword against the Teutonic League. But on this matter
the High Command could have no delusions. They had driven
back the armies of a little nation which was desperately short of
munitions and had made a serious strategical blunder ; but the
success had small bearing on the real problem. The extension of
their lines to the Sereth shortened their Eastern front as compared
with its position in September, but it did no more. It still gave
them some extra hundreds of miles of line to hold as compared with
August. The promise of Rumanian supplies had been falsified.

igi6] THE GERMAN AUXILIARY SERVICE BILL. 331

The oil-fields were in ruins, and most of the grain had been de-
stroyed or removed ; the balance was a mere drop in the bucket of
Teutonic needs, and would only lead to bitter quarrels as to its
allocation. Moreover, the Rumanian retreat had not perplexed
or divided the Allies' plans. Russia had made scarcely a change
in her main dispositions, and not a man or a gun had been moved
from the West. Germany— in the eyes of those best fitted to
judge — had only added to her barren occupations of territory,
and increased the commitments of her waning strength.

Hence, while the joy-bells rang in Berlin, and the Emperor
repeated his familiar speech about his irresistible sword, the true
rulers of Germany were busy with devices which proved that
in their opinion the outlook was growing desperate. The peace
proposals and their sequel, unrestricted submarine warfare, must
be left to later chapters. Here we are concerned with the two
burning problems which demanded an immediate answer — the
shortage of men and the shortage of supplies.

With regard to the first, during the early autumn German
policy seems to have wavered. At one time men were " combed
out " from industries for the field ; at another they were sent back
to industrial life from the fighting line. But with November a
great step was decided upon. A War Bureau was established,
to which were handed over eight separate branches — the Works
Department, the Field Ordnance Department, the Munitions
Department, the War Raw Materials Department, the Factory De-
partment, the Substitution Service Office, the Food Supply
Department, and the Export and Import Department. At its
head was placed one of the ablest of Germany's organizing brains,
the Wurtemberg soldier, General von Groner, who had previously
been at the head of the Military Railway Service. This step was
taken largely at the instigation of Hindenburg, who in two letters
to the Imperial Chancellor reviewed candidly the economic situa-
tion, and demanded the organized exploitation of every class of
industrial and rural labour — of the former, that the Allied efforts
might be met and surpassed ; of the latter, that the former might
have sufficient supplies to make their work effective. Accordingly
the Auxiliary Service Bill was passed by the Reichstag on 2nd
December, legalizing the levee-en-masse. Contrary to expectation,
women were not included. Every male German between the ages
of seventeen and sixty-one, who had not been summoned to the
armed forces, was liable for auxiliary service, which was defined as
consisting, " apart from service in Government offices or official

332 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

institutions, in service in war industry, in agriculture, in the nurs-
ing of the sick, and in every kind of organization of an economic
character connected with the war, as well as in undertakings
which are directly or indirectly of importance for the purpose of
the conduct of the war or the provision of the requirements of the
people." The recruitment was to be locally managed, and com-
pulsion was not to be applied until the call for volunteers had failed.
The purpose was twofold — to substitute as far as possible in the
non-combatant branches men liable to auxiliary service for men
liable to military service, and to make certain that the work of
the civilian manhood of Germany was used in the spheres most
vital for the conduct of the war.*

In her quest of man-power Germany cast her net beyond her
native territories. From the beginning of October onward the
inhabitants of the occupied Belgian provinces were rigorously
conscripted for war work on her behalf. Partly these were work-
men already thrown out of employment by the closing down of
Belgian factories, but largely they were men engaged in private
undertakings who were peremptorily ordered to labour for their
new masters. Slave raids — for they were nothing better — were
conducted on a gigantic scale, and some hundreds of thousands
of Belgians were carried over the German frontiers. When the
labourers learned on what tasks they were to be employed, there
was frequent resistance, and this was crushed with consistent
brutality. Belgium had already been stripped of her industrial
plant, her foodstuffs, and her rolling stock for Germany's benefit,
and she had now to surrender the poor remnant of her man-power.
Her Foreign Minister appealed to neutral countries and to the
Vatican, and the scandal was so great that President Wilson was
moved to protest. But for the moment the Allies were helpless.
They were obliged by considerations of common humanity to
continue their work of feeding the Belgian people by means of a
neutral Commission, even though Germany was using it to her
own advantage by exporting foodstuffs from Belgium, and sus-
pending public relief works that she might have an excuse for her
deportations. The reckoning must wait yet awhile, but the
" man-hunting " of the autumn added to it another heavy item.
The British Government, in the words of its Foreign Secretary,
could give Belgium only one answer : " That they will use their
utmost power to bring the war to a speedy and successful con-

* The scheme, as it turned out, was better on paper than in practice. See
Ludendurft's criticism, My War Memories (Eng. trans.), I., 328, etc.

1916] GERMAN POLICY IN POLAND. 333

elusion, and thus to liberate Belgium once and for all from the
dangers which continually menace her so long as the enemy remains
in occupation of her territory. This is a cardinal aim and object
of all the Allies, and the people of the British Empire have already
been inspired by this latest proof of German brutality with re-
newed determination to make every sacrifice for the attainment of
that end."

Germany looked also to the occupied territories in the East
for a new recruitment. She had already made use of starvation
to try and attract workmen from Russian Poland westward to
her own factories. Now she took a bold step, for, with the object
of enlisting Polish regiments for her army, she announced on 5th
November that, in conjunction with Austria, she proposed to
establish an independent Poland with an hereditary monarchy
and a constitution. The thing had been long in the air, and the
establishment of a Polish university at Warsaw had been one of
the steps to it ; but the official announcement had been delayed
so long as Berlin believed that there was hope of making a sepa-
rate peace with Russia. Now that hope had gone, and Germany
burned the boats that might have made a passage to Petrograd.
The new Polish kingdom was to be but a small affair, for Posen
and Galicia, which contained half the Polish race, were not in-
cluded. It was to be a satellite of the Central Powers, and some
one of their numerous princelings would be set on this caricature
of the throne of John Sobieski. The very wording of the procla-
mation betrayed its purpose. There was to be a Polish army,
with an " organization, training, and command " to be " regu-
lated by mutual agreement," and the German Press, commenting
on the point, made it clear that such an army was to be a mere
reserve for Germany to draw upon. " Germany's security," wrote
the semi-official North German Gazette, " demands that for all
future times the Russian armies shall not be able to use a mili-
tarily consolidated Poland as an invasion gate of Silesia and West
Prussia." With this motive so brazenly conspicuous, it required
some audacity to claim that Germany and Austria now stood out
nobly before the world as the true protectors of small nations.
Hindenburg wanted recruits, and had demanded 700,000 by hook
or by crook from Russian Poland. The new Poland was to be
like Napoleon's Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, established with the
same purpose, and at the same price.

The move incensed Russia — even those elements in her Gov-
ernment which were prepared to look favourably on a separate

334 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov,

peace. A proud nation will scarcely submit with equanimity to
the spectacle of another Power giving away its territory and con-
scripting its own subjects for a war against it. Nor could the
long-felt and passionate desire of the Poles for national unity be
satisfied by such meagre territorial limits or such an ignoble vassal-
dom. Non tali auxilio, nee defensoribus istis. Unhappily, the
Polish people were split into a hundred groups and rivalries, and
there were many elements which were won over to the German
policy. But the better elements in the race and its ablest leaders
stood scornfully aloof. Germany gained nothing of practical value
by her proclamation. The manhood of Russian Poland had already
been mainly recruited for the Russian ranks. In the great retreat
of the summer of 1915, the vast proportion of the remaining able-
bodied men had been swept eastward into Russian areas. So far
as she could by vigorous enlistment for the Polish Legion,* and
by conscription for industrial work, Germany had already sucked
the occupied territories dry. In the approbation of her own press
and the encomiums of her tame Warsaw professors, she had to
look for her reward.

To meet the second of her problems, the shortage of supplies,
she had no very clear resource. The ingenious Food Controller,
Herr Batocki, had done his best to compel two and two to make
five, but he had not succeeded ; and beyond doubt, especially in
the handling of the potato crop, grave errors had been committed,
and certain areas and classes suffered not only from scanty rations
but from a burning sense of unfair treatment. As the expected
gains from the Rumanian campaign shrank into a very modest
bounty, the problem of the Food Controller became insoluble. Only
one course remained — to satisfy popular feeling by a ruthless sub-
marine campaign. If Britain blockaded Germany, then Germany
in turn would blockade Britain, and through the early winter the
temper of all classes of the nation was moving towards a great act
of revenge and defence in the spring. But no dreams of the future
could obliterate the extreme awkwardness of the present. Ger-
many had before her nine months of short commons before she

* The Polish Legion, fighting on the Austrian side, grew out of the militant
wing of the Polish Socialist party in Warsaw during the Russian revolutionary
troubles of 1905. The militants, when repudiated by the party in 1906, withdrew
to Galicia and organized on a military basis. Their numbers throughout the earlier
part of the campaign were between 30,000 and 50,000. Their leader, Pilsudski, was
made an Austrian brigadier-general, and in the spring of 1916, during the battles on
the Stokhod, actually withdrew his troops from the line as a political move. His
German army commander promptly cashiered him.

I9i6] OFFICIAL UTTERANCES. 335

could look for any relief. Though the rations of her troops were
not cut down below the standard necessary to ensure health and
vigour, their monotony was a subject of universal complaint.
In many interior districts the shortage was not far removed from
want, and there was a general under-nourishment of the whole
people. The suffering was embittered by the suspicion, only too
well founded, that certain classes were exempt from it, and were
even waxing fat on the leanness of others. At no time in modern
German history were the agrarian magnates of Prussia the objects
of such violent criticism. Moreover, there was bad feeling between
the constituent states. Bavaria and South Germany in general
complained that they were being sacrificed to satisfy Prussia's
need. In many a prisoners' camp on the Western front Bavarian
and Brandenburger came to blows, and the subject of controversy,
as often as not, was the greed of the northerners.

The utterances of official Germany during the autumn and
early winter provided an interesting reflex of the hopes and de-
pressions which beset the German mind. In October the Imperial
Crown Prince, who had of late fallen sadly out of the picture,
sought rehabilitation by a discourse on the beauties of peace.
His lyrical cry was confided to an American journalist, and formed
one of the interludes of comedy in the grim business of war.
He sighed over the commercial depravity of America, which had
led her financiers to invest in the Allied chances of success, and
quoted the Bible as a warning against the lust of gain. He de-
plored the expenditure of human talent on the work of destruction,
and assured his interviewer that every man in the German ranks
" would far rather see all this labour, skill, education, intellectual
resource, and physical power devoted to the task of upholding
and lengthening life," such as the conquest of disease. He pro-
claimed his passion for domesticity, and his grief at being separated
from his household. He paid modest tributes to the quality of
the enemy. " It is a pity," he said, " that all cannot be gentle-
men and sportsmen, even if we are enemies." And lastly he spoke
of flowers and music, that he might complete the part of the Happy
Warrior. In the same month a different type of man took up
a different parable. Hindenburg informed a Viennese journalist
that the situation on every front was secure and hopeful. He
announced that he was ready, if necessary, for a thirty years' war.
France was even now exhausted. She had called Britain to her
assistance, and " the help which her Ally gives is that she is forcing
the French to destroy themselves." Britain had no military

336 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

genius, and Russia's numbers could never learn true battle dis-
cipline. " How long will the war last ? That depends upon our
opponents. Prophecy is thankless, and it is better to abandon
it in war-time. It is possible that 19 17 will bring battles that will
decide the war, but I do not know, and nobody knows. I only
know that we will fight to a decision."

These were brave words. They were spoken to raise the
drooping spirits of Austria, and they had their effect so long as
daily advances east of the Carpathians could be reported. But
the governors of Germany were not contemplating a thirty years'
war ; they were cudgelling their brains to think how their Ru-
manian success could be turned to profit, for well they knew that
it was of use only as an advertisement, and that the true situa-
tion was very desperate. Bethmann-Hollweg on 9th Novem-
ber made a speech in the Reichstag which showed the inmost
cogitations of Berlin. The orations of the Imperial Chancellor
were at all times a good barometer of German opinion, for their
mechanical adroitness revealed more than it concealed. During
1915 he had explicitly stated his aim as such an increase of strength
as would enable Germany to defy a united Europe. " If Europe
is to arrive at peace, it can only be through the strong and
inviolable position of Germany " — a revival of the policy of
Charles V. and Louis XIV. In the first half of 1916 his tone was
the same. Belgium and Poland must be brought under the con-
trol of Germany, and peace could only be considered on the
basis of the war-map. But after the misfortunes of the summer
he changed his phrasing. On 29th September he announced :
" From the first day the war meant for us nothing but the defence
of our right to life, freedom, and development ; " but he left the
last word, the crux of the whole matter, undefined.

The speech of 9th November was skilfully advertised before-
hand, and had obviously been prepared with great care as the
starting-point of a new diplomatic phase. It contained the usual
roseate summary of the situation upon all the fronts ; but its
importance lay in the fact that for the first time the Imperial
Chancellor talked at large about peace. He laboured to prepare
the right atmosphere by showing that Germany's hands were
clean, that she had had no intention of conquest when she drew
the sword, and that from first to last she had waged a defensive
war. He attempted to cast upon Russia the whole responsibility
for the immediate outbreak, since the " act which made war
inevitable was the Russian general mobilization ordered on the

1916] THE ITALIAN CABINET. 337

night of July 30-31, 1914." This dubious historical retrospect
was the basis for a declaration on the subject of the future after the
war. Sir Edward Grey (now Lord Grey of Fallodon), in an earlier
speech, had spoken of an international league to preserve peace.
The German Chancellor professed himself in agreement. But
peace could only be ensured " if the principle of free development
was made to prevail not only on the land but on the sea." And
it must involve the dissolution of all aggressive coalitions. The
Triple Entente had been based solely on jealousy of and hostility
towards Germany, while the Central Powers had never had any
thought but of an honourable defence. Let peace come, said the
Chancellor, and let it be guaranteed by the strongest sanctions
that the wit of man can devise, and Germany will gladly co-operate
— provided it allows for her free and just development. On the
word " development " hung all the law and the prophets. The
speech, it is clear, was addressed to neutral opinion rather than to
the speaker's countrymen. It aimed at creating an atmosphere
of reasonableness. Victorious Germany, fresh from her brilliant
Rumanian conquests, and unbeaten on every front, was prepared to
appeal to the sense of decency of the neutral world. She, the victor,
alone could speak with dignity of peace. It needed little acumen
to see that the Imperial Chancellor's utterance was the first move
in a new game.

The political situation in Russia during the autumn was, as
we have seen, in the highest degree confused and perplexing.
On one point, indeed, the issue was clear. The German challenge
in Poland received prompt answer. Russia restated the views
which she had already publicly expressed, and announced that
nothing would drive her from her purpose of creating a free and
united Poland under her protection, " from all three of her now
incomplete tribal districts." But in domestic politics there was
no such unity of purpose, and already the frail dykes were crack-
ing under the rising floods.

In Italy the Boselli Government had no crisis to face such as
threatened others of the Allies. The chief event of the autumn
and early winter was a futile attempt on the part of the extreme
Socialists to commit the Chamber to peace negotiations, for which
German agents were striving throughout the world to create an
atmosphere. On 13th October Signor Bissolati,* the Civil Commis-

* When Italy declared war he had enlisted in the Alpini, though over military
age, and had been severely wounded and decorated for valour.

338 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.-Dec.

sioner of War in the Cabinet, had spoken strongly on the matter.
" I think that any state or states of the Alliance which to-day
harboured thoughts of peace would be guilty of an act of treason.
Rather than accept peace contaminated with the germs of future
wars it would have been better not to have embarked on the present
struggle at all. The germ of war can only be killed by destroying
Austria as a state, and by depriving Germany of every illusion of
predominance." Italy, as we know, had difficulties peculiar to
herself. Her popular feeling was mobilized rather against Austria
than Germany, and the ancient ramifications of German intrigue
and German finance in her midst, combined with the very real
economic suffering which the war now entailed, made her liable to
sudden spasms of popular discontent and suspicion. Almost alone
among the Allies, she had an avowed anti-war and Germanophil
party to reckon with. At the end of November the pro-German
Socialists in the Chamber, led by a Jew of German extraction,
brought forward a motion in favour of immediate peace, to be
secured by the mediation of the United States of America. The
Chamber dealt drastically with the motion, rejecting it by 293
votes to 47, and Signor Boselli, the Premier, restated in eloquent
words the central principle of the Allies. " Peace must be a pact
born of armed victory — a peace for which Italy has drawn the
sword in the name of maritime and territorial claims, that are not
mere poetry, but a reality of her history and of her existence ; a
peace which, in order to be lasting, must replace the equilibrium
of the old treaties by an equilibrium built up upon the rights
of nationalism. We seek not the peace of a day, but the peace
of new centuries."

The Government of M. Briand had not at any time an easy
seat, and during the early winter it had to face a series of petty
crises. In France there was no ebullition of pacificism worth
the name. The futile demonstration of the socialist M. Brizon,
in September, was overwhelmed by the Premier's torrential elo-
quence, and its author exposed to general ridicule. But M. Briand
held office rather because no alternative was very obvious than
because he had the assent of all parties. He was somewhat auto-
cratic in his methods, and preferred to govern with the minimum
of parliamentary assistance. The difficulties in the Near East,
in which France had a peculiar interest, and the apparent futility
of the Allied policy in Greece, did not make his task simpler.

The discontent of the opposition came to a head in the close of
November and beginning of December. The scarcity of coal, the

1916] RETIREMENT OF JOFFRE. 339

high price of food, the losses of the Somme campaign, certain failures
in transport, and doubts as to the capacity of various elements
in the High Command, made a basis for criticism of the Govern-
ment. In a series of stormy secret sessions, which revealed a
curious regrouping of parties, M. Briand was called upon to defend
his policy. He succeeded, though his majority dwindled and
most of the deputies on leave from the Front were found voting
in the minority. The result of the debates was that he was given
a mandate to reconstruct his Government, and to reorganize the
High Command. The first was a matter of consolidation and
readjustment, rather than the sweeping innovation which about
the same time was taking place in Britain. The Cabinet was
made smaller, three departments being grouped under one chief.
The Prime Minister still held the portfolio of Foreign Affairs,
M. Ribot remained at the Exchequer, and Admiral Lacaze at the
Ministry of Marine. An inner executive Cabinet was constructed
in the shape of a War Committee of five on the British model.
The most interesting appointment was that of General Lyautey,
the Resident-General in Morocco, to the Ministry of War. On his
great ability and experience all Frenchmen were agreed ; but there
was some doubt as to how a soldier, whose life had been mainly
spent abroad, and who had no parliamentary experience, would
work with the Chamber. It looked as if the extra-parliamentary
nature of the administration, which had been the chief topic of
M. Briand's critics, was to be accentuated by the reconstruction.

Far more remarkable were the changes in the High Command.
Popular opinion in France was passing through a critical stage,
and for the first time civilian views and political personalities
tended to influence directly military plans and the High Command.
The Somme had not been the decisive victory that had been looked
for, and France's losses there, following upon those at Verdun,
had alarmed the Cabinet, and, much exaggerated by rumour, had
shocked the ordinary public. Foch was the first to suffer. A
motoring accident in November was made an excuse for removing
him from his command, and for several months the greatest of
living soldiers was unemployed. Then the wave reached Joffre,
and that robust figure was swept from his place. His unrelieved
optimism had become a mannerism that palled ; some said he
was growing senile ; it was rumoured, too, that he considered that
France's great part in the war was over and that the main attacks
must now be left to the British. So he relinquished the office of
Generalissimo, which he had held since the outbreak of war, and

340 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

was nominated military adviser to the new War Committee, being
at the same time created a Marshal of France, the first holder of
that famous title to be appointed by the Third Republic. To
the command in the West Nivelle succeeded, a much younger man
who had won brilliant successes at Verdun, and had a plan for
winning a speedy and final victory by methods very different from
the tortoise-like progression of the Somme. The military sig-
nificance of these changes will be discussed later ; here let us
take leave of one of the most honourable and attractive figures
that this narrative will reveal. The services of Joffre to his country
and to the Allied cause had been beyond all computation, and
in the history of the time his is one of the two or three names
that will shine most brightly. To his skill and nerve and patience
was due the triumph of the Marne, won when the skies were darkest,
which destroyed for ever the German hope of victory. He had been,
like Ajax, the pillar and shield of his people, and his rock-like
figure had held the confidence of his country since the guns first
opened in Alsace. To him more than to any other man was due
the superb military effort of France and her unyielding resolution.
He had brilliant lieutenants, some of them his superiors in the
technical accomplishments of a soldier, but his was always the
deciding will and the directing brain.

During the autumn it was becoming clear that the Coalition
Government in Britain was rapidly sinking in public esteem.
There was perhaps less captious criticism of particular Ministers
than there had been a year before ; but there was a deep-seated
dissatisfaction, and an impatience the more dangerous in that it
was more rarely expressed in words. The root of the feeling was
the belief that the Government was too much inclined to try to cure
an earthquake by small political pills. " The war is a cyclone,"
Mr. Lloyd George had told the trade unions, " which is tearing up
by the roots the ornamental plants of modern society, and wrecking
some of the flimsy trestle bridges of modern civilization. It is an
earthquake which is upheaving the very rocks of European life.
It is one of those seismic disturbances in which nations leap for-
ward or fall back generations in a single bound." The ordinary
citizen believed this, and looked for proofs of a like conviction in
the public acts of his Government.

The Coalition formed in May 1915 had not been a mobilization
of the best talent of the nation, but a compromise between party
interests. It contained most of the men who in the previous

1916] CRITICISM OF BRITISH GOVERNMENT. 341

Liberal Government had been responsible for the mistakes and
over-confidence of the first nine months of war. Its guiding prin-
ciple had resembled too closely that of an ordinary British Govern-
ment in times of peace — to keep the Ministry together at all costs
by a series of eirenica and formulas ill suited to a supreme crisis,
for, as has been well said, " the tremulous cohesion of a vacillating
Ministry is not the same thing as national unity." It had seemed
to many people to lack courage. All its members declared that
great sacrifices were necessary for victory ; but when it came to
the question of a particular sacrifice they were apt to hesitate.
The result of the National Service controversy proved that this
hesitation was needless. In this, as in other matters, the people
were in advance of their governors. It would be unfair to deny
that a vast deal of good work had been done between May 1915
and December 1916 ; but in many vital matters efficiency was to
seek, and, generally speaking, there was more political than ad-
ministrative talent among Ministers. Further, the main machinery
was not fitted for the prompt dispatch of business. A Cabinet
of twenty-three members, even with the added device of special
War Committees, is not an ideal body for prompt decision and
quick action. To quote Mr. Lloyd George again, " You cannot
conduct a war with a sanhedrin."

During the autumn of 1916 men of all classes were beginning
to ask themselves whether the Government, as then constituted,
was capable of bringing the war to a successful issue. Instances of
apparent timidity and lack of forethought and imagination had so
grown in number as to constitute a weighty, if unformulated, in-
dictment in the popular mind. Many of the charges were unfair.
The unsatisfactory position in the Near East sprang from causes
most of which could not be rightly laid to the charge of the Coali-
tion. The disasters of Rumania were blamed, with little reason,
on the Foreign Office. The halt of the British advance on the
Somme, due to bad weather, was made the occasion by certain
irresponsible critics for declaring that the great battle had failed,
that our Western strategy was a blunder, and that the lives of
our young men had been squandered in vain. But there were other
complaints which had greater substance. The whole question of
pensions was unsatisfactory, and there was growing discontent
among the classes concerned. The Air Board seemed to be without
a clear policy ; the revival of German long-range submarine activity,
contrary to popular expectation, suggested that all was not well
at the Admiralty. The military authorities had warned the nation

342 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

that we should have to make large further levies on our man-
power ; and at the end of September 1915 a Man-Power Dis-
tribution Board was appointed to deal with the matter. The
Board recommended a wholesale drafting of semi-skilled and un-
skilled men below a certain age into the Army, and the filling of
their places by volunteers and women. Its report was submitted
on 9th November, but it looked as if no immediate action would
be taken. Finally, the rise of prices convinced every householder
that presently, unless something was done, there would be a serious
shortage of food and conceivably a famine. In June 1915 a Com-
mittee had been appointed under Lord Milner to consider the ques-
tion of food production at home. A month later it reported,
urging, among other things, that a guarantee of prices should be
given for wheat grown on land broken up from grass, and that the
country should be organized in local units for the distribution of
labour and the supply of seeds and fertilizers. The report was
pigeon-holed, the Government accepting the view of the minority
that the submarine menace was now well in hand ; that there was
no fear of a short supply of wheat from abroad ; and that it was
" unnecessary to adopt any extraordinary measures to ensure a
home-grown supply, even if the war should extend beyond the
autumn of 1916." In the said autumn this complacency had been
rudely broken. On November 15, 1916, Mr. Runciman announced
the appointment of a Food Controller ; but no Food Controller
was forthcoming, since no responsible man would undertake a post
which it was proposed to make a mere impotent appendage of the
Board of Trade. Even at that late date the Government seemed
only to toy with the idea of action.

It is probable that for many months the great majority of the
people of Britain had been convinced that a change was necessary.
But the Government was slow to read the weather signs. With
the conservatism that a long term of power engenders, its chief
members found some difficulty in envisaging an alternative Min-
istry. They were patriotic men, who earnestly desired their
country's victory, and they feared that Cabinet changes and
resignations would weaken the strength of the nation and the
confidence of the Allies. Hence, when the blow came, there was
a tendency to attribute it solely to a malign conspiracy and a
calumnious press. Conspiracy and press campaign there were,
but it is impossible to believe that in the crisis of such a war any
Government could have been driven from office by backstair
intrigues alone or by the most skilful newspaper cabal. The

i9i6] MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S PROPOSAL. 343

press which criticized owed its effect solely to the fact that it
echoed what was in most men's minds. Mr. Asquith's Govern-
ment fell because the mass of the people had come to believe,
rightly or wrongly, that it was not the kind of administration to
beat the enemy.

The details of the story may be briefly summarized, for though
among so many great events they have little importance, yet they
cast an interesting light on certain protagonists of the larger drama.
Mr. Lloyd George, ever since in the preceding summer he had
succeeded Lord Kitchener at the War Office, had been restless
and uncomfortable. Sir William Robertson, when he became
Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had insisted on a definition
of his powers, and the agreement then reached was binding upon
Lord Kitchener's successor. Mr. Lloyd George found himself a
secondary figure at the War Office ; certain indiscretions during a
visit to France that autumn had made him deeply suspect by
both the British and the French generals ; in the Cabinet, too,
it appeared as if his influence was on the wane. His prestige,
still high with the public at large, had sunk low in official and
ministerial circles. Apart from the personal question, he was
honestly convinced that the war was being ill managed both by
the generals in the field and the statesmen at home, and longed
to infuse into its conduct a fierier purpose. At the time he had
no close political ally except Mr. Churchill, who was out of office
and somewhat under a cloud. Casting about for help, he bethought
himself of the Unionist leader in the Commons, Mr. Bonar Law,
and of an intimate friend of that leader, a young Canadian member
of Parliament, Sir Maxwell Aitken.

Mr. Bonar Law was at the moment a tired and anxious man,
and a controversy with some of his own followers, over a bill
authorizing the sale of enemy property in West Africa, had seri-
ously troubled him, and predisposed him to think that the exist-
ing arrangement was not the best conceivable. Mr. Lloyd George's
scheme was for a very small War Committee of three members,
of which the Prime Minister should not be one — a scheme not
devised, as might appear at first sight, to compel Mr. Asquith's
resignation, but a quite sincere attempt to get the actual direction
of the war into more vigorous hands. Mr. Bonar Law, whose
simplicity was as great as his probity and patriotism, believed that
Mr. Asquith might fairly accept it ; but the Prime Minister, while
agreeing to the small War Committee, not unnaturally refused thus
to divest himself of the main duty of leadership.

344 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

On Friday, ist December, two newspapers in Mr. Lloyd George's
confidence published a guarded account of the controversy, and
next day the journals of Lord Northcliffe, who was now made
privy to the enterprise, informed the world that Mr. Lloj'd George
was on the point of resignation. On Sunday, 3rd December, Mr.
Bonar Law called a meeting of the Unionist leaders, and to his
surprise found that they did not regard Mr. Lloyd George's depart-
ure from the Government as an unmixed misfortune. They were
anxious that Mr. Asquith should resign as a tactical measure, and
in order that he might reconstruct with a free hand they were
prepared at the same time to tender their own resignations ; but
it was clear that they hoped that the new Cabinet would not include
Mr. Lloyd George. Mr. Bonar Law, whose motive was not to
get rid of Mr. Asquith but to retain the great talents of the Secre-
tary for War, visited the Prime Minister that afternoon and urged
a settlement. To this the latter agreed, consenting not to be a
member of the War Committee, provided he had effective control
over its decisions.

But to Mr. Lloyd George and those in his full confidence —
who at this time were only Sir Maxwell Aitken and Sir Edward
Carson — such a settlement was not sufficient. They were resolved
that Mr. Asquith's supremacy should be purely titular. On the
morning of Monday, 4th December, the Times printed a leading
article describing the arrangement, and insisting that the Prime
Minister had to all intents abdicated from the control of the war.
This move had an instantaneous effect. The Liberal Ministers
rose in arms, and Mr. Asquith was compelled to revise his agree-
ment of the Sunday and insist that he must be permanent presi-
dent of the War Committee. Mr. Lloyd George had therefore to
burn his boats, and on the Tuesday announced his resignation.
That same day the Prime Minister was visited by various Unionist
colleagues, who angrily dissociated themselves from any partner-
ship in the manoeuvre of the Secretary for War.

Mr. Asquith now took a step which seemed to be amply justified,
but which in truth was fatal to his fortunes. He himself tendered
his resignation. Counting on the support of the bulk of the Liberal
and Unionist parties, he argued that it would be impossible for
his malcontent colleague to form a Government. Fate seemed to
have delivered Mr. Lloyd George into his hands. The King sent for
Mr. Bonar Law, who, after taking a day and a night to think over
it, declared himself unable to construct an administration, and
advised his Majesty to summon Mr. Lloyd George. Mr. Lloyd

i9i6J MR. LLOYD GEORGE PRIME MINISTER. 345

George was accordingly sent for, and on the evening of 7th December
kissed hands as Prime Minister.

He had played a daring game with consummate coolness and
courage, and he believed that he had the people of the country
behind him. But for the moment his first need was the Unionist
party if he was to form any kind of presentable Government.
Mr. Balfour was ill in bed ; he had consequently had no part in the
hectic negotiations of the past week, and was imperfectly informed
about the details. When the Foreign Office was pressed upon him by
Mr. Bonar Law as a patriotic duty he consented, and his adherence
brought in the rest of the Unionist statesmen. The latter insisted,
however, that Mr. Churchill should not be given office, a condition
at which the new Prime Minister did not cavil. Mr. Lloyd George's
first task was to appoint a War Cabinet. He called to it Lord
Milner and Mr. Arthur Henderson as Ministers without portfolios ;
Lord Curzon, the new President of the Council ; and Mr. Bonar
Law, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer ; while he himself
acted as its chairman. This body of five was entrusted with all
matters pertaining to the conduct of the war. Sir Edward Carson
became First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lord Derby Secretary
for War. Since the ordinary political material was limited, some
bold experiments were made, experts with little or no parliamentary
experience being brought to special departments — Sir Albert
Stanley to the Board of Trade, Mr. H. A. L. Fisher to the Education
Office, Sir Joseph Maclay to the new Shipping Department, Mr.
Prothero to the Board of Agriculture, and Sir Hardman Lever to
the Treasury as Financial Secretary. The posts in the new Min-
istry were roughly divided between Liberal and Labour members
and Unionists. All the Liberal Cabinet Ministers followed the late
Prime Minister into retirement ; but at a party meeting on 13th
December, under the direction of Mr. Asquith, they pledged them-
selves to give Mr. Lloyd George's administration a fair trial.

The fate of Mr. Asquith's Government will, it is probable, be
for future historians something of a landmark in the political
history of Britain. It marked, some have argued, the end of the
pre-eminence of a school of thought which had flourished since the
fat days of the Victorian era ; a school which had done good ser-
vice in its day, and which contained many elements of permanent
worth, but which had been invested by its votaries with a Sinaitic
sanction that no poor creed of mortal statecraft could long sustain.
These matters lie outside the province of a historian of the war.
But, since contemporary public opinion is within that province,

346 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

we may briefly inquire why a Government so solidly buttressed
should suffer such a sudden eclipse. Whatever be our view of
the necessity of the change of Ministers, we can admit that the
manner of it was ungracious. The Prime Minister and the Foreign
Secretary, who had laboured long and hard in the service of their
country, retired to the accompaniment of much coarse abuse
from a section of the press. As a race we are magnanimous, and
not careless of the decencies. Whence came this lapse from our
normal practice ? Whence sprang the nearly universal conviction
that horses must be swopped, however turbulent the stream ?

It is to be observed, in the first place, that a change of leaders
in a long struggle is the usual practice of nations. In most of the
great wars of history the men, both soldiers and civilians, who
began the struggle have not been those who concluded it. Lin-
coln was the exception, not the rule. Since August 1914, in all
the belligerent States there had been much shuffling of cabinets
and commands. Germany had seen three successive chiefs of
the General Staff, and if the same Imperial Chancellor continued
in office, it was only because he was removed beyond the reach
of the mutations of the popular will. In Russia the leadership
of the armies had already passed from the Grand Duke Nicholas
to Alexeiev ; the Premiership from Goremykin to Sturm er, and
from Sturmer to Trepov. Italy had changed her Premier once ;
France had had several Cabinet reconstructions, and had now a
new Commander-in-Chief. Among departmental heads in every
country there had been a continuous and bewildering exchange ;
France had had three Ministers of War, Britain two, and Russia
three — to take the office where change was prima facie least desir-
able. The British Prime Minister and the British Foreign Secre-
tary seemed almost the only stable things in a shifting world.

That new leaders should be demanded in a strife which affects
national existence is as inevitable as the changes of the seasons.
The problems of the second and third stages of a war are not those
of the first stage, and the man who has borne the heat and burden
of the morning will be apt to bring a stale body and a wearied brain
to the tasks of the afternoon. Few leaders are so elastic in mind
that, having given all their strength to one set of problems, they
can turn with unabated vigour to new needs and new conditions.
The odds are that the man who has shown himself an adept in a
patient defensive will not be the man to lead a swift advance.
Again, every war is a packet of surprises, and the early stages must
be strewn with failures. History may rate the general who has

i9i6] MR. ASQUITH. 347

endured and learned the lessons of failure far higher than his
successor who reaps the fruit of that learning, but contemporaries
have not this just perspective. The nature of the popular mind
must be reckoned with, and that mind will turn eagerly from one
who is identified with dark days of stress to one who comes to his
task with a more cheerful record. The nation, which bears the
brunt of the struggle, must be able to view its leaders with hope-
fulness, and in all novelty there is hope.

The demand for change is likely to be the stronger in the case
of a civilian Government, if its members entered upon the war
already weary from long years of office, and if one of their claims to
fame has been skill in the common type of politics, a type which
has been wrecked by the new era and has left in the popular mind
a strong distaste. This was very notably the case with Mr. Asquith
and some of his chief supporters. The Liberal Government had
been continuously in office since the close of 1905 ; it had gone
through three General Elections ; it had been engaged in many
bitter disputes, and had weathered more than one serious crisis.
After eight such difficult years there must inevitably have followed
some decline in the elasticity and vigour of those who were re-
sponsible in such stormy waters for the ship of state. Again,
those eight years had been years of conspicuous success in party
management. The art of directing the House of Commons had
rarely been carried higher than by Mr. Asquith, and great was the
skill of those lieutenants who cultivated and manipulated the
caucus. But after three months of war the caucus was futile,
and the party catchwords meaningless. More, there was growing
up in the popular mind a dislike of the whole business, a suspicion,
not wholly baseless, that Britain owed some of her misfortunes
to this particular expertise. The skill, so loudly acclaimed a year
before both by those who benefited and by those who suffered
from it, seemed now not only useless but sinister. The dapper
political expert was as much in the shadow as the champion faro
player in a western American township which has been visited by
a religious revival. It was no question of political creed. The
same fate would have overtaken a Conservative or a Labour
Government if it had been in power before the war. It was
the reaction of the plain man, plunged into a desperate crisis,
against the sleek standards of a vanished world.

Lastly, there was that in the temperament and talents of the
Prime Minister himself upon which the nation had begun to look
coldly. His great ability no man could question — his oratorical

348 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

gifts, his diplomatic skill, his shrewd and closely reasoning mind.
Not less conspicuous were his endowments of character. He had
admirable nerve and courage, and as a consequence he was the
most loyal of colleagues, for he never shrank from accepting the
burden of his own mistakes and those of his subordinates. He
was incapable of intrigue in any form. He had true personal
dignity, caring little for either abuse or praise, and shunning the
arts of self-advertisement. But he left on the ordinary mind the
impression that he thought more of argument than of action.
To most men he was identified with a political maxim enjoining
delay, and in many matters his Ministry had been too late. He
was a man of the old regime, devoted to traditional methods and
historic watchwords ; his intellect was lucid and orderly, but in no
way original ; and the nation asked whether such a man could
have that eye for the " instant need of things " which an unpre-
cedented crisis demands. It seemed to his critics impossible to
expect the unresting activity and the bold origination which the
situation required from one whose habits of thought and deed were
cast in the more leisurely mould of the elder school of statesmen.

When a people judges there is usually reason in its verdict, and
it is idle to argue that Mr. Asquith was a perfect, or perhaps
the best available, leader in war time. But history will not let
his remarkable services go unacclaimed. In August 1914 he had
led the nation in the path of honour and political wisdom. No
man had stated more eloquently the essential principles for which
Britain fought, or held to them more resolutely. In a tangle of
conflicting policies he had kept always in the mind of the public
the vital point of the quarrel with the Central Powers. And if his
optimism had at times an unfortunate effect, there can be little
doubt that his steady nerve, coolness, and patience did much to keep
an even temper in the people during days of disappointment and
darkness. He departed from office with the dignity that he had
worn in power, and he behaved throughout in all respects not as
a party chief but as a patriot. History will see in him a great
debater, a great parliamentarian, a great public servant, and a
great gentleman.

CHAPTER LXX.

THE GERMAN MANOEUVRES FOR PEACE.

November g, 1916-February 1, 1917.

Origin of German Peace Offer — The Imperial Chancellor's Speech of 12th December
— The German Note — The Answer of the Allies — President Wilson's Note —
Germany declares unrestricted Submarine Warfare.

Throughout the autumn of 1916 the German troops and people
were encouraged with hints of peace by Christmastide. The
Imperial Chancellor, in his speech of 9th November, spoke smooth
words, and the mind of the nation was prepared for his declaration
of 1 2th December in the Reichstag, and the dispatch on the same
day of a summons to the enemies of Germany to enter into negotia-
tions. Before we deal with these overtures, it is necessary to
consider the state of mind which prompted them.

Germany's diplomacy had never been distinguished by subtlety.
He who ran might read as in large type the motives of her
numerous pronunciamentos. The causes which she wished the
world to believe to have guided her action were always explicitly
stated, but the true reasons could be observed sticking out like the
stuffing from a damaged marionette. In the present case she
adopted the role of a generous conqueror. She had won in every
field, but out of the fullness of her strength and the greatness of
her soul she would condescend to treat with beaten antagonists for
the sake of humanity and the world's future. It is safe to say that
the pose deceived no one except the more ignorant and credulous
classes of her own people. She had begun the campaign with loud
talk about the rights of Germany founded on a higher kultur, and
with proclamations of her " will to power." When her great offen-
sive was foiled — but not till then — she discovered that she had
always been waging a defensive war, and asked but the security
of her frontiers and the opportunity of peaceful development.

But her own spoken and written words, and, above all, her deeds,

349

350 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

remained as damning evidence against her. If she abated one
jot of her earlier pretensions, it was due not to a change of heart
but to a change of circumstance.

Her first motive was prudential. The tide of her success had
long ago begun to turn, and she wished to arrest the ebb while
yet there was time. Deeply embarrassed as she was, she still
occupied much foreign territory, which might be used in bargaining.
The Battle of the Somme had shown her that her military machine
was being strained to breaking-point ; once it broke all would
be over, and at any cost that catastrophe must be averted. She
had seen the Allied strength in the field grow to a pitch which
she had believed impossible ; but arguing from her own case,
she considered that the effort had only been made at the expense
of colossal sufferings, and that behind the Allies' resolution lay
a profound war weariness. An offer of negotiations might, she
thought, be welcomed by the masses in the Allied nations, and
forced by them on their governments. Once the belligerents
consented to treat, she believed that she had certain advantages
in any conference. She had much to give up which she could
not hold, and her renunciation might win her the things which
she considered vital to her future. Moreover, if her opponents
were entangled in discussions, there was a chance of breaking
up their unity and shifting the argument to minor issues. Her
peril lay in the silence of her enemies. So long as they main-
tained their deadly concurrence on the broad principle that Ger-
many had shattered the world's peace, and must be prevented from
doing it again, her protestations would not move them, and her
bluster would only steel their hearts. But once let them sit down
to argue on ways and means, and they would beyond doubt reveal
divergences of purpose. It was a matter of life and death to her
that the rift should appear in the Allied lute before she had suffered
a final catastrophe.

Her overtures were made also with an eye to the neutral states,
notably America. Their sufferings during the war had been grave,
and the longer it lasted the more difficult became their position.
They hungered for peace, and would not scrutinize Germany's
motives with the acumen of her actual foes. It might be assumed
that they would look at the war map, to which the Imperial
Chancellor so often turned, with eyes more readily dazzled than
those who had won during two years of conflict a truer sense of
the military value of territorial conquests. They might take
Germany's claims at their face value, and be really impressed by

iqi6] GERMANY'S MOTIVES. 351

her apparent magnanimity. In any case they would not be likely
to welcome a summary bolting of the door against negotiations.
If the Allies declined the offer, neutral opinion might force them
to reconsider their refusal, and, if they persisted, be seriously
alienated from them. To win the goodwill of neutrals, even if
nothing more were gained, would be an immense advantage for
Germany, for there lay her one hope of reconstruction.

Finally, she was thinking of her own people. They had at
first been buoyed up with illusory dreams of a settlement dictated
to a conquered earth. Then, with accustomed docility, they had
accepted the view that Germany was waging a war of self-
defence, and fought for virtue and peace against the mailed wicked-
ness of the world. God had been good to her, and the malice of
her enemies had been confounded ; but, to show the cleanness of
her soul, she was willing to forget and forgive, and to forgo her
just revenge for the sake of a quiet life. If proof were needed that
the guilt of beginning the war did not lie on Germany, here, surely,
was the last word ; for, though victorious, she refused to take the
responsibility of continuing it. The Emperor was a prince of peace
as well as a lord of battles.

Action which proceeds from many mixed and conflicting
motives is likely to be a blunder. The German peace offer was
no exception to the rule. To impress the German people, it had
to be couched in a tone of high rhetoric and conscious superiority ;
to win its way with neutrals, it must emphasize Germany's past
triumphs and present magnanimity. But these arguments would
not appeal to the Allies, who denied the assumptions, so for their
benefit something was added in the nature of a threat. The mere
fact that the attempt was made at all implied a confession of
weakness, when Germany's previous record was remembered.
The consequence was that the impression left on men's minds
by the German overtures was one of maladroitness carried to the
pitch of genius. Of all combinations of manner, the least likely
to impress is a blend of truculence and sentimentality, of cajolery
and bluster.

The antecedents of the step may be briefly summarized. As
early as September 19 16 the Imperial Chancellor was considering
how President Wilson might be induced to offer mediation, if pos-
sible before the Presidential election in the beginning of November,
and the army chiefs, somewhat sceptically, approved the notion.
Count Bernstorff at Washington was encouraging ; he believed
that " peaceful money-making is the sole life and interest of the

352 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

American." In October Baron Burian, the Austrian Premier,
came forward with the proposal that the Teutonic League should
itself take the first action and make a direct offer to the enemy.
There was some private discussion about minimum terms, from
which it appeared that Austria and Germany were well agreed
that the concessions must be trifling. Even Bethmann-Hollweg,
who was the most moderate, insisted upon the annexation of
Liege and the mines of Briey, and the evacuation of French ter-
ritory only after the payment of a war indemnity. About the end
of the month the Emperor indited a letter to his Chancellor. Dis-
mayed at the obstinacy of his enemies, he declared that they were
obsessed by " war psychosis " from which they possessed no
liberator. " Making a peace proposal," he wrote, "is an act
necessary to deliver the world, including neutrals, from obsession.
For such an act a ruler is wanted with a conscience, who feels
responsible towards God, and who has a heart for his own and
hostile peoples. A ruler is wanted who is inspired by a desire to
deliver the world from sufferings without minding possible wrong
interpretations of his act. I have the courage to do it. I will
venture it, relying upon God." Hindenburg and Ludendorff con-
curred without much enthusiasm. Their main desire was the requi-
sitioning of the whole of Germany's man-power, and the Auxiliary
Service Bill, which satisfied part of their demands, became law on
2nd December. The Majority Socialists, who, under Scheidemann,
had now all but cut loose from the Minority and become a Govern-
ment party, were sounded, and promised their support. The fall of
Bucharest on 6th December gave the cue for the entry of the
peacemaker. It was unfortunate for his purpose that Nivelle
chose the same time to inflict a signal defeat at Verdun on the
peacemaker's all-conquering legions.

On 1 2th December the Imperial Chancellor made a speech in
the Reichstag, in which he announced that, by the Emperor's
orders, he had that morning proposed to the hostile Powers to
enter into peace negotiations, in an invitation submitted through
the representatives of neutral states. His peroration gave the key
to his motives, for it struck all the different notes : —

" In August 1914 our enemies challenged the superiority of power
in a world war. To-day we raise the question of peace, which is a
question of humanity. We expect that the answer of our enemies
will be given with that sereneness of mind which is guaranteed to us
by our external and internal strength and by our clear conscience.
If our enemies decline and wish to take upon themselves the world's

1916] THE GERMAN PEACE NOTE. 353

heavy burden of all those terrors which thereafter will follow, then,
even in the least and smallest homes, every German heart will burn
in sacred wrath against our enemies, who are unwilling to stop human
slaughter in order that their plans of conquest and annihilation may
continue. In a fateful hour we took a fateful decision. God will be
judge. We can proceed upon our way without fear or resentment.
We are ready for war and we are ready for peace."

The Note began by emphasizing the "indestructible strength"
of Germany and her allies. It explained that this strength was
used only to defend their existence and the freedom of their natural
development, and all their many victories had not changed this
purpose. They asked for peace negotiations at which they would
bring forward proposals " which would aim at assuring the ex-
istence, honour, and free development of their peoples, and would
be such as to serve as a basis for the restoration of a lasting peace."
No hint was given of what such proposals would be.

The document was cunningly worded as to one part of its
purpose — to impress the people of the Fatherland. It was less
skilful in regard to its effect upon neutrals, for it emphasized as
facts one baseless assumption — that Germany was already the
victor; and one falsehood — that the Allies were responsible for
the origin of the war. A majority in the neutral world was prob-
ably indisposed to admit the first, and was almost certainly inclined
to deny the second. As for the Allies themselves, the net was
spread too brazenly in their sight. An invitation to a conference
based on such premises would, if accepted, put them wholly in a
false position. It revealed the lines of the German argument —
lines which admitted of no conceivable agreement. It was an
empty offer, not specifying the terms which Germany was willing
to accept, but leaving them to be deduced from the arrogance of
the peacemaker's language. For the Allies to consider the thing
for one moment would have been a waste of time in the serious
business of war.

The design was too obvious to deceive any but the slenderest
and most perverse section of Allied opinion. It was promptly
exposed in France by M. Briand, in Italy by Baron Sonnino, in
Russia by M. Pokrovsky, and in Japan by Viscount Motono,
the Minister for Foreign Affairs. On 30th December the French
Government communicated to the United States Ambassador in
Paris a formal answer, signed by Russia, France, Great Britain,
Japan, Italy, Serbia, Belgium, Montenegro, Portugal, and Ru-
mania. The document expounded most temperately but most

354 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

clearly the illusory nature of Germany's proposal. There could
be no peace without retribution, reparation, and guarantees for
the future ; of these the German Note made no mention, and its
truculence precluded any hope of assent to them. The overtures
were merely an attempt to " justify in advance in the eyes of the
world " some new series of crimes.

" Once again the Allies declare that no peace is possible so long as
they have not secured reparation for violated rights and liberties,
recognition of the principle of nationalities, and of the free existence
of small states ; so long as they have not brought about a settlement
calculated to end, once and for all, causes which have constituted a
perpetual menace to the nations, and to afford the only effective guaran-
tees for the future security of the world."

About the same time the German press took to publishing
documents which showed that the Allies were right in their diagnosis
of German tactics. One was the secret memorandum adopted six
months before by the Council of the German Navy League, which,
in sober, business-like language, laid down the minimum that
Germany required as the result of war — a minimum which included
the annexation of Belgium. More important still was the article
published on New Year's Eve in the Frankfurter Zeitung by Pro-
fessor Meinecke of Freiburg on the development of Germany's
war plans. The historian admitted what the publicists had denied.
Germany had entered upon a contest which only in the political
sense could be called defensive ; from the military point of view
it was meant to be a " knock-out " war. It had failed at the
Marne, and the later phase, the war of attrition, had failed before
the Somme began. She had come to the conclusion that victory
in the full sense was impossible. She therefore favoured " the idea
that the sacrifices demanded by the continuation of the war can
no longer bear any relation to the military results which can still
be expected, and that it is statesmanlike, intelligent, and wise
to abandon the intention of destruction, which after all does not
lead to destruction, and to seek a reasonable compromise." It
was the truth. Having failed to destroy in the field, Germany
sought to bargain ; but the candour of the historian gave the lie
to the rhetoric of the Imperial Chancellor and his master.

Close on the heels of the German overture came another Note
of a very different kind. Mr. Wilson was now in the position
which has been described as the most powerful enjoyed by any
of the rulers of the world — that of an American President elected

i9i6] MR. WILSON'S NOTE. 355

for a second term of office. The nation had affirmed by a great
majority its confidence in him, and since, by the unwritten con-
stitutional law of the United States, a third consecutive term as
President is inadmissible, he was free from those considerations of
tactics which must to some extent embarrass the most independent
of party leaders. He was now able, if he so willed, to reopen the
question of America's neutrality, subject always to the restriction
that as a constitutional ruler he must carry the nation along
with him.

The election had been fought on narrow issues. Both parties
had talked assiduously of the necessity of defending American
rights against violation from any quarter ; but Mr. Hughes, the
Republican candidate, had contented himself with a general criti-
cism of Mr. Wilson's policy towards Mexico and Germany, and had
taken no clear line on the question of intervention. There were
German sympathizers, as there were strong advocates of the Allies,
in the ranks of both sides. Mr. Wilson undoubtedly received the
bulk of his popular support because he had kept America out of
the war. Therefore his mandate was to uphold so far as was
possible the existing status of peace. But, at the same time,
in his election campaign he had kept to the fore a kind of inter-
nationalism. The policy of the " League to Enforce Peace "
had been part of his programme, and this scheme for compulsory
arbitration among the Powers of the world, and the re-establish-
ment of a definite code of public right, meant really a breach with
the traditional foreign policy of America. It was clear that, in
Mr. Wilson's view, no nation, however powerful, could live for
itself alone. In the speech in which he accepted his re-nomination
he had declared : "No nation can any longer remain neutral
as against any wilful destruction of the peace of the world. . . .
The nations of the world must unite in joint guarantee that what-
ever is done to disturb the whole world's life must first be tested
in the court of the whole world's opinion before it is attempted."
Mr. Wilson was therefore elected not merely to keep America at
peace ; he was given a mandate for international reform ; and
the two missions might well prove incompatible.

When, after his victory, he looked round the horizon, he saw
many clouds that promised storm. The darkest was the German
submarine campaign. Germany, in spite of her pledge to Wash-
ington, was busily engaged in those very acts which in the preceding
April he had unsparingly condemned. He saw, moreover, that
the lot of neutrals was rapidly becoming unendurable, and that

356 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

with Germany in her present temper the most pacific among them
might be forced into a war of self-defence. Accordingly, he felt
obliged to clear up the situation by asking the belligerents to define
their real aims. Such a step had in the main a tactical purpose.
Elected as a peace-President, he must be able to justify himself
fully to his people if he were forced into a course which was not
pacific. He had formulated an international policy with general
assent. The war aims of the belligerents must be clearly shown
to be in accord with, or antagonistic to, that policy before the
United States could take sides. He felt that the compulsion of
events was forcing him in the direction of war. He wished to
point this out to the world, for it might have a restraining and
sobering effect on the combatants. If he failed in that aim, he
would at least prepare the mind of America for the inevitable.

The Note, which was presented on 18th December, had no
relation to the German peace proposals. It was written, in part
at any rate, before the Emperor's move, and, as we have seen,
was a necessary consequence of Mr. Wilson's new position. Its
construction and wording were devised with skill to serve the
President's purpose. It stated that the published aim of both
sets of belligerents appeared to be the same, and it defined these
aims in a manner consonant with America's declared views.

" Each side desires to make the rights and privileges of weak peoplea
and small States as secure against aggression and denial in the future as
the rights and privileges of the great and powerful States now at war.
Each wishes itself to be made secure in the future, along with all other
nations and peoples, against the recurrence of wars like this, and against
oppression and selfish interference of any kind. Each would be jealous
of the formation of any more rival leagues to preserve an uncertain
balance of power against multiplying suspicions ; but each is ready to
consider the formation of a League of Nations to ensure peace and
justice throughout the world."

It was an adroit move, for by defining the aims of the Allies, and
crediting these aims also to the Central Powers, it brought the
conduct of the latter — which from the first day of the war had been
a flagrant denial of these aims — into bold relief. The Note went
on to invite a comparison of views in detail, since on generalities
all seemed to be in agreement. It pointed out that the pro-
longation of the war to an aimless exhaustion would endanger the
whole future of civilization. " The President is not proposing
peace," so ran the conclusion ; " he is not even offering media-
tion. He is merely proposing that soundings be taken in order

I9i6] THE ALLIED ANSWER. 357

that we may learn, the neutral nations with the belligerents, how
near the haven of peace may be for which all mankind longs with
an intense and increasing longing."

The purpose of the Note was not at first detected among the
Allied peoples. Small blame to them for their misapprehension !
Combatants engaged in a struggle of life and death have no time
to appreciate the finesse of a third party who stands outside the
fray. Mr. Wilson's definition of Germany's war aims seemed to
most people a misreading of the plain facts of the war, and of a
thousand printed and spoken German declarations. His request
to the Allies to formulate in detail their proposals seemed to be
open to the same objection which Lincoln urged against those
who clamoured for his plan of reconstruction before the North
had won in the field. " I have laboriously endeavoured," Lincoln
said in 1863, " to avoid that question ever since it first began to
be mooted, and thus to avoid confusion and disturbance in our
own councils." The Allied Governments judged more wisely.
They saw Mr. Wilson's purpose. They realized that he was being
forced towards a breach with Germany, and that he must make
certain in his own mind and the mind of his people that the cause
for which the Allies fought was consistent with American ideals.
Accordingly they received his Note with a true appreciation of its
meaning, and patiently and temperately set forth their answer.

That answer was one of the most notable documents that ever
emanated from European chanceries. In the friendliest spirit
it declined to set out the Allied war aims in detail, since these
could not be formulated till the hour for negotiations arrived.

" But the civilized world knows that they imply, necessarily and
first of all, the restoration of Belgium, Serbia, and Montenegro, with
the compensation due to them ; the evacuation of the invaded terri-
tories in France, in Russia, in Rumania, with just reparation ; the
reorganization of Europe, guaranteed by a stable regime and based at
once on respect for nationalities and on the right to full security and
liberty of economic development possessed by all peoples, small and
great, and at the same time upon territorial conventions and inter-
national settlements such as to guarantee land and sea frontiers against
unjustified attack ; the restoration of provinces formerly torn from
the Allies by force or against the wish of their inhabitants ; the libera-
tion of the Italians, as also of the Slavs, Rumanians, and Czecho-
slovaks from foreign domination ; the setting free of the populations
subject to the bloody tyranny of the Turks ; and the turning out of
Europe of the Ottoman Empire as decidedly foreign to Western civi-
lization."

358 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.

The Allies associated themselves whole-heartedly with the projects
of a League of the Nations, but pointed out that before such a
league could come into being the present dispute must be settled.
The malignant ill in the body-politic must be cured before a regimen
could be adopted to ensure its future health. At the same time the
Belgian Government submitted an answer to the American Presi-
dent, pointing the moral from the case of their own country. " The
barbarous manner in which the German Government has treated
and still treats the Belgian nation does not allow us to presume
that Germany will trouble in the future about guaranteeing the
rights of weak nations which she has never ceased to trample under-
foot since the moment when the war, let loose by her, began to
decimate Europe."

The American Note met with no response from Germany.
Chagrined by her failure to produce dissension among the Allies,
and profoundly embarrassed by President Wilson's overtures,
she contented herself with an angry declaration to neutrals, a
mixture of bad logic and bad history, and a string of denials of
what she had in her palmier days admitted and gloried in. This
came on January n, 1917, and the next day the Emperor issued
a proclamation to make certain that his tactics, if they had failed
with the enemy, should at least have some success with the
German people.

" Our enemies have dropped the mask. After refusing with scorn
and hypocritical words of love for peace and humanity our honest
peace offer, they now, in their reply to the United States, have gone
beyond that and admitted their lust for conquest, the baseness of which
is further enhanced by their calumnious assertions. Their aim is the
crushing of Germany, the dismemberment of the Powers allied to us,
and the enslavement of the freedom of Europe and the seas under the
same yoke that Greece, with gnashing teeth, is now enduring. . . .
Burning indignation and holy wrath will redouble the strength of every
German man and woman, whether it is devoted to fighting, work, or
suffering."

The sympathetic reception of the Allied reply in America
proved that the President had read aright the temper of his people,
and that the Allied Governments had been correct in their inter-
pretation of the meaning of his message. Britain and the United
States were alike in one thing— both had regarded themselves in
old days as extra-European Powers. But the logic of circumstances
had brought one into the family of Europe, and the same force
seemed about to bring the other into a fellowship which was not

1917] MR. WILSON'S CONDITIONS. 359

of Europe alone, but of the civilized world. On January 22, 1917,
the President, deeming that the words of his Note needed ampli-
fication, delivered a remarkable address to the Senate, in which
he unfolded his programme for a League of Peace. Such a league
could only come into being after the present war was over, and
on the nature of the settlement depended America's support to
guarantee the future. He outlined the terms which he would
consider a satisfactory foundation for the new world. It must
be a peace without victory— that is, a peace not dictated by a
victor to a loser, leaving a heritage of resentment. It must be
founded on the recognition of the equal rights of all States, great
and small. It must be based on the principle that a people was
not a chattel to hand from one sovereignty to another, but that
governments only derived that power from the consent of the
governed. It must assure, as far as possible, a direct outlet for
every great people to the highways of the sea. The ocean must
be free in practically all circumstances for the use of mankind,
and armaments, both military and naval, must be limited.

From no one of these conditions were the Allies disposed to
dissent. By " peace without victory " it was clear from the
context that Mr. Wilson meant peace without that destruction
and dismemberment of Germany which the Allies had expressly
repudiated. In another sense there could be no peace without
victory — victory over the mad absolutism and military pride of
the Central Powers. Unless that were crushed to the earth, no
sanctions, no guarantees, no system of treaties, no rectification of
frontiers, no League of Peace, would endure for a decade ; for it
had long ago proclaimed itself above international law and a flouter
of all rights, however sacred. If it were decisively beaten, the
terms of peace mattered less, for the secular enemy of all peace
would have disappeared. Victory, the right kind of victory, was,
on Mr. Wilson's own argument, the essential preliminary of any
lasting settlement.

There come moments in the middle of any great toil when it
is desirable for the good of the toiler's soul that he straighten his
back and look round. Respice finem is the best traveller's maxim.
Without a constant remembrance of the goal the pilgrim may
find the rough places impassable, and will be prone to stray from
the road. The value of Mr. Wilson's intervention was that it
caused the Allies to reflect upon the deeper purpose of the war.
It emphasized the essential idealism of their cause, which had
become dim in many minds from that preoccupation with detail

360 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.

which a desperate contest induces. It was well that it should be
so, for events were in train in Russia and in America itself which
were to change the whole complexion of the struggle, and set the
ideal aspect foremost in the eye of the world. For the remainder
of the war the question of ultimate aims was to be canvassed
unceasingly, and every Ally had to examine herself and discover
her soul in the quest for a common denominator of purpose.

Germany, too, discovered herself, and that speedily. The
" terrors " which the Imperial Chancellor had proclaimed in his
speech of 12th December were at once put into motion. In the
previous August Hindenburg and Ludendorff had opposed un-
restricted submarine warfare on the ground that the time was not
ripe for it. They changed their views after the Rumanian victory,
when it became certain that no European neutral was likely to
enter the lists against them. The price, as they frankly recognized,
was war with the United States, but they calculated that America
could not put in the field more than five or six divisions during the
first year, and they were clear that the campaign would have a
decisive effect long before America could send armies on the grand
scale. They had small hope of results from the peace offer, but
they consented to postpone a decision until it had been given a
fair trial. On 23rd December Hindenburg told the Chancellor
that in his view unrestricted submarine warfare was now essential
in view of Germany's dangerous economic and military position,
and at the conference on January 9, 1917, the Emperor and the
Chancellor accepted the view. The decision was, strangely enough,
combined with the drafting, on 29th January, of Germany's peace
terms for dispatch to Mr. Wilson. These included the renunciation
of the part of upper Alsace then occupied by France, the return of
the German colonies, a strategic rectification of the French and
Russian frontiers, and the restoration of Belgium subject to
guarantees. But this peace overture was obscured by the momen-
tous declaration of the new submarine policy. For, on 31st January,
the German Government announced that from 1st February all
sea traffic within certain zones adjoining Britain, France, and
Italy, and in the Eastern Mediterranean, would, " without further
notice, be prevented by all weapons." This meant that German
submarines would sink at sight within these areas all vessels,
whether neutral or belligerent. The causes alleged were the ille-
gality of the Allied blockade, and the Allied rejection of Germany's
peace offer. But Bethmann-Hollweg in the Reichstag set forth

1917] UNRESTRICTED SUBMARINE WARFARE. 361

another reason. He had always been in favour, he said, of ruthless
methods of submarine warfare, if they were best calculated to
lead to a swift victory. " Last autumn the time was not yet
ripe, but to-day the moment has come when with the greatest
prospect of success we can undertake this enterprise. We must,
therefore, delay no longer." The Imperial Chancellor was a
maladroit diplomat, who occasionally blundered into speaking the
truth.

CHAPTER LXXI.

THE CLEARING OF SINAI AND THE FALL OF BAGDAD.
August 9, 1916-M arch II, 1917.

Position of Turkey — The Sinai Desert crossed — Actions of Magdhaba and Rafa —
End of Senussi Campaign— Sir Stanley Maude — His Capture of Kut — Fall of
Bagdad.

We left the story of the war against Turkey at the point when,
in August 1916, Sir Archibald Murray's forces in Egypt had suc-
cessfully repelled the Turkish offensive at Romani, while Sir Stanley
Maude's Army of Mesopotamia was slowly perfecting its prepara-
tions for the recovery of Kut. Yudenitch in the Caucasus, with
Erzerum, Trebizond, and Erzhingian in his possession, was de-
taining at least half of Turkey's total fighting strength, and Baratov
with his small column was hanging somewhat precariously on the
western borders of Persia. For the moment Turkey was safe, but
her security was not solidly founded. She owed it rather to her
opponent's mistakes than to her own inherent strength. Her fifty
odd divisions were widely scattered — half against Yudenitch, five
or six in Galicia and the Dobrudja, three on the Tigris, five in Syria,
and detachments on the Persian frontier, at Gallipoli, and on the
Struma. If her enemies could combine, if Maude and Yudenitch
could join hands, and Murray press northward through Syria,
there was a chance of that decisive defeat in the field which would
put her out of action. The Allies had blundered grievously ; but
they had learned much, and they had great assets. They had in
Egypt an ideal offensive base, the advantages of which were only
now being realized, and they had against them an enemy whose
military strength had been heavily depleted by costly actions and
weakened by every kind of internal distraction and misgovern-
ment.

The distinction between the Western and Eastern schools of
strategy among the Allies was largely fictitious. No sane men

362

igi6] THE TURKISH CHARACTER. 3^3

denied the necessity of making the chief effort on the Western
front, and few but admitted that victory was no less necessary in
the East. Germany must be beaten in the theatre where her main
forces were engaged, but it was not less important to cut her off
from the Eastern extension on which for a generation she had set
her heart. Turkey, it was clear, must be brought to such a pass in
the field that she would have to submit to the drastic terms of the
Allies. Her policy had been thoroughly Germanized. She had flung
off all her old treaty obligations and claimed the status of one of the
Great Powers of Europe.* She had lost most of her shadowy
hegemony over Islam, for the Grand Sherif of Mecca, who at the
close of 1916 assumed the title of King of the Hedjaz, had called
the faithful to witness that the so-called Khalifs of Constantinople
had at all times been puppets in the hands of some kind of janissary,
and that the new janissaries from Prussia were conspicuously
unsuited to be the guardians of the mysteries of the Faith. Turkey
had thrown down a challenge which could only be answered by
her destruction as an empire and as a suzerain Power.

There was every military reason for an energetic campaign
against her, for her immobilization would have immediate effects
upon that Achilles heel of Prussianism, its Austrian and Bulgarian
allies. The political reasons were even stronger, for no war of
liberation could suffer the anomaly of the Near East to go uni-
formed. The Turk had been so long the nominal ally of Britain
that many had come to regard him with an affectionate toleration,
as a man regards the occasional misdeeds of a faithful and spirited
dog. That the Turkish peasant was brave, hardy, and uncom-
plaining was beyond doubt ; that a considerable section of the
old Turkish gentry had good manners, a picturesque air, and certain
virtues not too common in the modern world, might be maintained
with reason ; but no sentimentalism could change the fact that
the Turk and his kind had nowhere shown a trace of administrative
genius or civic spirit, and that wherever he had set his foot he had
blasted the land. His race was like the wind from the desert,
which scorches and never fructifies or blesses. Turkey was a military
Power, competent only when in the saddle, with the sword drawn ;
she had no gifts for the arts of peace, and no power to rebuild
when she had broken down. Her history was, in the words of the
Allied statement of war aims to President Wilson, a " bloody

* On January I, 1917, she finally denounced the Treaty of Paris of 1856, and the
Treaty of Berlin of 1878, and at the same time abolished the autonomous organization
of the Lebanon province.

364 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.-Nov.

tyranny." The old Turk was a blunderer with certain redeeming
qualities ; the new Turk was no less a blunderer, but he had lost
the qualities and adopted with easy grace the worst vices of his
Prussian masters, whose creed was terribly akin to the root charac-
teristics of his tribe.

Turkey's dominion embraced the ruins of the richest and most
enlightened lands of the ancient world, the cradle of civilization and
of the Christian faith. The old proud empires from New Rome to
Bagdad were not destroyed by Islam. The rich Ommayad culture
and Bagdad under the Caliphs were the achievement of the eldest
sons of Islam, the Arabs, who gave light and leading to all North
Africa and one-third of Asia. They were destroyed by the Turk.
Under his kindly rule Bagdad became a city of hovels, and Mesopo-
tamia a swamp and a sand dune. Persecutions, over-taxation,
corruption, and incompetence characterized all the centuries of his
regime. Since the war began he had shown his natural instincts by
causing the death of the better part of a million Armenians, and,
partly from fecklessness and partly from malice, letting half the
population of the Lebanon die of famine. The world had been very
patient with him, but the cup of his offences now overflowed. So
monstrous an anachronism as the Turkish Empire must be removed
from the family of the nations, and the Turk must return to the
part for which he had always been destined — that of the ruler of a
tribal province.

Through the autumn months of 1916 Sir Archibald Murray
was engaged in pushing the new railway eastward from Kantara
across the Sinai desert. This kind of warfare was much the same
as the old Sudan campaigns. The condition was that before each
move large quantities of supplies had to be collected at an advanced
base. An action was then fought to clear the front, and after it
came a pause while the railway was carried forward and a new
reserve of supplies accumulated. The task was harder than in the
Sudan, for there was no river to give water. In that thirsty land,
after the Katia basin was left behind, water was almost non-existent,
and supplies had to be brought by rail in tank trucks till a pipe
line could be laid. The work entailed was very great, but the
organization of camel transport gradually bridged the gap between
the railhead and the front. The soldiers in the French and Flanders
trenches were inclined to look upon the Egyptian campaign as the
longed-for war of movement. Movement there was, but it was less
the movement of cavalry riding for an objective than the slow prog-

i9 16] THE CROSSING OF SINAI. 365

ress of engineers daily completing a small section of line in the sun-
baked sand. Sir Archibald Murray has described the situation :—

" The main factor — without which all liberty of action and any
tactical victory would have been nugatory — was work, intense and
unremitting. To regain the peninsula, the true frontier of Egypt,
hundreds of miles of water piping had been laid ; filters capable of
supplying 1,500,000 gallons of water a day, and reservoirs, had been
installed ; and tons of stone transported from distant quarries. Kan-
tara had been transformed from a small canal village into an important
railway and water terminus, with wharves and cranes and a railway
ferry ; and the desert, till then almost destitute of human habitation,
showed the successive marks of our advance in the shape of strong
positions firmly entrenched and protected by hundreds of miles of
barbed wire, of standing camps where troops could shelter in com-
fortable huts, of tanks and reservoirs, of railway stations and sidings,
of aerodromes and of signal stations and wireless installations — by all
of which the desert was subdued and made habitable, and adequate
lines of communication established between the advancing troops and
their ever-receding base. Moreover, not only had British troops
laboured incessantly during the summer and autumn, but the body of
organized native labour had grown. The necessity of combining the
protection and maintenance, including the important work of sani-
tation, of this large force of workers, British and native, with that
progress on the railway roads and pipes which was vital to the success
of any operation, put the severest strain upon all energies and resources.
But the problem of feeding the workers without starving the work
was solved by the goodwill and energy of all concerned."

The headquarters of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force under
Sir Archibald Murray were now at Cairo, and the Eastern Force,
with headquarters at Ismailia, was under Lieutenant-General Sir
Charles Dobell, the conqueror of the Cameroons. Of this the spear-
head was the Desert Column, consisting mainly of Australian, New
Zealand, and British mounted troops and the Camel Corps, now
under Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode, who had commanded
the 2nd Cavalry Division on the French front. The immediate
objective was El Arish, and during October and November much
bombing work was done by the Royal Flying Corps, and there
were various brilliant little cavalry reconnaissances. Between
13th and 17th October, for example, the enemy position on the
steep hills at Maghara, sixty-five miles east of Ismailia, was suc-
cessfully reconnoitred after two difficult night marches. Meantime
the railway was creeping on. At the end of October it was four
miles east of Bir el Abd, and by 26th November it had reached
Mazar. The enemy's advanced position in front of El Arish and

366 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

Masaid covered all the water in the area, and it was necessary to
accumulate large supplies at railhead in case the operation of dis-
lodging him should prove a slow one.

By 20th December we were ready to strike, but the Turks did
not await us. On the night of 19th December they evacuated the
positions which they had so elaborately fortified. Their retreat was
discovered by our airmen, and on the night of the 20th Australian
and New Zealand mounted troops, supported by the Imperial Camel
Corps, marched twenty miles, and reached El Arish at sunrise to
find it empty. The Turkish garrison of 1,600 men had fallen back
upon Magdhaba. Scottish troops entered El Arish some hours
later, and the frontier town which for two years had been in the
enemy's hands was now restored to Egypt. Mine-sweeping opera-
tions were at once begun in the roadstead, a pier was built, and by
the 24th supply ships from Port Said had begun unloading stores.
We had won the necessary advanced base for the coming major
operations.

The next step was to " round up " the retreating garrison.
At 12.45 a.m. on the morning of 23rd December a flying column
took the road under Chauvel, and found the enemy at Magdhaba,
twenty miles to the south-south-east, in a strong position on both
banks of the Wadi el Arish. Then followed a very perfect little
action. The Australian Light Horse and the New Zealand Mounted
Rifles moved east of Magdhaba against the enemy's right flank
and rear, while the Imperial Camel Corps attacked in front. The
reserves, in order to prevent escape, swung round from the north-
west. Shortly after noon the Turkish position was completely
surrounded. The mirage, however, impeded the work of the horse-
artillery batteries, and the entire absence of water made it clear
that unless Magdhaba was carried soon the troops would have to
be withdrawn. Chauvel, accordingly, was given orders to press
the attack, and by four o'clock, after a bayonet charge by a Light
Horse regiment, the place was won. Our casualties were twelve
officers and 134 other ranks killed and wounded ; we took 1,282
prisoners, four mountain guns, one machine gun, and over one
thousand rifles.

Our airplanes reported that the enemy had entrenched himself
at Magruntein, near Rafa, thirty miles north-east of El Arish;
but Dobell had to wait for supplies before he could strike a fresh
blow. The new position was a formidable one, made up of a cen-
tral keep surrounded by three strong series of works connected by
trenches, with an open glacis in front of them. The Desert Column,

1916] MAGDHABA AND RAFA. 367

under Sir Philip Chetwode, consisting of Australian and New Zea-
land Mounted Troops, British Yeomanry, and the Imperial Camel
Corps, left El Arish on the evening of January 8, 1917, and at dawn
on the 9th had surrounded the enemy. As at Magdhaba, the Aus-
tralians and New Zealanders attacked on the right from the east,
while the Camel Corps moved against the front. By 11 a.m. Rafa
was taken, and by 4.45 p.m. the New Zealanders had captured
the main redoubt. By 5.30 p.m. the action, which had lasted ten
hours, was over, and a relieving enemy column, coming from Shellal,
had been driven back. Our casualties were only 487 in all, and
from the enemy we took 1,600 unwounded prisoners, six machine
guns, four mountain guns, and a quantity of transport.

The actions of Magdhaba and Rafa were models of desert cam-
paigning, and showed the perfect co-operation of all arms. They
were battles of the old type, where mobility and tactical boldness
carried the day, and where from a neighbouring height every inci-
dent of the fight could be followed. The result was the clearing
of the Sinai desert of all formed bodies of Turkish troops. Opera-
tions in the interior and the south, conducted by small flying
columns of cavalry and camelry, had kept pace with the greater
movement in the north. The British troops were now beyond
the desert, on the edge of habitable country. The next objective
was the Gaza-Beersheba line — the gateway to Syria.

During the last month of 1916 the western borders of Egypt
were comparatively peaceful. The last flickering of rebellion was
stamped out in Darfur in November, when the ex-sultan, Ali Dinar,
was killed. The Baharia and Dakhla oases had been occupied
without trouble, and our chief business on that frontier was that
of police patrols and an occasional reconnaissance. But during
January news came that Sidi Ahmed, the Grand Senussi, with his
commander-in-chief, Mahommed Saleh, and a force of 1,200, was
preparing to leave the Siwa oasis and return to Jaghbub. Major-
General Watson, commanding the Western Force, was ordered
to advance on the Siwa and Girba oases, with the object of cap-
turing the Grand Senussi and scattering his following. But to
conduct any considerable force over the 200 waterless miles be-
tween Mersa Matruh and Siwa would have taken at least a month's
preparation, so the task was entrusted to a column of armoured
motor cars. The plan was for the main body to attack the enemy
camp at Girba, while a detachment should hold the Munasib Pass —
the only pass between Siwa and Jaghbub practicable for camels
— and so deflect Sidi Ahmed's flight into the waterless desert.

368 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

On 3rd February the main enemy camp at Girba was attacked.
Sal eh resisted strongly all day, while Sidi Ahmed made off west-
ward. At dawn on the 4th, Saleh too was in flight, and on the
5th, Siwa was entered without opposition. Meantime the Munasib
detachment had occupied the pass and ambushed a party of the
enemy. Sidi Ahmed was therefore forced to abandon his natural
route of retreat, and with his commander-in-chief make the best
of a bad road to his distant sanctuary. The expedition, in the
words of Sir Archibald Murray's dispatch, " dealt a rude blow
to the moral of the Senussi, left the Grand Senussi himself painfully
making his way to Jaghbub through the rugged and waterless dunes,
and freed my western front from the menace of his forces."

In August Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, who had
commanded the 13th Division, had succeeded Sir Percy Lake in
command of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force. The worst
troubles of that army were now over. Hospital arrangements
had been perfected, river transport had been reorganized, railway
communications had been completed, and all the work behind the
front, without which an advance of troops cannot be made, had
reached a state of efficiency very different from the confusion of
the early days. General Maude had before him an intricate strate-
gical problem. His area of command stretched from the banks
of the Euphrates to the walls of Ispahan, and it seemed as if the
enemy aimed at containing the British on the Tigris, while attack-
ing towards Nasiriyeh on the Euphrates in the west, and in the east
waging a campaign through Persia against the safety of India.
In these circumstances, the British Commander-in-Chief decided
rightly that " to disseminate our troops in order to safeguard the
various conflicting interests involved would have relegated us to a
passive defensive everywhere." The true policy was to strike at
the enemy's main centre, Bagdad, for a successful advance up the
Tigris would relieve the pressure in Persia and on the Euphrates.
Movement was, of course, impossible during the summer. The
intense heat had tried the health of men who had already behind
them an incredible record of desert warfare. The cooler days of
the early autumn were employed in improving the training of all
arms, accumulating supplies at the front, and bringing forward
drafts for the different units. By the end of November the time
was ripe for an advance. The battalions were up to strength and
in good health and spirits, and the concentration on the river up-
stream from Sheikh Saad was completed.

igi6] MAUDE BEGINS HIS ADVANCE. 369

We have seen in an earlier chapter that after the fall of Kut
we had considerably advanced our lines before the advent of the
Mesopotamian summer put an end to campaigning. In the begin-
ning of December the Turkish front before Kut lay as follows : —
On the left bank of the Tigris, fifteen miles from the town, they
still held the Sanna-i-yat position — now much elaborated and
strengthened — between the Suwaicha marsh and the river, and
all the hinterland as far as Kut was covered with a series of reserve
lines. On the right bank their front ran from a point on the Tigris
three miles north-east of Kut, across the big loop which is called
the Khadairi Bend, to the Shatt-el-Hai two miles below where it
leaves the main river. There it crossed the Hai and ran north-
west to the Shumran Bend of the Tigris. There was a pontoon
bridge across the Hai close to its point of exit from the main river,
and another across the Tigris at Shumran. Further, the enemy
held the Hai itself for several miles below the bridgehead. Every-
where he had strong trench systems and wire entanglements. On
the left bank we were within 120 yards of him at Sanna-i-yat ;
on the right bank our contact was less close, our advanced posts
being about two miles from the Khadairi Bend and five miles from
the Hai position.

The strategical situation was, on the whole, favourable for
Maude. The enemy's lines on the right bank of the Tigris were a
dozen miles upstream from those on the left bank. His communi-
cations were therefore, in the technical phrase, in prolongation
of his battle front. If we carried the line of the Hai, we should
be in a position to threaten seriously the communications of the
Sanna-i-yat lines. On the other hand, our own situation was
reasonably safe. The waterless desert made any flanking move-
ment against us from the Hai precarious, and the Suwaicha marsh,
if it protected the Turkish left flank, also secured our right. Again,
the long front gave us many opportunities for feints to cover our
real purpose. Maude's plan was simple and sound. His first
object was to carry the Hai line, and then gradually to drive the
enemy from the right bank of the river. If he succeeded in this,
he would be able by constant attacks to make him nervous about
his communications. Then a great effort could be made to force
the Sanna-i-yat position, which would mean the fall of Kut. But
even if this operation proved too difficult, it might be possible,
when the enemy was sufficiently weakened and distracted, to cross
the Tigris west of Kut and cut his communications. As we shall
see, Maude succeeded in each item of his plan.

370 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.

By 12th December our concentration was complete, and our
troops in a position for attack. The British striking force was
divided into two parts. That on the right, under Lieutenant-
General A. S. Cobbe, V.C., was devoted to holding the enemy on
the left bank of the river to the Sanna-i-yat position, and watching
the right bank up to the Khadairi Bend ; while that on the left,
under Lieutenant-General W. R. Marshall (which included the
cavalry), was by a surprise march to win a position on the Hai.
All through the 13th Cobbe bombarded Sanna-i-yat as if about to
attack there, and that night Marshall moved westward against
the Hai. The enemy was taken by surprise, and without much
difficulty we crossed at Atab and Basrugiyeh, about eight miles
from Kut, clearing the ground on the western bank to the depth
of over a mile. We then swung northward along both banks to
a point some two and a half miles from Kut. Two pontoon bridges
were constructed at Atab. During the next two days we pressed
steadily forward, while our aircraft bombed the Turkish bridge of
boats at Shumran, and compelled the enemy to remove it to the
west side of the bend. The Turkish bridgehead at the exit of the
Hai was now under a continuous bombardment. On the 18th we
succeeded in reaching the river between the Khadairi Bend and
Kut, thereby severing the Turkish lateral communications on the
right bank. This left the Turkish force in the Bend cut off on
left and right, and sustained only by their connection with the
enemy left flank across the river.

On 26th December the weather broke, and the rains fell steadily
for a fortnight. The stream rose and spread over the countryside,
so that our single-line railway, now extended to Atab, was worked
with difficulty, and cavalry reconnaissances were hampered by
the lagoons and sodden ground. Nevertheless, during the first
weeks of 19 17, we kept up a steady bombardment, and especially
made the Turkish bridgehead at Shumran a precarious lodgment.
An attempt by us on 20th January to bridge the Tigris four miles
west of Shumran was anticipated by the enemy, and had to be
abandoned. But the chief work of these days was the clearing
of the Khadairi Bend. Our hold on the Hai had given us real
advantages, the chief of which were that we were in a position to
threaten constantly the Turkish communications west of Shumran ;
that we had removed the danger of any attack on Nasiriyeh, on
the Euphrates ; and that we had cut off the enemy's supplies from
the rich country of the middle Hai. We had reached the banks
of the Tigris south-east of Kut, but between that point and Magasis

1917] OPERATIONS ON RIGHT BANK OF TIGRIS. 371

the Turks still held the right bank, and could in flood-time open
the " bunds " and swamp part of our front. Obviously, before
we could advance we must clear this Khadairi Bend, which would
give us the mastery of the whole right bank from Kut downwards.
The task was entrusted to Cobbe, who, beginning operations on
5th January, succeeded by the 19th in effecting his purpose. The
ground was flat and bare, and exposed on both flanks to fire at
close range from across the river. Hence many thousand yards
of new trenches and covered approaches had to be dug in drench-
ing rain and under continuous fire. The successive Turkish lines
were carried by severe hand-to-hand fighting, which did much to
weaken the enemy moral.

Meantime Marshall was busy winning the last fragment of the
Hai line, that corner close to the Tigris where the Turks held a
strongly entrenched salient astride the lesser stream. It took him
thirteen days to get into position for the attack ; but on 24th Janu-
ary his trenches were within 400 yards of the enemy front. Next
day he carried the Turkish first line on a breadth of more than a
mile, and his right wing also broke through the second line, thanks
to the clearing of the Khadairi Bend. His left wing, on the western
bank of the Hai, had a more difficult task ; for it was exposed to
heavy enfilading fire, and had the enemy in strength against it.
At first it, too, won the Turkish second line, but after four attacks
it was compelled to retire. Next morning two Punjabi battalions
finally carried the ground, and by the 28th we held two miles of
the position to a depth of from 300 to 700 yards. On 1st February
our right won the enemy third line ; but a similar gain on our left
could not be held against the Turkish counter-attack, supported
by enfilading fire. Next day Marshall extended his left towards
the Tigris, with a view to operating presently against the Dahra
Bend — the loop of the river between Kut and the Shumran penin-
sula. On the 4th the whole of the left bank of the Hai was ours,
and the Turks fell back to the Liquorice Factory, in the western
angle between the Hai and the Tigris, and a line across the Dahra
Bend.

The enemy's hold on the right bank of the Tigris was now rapidly
weakening, and the next step was to clear the Dahra Bend. The
Liquorice Factory was kept under constant bombardment, for it
was a nest of machine guns, and on the 9th ground was won in the
enemy's centre, while on the left we pushed our front to within
2,500 yards of the south end of the Shumran Bend. On the 10th
there was a general forward movement, in spite of a high wind

372 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Feb.

and a dust storm, and the Turks were compelled to evacuate the
Liquorice Factory, and withdraw to a new line two and a half
miles long well inside the Dahra Bend. Next day we reached the
Tigris, south-east of the Shumran Bend, and so enclosed the enemy.
Marshall resolved to attack the Turkish right centre, and several
days were occupied with driving the enemy from advanced posts
and constructing trenches and approaches for the coming assault.
On the 15th we feinted hard against the Turkish left, and this
enabled us to carry the enemy's right centre on a broad front,
since our barrage prevented him from transferring thither the
men he had used to strengthen his left. Presently his left centre
was carried by Scottish and Indian troops, who pushed north-
eastward towards the Tigris, isolated the Turkish left, and took
1,000 prisoners. The enemy fell back across the river, leaving
some 2,000 prisoners behind him, and by the morning of the 16th
the Dahra Bend was wholly in our hands. " Thus terminated,"
wrote Maude, " a phase of severe fighting, brilliantly carried out.
To eject the enemy from that horseshoe bend, bristling with trenches
and commanded from across the river on three sides by hostile
batteries and machine guns, called for offensive qualities of a high
standard on the part of the troops."

Maude had carried out the main preliminaries of his plan. He
had won all the right bank of the Tigris in the vicinity of Kut.
Khalil's line now ran east and west from Sanna-i-yat to Shumran,
with his left wing bent at right angles between the Suwaicha
marsh and the river. It was geographically a strong defensive
position, for it was protected throughout almost its whole length
by the Tigris. But it had one weak point — at Shumran, where
the enemy's battle front and his line of communications met —
and his fears for this point had compelled him to weaken other
parts of his front. The moment had come for the British to cross
the river, and the proper crossing place must be as far as possible
to the west. If the crossing was to succeed, the forces at Sanna-i-
yat must be kept closely engaged, and activities maintained along
the whole river line. We hoped to enter by the back door, but
if that was to be forced open it was necessary to knock violently at
the front door to distract the occupants.

On 17th February Cobbe attacked at Sanna-i-yat over sodden
ground, for during the last few days the rain had fallen heavily.
His attack was a surprise, and with little loss he carried the first
and second lines on a frontage of 400 yards. Enemy counter-
attacks, however, drove him back to his own lines before the even-

i9i6] THE RIVER CROSSED. 373

ing. Then came a pause, while preparations were being made
for the Shumran crossing, approaches being constructed and guns
moved under cover of night, and the crews of the pontoons trained
for their duties. On the 22nd, part of Cobbe's forces again at-
'acked at Sanna-i-yat, and after a day's hard fighting secured the
lirst two enemy trench lines. That night we made a feint as if
to cross at Kut and Magasis, and during the daylight we had al-
lowed our preparations to be furtively observed, so that the enemy
moved troops and guns to the Kut peninsula. On the 23rd came the
real attempt. The place selected for the purpose was the south
end of the Shumran Bend, and three ferries were provided im-
mediately downstream. Just before dawn the work of the ferries
began. The lower ferries came immediately under such a furious
machine-gun fire that they had to be closed, though not until a
gallant company of Gurkhas had reached the farther bank. But
the troops using the uppermost ferry crossed with ease and took
five machine guns and 300 prisoners. By 7.30 a.m. three com-
panies of Norfolks and 150 Gurkhas were across, and the work
of building the bridge began. The Turkish guns were engaged
by ours, and the Norfolks and Gurkhas, pressing inland and along
the bank, were soon a mile north of the bridgehead. At 4.30 p.m.
the bridge was open for traffic. " By nightfall, as a result of the
day's operations, our troops had, by their unconquerable valour
and determination, forced a passage across a river in flood, 340
yards wide, in face of strong opposition, and had secured a position
2,000 yards in depth, covering the bridgehead ; while ahead of this
line our patrols were acting vigorously against the enemy's advanced
detachments, who had suffered heavy losses, including about 700
prisoners taken in all. The infantry of one division was across, and
another division was ready to follow." It was a crossing worthy
to rank with the passage of the Aisne in September 1914 ; for if the
Turkish strength was less formidable than the German, the swollen
Tigris was a far greater barrier than the sluggish French stream.

That same day Cobbe, at Sanna-i-yat, had won the third,
fourth, and fifth lines, and was busy making roads for his guns
and transport across the tangle of ruined trenches. On the 24th
Marshall advanced in the Shumran Bend, fighting hard in the
north-east corner, where a series of nullahs were honeycombed
with machine-gun emplacements. That night the enemy, stoutly
resisting, had been forced back 1,000 yards. Another division
had crossed the bridge, and the cavalry, too, were over, and striv-
ing to break out from the peninsula to cut off Khalil's retreat

374 A HISTORY OK THE GREAT WAR. [March

towards Bagdad. Our airplanes reported that every road was
thronged with retiring troops, but the Turkish rearguards made
a good defence, and our horsemen did not emerge from the pen-
insula till too late for a grand coup. That day Cobbe carried the
enemy's sixth line at Sanna-i-yat, and marched on the Nakhailat
and Suwada positions, only to find them empty. The iron fort-
ress, which had defied all our efforts in the early months of
1916, had yielded to the resolute assault of our infantry, supported
by the distraction at Shumran. Cobbe entered Kut unopposed,
and the gunboats came upstream from Falahiyeh, and anchored off
the town where exactly ten months before the Julnar had failed to
run the blockade and bring food to Townshend's famished remnant.

Meantime Marshall's forces and the cavalry were hot upon
Khalil's track. Eight miles from Shumran the Turks attempted
a stand, but were driven in with a loss of 400 prisoners. The
cavalry on our right endeavoured to get round the Turkish flank,
but were held up by entrenched infantry and the frequent marshes.
The pursuit was in two columns — one following the river, and the
other striking across country in the hope of intercepting the enemy
rearguards. But the Turkish retreat was well handled, and the
bulk of their forces were too quick for us. Our gunboat flotilla
had better luck, for it sunk or took most of the enemy's craft.
Among its captures were the Firefly, the Sumana, and the Pioneer,
vessels which we had lost in the preceding campaign. By 28th
February Marshall had arrived at Aziziyeh, halfway to Bagdad,
where he halted to reorganize his communications, while Cobbe's
forces closed to the front. Since the crossing of the Tigris we
had taken 4,000 prisoners, of whom 188 were officers, 39 guns,
22 trench mortars, 11 machine guns, besides vast quantities of
other material.

On 5 th March the advance was renewed. Marshall marched
eighteen miles to Zeur, while the cavalry pushed on seven miles
further to Laj, and had a successful brush in a dust storm with
a Turkish rearguard, during which a Hussar regiment galloped
straight through the enemy trenches. Next day the Ctesiphon
position was passed ; it was found to be strongly entrenched
but empty, and the cavalry got within three miles of the river
Diala, which enters the Tigris from the east eight miles below
Bagdad. Next day, 7th March, our advanced front was in contact
with the enemy along that river line.

Here it was clear the Turks proposed to attempt a stand.
After sunset on the night of the 7th, when we launched our first

i9i6] CAPTURE OF BAGDAD. 375

pontoon, it was greeted by heavy rifle and machine-gun fire, and
four later pontoons met the same fate. A small column from
Marshall's force was ferried across the Tigris in order to enfilade
the Diala position, and during the night of the 8th four attempts
were made to cross the Diala. One partially succeeded, and
seventy men of the North Lancashires established a post in a loop
of the river, and held it gallantly for twenty-four hours. At 4 a.m.
on the morning of the 10th Marshall attacked again at two points
a mile apart, and by 7 a.m. the East Lancashires and the Wiltshires
had crossed and joined the North Lancashires. A bridge was
constructed by noon, the riverside villages were cleared, and some
hundreds of prisoners were taken. That night we were in touch
with the enemy's last position covering Bagdad from the south-
east along the ridge called Tel Muhammad.

Meantime, on the 8th, a bridge had been thrown across the
Tigris below the Diala mouth, and the cavalry and part of Cobbe's
forces had crossed, and advanced against the Turkish position at
Shawa Khan, which covered Bagdad from the direction of the
Euphrates valley. Shawa Khan was easily taken on the morning
of the 9th, but we were kept busy for the rest of the day with the
Turkish rearguard a mile and a half to the northward. During
the night this rearguard fell back, and on the 10th we engaged it
within three miles of Bagdad, while our cavalry from the west
came within two miles of the railway station, which lay on the
right bank of the Tigris. A furious dust storm checked our ad-
vance that day, and at midnight the enemy retired. Next morning,
nth March, at 5.30 a.m., our troops groped their way through the
dust into the railway station, and learned that the enemy force
on the right bank had retired upstream beyond the city. Our
advanced guards entered the suburbs on that bank, and the cavalry
pressed the enemy to the north-west. Early that same morning
Marshall had discovered that the Turks were retreating from the
Tel Muhammad ridge. He lost no time in pursuing them, but he
found that the dust storm prevented him from keeping contact
with the enemy. An hour or two later he had entered Bagdad,
and was warmly welcomed by the inhabitants, who were threat-
ened with looting and burning by a riff-raff of Kurds and Arabs.
Order was presently restored, and the British flag hoisted over
the city. The fleeing Turks had attempted to destroy the stores
they could not remove, but a vast amount of military material
was left behind. From the Arsenal we recovered the guns which
Townshend hid rendered useless before Kut was surrendered.

376 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

The capture of Bagdad was an event of the first magnitude
in the history of the war. It restored British prestige in the East,
which Kut and Gallipoli had shaken. It deprived the Teutonic
League of a territory which had always played a vital part in
its policy. It hit Turkey hard in her pride, and not less in her
military strength. It cheered and enheartened our Allies, for
Bagdad was so far the only famous city won from the enemy.
But the chief importance of the success was its proof to the world
of the moral of the British army and the British nation. They had
been beaten, but they had not accepted defeat. They had fallen
back, after their fashion, only to come again. The gallant dash
had failed, so they had set themselves resolutely to win by slow and
sure stages. The Tigris Expedition was in many respects a parallel
to the old Sudan campaigns. In the one as in the other Britain
had begun with improvisations and failed ; in the one as in the
other she had ended with methodical organization, and had suc-
ceeded. Victory following on failure is doubly creditable, and after
the confusion and tragedy of her first venture it was proof of a stout
national fibre that she could so nobly retrieve her mistakes.

The performance of Sir Stanley Maude would be hard to over-
praise. On a broad basis of careful preparation he had constructed
a strategical scheme as brilliant as it was simple. The tactical
work had been marked by great resourcefulness and ingenuity,
and by the most meticulous care. Here there was none of that
lack of generalship which at other times had made fruitless the
gallantry of our fighting men. But if the leadership was excellent,
the stamina and courage of the troops were super-excellent. These
were men who had for the most part been engaged for a year and
a half in the same terrain, who had endured every extreme of heat
and cold, who had suffered from the countless local diseases and
the earlier disorder of the hospital and transport service, and
who had in their memory more than one galling disaster. Of their
achievement let their leader speak : —

" Each difficulty encountered seemed but to steel the determination
to overcome it. It may be truly said that not only have the traditions
of these ancient British and Indian regiments been in safe keeping in
the hands of their present representatives, but that these have even
added fresh lustre to the records on their time-honoured scrolls. Where
fighting was almost daily in progress it is difficult to particularize, but
the fierce encounters west of the Hai, the passages of the Tigris and
Diala, and the final storming of the Sanna-i-yat position, may perhaps
be mentioned as typical of all that is best in the British and Indian
6oldier."

BOOK III.

THE GREAT SALLIES.

CHAPTER LXXII.

THE RUSSIAN COUP D'ETAT.
December 29, igi6-March 16, 1917.

Rasputin : his Career and Death — Protopopov — The Quiet before the Storm-
Revolt of Petrograd Garrison — Formation of Provisional Government — The
Petrograd Soviet — Abdication of the Emperor — The House of Romanov — ■
The Gap to be filled — The Failure of the Moderates.

The opening of 1917 found Russia in a state of artificial calm.
The stormy November session of the Duma and the unanswered
and unanswerable attacks upon the administration had, it ap-
peared, produced no lasting result. The autocracy had won, as
was shown by the appointment of Prince N. Golitzin as Premier,
the rehabilitation of men whose career had been a public scandal,
and above all by the increased activities of M. Protopopov, the
principal agent of reaction. Yet behind the calm there was move-
ment, the more significant because it was so quiet. The reasonable
and patriotic elements in Russia's life, the Duma, the Union of
the Towns and Zemstvos, the Council of the Empire, the United
Nobility — men of every shade of political opinion — were gradually
drawing together. The communists in the industrial areas were
grouped, though with a different purpose, on the same side. The
Army and the Army chiefs were in full sympathy. Opposed
to this great mass of opinion stood the Court circle and the
"dark forces" — small in numbers but all-powerful, for they
controlled the administrative machine, and the secret police
were their docile servants. That back-world of illiberalism, cor-
ruption, and neurotic mysticism was well aware that it was
fighting lor its life. It had forgotten the struggle with Germany
and the interests of the nation. Its aim was to force on a futile
revolution, to quench it in blood, to quell by terrorism any
agitation for reform, and to entrench itself anew in power for

879

380 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

another century. It had become wholly unnational, and it had
also become desperate, for an event had happened at the close
of the year 1916 which had been a challenge to an implacable
vendetta.

Forty-four years before there had been born in the Siberian
district of Tobolsk a certain Gregory Novikh, who, as he grew up,
was given by his neighbours the name of Rasputin, which signifies
" dirty dog." He came of a peasant family, which, like many
Siberian stocks, had a hereditary gift of mesmeric power. His
youth was largely devoted to horse-stealing and perjury, and his
prowess as a drunkard and a rural Don Juan was famed throughout
the countryside. In early manhood he added another part to his
repertoire. He became religious, let his hair grow long, and
tramped about the world barefoot, while his long ostentatious fasts
proclaimed his holiness. He was never in religious orders ; but
his fame as an ascetic grew, and the dignitaries of the Church
turned a favourable eye on one who might prove a popular miracle-
worker. He did not change his habits, for on occasion he was
as drunken as ever, and his immorality was flagrant ; but it was
not the first time that a Casanova had masqueraded in a hair
shirt. Devout ladies of high rank heard of him and admitted
him to their circles, and he played havoc among the devout
ladies. His personal magnetism and his erotic mania gave him
an uncanny power over hysterical women on the outlook for the
miraculous.

Moscow was at first his sphere of influence ; but his reputation
spread far and wide, and no scandals could check it. He started
a new cult, where dancing and debauchery were interspersed with
mystical seances ; and presently, through the medium of one of
the ladies-in-waiting, he had the Imperial family among his
devotees. The man was a scoundrel and a charlatan, but he must
have had some strange quality of his own to attract and hold so
great a following. He was given the office of Lighter of the Sacred
Lamps in the Palace, but his real function was that of chief
medicine-man to a superstitious Court. His filthy peasant's shirt
was used as a charm to cure the little Tsarevitch of a fever. His
lightest word became law, and he was consulted on matters of
which he did not understand the names. Fashionable ladies
fought for his favours ; great ecclesiastics and ministers waited
patiently in his anteroom. He was a man of middle height, with
curious, deep-set eyes, long thick hair, and a tangled beard,
dressing always in peasant's clothes, and rarely washing. Few

1916] RASPUTIN. 381

more squalid figures have ever reached supreme power in a great
nation.*

After drink and women his chief passion was gold, and he
found in politics full gratification for his avarice. To bribe Ras-
putin became the easiest, and often the only, way to high office.
Those who opposed him or failed to cultivate him were dismissed.
An unfriendly journalistic reference led to the suppression of the
paper that printed it. He held the clergy for the most part in the
hollow of his hand. He was a friend of Count Witte in his day,
of Maklakov and Sukhomlinov, of Goremykin and Sturmer. He
had much to do with the retirement of the Grand Duke Nicholas,
who never concealed his contempt for him. At the end of 1916
he had four principal creatures through whom he conducted his
business — Protopopov, the Minister of the Interior ; Rajev, the
Procurator of the Holy Synod ; Manasevitch-Manuilov, a jackal
of Stunner's ; and Pitirim, the Metropolitan of Petrograd. Grand
dukes and princes of the royal blood appealed to the Emperor and
Empress to shake themselves loose from his shackles, but the only
result was the exile of the appellants. It is not probable that
he had any serious pro-German proclivities, though he received
German gold. He had no considered views on high politics, and
played for his low personal ends. But he was anti-national, in-
asmuch as he stood for the dark back-world of Russia, which must
cease to exist if the Russian people were to emerge victorious from
the war. J

Such a man must live in perpetual danger, and it was noticed
by those who interviewed him that during the winter he had begun
to wear a hunted look, as if he heard the hounds on his trail. He
had betrayed so many women that there was scarcely a noble
family in Russia but had some wrong to avenge. He had been
assaulted several times, and once he had been soundly beaten ;
but to the amazement of Europe he went on living. The events
of November, however, in the Duma and the Council of the Empire

* He was thus described by an observer :— " The fascination of the man lay
altogether in his eyes. Otherwise he looked only a common moujik, with no beauty
to distinguish him ; a sturdy rogue, overgrown with a forest of dirty, unkempt
hair, dirty in person, and disgusting in habits. His language oscillated between the
stock-in-trade odds and ends of Scripture and mystic writ and the foulest vocabularv
of Russian, which of all white men's tongues is the most powerful in the expression
of love and affection and of abominable abuse. But the eyes of this satyr were
remarkable— cold, steely grey, with that very rare power of contracting and expand-
ing the pupils at will regardless of the amount of light present."

t Guchkov had denounced him in the Duma in 1912 as " a mysterious tragi-
comic figure, an apparition of the Dark Ages."

382 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec

showed him that his enemies were getting bolder. It was not the
people at large whom he had to fear, for they scarcely knew of his
existence. It was the nobility and the upper classes who wished
to remove a plague spot from the national life. He grew fright-
ened, shut himself up in his house, and only saw those who were
first examined by his private bodyguard of secret police. Pres-
ently his alarm increased, and he tried to conceal his whereabouts ;
but by this time the ring was drawn close around him, and it was
very certain that he would die.

On the night of 29th December 1916, Prince Yusupov, a young
man of rank and wealth, who had been educated at Oxford, and
had married a connection of the Imperial family, rang up Rasputin
on the telephone, and asked him to supper at his house. Such
supper-parties were no unusual things in the man's experience,
for he could drink any guardsman under the table, and was famous
as a ribald jester. Rather unwillingly he accepted the invitation,
and was fetched by his host in his own car. The chauffeur, who
was a member of the Duma, followed them inside the house, where
they found the Grand Duke Dimitri Paulovitch. His executioners
locked the door, and after a struggle shot him dead. The noise
attracted the attention of the police, who came to inquire as to its
meaning. " We were getting rid of a troublesome dog," they were
told. The corpse was placed in the car, and taken to a lonely island
in the Neva, where it was weighted with stones, and dropped through
a hole in the ice. Blood-marks on the snow and one of his goloshes
were the only marks of the deed ; but three days later the body
was found. After mass said by the Metropolitan, it was taken to
Tsarskoe Selo, and buried in a silver coffin, the Emperor and Proto-
popov being among the pall-bearers, and the Empress among the
chief mourners. The executioners went home, and telephoned to
the police to proclaim what they had done. Next evening the
Bourse Gazette announced Rasputin's death, and that night at the
Imperial Theatre the audience celebrated the event with enthusiasm,
and sang the National Anthem. The whole country applauded the
equity of the deed, and regarded it less as a murder than as a
judicial execution. The man had put himself where the law could
not touch him, and representatives of the people and of the nobility
ceremoniously and deliberately brought him within the pale of a
rough justice.

The death of Gregory Rasputin was the first act in the Russian
Revolution. It is the way of revolutions to have among their
preliminaries some strange drama, apparently outside the main

I9i6] PROTOPOPOV. 383

march of events, which yet in the retrospect is seen to be organically
linked with it. In slaying him the Russian nobility made their
reckoning with one who had smirched the honour of their class,
and the next step was for the Russian people to take order with
what was smirching the honour of the nation. But for the mo-
ment the autocracy drew the strings tighter. Rasputin was dead,
but Protopopov remained. The Duma, which should have met
on January 25, 1917, was postponed for a month, in order, it was
stated, to give the new Premier time to revise the policy of his
predecessors. The general congress of the Union of the Towns
and Zemstvos had already been forbidden, and the police were
given the right of being present at all private meetings of any
organization.* The censorship was drawn tight, and the Minister
of the Interior turned the ordinary work of his department over
to his assistants, devoting all his energies to the press and the
secret police. The numbers of the latter were greatly increased,
and Petrograd was filled with them ; while machine guns, sent
from England for the Army and sorely needed at the front, were
concealed on the roofs at commanding points throughout the city.
All things were ripe for the forcing on of that abortive revolution
which the reactionaries desired for their complete establishment
in power.

The protagonist in this sinister business, Alexander Protopopov,
will remain one of the enigmas of history. Originally a Liberal,
he came to Western Europe in the summer of 1916 with a deputa-
tion of members of the Duma and the Council of the Empire, and
delighted audiences in England and France with his perfervid
oratory. He had great charm of manner, and an air of earnest
simplicity which deeply impressed those who met him. He talked
the commonplaces of the Allied cause, but with a conviction and
a warmth of imagination which made his speeches by far the best
made by any foreign visitor to our shores since the outbreak of
war. But those who were often in his company observed that he
seemed to be living always at fever point. He suffered much from
insomnia, and his talk was often wild and strained. On his return
to Russia he fell completely into the hands of the Court party,
and more especially of those elements which were represented by
Rasputin. His neurotic temperament and his restless romantic
imagination predisposed him to be influenced by the glamour of
the Court and the necromancy of charlatans. He took to spending

* This measure was passed under Article 87 of the Constitution, which permitted
exceptional legislation when the Duma was not in session.

384 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.-March

as much time at seances as in the Council Chamber. Towards the
end he became known as the " Mad Minister," and it is likely that
his wits were seriously unhinged. That, at any rate, is the most
charitable hypothesis on which to explain the aberrations of a
man who had in his time done honest public service, and who was
certainly no common traitor.

During January and February the people seemed apathetic
under the new tyranny. No one desired revolution except the
agitators who had made it their business, for the thinking man
realized that it would cripple the conduct of the war and play the
game of the enemy. The reactionaries grew bolder, and on 9th
February the Labour group of M. Guchkov's War Industry Com-
mittee— the equivalent to the British Ministry of Munitions —
were arrested on a charge of conspiracy, and imprisoned without
trial. The outrage was received with calm, for its intention was
seen to be provocative. M. Miliukov and some of the Labour
leaders wrote appeals to the people to remain quiet, and their
appeals were suppressed by the authorities. Petrograd was made
a military district by itself, but even this menace failed to create
disturbances. An Allied commission, including Lord Milner and
General de Castelnau, was in Russia at the time, and its members,
though they believed revolution to be inevitable some time or other,
misjudged the popular temper, and thought that nothing would
happen till after the war. On 27th February the Duma met
amid bodyguards of police. In the Council of the Empire Scheglo-
vitov, who had originally been dismissed from office along with
Sukhomlinov, and in the Duma Markov, revealed themselves as
the Government's representatives, and it was clear that Protopopov
was about to engineer new elections, that he might have a Duma
to his liking. Things went so tamely that the reactionaries began
to natter themselves that their enemies were cowed, and that they
had already won the game. But Purishkevitch, an extreme
Conservative and a sturdy patriot, spoke more truly than he knew
when he concluded a fiery attack on Protopopov with the words,
" Dawn is not yet, but it is behind the hills."

In the meantime the people were hungry, and hunger is the
great dissolvent of patience. It had been a bitter winter with
heavy snowfalls, and the supply of food was scanty. The im-
mense demands of the Army had strained the transport machinery
to its utmost, and the situation was made worse by the restrictions
imposed on the export of grain from one district to another, for
in some areas there were large surplus stocks. The Government

igiy] PANIS ET CIRCENSES. 385

had no plan to deal with the shortage, and by February the daily
bread ration in Petrograd, small at the best, looked as if it were
about to fail. Patiently the people waited for hours in the bread
queues, telling each other that their kinsfolk were enduring far
worse hardships in the trenches, and that it behoved them to be
patient for Russia's sake. But word began to go round that before
the spring came real starvation would be upon them, and there
were many — Social Democrats in the factories, mysterious figures
at the street corners — to point the moral and ask what was the use
of a Government which could not give them bread. Long, strag-
gling, innocent processions began to wander about Petrograd,
helpless people asking only food for their children. They seemed
to beg and expostulate rather than demand.

Thursday, 8th March, was a day of clear, fine weather. In
the afternoon there was a gala performance of Lermontov's
Masquerade at the Alexander Theatre, on which ten years' prepara-
tion and vast sums of money had been lavished. All day long
women waited in the streets outside the bakers' shops for a chance
to get their dwindling bread ration. Panis et cir censes — the old
antidotes to revolution ! In the Duma a debate on the question
of food supplies was winding out its slow length. Everywhere
there seemed a profound peace — the peace of apathy and dishearten-
ment. But in the afternoon a small party of Cossacks galloped
down the Nevski Prospect, causing the promenaders to ask whether
there was trouble somewhere across the river. A little later a few
bakers' shops were looted in the poorer quarters, and a forlorn
and orderly procession of students and workmen's wives appeared
on the Nevski. Protopopov's spies reported that all was quiet ;
but they were wrong, for the revolution had begun. The breaking-
point had been reached in the people's temper, and the city was
on the tiptoe of expectation, seeking for a sign.

Next day, Friday, the 9th, in the same bright, cold weather,
it became apparent that some change had taken place. The people
by a common impulse flowed out into the streets. Some of the
chief newspapers did not appear, and those that did contained
solemn warnings about the crisis. The food debate in the Duma
took a new turn, and the Government was appealed to to grapple
with the provisioning of the capital. Crowds were everywhere,
laughing, talking, and always expectant. The Cossack patrols
stopped to fraternize with these groups, and seemed to be on the
best of terms with them. Workmen chaffed and cheered the
soldiers, and the soldiers could be heard assuring the people that

386 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

they would not shoot at them, whatever their orders. " You
are not going to fire on us, brothers," cried the crowd to the troops ;
" we only want bread." " No," was the reply ; " we are hungry,
like yourselves." Towards the police, on the other hand, there
was no friendliness. Stones and bottles were thrown at them,
and there was some shooting. Two workmen were arrested and
taken into a courtyard, which was defended by a company of
soldiers. The crowd tried to rush the courtyard to effect a rescue,
and the soldiers seemed about to fire, when a band of Cossacks
rode up, secured the arrested men, and delivered them to their
friends. There was very little political speech-making. Late in
the afternoon a workman, standing on a tub in the middle of the
Nevski, announced that they must get rid of the Government.
One of his hearers shouted, " Down with the war ! " and was at
once sternly rebuked. " Remember the blood of our brothers
and sons must not be spilt for nothing. The thing to do is to get
rid of the Government. Peace when it comes must be an honour-
able peace."

To the casual observer it seemed as if there was no purpose
except idle curiosity in the great throngs. They seemed too tolerant
and good-humoured to mean serious business. But to one who
watched more closely it was clear that there was some kind of
organization behind it all. Otherwise why the constant appeals
for moderation made wherever there was a chance of the peace
being broken ? " The Government wants an excuse to crush the
people. Do not play into their hands by rioting, but keep cool.
The one great thing is to force the Government to go." Something
already had been achieved. There had been meetings and pro-
cessions, and the soldiers had encouraged them. But it was hard
to believe that these leaderless crowds could achieve anything
great. They were unarmed and undisciplined, and in Petrograd
there were at least 28,000 police, with many machine guns.

Next day, Saturday, the trams stopped running, though the
shops were still open, and the cinematograph shows crowded.
The expectation had grown tenser, and the streets were more
densely packed than ever. The workmen, having received their
week's pay, struck work and joined the throngs, and serious political
talk took the place of the gossip and banter of the preceding day.
The next move lay with the Government. Either it must satisfy
the people, or it must coerce them.

The following morning, Sunday, the nth, the Government
acted. General Khabalov, the new military governor of Petro-

igiy] REVOLT OF PETROGRAD GARRISON. 387

grad, plastered the city with proclamations, announcing that the
police had orders to disperse all crowds, and that any workman who
did not return to work on Monday morning would be sent to the
trenches. No attention was paid to the first part, and the crowds
in the streets were enormous, including women and children who
had turned out from pure curiosity. It was noticed that the police
patrols had been much strengthened, and that detachments of
regulars had been brought in to assist. The Nevski Prospect was
cleared from end to end and put under military guard, but the
people took it calmly. There was a certain amount of firing on
the crowds, with the result that some two hundred were killed.
Observers, friendly to the revolution, saw in the day another
complete fiasco after the fashion of Russian revolts. But three
significant incidents had occurred. A company of the Pavlovski
regiment had mutinied when told to fire on the people. The
President of the Duma, M. Rodzianko, had telegraphed to the
Emperor : —

" Situation serious. Anarchy reigns in the capital. Government
is paralyzed. Transport, food, and fuel supplies are utterly disor-
ganized. General discontent is growing. Disorderly firing is going
on in the streets. Various companies of soldiers are shooting at each
other. It is absolutely necessary to invest some one who enjoys the
confidence of the people with powers to form a new Government.
No time must be lost. And delay may be fatal. I pray God that at
this hour responsibility may not fall on the wearer of the Crown."

He sent copies of his telegram to the different commanders-in-chief
at the front, and asked for their support. The Government, after
much hesitation, also acted, and Prince Golitzin prorogued the
Duma, under discretionary powers which he had received from the
Emperor. But the Duma refused to be prorogued, and elected a
Provisional Committee which continued to sit. Rodzianko's huge
figure rose in the winter twilight, and, waving in his hand the order
for dissolution, he announced that the Duma was now the sole
constitutional authority of Russia.

Next day the soldiers followed suit.* Monday, 12th March,
was to prove the decisive day, and a movement which had begun
by slow and halting stages was to become a whirlwind. During
the night the two operative forces of the revolution had made their
decision. The troops — both the Petrograd garrison and those
brought in as reinforcements — were aware what their orders would

* The Fetrograd garrison had reached the enormous figure of 160,000. It was
not trusted by the Government, who relied mainly upon the police.

388 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

be, and were resolved to disobey them. They could not shoot
down their own class. The consciously revolutionary elements
in the army were small, and this resolve was simply the revolt of
human nature against an unnatural task. At the same time the
socialist organizations among the workmen were preparing their
own scheme. If the old regime were dissolved they would be
ready with an alternative.

Before nine o'clock in the morning the streets were black
with people, and it was curious to note that on the crust of the
volcano much of the normal life of the city continued. Men went
about their ordinary avocations till they were pulled up by some
lava stream from the eruption. The crisis came early in the day.
The Preobrajenski Guards, the flower of the Household troops,
were ordered to fire on the mob ; instead, they shot their more
unpopular officers. The Votynski regiment was sent to coerce
them, and joined in the mutiny. The united forces swept down on
the Arsenal, and after a short resistance carried the place, and
provided the revolution with munitions of war. Then began a
day of sheer naked chaos. The soldiers had no plans, and drifted
from quarter to quarter, intoxicated with their new freedom, but
still maintaining a semblance of discipline. There was no looting,
and little drunkenness. No leader appeared, and the force of some
25,000 men — made up of the Preobrajenski, Volynski, Litovski,
and Kexholmski regiments * — swung from street to street, as if
moved by some elemental law. The headquarters of the autocracy
fell one by one. At n a.m. the Courts of Law were on fire. Then
the various prisons were stormed, and a host of political prisoners,
as well as ordinary criminals, released. In the afternoon the great
fortress of SS. Peter and Paul surrendered. And all day the nests
of the secret police were being smoked out. The chief office was
raided, and the papers which it contained were burned in the street.
The Bastille of the old regme had fallen.

There was now no semblance of Government in Petrograd
except the Duma, still sitting under Rodzianko's presidency.
The Emperor had not replied to the first telegram, so a second
was dispatched more strongly worded. Then about midday came
the news that the Emperor had wired to the Minister of War that
he was coming, and that he was bringing troops from the northern
front to quell the rising. The Duma continued its session, scarcely

* Many of these troops were not pure Russian. The Volynski regiment was
composed of Rutheaes and Ukrainians, the Litovski of Poles, the Kexholmski of
Finns.

1917] THE DUMA COMMITTEE. 389

less at a loss than the crowds now parading the streets. It did not
realize as yet the completeness of the coup d'etat, and so missed the
chance of riding the storm. Presently came deputations from the
insurgent troops, who were informed of the messages sent to the
Emperor. The socialist deputies addressed them, and bade them
at all costs maintain order, since order was vital to the cause of
freedom. The regular Duma guard was removed, and a new
" bodyguard from the pavement " substituted. In the afternoon
the Duma conferred in secret, and chose an Executive Committee
of twelve men to act as a Provisional Government. Their names
were Rodzianko, Nekrasov, Konovalov, Dmitrikov, Lvov, Rjenski,
Karaulov, Miliukov, Schledlovski, Shulgin, Tcheidze, and Kerenski.
Outside its walls another committee was also being formed, a
committee of workmen and social revolutionaries ; and since they
were in the van of the actual work of the revolution, they speedily
obtained a great influence over the troops now pouring into
Petrograd. But the centre of gravity was still with the Duma,
and all that Monday soldiers, workmen, and students thronged
its doors, listening to speeches, and making new constitutions
every half-hour. The chief Duma leaders visited the various
barracks, and the trend of all appeals was the same — maintain
order and discipline, or your new-found liberty is lost. All day
prisoners were brought in — officials, and those of the police who
had escaped the fury of the mob. One of these was Scheglovitov,
the President of the Council of the Empire, and a pillar of the
" dark forces." When the night fell the Admiralty searchlights
lit the Nevski from end to end, as if to prove that the old secret
ways had perished. Close on midnight a shabby man in a dirty
fur coat spoke to one of the Duma guards. " Take me," he said,
" to the Committee of the Duma. I surrender myself voluntarily,
for I seek only the welfare of our country. My name is Proto-
popov."

The coup d'itat had been achieved in Petrograd, but not yet
in Russia. The Emperor had still to disclose his hand. The
views of the great army beyond the walls of the capital were still
unknown. But on Tuesday it became plain that no opposition
need be feared from that army. Every regiment that reached
Petrograd went over whole-heartedly to the revolution. On that
day, 13th March, the Duma Committee, now a little clearer in its
mind, grappled with the immediate problems of government. It
was composed mainly of men who would be called moderates in
other countries, men who desired a stable constitutional govern-

390 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

merit on the lines of the Western democracies. It had to fear
reaction on the one hand, and on the other the extremism of the
Council of Labour, which had already organized itself more com-
pletely than the Duma, and had a great following both among the
Petrograd masses and the incoming troops. Any strife between
the two would lead to a bloody commune, and give reaction a
chance to re-establish itself ; so the Duma Committee, using its
two members Tcheidze and Kerenski as its liaison with the ex-
tremists, strove to keep in line with the other. All Tuesday the
Tauris Palace was one babel of talk. Soldiers, students, Jews,
workmen, and socialist agitators held their meetings and camped
on its floor, while its courts were a mixture of arsenal and eating-
house ; and in quieter corners the harassed members of the Executive
Committee made plans for getting supplies into the city, argued
with Labour delegates, and strove to forecast the future. News
had come that Moscow accepted the revolution ; but next day
the Emperor was expected, and might even then be marching a
great army to take order with the new reg'me.

Meantime, in the streets strange dramas were being enacted.
The Admiralty buildings at one end of the Nevski Prospect had
been besieged for thirty-six hours. It was the last stronghold of
the old Government, and thither General Khabalov had retired
on the outbreak of the revolt. On Tuesday morning a letter was
sent to the Naval Minister, Grigorovitch, announcing that if the
place were not surrendered within half an hour it would be de-
stroyed by the big guns from the fortress of SS. Peter and Paul.
Khabalov capitulated, the troops marched out, and on the gates
appeared the notice : " Under the protection of the State Duma."
The Astoria Hotel, which had been a caravanserai for officers, was
attacked, since shots had been fired on the crowd from its roof.
The same thing happened elsewhere, for Protopopov's machine
guns were still in position on the housetops, and the police did f
not surrender without a struggle. The taking of those wretched
creatures provided the chief instances of barbarities during the
first stage of the revolution. When captured they were promptly
murdered, often under revolting circumstances, for the people had
a long and bitter count against them. During that day, too, the
rest of the leaders of the old Government were made prisoners —
Stunner and Pitirim and Kurlov ; Dubrovin, a leader of the
" Black Hundred " ; and Sukhomlinov, who was only saved from
being torn in pieces by the interposition of Kerenski.

On Wednesday, the 14th, the coup d'etat in Petrograd was

1917] THE PETROGRAD SOVIET. 391

virtually over, and the interest centred in the relations between
the Executive Committee of the Duma and the Council of Labour,
which had now grown into the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers'
Delegates, the Soviet, which was to become a familiar name in
Europe. Such sovereignty as now existed was divided between
them ; and, as the revolution spread, and the armies of Brussilov
and Russki announced their adherence, there seemed danger of a
revolution within the revolution, of civil war between two sides
whose feet were alike set on the new path. The Soviet rained
proclamations — some of them noble and statesmanlike, some of
them visionary and foolish, such as that notorious No. I., framed by
the Petrograd Soviet, which abolished saluting for private soldiers
off duty, and proclaimed that " the orders of the War Committee
must be obeyed, saving only on those occasions when they shall
contravene the orders and regulations of the Council of Labour
Deputies and Military Delegates." The appeal of the Duma Com-
mittee was more wisely inspired : —

" Citizens :

" The Provisional Executive Committee of the Duma, with the
aid and support of the garrison of the capital and its inhabitants, has
now triumphed over the baneful forces of the old regime in such a
manner as to enable it to proceed to the more stable organization of
the executive power. With this object, the Provisional Committee
will name Ministers of the First National Cabinet, men whose past
public activity assures them the confidence of the country.

" The new Cabinet will adopt the following principles as the basis
of its policy :

" 1. An immediate amnesty for all political and religious offences,
including military revolts, acts of terrorism, and agrarian crimes.

"2. Freedom of speech, of the press, of associations and labour
organizations, and the freedom to strike ; with an extension of these
liberties to officials and troops, in so far as military and technical
conditions permit.

"3. The abolition of social, religious, and racial restrictions and
privileges.

"4. Immediate preparation for the summoning of a Constituent
Assembly, which, with universal suffrage as a basis, shall establish
the Governmental regime and the constitution of the country.

"5. The substitution for the police of a national militia, with
elective heads and subject to the self-governing bodies.

" 6. Communal elections to be carried out on the basis of universal
suffrage.

" 7. The troops that have taken part in the revolutionary move-
ment shall not be disarmed, but they are not to leave Petrograd.

392 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

" 8. Wlule strict military discipline must be maintained on active
service, all restrictions upon soldiers in the enjoyment of social rights
granted to other citizens are to be abolished."

Meantime there was the Emperor. He had not been deposed,
and, to the vast majority of the Russian people, was still sovereign
and father. On Wednesday, the 14th, he tried to reach Petrograd ;
but he got no farther than the little station of Bologoi, where
workmen had pulled up the track, and he was compelled to return
to Pskov. At 2 a.m. on the morning of the 15th he sent for Russki,
and told him : "I have decided to give way, and grant a respon-
sible Ministry. What is your view ? " The manifesto, already
signed, lay on the table. Russki advised him to get in touch
with Rodzianko, and himself telephoned to the Duma in Petrograd
and to the other generals. The replies he received made it clear
that there was no other course than abdication, and at 10 a.m.
he made his report to the Emperor, saying that his view was con-
firmed not only by Rodzianko, but by Alexeiev, Brussilov, and the
Grand Duke Nicholas. Rodzianko could not leave Petrograd ;
but Guchkov and Shulgin arrived in the evening, and found the
Emperor in the royal train, haggard, unwashed, and weary. He
had no one in attendance except his veteran aide-de-camp, Count
Fredericks. He asked to be told the truth, and he heard that the
Army, led by his own Household troops, had joined the revolution.
" What do you want me to do ? " he asked. " You must abdicate,"
Guchkov told him, " in favour of your son, with the Grand Duke
Michael Alexandrovitch as Regent. Such is the decision of the
new Government." The Emperor covered his eyes. " I cannot
be separated from my boy," he said. " I will hand the throne to
my brother. Give me a sheet of paper."

On that sheet of paper he wrote these words : —

" By the Grace of God, We, Nicholas II., Emperor of all the Russias,
to all our faithful subjects :

" In the course of a great struggle against a foreign enemy, who
has been endeavouring for three years to enslave our country, it has
pleased God to send Russia a further bitter trial. Internal troubles
have threatened to compromise the progress of the war. The destinies
of Russia, the honour of her heroic Army, the happiness of her people,
and the whole future of our beloved country demand that at all costs
victory shall be won. The enemy is making his last efforts, and the
moment is near when our gallant troops, in concert with their glorious
Allies, will finally overthrow him.

" In these days of crisis we have considered that our nation needs

1916] THE EMPEROR ABDICATES. 393

the closest union of all its forces for the attainment of victory. In
agreement with the Imperial Duma, we have recognized that for the
good of our land we should abdicate the throne of the Russian state
and lay down the supreme power.

" Not wishing to separate ourselves from our beloved son, we
bequeath our heritage to our brother, the Grand Duke Michael Alex-
androvitch, with our blessing upon the future of the Russian Throne.
We bequeath it to him with the charge to govern in full unison with
the national representatives who may sit in the Legislature, and to
take his inviolable oath to them in the name of our well-beloved
country.

" We call upon all faithful sons of our land to fulfil this sacred and
patriotic duty in obeying their Emperor at this painful moment of
national trial, and to aid him, together with the representatives of
the nation, to lead the Russian people in the way of prosperity and
glory.

" May God help Russia ! "

But Amurath was not to succeed thus simply to Amurath.
When Guchkov brought back his report and the fateful sheet of
paper, he found Petrograd seething with constitutional squabbles.
The Moderates — the bulk of the Duma Committee — sought a
constitutional monarchy ; the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers'
Delegates desired a republic in so far as they had considered forms
of government at all. The abdication of the Emperor was still
unknown when, on Thursday afternoon, Miliukov made a speech
in the Duma which declared the names of the new Ministers. These
were Prince George Lvov, Prime Minister and Minister of the
Interior ; Miliukov, Foreign Affairs ; Guchkov, War and Marine ;
Kerenski, Justice ; Terestchenko, Finance ; Shingarev, Agricul-
ture ; Konovalov, Commerce and Industries ; Nekrasov, Ways
and Communications ; Manuilov, Public Instruction ; Godnev,
State Comptroller ; Vladimir Lvov, Procurator of the Holy Synod ;
and Rodichev, Finnish Affairs. It was in the most exact sense a
coalition, for it included representatives of every party of the left
and centre. The Premier, Manuilov, Miliukov, Rodichev, Shin-
garev, and Nekrasov, were Constitutional Democrats ; V. Lvov was
a Liberal Nationalist ; Godnev and Guchkov were Octobrists ;
Konovalov and Terestchenko were Liberals ; and Kerenski was
a Social Revolutionary. Miliukov explained the credentials of the
new Ministry.

" I hear voices ask : ' Who chose you ? ' No one chose us ; for if
we had waited for election by the people, we could not have wrenched
the power from the hands of the enemy. While we quarrelled about

394 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

who should be elected, the foe would have had time to reorganize and
reconquer both you and me. We were elected by the Russian Revolu-
tion. . . . We shall not retain power for a single moment after we are
told by the elected representatives of the people that they wish to see
others, more deserving of their confidence, in our place. . . . But we
will not relinquish power now, when it is needed to consolidate the
people's triumph, and when, should it fall from our hands, it would
only be seized by the foe."

He concluded by informing his hearers that " the despot who
has brought Russia to the brink of ruin will either abdicate of his
free will or be deposed." He added that the Grand Duke Michael
would be appointed Regent. This announcement was the spark
to the explosion. The Petrograd Soviet at once demanded a
republic, and for an hour or two it seemed as if the new Govern-
ment would disappear in the horrors of a commune. The situa-
tion was saved by Kerenski. He went straightway to the Soviet
meeting, and broke into its heated debate. " Comrades," he
cried, " I have been appointed Minister of Justice. No one is a
more ardent republican than I ; but we must bide our time. Noth-
ing can come to its full growth at once. We shall have our re-
public, but we must first win the war, and then we can do what
we will. The need of the moment is organization and discipline,
and that need will not wait." His candour and earnestness carried
the day. The Soviet passed a resolution in support of the Pro-
visional Government by a majority of 1,000 to 15, and the new
regime entered upon office.

But it was clear that the arrangement made by Guchkov in
the royal train at Pskov could not stand. Late on the night of
Thursday, the 15th, a deputation, led by Prince Lvov, and includ-
ing Kerenski, sought out the Grand Duke Michael, and informed
him that the people demanded that he should renounce the Regency,
and relegate all powers to the Provisional Government until a
Constituent Assembly could decide upon the future. The Grand
Duke bowed to fate, and on the morning of Friday, the 16th, there
was issued a declaration in his name which rang the knell of the
Romanov dynasty. " I am firmly resolved," so it ran, " to accept
the Supreme Power only if this should be the desire of our great
people, who must, by means of a plebiscite through their repre-
sentatives in the Constituent Assembly, establish the form of
Government and the new fundamental laws of the Russian State.
Invoking God's blessing, I therefore request all citizens of Russia
to obey the Provisional Government, set up on the initiative of

1916] THE HOUSE OF ROMANOV. 395

the Duma, and invested with plenary powers, until, within as
short a time as possible, the Constituent Assembly, elected on a
basis of equal, universal, and secret suffrage, shall enforce the will
of the nation regarding the future form of the constitution."

This was on Friday, 16th March. A week before Protopopov
had been in power, and his police had been established in every
corner of Petrograd ; the patient bread queues had been waiting
in the streets ; and the rank and fashion of the capital had been
thronging to the Alexander Theatre. Now these things were as if
they had never been. The sacred monarchy had disappeared, the
strongholds of reaction had been obliterated as if by a sponge,
and agitators, but lately lurking in dens and corners and dreading
the sight of a soldier, were now leading Guards regiments under
the red flag and dictating their terms to grand dukes and princes.
No more dramatic peripeteia was ever witnessed in the chequered
history of human government.

The fall of the Emperor was received among the Allies with
a divided mind. Even those who acclaimed the revolution, and
recognized the inadequacy of the Imperial rule, could not view
without some natural regret the fate of a man who since the first
day of the war had been scrupulously loyal to the Alliance ; who, as
was proved by his initiation of the Hague conferences, had many
generous and far-sighted ideals ; and who, on the admission of all
who knew him, was in character mild, courteous, and humane.
Moreover, in the West there is always a lingering sentiment for
disinherited kings — a sentiment sprung of that intense historic
imagination which is the birthright of France and Britain. II
garde au cceur les richesses steriles d'un grand nombre de rois oublies.
Hence it was with some surprise that Western observers watched
the utter eclipse of that Tsardom, which they had been taught to
regard as something intertwined with the fibre of Russian folk-
thought and religion. But among a people so heterogeneous and
so little integrated by a common educational standard, such sudden
reversals of thought were not unnatural. The Russian mind
remained as before, loyal to its own peculiar mysticism, but the
ideal of a thing called liberty could supplant with ease the ideal
of a paternal king. A race which had so little visualizing power
among its mental furniture was not the stuff of which impassioned
royalists were made.

The House of Romanov may be said in one sense to have
deserved its fate. It had allowed itself to become an anachronism

396 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

in the modern world, a mediaeval fragment in line neither with the
bludgeoning German absolutism nor the freedom of Italy and
Britain. A stronger man than Nicholas might have established
an efficient autocracy with the complete assent of his people ; a
wiser man could have transformed the Tsardom into a constitu-
tional kingship. But for either change a stalwart soul and a
penetrating mind were required, and Nicholas was not cast in
that mould. He wavered between the two alternatives, and was
incapable of the sustained intellectual effort necessary to follow
either course. His sympathies were, on the whole, liberal ; but
he was easily swayed by his entourage, and especially by his wife.
He did not blunder from lack of warning. The Grand Duke
Nicholas Mikhailovitch told him the truth the preceding Christmas,
and was banished for his pains. " Your first impulse and decision
are always remarkably true and right. But as soon as other influ-
ences supervene you begin to waver, and your ultimate decisions
are not the same." History can only regard that gentle, ineffective,
tragically fated soul with tenderness and compassion. He was
born to a destiny too difficult ; his very virtues — his loyalty, his
mercifulness — contributed to his undoing. The worst influence
was the wife whom he deeply loved. The Empress Alexandra
Feodorovna will be remembered with Henrietta Maria of England
and Marie Antoinette of France as an instance of a devoted queen
who dethroned her consort. In her eyes popular leaders were no
more than traitors, to whom she hoped some day to give short
shrift. She was possessed with whimsies about divine right, and
her one object in life was to hand on the Russian crown to her
son with no atom of its glory diminished. Her shallow mind,
played upon by every wind of superstition, was incapable of dis-
tinguishing true men from false, or of discerning the best means
of realizing her ambitions. In the end she had so surrounded
herself and her husband with rogues and charlatans that the
Court stank in the nostrils of decent citizens, and when it was
assailed there was none to defend it. The autocracy collapsed
from its own inherent rottenness. The revolt succeeded not
because it was well planned and brilliantly led, for there was
neither plan nor leading. It won because there was no opposition.
The old order ended at the first challenge, for it had become mere
lath and plaster.

The revolution triumphed in a week, and at a cost of human
life far lower than any other movement of the same magnitude
had ever shown. So, at any rate, it seemed to Western observers ;

i9i6] THE VACUUM IN RUSSIA. 397

but the view was scarcely accurate. What happened was a coup
d'etat, supported by nearly all the troops, and such strokes are
usually swift and bloodless. The real revolution was yet to come ;
on Friday, 16th March, it had scarcely begun. The cause of its
immediate success was the adhesion of the Army, for a Govern-
ment must collapse when it can no longer depend on its own
armed forces. The decision as to who inspired it is more difficult.
Without the Duma, the only nucleus of government, the business
would have marched at once into naked chaos ; there would have
been a commune in Petrograd, and probably in other cities ; and
it is certain that the Army would not have been united, the great
commanders would not have accepted the change, and presently
there would have been civil war. At the same time, without
the driving force of the working classes of the capital it is pos-
sible that the revolution would have ended in a barren com-
promise. The Duma had not the power of free initiative. Even
the Provisional Committee contained too many types of political
thought to enable it to speak with a clear voice. Its moderate
elements, the men who understood the mechanism of government,
were the men who had already failed in the struggle with the
autocracy. Even a strong man like Guchkov, who had laboured
hard to provide munitions for the army, had found his work ham-
pered and nullified. The taint of failure was on them all, and the
public mind turned naturally to the extremists, who had never
sought to work with the old regime, who had never ceased to preach
a root-and-branch destruction. Revolutions are violent things,
and their first result must always be to give a hearing to the fanatic
rather than to the politique. The prestige and the initiative lay
with the impromptu organization of the Petrograd proletariat.

The dominant fact was that a great gap had been created, and
that the gap must be filled. There were two rival theories as to
the method and the principles to be followed — that of the con-
stitutionalists and that of the extremists. The former, who were
represented by the Provisional Government formed on 15th March,
realized that Russia was in the throes of a great war, and that
some kind of stable administration was needed without an hour's
delay. There were all shades of opinion in their ranks, for some
would have preferred to maintain the dynasty under new constitu-
tional restrictions, while others were ready to accept a republic ;
but all were practical men who were willing to jettison their pet
theories and look squarely at facts. Their aim was a Committee
of Public Safety, which would guide Russia to peace, and then,

398 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

with fuller knowledge and ampler leisure, prepare a constitution,
as Alexander Hamilton had prepared a constitution for the United
States after freedom had been won. The Premier, Prince Lvov,
was a specialist in local government, a man who had busied him-
self not with political speculation but with instant practical needs.
Miliukov and Shingarev were of the same cast of mind as some-
what doctrinaire British Liberals ; Guchkov — to continue the British
parallel — was a moderate Conservative ; Terestchenko was a rich
and enlightened employer of labour, a Tory democrat ; Vladimir
Lvov was a Liberal country gentleman. Their following lay in
the professional classes, the business men, the country gentry, and
the bourgeoisie. They alone in Russia had any understanding of
foreign politics and of the main problems of the war. They repre-
sented all the store of administrative experience which the country
possessed. Worthy, honest, and patriotic, they had kept flying
the banner of a reasonable freedom during the dark days ; but they
had failed in the past to achieve reform, and the memory of that
failure clung to them. They were not by nature makers of revo-
lutions. They lacked the fiery appeal, the daimonic personality,
which awes and attracts great masses of men. Logical, capable,
intensely respectable, they were also a little dull. They were wholly
right in their perception of the needs of their country ; but when
an excited populace is clamouring for a new heaven and a new
earth, it will not be greatly attracted by a plan for stable govern-
ment. Moreover, the very blackness of the old regime seemed to
demand a sensational and violent reversal. " So foul a sky clears
not without a storm."

The extremists of the Council of Workmen and Soldiers repre-
sented a far narrower class. They stood for the working popula-
tion of Petrograd, and in a lesser degree for industrial Russia ; but
Russia was not a highly industrialized country, and the workmen
were a mere handful compared with the many millions of the
peasantry. The rank and file were profoundly ignorant on all
questions of government, and the leaders were little better. Their
strength lay in the fact that they preached a creed which was the
antithesis of all that had gone before, and which combined ideals
that were capable of appealing both to a narrow class interest and
to the generous and imaginative side of the Russian mind. More-
over they were in Petrograd, at the centre of affairs, and they
were vocal, while other sections were dumb. Many of them were
sensible men, who saw that victory in the war was essential to the
safeguarding of their new-won freedom, and who had a wider

I9i6] MEANING OF THE COUP D'£TAT. 399

outlook in political matters than the interests of one class. But
even the best of them were inexperienced in public affairs. It is
not easy for those who have long been compelled to work in the
dark to come suddenly into the full glare of responsibility. With
the best will in the world there must be a certain jealousy, a certain
suspicion, a certain mauvaise honte due to the strangeness of it all.
Precious time was wasted in the discussion of half-baked ideals
when the nation cried out for action. Discipline, the supreme
need in war, is hard to come at in a debating society. But the
gravest peril arose from the intractable minority, whose leaders,
willingly assisted by Germany, were even then speeding to the
storm centre across Europe in locked and shuttered railway car-
riages, like some new secret munition of war. In a time of con-
fusion the wildest creed is often the most acceptable, and these
men had a method in their madness, and could play cunningly
on the weakness of a sorely-tried and most malleable people.
Some were beyond doubt in German pay ; the majority were as
honest as they were perverse. But unhappily in times of stress
the rogue is not more dangerous than the fool.

The first news of the coup d'etat enheartened and inspired every
ally of Russia. It seemed as if the deadweight which had clogged
her efforts was now removed. She had been a giant with one arm
shackled, but now she had the full use of her limbs. Corruption
and favouritism, which had weakened her mighty purpose, would
flourish no longer in the clear air of freedom. She was now wholly
in line with the other democracies, and the old suspicion of an
autocracy, which had always existed in some degree in Britain
and America, was dispelled from the minds of her well-wishers.
Her revolution had been swiftly and completely carried out with
the assistance of the Army. More than a century before, the sol-
diers of revolutionary France had scattered their enemies. Would
not the same be true of the soldiers of revolutionary Russia ?

These hopes were based on false analogies. Russia had gained
freedom, but she was not yet confirmed in it. If the revolution
was to endure, the war against Germany must be won, and any
cataclysmic change, however beneficent in its ultimate effect, must
weaken her fighting strength in the immediate present. The
extremists, who, if they did not make the coup d'etat, were its
loudest propagandists, were admittedly anti-national ; not like the
extremists of the French Revolution, who never lost their nation-
alist character. Moreover, the former were avowed pacificists,

400 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

while the latter preached every folly but a hollow peace. The
former wished to end one war to begin another ; and while there
might be little enthusiasm for the second part of their programme,
the first had a dangerous appeal to a people who had lost heavily of
its manhood, and had suffered for two and a half years the most
grievous privations. In the villages, according to one observer at the
time, " the commonest record is that, of a number of adult brothers,
only one is left still at the front, and sending home what money
he can (a soldier's pay is three roubles a month) ; the families of
all club together. The work of the fields is done by women. Any
man fit to return to the line does so, some of them five or six times.
Everywhere, in numbers unheard of in any other war, are to be
seen helpless cripples, bringing home to all who see them the horrors
of modern armaments and the present struggle." To a nation
which had suffered thus, and which was essentially peace-loving
and humane and without a tincture of military pride, immediate
peace buttressed by vague formulas about the status quo ante, and
" no annexations or indemnities," had an uncanny charm. They
did not understand the phrases, but they liked the sound, and
owing to the lack of popular education they were unable to read
the deeper meaning of the war. Already the Council of Workmen
and Soldiers were extolling the maxim of " peace without annexa-
tions or indemnities " — no invention of their own, but a phrase
borrowed from the Zimmerwald manifesto of September 1915,
signed by the Russian Lenin and the Swiss Robert Grimm. What
could the Russian peasant make of foreign words like contributsia
and annexia ? He thought the first the name of a town which
ought not to be surrendered, and the second the name of a fifth
daughter of the Emperor ! * But if they meant peace he would
shout for them, and in the next breath he would shout for the
liberation of Belgium and Serbia, which meant a victorious war.
It all spelled confusion and bewilderment and irresolution.

The case was still graver with the army. The Russian army did
not need to be democratized ; it was already the most democratic
force in the world. Relations between officers and men were almost
uniformly excellent. But it was not a highly disciplined army ;
for, being spread out on a long, thin line, with sometimes no more
than 150 men to the mile, the commanders had not the troops
under their hand. It was a superb field for propaganda, and the
Council of Workmen and Soldiers, seeing in it the only hope of

* A pamphlet was published in Petrograd in these days called the Revolutionary
Pocket Dictionary, purporting to expound the new terminology, and of over a hundred
words explained only six were Russian 1

i9i7] KERENSKI. 401

reaction, resolved to " democratize " the Army in their own peculiar
fashion. Hundreds of emissaries were dispatched, and there was
no one to say them nay. Already a carnival of loose talk was
beginning. The men were told that the officers were bloodsuckers
and tyrants, when they had looked upon them as friends. The
glib formulas of the demagogues were preached to audiences
which had not the education to judge them truly. The Army
whose influence had made the coup d'etat was the one hope for the
establishment of a stable government, had there been some one
with sufficient authority to veto this crazy electioneering. But
military discipline is a delicate plant, and to set up the hustings in
the field has before this wrecked many a gallant force.* Those
who loved and admired the Russian soldier, and regarded his
campaigns as the summit of mortal heroism and endurance, saw
with consternation his exposure to this incredible trial. He was
called to debate in his ignorance on the foundations of statecraft
in the presence of a vigilant enemy.

A revolution may at the outset be the work of many ; but its
establishment is usually the task of one man — a Csesar, a Crom-
well, a Napoleon. Among the extremists there was no such man,
for in the nature of things he must not be extreme ; he may dream
dreams and see visions, but he must have an iron hand and a clear
eye for realities. In the respectable circle of the Duma states-
men, competent, honest, brilliant even, he seemed to be lacking.
Guchkov was the nearest approach ; but Guchkov had no mag-
netism to compel a following, and the man of destiny miist be a
trait d'union between the practical administrators and the masses.
One figure alone seemed to stand out from the others — a young
man barely thirty-five, the son of a Siberian schoolmaster, hitherto
an obscure Petrograd lawyer, and a somewhat flamboyant orator
in Labour circles. His haggard white face and melancholy eyes
showed his bodily frailty, and indeed he was one who walked very
close to death. In the first stage of the revolution Alexander
Kerenski played boldly. Himself a strong republican and a staunch
socialist, he seemed to recognize that a country cannot be saved
by ideals alone, and to gird himself for the rough work of construc-
tion. His fervent speeches kept the new Provisional Government

* Here is Gourko's experience with the Armies of the West : " The most impor-
tant was the ' Meeting of the Whole Front,' with delegates from all units, about
1,500 altogether. . . . Then followed gatherings of doctors, of Sisters of Charity, Red
Cross societies, elementary teachers of the Minsk district, military priests, a Polish
meeting, a White Russian meeting, meetings of veterinaries and chemists." — Russia
in 1914-17, p. 285.

402 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

from being wrecked at the start, and he had his way alike with
the elder statesmen of the Duma and the firebrands and amateurs
of the Workmen's Council. Here, so at the moment it seemed,
was a " swallower of formulas," a second Mirabeau. Would he
die, like Mirabeau, before he could guide the revolution aright ?
Would he faint by the wayside, baffled by problems too great for
mortal solution, and handicapped by the trammels of his old
environment ? Or would he live to lead his people beyond the
wilderness to the Promised Land ?

CHAPTER LXXIII.

THE NEW GOVERNMENT IN BRITAIN.

December 19, 1916-ilfay 2, 1917.

Mr. Lloyd George — The War Cabinet — Problems of Men, Food, and Raw Materials
— The British Finances — Labour.

The new Ministry in Britain entered upon office faced by a host
of vexatious and intricate problems. Rumania had been over-
run, and was now making a last stand on the lines of the Sereth.
Greece was in a state of naked chaos. In Russia the incompetence
of the bureaucracy was now grossly apparent. The campaign in
the West had reached the apparent stagnation which comes with
mid-winter, and in consequence the attention of the people was
diverted to domestic criticism. The peace overtures of Germany
and President Wilson's Note had produced a situation which
called for a wary and patient diplomacy. At home the increased
activity of the German submarines had raised acutely the question
of food and supplies. The need of men for the army was more
urgent than ever if the strategic purpose of the forces in the field
was not to be compromised. But the new Government had one
clear advantage. It had been accepted by the people as a Govern-
ment of action, and the country at large was prepared to make any
effort which it should direct. It was in the eyes of most men a
" business Government," an executive committee of the whole
nation. Hence when, in his first speech in the House of Commons
on December 19, 1916, the new Prime Minister sketched a pro-
gramme of large and drastic measures, his demands were willingly
granted. He summoned the country to a national Lent, an hon-
ourable competition in sacrifice. He asked that every available
acre should be used for the production of food, and that the over-
consumption of the rich should be cut down to the compulsory
level of the poor. He proposed a system of immediate national
service for war. He announced that the Government would com-

408

404 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

plete their control over mines and shipping. He warned his
hearers that such as gave their trust to the new administration
in the hope of a speedy victory would be doomed to disappoint-
ment— that there was a long and difficult road still to travel before
victory was won. But his tone was one of grave yet buoyant confi-
dence ; and he gave a new encouragement to those who believed
that the resources of the whole Empire should be mobilized by his
promise to summon at an early date an Imperial War Conference.
The country looked kindly at his committee of experts, and was
ready to grant them a fair field for their energy. Few Ministries
have ever entered upon office accompanied by a more general
goodwill.

The linch-pin of the coach was the Prime Minister, and with
his accession to the highest place the world became more fully
cognizant of one of the most remarkable and potent figures in
modern history. His pre-war record had shown that he had unsur-
passed demagogic talents, and that rarer gift, a sense of political
atmosphere. He might err in his ultimate judgments, but rarely
in his immediate intuitions ; if his strategy was often erroneous,
his tactics were seldom at fault. He had been accused both by
colleagues and opponents of lack of principle, for in truth he cared
little for dogma, and distrusted the Whig code, so far as he troubled
himself to understand it. His interest was not in doctrine but in
life, and his quick sense of reality made him at heart an opportunist
— one who loved the persistency of facts, and was prepared to
select, if need be, from the repertory of any party. This elas-
ticity, combined with his high political courage, rendered him
even in his bitterest campaigns not wholly repugnant to his oppo-
nents. He was always human, and had nothing of the dogmatic
rigidity, the lean spiritual pride of the elder Liberalism.

In December 1916 Mr. Lloyd George was but partially revealed
to his countrymen and to the world, but enough was known to
make it clear that he had great assets for the task. He was a
born coalitionist, sitting always loose to parties ; a born war
minister, for strife was his element ; and a born leader of a democ-
racy. Of democracy, indeed, both in its strength and weakness,
he was more than a representative — he was a personification. He
had its fatal facility in general ideas, its sentimentality, its love
of picturesque catchwords ; and he had also its incongruous realism
in action. Devotees of consistency were driven mad by his vagaries,
for a tyrant or an oligarchy may be consistent, but not a free
people. He had a democracy's short memory, and brittle personal

1916] MR. LLOYD GEORGE. 405

loyalties. Perhaps his supreme merit as a popular leader was his
comprehensibility. No atmosphere of mystery surrounded his
character or his talents. The qualities and the defects of both
were evident to all, and the plain man found in them something
which he could himself assess — positive merits, positive weak-
nesses— so that he could give or withhold his confidence as if he
were dealing with a familiar friend. This power of producing a
sense of intimacy among millions who have never seen his face or
heard his voice is the greatest of assets for a democratic statesman,
and Mr. Lloyd George had it not only for Britain but for all the
world. He was a living figure everywhere — as well known in
France as M. Briand, an intelligible character in America as
much as Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Wilson. A reputation such as Mr.
Balfour's or Mr. Asquith's was a local thing which grew dim be-
yond the seas ; but Mr. Lloyd George's was like an electric current
whose strength was scarcely lessened by transmission over great
distances. When he spoke he was understood by the whole round
earth. His speeches made exactly the appeal which he intended,
whether heard in London or read in Paris and Petrograd. He
used a universal tongue, and his cardinal strength lay in this uni-
versality, in his abounding share of a common humanity. It is
a rare and happy gift, and while it has been possessed by cer-
tain artists and thinkers, it has been the endowment of but few
statesmen.

Apart from this special genius, his most notable qualities
seemed, at the moment of taking office, to be his courage and energy.
His physical appearance was a clue to the man ; the thickset figure,
the deep chest, the bright, wary swordsman's eye — all spoke of an
ebullient and inexhaustible life. As the months passed critics were
to be found to depreciate his wisdom, his honesty, even his valour,
but no man ever denied his vitality. He was exhilarated rather
than depressed by misfortunes, even though he might be also a
little frightened. His strength was that he overflowed at all times
with zest and interest and passion. The Allied cause now made
the same emotional appeal to him that the handicaps and sufferings
of the poor had made in earlier days. He was not only energetic
himself, but an inspirer of energy in others. Like a gadfly he
stung all his environment to life. He was inordinately quick at
grasping the essentials of a problem, and with him the deed did
not wait long on the thought. His well-wishers were less certain
whether this instinct for action was combined with an equal sagacity
in counsel and prescience in judgment, for it is a rule of mortality

406 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Dec.

that the considering brain and the active will are not commonly
found together in the same being. It was not enough that such a
man should choose able colleagues, for his temperamental domi-
nance was so strong that the subtlest and shrewdest of advisers
would be apt to be dragged along at his impetuous chariot wheels.
It was clear that he would not falter in the race ; but there was the
risk that his fine ardour might be sometimes wasted through mis-
direction, and that paths might be chosen in haste which would
have to be abandoned at leisure.

He was above all things the inspirer and comforter of the
nation through the medium of the spoken word. As an orator he
was in a unique position. There have been many greater speakers
— men who have had at their disposal a more complete armoury
of all the weapons of rhetoric and debate — but there have been
few indeed who have had his specific talent. He had not the
golden eloquence of Lord Rosebery, rich in historical allusion and
imagery ; or Mr. Balfour's architectural power, which made each
part of the argument fall into its place with a mathematical pre-
cision ; or the austere elevation, like that of the English Bible,
which is found in the best speeches of Abraham Lincoln. His
oratory was altogether less accomplished, the product of a native
talent rather than of a laborious apprenticeship. At its worst it
was merely noisy, the robustious hammer-and-tongs business of
the hustings. In its average quality it was homely, vigorous,
hard-hitting, and usually effective, giving the ordinary man some-
thing he could readily understand, and providing the answer to
his opponents which the ordinary man desired to give. It was
platitudinous, but often witty and invariably picturesque. But
there were moments when it became poetry, a rare and ex-
quisite music which lingered on the air like an old song, and
transformed the dusty arena of politics as a sunset transfigures a
dingy landscape. Such passages * were usually illustrations drawn
from some episode of the natural world or some recollection of
boyhood. They were never recondite ; but their use was so apt,
their presentation so beautiful, that they came to the mind of his

* Take such a passage as this from his speech at Carnarvon on February 3, 1917,
spoken among the Welsh hills towards the close of a bitter winter : —

" There are rare epochs in the history of the world when in a few raging years
the character, the destiny of the whole race is determined for unknown ages. This
is one. The winter wheat is being sown. It is better, it is surer, it is more bountiful
in its harvest than when it is sown in the soft springtime. There are many storms
to pass through, there are many frosts to endure, before the land brings forth its
green promise. But let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall
reap if we faint not."

i9i6] THE WAR CABINET. 407

hearers with the shock of a revelation. It was simplicity itself,
but it was the simplicity of genius ; and, save in a few rare utter-
ances of Cromwell, the history of British oratory may be searched
in vain for a parallel. And because it was poetry its appeal was
world-wide, for true poetry knows no frontiers of race or tongue.

The machinery which the Prime Minister had announced on
his accession to office seemed at first sight adequate to his purpose.
The old Cabinet of twenty-three had been too large and cumbrous ;
it had met infrequently, and it had kept no minutes. The special
War Committee which existed had been too informal and too ill-
defined in its powers to be effective. Mr. Lloyd George's War
Cabinet was five in number, and only one of its members, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, had the cares of a heavy department
to distract him. This body of five had their hands free to direct
the management of the campaigns. They were picked men who
brought to the common stock a great endowment of consultative
and executive competence. Mr. Arthur Henderson was a Labour
leader with a wide knowledge of the mind of the British workers,
and he had the patience and sagacity and unrhetorical patriotism
of the best type of his class. Mr. Bonar Law was a business man
with a high reputation for practical ability, and his remarkable
skill in debate made him an admirable exponent of policy in Par-
liament. Lord Curzon had been the most successful Viceroy of
India since Dalhousie. Lord Milner had been the civilian leader
in a long and difficult war, and had borne the weight of the recon-
struction of South Africa. All who had ever worked with him
were aware that he possessed administrative talents which were
probably not equalled by any contemporary Englishman. And at
the head of this distinguished junta was Mr. Lloyd George, with
his magnetic energy and his quick imagination. It seemed on
paper an ideal arrangement for the conduct of the campaigns. It
was a proof of the elasticity of the British Constitution that a
wholly novel machinery could come into being at once without
legislative sanction, without debate in Parliament or in the country,
on the authority of one man.

But those who examined the scheme closely, while fully alive
to its merits, saw certain dangers in the near future. The new
War Cabinet was the only Cabinet. The other members of the
Ministry were departmental heads, without opportunity for con-
sultation or collective decision except in so far as they might be
summoned to attend the War Cabinet at odd meetings. But the
British Constitution is based on collective resolutions and collective

408 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.-March

responsibility. Again, while the major business was the war, the
normal government of the country had to be carried on ; important
decisions must be taken in such matters as finance, education, and
labour, which might be purely domestic in character, but which
required the assent of the whole Government ; and even in internal
affairs many questions might bear a war complexion. Hence it
seemed certain that the War Cabinet would not only have to per-
form the special functions for which it was created, but to do the
work of the old Cabinet as well. In practice its membership could
not be limited to five, for other Ministers would require to be
constantly in attendance ; and in practice it could not confine itself
to problems directly arising out of the war, but must include in
its province the whole government of Britain. Finally, one of
Mr. Lloyd George's first acts was to create a number of new depart-
ments— Shipping Control, National Service, Food Control, Pen-
sions— which were not branches of old departments, but directly
responsible to the War Cabinet itself. It looked as if the com-
mittee of five might be swamped with endless matters of detail,
referred to them because there was no other mode of reference.

At first, however, the danger was not pressing, and the War
Cabinet, sitting in almost continuous session, endeavoured to draw
together the threads of war administration. It showed courage
and energy in grappling both with internal and foreign problems.
The Prime Minister went to Paris and Rome, Lord Milner was
dispatched to Russia, conferences of the Allies became frequent,
and — most vital of all — a War Conference of the British Empire
was called for the early spring. This conference took the form
of a temporary enlargement of the War Cabinet, the Dominions
Prime Ministers or their representatives and the Indian delegates
being included for the purpose in its membership. It was the eighth
conference of the Empire which had been held since the first Jubilee
Conference of 1887. At the earlier ones the main questions dis-
cussed had been imperial defence, imperial reciprocity, and imperial
consolidation ; but the vital question of co-operation in war had
not been seriously raised till the conference of 1909. It had been
developed at the Coronation Conference of 1911, when Sir Edward
Grey took the representatives of the Dominions into his confidence
on matters of foreign policy. But up to the outbreak of hostilities
these deliberations had not resulted in the devising of any real
machinery for united effort. The old doctrine of a loose partner-
ship of self-governing peoples held its ground — a friendly partner-
ship based on frequent consultations, but a partnership in which

1917J THE WAR CONFERENCE OF THE EMPIRE. 409

the main burden both of responsibility and of action lay upon
Britain herself. The war had wholly changed the outlook both
of the Mother Country and of the Dominions. Co-operation in
the field, in finance, and in all forms of war activity had become
a tremendous reality. But the machinery of co-operation was still
faulty. The conduct of the campaigns and of foreign policy still
rested exclusively with the British Government. This would have
been well enough had the Dominions' contribution been made
merely out of loyalty and friendship for the parent land. But
that was not the main motive. Australian and Canadian, New
Zealander and South African fought side by side with British
troops, not primarily in defence of Britain but in defence of their
own homelands, and on behalf of those ideals of civilization and
international honour which they realized to be the only securities
for their future freedom and peace. Hence there must be co-opera-
tion not only in effort but in the direction of that effort, and from
this practical and responsible partnership in the conduct of war
there must follow a true partnership in the conduct of peace.
The Prime Minister was under no delusion. " You do not suppose
that the overseas nations can raise and place in the field armies
containing an enormous proportion of their best manhood, and
not want to have a say, and a real say, in determining the use to
which they are to be put. ... Up to the present the British
Government has shouldered the responsibility for the policy of
the war practically alone. It now wishes to know that in its
measures for prosecuting the war to a finish, and in its negotia-
tions for peace, it will be carrying out a policy agreed upon by the
representatives of the whole Empire sitting in council together.
... Of this I am certain : the peoples of the Empire will have
found a unity in the war such as never existed before it — a unity
not only in history but of purpose. ... Do you tell me that the
peoples who have stood together and staked everything in ordei
to bring about the liberation of the world are not going to find some
way of perpetuating that unity afterwards on an equal basis ? "

The first great problem which the new Ministry had to face
was the need for men. The requirements of the Army were grow-
ing, and it was calculated that, to keep the forces in the field up
to the strength required by the strategic purposes of the High
Command, 200,000 extra men must be found before the end of
the summer. In March 1917 Mr. Bonar Law told the House of
Commons that since the beginning of the year recruits had fallen

410 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.-March

short of the number estimated by 100,000. To meet the demand,
a comprehensive new examination of discharged and rejected
persons was undertaken which would enable the military authori-
ties to deal with a million men. Such a " combing out " involved
many hardships. The doctors, acting under urgent War Office
instructions, were inclined to be liberal in their view of what con-
stituted physical efficiency, and thousands who had been hitherto
rejected or placed in a low class found themselves passed for general
service. In the same way the tribunals were slow to grant exemp-
tions, and pleas which a year before had been allowed were now
summarily dismissed. The principle was undoubtedly right —
that every man fit to be in the fighting line should go there unless
his services were required for national work of equal importance
at home. But the word " fit " was far too loosely construed : men
were drafted into the line who retired to hospital after the first
week of service, and thereby increased the cost of our army with-
out adding one atom to its strength. Side by side with this purely
military scheme there was established an organization for national
civilian service, similar to that set up in Germany the previous
autumn. The idea was sound— to find substitutes for men engaged
in vital industries and in military service by calling in men over
age or debarred by some physical handicap from fighting. The
country was split up into recruiting areas, and an appeal was made
for volunteers, both men and women. An attempt was made to
compile a great register in which should be set down the ability
of each volunteer for the different branches of national work.
Unfortunately the mechanism was cumbrously devised, and volun-
teers were demanded before any scheme for their utilization had
been framed. The result was that men and women were kept
waiting indefinitely, or hastily assigned to incongruous tasks.

The National Service Department, much criticized and labour-
ing amid hopeless difficulties, did something to ease the situation,
but it cannot be said to have realized the aim of its promoters.
The scheme of the military authorities, on the other hand, secured
large numbers of men ; but it involved so many mistakes that
during the spring and summer it had to be constantly revised.
Many of the blunders were so glaring that they inspired an un-
pleasant sense of insecurity and injustice among the people. It
was too often forgotten that, having grafted compulsion upon
our old voluntary plan, we had thereby improvised a system far
less scientific and equitable than that which existed in conscript
countries. Many thousands had volunteered in the early days

1917] MEN, FOOD, AND RAW MATERIALS. 411

of the war who under a proper scheme would have remained at
home, and consequently our later compulsory methods could not
be applied in a fair field. For a sedentary man of forty, with a
family and a business depending on his own efforts, to be hurried
into the ranks was a very real hardship, which the sight of multi-
tudes of young men reserved for so-called vital industries did not
tend to alleviate. The country, recognizing the urgent necessity
of the case, bore the anomalies with amazing good humour, and
that the protests were on the whole so few spoke volumes for the
patience and patriotism of the nation.

Scarcely less urgent was the supply of food and raw materials
which the success of the unrestricted German submarine cam-
paign forced into prominence. In a later chapter we shall con-
sider the features of that campaign ; here it is sufficient to note
its results upon our domestic policy. On February 23, 1917, the
Prime Minister informed the House of Commons that the ultimate
success of the Allies depended, in his opinion, on solving the tonnage
difficulties with which they were confronted. New restrictions
were imposed on all imports not essential to the prosecution of
the war. Certain forms of non-essential home production, such as
brewing and distilling, were rigorously cut down. A great effort
was made to increase the building of new standardized merchant
ships. Home production was stimulated in such matters as timber
and iron ore, and notably in the provision of food supplies. In
order to extend agricultural effort, farmers were guaranteed certain
minimum prices for wheat and oats and potatoes, that they might
be induced to put pastoral lands under crop ; a minimum wage
was fixed for agricultural labour ; and landlords were forbidden
to raise rents except with the consent of the Board of Agriculture.
These and many other schemes were aimed at the conservation
and increase of Britain's economic strength ; for it was realized that
the enemy was directing against it his most serious attack, and
that a long and stern struggle lay before the nation. A kind of
practical communism came into being. No national asset could
any longer be kept under unrestricted private management if
the strength of Britain was to be mobilized for war ; and State
interference reached a height which three years before would have
staggered the most clamorous socialist. An example was the
Government control of all coal mines, which came into force in
February 1917. The truth was that Britain was blockaded, and
her policy must be that of a beleaguered city. Germany was in
the same position, and the world saw the astounding result of

412 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.-March

two sets of belligerents each reduced by the other to a condition
of economic stringency, the one by above-water and the other by
under-water naval operations. At the same time there could be
no comparison between the kinds of stringency. In Mr. Lloyd
George's phrase, there was a vast difference between privation
and deprivation ; and the former had been for some time the lot
of Germany, but was still unknown in Britain.

The food problem, which was the one which affected most
notably the ordinary man, was dealt with by a set of curious
measures, which included experiments not always well considered.
Mr. Runciman, the President of the Board of Trade under the
former Government, had begun in November 1916 with the adoption
of a form of " standard " bread, and with certain restrictions on
the meals served in restaurants. When Lord Devonport became
Food Controller, he found the position with regard to the grain
supply very serious, and by a multiplicity of orders, culminating
in the Government control of all the chief flour mills, he endeav-
oured to prevent the waste of food stuffs. Stocks of sugar were
also short, and during the first half of the year 19 17 there was
a very great dearth of potatoes. In February he appealed to
patriotic households to accept a voluntary scale of rations, and
the Royal Proclamation of 2nd May urged the nation to a united
campaign of food economy. Apart from restrictions of con-
sumption, there was a general attempt on the part of householders
who had access to the land, whether in the shape of gardens or
allotments, to increase the food supplies by the planting of potatoes
and other vegetables. Shortage was followed by high prices,
which bore heavily on the poorer classes, and were attributed
by many to the " profiteering " of the large dealers. Lord Devon-
port's sporadic efforts to control these prices were attended with
no great success ; and the matter was not firmly handled till he
had retired and given place to Lord Rhondda, the former President
of the Local Government Board, who by his vigorous administra-
tion gave the country assurance that such high prices as remained
were the inevitable effects of war and not of private greed.

The first financial measure of the new Government was a
gigantic loan, which was expounded by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer at a great meeting in the Guildhall. The amount was
unlimited, and was to be raised in two issues : a 5 per cent, loan,
issued at 95, and repayable at par on June 1, 1947 ; and a 4 per cent,
loan, issued at par, and repayable on October 15, 1942. The
interest on the first issue was subject to income tax, and the yield

I9i7] THE 1917 BUDGET. 413

was therefore £4, 2s. 3d. per cent. ; the interest of the second was
free from tax. A sinking fund was instituted of if per cent, per
annum. The Four and a Half per cent. War Loan and Five and
Six per cent. Exchequer Bond issues were convertible into the new
loan at par, but there was no right of conversion into any future
war loan. The scheme was methodically advertised, and when the
lists closed on 16th February it was found that the loan had
yielded in new money £1,000,000,000, which was £300,000,000 in
excess of Mr. Bonar Law's provisional estimate. No such result
had as yet been attained in any belligerent country, and the amount
subscribed exceeded the combined results of the two previous
British loans. There were no subscriptions from the banks,
which were therefore left free to finance the general business of
the country. Some 8,000,000 people had subscribed, as contrasted
with Germany's highest figure of 4,000,000, though the population
of Germany was 50 per cent, larger than that of Britain. A little
later it was announced that the Government of India had agreed
to subscribe £100,000,000 to the general expenditure of the war.

These heroic measures were needed, for the cost of the cam-
paigns was rising rapidly. On 12th February the Chancellor of
the Exchequer declared that the average daily expenditure had
risen to £5,790,000 — an increase of over a million a day since the
beginning of the financial year. Such an increase was inevitable.
There were now fourteen times as many troops on the different
fronts as at the beginning of the war ; and, as compared with the
average in the first year, the smallest increase among the different
types of munitions was twenty-eight fold. The rate was soon to
be greatly added to, for in the first nine weeks of the new financial
year, 1917-18, the daily average had risen to £7,884,000. Mr.
Bonar Law's first Budget, introduced in April, showed an actual
deficit on the past year of £1,624,685,000, to be met out of loan
money. His estimate for the year 1917-18 was an expenditure of
£2,290,381,000 and a revenue of £638,600,000, leaving a deficit
of £1,651,781,000. There were no new taxes, but a new revenue
of £27,000,000 was estimated for, chiefly from the raising of the
tobacco duty and the increase of the Excess Profits Tax from 60
to 80 per cent. The figures were so vast that the most vigilant
of financial critics were struck dumb ; the thing was not in pari
materia with anything in their past experience or even in their
wildest imaginings. The State was contracting a colossal debt
to its citizens ; but it was an internal indebtedness, and the worst
difficulties concerning foreign payments were in process of being

414 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.-March

solved by the entry of America into the war. Without that for-
tunate event the financial position of all the Allies would have been
difficult in the extreme. Britain was expending her accumulated
savings, but she had not yet trenched seriously upon the assets
necessary for the production of her national income. Moreover,
a growing part of her outlay was returning to her war chest. The
campaign of the War Savings Committee, conducted quietly and
persistently through the land, was not only bringing a considerable
part of the high wages now current back to the use of the State,
but was inculcating habits of thrift and investment in classes who
might otherwise have been demoralized by the changed conditions
of the world.

The opening of 1917 saw no change in the mass of British opinion
concerning the war, save perhaps a certain hardening. The long
struggle of the Somme had brought home to the nation the magni-
tude of the toil and the greatness of the needful sacrifices ; and,
as Germany's policy unfolded itself and as a fuller idea of her
aims built itself slowly in the minds of those not given to reflect
upon international politics, the conviction grew that no halfway
house could be found between victory and defeat. The peace
overtures of December 1916 did, it is true, induce the doubters
to urge that a victory in the field was impossible, and that peace
must be sought by negotiation, and the easily beguiled to cry out
that there were signs in Germany of a change of heart, which it
was the Allies' duty to encourage.* But of pacificism in the
dangerous sense there were few signs, and the plea for " peace by
negotiation " sprang in most cases from an error of head rather than
of heart. In every great struggle there will be a certain class
who in the name of democracy choose to set themselves against the
tide of popular opinion, and out of a kind of spiritual and inteDectual
pride misread facts which are plain to less sophisticated souls.
Such views are middle-class rather than popular ; and they are
found, not among those who are bearing the burden of the contest,
but in the small minority who even in war contrive to lead a
sheltered life.

But if there was no weakening in purpose, the country, as the
third year of war drew to a close, was suffering beyond doubt from

* " The Bloodmen are a people that have their name derived from the malignity
of their nature, and from the fury that is in them to execute it upon the town of
Mansoul. . . . These people are always in league with the Doubters, for they jointly
do make question of the faith and fidelity of the men of the town of Mansoul."—
Bunyan's Holy War.

1917] THE MIDDLE CLASSES. 415

a high degree of war weariness. The revulsion from the hope of
an early and dramatic close had plunged many into a dogged apathy.
The losses on the Somme had been felt in every class, and very
especially in those classes which had small military knowledge and
could not view the campaign in a true perspective. It was remarked
that in certain districts the temper of the people seemed to have
lost its edge. They were resolute to go on to the end, but they had
ceased to envisage that end, and were like a man towards the close
of a day's journey who dully places one foot behind another with-
out the sanguine enterprise of the morning hours. Workmen were
weary with the strain of three years' overwork, and all were dazed
with the long anxiety. The effect of staleness, which was to be
noticed among troops who had been kept too long in the firing-
line, was beginning to appear among the civilian population at
home. It is the lesson of all wars : the stronger military force
will win pourvu que les civils tiennent. But what had been an
academic postulate in the early days of the campaign was now
revealed as a most vital truth. The nation was determined to
hold, but it realized that the endeavour might bring it very near
to the limits of its strength.

The class which suffered most was the least vocal. In a struggle
which called forth the best from all conditions of life it would be
idle to compute degrees of sacrifice ; but if one class were to be
singled out as especially heroic, it would be what is commonly called
the " lower middle " — the minor walks of commerce and the
professions. A young man of the upper classes had, as a rule, a
comfortable background behind him. The workman had his
trade or craft to return to, and his separation allowance was
generally sufficient to support his family in the mode of livelihood
to which they had been accustomed. But take the man who
had built up a little business by his own efforts, or had just won a
footing in one of the professions. When he enlisted, he sacrificed
all the results of his past toil ; if he survived, he would have to
start again from the beginning. The little shop or business was
closed down, his professional chances disappeared. No separation
allowance, no pay as a second-lieutenant, could keep up his home
on the old scale of modest respectability. It was from this class,
it should be remembered, that the bulk of the officers of the New
Armies were drawn. For it there was no chance of exemption,
for its work was not regarded as of national importance. It had
no trade union to watch its interests, and no popular press to
expound its hardships. But of all the many sacrifices to which

416 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.-March

the nation was called it bore the heaviest share. It was a melan-
choly experience to walk through the fringes of an industrial town.
In the artisan area life seemed to be going on as before. The
streets in the daytime were full of women and children, and in the
evening the fathers of families came back from work as in the times
of peace. But in the " residential " quarters, where the rows of
small villas housed the clerk, the shopkeeper, and the minor pro-
fessions, every second house was closed. A section of society,
which above all others prided itself on the little platform it had
won in the struggle for life, saw its foundations destroyed.

The position of Labour during the early part of 1917 was to
some small extent influenced by the Russian Revolution. War
is a time when the whole world acquires a new sensitiveness, and
the cataclysm in Russia made itself felt in remote quarters, as a
great storm at sea will affect peaceful backwaters far up a tidal
river. There were stirrings and questionings abroad which did
not formulate themselves in any revolutionary creed, but gave a
special edge to the existing labour difficulties. Continual minor
disputes and occasional strikes were proof of a real unsettlement ;
but it was too often assumed that this was mainly due to a
gang of unpatriotic agitators. Agitators there were who, taking
advantage of the absence of responsible leaders, preached the
cruder doctrines of syndicalism and the class war, and had a fair
field owing to the fact that the Government did not organize
counter propaganda. The ordinary Briton was accustomed to a
good deal of public speaking ; but the war had dried up the usual
founts of political oratory, and the extremist was left to provide
most of the talking. But the influence of the firebrand was strictly
limited. The real cause of unrest — apart from the inevitable war
weariness — was to be found in certain specific grievances and
discontents. It is important to recognize that Labour had a good
case, and did not make trouble out of mere selfish perversity.

The old charter of Trade Union rights had been abrogated
during the war with the consent of the Unions. It was too often
forgotten what this sacrifice entailed. In other countries less
highly industrialized than Britain the land had remained as the
sheet-anchor of the peasant. But in industrial Britain the work-
man was cut off from his ancient natural security, and had to seek
an artificial defence. This he found in the rules of his Union,
without which he was an economic waif unable to bargain on a
fair basis. Hence he regarded any infringement of his Union
rules as a weakening of the safeguards essential to his very ex-

1917] DIFFICULTIES WITH THE TRADE UNIONS. 417

istence. He consented to drastic alterations on the understanding
that they were purely war measures ; but he was naturally jealous
that the plea of military necessity should not be used to impair
his ultimate rights, of which he stood as the trustee not only for
himself but for his kinsmen in the trenches. Anything which
seemed to point to a delay in the restitution of his old status after
the war made him acutely uneasy ; and his suspicion was not
lessened by foolish talk on the part of some employers about a
complete revision of the industrial system involving the repeal of
the Factory Acts and the Trade Disputes Act. It seemed to
him that in defending his rights, as he conceived them, he was
resisting Prussianism as much as the troops in the field. But in
time of war, when new urgencies appeared with each day, it was
hard for a Government to keep the strict letter of a contract with
Labour. The British workman was not unreasonable, and when
a fresh necessity was made clear to him he would usually accept
it. But unfortunately the war had largely deprived him of the
services of the men who might have done the explaining. His old
leaders had been for the most part absorbed into the Government,
and in the stress of heavy executive duties were unable to keep in
close touch with their followers. Moreover, the mere sight of them
as part of the official machine caused them to be regarded with a
certain suspicion. The consequence was that a new type of leader
came into prominence — younger and less responsible men, who took
a stand not only against the Government but against the proper
Trade Union officials. Of such a type were the shop stewards in
the engineering trades. Originally they had been merely agents
of the district committees ; but, since they were the only Union
officials left in intimate contact with the men, they acquired new
powers, and became the spokesmen of the workers not only against
the State but against the Union executives. The strike of the
engineers in May was organized in defiance of their Union by a
self-elected committee of shop stewards. Finally, there was a
very general suspicion of " profiteering." The men objected to
sacrifice their Union rules in order, as they saw it, to swell the
profits of private employers ; and they bore with impatience the
high cost of living, because they suspected that private monop-
olies and corners played as large a part in producing it as the
dislocation of war.

In handling this difficult situation the Government made fre-
quent mistakes. The whole State organization was overworked,
and there were many departmental delays in starting the agreed

418 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

machinery, and especially in adjudicating on differences between
employers and employed. But the main sources of trouble in the
May strikes were the withdrawal of the trade card scheme and the
extension of dilution to private work. These two points demand
a short explanation, for they were typical of the kind of disputes
which, without discredit to both sides, were bound to arise. In
order to prevent the confusion of work from the sudden calling up
of skilled men, and to get rid of the suspicion that an employer
could punish a man he disliked by declaring him no longer in-
dispensable, the trade card scheme was approved in November
1916, under which every member of an engineering union was
absolutely exempted from military service. It was obviously a
bad arrangement, for it was hard to see why exemption should be
based on membership of a particular Union and not on national
utility ; and other Unions, not thus protected, viewed the scheme
with suspicion. When, early in 1917, the Army authorities began
to press for more men, the Government, instead of trying to nego-
tiate a fresh agreement, simply announced that the trade card
scheme would terminate as from 1st May. The " dilution "
question was even more delicate. The principle of dilution in
munition work — which, be it remembered, involved the most
sacred principle of the craft Unions — had been accepted by
Labour in 1915, on the understanding that no dilution should be
enforced in work other than war work. But the necessities of the
Army, and the importance at the same time of keeping private
industry alive, caused the Government to bethink itself of dilution
in private work. In November 1916 it came to an arrangement
with most of the Unions, but not with the engineers. Nevertheless
it introduced the Munitions of War Bill, 1917, to give the Ministry
of Munitions power " to carry into effect a scheme of dilution of
skilled labour by the introduction of less skilled labour (both
male and female) upon private work."

The result of these measures was that Labour did not know
where it stood. Explicit pledges had been violated, and the ex-
planations did not harmonize. The Ministry of Munitions declared
that it only wanted to spread skilled men more evenly over the
whole industrial system, and not to take them for the Army ;
but the military authorities made no secret of the fact that they
expected to get large drafts from the engineering trades. There
was the further grievance that the Chancellor of the Exchequer
proposed to abolish the limitations originally placed on the profits
of controlled establishments, and leave the employers subject only

1917J THE MAY STRIKES. 419

to the Excess Profits Tax. The result of this atmosphere of sus-
picion was the outbreak of trouble in May in some thirty muni-
tion areas in defiance of the executives of the Unions. A quarter
of a million men were affected, and the arrest of the chief strike
leaders did not improve the situation. Ultimately the men were
released, and an arrangement was reached with the strikers under
which the Government made important concessions as to the ob-
noxious legislation which they had contemplated.

Incidents such as this showed the difficulties which attended
co-operation between a Government, forced constantly by new
needs into new measures, and Labour, suspicious of the intentions
of the State, out of touch with its experienced leaders, and pro-
foundly anxious about the future fate of those rights which it had
temporarily surrendered. It may be doubted whether the making
of a strike a punishable offence under the first Munitions of War
Act in July 19 15 was a wise step, for it deprived unrest of a natural
outlet, and caused doubts to brood like mosquitoes on stagnant
water. Yet, when all has been said, overt discontent was the ex-
ception and not the rule. There was no sounder patriotism or
stauncher resolution anywhere in the Allied nations than among
the workers of Britain. When we remember the strain and mo-
notony of their toil, the innumerable grounds for suspicion open
to them, and the blunders in tactics made, sometimes avoidably
and sometimes unavoidably, by the Government, we may well
conclude that the chief characteristic of British Labour during
the war was not petulant unrest, but an amazing stamina and
patience.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

THE BREAKING OF AMERICA'S PATIENCE.
January 22-ApHl 6, 1917.

Effect on America of Germany's new Submarine Policy — Diplomatic Relations
suspended — American Merchant Ships armed — The special Session of Congress
— Mr. Wilson's Message — America declares War.

In earlier chapters we have examined the stages in the ripening
of American opinion against the aims and methods of the Teutonic
League. It was a slow process, for the great republic had a long
road to travel from her historic isolation to the point of junction
with the Allies in Europe. She had started with three principles
which had always been the foundation of her policy. The first
was the doctrine of Washington and Monroe — that she would not
interfere in European disputes or entangle herself in any foreign
alliance, and that her one external interest was to keep the New
World free from foreign aggression. The second was that she would
persistently labour to secure such a maritime code as would ensure
to the whole world the freedom of the seas. For this purpose she
had assisted Britain to clear out the Barbary pirates, and, save
during the stress of her Civil War, she had leaned towards the
doctrine of the inviolability of private property at sea, a generous
free list, and a narrow definition of contraband. The third was
an endeavour to substitute a judicial for a military settlement of
disputes between nations. These principles of policy were very
dear to her, and to a desire to safeguard them she added the hope
that, if she could keep aloof from the war in Europe, she might be
in a position at its close to take the lead in rebuilding a ruined
world and healing the wounds of the nations.

But the American people were of Cromwell's opinion that
" it is necessary at all times to look at facts." Slowly and with
bitter disappointment they learned that isolation was not feasible ;
that there could be no freedom at sea unless they did their share

420

igiy] AMERICA'S DISILLUSIONMENT. 421

in winning freedom on land ; that right instead of might could
not be set on the throne of the earth unless they were willing to
restrain the Power that worshipped force ; that they could not
bind up the wounds of the world until they compelled the op-
pressor to sheathe the sword. It was not always easy for the Allies
to watch with patience the progress of this gradual disillusionment ;
it was so very gradual, apparently so blind to actualities, so much
in love with the technicalities of a law which had been long since
shattered. But the wiser statesmen in Europe saw that, behind
the academic decorum of America, the forces of enlightenment
were at work, and they possessed their souls in patience. For
with a strong people a slow change is a sure change.

The initial atrocities in Belgium and France had induced in
the greater part of the educated class in America the conviction
that Germany was a menace to civilization. But such a conviction
was still far removed from the feeling that America was called on
to play an active part in the war. Her pride was first wounded
by Germany's insistence that as a neutral the United States had
no right to trade in munitions with the Allied Powers. The
American view was well stated in the official presentation of
America's case issued after she entered the struggle by the Com-
mittee of Public Information. " If, with all other neutrals, we
refused to sell munitions to belligerents, we could never in time
of a war of our own obtain munitions from neutrals, and the nation
which had accumulated the largest reserves of war supplies in
times of peace would be assured of victory. The militarist state
that invested its money in arsenals would be at a fatal advantage
over a free people that invested its money in schools. To write
into international law that neutrals should not trade in munitions
would be to hand over the world to the rule of the nation with
the largest armament factories." Then came the sinking of the
Lusitania, and the preposterous demand that America should
surrender her right of free travel by sea. Concurrent with the
prevarications and belated apologies of Berlin ran a campaign of
German machination and outrages in the New World. To quote
again from the same document : " In this country official agents
of the Central Powers — protected from a criminal prosecution
by diplomatic immunity — conspired against our internal peace,
placed spies and agents provocateurs throughout the length and
breadth of our land, and even in high positions of trust in depart-
ments of our Government. While expressing a cordial friendship
for the people of the United States, the Government of Germany

422 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.-Feb.

had its agents at work both in Latin America and in Japan.
They bought and subsidized papers and supported speakers there
to arouse feelings of bitterness and distrust against us in those
friendly nations, in order to embroil us in war. They were inciting
to insurrection in Cuba, in Haiti, and in Santo Domingo ; their
hostile hand was stretched out to take the Danish Islands ; and
everywhere in South America they were abroad sowing the seeds
of dissension, trying to stir up one nation against another, and all
against the United States. In their sum these various operations
amounted to direct assault of the Monroe doctrine."

The complicated negotiations between Washington and Berlin
have already been described in these pages. When on May 4,
1916, Germany grudgingly promised that ships should not be sunk
without warning, it seemed as if the controversy was settled.
But meantime two currents of opinion in America had been grow-
ing in volume. One was the desire to make this war the last fought
under the old bad conditions of national isolation, to devise a
League to Enforce Peace, which would police the world on behalf
of international justice. Of such ideals Mr. Wilson was a declared
champion. The second was the conviction that this war was in
very truth America's war ; that the Allies were fighting for Amer-
ica's interests, the greatest of which was the maintenance of
public right. To this creed Mr. Root and Mr. Roosevelt had borne
eloquent testimony. In the light of it the various diplomatic
wrangles with Britain over her naval policy became things of small
moment. " As long as militarism continues to be a serious danger,
peaceful neutral nations, by insisting on the emancipation of
commerce from interference by sea-power, would be adopting a
suicidal policy. . . . The control of commerce in war is now
exercised by Great Britain because she possesses a preponderant
navy. Rather than that control should be emasculated, Great
Britain must be allowed to continue its exercise. ... We are more
than ever sure that this nation does right in accepting the British
blockade and defying the submarine. It does right, because the
war against Britain, France, and Belgium is a war against the
civilization of which we are a part. To be fair in such a war
would be a betrayal." *

The Presidential election in the autumn of 1916 caused public
discussion on the question to languish, but it did not stop the
steady growth of opinion. Then came the revival of German

* These quotations are taken from the American weekly paper, the New Republic,
of August 7, 1915, and February 17, 1917.

igiy] RELATIONS WITH GERMANY SEVERED. 423

submarine activity in the early winter, and the hectoring German
peace proposals, which boasted so loudly of German conquests,
and asked the world to accept them as the basis of all negotiations.
Mr. Wilson, secure in power by his second election, and pledged to
the ideal of a League of Nations, dispatched his own request to
the belligerents to define their aims, for he saw very clearly that
the hour of America's decision was drawing nigh. The interchange
of notes which followed cleared the air, and established the fact
that American and Allied opinion were moving in the same chan-
nels. On 22nd January the President, in an eloquent address to
the Senate, outlined the kind of peace which America could guar-
antee. The area of agreement had been defined, and the essential
difference was soon to leap into blinding clarity. For on 31st
January, as we have seen, Germany tore up all her former promises,
and informed Washington that she was about to enter upon an
unrestricted submarine campaign.

The Rubicon had been reached, and there could be no turning
back. The German Ambassador was handed his passports on
3rd February, and Mr. Gerard summoned from Berlin. On the
same day the President announced to both Houses of Congress
the severance of diplomatic relations with Germany. He showed
by his speeches that he took the step unwillingly. He drew a
distinction between the German people and the German Govern-
ment— the old distinction to which idealists in democratic countries
were apt to cling till facts forced them to relinquish it. He de-
clared that he could not believe that the German Government
meant "to do in fact what they have warned us they feel at
liberty to do," and that only " actual overt acts " would convince
him of their hostile purpose. But he ended with the solemn an-
nouncement that if American ships were sunk and American lives
were lost he would come again to Congress and ask for power to
take the necessary steps for the protection of his people.

The immediate result of the German decree was that American
passenger ships were deterred from sailing for Europe. This
brought the situation home very vividly to the dwellers on the
Eastern states, but had only a remote interest for the inhabitants
of the West and the middle West. At first there was no very
flagrant offence against American shipping, though the Housatonic
was sunk on 3rd February and the Lyman M. Law on 13th Feb-
ruary. But the situation was none the less intolerable, and on
the 26th Mr. Wilson again addressed Congress, pointing out that
Germany had placed a practical embargo on America's shipping.

424 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

and asking for authority to arm her vessels effectually for defence.
What he contemplated was an armed neutrality which should
stop short of war. On ist March the House of Representatives
gave this authority by 403 votes to 13, but in the Senate a similar
vote was held up by a handful of pacificists, and could not be passed
before the session came automatically to an end on 4th March.
Nevertheless an overwhelming majority of the Senate signed a
manifesto in favour of the Bill. Meantime various events had
roused the temper of the country. On 26th February the Laconia
was sunk and eight Americans drowned. On ist March there was
published an order issued on 19th January by Herr Zimmermann,
of the German Foreign Office, to the German Minister in Mexico.
The latter was instructed to form an alliance with Mexico in the
event of war breaking out between Germany and the United
States, and to offer as a bribe the provinces of Texas, Arizona,
and New Mexico. In the same document it was suggested that
efforts might be made to seduce Japan from the Allies and bring
her into partnership with Germany. Such proposals inspired the
deepest resentment in the West and the middle West, where the
submarine atrocities were least realized. There was another con-
sideration which was beginning to impress thoughtful Americans.
Even if she avoided war, America would be forced one day or
another to negotiate a settlement with Germany. Peace would
not come to her automatically on the conclusion of hostilities,
and her position in peace negotiations would depend on how the
war ended. Mr. Wilson realized that his present policy could not
endure. In his inaugural address of 5th March, he said : " We
have been obliged to arm ourselves to make good our claim to a
certain minimum of right and of freedom of action. We stand
firm in armed neutrality, since it seems that in no other way we
can demonstrate what it is we insist upon and cannot forgo. We
may be drawn on by circumstances, not by our own purpose or
desire, to a more active assertion of our rights as we see them, and
a more immediate association with the great struggle itself."

The order for arming merchant ships was issued by the Amer-
ican Government on the 12th of March. A week later came the
" overt acts " of which the President had spoken. On the 16th
the Vigilancia was sunk and five American lives lost. On the
17th the City of Memphis and the Illinois followed suit. On the
21st the Healdton was torpedoed off the Dutch coast and outside
the prohibited zone, and seven Americans perished. On ist April
came the loss of the Aztec, when twenty-eight Americans were

igiy] MR. WILSON'S MESSAGE TO CONGRESS. 425

lost. The defiance was flagrant and unmistakable. The feeling
against Germany rose to fever heat. At last the country was ripe
for the final step. In the words of the official statement : " Judg-
ing the German Government now in the light of our own experience
through the long and patient years of our honest attempt to keep
the peace, we could see the Great Autocracy and read her record
through the war. And we found that record damnable. . . .
With a fanatical faith in the destiny of German kidtur as the system
that must rule the world, the Imperial Government's actions
have through years of boasting, double-dealing, and deceit, tended
towards aggression upon the rights of others. ... Its record . . .
has given not only to the Allies but to liberal peoples throughout
the world the conviction that this menace to human liberties
everywhere must be utterly shorn of its power for harm. For the
evil it has effected has ranged far out of Europe — out upon the
open seas, where its submarines, in defiance of law and the concepts
of humanity, have blown up neutral vessels and covered the waves
with the dead and dying, men and women and children alike.
Its agents have conspired against the peace of neutral nations
everywhere, sowing the seeds of dissension, ceaselessly endeavour-
ing by tortuous methods of deceit, of bribery, false promises, and
intimidation, to stir up brother nations one against the other,
in order that the liberal world might not be able to unite, in order
that the Autocracy might emerge triumphant from the war. All
this we know from our own experience with the Imperial Govern-
ment. As they have dealt with Europe, so they have dealt with
us and with all mankind."

The case against Germany was plain, and an event had occurred
which made an alliance easier with Germany's foes. On 9th
March the Revolution broke out in Petrograd ; by 16th March the
autocracy had fallen and a popular Government ruled in Russia.
The issue was now clear, not as a strife between dynasties, but
as the eternal war of liberty and despotism, and no free people
could be deaf to the call. The special session of Congress was
advanced by a fortnight, and on 2nd April Mr. Wilson asked
it for a declaration of war.

The President's message on that day will rank among the greatest
of America's many famous state documents. Couched in terms of
studious moderation and dignity, it stated not only the case of
America against Germany, but of civilization against barbarism
and popular government against tyranny. He began with an in-
dictment of the submarine campaign, recalling the promise given

426 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

on May 4, 1916, and its complete reversal by the decree of January
31, 1917. " Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their char-
acter, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruth-
lessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of
help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals
along with those of belligerents. Even hospital ships * and ships
carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken peoplf of Bel-
gium, though the latter were provided with safe-conduc* through
the proscribed areas by the German Government itself, and were
distinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have been sunk
with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle.'' Ger-
many had swept away the last fragments of international rights,
and her new warfare was not against commerce only but against
mankind.

He admitted that when he spoke on 26th February he had hope<i
that an armed neutrality would be sufficient to protect his people.
But Germany was resolved to treat the armed guards placed on
merchantmen as mere pirates beyond the pale of law. " Armed
neutrality is ineffectual enough at best ; in such circumstances
and in the face of such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual ;
it is likely only to produce what it is meant to prevent ; it is per-
fectly certain to draw us into war without either the rights or
the effectiveness of belligerents, f There is only one choice we
cannot make, we are incapable of making : we will not choose
the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our
nation to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we
now array ourselves are no common wrongs ; they cut to the very
roots of human life. With a profound sense of the solemn and
even tragical character of the step I am taking, and of the grave
responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience
to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress
declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to
be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people
of the United States."

He outlined the urgent practical requirements. War would
involve the organization and mobilization of all the national

* Notably the Britannic, the Gloucester Castle, and the Asturias (sunk 20th March).
The Belgian relief ships were the Camilla, the Trevier, the Feistein, and the Storstad.

t It had been tried before in American history. In 1798 President John Adams
was empowered by Congress to arm American merchant vessels against French priva-
teers. Several naval engagements took place, and it was clear that America was
moving rapidly towards war. An army was being prepared, under Washington and
Alexander Hamilton, and an alliance sought with England, when Napoleon came
iato power and offered terms which America could accept.

1917] HIS DECISION FOR WAR. 427

resources of the country ; the immediate full equipment of the
navy ; the immediate addition of half a million men to the armed
forces under the principle of universal service, and the authoriza-
tion of further levies as soon as they could be handled. Above
all it involved " the utmost practicable co-operation in counsel
and action with the Governments now at war with Germany,"
and the extension to them of the most liberal financial credits.
The problem was twofold — to prepare America for war, and at
the same time to supply the Allied nations with the materials which
they needed. " They are in the field, and we should help them
in every way to be effective there."

The declaration was complete, explicit, and uncompromising ;
but the President did not end with that. His conclusion raised the
argument to a higher sphere, for he gave expression to the eternal
principles for which America entered the field. He restated his
hope for the establishment of peace based upon the reign of law.
" Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable when the peace of
the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the
menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic
Governments backed by organized force, which is controlled wholly
by their will, not by the will of their people. We have seen the
last of neutrality in such circumstances. We are at the beginning
of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of
conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed
among nations and their governments that are observed among
the individual citizens of civilized states." He had dreamed of a
League of Nations, but there could be no honest friendship with
autocracies. " Self-governing nations do not fill their neighbour
states with spies. . . . Such designs can be successfully worked
out only under cover and where no one has the right to ask ques-
tions. ... A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained
except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic
Government could be trusted to keep faith with it or observe
its covenants. It must be a league of honour, a partnership of
opinion. Intrigues would cut its vitals away ; the plottings of
inner circles who could plan what they would, and render account
to no one, would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only
free people can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a
common end, and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow
interest of their own."

" The world must be made safe for democracy." This phrase
was the keystone of the speech, and it will stand among the dozen

428 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March-April

most celebrated sayings of modern history. Almost in the strain
of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, the message concluded : —

" It is a fearful thing to lead this great and peaceful people into war,
into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself
seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than
peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest
our hearts — for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority
to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties
of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert
of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make
the world itself at last free.

" To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, every-
thing that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those
who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend
her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and
happiness and the peace which she has treasured.

" God helping her, she can do no other."

Under the American Constitution the right to declare war
lay with Congress. The President's message was received with
stormy enthusiasm by the audience which listened to it, and a thrill
of assent ran through the length and breadth of the land. The
debate in the two Houses revealed a preponderant weight of
opinion for war. Senator Stone, the Chairman of the Committee
on Foreign Relations, went into frank opposition, and various
senators attacked the resolution on such grounds as that the war
was a struggle of financiers which did not concern the people at
large, or that the Republic was being made a catspaw by the
reactionary British monarchy. Echoes of anti-British feeling, the
dregs of the romantic views of history once taught in American
schools, were heard throughout the discussion. But the great
issues were eloquently stated by men like Senator Lodge, and
Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi delivered a passionate
protest against the old hack criticism of Britain. On 4th April
the Senate passed the war resolution by 82 votes to 6. Next
day it was introduced in the House of Representatives by Mr.
Flood of Virginia, and the debate which followed showed that
a good deal of confusion still existed among the members. Some
defended it on the broadest lines of world policy and inter-
national right, others took the narrower ground of American
interests. Its critics lamented the end of the Monroe doctrine,
or expressed simply the humanitarian repugnance to bloodshed,
or attacked Britain's naval policy, or revelled in the old spread-

1917] THE DEBATE IN CONGRESS. 429

eagle republicanism. The comedian-patriot was not wanting.
Said one gentleman from Nevada : "All crowned heads look alike
to me, and I do not want to sleep with any of them, whether it be
the Kaiser, the Mikado, John Bull, or the Sultan of Turkey. This
fight is not of our making, and we had better keep out of it. I
do not think Uncle Sam looks good mixed up with any of them.
I want to tell you that every man, woman, and child in the country
would applaud if we would take both John Bull and the Kaiser
and bump their royal noddles together, open up all seas, and
treat them both alike."

The arguments of the opposition were for the most part trivial,
and were easily met by the supporters of the resolution ; but they
proved that a considerable section of the nation, its mental joints
stiffened from two and a half years of neutrality, found some
difficulty in adjusting itself to the new conditions. They were not
quite certain about their new allies, but on the whole they were
certain about their enemies. The speech of Mr. Foss of Illinois
expressed with vigour the predominant attitude towards Germany.
"As a reward for our neutrality what have we received at the
hands of William II. ? He has set the torch of the incendiary to
our factories, our workshops, our ships, and our wharves. He
has laid the bomb of the assassin in our munition plants and the
holds of our ships. He has sought to corrupt our manhood with
a selfish dream of peace when there is no peace. He has wilfully
butchered our citizens on the high seas. He has destroyed our
commerce. He seeks to terrorize us with his devilish policy of
frightfulness. He has violated every canon of international de-
cency, and set at naught every solemn treaty and every precept
of international law. He has plunged the world into the maddest
orgy of blood, rapine, and murder which history records. He has
intrigued against our peace at home and abroad. He seeks to
destroy our civilization. Patience is no longei a virtue, further
endurance is cowardice, submission to Prussian demands is slavery."

On 6th April, by a majority of 373 votes to 50, the House of
Representatives passed the resolution, which ran as follows :
" Whereas the Imperial German Government have committed
repeated acts of war against the Government and the people of
the United States of America : Therefore be it resolved by the
Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of
America in Congress assembled : That a state of war between
the United States and the Imperial German Government which
has been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared ;

430 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

and that the President be, and he is hereby authorized and directed
to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States
and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the
Imperial German Government ; and to bring the conflict to a
successful termination all the resources of the country are hereby
pledged by the Congress of the United States."

The entrance of America into the war on the Allied side meant
an immediate increase of strength in certain vital matters. She
was the greatest workshop on earth, and the high mechanical
talent of her people was invaluable in what was largely a war of
engineers. She had immense wealth to put into the common
stock. She had a powerful fleet, though one somewhat lacking
in the lighter type of vessel which was the chief need of the moment,
and she had a great capacity for shipbuilding. Her army was
small, but its officers were among the most highly trained in the
world, and her reserves of man-power gave her the chance of almost
unlimited expansion. It would be some time before she could
make her potential strength actual, but in the meantime she solved
the worst financial difficulties of the Allies, and her accession made
ultimate victory something more than probable. Like her cousins
of Britain, she was a nation slow to move, but on the path she had
chosen she would walk resolutely to the end of the journey.

Her coming seemed to make victory all but certain, and the right
kind of victory. For she entered upon war not for any parochial
ends, but for the reorganization of the world's life on a sane basis.
Her organic internationalism — the more comprehensive since it was
a reaction against a traditional policy of isolation — was in starker
antagonism to Prussianism than any of the ordinary schemes of
territorial readjustment in Europe. Her motives were a mingling
of the best conclusions which American thought had reached
during the past three years, the dream of a pacific alliance of all
peoples, the recognition that peace could only be won on the basis
of a common freedom, and the desire to reconstitute public right
on a surer foundation than partial treaties. She restated the
ideals which had been at the back of the minds of all the Allies
from the start, but had been somewhat overlaid by the urgent
problems of the hour, and she prepared to give these ideals the
support of the whole of her mighty practical strength.

Mr. Wilson had justified his policy of waiting. The debates
on the declaration of war showed that the public mind of America
was still in some doubt and confusion, and if this were so even at

igiy] MR. WILSON'S ACHIEVEMENT. 431

that late hour, it is probable that the President could not have
secured the national assent he needed at any earlier date. A
different type of leader might by the sheer force of personality
have swung his country into the war in 1915, trusting to facts to
compel unanimity : Mr. Wilson, obeying another code, demanded
an all but universal agreement before he acted. Fortunately the
very districts most averse to war were those where his personal
prestige was greatest. He had played his part with remarkable
skill. He had suffered Germany herself to prepare the American
people for intervention, and Germany had laboured manfully to
that end. He had allowed the spectacle of American powerless-
ness in the titanic struggle to be always before the popular
mind till the people grew uneasy and asked for guidance. He had
shown infinite patience and courtesy, so that no accusation of
petulance or haste could be brought against him. But when the
case was proved and the challenge became gross he struck promptly
and struck hard. If in the eyes of his critics he had not always
stated the issue truly and had shown an easiness of temper which
came perilously near complaisance, it was now clear that he had
had a purpose in it all. As soon as he felt himself strong enough
for action he had not delayed. He had brought the whole nation
into line on a matter which meant the reversal of every traditional
mode of thought ; and when we reflect on the centrifugal tendencies
of American life, and its stout conservatism, we must confess that
such a feat demanded a high order of genius in statecraft.

CHAPTER LXXV.

GERMANY SHORTENS HER WESTERN LINE.
November 16, 1916-April 5, 1917.

The new Hindenburg Positions — Nivelle departs from Joffre's Policy — Haig's
Difficulties — The final Arrangements — The British capture Serre — Beginning
of German Retreat— The New Line and its Pivots.

During the last weeks of the Battle of the Somme British airmen,
scouting far east of Bapaume and Peronne, reported a great activity
in front of Cambrai and St. Quentin. Thousands of Russian
prisoners were at work digging trenches on a plan which seemed
to imply the creation of a fresh fortified line. Shortly after,
rumours began to spread in Germany of a new bulwark of the
Fatherland created by the genius of Hindenburg. The successive
defeats on the Somme, and the rapid loss of positions which had
been pronounced impregnable, had induced in the German people
a profound nervousness about the situation in the West. At any
moment it seemed that the defences might crumble, and the German
frontiers lie open to the Allied armies. The magic of Hindenburg's
name was invoked to reassure his people. He had had no part
in the original defences of the West, and took no discredit by
their failure. But if a position were created under his auspices,
that position would stand, for in German eyes failure and Hinden-
burg had never met. The new line was called after the heroes
of Teutonic mythology— Woden, Siegfried, Alberich, Brunehilde,
Kriemhilde — and the legend of it was whispered through Germany
during the winter. The Allies, who followed with interest the
stages in its construction, called it the Hindenburg Line, being well
aware that its main value for Germany lay in its association with
Germany's most popular commander.

The situation in the West demanded a plan, for the Somme
had shaken the German moral to its foundations. It was clear
that a mere defensive battle was not enough ; for to be driven

432

1916] THE HINDENBURG LINE. 433

from crest to crest by the Allied infantry, and pounded day and
night by the Allied guns, would lead presently to a general disaster.
Hindenburg resolved to prepare for an offensive in the spring, and
for this purpose accumulated a strategic reserve which presently
mounted to upwards of fifty divisions. He was aware that the
Allies would advance as soon as the soil dried after the winter,
and he proposed to yield ground which was no longer tenable, and
fall back upon a position of his own choosing, where he might
compel them to fight at a disadvantage. His argument was not
without reason. The Allies in advancing would be moving over
a country devastated by war, and every yard of their progress
would be slow and difficult. The German retreat would be by
good roads and railways in a terrain with which they were minutely
familiar, and to a halting-place which had been laboriously pre-
pared. The odds were that in such a situation an opportunity
would be found to strike a counter-blow with the chances in Ger-
many's favour. A frontal offensive like the Battle of the Somme
was not possible for Hindenburg, with his inferiority in guns and
— even after all his recruiting efforts — in numbers of men.* His
one hope was some ruse where advantage could be taken of a
long-prepared position and the difficulties of an enemy advan-
cing across an old battlefield. But if he were to succeed, the
retreat must be meticulously planned and methodically exe-
cuted. No area must be ceded to force instead of strategy ; for,
if the withdrawal at any point were hustled, the whole pro-
gramme would fall to pieces, and a counter- stroke would become
impossible.!

When, in the third week of November 1916, the larger opera-
tions on the Ancre came to an end, the condition of the German
line was not enviable. From the Butte de Warlencourt to the
river Somme they had fairly good positions, though in most parts
at the mercy of our observation from the higher ground. But to
the north the salient which had its apex on the spur above Beau-
mont Hamel was exposed to constant danger from the British
movement in the Ancre valley, where every fresh advance led to
a more awkward enfilading, and laid bare to our view the rear of
the defences at Serre and Gommecourt. To increase this awk-
wardness was obviously the British winter task. It could be done
with small expenditure of men in the short spells of fine weather.

* The Allies at the moment had a superiority in the West of between thirty and
forty divisions.

t The arrangements for the retreat were notified to the commanders as early a9
November 22, 1916. — O. von Moser, Feldzugsaufzeichnungen, 1914-18.

434 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.-Dec.

But in the meantime preparation must be made for the great spring
offensive. On 16th November Haig and Joffre had met at Chan-
tilly, and concerted a plan for 19 17. The main principles were
that the pressure in the West was to be kept up throughout the
winter, and that the Allied armies were to be prepared for an
offensive by the middle of February. On 27th November Joffre
issued more explicit instructions. By 1st February the British
armies were to be ready to attack between Bapaume and the Vimy
ridge, and the French northern group, under Franchet d'Esperey,
between the Oise and the Somme. Within a fortnight the French
central group was to attack on the Aisne. When the enemy had
been weakened by this arpeggio of assault, it was Haig's intention
to turn to Flanders, and there finish the operations of the summer
— and, it might be, of the war.

For these projects extensive preparations must be made. The
troops which had been so sorely tried in the past five months
must be rested and brought up to strength ; new divisions must
be trained, and the vast educational system continued under
which the whole British hinterland had become a staff college.
Above all, the communications must be perfected for the coming
advance. We have seen how in October the incessant rain had
played havoc with the roads in the Somme area. A hard winter
would complete their ruin unless the whole system of routes were
re-formed. Light railways must be constructed on a colossal scale,
to ease the strain on the main highways and set the weather at
defiance. " The task of obtaining the amount of railway material
to meet the demands of our armies," wrote Sir Douglas Haig in
his dispatch, " and of carrying out the work of construction at
the rate rendered necessary by our plans, in addition to providing
labour and materials for the necessary repair of roads, was one
of the very greatest difficulty." It was, indeed, the key of the
whole situation. The railway companies in Britain and Canada
loyally co-operated, giving up locomotives and rolling stock, and
even tearing up tracks to provide the necessary rails.

The Somme, as we now know from the enemy's confession, had
struck a blow at his strength far deadlier than at the time the
world recognized. To the civilian Governments of France and
Britain the long battle had seemed but a moderate success, won
at a prodigious cost of life, and only to one or two of the fighting
commanders was the truth revealed. It is probable that, had the
pressure been kept high and the Chantilly plan put into effect in
early February, before the enemy could perfect his arrangements

I9i6] NIVELLE'S CHANGE OF PLAN. 435

for retreat, and long before he could draw any advantage from
the chaos soon to reign in Russia, the summer of 1917 would
have seen the victory of the Allies. But the fates willed other-
wise, and their main instruments were the French politicians.
For long it had been becoming clear to Joffre that France could
not permanently sustain the chief offensive ; that the depletion
of her man-power made it desirable that she should gradually
entrust the main attack to the rapidly growing British armies.
In such a renunciation there could be no loss of honour ; she had
drawn all the spears to her breast in the first years of war, and
might reasonably leave it to others to complete that which she
had so nobly instituted. Joffre saw, too, the practical difficulty
of calling upon the British armies at one and the same time to
act on the defensive and the offensive — to increase the length of
their front and also to carry out ambitious attacks. His views
were not shared, however, by certain powerful groups in politics.
These feared that France, who had already suffered so much,
would miss the glory of the final blow. They held that her strength
was still sufficient to deal that blow, but that some method must
be found less banal, slow, and costly than the tactics of the Somme.
Joffre was an old man, set firm in a groove ; let some new leader
be chosen, with youth and genius on his side, to break through the
miasmic tradition of limited objectives, advances measured by
inches, and battles spun out to half a year. This view prevailed ;
on 16th December Joffre was shelved by promotion, and Nivelle
became Commander-in-Chief.

Nivelle's policy, his difficulties, and the grave crisis which
ensued in the French army belong to a later chapter. Here we
are concerned only with the effect of his appointment on the British
command. The Chantilly plan was at once dropped. On 21st
December the new French Generalissimo informed Haig that there
would be two preparatory attacks, as arranged at Chantilly, but
on much shorter fronts, and that the main operation would be an
attempt to break through on the Aisne by twenty-seven French
divisions. To obtain these divisions he requested Haig to extend
the British line south of the Somme as far as the Amiens-Roye
road. This completely altered the British plan. The extension
of his front prevented Haig from exercising upon the enemy the
close pressure he had intended, and the postponement of the attack
by a matter of at least six weeks seemed to give that enemy a
chance to recover and so undo the effect of the Somme battle.
It was true that there would be ample compensation if Nivelle's

436 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.-Feb.

great enterprise succeeded, and in twenty-four hours, as he promised,
he had captured the enemy's heavy guns.

Meantime Mr. Lloyd George had become Prime Minister of
Britain, and he had as little love for the Somme tactics as had
the critics of Joffre. Moreover, his mental vitality made him
adventure gaily on the most expert domains, and he was prepared
to theorize about the conduct of war and to enforce his theories.
On January 5, 1917, he attended a conference at Rome, and de-
lighted Cadorna by a proposal to give him the British and French
reserves, and finish the war by pushing through the Julian Alps
to Laibach and Vienna. But apart from the Italian General Staff
he could get no soldier to support this scheme, and Nivelle was
openly scornful. On his way home Mr. Lloyd George heard of
Nivelle's plan — limitless objectives, the end of trench fighting,
victory within two days — and naturally fell in love with it. On
15th January the French Commander-in-Chief explained his con-
ception to the British War Cabinet, and though Haig and Robert-
son were sceptical of its success, as were Petain and nearly all the
French generals, the British Government, like the French, were
prepared to take the risk. The latter proposed that Haig should
be put under the orders of Nivelle. Mr. Lloyd George agreed, and
on 26th February a conference was held at Calais to negotiate the
details. The first French suggestion was for an " amalgam " of
the two commands — a French generalissimo, a British chief of
staff, and a mixed headquarters staff, with French control not
only of strategy, but of the distribution and supply of the British
troops. The ultimate decision was that during the period of the
coming operations Haig should conform to Nivelle's general
strategy, but should be free to choose his own method; any
serious difference between the two was to be reported to the
War Cabinet.

Such an arrangement had little to recommend it. It was not
a unified command ; it was the placing of one army in subordina-
tion to another, and yet not in complete subordination, for Haig
could not rid himself of his responsibility to his own Government,
and the British War Cabinet reserved the right to interfere. Diffi-
culties were not slow in revealing themselves. On 27th February
Nivelle instructed Haig to attack towards Cambrai, which meant
that the British commander would entangle himself in a pocket
of the new Siegfried system, instead of destroying its pivot at
Vimy. Nivelle refused to believe in a German retreat, though it
had already begun with the loss of the Miraumont heights ; as late

1917] HAIG AND NIVELLE 437

as 4th March we find him informing Franchet d'Esperey, who sent
him a memorandum on the subject, that the Germans would never
voluntarily abandon a front which was a direct menace to Paris.
Haig rightly protested against his instructions, and after an anxious
controversy, carried his point at the London conference of 13th
March. It was arranged that his attack, when it came, should
be in the Arras-Vimy section, and should have a general direction
towards Douai rather than Cambrai.

Such is a summary of the confused preliminaries of the 1917
offensive. It is important to keep them in mind if we would
appreciate the difficulties which faced Haig and Franchet d'Esperey,
and the good fortune which saved the enemy from a position of
infinite peril. The change of plan in December nullified the chief
results of the Somme battle. The close contact with the enemy,
necessary to pin him down to a bad line, was lost while Haig was
occupied with taking over fresh miles of front and Franchet d'Es-
perey with labouring to compile Nivelle's reserve. The postpone-
ment of the main attack from February to April gave the Germans
the margin for refitment and rest which made all the difference.
The civilian Governments of both France and Britain chose to
regard the Somme as a failure, and, ignorant of the mercies vouch-
safed to them, declined to reap the fruits of an indisputable success.
Nivelle offered a brilliant gamble ; but in accepting it they rejected
a sober and certain victory. The French debacle of May, the
horrors of Third Ypres, Caporetto, the final downfall of Russia, the
1918 retreat from the Somme, the Lys, and the Aisne, may be
regarded as implicit in that fatal decision.

The attack of November 18, 1916, the last phase of the Battle
of the Somme, had brought our line on the left bank of the Ancre
close to the outskirts of Pys and Grandcourt. The German posi-
tion in this area now ran from the spur above Beaumont Hamel
along the ridge north of Beaucourt, and then crossed the Ancre
and enclosed Grandcourt, Miraumont, and Pys. Behind lay a
strong second system, a double line of trenches heavily wired, in
front of Bucquoy and Achiet-le-Petit, Grevillers, and Loupart
Wood to the Albert-Bapaume road, whence it continued south-
east past Le Transloy to Saillisel. This position, which we called
the Le Transloy-Loupart line, was, both from its natural and
artificial defences, immensely strong, scarcely inferior to the
Thiepval-Morval line which we had carried in the autumn.
Behind it, on the far side of the crest, a third line was being con-

438 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Jan.-Feb.

stmcted during November and December covering Rocquigny,
Bapaume, and Ablainzevelle.

December was wet and misty, and with the opening of the new
year came a period of bitter frost, varied by snowstorms, which
tried sorely the endurance of the men in the front trenches. But
in January, in spite of the weather, we began a steady advance.
Our first business was to clear the Beaumont Hamel spur. At
dawn on nth January we carried the crest for nearly a mile east
and north-east of Beaumont Hamel, taking over two hundred
prisoners ; and, after repeated small attacks, by the end of the
month we had won all the spur, had pushed 1,000 yards north of
Beaucourt, and had gained a footing on the southern slopes of the
ridge north-west of Miraumont. Our casualties were light, for the
ground had been magnificently prepared by our artillery, with the
assistance of direct observation from the Thiepval ridge.

Our new position gave us command of the whole western side
of the high ground from Serre to opposite Grandcourt. The next
objective was the top of this ridge. On the night of 3rd February
and the following day we bit into the German second line on a
broad front, and carried our line north of the Ancre to a point
level with the centre of Grandcourt village. This advance made
Grandcourt untenable by the enemy, and on the morning of 6th
February he evacuated the trenches between Grandcourt and
Stuff Redoubt. Next morning we entered the village, and that
night, pushing forward on the right bank of the stream, took Bailies-
court Farm, within 1,000 yards of Miraumont.

Serre had now become an acute salient, and, since we held most
of the hollow which runs north from Beaucourt, it was only a ques-
tion of days till it yielded. On the night of 10th February, after
a sharp struggle, we carried a line of trenches at the southern foot
of Serre Hill. In the two succeeding days we beat off counter-
attacks, and prepared for a more elaborate movement. At Cour-
celette a clearly marked spur ran westward from the Thiepval-
Morval ridge. The northern end of this commanded the approaches
to Pys and Miraumont from the south, and moreover gave observa-
tion over the nest of enemy batteries concealed in the upper Ancre
glen, on whose support the defence of Serre depended. South of
the Ancre this spur was our objective, while north of the stream
we aimed at winning a sunken road on the ridge north-east of
Baillescourt Farm, which would give us command of the western
approaches to Miraumont.

A thaw set in on 16th February, and the night following was

1917] BEGINNING OF GERMAN RETREAT. 439

black as pitch, with a thin mist rising from the sweating earth.
The enemy expected some movement, and about 4.45 a.m. on the
morning of the 17th he opened a heavy barrage, which caught our
troops as they were forming for the attack. In spite of these
drawbacks, our men advanced at 5.45 a.m. with perfect resolu-
tion. North of the stream they won all their objectives, and south
of it, though they fell short of their full goal, they reached a line
within a few hundred yards of Petit Miraumont, the suburb of
Miraumont across the Ancre. Six hundred prisoners were the
result of the day. Next day, the 18th, the enemy counter-attacked
without success, and during the subsequent days we crept to the
summit of the desired ridge. The whole hinterland of Serre and
the whole of the upper Ancre glen were now exposed to our direct
observation, and it was clear that the German position in that
area could not be maintained. Miraumont was the key of Serre ;
Serre was the key of Puisieux-au-Mont and Gommecourt. When
the corner stone is taken from the building the other supports
must totter and fall.

Haig was not mistaken in his forecast. On 21st February our
patrols reported that the trenches before Pys, Miraumont, and
Serre seemed to be empty. That day and the next we pushed
continuously forward, and discovered that the enemy had evacu-
ated all his positions in front of the Le Transloy-Loupart line and
north of the Albert-Bapaume road. By the evening of the 25th
we held the hamlets of Warlencourt-Eaucourt, Pys, Miraumont,
the famous dovecot at Beauregard, and the ruins of Serre. The
last gain brought satisfaction to the many thousands who on 1st
July, and again in November in the preceding year, had struggled
in vain against its honeycombed ridges and its forest of wire. Our
advance had few casualties and little opposition. The withdrawal
had been skilfully managed, but it had all the chances on its side.
In the words of the official dispatch, " The enemy's retirement at
this juncture was greatly favoured by the weather. The pro-
longed period of exceptional frost, following on a wet autumn,
had frozen the ground to a great depth. When the thaw com-
menced, in the third week of February, the roads, disintegrated
by the frost, broke up, the sides of the trenches fell in, and the
area through which our troops had fought their way forward
returned to a condition of slough and quagmire even worse than
that of the previous autumn. On the other hand, the condition of
the roads and the surface of the ground behind the enemy steadily
improved the farther he withdrew from the scene of the fighting."

440 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

The position now was that north of the Albert-Bapaume road
we were face to face with the main Le Transloy-Loupart line, but
that south of the road we had still to carry an intermediate posi-
tion, running from a point in the Le Transloy line west of the village
of Beaulencourt, in front of Ligny-Thilloy and Le Barque, to the
south end of Loupart Wood. During the last week of February
we gradually ate our way into this position, and by the evening
of 2nd March had won Le Barque, Ligny-Thilloy, and Thilloy, and
were within 2,000 yards of Bapaume itself. North of the Ancre
by that date we had entered Puisieux-au-Mont, and held Gomme-
court village, with its park and chateau. Only Irles remained,
now the point of a sharp salient linked up to Loupart Wood and
Achiet-le-Petit by strong trench lines. It took us a week to make
routes through the wilderness, and during our road-making we had
to keep in constant touch with the enemy by raids and small
outpost attacks. On 10th March we were ready, and at 5.25 that
morning we captured Irles, taking numerous machine guns and
trench mortars, and considerably more prisoners than our total
number of casualties.

By now there were signs that the time had ripened for the greater
withdrawal which Hindenburg had long contemplated. Haig had
met Nivelle's request to take over a larger part of the front, and
by 26th February had extended as far south as Roye, so that the
British line in the West was now no miles long. This gave us
a long and most intricate front to watch, and the two armies in
the centre area — the Fifth, under Sir Herbert Gough, north of the
Albert-Bapaume road ; and the Fourth, under Sir Henry Raw-
linson, to the south of it — had a task which tried to the utmost
their capacities. The Germans were in an awkward salient between
Arras and Le Transloy, and they were in a position scarcely less
difficult in the greater salient between Arras and the Aisne. To
cut off the former meant a withdrawal to the line on the eastern
side of the Bapaume ridge running from Rocquigny, 300 yards
east of Le Transloy, through Bapaume to Ablainzevelle, 3,000
yards north-east of Bucquoy. It meant the surrender of the Le
Transloy-Loupart line, and the retirement to the last of the pre-
pared positions of which we were cognisant in the Somme area.
To cut off the larger salient involved a far greater retirement — a
retirement to the Siegfried Line itself, which branched off from
the old position near Arras, ran south-eastward for twelve miles
to Queant, and then passed west of Cambrai and St. Quentin and
La Fere to the heights of the Aisne. By the beginning of the

igiy] BAPAUME OCCUPIED. 441

second week of March the Allies were conscious of a general move-
ment in the enemy lines everywhere between the Aisne and Arras.
For the Germans to carry out their programme it was necessary
first to extricate themselves from the local Bapaume salient. There
they held one of the strongest positions on the whole Western front,
and it was intended to yield it by slow degrees while preparations
for withdrawal were completed in other areas.

But the British advance was speedier than the enemy foresaw.
Especially, in spite of the tortured ground, the guns had been
brought forward with surprising celerity, and roads prepared for
the ammunition supply. On nth March our artillery opened
against the Le Transloy-Loupart line, and in two days the enemy
had been shelled out of it, and driven back upon his last position.
This was not according to his programme. Grevillers and Loupart
Wood were now ours, and we lost no time in pressing the bombard-
ment of the final line. The event dislocated the German plan,
and hustled a retreat which had been meant to be more orderly
and leisured. On 14th March our patrols found the German first
line empty at St. Pierre Vaast Wood. Cautiously pushing forward,
we held the whole of that wood and the western half of Moislains
Wood by the evening of 16th March. Meantime we had discovered
that the enemy front south of the Somme was becoming fluid. It
had grown very thin, and seemed to be held mainly by rearguards
with machine guns. The time had come for a general pressure
along the whole front. Hitherto the fighting had been almost
exclusively in the British area. The advance was now to spread
from the Scheldt to the Aisne.

On the morning of 17th March the Allied commanders, French
and British, ordered a general forward movement on a front of
forty-five miles. The movement was, indeed, greater, for it em-
braced virtually the whole line from Arras to north of Soissons —
seventy miles as the crow flies, well over one hundred if the sinu-
osities of the front trenches were followed. There was no serious
resistance. Rearguards had been left in places like Chaulnes,
Government Farm between the woods of St. Pierre Vaast and Vaux,
Bapaume, and Achiet-le-Grand ; but they were no more than
rearguards, and were easily pushed back, leaving a track of flam-
ing villages. That night the Australians of the British Fifth Army
were in Bapaume, and advanced troops of the Fourth Army were
in Chaulnes. The French Sixth Army entered Roye, where they
found some hundred civilians whom the enemy had had no time
to remove, and south-east of the town reached the Roye-Lassigny

442 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

road. Next day, the i8th, British and French cavalry met in
the streets of Nesle. Rawlinson entered Peronne at seven that
morning, and south of the town forced his way up to the bank
of the Somme. By ten in the evening our engineers had partly
repaired the bridge at Brie, and our vanguards were over the river.

The next few days revealed to our soldiers some of the most
surprising sights of the campaign. With the crossing of the
Beugny-Ytres line on 18th March they were beyond the old tor-
tured battlefield, with its infinite ramification of trenches. Hence-
forward, up to the new Siegfried Line, there was open country.
The fields were not pitted with shell-holes ; the trees were not
splintered into matchwood ; the villages had not been levelled by
the Allied artillery. But the enemy himself in falling back had
made a great destruction. Some of his doings were no doubt
justifiable on military grounds. He was within his rights in
destroying roads, in mining certain areas, in levelling buildings
which might give billets to the Allies, in cutting down woods
which could afford cover. Such is the ugly business of war ; such
it has been from the beginning of time. But war among civilized
folk has always had its decencies, and no rag of them remained to
cover the nakedness of German barbarism. Around the villages
were often little orchards of immature fruit-trees which could
not have offered shelter to a rat. Every one of these had been
methodically killed.* Every house in town and hamlet had been
looted of all goods that could be removed, and what could not be
taken away had been smashed up or defiled. Churches had been
ruthlessly violated. Graves had been broken open and plundered.
Wells had been fouled. Sacred symbols had been defaced.

And in these deeds Germany gloried. Shameless details were
published in her press as examples of how masterly and orderly
had been the retreat, and how thorough-going were German
methods. On a wall in one ruined town some apologist had
written, " Do not rage at these things ; only wonder." The on-
coming Allies wondered, and they did not rage ; their loathing
was too deep a thing for the honest passion of anger. When the
French cavalry cantered into some village and saw the thin faces
of their fellow-citizens, lit now with a new hope but bearing terrible

* " When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take
it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by wielding an axe against them ; for
thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down ; for is the tree of the
field man, that it should be besieged of thee ? Only the trees which thou knowest
that they be not trees for meat, thou shalt destroy and cut them down " (Deut. xx.
19, 20).

i9i7] GERMAN OUTRAGES. 443

marks of ravage and suffering, they said nothing. No more did
the British soldier, when he found a peasant groping blindly among
the wanton ruins of his cottage for some of his pitiful little treas-
ures, now in some German haversack. The thing was beyond
words. They recognized by his mark the evil thing which they
were pledged to destroy ; and the knowledge, long possessed but
now a thousandfold increased, was shown only in their eagerness
to get to grips again. Their wrath found vent in superhuman
labour to restore the roads so that the guns could come forward,
for the guns were the only argument to deal with savagery. Like
the sack of Belgium, the German retreat in the West emphasized
that in the Allied purpose which was penal and retributive. On
the last day of March M. Viviani in the French Senate spoke the
mind of his countrymen. " These acts of murder and rapine and
pillage are not merely an outrage on international law and honour.
They constitute crimes dealt with in the penal code of all civilized
countries. In order to prepare the verdict of history these crimes
must be placed on record adequately and accurately. We shall
fight until victory be gained, for it is on it alone that chastisement
depends." *

During those days the Allies had literally to grope their way
forward. They were advancing, over country in which all means
of communication had been destroyed, against an enemy whose
armies were still intact. Strong detachments of his infantry and
cavalry occupied points of advantage along the line of advance ;
his guns, which had been withdrawn to prepared positions, were
available at any moment to cover and support a sudden counter-
stroke, while the broken country made the progress of the Allied
artillery slow. He had a most formidable defensive system, upon
which he could fall back should his counter-stroke miss its aim ;
while the Allies, as they moved forward, left prepared defences
farther and farther behind them. The position craved wary walk-
ing, and those were anxious days for the Allied High Commands.
Their cavalry felt their way gingerly through a country full of
unknown perils. The infantry behind them prepared, as they
advanced, successive lines of resistance in the event of a counter-
attack. Behind them, again, the engineers and labour battalions
did wonderful work in restoring roads and bridges and pushing

* Mangin's verdict is worth quoting : " Consacrer une grande quantite d'ex-
plosifs a faire sauter des mines imposantes, et une main-d'aeuvre considerable a
raser tous les arbres fruitiers, c'est le fait d'une sauvagerie perfectionnee." — Comment
finit la Guerre, p. 117.

444 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March-April

on light railways, so that presently the difficulties of the old battle-
field were conquered. The retreat of the Germans was, all things
considered, a brilliant performance ; but scarcely less brilliant
was the work of the Allies, which nipped in the bud the counter-
stroke that had been one object of that retreat.

To continue the chronicle of events. On the evening of 19th
March the British held the line of the Somme from Canizy to
Peronne, with outposts across the river, while northward their
front ran from Beaurains, just south of Arras, by St. Leger and Velu
to Barastre. The French were moving towards Ham, and had
entered Noyon, in the Oise valley. Between the Oise and the Aisne
they had occupied the old German front line, and had taken Crouy,
on the plateau north of Soissons. On the 20th the British were
fairly across the Somme by the new bridge at Brie, which had to
be carried across both the river and the canal,* while the French
were in Guiscard and east of Ham. The British advance was now
reaching its limits in the north, for we were within a mile or two of
the Siegfried Line, which entered the old German front-line system
of Tilloy-lez-Mofflaines. On the 21st we took Beaumetz, and had
to rebut five attempts to recover it, for the enemy's resistance was
hardening as he drew near his prepared position. The French
on that day had pushed as far as Roupy, only five miles from St.
Quentin ; had reached Tergnier, and crossed the St. Quentin
Canal ; and, south of Chauny, were on the line of the Ailette.
But though each day saw some gain, the progress was slower, and
the enemy had to be forced out of each outpost. Those days saw
some brilliant cavalry work. On 27th March a single British
squadron drove the enemy from Villers-Faucon and its neighbouring
villages, taking twenty-three prisoners and four machine guns.
So at Equancourt and Longarvesnes, where the Germans did not
await the charge of a handful of our horsemen.

At the beginning of April the British were close up against
the Siegfried Line from Beaurains to Doignies, and lay south by
Epehy and Jeancourt to near Selency, a few miles north-west of

* The magnitude of this performance may be judged from the official account : —
" Six gaps had to be bridged across the canal and river, some of them of con-
siderable width and over a swift-flowing stream. The work was commenced on the
morning of the 18th March, and was carried out night and day in three stages. By
10 p.m. on the same day footbridges for infantry had been completed. Medium
type bridges for horse transport and cavalry were completed by 5 a.m. on the 20th
March, and by 2 p.m. on the 21st March, or three and a half days after they had
been begun, heavy bridges capable of taking all forms of traffic had taken the place
of the lighter type. Medium type variation bridges were constructed as the heavy
bridges were begun, so that, from the time the first bridges were thrown across the
river, traffic was practically continuous."

THE NEW FRONT IN THE
WEST.

I

W3H

.T33W

>v

1917] THE NEW ALLIED FRONT. 445

St. Quentin, at which point they again touched the German pre-
pared position. The French were within a mile or two of La
Fere. On 1st April the British, after a sharp fight, took the village
of Savy, which gave them a prospect of St. Quentin, and next day
drove the Germans from Savy Wood. During the following days,
in spite of frequent counter-attacks, they pushed north of the wood
between the St. Quentin -Cambrai railway and the Crozat Canal,
which links the Scheldt and the Somme. They took half a dozen
villages on the western skirts of St. Quentin, and established them-
selves within two miles of the town. Farther north they carried
the line of fortified villages, the outposts of the Siegfried Line,
stretching from Doignies to Croisilles. There now only remained
the advanced position between Doignies and Selency, and on the
4th and 5th of April, in bitter, snowy weather, they took the
villages of Roussoy, Lempere, and Metz-en-Couture, and pushed
into the outskirts of Havrincourt Wood. Meantime the French
were moving towards the Oise north of La Fere, advancing on the
outworks of the St. Gobain plateau, between the Oise and the
Ailette, and south of the latter stream moving along the ridge
north of the Aisne. On the 3rd, in the first area, they took the
villages of Dallon, Giffecourt, and Cerizy, and in the last reached
the edge of Laffaux and occupied Vauxaillon. On the 4th they
entered Moy, on the west bank of the Oise where it flows due
south to La Fere.

The position now was that between Arras and the Aisne the
Allies were almost everywhere in front of the German Siegfried
Line. By the capture of Moy, St. Quentin was slightly outflanked
towards the south. The vital point was the St. Gobain plateau,
the occupation of which would make La Fere untenable, and
would be the first step towards the capture of Laon. But the
enemy was well aware of the importance of this plateau, and its
many ravines and dense woods made it a hard position to carry.
Already the French had won Coucy, with its noble old castle now
blown up by the Germans, and had reached the western edge of
the tableland. But there the enemy's front hardened, as it hard-
ened south of the Ailette, on the limestone scarp between that
river and the Aisne. His plan was now apparent. He had reached
his famous line, and believed it to be impregnable. He would
fight desperately for all parts of it, but especially for the pivots
on which its security depended. These pivots were the positions
about Arras in the north, and those in the south around Laon and
the Chemin des Dames.

446 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR [April

The German retirement was an event of supreme military
interest, skilfully conducted and on the whole successful. The
enemy did not yield much ground, for though some hundreds of
ruined villages were restored to France, the depth gained was at
the greatest only some twenty miles. He had few casualties, and
lost few guns. But it is well to remember that he did not succeed
in his full purpose. He sought to retire at his own time ; but he
had to submit to the Allied will, for the fighting on the Ancre in
February and early March drove him from the Bapaume ridge,
whether he willed it or not. He was more hustled in his retirement
than he intended, and he wholly failed to draw the Allies into the
snare which he had devised for them. He had never the chance
of the crushing counter-stroke for which he had hoped. More-
over, as he told his people, he aimed at restoring the old war of
movement ; but in a fortnight he was as tightly pinned to his
entrenchments as he had been on the hills of the Somme. The
Siegfried Line was destined to remain for long not a fortress from
which he could sally, but a prison. The honours of the retreat,
therefore, were evenly divided.

To follow in the wake of the advancing armies was a strange
experience for one who through the preceding eight months had
watched the patient grinding movement of the Somme battle.
The roads were speedily repaired, and the Albert-Bapaume high-
way, once a honeycomb of shell-pits, soon attained the perfection
of a route nationale in peace. It was strange and eerie to move
swiftly through country where a month before a man could
scarcely crawl, and to pass the ghostly tumulus of the Butte de
Warlencourt, round which so much good blood had been shed.
Beyond Bapaume the observer saw, almost with a shock, fields
yet cultivated and trees unbroken. In the shallow pocket where
St. Quentin lay the guns still grumbled ; but by the end of the
first week of April the new Siegfried Line seemed quiet, save for
an occasional burst of counter-battery work and the bickering of
outposts. But in the south around St. Gobain Forest and on the
Aisne plateau there was a steady bombardment, and, as the
traveller went north and came to the point near Arras where the
new enemy positions branched off from the old, the ear was
deafened with the heavy rumour of war.

The Allies were preparing their spring offensive. The Siegfried
Line had been reconnoitred, and the next blow would be struck at
its pivots.

CHAPTER LXXVI.

THE BATTLE OF ARRAS.
April 4-June 6, 1917.

The Arras Neighbourhood — Haig's Problem and Dispositions — The Attack of Easter
Monday — Difficulties of Weather — Fighting on the Scarpe and at Bullecourt
— Summary of Battle.

At the end of the first week of April the German armies were back
in their sanctuary, and everywhere from Arras to the Aisne the
attack of the pursuing enemy had been checked. The French were
involved in the difficult country of the St. Gobain plateau ; Sir
Henry Rawlinson's Fourth Army had halted at the outskirts of
St. Quentin ; Sir Hubert Gough's Fifth Army, having forced the
outlying positions early in April, stood in front of the main de-
fences in the upper valleys of the Cojeul and the Sensee. In the
Arras region lay Sir Edmund Allenby's Third Army, and beyond
it Sir Henry Home's First Army before Lens and La Bassee, and
thence to the sea Sir Herbert Plumer's Second Army — all three
in the positions which they had held for more than a year. The
group under the Crown Prince of Bavaria had been extended to
include the IV., I., and II. Armies, and with some sixty divisions
held the front from the Channel to the Oise.* To meet the Allied
artillery the enemy had increased the range of his field guns by
some two thousand yards ; he had in use a large number of long-
range naval guns, and in his 5.9-inch howitzer he had a heavy
weapon of exceptional value. His air work had vastly improved,
especially as regards fast single-seater fighting machines like the
Albatross and the Halberstadt. He comforted himself with the
reflection that his Siegfried Line gave him a position stronger
than that which he had lost on the Somme ; that the Allies,

* Duke Albrecht of Wiirtemberg had been moved from Flanders to the group
of detachments in Lorraine and the Vosges. The third group, that of the Imperial
Crown Prince, lay from the Oise to east of Verdun, and embraced the VII., III., and
V. Armies.

447

448 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

wearied with the hectic business of pursuit, were not in a position
to launch any great attack yet awhile ; and that ere they were
ready his defences would have become impregnable.

The eyes of the Allied generals were fixed on the pivots, and
Britain's concern was that northern one where, at the hamlet of
Tilloy-lez-Mofflaines, the Siegfried Line branched off from the old
front. Between that point and Lens the original lines were very
strong, consisting of three main systems, each constructed on the
familiar pattern of four parallel lines of trenches, studded with
redoubts, and linked up with numerous switches. A special and
very powerful switch line ran for five and a half miles from the
village of Feuchy northward across the Scarpe to beyond Thelus,
and so constituted what was virtually a fourth line of defence.
The whole defensive belt was from two to five miles deep ; but the
German Command were not content with it. They had designed
an independent line running from Drocourt, south-east of Lens,
to the Siegfried Line at Queant, which should be an alternative
in case of an assault on the Arras salient. But at the beginning of
April this position, which was to become famous as the Drocourt-
Queant line,* was not yet completed. It was intended as a pro-
tection for Douai and Cambrai, the loss of which would have made
the whole Siegfried system untenable. But it was designed only
pro majore cautela, for there was every confidence in the mighty
ramified defences between Lens and Tilloy, and in the resisting
power of the northern Siegfried sector.

The plan devised at Chantilly in November 1916 had, as we
have seen, to be wholly recast, in view of the different policy and
the enlarged powers of the new French Commander-in-Chief, and
the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line. The position now
was that the Arras attack, which Haig had regarded as only a
preparation for the main campaign in Flanders, became the prin-
cipal task of the British army during the first half of 1917. This
action, at the same time, was conceived as a movement subsidiary
to the greater effort of the French in the south. It was admittedly
an attack in a region where, except for an unexampled piece of
fortune, good strategic results could scarcely be obtained. The
success of the British depended on what the French could do on
the Aisne. If the latter failed, then the former, too, must fail
in the larger strategic sense, however valuable might be certain of
their local gains. If, however, Nivelle succeeded, the pressure from
Arras in the north would beyond doubt greatly contribute to the

• Known to the Germans as the Wotan Line.

1917] HAIG'S PROBLEM AT ARRAS. 449

enemy's discomfiture. The danger of the whole plan was that the
issue might be indeterminate, and the fighting at Arras so long
protracted, without any decisive success, that the chances of the
more vital Flanders offensive later in the summer might be imper-
illed. This, as we shall see, was precisely what happened.

The Arras neighbourhood had seen some of the bloodiest fighting
of the war. It had been occupied by the Germans on September 1,
1914, and on the 18th of the same month reoccupied by the French.
There, in October 1914, Maud'huy had held the fort through a
desperate month. There, in May and June 1915, d'Urbal and the
French Tenth Army had battled in vain for the Vimy heights.
There, in September of the same year, during the Battle of Loos, a
portion of the heights was won ; but the true crest was never gained,
and during the succeeding month the French were forced back
to the boggy valley of the Souchez. At the moment with which
we are now concerned the British line from Loos southward lay
just west of the Double Crassier : east of Souchez and Neuville St.
Vaast : and thence in a sharp curve eastward to cover Roclincourt.
The key of all this area was the Vimy ridge, which dominated
the British lines on the Souchez, as the Messines ridge dominated
the southern part of the Ypres Salient. Our front crossed the
Scarpe just west of Blangy, and south of the Arras-Cam brai road
came in contact with the Siegfried Line from Tilloy-lez-Mofflaines
onward. Beaurains was now ours, and Arras was, therefore, free
from its old encirclement on the south. Here, where the Picardy
wolds break down into the flats of the Scheldt, long low spurs
reach out to the eastward, separating the valleys of the Scarpe,
the Cojeul, and the Sensee. Their sides are scored with smaller
valleys, and on their crests are various hillocks — such as Tele-
graph Hill, south of Tilloy, and the more considerable height above
Monchy-le-Preux. It is a pockety country — the last foothills of
the uplands of Northern France, and, like all foothills, a strong
position for any defence.

Haig had a formidable problem before him. The immediate key
of the area was Vimy ridge, the capture of which was necessary
to protect the flank of any advance farther south. It was clear
that no strategic result could be obtained unless the Drocourt-
Queant switch was breached, and that meant an advance of well
over six miles. But this position was still in the making ; and, if
the fates were kind, and the first three German systems could be
carried at a rush, there was good hope that the Drocourt-Queant
line would never be manned, and that the drive of the British,

450 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

assisted by the great French attack on the Aisne, might bring them
to Douai and Cambrai. It was a hope, but no more. A result
so far-reaching demanded a combination of fortunate chances,
which as yet had not been vouchsafed to us in any battle of the
campaign.

The city of Arras, situated as it was less than a mile inside the
British lines, might well have shared the fate of Ypres. It was,
like Ypres, the neck of the bottle, and through it and its environs
went all the transport for the front between the Scarpe and the
Cojeul. But, strangely enough, it had for two years been a place
of comparative peace. It had been badly shelled, but mainly in
the autumn and winter of 1914. The cathedral, a poor rococo
edifice in the Palladian manner, had been wholly destroyed, and
looked far nobler in its ruin than it had ever done in its integrity.
The beautiful old Hotel de Ville had been wrecked, and much
damage had been done among the exquisite Spanish houses of
the Grande Place. Few buildings had altogether escaped, but the
place was a desert and not a fragment. It was still a habitable
though a desolated city. Entering it by the Baudimont Gate on
a summer's day, the stranger saw the long white street running
intact towards the railway station, and it was not till he looked
closer that he noted shell-marks and broken windows and the
other signs of war. There were many hundreds of civilians still
living there, and children could be seen playing on the pave-
ment. Visitors came often, for it was the easiest place in all
France from which to enter the first lines. Across the railway
a short walk in communication trenches, or even on the open
road, and you were in the actual battle-front near Blangy or in the
faubourg of St. Sauveur. One inn at least was still open, where
men could dine in comfort and then proceed to their posts in the
line. But up till April 1917 the place had the air of a tomb. It
was like a city stricken by the plague, whole yet tenantless. Espe-
cially eerie did it seem in the winter twilight, when in the long
echoing streets the only sign of life was an occasional British soldier
or a hurrying peasant woman, and the rumble of the guns beyond
Vimy alone broke the depressed silence. The gaunt choir of the
cathedral rose like a splendid headstone in a graveyard.

At the beginning of April Arras awoke to an amazing change.
Its streets and lanes once more became full of life, and the Roman
arch of the Baudimont Gate saw an endless procession of troops
and transport. A city makes a difficult base for a great attack.
It must be the route of advancing infantry and their billeting area,

A Street in Arras

From a painting by John S. Sargent, R.A.

c .1)1

f * i : /

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feSiitMa

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1917] BRITISH DISPOSITIONS. 451

and it is a mark which the enemy guns can scarcely miss. To
minimize this danger, the Allied generals had recourse to a bold
plan. They resolved to assemble in this section their armies under-
ground. After the fashion of old French towns, Arras had huge
ancient sewers, like those of Paris which may be read of in Les
Miserables. A map of them was found, and the underground
labyrinth was explored and enlarged. Moreover, the town had
grown over the quarries from which the older part had been built,
and these also were discovered. The result was that a second city
was created below the first, where three divisions could have been
assembled in perfect security. The caverns were lit by electricity,
and plans and signposts were put up as if it had been a tube rail-
way station. As a matter of fact, the thing was not needed. The
Germans shelled the town intermittently, but there was no real
bombardment, and before Arras could be methodically assailed
the enemy had been pushed many miles eastward.

The British front of attack was slightly over twelve miles long,
from Givenchy-en-Gohelle in the north to a point just short of
Croisilles in the south. Against the Vimy ridge lay the right of
the First Army, Sir Julian Byng's Canadian Corps, with one British
brigade. Then came the Third Army — between the Canadians
and the Scarpe, Sir Charles Fergusson's 17th Corps ; opposite Arras,
Aylmer Haldane's 6th Corps ; and south of it, astride the
Cojeul, Snow's 7th Corps. In its constituents the army of assault
was largely Scottish. Thirty-eight Scots battalions were destined
to cross the parapets — a larger number than the British at Water-
loo, and more than seven times the size of the force that Bruce
commanded at Bannockburn.*

In the third week of March a systematic cutting of the enemy's
wire began, and our heavy artillery shelled his back areas and com-
munications. About Wednesday, 4th April, the British guns woke
along the whole sector. There was a steady bombardment of all
the enemy positions, more especially the great fortress of the Vimy
ridge. Wonderful counter-battery work was done, and battery
after battery of the enemy was put out of action, located partly by
direct observation from the air, and partly by our new device for
sound identification. These were days of clear, cold spring weather,
with the wind in the north-east, and from dawn to dark our air-

* The dispositions from left to right were : — First Army : Canadian Corps (4th,
3rd, 2nd, 1st Canadian Divisions), and British 13th Brigade. Third Army: 17th
Corps (51st, 34th, 4th, 9th Divisions), 6th Corps (37th, 15th, 12th, 3rd Divisions),
7th Corps (14th, 56th, 30th, 21st Divisions). The 37th and 4th Divisions were to
go through after the road had been opened.

452 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

planes fought a mighty battle on their own account. In the his-
tory of air-fighting that week mast rank as an epoch, for it was a
last desperate struggle on the enemy's part to defend his side ot
the line against our encroaching supremacy. It was a week of
heavy losses, for at all costs the foe must be blinded, and the
British airmen kept up one continuous offensive. Forty-eight of
our own planes failed to return, and forty-six of the enemy's were
destroyed or driven down out of control. The attackers, as was
natural, paid the heavier price.

The " preparation " was intense till Sunday, 8th April. That
day was perfect weather, with a foretaste of spring. A lull seemed
to fall upon the British front, and the ear-splitting din of the past
week died away into sporadic bombardments. It is possible that
this sudden quiet outwitted the enemy. He was perfectly aware of
the coming attack, and he knew its area and objective.* He had
expected it each day, and each day had been disappointed. On
the Sunday he began to reply, and rained shells at intervals into
the streets of Arras. But he did little harm. The troops of attack
there were waiting comfortably in cellars and underground assembly
stations. In the late evening the weather changed. The wind
shifted, and blew up to rain and squalls of snow. During the
night there were long spells of quiet, broken by feverish outbursts
of enemy fire from Vimy to Croisilles. Our own batteries were
for the most part silent.

Zero hour was 5.30 on the morning of Easter Monday. At
4 a.m. a drizzle had begun which changed presently to drifts of
thin snow. It was intensely cold, and it was scarcely half-light,
so that the troops waiting for the signal saw before them only a
dark mist flecked with snowflakes. But at the appointed moment
the British guns broke into such a fire as had been yet seen on no
battle-ground on earth. It was the first hour of the Somme re-
peated, but a hundredfold more awful. As our men went over the
parapets they felt as if they were under the protection of some
supernatural power, for the heaven above them was one canopy
of shrieking steel. There were now no enemy front trenches ;
soon there were no second-line trenches ; only a hummocky waste
of craters and broken wire. Within forty minutes all the German
first position was captured, and our men were moving steadily
against the second, while our barrage crept relentlessly before them.

* The Germans had intended a local advance between Lens and Arras at the
beginning of April. On the 6th Ludendorff realized that a British offensive was
coming, and ordered up his reserves behind the VI. Army. — My War Memories
(Eng. trans.), II., p. 419.

1917] THE ATTACK OF 9th APRIL. 453

On the left wing the Canadians with a bound reached the crest
of Vimy, and swarmed on to the tableland from which the ground
fell away to the flat industrial area between Lens and Douai. Few
finer pieces of dogged fighting were seen in the campaign. The
guns had done the work for them till they were beyond the crest,
but after that, over a mile of plateau, they had to fight their way
from shell-hole to shell-hole under a deluge of rifle and machine-
gun fire. Before nine o'clock all the Vimy ridge was ours, except
its northern corner and the high point marked Hill 145. Between
the Canadians and the Scarpe the 17th Corps had taken La Folie
Farm, and were advancing on Thelus. In front of Arras the 6th
Corps had overrun Blangy, and were facing the formidable Railway
Triangle, while farther south Tilloy-lez-Mofflaines had fallen, and,
south of it, the great fortress called the Harp. The Harp was such
a place as in the early days of the Somme would have baffled us
for a month or more. It was stronger than Contalmaison or
Pozieres or Guillemont. It was rushed with the assistance of a
batch of tanks, some of which stuck fast in its entanglements,
while others forced their way through to the plain beyond.

By 9.30 the whole of the German second position had fallen,
except a short length west of Bailleul. By the early afternoon
the enemy had been forced from the two worst points south of
the Scarpe — Observation Ridge and the Railway Triangle. This
last, formed by the junction of the Lens and Douai lines, was a
formidable obstacle, bristling with machine guns, and for a little
it stayed the advance of the Scottish division on the left of the
6th Corps — the 15th Division which had captured Loos and Martin-
puich, and had long ranked as part of the corps d' elite of the British
army. But our artillery came to their aid, and presently they
were surging eastward ; and in a hollow called Battery Valley,
between the German second and third positions, they made enor-
mous captures of enemy guns. By the evening that division had
taken the German third line at Feuchy, and to the north of the
Scarpe the right of the 17th Corps — the Scottish and South African
troops of the 9th Division — had carried Athies, and the 4th Divi-
sion, passing through them, had taken Fampoux village and Hyder-
abad Redoubt and broken into the German third line on a front of
two and a half miles. The Feuchy switch line had now gone, and
the enemy front had been utterly destroyed. He had no prepared
position short of the Drocourt-Queant line, and that was still in
the making.

But the weather was on his side. The ground was sodden.

454 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

and our guns took time to bring up. He was holding it with
machine guns in pockets, which prevented the use of cavalry for
what was the true duty of cavalry. Had we possessed a light
type of tank in reasonable numbers the rout could have been
made complete. As it was, there was no chance of a dramatic
coup de grace. The infantry could only push forward slowly and
methodically, and complete their capture of the German third
position. In wild weather on Tuesday, ioth April, the Canadians
carried Hill 145, and with it gained the whole of Vimy ridge. The
relics of the 14th Bavarians, which had formed the defence, were
withdrawn and sent to recruit on the Eastern front. To the south
the village and wood of Farbus were taken, and that evening,
after hard fighting, the 6th Corps reached the hill where stood the
village of Monchy-le-Preux. Next day, the nth, in a snowstorm,
Monchy was carried, with the assistance of detachments of cavalry,*
but not without heavy losses. It was a key position of the country
between the Scarpe and the Sensee, standing on the ridge of a
little plateau some ninety feet above the surrounding levels. Its
approaches on four sides were sunken roads lined with machine
guns. In the end it fell to a converging attack from the north
and west, but its defence showed that the enemy was recovering
from his first demoralization. Moreover, he had begun to counter-
attack.

We may take the evening of Wednesday, nth April, as the
end of the first stage of the Battle of Arras. It was now necessary
for the infantry attack to wait on the advance of the guns, and
meantime to devote itself to minor operations to round off its
gains. It had been a remarkable success, won at comparatively
small cost by a preparation in which no detail had been neglected.
Aircraft, artillery, infantry, and tanks had worked in perfect com-
bination. The result had been that on a front of twelve miles we
had broken through all the German defences, and come half-way
to the Drocourt-Queant line. We had carried two miles of the
northern end of the Siegfried Line. The exploits of each corps in

* The cavalry had been brought east of Arras on the afternoon of the 9th, in case
the break in the German third line should be sufficiently wide to permit the use of
mounted troops. They were held up, however, by the unbroken wire south of
Feuchy and by Monchy-le-Preux hill. Small bodies were employed during the
afternoon to maintain touch with the troops on the two sides of the Scarpe. On
the ioth an attempt to pass them south and north of Monchy was defeated by the
enemy machine-gun fire. They took part next day in the capture of Monchy, when
Brigadier-General Bulkeley-Johnson fell. On the 12th they were withdrawn west
of Arras. It was a clear proof that cavalry were useless for pushing on through a
gap in a modern trench line. The event might well have been foreseen and this
needless slaughter avoided.

igiy] THE CAPTURES. 455

action had been magnificent. The Canadians at Vimy had stormed
the last of the great German view-points south of the Lys. By
their speed they had cut off large numbers of the enemy in honey-
combs of the hill, and had taken over 4,000 prisoners. The 17th
Corps had won desperate fortresses like the Hyderabad Redoubt,
where a general and all his staff were captured, and had between
three and four thousand prisoners, the South African Brigade taking
nearly as many as it had effectives in action. The 6th Corps had
dealt with the Harp and the Railway Triangle, and by their doings
in Battery Valley were responsible for the larger number of guns
taken. Altogether in the three days something over 12,000 pri-
soners and 150 guns were captured, and the guns were speedily
turned into British weapons. Byng formed a " 1st, 2nd, and
3rd Pan-Germanic group " out of the batteries which fell to his
share. These were the largest captures so far made by the British
army in a like period of time.

But no victory can truly be measured by booty, and the essence
of the achievement lay in the breach made in the German wall.
It was an undeniable breach, the thing we had hoped for at Loos
and on two occasions during the Somme. But it was a breach of
which full use could not be made. Modern war is so intricate that
against an enemy with a proper equipment it must be slow. The
lightning dash is forbidden, since the speed of an advance is the
speed of its slowest unit — the guns and their munitionment. Cav-
alry could not be used as in old days, since a machine-gun outpost
could frustrate any cavalry action, and the true weapon, the tank,
had not yet been perfected. The first days of the Battle of Arras
confirmed in their views those who had always held that on the
Western front there could be no short cut to success. The Germans,
it is true, had been able to drive back Russians and Rumanians
in a war of movement, but in both cases they fought against troops
who had an imperfect military machine to support them. Against
an enemy approximately our equal we could hope for no spectacular
triumph yet awhile. The Somme tactics still held the field— the
limited objective, progress by slow and calculated stages, a steady,
grinding attrition — since the debacle of Russia was not yet foreseen.
Some day these methods would wear thin the stoutest metal, and
then the end would come. Haig had never subscribed to the heresy,
common at that time in certain civilian and military circles, that
by some superior cleverness the fruits of victory might be reaped
without the enemy being beaten. The first and only task was to
beat the enemy, and against an enemy so well equipped, so stub-

456 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

born, and, on the whole, so well led, success could not be won by
any bold, sensational strategy. Each time we struck we won a
victory, though not the victory ; but each time brought us nearer
to the desired goal.

On 1 2th April we improved our position on each flank of the
new battlefield. On the south we took, with the assistance of
tanks, the two villages of Wancourt and Heninel, which faced
each other from opposite banks of the Cojeul, and with them added
to our gains another 1,000 yards of the Siegfried Line. It was
a day of snowstorms, and on our left, north of the Vimy ridge,
the Canadians took the two small hills, known as the Pimple and
the Bois-en-Hache, on each side of the Souchez stream, behind
which the enemy might have concentrated troops for a counter-
attack. This last success drove the Germans back upon their
third line from Gavrelle northward, and compelled them to bethink
themselves of the defences of Lens. The wind had veered to the
south and brought squalls of rain, through which on the two follow-
ing days we pressed hard on their retreat. A wide tract of country
from Fampoux to just south of Lens became ours, including the
villages of Vimy, Bailleul, Willerval, Givenchy-en-Gohelle, Angres,
and the town of Lievin. There fell, too, the Double Crassier,
south of Loos, which had once before been ours. Looking from the
ridge, our men saw clusters of red-brick dwellings, broken by slag-
heaps, tall chimneys, and the headgear of mines, and now obscured
by the smoke from burning buildings and the debris of explosions.
In all the mining suburbs of Lens — the cites named after divers
saints — the enemy strove to make a great destruction, but he was
driven out before he could complete his work. We captured vast
quantities of stores and ammunition, truckloads of tools, pioneer
dumps, and many guns, including four 8-inch howitzers, which he
had not had time to remove.

But the rough weather had given him his breathing space, and
his resistance was hardening. More guns had come up, and new
divisions had arrived from the Eastern front. From the 14th
onward counter-strokes were frequent south of the Scarpe, and on
the morning of Sunday, the 15th, an attack by five regiments of
the Prussian Guard was launched on a six-mile front astride the
Bapaume-Cambrai road, from Hermies to Noreuil, against the 1st
Australian Corps under Birdwood. The assault failed completely,
except at Lagnicourt, where for a moment the enemy gained a
footing, only to be driven out an hour later. He left 300 prisoners
in our hands and 1,500 dead in front of our positions. There was

iqi7] THE ATTACK OF 16th APRIL. 457

also heavy fighting around Monchy, where the famous 3rd Bavarians
were in action against the not less famous 29th Division. Their
advance up Monchy hill in five columns was broken by our guns,
and their losses were not less than 4,000.

Next day, Monday, 16th April, saw the great French attack on
the southern part of the Siegfried Line, the consideration of which
belongs to the following chapter. As we shall see, its success fell
far short of the hopes of its commanders, and it was incumbent on
Haig to press his advance towards Douai and Cambrai in order
to divert the enemy strength from the Aisne heights. So far a9
the British armies were concerned, their main task was finished,
and their duty now was subsidiary — to distract the enemy from
Nivelle rather than to win their own special objectives. At dawn
on Monday, the 23rd, the British attacked on an eight-mile front
on both banks of the Scarpe against the line Gavrelle-Roeux-
Guemappe-Fontaine-lez-Croisilles. South-west of Lens, in a sub-
sidiary assault, we advanced our front along the Souchez stream.
The 17th Corps carried Gavrelle on the Arras-Douai road, and the
enemy defences for two and a half miles south as far as Rceux
cemetery. Beyond the Scarpe the 6th Corps won Guemappt,
on the Arras-Cambrai highway. It was a day of sustained and
desperate fighting, continued during the night and prolonged far
into the next morning. The enemy was in strength, and counter-
attacked fiercely ; and though some of his units made but a poor
resistance, the 3rd Bavarians lived up to their old renown. Seven
German divisions were engaged, and by the evening of the 25th
we had advanced our line on the whole front from one to two
miles, and by the capture of Guemappe had won the key of the
country between the Cojeul and the Sensee. This section of the
battle cost us dear ; but it cost the enemy more, and his losses
in these days' fighting were as high as any that he had suffered
during the campaign. He left 3,400 prisoners in our hands, and it
was estimated that the total casualties of the defence were at least
thrice those of the assault. His misfortunes were due to the fact
that he had to launch his counter-attacks across ground swept by
our artillery, and, since the fight was fought in clear weather, he
had no shelter from our omnipresent aircraft.

The 28th and 29th of April saw the battle renewed north of
the Scarpe. The enemy had on the 9th lost his third position
from Fampoux for some miles southward, but on the left of our
front he had been in his second position till the 12th, and at the
moment was holding his third line of defence from Gavrelle north-

458 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April-May

ward On the 28th we drove him out of it on a two-mile front at
Arleux-en-Gohelle, and won ground at Oppy and on the western
slopes of Greenland Hill between Gavrelle and Roeux, taking over
1,000 prisoners. South of the Scarpe we advanced our line to the
north of Monchy. He was fighting stubbornly for his Douai
positions, for we were already half-way from Arras to that city,
and only the Drocourt-Queant line barred the way. The country-
side falls in long, easy slopes to the Douai plain, and no hill or
river gave a natural protection. The Germans had to stop the
gap with men, and let it be freely admitted that they showed a
stalwart resolution.

The close of April marked the end of the Battle of Arras as
originally planned. That plan, in its ultimate objective, involved
the destruction of the northern pivot of the Siegfried Line, and
the first step to the reduction of the whole position. But the
failure of the French at the southern pivot made this great scheme
impossible in the immediate future. Two tasks now lay before
the British Commander-in-Chief. The scheme of the attack on
the Siegfried pivots had not been his. His original plan had been
to cut off the enemy in the Arras-Bapaume salient by flank attacks
and win at the same time the Vimy ridge. After the German
retreat he would have contented himself, had he been solely respon-
sible, with carrying Vimy, and then would have flung his weight
into the Flanders operation. The action against the Siegfried
pivots was Nivelle's conception, accepted by the Allied Govern-
ments, and, once begun, it could not readily be broken off. Sir
Douglas Haig had, therefore, to work with a double aim. He
had to continue his efforts in the Arras area, partly to ease the
pressure on the new French positions on the Aisne, partly in order
that, when the time came for breaking off the battle in this sector,
he should be able to leave his front in a favourable position for
future operations. Likewise he had to prepare for that great
assault upon the German right wing in Flanders which he had
long ago determined should be the main British enterprise of the
summer. The fighting of May was, therefore, in a different cate-
gory from that of April. The initial impetus had gone, the main
strategical end had not been attained, and, as during the last phase
of the Somme, it was an affair of local offensives and limited
objectives.

The main attack was made on Thursday, 3rd May, on a twelve-
mile front from the Acheville-Vimy road, north of Arleux, to a

1917] THE FIGHTING AT BULLECOURT. 459

point in the Siegfried Line at Bullecourt, south of the Sensee.
Its object was to distract the enemy in view of a new French attack
impending on the Aisne. Our troops crossed the parapets at 3.45
a.m., just before dawn, and were faced by a stubborn resistance.
On our left the Canadians of the First Army broke through the
strong Oppy-Mericourt line, and took the village of Fresnoy,
crippling the German 15th Reserve Division, which had just been
brought up preparatory to a counter-attack for the recovery of
Arleux. In the wood north of Oppy we forced our way forward,
encountering the 1st and 2nd Reserve Divisions of the Prussian
Guard. On both banks of the Scarpe, at Rceux and the ridge called
Infantry Hill east of Monchy, we advanced our front, and farther
south made progress near Cherisy. On the right the 2nd Aus-
tralian Division of the Fifth Army carried the front and support
trenches of the Siegfried Line * at Bullecourt, and parties of
advanced troops actually reached the Queant-Fontaine-lez-Croi-
silles road beyond. Our prisoners numbered close on 1,000. We
were not left in quiet possession of our gains. At once the enemy
counter-attacked with determination, and his artillery shelled
heavily our new positions. The struggle lasted all day and far
into the night, and under the pressure of the incessant attacks our
centre gradually retired, till, except for small lengths of line at
Fontaine-lez-Croisilles and on both banks of the Scarpe, it was
back in the trenches it had occupied before the assault began.
Here the enemy was stayed. He had compelled us to relinquish
our winnings, but he could not recover any of the ground he had
formerly lost. On our flanks we fared better. The Canadians
clung to Fresnoy, and the Australians still held the Siegfried sup-
port line at Bullecourt.

The situation now resolved itself into a struggle for three points
on which the enemy set high value — Fresnoy, Rceux, and Bulle-

* Some idea of the strength of the Siegfried position may be gained from the
following details. There were two main lines — the first line and the support line.
One hundred and twenty-five yards in front of the first line was a belt of wire 25 feet
broad, and so thick that it was impossible for a man lying on the ground to see
through it. In the line itself were double machine-gun emplacements of ferro-
concrete 125 yards apart, and other lesser emplacements were dotted all over it.
The communication trenches were exceptionally broad and deep. More belts of
wire defended the support line, which was the main line of defence. Here a con-
tinuous tunnel had been dug in the chalk at a depth of over 40 feet. It had been
constructed entirely by Russian prisoners, and every 35 yards or so were exits with
flights of forty-five steps. The tunnel was roofed, lined and bottomed with 9-inch
by 3-inch timbers, and had numerous rooms opening off it. It was lit throughout
by electricity. Large 9-inch trench mortars with concrete emplacements stood at
the traverses, and were fed with ammunition from below. Strong machine-gun
positions covered the line from behind.

46o A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

court. On the 8th of May, very early in the morning, after a
heavy bombardment, a German division — the 15th Reserve —
attacked our positions north-east of Fresnoy village, which, since
the enemy held Acheville and Mericourt, were dangerously exposed.
They entered some of our trenches, but were ejected by a counter-
attack. At 8 a.m., supported by two other divisions, the 4th
Guard Reserve and the 5th Bavarians, which cut in on the flank,
they renewed the attack on a wide front, and compelled us to fall
back from the salient formed by Fresnoy village and wood. Next
day we retook the wood, and held it thereafter. Fresnoy was one
of the few cases in the campaign of a place won by us and held
for more than twenty-four hours which the enemy succeeded in
recapturing.

In the centre there was steady fighting. On 5th May, and
again on the night of 10th May, we were busy pressing forward
south of the Scarpe in the neighbourhood of Infantry Hill. There
were many counter-attacks, and one on the night of 10th May,
when flammenwerfer were employed, was of exceptional violence
and complete futility. The following night, nth May, we attacked
in some force on both sides of the Scarpe. On the south bank
the 56th Division took Cavalry Farm, on the Arras-Cambrai road,
and a mile of trenches north of it. On the left bank of the river
the 4th Division carried Rceux cemetery and the Chemical Works
in the neighbourhood of Rceux station, taking some hundreds of
prisoners. On 12th May we took the enemy's position on a front
of one and a half miles between Rceux and Greenland Hill ; and
by the 14th the whole of Rceux village was captured by the
51st Division.

But the great episode of this final stage of the Battle of Arras
was the struggle in the Siegfried Line around Bullecourt, where the
Lehr Regiment of the 3rd Guard Division — the " Cockchafers "
— toiled to win back the ground lost on 3rd May, and the Austral-
ians and British troops of the Fifth Army sought in their turn to
increase their winnings. The massive strength of the Siegfried
Line was hard enough to force ; but not less formidable were the
machine-gun positions behind — linked concreted pits protected
by steel coverings, through an orifice of which the guns fired a
few inches above the level of the ground. The Australians had
carried this section on 3rd May with superb audacity, and they
showed the same coolness in defence. But the situation was a
grave one ; for on the left Bullecourt village projected in a kind
of promontory, and to the right was the Riencourt ridge with

1917] NIVELLE'S POLICY ABANDONED. 461

Queant behind it, and both positions were occupied by the enemy.
The Australians' hold on the Siegfried Line was the ugliest kind of
salient. On 7th May the 7th Division gained a footing in the
south-east corner of Bullecourt, and next day ten of our men
were rescued who had been in Bullecourt since the 3rd of May.
By the 12th the greater part of the village was in our possession,
though parties of the enemy still held out in the south and south-
western outskirts. Then came the counter-attacks, more espe-
cially upon the Australians in the Siegfried Line. The Lehr Regi-
ment had rehearsed every detail of their work ; but two minutes
after the assault was delivered at dawn on the 15th the plan had
melted into air. The Australians, gallantly assisted by London
troops, turned their defence into a brilliant offensive. On 17th
May the 58th and 62nd Divisions completed the capture of Bulle-
court village. On the 20th the 33rd Division struck at the Siegfried
Line between that point and Fontaine-lez-Croisilles. On the
morning of that day, after a stiff fight, the whole of the enemy's
front position was captured. In the evening we attacked the
support line, and carried it on a front of a mile. All counter-
attacks were repulsed, and on the 26th and 27th of May we
secured our position beyond danger.

The battle was now drawing to its close. On Sunday, 3rd
June, our advanced posts were attacked south-west of Cherisy,
and on the same day we gained and lost ground in an attack by
the Canadians on the electric power-station south of the Souchez
river. On the 5th we won the power-station, and on the 6th we
took a mile of the enemy position north of the Scarpe on the
western slopes of Greenland Hill. But these actions were in the
nature of feints, for the centre of gravity had now shifted north
of the Lys.

On 5th May the French carried the Craonne plateau, and thereby
won their immediate object on the Aisne. Haig's subsequent
operations had, therefore, been either for the purpose of securing
or rounding off the ground won, or of misleading the enemy by a
show of activity in an area not seriously threatened. On the 4th
and 5th of May an Allied conference in Paris agreed to the British
plan of an immediate Flanders offensive — a decision which marked
the formal abandonment of Nivelle's policy. Already the Arras
front was being thinned, and troops and guns were moving north-
ward. On 20th May the French extended their line to the Omignon
river, thereby taking over again that part of the front which they
had relinquished to the British on 26th February. As early as

462 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May- June

24th May the German bulletins reported great activity in the dis-
trict between Ypres and Armentieres, and in the early days of
June they daily informed the world that the British artillery was
shelling the Wytschaete-Messines ridge. They foresaw a new
offensive, but they did not guess how deadly that offensive was
to be.

The Battle of Arras may be regarded with some truth as an
action complete in itself. It lasted just over a month. It was a
limited victory — that is to say, it attained completely its immediate
objectives ; but owing to events outside the control of the British
Command, it did not produce the strategical result upon the Western
front as a whole which was its ultimate design. It was, therefore,
an action on the Somme model, a stage in the process of attrition,
the value of which must be measured in terms of its effect upon the
enemy's moral and the efficiency of his military machine. Judged
by such standards it compared brilliantly with every previous
British advance. In a month we took more than 20,000 prisoners,
257 guns (of which 98 were of heavy calibre), 227 trench mortars,
and 470 machine guns.* If we contrast the first twenty-four days
of the Somme with the first twenty-four days of Arras, we shall find
that in the latter battle we took four times the amount of territory,
engaged double the number of German divisions, and had half the
casualties. We had advanced many stages in our knowledge of
the new methods of war.

But such figures did not exhaust the criterion. The vital fact
was that we had defeated the enemy's plan. When his too hasty
retreat to the Siegfried Line deprived him of the chance of taking
the Allies at a disadvantage, he determined to avoid battle, to
create a stalemate on the West, and to set his hopes of victory on
the success of his submarine campaign. The first day of Arras
shattered that illusion. He lost the Vimy ridge, one of his most
cherished observation posts ; he lost Bullecourt, where the Wotan
Line joined the main Siegfried position ; he lost between six and
seven miles of the cherished Siegfried Line itself. The new
defences of which he had boasted had proved no more impregnable
than Thiepval or Guillemont. He had had 104 divisions in action,
and of these seventy-four by the end of May had to be withdrawn
to refit. The whole German plan of defence was based on the
impregnability of the old lines from the sea to Arras, and of the

* Between ist July and 18th November, on the Somme, we took 38,000 prisoners,
29 heavy guns, 96 field guns, 136 trench mortars, and 514 machine guns.

n it y] ==... Mam Roads.

^/^ / Secondary Ro,

^•' t *-...-.-. .Railways.

fHE BATTLE OF ARRAS.

$ Miles

i

fS*V

'AfiflA

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on,

1917] SUMMARY OF THE BATTLE. 463

Siegfried Line from Arras to the Aisne. When he lost ground
he was compelled to throw in large numbers of his best troops
in the attempt either to win it back or to gain time for the con-
struction of other lines in the rear. We therefore achieved our
major purpose of inflicting great losses on the enemy and using
up his reserves. It was still hammer play : we were still painfully
destroying the wall, and had not reached that nodal point which
would involve a widespread cataclysm. But each blow of our
hammer had gone truly home.

Arras, therefore, though the earlier and better plan of Haig
had been relinquished, emphasized and continued the effect of
the Somme battle, and — had the Russian front remained intact —
would have brought Germany's strength very near to breaking
point. Already there were indications that, in spite of Hinden-
burg's new divisions, she was having difficulties with her man-
power. New regiments, for example, which had been destined to
form new divisions, were broken up to provide drafts for divisions
shattered in the battle. More significant still, there was a general
reduction in the establishment of infantry battalions from 1,000
to 750. But the slow weakening of the German machine was best
shown by the new tactical device, the use of Sturmtruppen or
Stosstruppen* which the course of the action revealed. Germany
had always been inclined to bemuse herself with the idea of " crack "
corps, from the Pomeranian giants of the Great Elector to the
Prussian Guards and the Brandenburgers of the present campaign.
To some extent the idea was a just one : each army has its units
who are respected beyond others ; but in Germany's case the
practice was a contradiction of her whole theory of war. This
skimming of the cream from the army left each time the residuum
weaker ; in her efforts to raise the drooping moral of the ordinary
line Germany still further depressed it. Moreover, the practice
spoiled the " machine." In the old warfare a picked cohort of
knights might cut its way through a mob of footmen, but with the
mass-armies of Germany the foundation was the equal discipline
and the even efficiency of every unit. For in a machine one wheel
should not be of better workmanship or one crank of finer temper
than the rest, since the strength of the machine is not its strongest
but its weakest part. The well-oiled and remorseless modern

* A battalion of Stosstruppen was attached about this time to each army corps.
This battalion contained four companies of assault, each ioo strong — a machine-
gun company with six machine guns, a company of bombers, a company of flame-
throwers, and a battery of assault. The battalion commander had usually a captain's
rank. Motor cars were attached to each battalion for rapid transport.

464 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

engine which had rolled smoothly through Flanders and Picardy
in the early autumn of 1914 was changing to the archetypal form
of barbarian armies — the sullen commonalty and the spirited and
privileged few.

Such conclusions might reasonably have heartened the Allies
in that month of May. For the utter ruin of Russia was not yet
dreamed of — a ruin which was to enable Germany to mass every-
thing in the West, to win a substantial superiority in numbers,
and to use her shock-troops, begun as a counsel of despair, in a
brilliant new tactical plan which brought her to the very edge of
victory.

CHAPTER LXXVII.

THE SECOND BATTLE OF THE AISNE.
December 16, 1916-June 2, 1917.

Nivelle's Strategy — Attitude of new French Cabinet — The Heights of the Aisne-—
Defects in French Plan — The Attack begins — The Moronvillers Fighting —
Petain succeeds Nivelle — Foch Chief of General Staff — Last Days of the
Battle — The French Mutinies.

On 16th December 1916 Nivelle succeeded Joffre in command of *
the armies of France, and, as we have seen, altered the original
plan for the coming spring. The new scheme had some of the
features of the old : the British were to advance at Arras, and the
French east of the Somme ; and then when the enemy was confused
by attacks in widely separated localities, the deadly blow was to
be delivered in the south. But in designing this last stage Nivelle '
departed wholly from Joffre's conception and from the Somme
tactics of a movement by steady stages to limited objectives. On
the Aisne, where already he had fought as colonel of artillery and
as divisional general, he hoped to break through at once between
Vailly and Rheims, smash the southern portion of the Siegfried
Line, and envelop the whole position. Verdun had brought him
fame, and that fame had been won by enterprises of peculiar
audacity and brilliance. His great winter battles there in
1916 had followed the Somme method, but Nivelle had never re-
garded this method as the final device in war. He had written
to a friend : " The trench warfare which we have been waging
on the same ground for two years is only one of the numerous
forms of war — a form which cannot last for ever, because it cannot
bring a decision. ... Be sure that the essential principles of war,
those of Napoleonic strategy, have lost none of their value. . . .
The moment approaches when the decisive blow will be struck
by the stronger and more resolute." He considered rightly that
the last word had not been spoken in tactics, that new devices

MS

466 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March-April

might be found, and that the enemy's stolid strength might be
broken by other means than slow sapping. His aim now was
the " decisive blow " — not to weaken but to crush, not to " break
up " but to " break through." With robust self-confidence he
promised himself Laon as the result of the first day's action, and
such a gain was inconceivable unless he really succeeded in crumbling
the whole enemy defences. As in the previous winter at Verdun,
he told his Government precisely what he meant to do, and by
what hour he would accomplish it ; and to members of the Govern-
ment, like M. Briand and General Lyautey, he communicated his
own optimism and ardour.

But in the third week of March came a political crisis.
M. Briand fell from power, and M. Ribot became Premier and
M. Painleve Minister of War. The last did not share Nivelle's cheer-
fulness, and, like Foch and Petain, had grave doubts of the whole
enterprise. He was alarmed at the shrinking man-power of France,
and reluctant to incur further serious losses, and he was also critical
of Nivelle's proposed methods and sceptical about the promised
success. He found abundant support for his scepticism among
other generals, and subjected the Commander-in-Chief to such
constant interrogation that the latter was with difficulty dissuaded
from resigning his post. Things came to a head on 3rd April,
when Nivelle was summoned to a conference with the Premier
and the Minister of War. Distracted by his cross-examination, the
Commander-in-Chief was induced to hazard all, and promise that
within three days the armies of attack should be on the Serre with
thirty kilometres of new ground behind them. The civilian states-
men expressed their satisfaction, but three days later summoned
the Commander-in-Chief to another conference, and again de-
manded that he should lay their doubts. The result was that
Nivelle began his task with two serious handicaps : the perpetual
questioning had weakened his confidence in himself, and, since the
tale of it had gone abroad, had shaken the faith of the armies in
their general. It is not easy for a soldier to venture everything
when he has been warned that his Government expects him to be
chary of losses.

Let us consider in greater detail the nature of the blow which
Nivelle contemplated, and the area in which it was to be delivered.
In the First Battle of the Aisne, in September 1914, the Allies had
won the passage of the river from the forest of Laigue above
Compiegne to Berry-au-Bac, where the Roman highroad from
Rheims to Laon crosses by the most famous ford in France. At

1917] THE AISNE POSITION. 467

one point the assault of the British 1st Corps had reached the
Chemin des Dames north of Troyon and the crown of the Aisne
plateau. But the German attack in January 1915 had driven a
broad shallow wedge into that front, and given them the south
bank of the river from Missy-sur-Aisne to a little east of Chavonne.
From that date onward there had been no action of any signifi-
cance between Soissons and Rheims. East of Rheims the western
end of the Champagne-Pouilleuse had been part of the terrain of
the great battle of September 1915, and in October of the same year
Heeringen had striven in vain to cut the Rheims-Chalons railway
by an attack between Prunay and Auberive. But since then the
whole section had been stagnant, and thinly held by both sides,
while the main conflict raged round Verdun and on the Somme.
The retreat of the enemy during February and March 1917 had
altered the configuration of the French front in the western end of
the area. The advance along the heights south of the Ailette had
brought their left just west of the village of Laffaux. Thence it
ran to the Aisne west of Missy, and continued along the south bank
to a mile or so east of Chavonne. From that point it turned to
the north-east by Soupir, across the Aisne-Oise Canal below the
tunnel, and so to Troyon and the Chemin des Dames. It then left
the ridge, and continued below the south edge till it struck the
marshy flats south of Craonne, whence it continued west of Ville-
aux-Bois to Berry-au-Bac. From the Aisne crossing there it ran
west of the Rheims-Laon highway to Betheny, covered Rheims,
and passed south of the Nogent l'Abbesse and Moronvillers heights
to the upper streams of the Suippe.

This stretch of the front was in length some fifty miles, and its
physical character was most intricately varied. The heights of
the Aisne, on which a century before a foreign invader had defied
the genius of Napoleon, were, as we knew to our cost, one of the
strongest positions in Europe. The limestone plateau, curiously
wooded and cut by deep ravines, had been turned by the enemy
into a veritable fortress. The sides of the glens had been forested
with barbed wire ; tunnels had been driven through the ridge,
which formed perfect concealed communications ; machine guns
had been cunningly emplaced at every angle of fire ; and the
many natural caves in the limestone had been converted into
underground shelters and assembly stations. Moreover, he had
all the view-points, and from the Chemin des Dames commanded
everywhere the French lines. His only weakness was that he
held an acute salient, the apex of which was south of the Aisne.

463 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

The first section, therefore, was the salient from Vauxaillon above
the Ailette by Missy to Troyon on the Chemin des Dames, a front
of some twenty miles. It was a region of long, narrow spurs
abutting in bold bluffs on the river valley. Along the hog's back
from which they sprung ran the western part of the Chemin des
Dames. Of these spurs there were five specially notable — from
west to east, those running from Laffaux to Missy ; from above
Allemant to Chivres ; from Vaudesson to Vauxelles ; from Mal-
maison to Vailly ; and from Ostel to Chavonne. Each spur was
serrated like a comb by ravines, and radiated under-features.
The second section comprised the eastern end of the Aisne heights
which culminated in the promontory of Craonne, rising from the
plain like the hull of a ship at sea. Here the plateau narrowed at
one place to the width of a hundred yards, and also reached its
greatest elevation — over 650 feet — near the farm of Hurtebise.
Its wooded sides rose steeply both from the Aisne and the Ailette.
North of it, across the Ailette, rose a second broad plateau, for
the most part lower than the Chemin des Dames ridge, but at its
eastern end rising to nearly the same height. Beyond it again
lay Laon upon its little hill. The third section extended from
Craonne to Betheny, a distance of some twelve miles, where the
front, after leaving the marshy woods south of Craonne, entered
the rolling Champagne country, unbroken save for the heights
of Brimont and Fresnes, where the German guns were placed for the
bombardment of Rheims. East of that city from Nogent l'Abbesse
stretched for seven or eight miles as far as Auberive the wooded
hills of the Moronvillers group. Such was the nature of the ground
on which Nivelle designed to fight the coming battle.

It was a difficult terrain, for at all points save Troyon the
enemy had the dominating positions. The idea in the mind of
Nivelle was to make of the gap between Craonne and Brimont an
alley into the plain of Laon. But this alley was everywhere com-
manded, and success was not possible at any one place unless it
wer.- simultaneously won at others. To win the alley the hilh
of Brimont and Fresnes must be turned on one side, and the
Craonne heights secured on the other. But the Craonne ridge
could not be won unless the western end of the Chemin des Dames
was also mastered, and the alley would remain insecure on the
south unless the enemy were driven from the Moronvillers upland.
Moreover, in each section the tactical difficulties were immense,
owing to the skilful siting of the German line.

When a problem so intricate presents itself to a commander

I9i7] NIVELLE'S PLAN. 469

in the field the natural method is to take it in stages. But Nivelle,
hoping to find the enemy already confused by the attacks in the
north, resolved to make a bid for instantaneous success. His
plan was to force the Aisne heights in one bold assault from west,
south, and south-east ; at the same moment to carry the Rheims
heights from the north ; and simultaneously to launch his centre
through the gap between the two into the plain of Laon. Next
day a fresh army would attack the Moronvillers massif to distract
the German counter-attack, and protect his own right flank. In
the centre he would use the new French tanks — machines less
stout and solid than the British, but believed to possess greater
speed. Petain, in whose group-area lay the terrain of assault, was
utterly sceptical about the scheme, so a new group was formed
for the purpose under Micheler, the former commander of the
Tenth Army. Nivelle proposed to put this group into action from
the Ailette to Rheims — in order, the Sixth Army, under Mangin,
between Laffaux and Hurtebise, and the Fifth Army, under Mazel,
between Hurtebise and Rheims. The Tenth Army, under Duchesne,
was in reserve. East of Rheims, the day after the main attack,
the Fourth Army, under Anthoine, would begin the Moronvillers
battle. It was by far the largest front of attack seen on the West
since the Marne, and the divisions of assault to be employed were
three times those which Haig had used at Arras. Whatever our
verdict on the result, let us do justice to the audacity and courage
of Nivelle's conception. Like Browning's Grammarian, he " ven-
tured neck or nothing " :

" That low man goes on adding one to one,

His hundred's soon hit :
This high man, aiming at a million,

Misses an unit."

Unhappily, in a war of life and death it is results that count and
not loftiness of aim, and the hundred hit is more valuable than the
million missed.

The plan was indeed doomed from the start. In the first
place, it was not the culmination of an arpeggio of attack, as had
been proposed ; for Franchet d'Esperey, who attacked on 14th
April near St. Quentin, failed utterly, being brought up sharp
against the strongest part of the Siegfried defences. In the second
pla:e, the scheme was known in full detail to the enemy. In the
middle of February a German raid in Champagne captured an order
of a French division pointing clearly to a great French offensive
on the Aisne in April. This set the Germans to the work of pre-

470 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

paration. In the area of attack lay their VII. Army under von
Boehn, and the III. Army under von Einem, and between the two
was interpolated Fritz von Below with part of the I. Army. Then
on the night of April 4th they made prisoner a French non-com-
missioned officer carrying a document which gave the order of
battle of the troops north of the Aisne and the various corps
objectives. Never was a defence more amply forewarned. In
the third place, the aim which Nivelle set before himself demanded
forces in the perfection of physical and moral well-being — an army
of " shock-troops " ; and the French armies were weary, dis-
pirited, out of temper, doubtful of their leader, and in the mood
to listen to treasonable tales. Small blame to them, for they had
been too highly tried. Many had had no leave for two years,
and the small comforts which keep troops in good humour
had been neglected. To launch an ambitious offensive with
jaded and captious men was to court disaster. Let it be added
that Nivelle himself had been compelled by the Government,
before the battle, to spend much of his time away from his troops,
and that he had already lost the high confidence of December.
He had shifted his general headquarters from Chantilly to
Beauvais, and then presently to Compiegne, and, confronted with
the suspicion of the Cabinet and the hostility of certain of his
colleagues, had already begun to fumble. To retain composure and
conviction unshaken in the face of an all but universal scepticism
required a character far different from Nivelle's gracious and
buoyant temper.

But, even had there been none of these attendant misfortunes,
the plans of the French general would still have been open to cen-
sure. He proposed to break through a strong enemy defence, but
his tactical methods were not different from those already used
for less ambitious objectives. His main conception was right :
trench warfare could be ended, an enemy front could be not only
pierced but crumbled ; but he had not discovered the means. His
tanks were mechanically imperfect, and there was no knowledge
of their true tactical use. He did not appreciate the real character
of the enemy defence. Indeed, he envisaged the whole battle
with a strange amateurishness, for he thought that if his losses
became too high he could easily break it off. Nivelle represents
the first crude revolt against the Somme tactics, the tactics of
attrition, as the conception of von Hutier, six months later, was
the second stage in the change, and the tactics of Foch the ultimate
solution.

1917] THE FIRST DAY. 47r

On 6th April the French " preparation " began from the Ailette
to Rheims. On 10th April it was extended to the eastward from
the Thuizy-Nauroy road to Auberive. That day the civilian
population of Rheims was evacuated, for the enemy had begun to
shell the much-battered city, and inflict new wounds on its great
cathedral. The weather was snowy and wet, and aircraft observa-
tion was badly crippled, so zero day, which had been fixed for the
14th, was postponed. The French bombardment rose in a crescendo
till on Sunday, the 15th, every gun sounded on the fifty-mile front.
That night saw a blizzard of sleet, but just at dawn came a clearing
of the sky. At 6 a.m. on the 16th the first French infantry crossed
the parapets, and almost at once the pall of storm closed in again
on the battlefield.

The extreme French left — the 1st Colonial Corps — attacked the
roots of the westernmost spur around Laffaux. It took Moisy
Farm, east of Vauxaillon, and surrounded Laffaux, but was driven
back by a counter-stroke in the afternoon. Farther south, on the
other side of the salient, the attack was directed against the Ostel-
Chavonne ridge, a spur in some parts over 600 feet high. The
French crossed the Aisne, broke through the two German lines
on its northern bank, entered Chavonne, and struggled all day for
the southern under-feature of the spur, which was named Les
Grinons. The main assault failed, and by the evening Mangin's
centre was forced back to the edge of the river. But on the right
a chasseur battalion had stormed another under-feature called
Mont des Sapins, and, in spite of many counter-attacks and a
constant rain of bullets from the machine guns concealed in the
shattered woods, it clung to its winnings, and held the approaches
to the farm of La Cour de Soupir, on the main ridge. Farther
east the little spur which runs from Courtecon to Moussy had been
forced, and Moroccan infantry from Troyon had pushed westward
along the Chemin des Dames, and cut off the retreat of the enemy
troops in Chivy.

But the main attack in this section was to the east, where two
corps had advanced along the crest of the plateau. Hurtebise
Farm, at the narrows of the ridge, was carried by Marchand's
10th Colonial Division, and on the right the French entered the
skirts of Craonne village. Beyond that lay the gap which it was
hoped would prove the alley to the plain of Laon. Here Juvin-
court was the immediate objective, and the approach was guarded
by two little hills, outliers of the Craonne massif, the Bois des
Buttes and the Bois des Boches, behind which lay the village of

472 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

Ville-aux-Bois. Each was a machine-gun fortress, excavated into
galleries, and with dug-outs sixty feet deep. They had been
severely pounded by the French artillery, but they were strongly
held by two Bavarian battalions, and till they fell Ville-aux-Bois
could not be won or any use made of the gateway into the plain.
The Parisians of the 31st Infantry Regiment stormed and held
the Bois des Buttes, and south of Ville-aux-Bois the two German
lines between that village and the Aisne were carried by the
tanks. The ground was not the most suitable for their work,
and the fire from the Craonne heights and certain flaws in their
mechanism put a large number of them out of action. But
the evening saw the French well past Ville-aux-Bois on the
south, and working up the hollow of the Miette towards Juvin-
court. North of Ville-aux-Bois, however, they were firmly held
by the machine-gun positions in Craonne, and the place itself was
still untaken.

South of the Aisne, from Berry-au-Bac to Betheny, the French
front was curiously placed. From the Aisne to Le Godat it lay
east of the Aisne-Marne Canal. From Le Godat to Courcy the
canal was in front of it, and protected the German position, which
was further supported by the Rheims-Laon railway embankment,
and by the guns on the hill of Brimont. Here the French objective
was the village of Loivre, and Bermericourt out in the plain, the
possession of which would turn Fnsnes and Brimont from the
north. In the first assault the French carried Bermericourt, but
lost it before the evening. Farther south the east bank of the
canal was won, and Loivre fell to a dashing charge. On the right
a Russian brigade, which had been in the Argonne the year before,
took Courcy and its chateau, but beyond them the German guns
on the Rheims hills prevented any further advance.

The first day of the battle closed in driving sleet. Much had
been won, notably the crowning point of Hurtebise on the Aisne
plateau, one sentinel hillock of the gap between Craonne and the
Aisne, and positions threatening Brimont and Fresnes. Some
11,000 prisoners had been taken, and many guns. But Nivelle
was still very far from the gates of Laon.

Tuesday, 17th April, dawned in a hurricane of wind and snow.
At half-past five the battle began on the left with the capture of
Les Grinons, which must involve the fall of Chavonne and La
Cour de Soupir. At Hurtebise, at Ville-aux-Bois, at Loivre, at
Bermericourt and Courcy the French beat off counter-attacks or
secured their ground. Meantime east of Rheims Anthoine's Fourth

i9i7] THE MORONVILLERS BATTLE. 473

Army * had opened its attack upon the Moronvillers massif. This
new area demands a brief description. Between Nogent l'Abbesse,
east of Rheims, and Moronvillers lies a pocket of flat ground some
seven miles wide around the little town of Beine. South and east
of this basin, and bordering on the north the plain of Chalons, is
a cluster of rounded hills, feathered with firwoods, the watershed
between the Vesle and the Suippe. The highest part, Mont Haut,
is a little over 600 feet. This massif constituted a defence on the
eastern flank of the German positions around Rheims, and a defence
on the south of the Bazancourt-Apremont railway, which had been
one of the objectives in the Champagne battle of 1915. It formed
also a dangerous view-point over the whole plain of Chalons. The
enemy was well aware of its importance, and had defended its
flanks with mighty works — on the west the trench system west
of the Thuizy-Nauroy road, on the east the network between
Auberive and Vaudesincourt. All the hills had been tunnelled
and ringed with forts.

The main strategical object of the French attack was to uncover
the heights east and north of Rheims held by the enemy, and to
drive him from the south bank of the Aisne, between the Aisne-
Marne Canal and the Suippe, and broaden the entrance into the
plain of Laon for Nivelle's centre. The Fourth Army was com-
pelled to make a frontal attack, owing to the great strength of the
German flanks, and a frontal attack against such a hill fortress
was an enterprise not to be lightly undertaken. The force con-
sisted of two corps — the left under Hely d'Oissel, and the right
under Dumas — a total of some 75,000 men. Anthoine, an old
gunner, had not neglected his artillery. He had behind him such
a massing of guns as had probably never been seen in an area
of the same size, for he realized that the problem before him was
insoluble unless the way was made plain for his infantry. On
the night of 16th April the French front in the section of assault
lay just north of the Rheims-St. Hilaire road. The first German
line was in the flats at the foot of the hills, the second was half-
way up the slopes, and the third line was the fortressed summits
of Mont Cornillet, Mont Blond, Mont Haut, Mont Perthois, and
Mont sans Nom. The attack began at 4.45 on the morning of
the 17th. The result of the first day of the Moronvillers battle
was that the French centre had pushed well into the hills,
reaching the summits of Mont sans Nom and Mont Blond, and

* This army belonged to Petain's Group of the Centre, and not to Micneler's special
group.

474 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

falling just short of the summit of Cornillet ; but that the left
and right, fighting against strong German defences, were stayed
in the enemy's second line. The beginning had been brilliant,
but the result of the battle was still on the knees of the gods. Reso-
1 ite counter-attacks might drive in the sides of the new salient,
and cut off the vanguard on the hills.

On Wednesday, the 18th, the offensive was resumed through-
out the whole battle-ground. On the west the knell was struck of
the German salient on the western heights of the Aisne. The
French left, already between Laffaux and Margival, pressed right
across the Vregny spur, over the ravine which descends to Missy,
and on to the Chivres ridge, where they took the village of Nan-
teuil-la-Fosse. Farther south, the French crossed the Aisne at
Celles and Vailly, took Vailly, and rounded up two Saxon regiments
on the spur to the north. Chavonne and Chivy had fallen during
the night. Ostel was taken, so was Braye-en-Laonnois, and the
plateau above it up to the edge of Courtecon. Great captures of
guns, both field and heavy, were made, for the rush of Mangin's
men had surprised all the enemy's calculations. Of all the western
spurs he now possessed only the southern part of the Chivres spur,
where stood the old fort of Conde, and the little Vaudesson-
Vauxelles spur to the east of it.

On the night of the 17th an encircling movement was begun
against Ville-aux-Bois from the south-east. By six o'clock on the
morning of the 18th the French had carried the village and the
remaining hillock, the Bois des Boches, which brought them to the
great Rheims-Laon highroad. That afternoon came the first of
the serious German counter-attacks. Two fresh divisions were
launched against the front between the Miette and the Aisne ; but
the French barrage mowed them down in the open, and the French
machine guns destroyed what the barrage had spared. Between
the Aisne and Rheims there was little fighting ; but that day in
the Moronvillers region saw a steady advance. Both the summits
of Mont Haut were taken, the highest point of the range, while
Degoutte's Moroccan division pushed to the east of Mont sans
Nom. So far no great German counter-attack had developed here,
but the French aircraft brought news of fresh enemy divisions
hastening to the scene of conflict. Meantime the French Tenth
Army, hitherto in reserve, was brought in between the Fifth and
the Sixth, between Hurtebise and Craonne.

On Thursday, the 19th, Mangin's left took Laffaux at last, and

1917] THE GERMAN COUNTER-ATTACKS. 475

the point of the Chivres spur fell. Fort Conde" was blown up by
its garrison, who tried to retreat northward along the ridge, but
were for the most part destroyed by the French barrage. This
marked the end of the German salient which had endured since
January 1915. The enemy was pushed up to the hog's back, and
the villages of Aizy and Jouy were taken. The position now wa*
that the French held all the spurs except a small part of the extreme
western one, while the Germans held the Chemin des Dames at its
western and eastern ends, but had lost the crest of the ridge for
some three miles between Troy on and Hurtebise. The gap be-
tween the eastern terminal of the heights and the Aisne was cleared,
but not yet open, for the Craonne guns still commanded it. That
day there was a little progress between Berry-au-Bac and Betheny.
The Moronvillers area saw violent counter-attacks by two new
German divisions, the 5th and 6th, which had arrived from Alsace. It
was one of the bloodiest days of the battle. The French, however,
took the hill called the Teton, swayed all day on the summit, and
when night fell were still in possession. Meantime, on Anthoine's
right, Auberive had at last fallen to Degoutte's division.

On Friday, the 20th, the battle had temporarily died down in
the west and centre, except for the capture of Sancy, the village at
the narrows of the Chivres spur. But Anthoine was still heavily
engaged. He was still held short of the summit of Cornillet, and
that day was forced back from the crest of Mont Haut. On his
right, however, Degoutte's Moroccans had worked their way well
to the north-east of Mont sans Norn. The first phase of the action
had now concluded. Anthoine had won most of his objectives east
of the Thuizy-Nauroy road. He was close on the crest of Cornillet,
he held Mont Blond, the lower summit of Mont Haut, Mont sans
Nom, and Auberive. Above all, he had faced and defeated furious
counter-attacks delivered by fresh German divisions. But he held
a dangerous salient, and the enemy possessed admirable starting-
points for counter-strokes in the future.

The closing days of April saw little activity on the left and
centre of the battle-ground. There were counter-attacks in the
Troyon area on the 20th, and on the 21st the French pushed north
on the Chivres spur to beyond the narrows. On the 25th there
were counter-attacks at Hurtebise and Vauxaillon, and an abortive
German move between Rheims and La Pompelle. It was possible
now to estimate gains. Between the Ailette and the Suippe, from
the 16th to the 20th, there had been captured 21,000 prisoners and
183 guns. The enemy had lost all the banks of the Aisne from

476 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

Soissons to Berry-au-Bac and all the spurs of the Aisne heights,
while the French held the centre of the tableland. The evacuation
of Laon had begun. Out of fifty-two enemy divisions in reserve on
ist April, all but sixteen had been drawn in. But the dominating
height of Craonne had not fallen, and the hills of Brimont and
Fresnes had not been turned. Anthoinc had won the better part
of the Moronvillers massif, but not enough to complete any strate-
gical purpose. In short, though there had been considerable gains
of ground, the major strategy had failed. The road to Laon was
as firmly barred as ever.

The result was to produce grave discouragement among the
French people. It was not that their own losses were disproportion-
ate, for, considering the nature of the obstacles attacked, they were
on a moderate scale. But these losses were grossly exaggerated
by ministers and journalists. The rumour was 120,000 casualties
in the first three days, of whom 25,000 were dead ; the real figures
were respectively 75,000 and 15,000.* France's hopes had been
keyed too high, and she suffered a corresponding reaction. She
had been promised Laon, and she would not be content with Ville-
aux-Bois. The tanks, from which she had looked for much, had
done little, having proved themselves both slow and fragile ; and
the confidence in Nivelle's inspired audacity, induced by his Verdun
exploits, had not been justified. As a consequence, there was a
sudden reversion of feeling in favour of the cautious tactics of the
Somme, and of Petain and Foch, the chief exponents of those
tactics in the French army. As early as 18th April Sir Douglas
Haig was being sounded by the British Government, who saw what
was about to happen in Paris, as to his views about the continuance
of an offensive, and was arguing strongly in its favour. Meantime
Nivelle had shifted the axis of his attack towards the north-east,
and proposed to disengage Rheims by the capture of the Brimont
hills. The story goes that Mazel, commanding the Fifth Army,
was asked by M. Painleve what would be the cost, and was told
60,000 men, and that that which the General meant for the effectives
required the Minister of War took as the inevitable losses, with
the result that the Brimont attack was countermanded. More
conferences followed, to which Haig was summoned, and on the
29th the post of Chief of the General Staff at the Ministry of War
was revived, and Petain was appointed to fill it. He was to act

* The French losses from 16th to 29th April were 107,854 of all ranks, including
5,830 Russians. Many of them were very lightly wounded, and the total was no
more than 6.55 of the effectives engaged. — See Rousset's La Baiaille de I' Aisne, 1920.

1917] NIVELLE REPLACED BY PETAIN. 477

as the adviser of the Cabinet on all questions connected with the
campaign and the co-operation of the Allied armies ; and to advise
on all operation plans proposed by the various commanders-in-
chief, and on all technical problems of materiel, transport, and the
economics of war. The change, it was obvious, was only the
precursor of others. If Petain's strategy was to be adopted, Petain
must be put in supreme command. It was clear to most observers
that, except for Foch, he was the most considerable leader, both in
brain and character, that France had as yet produced, and the only
place for such a man was the highest. Nivelle was invited to resign,
declined, and on 15th May was replaced by Petain, while Fayolle
succeeded to Petain's old group command in the central sector.
Foch followed Petain as Chief of the General Staff in Paris.

Meantime the great right was not over. Even if the major
purpose had failed, much had been gained ; but these gains were
still unmatured, and must be brought to that point where a true
tactical advantage could be derived from them. In particular,
the Craonne height must be won, and the Moron villers range finally
controlled. The new battle opened in the latter area. On 30th
April, an hour after midday, the summit of Cornillet was won and
lost, the top of Mont Perthois was reached, but the attack failed
to carry the higher of the two summits of Mont Haut. On 4th
May an unsuccessful attempt was made to turn Cornillet by the
west. Anthoine once again held his hand, and brought up fresh
troops, while his guns began a new " preparation."

On Friday, 4th May, the battle reopened in the west. The
front of attack was from Craonne to Brimont, but the main fighting
was on the left, where the French entered Craonne, and carried
two and a half miles of the enemy's first line. Pushing through
the ruined village, two French companies climbed the great ter-
minal bluff, and dug themselves in on the very top of the ridge,
on the plateau called California. The Germans counter-attacked
against the French right with two fresh divisions from the direction
of Aguilcourt and the mouth of the Suippe, but they effected
nothing, and lost 700 prisoners. The French had now obtained a
footing on the long-sought eastern end of the Chemin des Dames,
a point of immense tactical importance, since in looking from it
no subsidiary range beyond the Ailette blocked the vision, and
the greater part of the railway between Rheims and Laon lay open
to the eye. It remained to be seen if they would be suffered to
hold it.

At dawn next day, Saturday, 5th May, the whole of the French

478 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

left and left centre was in action. On the left the chief objective
was the point of the German salient east of Laffaux, on the Soissons-
Laon highroad. The enemy was driven from Hill 157 east of
Vauxaillon, and the battle raged around the mill of Laffaux, which
stood by the highway. Beyond the mill the ground fell steeply
to the ravine which runs to Missy, and in the quarries on the edge
of the scarp the Germans had a formidable position. A division
of dismounted cuirassiers, supported by tanks, attacked at 4.45
a.m., and by ten o'clock had taken the mill and the trenches to
the left of it, and later in the day pushed on to the narrows between
the aforementioned ravine and that which runs north to the Ailette
by the village of Allemant. Troops climbing up the ridge from
Nanteuil-la-Fosse supported the right, and farther east an advance
was made along the Fort Conde spur towards its junction with the
main ridge. Above Craonne the whole of the California plateau
was held except the German work called the " Winterberg " at its
western end above the forest of Vauclerc. The position now was
that all the Chemin des Dames ridge was in French hands except
for some points on its northern edge, the sector for a mile on each
side of the fort of Malmaison, and the area around Courtecon.

On Sunday, the 6th, there was severe fighting on the northern
scarp between Laffaux Mill and the ravine of Allemant, where for
the most part the French retained the positions they had won.
More important still, moving out from Craonne, they took the
hamlet of Chevreux in the plains, and so safeguarded their hold
on the terminal with an advanced post. Already the three days
of fighting had given them over 6,000 prisoners, including 150
officers. The following days saw a series of counter-attacks,
delivered with fresh " shock troops," after the new German fashion.
On the nights of 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th May, and during
most of the daylight hours of the 9th and 10th, there was bitter
fighting all along the ridge, but most notably on the Vauclerc and
California plateaux, and at Chevreux in the plains. On the 16th
the enemy attacked on a two and a half mile front north of the
mill of Laffaux, and two days later he made costly and fruitless
efforts at California and north of Braye-en-Laonnois. On the 20th
he struck at the French front from Craonne to the fort of Mal-
maison, but where he got through the barrage he was routed by
the infantry, and left 1,000 prisoners behind him.

That day, Sunday, 20th May, saw the culmination of the Moron-
villers battle. The task that remained before the French was to
round off their scattered gains in the massif by forming a line in

THE SECOND BATTLE
OF THE AISNE.

i, -v.

i9i7] THE END OF THE BATTLE. 479

which they could abide. The sector of attack was the highest
ground from Cornillet eastward, for the objectives west of the
Thuizy-Nauroy road had been relinquished. Three new divisions
were detailed for the task, and at half-past four in the morning,
after a mighty artillery bombardment, advanced to the assault.
The Germans on Cornillet were ensconced in the strong Flensburg
trench just below the summit, in a great tunnel, and on the north
slopes behind the crest. Against these was launched the ist Regi-
ment of Zouaves, the same which had fought under Grossetti on
the Yser during the First Battle of Ypres. They raced the 250
steep yards to the summit, under a heavy enfilading fire from the
Flensburg trench on their right, gained the crest, and moved down
the farther side towards Nauroy. When the entrance to the tunnel
was reached, it was discovered that the 600 troops in it were dead,
asphyxiated by the blocking of the air-holes and by the French
gas shells. The whole summit ridge of the massif had now been
secured. Since the opening of this section of the battle on 17th
April there had been taken 6,120 prisoners, including 120 officers,
52 guns, 42 trench mortars, and 103 machine guns.

The remaining days of May and the month of June saw between
the Ailette and the Suippe the usual aftermath of a great action.
There were small advances of the French to improve their line,
and many violent attacks by picked German troops to recover
lost points of vantage. By making a list of such counter-strokes
it is possible to master the tactical topography of the battle-
ground, and learn which points the enemy considered vital. The
chief was the California plateau, the watch-tower over the plain of
Laon. This was attacked on 21st, 23rd, and 24th May, and very
violently on the night of 2nd June. Another was the cockscomb
of the ridge near Hurtebise, another the ground around Cerny, and
a third the apex of the western salient between Vauxaillon and
Laffaux Mill. In the Moronvillers region the disputed points were
all the main summits. The action died away into upland fighting,
where tunnels, quarries, and grottoes were the battle-ground, and
where the initiative and resolution of companies, platoons, and
individuals determined the issue. The day of ambitious strategy
had passed.

The Second Battle of the Aisne lasted a little more than a
month. It represented, as we have seen, in its main intention a
departure from the policy of the Somme, a departure which after
the first day or two was not persisted in. It did not achieve the

480 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

aim of the French High Command, which was the dislocation of
the southern pivot of the Siegfried Line and the envelopment or
destruction of that position, and to that extent may be written
down a failure. It did not even, as at Arras, gravely endanger any
vital enemy centre, and thereby put out of gear his plans for the
summer. But it was far from being barren of results. It engaged
and destroyed a large number of German divisions ; it used up a
quantity of the best German " shock-troops " ; and it cost the enemy
positions which were essential to his comfort, and, ultimately, to
his security. Nivelle's reach had been heroic, but it had exceeded
his grasp. He suffered beyond doubt from the interference of
politicians and the fatigue of his armies ; but his essential strategy
was unsuited to the place, the hour, and the circumstances of the
case. He had a vision of an end without a clear understanding
of the means. Only by a succession of miracles could he have
succeeded, and miracles, when they happen in war, come singly
and not in battalions. He fell into the mistake of endeavouring to
reap the fruits of victory before beating the enemy. It was the
error of a gifted and generous and courageous spirit, but it was
none the less a blunder, for which he paid by a fall from com-
mand as sudden as his rise, and which was to bring his country
to the very brink of disaster.

For Petain on his succession to office found a grim problem
before him. The battle had been like a chemical which when
added to a compound produces an explosion, and the superb moral
of the soldiers of France seemed to be in the gravest jeopardy. As
early as February Nivelle had complained of pacificist and com-
munist propaganda among his troops. There were evil elements
in French life which seized the occasion of the fatigue and disillu-
sionment of the soldier to instil the poison of cowardice and treason.
The rank and file had many grievances. Leave was hard to get,
and when it was granted the permissionnaire found such diffi-
culties in reaching his family that most of his scanty time was
taken up by the journey. Intense bitterness was roused by letters
from home, which told the peasant of the struggle of his womenkind
to keep his farm in cultivation ; while the workmen of the towns
were exempted by thousands for munition making. There was dire
confusion in the medical services during the battle, and wounded
were sent all over France to spread despondency by the tale of their
needless sufferings.

The first signs of revolt appeared about 20th May, not in the troops
fighting on the Aisne, but in corps which had been some months

i9i7] THE FRENCH MUTINIES. 481

in reserve. The contagion spread to the men in the line, and in
certain divisions nearest Paris the mutiny seemed to have some-
thing of the character of a first step in political revolution.* The
crisis showed Petain at his best. On the one hand he insisted on
reforming flagrant abuses. New regulations were passed granting
as a right ten days' leave every four months, with the result that
350,000 French soldiers were on leave at one time, as against 80,000
British. With the help of the American Red Cross, which was
now beginning its beneficent work in Europe, the comfort of the
fighting man and his dependants was enormously increased. The
penal measures used were few ; less than a dozen suffered death
as mutineers. But Petain set himself to a great work of education
and exhortation. In two months he visited and addressed the
officers and men of over one hundred divisions, and created a pro-
found impression. He had no tricks to win popularity, no easy
geniality, none of the air of the bon enfant ; he was always grave
and dignified, always the general-in- chief. But such was the atmos-
phere of calm resolution which he bore with him, such the simplicity
and sincerity of his voice and eyes, that he moved audiences which
the most finished orations would have left untouched. Honestly
and gravely he told them of the peril of their country and the cause
for which they and their Allies fought. By the middle of June
the danger was past. But one consequence remained, which was
to affect the whole strategy of 1917. The armies of France were
convalescent, but they had still to be nursed back to perfect health.
For the rest of the year it was plain that Britain must bear the
chief burden.

* One of the most remarkable facts in the war was the way in which the French
mutinies were kept a profound secret both from the enemy and the Allies.

CHAPTER LXXVIII.

MESOPOTAMIA, SYRIA, AND THE BALKANS.

January g-June 25, 1917.

Maude advances north of Bagdad — Escape of Turkish 13th Corps — Capture of
Samara — Falkenhayn sent to Turkey — The First and Second Battles of Gaza
— Allenby succeeds Murray — Sarrail's abortive Spring Offensive — King Con-
stantine abdicates, and Venizelos becomes Prime Minister.

I.

Bagdad had fallen to Sir Stanley Maude on the morning of nth
March. With it he won the southern terminus of the unfinished
Bagdad railway, the first section of which had been completed as
far north as Samara. He won, too, the ganglion of all the routes
of the Mesopotamian plain, where six telegraph lines and six good
roads converged, and through which ran the historic highway to
Persia that the armies of Darius and Alexander and Harun-al-
Rashid had travelled. This highway was now to play a part in
the campaign. It ran north-east along the Diala to Khanikin,
and then through the lateral valleys of the Median range climbed
by Karind and Kermanshah to Hamadan on the Persian plateau.
There lay Baratov's small Russian force of one infantry division
and Cossack cavalry, which for a year had led a precarious existence
some two hundred miles from its base at Kasvin. It will be re-
membered that in January 1916 Baratov had won Hamadan —
the ancient Ecbatana — and, pushing westward, had occupied
Kermanshah and Karind, and had flung his patrols into Khanikin
itself, 120 miles from Bagdad. But the Turkish capture of Kut
put an end to this bold adventure. The Turkish 13th Corps
advanced up the Diala, and during the early summer of 1916
drove him back to the Persian tableland, and well to the east of
Hamadan. There during the rest of the year he remained, shep-
herding his difficult transport as well as he might, unable to advance

482

igiy] THE ADVANCE NORTH OF BAGDAD. 483

Mid equally unable to retire, for the air of Persia was not salubrious
for his handful, if once it had to retreat before the Turk. The
enemy had posts in the northern mountains at Senna and else-
where, and since he was secure on the Tigris he could at any moment
launch a force for Baratov's destruction. Maude's advance in the
beginning of 1917 changed the situation. As soon as he had
entered Kut on 24th February the Turkish 13th Corps fell back
from Hamadan. They did not attempt to hold the pass of Said
Abad in the main Median range, and by the time Bagdad fell they
were in Kermanshah, and Baratov's Cossacks were at Bisitun,
some twenty miles to the east, where the great rock-sculptures of
Darius frown from the mountain side. The reason of this retreat
was not far to seek. If Maude, pushing up the Diala, could reach
Khanikin first, he would cut off the retreat of the 13th Corps.
The Senna detachment was hastening to Kermanshah, and the
whole Turkish force was striving against time for Khanikin. It
was such a race as was rarely seen in the stagnant modern war-
fare of positions.

The conquerors of Bagdad, therefore, could not rest on their
laurels. Maude had two tasks before him which would not wait.
One was to get to Khanikin before the enemy ; the second was to
harass the retreating 18th Corps in front of him, to prevent it cutting
certain important dams on the Tigris and Euphrates, and to drive
it north beyond the rail-head at Samara. He had also to make
his left flank secure by seizing Feludja, the nearest point on the
Euphrates to Bagdad, and so cut the enemy's communications
between the upper and the lower river. He therefore divided his
forces into four columns. One advanced on each bank of the
Tigris, a third struck westward towards Feludja on the Euphrates,
forty miles distant, and the fourth followed the Persian road up
the Diala valley.

The two lesser tasks were quickly accomplished. The Turks
cut the dam above Bagdad as soon as we had entered the city,
and the river waters burst into the Akkar Kuf Lake, which over-
flowed and swamped all the ground up to the bund which protected
the railway and the western suburbs. But the bund held firm,
and since the Tigris was exceptionally low there was no serious
hindrance to our operations. The Euphrates column entered
Feludja on 19th March, just too late to cut off the garrisons of the
middle valley on their northward retreat. It harassed their rear-
guards, and drove them twenty-five miles upstream to their pre-
pared position at Ramadie.

484 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

On the same date Maude issued a proclamation to the Bagdad
vilayet, perhaps the most skilful of the many proclamations issued
by British generals to Eastern peoples. It deserves quotation : —

" 1. In the name of my King, and in the name of the peoples over
whom he rules, I address you as follows : —

"2. Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the
enemy, and the driving of him from these territories. In order to
complete this task, I am charged with absolute and supreme control
of all regions in which British troops operate ; but our armies do not
come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as
liberators.

"3. Since the days of Halaka your city and your lands have been
subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins,
your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers and your-
selves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to
wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by
unjust men and squandered in distant places.

" 4. Since the days of Midhat, the Turks have talked of reforms,
yet do not the ruins and wastes of to-day testify the vanity of those
promises ?

" 5. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also
the wish of the great nations with whom he is in alliance, that you
should prosper even as in the past, when your lands were fertile, when
your ancestors gave to the world literature, science, and art, and when
Bagdad city was one of the wonders of the world.

"6. Between your people and the dominions of my King there has
been a close bond of interest. For two hundred years have the mer-
chants of Bagdad and Great Britain traded together in mutual profit
and friendship. On the other hand, the Germans and Turks, who have
despoiled you and yours, have for twenty years made Bagdad a centre
of power from which to assail the power of the British and the Allies
of the British in Persia and Arabia. Therefore the British Government
cannot remain indifferent as to what takes place in your country now
or in the future, for in duty to the interests of the British people and
their Allies, the British Government cannot risk that being done in
Bagdad again which has been done by the Turks and Germans during
the war.

"7. But you people of Bagdad, whose commercial prosperity and
whose safety from oppression and invasion must ever be a matter of
the closest concern to the British Government, are not to understand
that it is the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien
institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspira-
tions of your philosophers and writers shall be realized, and that once
again the people of Bagdad shall flourish, enjoying their wealth and
substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred
laws and their racial ideals. In Hedjaz the Arabs have expelled the

1917] MAUDE'S PROCLAMATION. 485

Turks and Germans who oppressed them and proclaimed the Sherif
Hussein as their King, and his Lordship rules in independence and
freedom, and is the ally of the nations who are fighting against the
power of Turkey and Germany ; so, indeed, are the noble Arabs, the
Lords of Koweit, Nejd, and Asir.

"8. Many noble Arabs have perished in the cause of Arab freedom,
at the hands of those alien rulers, the Turks, who oppressed them. It
is the determination of the Government of Great Britain and the great
Powers allied to Great Britain that these noble Arabs shall not have
suffered in vain. It is the hope and desire of the British people and
the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once
more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth, and that
it shall bind itself together to this end in unity and concord.

" 9. O people of Bagdad, remember that for twenty-six generations
you have suffered under strange tyrants who have ever endeavoured
to set one Arab house against another in order that they might profit
by your dissensions. This policy is abhorrent to Great Britain and
her Allies, for there can be neither peace nor prosperity where there is
enmity and misgovernment. Therefore I am commanded to invite
you, through your nobles and elders and representatives, to participate
in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the political
representatives of Great Britain who accompany the British Army, so
that you may be united with your kinsmen in North, East, South, and
West in realizing the aspirations of your race."

On the 13th the western Tigris column moved out of Bagdad,
and on the 14th, in scorching weather and after stubborn fighting,
took the ridge called the Sugar Loaf Hill and the station of Mush-
aidie, and cleared the right bank of the river up to that point.
The fighting lasted into the early morning of the 15th, by which
time the remnants of the three enemy divisions were in full retreat
towards Samara. By the morning of the 16th they were some
forty miles north of Bagdad. But the advance on the western
bank could not be pressed so long as the eastern bank remained
uncleared, for the other divisions of the 18th Corps were concen-
trating there, and a fresh division had arrived from Mosul.

For the moment, however, the main interest lay in the race
against time with the Turkish 13th Corps in the mountains. On
the 15th Maude's eastern column left Bagdad, and on the night of
the 17th crossed the Diala, which in its upper valley bends west-
ward towards the Tigris, and took the villages of Bahriz and Bakuba.
Bahriz was the western end of a difficult mountain path from
Harunabad, on the Persian trunk road, by Mendeli, and our posi-
tion there prevented its use by the retreating 13th Corps. By
this time Baratov was in Kermanshah, and the Senna force was

486 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

cut off from its normal line of retreat, and compelled to attempt
the tracks of the mountain between it and the upper Diala, leaving
its guns behind it. The situation seemed a desperate one, but
the Turkish commander revealed surprising qualities of leadership
and strategy. West of Karind lies the pass of Piatak, on the ridge
which separates the streams which flow to the Karun basin from
the Alwand torrent which joins the Diala. There, in an admirable
position for defence, he left a strong rearguard, which succeeded
in checking Baratov's weak forces. Against the British Khalil
took up a position on the ridge called Jebel Hamrin, which cuts
the Diala at right angles near Mansuriya, some thirty miles north-
east of Bakuba. These two screens were intended to hold up the
pursuit until the 13th Corps reached Khanikin, crossed the Diala
near the mouth of the Alwand, and took the road which runs by
Kara Tepe, Kifri, and Kirkuk towards Mosul.

On 23rd March Maude was in Shahraban, and close on the Jebel
Hamrin position. His advance had been slow and difficult owing
to the number of canals and little rivers that had to be bridged.
Seventy miles off was Baratov, struggling in snowdrifts against
the Piatak Pass, while the British were sweltering in the torrid
plains. Between the two was the Turkish 13th Corps, rapidly
approaching the Diala and safety. On the 25th Maude attacked
the screen at Jebel Hamrin, his right moving along the highway
towards Kizil Robat, and the cavalry on the left attacking the
defile of Deli Abbas on the right bank of the Diala. Meantime
the column operating on the eastern bank of the Tigris had occupied
Deltawa and Sindia, thirty-five miles north of Bagdad, where the
Diala and Tigris are only nine miles apart. There they were facing
the larger part of the 18th Corps.

By the last days of March the Turkish 13th Corps had escaped
from the trap. On the 31st Maude carried the Deli Abbas position,
and on the same day Baratov was over the Piatak Pass, and some
ten miles farther west at Siripul. The enemy screens were being
withdrawn, for there was no further need of them. When we
passed beyond the barrier of the Jebel Hamrin hills we could see
on the far side of the Diala the last Turkish rearguards moving
on the western plain by Kara Tepe. The enemy had carried out
his plan with complete precision and success, and his opponents
were not slow to acclaim his achievement.

On the 29th the eastern Tigris column had forced the 18th Corps
back and crossed the marshy channel of the river Adhaim. We
were now on the left bank of the Tigris, within thirty miles of

i9i7] CAPTURE OF SAMARA. 487

Samara, on the ground where Julian the Apostate had received
his death-wound. But the situation had changed. The 18th and
13th Corps were now united, and able to take the offensive. Bara-
tov was in Khanikin, and on 2nd April his Cossack advance guards
joined hands with the British at Kizil Robat. About 7th April
the Turkish counter-offensive developed. The 13th Corps, in-
stead of making for Kifri, swung south, held the left bank of the
Shatt-el-Adhaim, in conjunction with the 52nd Division of the
18th Corps, and came in touch with the British cavalry on the line
Garfa-Deli Abbas. Maude promptly retired his advanced posts
on the right bank of the Diala, and fell slowly southwards towards
Deltawa, while his cavalry held the enemy. On the night of 10th
April the eastern Tigris column marched eastward, and on the morn-
ing of the nth had taken the Turks in flank. The battle began in
a mirage which, while it lasted, made air reconnaissance impossible.
It lifted towards midday, and before evening the enemy were in
retreat, leaving behind them 700 wounded prisoners. The fighting
lasted till the 13th, by which date the 13th Corps was forced back
again on the Jebel Hamrin range.

Meantime the western Tigris column had been making good
progress along the railway, and on the 16th captured the ridge in
front of the Turkish position which covered Istabulat station.
The time had now come for the final advance on Samara. On
the night of the 17th Maude's right wing recrossed the Shatt-el-
Adhaim. Next day it engaged and destroyed the Turkish forces
which held the right bank of the stream. The action was fought
on a day of intense heat, and at a cost of seventy-three casualties
we took over 1,200 prisoners, including twenty-seven officers.
On the 2 1st the left wing attacked Istabulat, and drove in the
enemy. Pressing on, they came in touch on the 22nd with the
final Turkish position, some six miles nearer Samara. By day-
light on the 23rd the line was carried, and that morning we took
Samara station, capturing sixteen locomotives, 240 railway trucks,
and two barges laden with munitions. Next day we entered
Samara town. In the operations of the preceding three days we
had taken some 700 prisoners, five guns, and large quantities of
rifles.

Khalil made one last attempt at a counter-stroke. The two
British columns on the Tigris had now joined hands, and the
Turkish 18th Corps was scattered some fifteen miles north of
Samara, where it was feverishly entrenching. But the 13th Corps
still hung on our right flank, and on 24th April it emerged from the

488 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

Jebel Hamrin hills. That day it was heavily beaten, and driven
up the Shatt-el-Adhaim. We struck again on the 30th against
the position which it held twenty-five miles south-west of Kifri,
at the defile where the Adhaim issues from the hills. The attack,
delivered in a furious dust-storm, was a surprise, and carried all
the enemy lines of entrenchments. Once more he was forced to
flee, with our cavalry at his heels.

The end of April found Bagdad secure. The 13th Corps, after
its brilliant escape from Kermanshah, had been three times engaged
and beaten, and was now forced into the Jebel Hamrin fastnesses.
The 18th Corps had fallen back on Tekrit, having been five times
defeated during the month of April alone. In every direction the
enemy had been forced at least eighty miles from the city ; more-
over, his two corps had been driven back on divergent lines. The
terminal section of the Bagdad railway was in our hands. Our
casualties had been slight, and our transport and hospital arrange-
ments were now so good that the Army of Mesopotamia, once the
worst cared for of British forces, was now almost the best. Sir
Stanley Maude, now that the summer heat was upon him, could
call a halt with an easy mind. The original plan of operations
for the spring of 1917 had given the beau role to the Russians —
an advance from Persia upon Mosul and Bagdad ; but the disor-
ganization of revolutionary Russia had made the great projected
westward and southward drive impossible. The heavy end had,
therefore, fallen upon the British commander, and he had per-
formed his task with consummate judgment and skill. He had
blocked the communications of the enemy with southern Persia,
and, therefore, with the Indian border.

After their victory of Kut the Turkish General Staff had been
flown with pride, and their German colleagues found them hard
to deal with. The loss of Bagdad deflated their arrogance, and
Enver begged of Germany a group headquarters and a corps for
the recapture of the city. In January 1917 the Amanus standard-
gauge tunnel had been completed, and the narrow-gauge Taurus
tunnel would be ready by the autumn. Germany assented Falk-
enhayn was placed in command of a group, and the German " Asia
Corps " was formed — a corps which the Turks called Yilderim or
" Lightning," the name their great-grandfathers had bestowed upon
Napoleon. This force was primarily destined for Mesopotamia,
but its fortunes, as we shall see, were to be linked with another
terrain. Meantime the accession of strength to the Turk was
being balanced by an Allied reinforcement in a different quarter.

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1917] LAWRENCE IN THE HEDJAZ. 489

The King of the Hedjaz, as we have seen, held Mecca, but a
Turkish garrison was in Medina, supplied by the Hedjaz railway.
That garrison, strongly reinforced, attempted the recapture of
Mecca, and since the only obstacle was Arab irregulars it looked
for a little as if it might succeed. In January, however, an Arab
force under Sherif Feisul, the king's eldest son, marched two
hundred miles north to Wejh, supported along the coast by the
British Red Sea Flotilla. This threat to the enemy flank worked
like a charm : the Turks gave up all thoughts of Mecca, and dis-
tributed their troops for the defence of Medina and the railway.
The incident revealed to the Arab tribes their true policy. In-
spired and led by a young English archaeologist, afterwards famous
as Colonel T. E. Lawrence, they entered upon a bold campaign,
not against the Turkish army but against its materiel. Bridges,
railways, guns, dumps, depots, were their quarry. Bands, mounted
on camels and carrying six weeks' food, raided the line at incredible
distances from their base, and immobilized the Turkish forces in
the Hedjaz. Colonel Lawrence made out of irregular war not only
a gallant adventure but an exact science.

II.

The fall of Rafa on 9th January had brought Sir Archibald
Murray to the eastern borders of Egypt. The desert railway was
being pushed along the coast to form a British line of communica-
tion similar to that which the enemy possessed in his military
railway from Beersheba. At first it was thought that the Turks
would make their next stand close to the frontier. On 28th Feb-
ruary our mounted patrols took the village of Khan Yunus, and
preparations were made for an attack in force upon the Weli
Sheikh Nuran position, at which the enemy had been working hard
since Christmas. But on 5th March our aircraft reported that the
two enemy divisions in front of us were falling back. A vigorous
pursuit was impossible, for the railhead was still too far in the rear,
and the enemy unhindered took up ground on the line from Gaza
to Tel el Sheria and Beersheba, this last point being strongly en-
trenched to protect his left.

The German general, Kress von Kressenstein, now in actual
command of the Turkish forces, was a brave and competent soldier,
who had to contend with immense difficulties. The people of
Turkey were heartily sick of the war. Starvation and pestilence

490 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

had raged throughout the land, and Syria had not suffered least.
The Lebanon and even Damascus were depopulated by famine.
Supplies of all kinds for the troops were hopelessly in arrear. Men
came unwillingly to arms, and desertion became an epidemic.
One division which left Constantinople at full strength lost 3,000
deserters on the road. A regiment reached Mesopotamia with
the loss of 500 deserters out of a total of 1,300 men. In the pre-
vious October, out of 2,000 sent as reinforcements from Con-
stantinople to Aleppo, only 966 arrived at their destination. In
such conditions it was hard to make a plan of campaign. Above
all, he had above him, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army of
Syria, Djemal, nominally Minister of Marine, whose moods were
as shifting as the desert sands. Djemal had quarrelled with all
his colleagues of the Committee, he had quarrelled furiously with
Kressenstein, and only his fanatical hatred of Britain kept him
from exchanging his uneasy Syrian satrapy for the more congenial
paths of intrigue at Constantinople.

The land from the Wadi el Arish — the ancient " River of
Egypt " — to the Philistian plain had for twenty-six hundred years
been a cockpit of war. Sometimes a conqueror from the north
like Nebuchadnezzar, or from the south like Ali Bey, Napoleon,
and Mehemet Ali, met the enemy in Egypt or Syria, but more
often the decisive fight was fought in the gates. Ascalon, Gaza,
Rafa, El Arish, are all names famous in history. Up and down the
strip of seaward levels marched the great armies of Egypt and
Assyria, while the Jews looked fearfully on from their barren hills.
In the Philistian plain Sennacherib smote the Egyptian hosts in the
days of King Hezekiah, only to see his army melt away under the
stroke of the " angel of the Lord." At Rafa Esarhaddon defeated
Pharaoh, and added Egypt and Ethiopia to his kingdoms. There,
too, the Scythian hordes were bought off by Psammetichus. At
Megiddo, or Armageddon, Josiah was vanquished by Pharaoh
Necho, who in turn was routed by Nebuchadnezzar. The first
Ptolemy was beaten at Gaza by the young Demetrius, and a cen-
tury later Ptolemy the Fourth shattered the Seleucid army at
Rafa. Twenty years after came the famous siege of Gaza by
Antiochus the Third. Then the land had rest till, in a.d. 614,
the last great Sassanid, Chosroes II., swept down upon Egypt. In
1072 the invasion of the Seljuk Turcomans was stayed in Philistia.
Godfrey of Bouillon, the Crusading king of Jerusalem, defeated the
Egyptians at Ascalon ; and a century and a half later that town,
long a Frankish stronghold, fell to the Mameluke Sultan after the

1917] THE POSITION AT GAZA. 491

Battle of Gaza. In this gate of ancient feuds it now fell to Turkey's
lot to speak with her enemy.

It was clear that Murray must fight a pitched battle before
he could advance. He had now left the Sinai desert for the stony
hills of Judah, which lie between the south end of the Dead Sea and
the Mediterranean, and rise in the north-east corner to the noble
mass of Hebron. In front of the enemy's position ran in a broad
curve from south-east to north-west the dry watercourse called
the Wadi Ghuzze. It was desirable to engage him as soon as
possible, lest he should fall back upon more favourable lines far-
ther north. Our railhead was still far behind, for it only reached
Rafa in the middle of March ; and if a blow was to be struck soon
it would be necessary to push forward the British force " to its
full radius of action into a country bare of all supplies and almost
devoid of water." There were two possible plans of campaign.
One was to strike at Beersheba, and so reach the Central Palestine
railway. The drawback of such a course was that it would have
brought the British line of communications from Rafa parallel to
the enemy's front, and given him an easy target for a counter-
stroke. The other and apparently the safer plan was to move up
the coast with Gaza as the objective, aiming at the Turkish right
flank. Such an advance would have its left covered by the sea,
it would, be better supplied with water, and the railway following
it would be easier to build among the flats of the Philistian plain
than among the rocks and ridges of the Judaean hills. Sir Archi-
bald Murray accordingly decided upon the latter course. On 20th
March Sir Charles Dobell, commanding the Eastern Force, moved
his headquarters from El Arish to Rafa, and Sir Philip Chetwode,
commanding the Desert Column,* joined him there. Chetwode's
cavalry was now at the little village of Deir el Belah, south-west of
the Wadi Ghuzze, and the 52nd and 54th Infantry Divisions and
the Camel Corps were disposed on its right south of the watercourse.
By the evening of the 25th all was in train for the coming battle.
The sun set in a sky of rose and gold, and there was a wonderful
night of stars, but those familiar with that coast sniffed in the air
the coming of a sea fog.

The British plan of battle was this. The enemy's front was not
a continuous line of trenches. Most of the troops were well to the
north-east of Gaza, but he had a considerable garrison in that

* The Desert Column comprised at this time the Australian and New Zealand
Mounted Division (Major-General Chauvel), the Imperial Mounted Division, and the
53rd Infantry Division.

492 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

town, and posts echeloned to the south-east as far as Beersheba.
The cavalry of the Desert Column were to advance early in the
morning and occupy the country east and north of the town to
prevent Turkish reinforcements arriving from that quarter and
to cut off the enemy's retreat. The 53rd Division from the Desert
Column was to follow the cavalry for a little, and then to attack
Gaza in front. The 54th Division was to move on its right rear
and hold the Sheikh Abbas height, in case of an attack from the
east or south-east. One brigade of this division was to assemble
a little to the westward to be ready at short notice to support
the Desert Column. The 52nd Division was held in general re-
serve. Murray's objects were these : to seize the line of the Wadi
Ghuzze, and so cover the advance of the railway ; to compel the
enemy to fight ; and by a surprise stroke to capture Gaza and
cut off its garrison. The main intention, it is clear, was less
the occupation of the town than the capture of the 7,000 Turks
who held it. It was in essence a raid on the largest possible
scale. Consequently it was an operation in which time was all-
important.

The cavalry scrambled down the forty-foot sides of the Wadi
Ghuzze, and ploughed through its sandy bottom at 2.30 a.m.,
while the night was yet dark. But no sooner had the sun risen
than a dense sea fog rolled over the countryside. No landmark
was visible, and the troops had to grope their way forward by
compass-bearings. This delay was the crucial event of the morn-
ing, for it upset the time-table of operations, and deprived what was
a race against time — for there was no water — of two priceless hours
of daylight. The Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division
in front, having crossed the Wadi by 6.15 a.m., rode for Beit Durdis
due east of Gaza, which it reached at 9.30. The Imperial Mounted
Division at the same hour arrived at El Mendur. Presently the
former division, pushing out detachments from Beit Durdis, had
completely outflanked Gaza on the north and east, and rested its
right on the sea. The 2nd Australian Light Horse took prisoner
the general commanding the 53rd Turkish Division, and destroyed
with machine-gun fire the head of a Turkish column debouching
from Gaza towards the north-east. The Imperial Mounted Divi-
sion sent out patrols towards Huj and Hereira and the railway at
Tel el Sheria, two squadrons of a Yeomanry brigade were astride
the Beersheba-Gaza road, and a squadron attempted to gain touch
with the Australian and New Zealand Division. This mounted
screen was all day heavily engaged, for it had to contend with the

1917] FIRST BATTLE OF GAZA. 493

enerrty reinforcements arriving from north, east, and south-east,
and was under the fire of the heavy guns at Hereira.

Meantime the 53rd Division — Welsh Territorials — had crossed
the Wadi Ghuzze for the frontal attack. Their right was directed
on the Mansura ridge and their left on El Sheluf, while the Yeo-
manry protected their flank towards the sea. These positions
were reached by 10 a.m., the guns had been brought up, and the
artillery " preparation " begun. The fog had gone by eight o'clock,
and the British infantry on the ridge could look across the two miles
of yellow sand-dunes to the white red-roofed houses of the little
town, the green of its lemon groves, and the minarets of the mosque
which was once the Templars' Church of St. John. On the right
in front of them was the hillock called Ali Muntar, up which Samson
carried the gates of Gaza. Beyond were the ridges and open spaces
where the cavalry were now engaged, and from the far base of the
Judaean hills rose the dust clouds which told of Turkish troops
hurrying to the battle-ground. The 54th Division — Territorials
from the eastern counties of England — was instructed to protect
the right rear of the 53rd against this threatened assault, and
took up position duly on the Sheikh Abbas ridge, five miles S.S.E
of the town. One brigade from this division went to Mansura
to support the attacking troops. The 53rd, deployed on the line
El Sheluf-Mansura, advanced against the Ali Muntar position.
This was a perfect honeycomb of trenches, and so was the hill to
the north-east separated from it by a low saddle of sand-dunes.
The three brigades went into action about noon, over ground devoid
of cover and under the hot sun of a Syrian spring. At one o'clock
they were close on their objectives, but the Turkish shrapnel and
machine-gun fire were woefully thinning their ranks.

At that hour Sir Philip Chetwode resolved to fling the whole
of the Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division against the
town itself to support the attack of the 53rd, and to bring the
Imperial Mounted Division and the cavalry farther north to act
as a screen against those enemy reinforcements from the railway
which were now observed to be coming up fast. By 3.30 General
Chauvel was ready to attack, the 2nd Australian Horse on the
north, with its right flank on the sea, the New Zealand Mounted
Rifles in the centre, and the Yeomanry on the left, adjoining the
main infantry battle. By 4.30 the 53rd Division had carried most
of Ali Muntar, and was closing in on Gaza from the south, while
the Australasian horsemen were in the eastern streets. At this
moment a brigade of the 54th Division arrived, with orders to

494 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

take the remnant of the position. The Territorials after a gallant
struggle succeeded, and pushed on nearly a mile beyond the crest.
Meantime the Australasians were fighting their way through the
cactus hedges on the skirts of Gaza, and the 3rd Australian Light
Horse were fending off enemy attacks to the east. In that direc-
tion the enemy was held, and in another hour the town would have
been in our hands. But the sea fog had done its work, and the
morning's delay had ruined our chances of success. For the dark-
ness descended before we had won the last ground, and in war
a task unfinished is often like a task not begun.

The British position was far from satisfactory. To quote Sir
Archibald Murray's words : " Gaza was enveloped, and the enemy,
in addition to heavy losses in killed and wounded, had lost 700
prisoners. The 53rd Division was occupying the Ali Muntar
position, which it had captured, but its right flank was very much
in the air, only a thin line of cavalry holding off the relief columns
of continually increasing strength which were approaching from
north and east. In support of this division the 54th Division,
less one brigade, was holding Sheikh Abbas, with its left about two
and a half miles from the flank of the 53rd. The Australian and
New Zealand Mounted Division were very much extended round
Gaza, and were engaged in street fighting. The Imperial Mounted
Division and the Imperial Camel Corps, on a very wide front,
were endeavouring to hold off enemy forces." It was a fantastic
situation in which Dobell's army now found itself, and it was
made perilous by the arrival of strong enemy reinforcements from
north, east, and south-east. Moreover the mounted troops had
been unable to water their horses during the day, and unless Gaza
was taken there was no water on that side the Wadi Ghuzze.

Dobell had still the 52nd Division in reserve, which he might
have used to support the 53rd, and enable it to join up with the
54th. But the night was falling, and it seemed to him, probably
with justice, too wild a gambler's throw. He accordingly resolved
to withdraw. Chauvel was ordered to break off the engagement
and retire his two mounted divisions west of the Wadi Ghuzze.
This would make the position of the 53rd Division impossible, so
it was instructed to draw in its right, and find touch with the
54th Division, now falling back from Sheikh Abbas to a ridge
south-west of Mansura. The retirement, considering the difficulties,
was brilliantly accomplished, though some of the Australian Light
Horse, coming round the east side of Gaza, had a sharp brush with
the enemy. The New Zealanders managed to bring back with

1917] THE CHECK. 495

them a battery of enemy guns which they had taken earlier in
the day.

At daybreak on the morning of the 27th the British line north
of the Wadi Ghuzze ran in a sharp salient along the El Sire and El
Burjalije ridges — the 53rd Division on the left and the 54th on
the right, with Yeomanry guarding the left flank next the sea,
and the Camel Corps between the right flank and the wadi. Mean-
time the enemy had taken advantage of our withdrawal to reinforce
strongly the Gaza garrison. The chance of a British advance had
gone, but nevertheless patrols from two brigades pushed forward
and occupied our positions of the day before on Ali Muntar Hill.
Supports were about to be sent forward to these outposts, when
Kressenstein launched his counter-attack from the north and
north-east. It at once drove in our patrols on Ali Muntar, and
was then checked by our artillery barrage. But it was necessary
to withdraw the apex of the salient, which was the point of junction
of our two infantry divisions. Meantime another Turkish force
had reached the Sheikh Abbas ridge, and shelled our rear south of
Mansura. The 53rd and 54th Divisions clung gallantly all day to
their ground, and the Camel Corps on their right repelled with
great slaughter an attack by the 3rd Turkish Cavalry Division.
But our situation was a bad one, exposed and waterless, and,
since we were far from railhead and the horses were tired, a rapid
reorganization for a new advance was out of the question. Dobell,
therefore, ordered a retirement, and during the night the infantry
and cavalry joined the mounted troops on the other side of the
Wadi Ghuzze, where they took up a strong position covering Deir
el Belah. Of the three contemplated objectives two had more or
less been gained. We dominated the seaward end of the Wadi
Ghuzze. We had forced the enemy to give battle. We had taken
950 Turkish and German prisoners and two Austrian field guns,
and — at the expense of under 4,000 casualties, most of them only
slightly wounded — had caused some 8,000 enemy losses. But we
had wholly failed to take Gaza, and this may fairly be attributed
to the fog and the consequent delay, rather than to any blunder in
the plan or lack of resolution in the troops. " The troops engaged,"
said the official dispatch, " both cavalry, camelry, and infantry, espe-
cially the 53rd Division and the brigade of the 54th, which had
not been seriously in action since the evacuation of Suvla Bay at
the end of 1915, fought with the utmost gallantry and endurance,
and showed to the full the splendid fighting qualities which they
possess."

496 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

Three weeks intervened between the first and second battles
of Gaza. In the meantime the railway had been brought forward
to Deir el Belah, and cisterns had been fixed in the Wadi Ghuzze,
to which water brought by rail was pumped over the In Seirat
range. The Gaza position was now very different from what it
had been on the 26th of March. Then the long straggling line of
posts towards Beersheba had been held by two Turkish divisions ;
now we had five infantry divisions against us, at least a division
of cavalry, and twice the number of heavy batteries. The inner
defences of the town — the Ali Muntar ridge — had been enormously
strengthened. There was a strong line of outer defences from the
sea to Sheikh Abbas, and on the eastern flank a new trench system
12,000 yards long had been constructed from Gaza south-east to
the Atawineh ridge. An immense amount of wiring had been
done, and the change in the situation was roughly the change in
the Gallipoli position between the first and second battles of
Krithia. There was no longer any possibility of a surprise. There
was no chance, owing to the flank defences, of an encircling move-
ment by the cavalry. The only tactics were those of a frontal
assault, undertaken without superior numbers, and with all the
disadvantages of lengthy communications. The explanation of a
policy so unpromising was that it was pressed on Murray by the
home Government. The British War Cabinet, unconvinced by
the lesson of Kut, underrated the need of complete preparation
in Eastern campaigning. They considered it desirable on political
grounds to make some advance in Palestine to synchronize with
the great French and British offensives on the Western front, and
believed that the enemy, shaken by the action of 26th-27th March,
would yield to the cumulative pressure of a second blow. The
alternative plan of turning Gaza by way of Beersheba was impos-
sible at the moment, since all the British preparations had been
directed towards the coast route. In such desert warfare, where
the mobility of troops is limited by the position of railhead, it is
impossible in a week or two to change a strategical plan.

The British scheme was a frontal attack in two stages. The
first stage was designed to carry the outer defences from the sea
to Sheikh Abbas, and the second to break through the Ali Muntar
position and take Gaza. In the first stage the dispositions were
these. On the left the 53rd Division was to stand north of the
Wadi Ghuzze and carry out strong reconnaissances along the
coast. On its right the 52nd Division was to advance against the
ridge running south-westward from Ali Muntar, which contained

1917] SECOND BATTLE OF GAZA. 497

the formidable defences known as the Warren, the Labyrinth,
Green Hill, Middlesex Hill, Outpost Hill, and Lees Hill. On its
right the 54th Division was to attack the line Mansura-Sheikh
Abbas. Its right flank was protected by a mounted division of
the Desert Column, while the other mounted division was placed
at Shellal, to watch enemy movements in the direction of Hcrcira.
The 74th Division — dismounted yeomanry, most of whom had
been in Gallipoli — was in general reserve. The country, it should
be remembered, was notably adapted for defence — sand-dunes,
criss-cross ridges, and endless natural redoubts for machine guns.

The attack began at dawn on 17th April under a sky which
promised a day of burning sun. The first stage was a brilliant
success. With the assistance of tanks the outer defence line —
Sheikh Abbas-Mansura-Kurd Hill — was taken by 7 a.m. with few
casualties. The cavalry on the right did good service, and dis-
lodged bodies of Turkish horse from pockets of the nullahs between
El Mendur and Hereira. During the 18th the ground won was
secured, and preparations were completed for the final effort on
the 19th. It was now the duty of the 53rd Division to push north
along the shore against the half-moon of trenches south-west of
Gaza, its first objective being the line Sheikh Ajlin-Samson Ridge.
The 52nd Division was to carry the long ridge running south-east
from Ali Muntar. The 54th Division was directed against Ali
Muntar itself and the enemy's position at Khirbet Sihan, with the
Camel Corps to help it. The 74th Division was to be held in readi-
ness behind the Sheikh Abbas and Mansura ridges. The Imperial
Mounted Division was to attack El Atawineh dismounted, and the
Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division to protect their
right. The task of the Desert Column was strictly a " containing "
attack, the struggle for the main objectives being left to the 52nd
and 54th Divisions.

The cavalry started at dawn, and so far as the mounted part
was concerned, succeeded in gaining its objectives. The dismounted
Imperial Division found themselves held, however, by the Atawineh
trenches. The " preparation " for the infantry began at 5.30 a.m.,
and was assisted from the sea by the guns of the French man-of-war
Requin and two British monitors. In the hot, windless dawn the
bombardment was a strange spectacle. " As the sun lifted over
the black hills of Judaea, from sea and land shells of all calibres
up to n-inch tore slits in the elaborate defences, throwing up
masses of earth and wire, and making Ali Muntar quake. Some
trees on that hill were entirely denuded of their leaves, but the most

498 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [April

prominent tree of all seemed to bend before the shell-storm and
retain most of its clothing. ... On the dunes pillars of sand were
raised, framed with the white and black smoke of the explosives,
a wonderful foil to the glittering golden ridges."

The 53rd Division attacked at 7.15, and the rest of the line at
7.30. The 53rd took Samson Ridge, and early in the afternoon
attained its first objective. The 52nd — Territorials from the
Scottish Lowlands, who had won fame at Gallipoli and in the
earlier Sinai campaign — had a harder task. They were attacking
the strong ridge running south-west from Ali Muntar, and though
they took Lees Hill, its first point, by 8.15 a.m., they were checked
on its second feature, Outpost Hill. The 54th could make little
headway against Ali Muntar, owing to the fact that its left was in
the air, but its right brigade and the camelry managed to enter
the enemy trenches at Khirbet Sihan. In the afternoon a heavy
counter-attack forced the whole division a little back, as well as
the 3rd and 4th Australian Light Horse on its right ; but the
attack was stayed by the gallantry and stamina of the Camel
Corps, who held a critical point till a Yeomanry brigade came up
in support. In the same way the 52nd Division was forced off
Outpost Hill ; a handful of men retook the place ; but the Low-
landers found themselves unable to advance farther, and unless
they could advance the left of the 54th Division would be seriously
enfiladed. The difficulty was that the configuration of the ground
made it hard to send reinforcements to the 52nd, since the attack
in that section must be made on a very narrow front. At 6.20 in
the evening we were forced off Outpost Hill, and the position at
nightfall was that, while the 53rd Division held the line Sheikh
Ajlin-Samson Ridge, the 52nd and 54th Divisions had made little
headway, and we had lost some 7,000 men.

Sir Archibald Murray, before the battle was broken off, had
issued an order that all ground gained must be held during the
night with the object of resuming the attack on Ali Muntar at
dawn. To this order Dobell not unnaturally demurred. The
troops had lost heavily, they were wearied out by the dust and
heat of a torrid day, the water supply was difficult, and the strength
of the Turkish position was now fully revealed. Chetwode agreed
with this view, and Murray allowed himself to be persuaded. If
the frontal attack was to be persisted in, reinforcements must be
awaited ; if some new plan were adopted, there must be certain
adjustments of communications to support it. Accordingly the
British front remained as it had been on the night of the 19th.

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No serious enemy counter-attacks followed. One, which might
have been formidable, was frustrated by a curious means. An
airplane detected some 2,000 Turkish infantry and 800 cavalry
assembling on the 20th in a wadi near Hereira. Four of our
machines promptly attacked this force, which was in mass
formation, and dropped forty-seven bombs, on it, scattering it
with heavy losses.

There was no further infantry action during the summer.
The British lines lay from Sheikh Ajlin on the sea to the Sheikh
Abbas ridge, and then turned back to the Wadi Ghuzze, with their
right flank extended to Shellal, whither a branch railway was
being constructed from Rafa. There was a good deal of shelling
at various points on the front, and one or two brilliant cavalry
enterprises, notably that of 23rd-24th May against the Beersheba-
El Audja railway, to prevent the enemy using its material for con-
structing a new branch line. Dobell, who had behind him a long
record of difficult tropical warfare, and had been suffering for some
time from the effects of sunstroke, resigned the command of the
Eastern Force after the second battle of Gaza, and was succeeded
by Sir Philip Chetwode. Major-General Chauvel was the new
commander of the Desert Column, and he was replaced in the
command of the Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division
by Major-General Chaytor. After the second battle Sir Archibald
Murray was recalled to England to report, and his place as Com-
mander-in-Chief was filled by Sir Edmund Allenby, one of the
foremost of British cavalry leaders, who came fresh from the
command of the victorious Third Army at Arras.

Gaza was a check to British arms as undoubted as Gallipoli,
and of a very similar type. The chance of a surprise failed through
no fault of generalship, and when the next attempt was made
it could only be a frontal attack, against which the enemy front
had hardened like stone. It was unfortunate that such a check
came at the end of so laborious and successful an enterprise as
the Sinai campaign. The various stages in its advance — Katia,
Romani, El Arish, Magdhaba, Rafa— had been brilliantly achieved.
No desert campaign had ever been conducted with more expert
foresight and skill. The engineering feats alone were sufficient
to make it remarkable. The 150 miles of the Sinai Desert had
defeated most conquerors who thought to force those dusty
fastnesses, and the thing was not accomplished without the most
painstaking organization. The troops who fought at Gaza were
drinking water which came from Egypt. The chief obstacle was

500 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March-April

nature, but the enemy was no bad second. He was skilfully led,
and in the later stages he was numerically superior to the invader.
The Russian degringolade had done its work, and divisions had
been released from the Caucasus for Syria. But in spite of the
check at Gaza the foundations had been laid for future success.
The road had been made once and for all across the desert, and it
was only a matter of months till troops and guns and supplies could
travel by it for a new concentration. A settled war of positions
was not inevitable in such a land, and the little branch line creeping
eastward from Rafa to Shellal was the fingerpost pointing to a far
more deadly offensive.

III.

The Allied front at Salonika lay unchanged through the four
months following the capture of Monastir. West of the Vardar
the line was held against the Bulgarian I. Army by the Italian,
Russian, French, and Serbian forces, and — at the end of the year —
by the Greek contingent. There the front followed pretty closely
the old Serbian border among the mountains which form the water-
shed between the Vardar and the Tcherna. West of these moun-
tains the famous loop of the Tcherna was within the Allied lines,
which ran north of Monastir to the Albanian frontier south of Lake
Ochrida, and thence by a loose chain of posts to Avlona. The
British army under General Milne faced the Bulgarian II. Army
from the Vardar to the Struma, on the line of the lakes Doiran,
Butkova, and Tahinos, a distance of some ninety miles. It was a
long front for the forces at General Milne's disposal, and the ex-
ceptionally wet and stormy winter did not make his task easier.
Moreover, many of the troops had been in line without relief for
over a year, and they had had none of the exhilaration of a vigorous
offensive. Much had been done to improve the highways and a new
road had been constructed to the front on both sides of the Doiran
lake, but the mountain paths still remained precarious and difficult.
In the Struma valley the British right had been carried across the
river close up to the enemy front among the foothills, and British
cavalry pushed reconnaissances between Seres and Lake Tahinos
beyond the Seres-Demirhissar railway. The Struma line having
been secured, General Milne turned his attention to the more diffi-
cult Doiran front. By various raids our position was improved,
and the offensive spirit of the troops sustained. At the end of
February General Sarrail informed his commanders that he pro-

1917] THE ATTACK AT DOIRAN. 501

posed to take the offensive during the last week of April, as part
of the great combined movement of all the Allies which had been
planned for the spring. It was not easy during a dripping and
boisterous March to secure the positions preliminary to a great
attack, more especially in the Doiran sector, where the main objec-
tive was the ridge between the lakes and the Vardar. But by the
end of March 1,000 yards had been won on a front of 3,000, and
we were ready to attack the strong enemy salient in front of
Doiran town.

Meantime during March the French and Italians in the Monastir
area had been continuously engaged. On the 13th the Italians
advanced against Hill 1,050 in the bend of the Tcherna east of
Monastir. On the 17th the French took a village some four miles
north of the town, and by the 21st had pushed up the Tcherve-
nastena spur of the Baba range to the west. Five days later they
captured its crest. During these operations over 2,000 prisoners
were taken, of whom twenty-nine were officers. Farther west there
had been some activity earlier in the year. Between the Italians
at Avlona and the rest of the Allied front lay a considerable gap
through which ran the Janina-Koritza road. In February an
advance was begun into southern Albania, and by the middle of
the month the gap was closed by the Italian occupation of the
Janina road from Koritza to the Greek frontier.

The main offensive was postponed by Sarrail to 24th April, and
on that day the British, after a long bombardment, attacked the
Doiran fortress. The place was like a mediaeval citadel, with a
central keep flanked and fronted by groups of bastions and turrets.
The keep was Hill 535, the centre of the Bulgarian third or main
line of defence, and from it towards our line ran a long ridge with
five humps on it known as the Pips. The enemy first line had as
its main bastion a bare sugar-loaf hill called the Petit Couronne.
In front of it, along its whole length, to complete the likeness to a
mediaeval castle, ran a moat, a deep gully called the Jumeaux
Ravine. The British troops crossed the parapets at 9.45 p.m. on
the evening of 24th April — the latest hour at which any battle in
the campaign had begun. On the left all the enemy's first positions
were taken. In the centre and right, however, the difficulties of
the Jumeaux Ravine were so great that only a few of the troops
reached the other side, and during the night that handful was
driven back by counter-attacks. The close of the action left us
with the western half of the enemy's first position, which we suc-
ceeded in securing and holding.

502 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

Sarrail had found himself obliged to postpone the attack of
the rest of the army at Monastir and west of the Vardar. On
the 8th of May Milne was instructed to make a second attempt,
and he resolved to confine it to the section between the lake and
the Petit Couronne. On the right gains were made on the slopes
of the Petit Couronne, but lost by noon of the following day.
Farther west a more considerable advance was made, and our line
was pushed farther forward on the 15th and 20th. The result of
the battle was that, at the expense of heavy casualties, we held a
considerable part of the first Bulgarian line, our front running
along the ridge from south of Krastali to Sejdelli village. On the
24th Sarrail ordered operations to cease throughout the battle-
ground. It was not easy to see on what principle they had ever
been undertaken. The British general had done his best to carry
out orders which were probably the most aimless and unconsidered
of any given in the campaign.

The problem before Milne was now the advent of the summer
heats, with the grave risk of malaria and dysentery among the
marshy valleys. To lessen the danger he abandoned his forward
positions on his right and right centre, and, without interference
from the enemy, withdrew his troops to the foothills on the right
bank of the Struma and to the south of the Butkova valley. The
Salonika front returned to its normal condition of trench bickering,
but the monotony was broken by the dispatch of detachments for
garrison duty in Greece itself. For during June the kaleidoscopic
politics of that country had suffered a sudden and violent trans-
formation.

The opening of 1917 had found the Athens Government in a
more tractable frame of mind. M. Lambros was still Prime Min-
ister, Dousmanis and his friends were still the King's advisers, but
the Court and Army had done penance for the outrage of December,
and the Greek divisions, in accordance with the Allied demands,
were being moved to the Peloponnesus. But the peace was only
seeming, and, as the world was to learn from later revelations,
the nest of German intriguers in Athens was busy as ever. There
were outbreaks of hooliganism the source of which was easily trace-
able, and evidence accumulated daily to show that King Con-
stantine was very far from fulfilling the spirit of his assurances to
the Allies. The latter were compelled to stiffen their demands,
and in order to provide a buffer M. Lambros retired, and the re-
spectable but ineffective M. Zaimis came again into power on 4th
May. Meantime the authority of M. Venizelos and his National

1917] JONNART ARRIVES AT ATHENS. 503

Government at Salonika continued to grow in spite of all the
diplomatic obstacles set to its expansion. Some of the chief
islands — Corfu, Zante, Cephalonia, Skiathos, Cythera — declared
for him, and the Allies were forced to respect the declaration. In
Thessaly, even in the royalist strongholds, the leaven was working.
A general satiety with King Constantine's rule, much increased
by the stringent Allied blockade, was spreading throughout Greece.
And by the end of May Venizelos had some 60,000 fighting men at
his command to place by the Allies' side.

To the ordinary observer in the West at this time it seemed
that King Constantine, having done the Allies' bidding, might now
be let alone. But the men on the spot were aware that he was
intriguing all the while with the enemy, and that his restless,
shallow spirit would not be content with the rdle assigned to him.
In dealing with such a character a certain harshness was inevitable,
for apologies and protestations could not be taken at their face
value, and the most solemn pact was meaningless, since honesty
and goodwill were wanting. Moreover, various obstacles which
had previously barred drastic action were now gone. Revolu-
tionary Russia had small affection for kinglets, and Italy, having
been given certain liberties of action on the Adriatic sea-board,
was ready to sanction what she had formerly vetoed. By the end
of May it was very clear that the day of reckoning with King Con-
stantine was nigh.

From the first days of June events marched swiftly. On the
3rd Italy proclaimed the independence of Albania under her pro-
tection, and on the 8th occupied Janina, thereby cutting the last
open line of communication between Athens and the Central
Powers. On the 6th M. Charles Jonnart arrived at Salamis in a
French ship of war as High Commissioner appointed by the Allied
Powers. He had been Foreign Minister in M. Briand's 1913
Ministry, and in his earlier career had played the part in Algeria
which Lord Cromer played in Egypt. He stopped for a few hours
at Salamis, and then continued his journey to Salonika, where he
saw Sarrail and Venizelos. On Sunday, the 10th, French and
British troops entered Thessaly, partly to safeguard the harvest
and partly to occupy certain points of strategic value like Volo
and Larissa. For long Sarrail's left rear had been infested with
bands of reservist komitadjis, and in view of coming events it was
necessary to secure that area. At Larissa there was some treacher-
ous shooting by a Greek detachment, but in most places the Allies
were welcomed as liberators.

504 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

On Monday, nth June, French troops seized the isthmus of
Corinth, and that evening M. Jonnart arrived in Athens, accom-
panied by Allied transports. He summoned M. Zaimis to an
interview on board his warship. The Prime Minister was informed
that the Allies meant to purchase the Thessalian crop and dis-
tribute it equitably among all the Greek provinces. M. Jonnart
added that they were now compelled to seek more satisfactory
guarantees for the safety of their forces at Salonika, and that
these could only be found in a restoration of the unity of Greece
and the revival of a true constitutional government. He there-
fore, in the name of the protecting Powers, demanded the abdica-
tion of King Constantine and the nomination of his successor, that
successor to be another than the Crown Prince.

M. Zaimis returned with his message, and a Crown Council
was summoned. All that day there were alarums and excursions
in the Athens streets. The bells of the city were rung spasmodically,
and shouting and protesting crowds hung around the Palace. At
three in the afternoon King Constantine signed an act of abdication
in favour of his second son, Prince Alexander. On the morning of
the 12th M. Jonnart received formal intimation of the act, and that
afternoon a royal proclamation was posted up in the streets.
" Obeying necessity and fulfilling my duty towards Greece, I
am departing from my beloved country accompanied by the heir
to the Crown, and I am leaving my son Alexander on the throne.
I beg you to accept my decision with calm." That same day the
new King issued his first proclamation, and he could scarcely be
blamed if in that document filial piety was more conspicuous than
political discretion.

That afternoon French troops began to disembark at the
Piraeus. About 5 p.m. the ex-King and his family left Athens
for the summer palace at Tatoi, and early next morning embarked
on the royal yacht at the village of Oropus, on the Gulf of Eubcea.
Accompanied by two French destroyers, the Sphacteria steamed
westward for an Italian port, carrying its master to a Swiss health
resort. The world had become very full of kings in exile, but to
Constantine the pity usually accorded to those who fall from
high estate could scarcely be granted. He had amply earned
his punishment, and bore with him the memory of no single honest
and courageous action — only loose-lipped speeches and shabby
intrigues.

The Germanophil party had no further cards to play. The
more extreme among them, such as the German Streit, General

1917] ABDICATION OF KING CONSTANT1NE. 505

Dousmanis, the ex-Premier M. Gounaris, and Colonel Metaxas,
were expelled from the country. Others, such as M. Lambros
and M. Skouloudis, were allowed to remain under police super-
vision. The abdication was received with calm by the nation at
large. On the 14th the Allied blockade of Greece came to an
end. On the 19th a committee of four was appointed, consisting
of two representatives of the Athens Government and two of the
National Government at Salonika, to consider methods of recon-
struction. On the 25th, at the invitation of M. Jonnart, M.
Venizelos arrived at the Piraeus, where he saw M. Zaimis, and
came to an agreement with him about the next step. Clearly the
decree which had illegally dissolved the Greek Chamber in Nov-
ember 1915 must be annulled, and that Chamber, which had been
legally elected on June 13, 1915, convoked, and the leader of its
parliamentary majority called to power. M. Zaimis resigned, and
M. Venizelos formed a cabinet and set about the laborious task of
rebuilding the ruins of his country.

The long game, the patient game, had succeeded. M. Venizelos,
biding his time, had lived to see a divided Greece gradually draw
towards unity from sheer weariness of discord. Quietly and
firmly he began to build, loyal to the new monarch, loyal to the
Allies, loyal above all to his country. In his reconstruction he
revealed the same wisdom that he had shown in the dark days of
waiting, and while he dealt drastically with treason, proved him-
self in all matters a constitutional statesman, respecting scrupu-
lously the rights and liberties of his most bitter opponents. His
work lay in a narrow area, and his problems were on a small scale
compared with those which faced his colleagues of Western Europe ;
but in the mental and moral endowments of the statesman he had
no superior, and perhaps no equal, among living men.

CHAPTER LXXIX.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.

March id- July 23, 19 17.

The Weakness of Russia — The Origin of Bolshevism — Lenin and Others — The
Soviet Principle — Progress of the Provisional Government — The last Russian
Offensive — Brussilov's initial Success — The Dibdcle.

I.

By 16th March the coup d'etat in Russia was over, and the Revolu-
tion itself was beginning its stumbling career. The land was
dazed and giddy. Even in the shouts of joy which hailed a new-
born freedom there was bewilderment. The people were like men
brought suddenly from a dark cell into the glare of a great power-
house with its monstrous dynamos ; they blessed the light, but
walked fearfully and feverishly among strange things. And the
light was not clear daylight, but a fantastic artificial glow, which
distorted familiar objects, and seemed to bring the horizon within
a hand's reach. All revolutions have certain features in common.
In all there is the same blotting out of the past, the same con-
fidence that the world can be started anew with a clean sheet.
In all there is the same orgy of dishevelled idealism. The first
impulse must always be towards peace and universal brotherhood,
because bellicosity has been satiated in the destruction of an old
regime, and the disposition of mankind is not towards eternal
strife. It was so at the beginning of the French Revolution, when
Wordsworth wrote : —

" Meantime prophetic harps
In every grove were ringing ' War shall cease ;
Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured ? ' "

In all there is the same dissolution of the structure of society.
The future of a revolution depends upon the shaping elements

606

1917] THE WEAKNESS OF RUSSIA. 507

which it may contain of a new discipline. Nature will not tolerate
a vacuum. The old must be replaced by the new, and the new
must be of the same quality as the old — it must be a discipline
which will integrate and direct the nation.

Here lay the fatal weakness of Russia's condition. There was
no such discipline, for her Revolution had come not from the
burning inspiration of a new faith, but from sheer weariness.
She had lost nerve and heart. She was tired in mind and body.
It is instructive to remember how different was the case of France.
There it had been the movement of a mass of people inspired by a
definite creed of life, a mass which knew, however crudely, what
it wanted, and was determined to achieve certain positive results.
In Russia it was simply an automatic crumbling of old things,
and the great bulk of the population had no object to strive for.
In France the leaders of the Revolution had been essentially
Frenchmen, of that stubborn middle-class which can create and
continue and provide a force of social persistence. Some of them
went mad, like Marat and Robespierre ; but the majority were
soldiers, lawyers, and men of affairs who could govern. In Russia
there was no such middle-class, and the men who alone had a policy
were international anarchists and communists, whose creed was
one of furious negations. Again, her Revolution did not come upon
a tired France. It broke down old barriers, and released a flood of
energy which naturally flowed into military channels. Its law may
have been harsh and cruel, but it was a discipline, and presently
it took shape in a formidable army. In Russia war weariness
made each step in her Revolution lead away from the discipline
of soldiers, and that in the midst of a struggle of life and death.
Finally, France acquired from her Revolution a sharper conscious-
ness of nationality, but Russia lost the little she possessed. The
autocracy had held in formal union elements different in race,
speech, religion, and social tradition. With its disappearance the
great empire began to split up like the ice on a lake when the bind-
ing spell of frost is withdrawn. The ideals of the new leaders
were cosmopolitan, and there was no true nationalism to set against
them.

These general elements of danger — the lack of a powerful
guiding class, the absence of any constructive ideals for the new
Government, intense war weariness, and an imperfect national
integration — were prodigiously increased by the particular con-
dition of Russia in the spring of 1917. The first difficulty was
political. There was no authority, even provisional, which had

508 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

anything like the assent of the people at large. The shadow
Government bequeathed from the old Duma had not the power to
make its will effective. The police had gone, the army was drifting
into chaos, and therefore it was difficult with the best intentions
to use that force without which no Government can endure. Its
authority was questioned all over the land by local Soviets, which
again had no clear policy of their own. Any attempt at firm ad-
ministration roused at once the cry of " reaction," for order was
identified with the vanished autocracy.

The second difficulty was economic. By all the rules of the
text-books Russia should long ago have been in economic dissolu-
tion ; but in spite of every conceivable blunder, the great natural
wealth of the country enabled her to avoid an actual breakdown.
But comfort did not exist. The mismanagement of transport,
the scandalous " profiteering," and the corruption of the old Gov-
ernment led to preposterous prices for necessaries, and a general
irritation and suspicion. Hence the Revolution meant industrial
anarchy. The workmen had not the education to pursue a coherent
policy like syndicalism ; they were ignorant of the rudiments of
economics, and used the situation as a lever to extort fanciful
terms, regardless of the effect on their own future. The result
was that production declined steeply, for its cost had become
prohibitive. In the three great industrial areas, Petrograd, Mos-
cow, and the Donetz, the supplies on which the army and the
civilian population alike depended shrank at once by 40 per cent.
The caprice of the workers knew no bounds, and the task of an
employer of labour became more difficult than that of the man
condemned to make ropes of sand. Two instances may be quoted
out of many. An English cotton-mill in Petrograd, being faced
with a stoppage through non-delivery of material, borrowed some
bales from a neighbouring mill ; the workmen would not let them
be moved. In another Petrograd factory the men, whose wages
had been increased threefold, summoned a meeting of the directors.
Their delegates explained that they were now getting eight roubles
a head more than formerly, and that they considered that they
were entitled to this increase for the whole period since the begin-
ning of the war. Eight roubles for five thousand men made 40,000
roubles a day, and 36,000,000 since August 1914. They requested
the directors to put this sum in the sacks they had brought within
twenty-four hours, or they would deposit the directors in the said
sacks and throw them into the Neva. The Ministry of Labour
managed to persuade the men that their demands were unfair.

1917] THE RUSSIAN CHARACTER. 509

upon which they withdrew them and apologized. The incident
and its termination showed the naivete of the classes who were now
the masters of a great country. There was also the problem of the
peasants — the great bulk of the population and the main reserves
of the army. To them revolution meant the seizure of the soil,
and at the first news of it they began to expel the landowners.
Rural anarchy followed close upon industrial confusion.

The next difficulty was the army and navy. Just before the
Revolution, in spite of maladministration and chicanery, Russia
was better supplied with munitions of war than at any time since
1914. She had immense numbers of men mobilized — far too
many for her immediate needs, so that the depots were crowded
with troops whom she could not train, and who would have been
far better left in their villages till the need arose. There were
regiments in the line which had 15,000 men held in depot. This
led to great popular dissatisfaction, and provided excellent material
for pacificist propaganda to work upon. Hence, both on the fronts
where there was no fighting, and in the rear where there was no
organization, anarchy spread like wildfire. In the navy it was
worse. The crews were not peasants, as in the army, but largely
mechanics from the towns, and their long inaction had bred every
kind of disorder. The Baltic Fleet became a farce, and the atro-
cities perpetrated in the early days at Kronstadt and on some of
the battleships were an ugly blot upon the humane professions of
the Revolution. The army and navy, instead of being the last
support of order, had become an incalculable factor, a mysterious
court of appeal which all parties used in argument, but of which
nothing could be confidently predicated. When this fact is real-
ized, it will be seen how tragically hard was the task of any Gov-
ernment at the moment in Russia. It could not use the natural
weapons of authority because of the risk that these weapons might
break in its hand.

The last and greatest difficulty lay in the Russian character.
Readers of the great Russian novelists, notably of Dostoievski,
will remember the singular tolerance which is extended to even
the basest perversions of character. The charity of the writers is
infinite and god-like, but it is also inhuman. For the world is
conducted by means of certain working definitions of conduct,
definitions which may be trivial enough in the eyes of Omniscience,
but without which we cannot live our mortal lives. Lacking such
rules, fallible as they are, we shall wallow in a bog of moral con-
fusion where there is no clear division between right and wrong.

510 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

This quality of their novelists was likewise a quality of tlK Russian
people. It had its noble and beneficent side, but it could also
degenerate into a slack-lipped tolerance which twiddled its thumbs
and spoke smooth words in the presence of cruelty and shame.
In any case it was no quality for a revolution, which needed a
positive creed and a single-hearted energy. The orientalism
which is in the Russian nature revealed itself in a curious boneless-
ness in the presence of urgent needs. The majority cared too little
to exert themselves. They were like Leonidas and his sister in
Tchekov's Cherry Orchard, always waiting in the face of desperate
crises for something to turn up. They might be willing to die for
their faith, but they would not act for it. In such circumstances
the power must fall into the hands of those who will stake every-
thing, their own lives and other people's, on the game — the " rash,
inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries " who have a positive purpose,
even if it be only to destroy.

The foregoing considerations will show the immense difficulties
in the way of producing in Russia, as the immediate child of the
Revolution, any kind of constitutional Government, and especially
a Government still able to continue the war by the Allies' side.
Aversion to war was the one feeling shared by the great mass of
the Russian people. The Allies had entered the campaign at the
call of Russia ; but that Russia had gone, and the new Russia
was not inclined to accept its liabilities. Britain and France had
been the types of civic freedom to the old Russian Liberals, but these
Liberals in the whirligig of change were now regarded as reaction-
aries, and to the communists the constitutionalism of the West
seemed indistinguishable from Tsarism and Kaiserism. They
sought a headier draught of liberty. The frontiers were open,
and German propagandists in different guises were busy among the
workmen and soldiers. They had a simple role to play, for they
had only to tell the people what they wanted to hear — that it was
folly to fight longer, and that her Western Allies were the true foes
of Russia, since they sought to force her to remain in the war.
The new socialist papers, which sprang up in Petrograd like mush-
rooms in the night, told the same tale. Much German money was
spent for the purpose, but it would be wrong to regard all the men
who used it as consciously German agents. They acknowledged
no country, and would take the money of any one to serve their
own international ends. The result was soon apparent not only
in the rapid demoralization of the Russian army, but in the hos-
tility which began to grow up to all the Allies, and especially to

1917] THE CONFLICT OF DOGMAS. 511

Britain. It was a tragedy which no forethought could have pre-
vented. It was sometimes urged that it was due to the failure of
Allied diplomacy, but that charge was idle. No Allied propaganda
or diplomacy could have succeeded where the powerful pro-war
parties in Russia failed. The Allies and the Germans in the
country at that moment did not contend upon equal terms. The
former preached a creed of honour which the people did not wish
to hear ; the latter preached an acceptable doctrine of self-interest
which was supported by the people's leaders.

II.

At this point we must pause and turn our attention from deeds
to dogmas, for the development of the Russian Revolution cannot
be understood unless we first traverse its strange hinterland of
theory. The general terms of political science are rarely given exact
interpretation, and their slipshod use has tended to create false
oppositions and conceal the fundamental agreement between the
main parties of western Europe. Three in especial have been
loosely handled — the terms " democratic," " popular," and " lib-
eral." " Democratic " describes a form of government in which
the policy of the State is determined and its business conducted
by the will of the majority of its citizens, expressed through some
regular channel. It is a word which denotes machinery, not
purpose. " Popular " means merely that the bulk of the people
approve of a particular mode of government. " Liberal " implies
these notions of freedom, toleration, and pacific progress which
lie at the roots of Western civilization. The words are clearly
not interchangeable. A policy or a government may be popular
without being liberal or democratic ; there have been highly
popular tyrannies ; the German policy in 1914 was popular, but
it was not liberal, nor was Germany a democracy. America is a
democracy, but it is not always liberal ; the French Republic
has at various times in its history been both liberal and democratic
without being popular. Accurately used, " democratic " de-
scribes a particular method, " popular " a historical fact, " liberal "
a quality and an ideal.

The Western nations held, with wide latitude of interpreta-
tion, an identical creed, which, in the broadest sense of the words,
was liberal and democratic. They believed in the slow perfecti-
bility of political man, and in an orderly and organic progress ; in
a State which, while itself an entity attracting the devotion of its

512 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

citizens and affording them a richer and fuller life, did not curb too
harshly the initiative and freedom of the individual ; in liberty of
opinion and in toleration ; in a differentiation of classes as essen-
tial to a healthy civic life ; in the inviolable right of each citizen
to certain franchises and his not less inexorable duties towards the
State and his neighbours ; in the law as the bulwark of these rights
and duties, set above the caprice of private wills ; in the right and
duty of each citizen to share in law-making and the routine of
government ; and in certain principles of Christian morality,
which provided, so to speak, the attitude of mind with which the
political code should be put in practice. To the main structure
were added many adminicles ; and, as frequently happens, ma-
chinery devices came to be regarded as in themselves essential
principles. Representative and parliamentary government was
such a device ; it was not essential to a democracy, but it had proved
itself a convenient method. Indeed we may go further and say
that the " rule of the majority," the principle of the " plenary
inspiration of the odd man," while apparently the simplest, was
not the only, or in certain circumstances the best, way of ascer-
taining the will of the community. Because mechanism was too
often confused with purpose, various critics had dealt destructively
with the theory of liberal democracy ; but the main fabric was
intact, and the faith in its broadest sense commanded the allegiance
of the best minds in Europe and America, and the vast majority
of the peoples.

Against it there was now arrayed a creed which was at variance
not with any accretion but with its innermost core of principle — a
creed based on a different interpretation of history and a different
code of ethics. This is not the place for any detailed study of the
doctrine of Karl Marx — his " theory of value," which is economically
dubious, and his materialistic interpretation of history, for which
history provides no warrant. His teaching was based upon a false
simplification of the past and a false simplification of human nature.
Radically weak in his sense of psychology, he could reason with
austere logic, but his conclusions were vitiated by the blunders
of his premises and the narrowness of his data. It is as idle to deny
the greatness of Marx as it is to exalt him into a seer. No man who
has so profoundly influenced great tracts of humanity could be
without certain large and potent qualities. As a destructive critic
he is often supreme ; his weakness is only apparent when he begins
to create. He has left behind him phrases rather than reasoned
policies, phrases which, because they can be interpreted with

1917] MARX AND LAVROV. 513

infinite variety, have for many minds the spell of incantations ;
and of these the two chief are " the class war " and the " dictator-
ship of the proletariat." He cast these two shells of formulas
upon the world, leaving to his successors the task of supplying the
content ; but, though he might seem to speak with different tongues,
one thing was clear in all his many writings — he wholly repudiated
the chief tenets of democracy and liberalism.

Marx is the source of one of the two channels in which Russian
socialistic theory flowed for the generation preceding the Revolu-
tion. At the head of the other stands the Russian Lavrov, whose
Lettres Historiques appeared in 1868.* He sought a philosophy of
history and of society based upon the development of the in-
dividual. He found his ideal in a socialist State, where the State
should not be an overriding tyrant, but should give the fullest
scope for that " maximizing " of the individual life which was
what he understood by moral progress. This view received
support from a different angle from the teaching of Bakunin,
who carried his individualism so far as to deny the moral value
of the State altogether. Lavrov's point of view was always that
of the historian. Liberty was his keyword, rather than justice ;
and he wished to conserve in Russia all the primitive socialism of
the peasant communities and the traditional folk-culture of the
Slav. He made his appeal not only to the industrial classes, but
to the intellectuals, and very notably to the peasants, and agrarian
reform was a chief feature in his programme. Such a creed did
not preach class war in the common sense, and it was keenly alive
to the organic value of national life. From it sprang the Social
Revolutionary party, which about 1900 began to come into promi-
nence in Russia. Typical members at the date of the Revolution
were Kerenski and Tchernov. It was essentially a native Russian
product, and it is hard to find for it a foreign parallel, though it
had certain resemblances to the British Fabian Society and to
the nationalist section of French Socialism.

To the materialism of Marx the only factors worth consideration
were the forces of economic evolution. To him the State was every-
thing, the individual nothing, and he construed the State rigidly
in the terms of a single class. Justice was his keyword, and liberty
was disregarded. The revolution which he sought was essentially
a class revolution, and hence he looked upon nationalism as an
obstacle to the realization of his aims. Directly from his teaching
sprang the Russian Social Democratic party, which in 1884 was
• The first volume of Marx's Capital was published in 1867.

514 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March

founded in Switzerland by Plekhanov and others. The teach-
ing spread rapidly among the Russian industrial classes, and in
some form or other was, at the date of the Revolution, the creed
of the great majority of Russian workmen. But the harsh intransi-
gence of the Marxian system was not altogether suited to Russian
soil, and in 1903, at its second congress, the party had split into
two. The Bolsheviki, or majority party, under the leadership of
Lenin, drew narrowly the class distinction, and regarded the
intellectuals, the bourgeoisie, and even the peasants, as enemies.
They were international in their aims, and sought not the re-
creation of Russia, but the triumph of one class throughout the
world. They were for the most part bitter and arid doctrinaires,
who clung to an abstract creed as their Tablets of Sinai, and met
every problem by a reference to the letter of their law ; but they
had the driving force which even the shallowest fanaticism gives.
The Mensheviki, or minority, were of a saner type. Though they
claimed for the working classes of the world the importance due to
their numbers, they did not ignore other classes. They set their
e}'es on definite practical reforms, and were willing to use the
existing machinery of the State for their purpose. The Great War
broadened the divergence between the two groups. The Men-
she viks, led by men like Plekhanov, Martov, and Tseretelli, ac-
cepted the war as a part of their programme. They recognized
that Prussianism was the great enemy of their creed, and that
nationalism must precede internationalism. They saw that the
cause for which the Allies fought was their own cause, the cause of
every worker in the world. Behind them they had beyond doubt
the great majority of Russian Social Democrats. To the Bol-
sheviks, on the other hand, the fate of their country mattered not
at all, provided that their policy of social reconstruction survived
the calamity. They were eager for peace on any terms, that they
might proceed with their own war, that class war which knew no
political frontiers.

It is with this Bolshevik sect that we are chiefly concerned, for,
though only a tiny fraction of the Russian people, it was soon to
dominate the Revolution. Its leader must stand as the strangest
figure of the war, and — whatever we think of his exploits — as one
of the two or three most important by virtue of his influence upon
the course of events and his domination over huge masses of men.
A portrait gallery of the chief Bolshevik figures would not reveal
many examples of manly beauty ; indeed, all but a few would
be set down from their physical appearance as hydrocephalus.

1917] LENIN. 515

neurotic, or degenerate. Lenin himself was a plump little man,
with a high bulbous forehead, a snub nose, and a bald head — the per-
fect petit bourgeois except for his steely grey eyes. His true name
was Vladimir Hitch Ulianov, a scion of a respectable house in the
Simbirsk district, who, after his elder brother's death on the gallows
for complicity in a Nihilist plot, had become an active leader in
revolutionary propaganda. From 1900 onwards he was in Switzer-
land, where he created the extreme left wing of the Social Demo-
crats. From 1905 to 1907 he was in Russia, where he found the
reform party not yet ripe for his intransigence. His chance did
not come till the outbreak of the Revolution, when he was per-
mitted by the German Government to journey overland from
Switzerland to Petrograd. He was in his own way the most
consistent politician alive, for he had never wavered from the
creed of destruction which he had formulated at seventeen, and now
at the age of forty-six he was given the chance to put it into prac-
tice. He accepted German assistance and German gold, but he
had as little love for the Hohenzollerns as he had for the Romanovs.
He held his sombre faith with the passion of a dervish, and, without
sense of humour or proportion, set about rebuilding the world
after his crude patterns. But in the nature of things he could not
live to see the complete new structure ; his part, therefore, must be
to destroy the old social system everywhere, that the poor and
oppressed might at least be free of their taskmasters. Such a creed
was not without a sombre greatness, and beyond doubt Lenin at
this stage was a single-hearted fanatic, without fear or self-seeking,
merciful enough in the common relations of mankind, but pitiless in
the service of his cause. No scandals smirched his private life, and,
unlike many of his colleagues, he was free from corruption. He was
incapable of small personal animosities, but in the pursuit of his
purpose he was as ruthless as some convulsion of nature. He had
great debating power, and was an expert at ingenious manoeuvring,
but he won his victories less by these arts than by his iron con-
sistency of aim and his utter fearlessness. He was resolved to
coerce society into the procrustean bed of his formula, and nothing
on earth or in heaven should be permitted to thwart his will.

The others were lesser people, but sufficiently formidable as
carrion birds to prey on a dying nation. Most were Jews ; * there
were also Letts and Armenians in the group ; few except Lenin

• It should be said that while Jews bulked largely among the Bolsheviks, they
were equally common among their opponents. The Bolshevik Jews were as a rule
very young, and it was a frequent comment that the Elders of Israel had lost control
of the Jewish youth.

516 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Mar.h

and Bucharin were genuine Russians. Trotski — otherwise Leiba
Bronstein, the son of a Kherson chemist — had some claim to the
second place. He had been a Menshevik, and as late as 1915 he
was under Lenin's suspicion. He had none of his leader's pure
cold fanaticism, being grossly vain, a lover of vulgar display, a
mind easily made drunk with self-glory. His glowing black eyes,
shaggy black hair, and thick sensual lips made him the perfect
villain of melodrama, and in Bolshevism he was the pirate king,
full of gesture and grandiosity. More of Lenin's stamp was Zino-
viev — otherwise Apfelbaum — a Jew of the Ukraine, an adept in
passionless, logical cruelty ; and Bucharin, a Russian of the upper
class, who had the courage at times to oppose his leader and who
cherished the same brand of doctrinaire fanaticism. There were
sentimental visionaries like Lunacharski and Tchicherin, and
masters of intrigue and propaganda like Karl Radek, and mere
crazy degenerates like Krilenko. But diverse as were the types,
they were men who alike stood outside the system of ethics and
polity which we call civilization ; and alike owed allegiance to
the squat smiling figure with the contemptuous eyes, who was
once known to admit that in a hundred Bolsheviks only one was a
true believer, and of the remainder sixty were fools and thirty-
nine knaves.

What did this strange group of outcasts seek ? They were
Marxists, but not orthodox Marxists, for they claimed a right to
a free interpretation of their master.* They sought to abolish a
State which was based on a division of classes, and erect a State
which was of one class only — the proletariat. Capitalism was to
disappear, and in the single-class community the co-operation of all
would take the place of the exploitation by the few. But before
the unfeatured desert of this ideal could be attained, rough places
must be crossed, and the method of attainment must be by
a temporary dictatorship, the dictatorship of the workers, till
capitalists and bourgeois were forcibly eliminated — converted or
destroyed. Toleration was impossible, a synonym for weakness ;
the majority rule of democracy was equally impossible, for com-
munists would never be a majority till they had purged the state
by civil war. They were resolved to simplify society with the
knife ; a small elect minority, they would force the majority to
do their bidding, because they were prepared to go to any length

* The reader may consult on this point Lenin's The State and Revolution (Eng.
trans., 1919) ; Kautsky's The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Eng. trans., 1919). a
reply to Lenin ; and Trotski's reply to Kautsky, The Defence of Terrorism (Eng.
trans., 1921).

1917] THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT. 517

of terror and crime. It was class-rule carried to the pitch of mania,
and murder exalted to be a normal function of the State. In this
nightmare the categories of Western thought made unholy alliance
with the dark fatalisms and the ancient cruelties of the East.

The chance of the Bolsheviks was found in the new soviet
organization. In the unsuccessful revolution of 1905 there had
been a Petrograd Soviet — the word means simply a council —
and in March 1917 the example was followed, since the Duma
was elected upon too narrow a suffrage to be truly representative.
But the Petrograd Soviet now included soldiers and sailors as well
as workers, and as the Revolution spread Soviets on the same
model began to appear in other cities. They were at first meant
to be only a temporary expedient, a supplement to the Duma, till
such time as a Constituent Assembly could be called. Their weak-
ness was that they were too large, and consequently had to delegate
executive authority to a smaller body, which was more easily cap-
tured by the extremists. The Soviets were in close touch with the
workshop committees now being instituted in the factories, and
came soon to have an industrial as well as a political authority.
Hence the way was prepared for regarding them as special associa-
tions on a basis of occupations or professions, and therefore rivals
to any representative body elected on the majority principle. It
was this aspect which the Bolsheviks exploited, and, after they had
captured the Soviets, adopted as the foundation of their rule.

III.

But at the start the Soviets were, nominally at least, on the side
of the Provisional Government. The duration of this Govern-
ment— the opening stage in the true Revolution— was exactly two
months, from 16th March to 16th May. It was composed mainly
of men from the Centre and the Right Centre. It contained only
one socialist, Kerenski, and he had already come to rank as a
moderate. At first it seemed as if it might succeed. On 23rd
March Miliukov declared for a republic, and so purged himself for
the moment of his suspected conservatism. On 26th March
Guchkov was at Riga, on a visit to Radko Dmitrieff and the Twelfth
Army, and reported that the northern front was solid for the
continuance of the war. The great army commanders had for
the most part accepted the Revolution, and were acclaimed as its
leaders. Alexeiev was in supreme command ; Dragomirov re-
placed Russki with the Northern group of armies ; Brussilov had

518 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [March-April

the Southern ; a brave and competent soldier, Kornilov, was in
command at Petrograd ; only Evert, the general in charge of the
Western group, had refused to accept the new regime, and Gourko
had been nominated as his successor. By the first days of April
it was reported that discipline was improving everywhere on the
front, and that the first unsettlement had disappeared. On 30th
March the Provisional Government issued a proclamation to the
Poles, guaranteeing the creation of an independent Polish state,
formed of all the territories in which a majority of the population
was Polish. For the moment, too, the four thousand members
of the Petrograd Soviet were open to reason. They seemed willing
to co-operate with Guchkov and Alexeiev in restoring order at the
fronts. A War Cabinet was created on the British model, con-
sisting of Prince Lvov, Guchkov, Miliukov, Terestchenko, Shin-
garev, Nekrasov, and Kerenski, which kept in close touch with
general headquarters. On 9th April the Prime Minister issued a
proclamation setting forth the views of the Provisional Govern-
ment : —

" The Government deems it to be its right and duty to declare that
free Russia does not aim at dominating other nations, at depriving
them of their national patrimony, or at occupying by force foreign
territories ; but that its object is to establish a durable peace on the
basis of the rights of nations to decide their own destiny.

" The Russian nation does not lust after the strengthening of its
power abroad at the expense of other nations. Its aim is not to
subjugate or to humiliate any one.

" In the name of the higher principles of justice it has removed the
chains which weighed upon the Polish people.

" But the Russian nation will not allow its Fatherland to come out
of the great struggle humiliated and weakened in its vital forces.

" These principles will constitute the basis of the foreign policy
of the Provisional Government, which will carry out unfailingly the
popular will and safeguard the rights of our Fatherland, while observ-
ing the engagements entered into with our Allies.

" The Provisional Government of Free Russia has no right to hide
the truth. The State is in danger. Every effort must be made to
save it. Let the country respond to the truth when it is told, not by
sterile depression, not by discouragement, but by single-hearted vigour,
with a view to the creation of a united national will. This will give us
new strength for the struggle and win us salvation."

This sane and loyal creed was emphasized three days later by
Brussilov, in command of the Armies of the South, who told the
Soviets that, much as he esteemed their work for liberty, they must
not presume to give orders to the troops, or to insist that officers

igiy] GERMAN INTRIGUES IN RUSSIA. 519

should be chosen by the soldiers like candidates for Parliament.
" Such a thing has never been seen. It is known in no army in
the whole world. If it were, it would not be an army, but a
mob."

Towards the close of April the debates of the Petrograd Soviet
revealed a curiously fluid state of opinion. Annexations and
indemnities were renounced, but on the latter point the cases of
Belgium and Serbia were ruled by the majority to lie outside the
formula. On the whole, opinion was for the continuance of the
war, provided it was waged on their own terms ; but it was speedily
revealed that these terms were impracticable. The majority fol-
lowed the Mensheviks, like Skobelev and the two Georgians,
Tseretelli and Tcheidze, in demanding that the Allies should at
once fall into line with their views on war policy, and that, in the
event of the Central Powers standing out, the war should continue.
But there was also a general refusal to sanction those provisions for
the maintenance of authority which alone could make a campaign
possible. The Bolshevik minority demanded an immediate cessa-
tion of hostilities, since in their view the enemies of the Revolution
were not the Central Powers, but the capitalists and bourgeoisie
in all countries, and not least the then Provisional Government
of Russia.

The intransigence of the minority, and the impracticable theoriz-
ing of even the moderate members of the Soviets, had more popular
appeal than the wisdom of the Ministers. The first demanded
peace and then democracy ; the second cried for democracy and
then peace ; the third called for victory, then democracy — and
both peace and democracy were more pleasing aims than that
victory which demanded a new resolution and a continued struggle.
To help this natural bias the Central Powers summoned all their
resources. German agents were at work from the first days of
the Revolution in every factory and on every front — doves of
pacificism, who, like those of the Psalmist, emerged from among
the pots with silver and gold in their wings. Bethmann-Hollweg
and Ludendorff had facilitated the journey of Lenin and his col-
leagues across Germany from Switzerland, in order that, like the
spores of some fatal fungus, they should poison the Russian body
politic. On 15th April Austria offered peace, and, though the
offer was refused, it convinced the Russian masses that the enemy
was becoming infected by their own spirit. More adroit still
was the next move, for Berlin and Vienna, Budapest and Sofia
mobilized their tame socialists, and approved of a conference at

520 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

Stockholm * in the summer, where it was hoped the Russian
delegates would be entangled in a maze of theoretical discussions,
and the plain issues of the war hopelessly obscured. The hapless
Provisional Government had a task too hard for mortal state-
craft.

From the first days of May it became obvious that it was losing
ground. Miliukov, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, addressed a
Note to the Allies, proclaiming the resolve of Russia to conclude
no separate peace, but to carry the war to a victorious end. Some-
thing in the wording annoyed the Soviets, and the streets of Petro-
grad were filled with processions carrying banners inscribed with
the demand for Miliukov's downfall. The majority of the Soviets
were busy making appeals to the soldiers not to fraternize with the
enemy, and pointing out the impossibility of a separate peace ;
but by their interference with normal discipline they took the best
way of destroying the army. They insisted, among other things,
that the functions of the officers were limited to issuing military
commands, and that all other matters, including discipline, must
be left to company or regimental committees where the private
soldiers were in a majority. On 13th May Guchkov f resigned,
since he could not be responsible for an army under such conditions.
A day or two later Miliukov followed. He had uncompromisingly
announced that Russia must have Constantinople, which, ap-
parently, the new Russia did not want. He had stated Russia's
obligations to her Allies with a candour which seemed to the Soviets
to smack of imperialism — a term under which they lumped every-
thing, good, bad, and indifferent, that had any affiliations with the
old world.

It was clear that the Provisional Government had now broken
down, and must be replaced by a coalition on a wider basis, in-
cluding more members of the Left. On 16th May a conference
took place with the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet,
and an agreement was arrived at on policy, the two main points

* The invitation to the Stockholm Conference was issued early in April by various
Dutch socialists, who had been co-opted on the executive of the Internationale
when it was transferred from Brussels to the Hague after the outbreak of war. Their
action was not approved by the Belgian leaders, who constituted the original
executive, and M. Vandervelde formally dissociated himself from the scheme. On
the other hand, M. Camille Huysmans, the Belgian secretary of the Internationale,
accompanied the Dutch socialists to Stockholm. On 23rd May the Dutch-Scandina-
vian Standing Committee was formed, with Huysmans as secretary and Branting
as president.

t He has been charged with a certain responsibility for the notorious Order
No. 1 which wrecked army discipline, but it is clear that he opposed it with all his
strength. The thing was wholly the work of the Petrograd Soviet.

1917] THE COALITION MINISTRY. 521

being the unity of all the Allied fronts, and the necessity of combat-
ing anarchy. As a result several prominent members of the Left
entered the Cabinet. Prince Lvov remained Prime Minister, and
Shingarev, Nekrasov, Konovalov, Godnev, Manuilov, and Vladimir
Lvov retained their old portfolios. Terestchenko succeeded Miliu-
kov as Foreign Minister, and Tchernov, a Social Revolutionary
and the leader of the Peasants' Party, became Minister of Agri-
culture. Skobelev and Tseretelli, two prominent Mensheviks,
went respectively to the departments of Labour and Posts and
Telegraphs, and Pieshekhanov, another socialist, took charge of
Food Supply. Most significant change of all, Kerenski became
Minister of War.

The new Coalition Government marked its advent to office
by the issue, on 19th May, of a declaration of policy, confirming
and elaborating the manifesto of 9th April — a declaration drafted
in consultation between the Ministry and the Soviets in spite of
the opposition of Trotski, who had arrived in Petrograd the day
before. This manifesto was answered cordially and sympathetically
by the different Allied Governments, answers which were chillily
received by the Soviets and their press. The Allies, moreover,
sent special missions to Russia to establish with the new regime
relations which could scarcely be effected by the formal channels
of diplomacy. M. Albert Thomas came from France, M. Vander-
velde from Belgium, Senator Root from America, and Mr. Arthur
Henderson from Britain. These trained and capable observers
found before them a problem which defied easy definition. All
parties seemed in a state of flux, the country was seething with
that expansive type of speculation which is often miscalled ideal-
ism, and of the condition and future of the armies no man, least of
all their generals, could speak with certainty. The High Commands
were in the melting-pot. Alexeiev was dismissed early in June, and
was succeeded by Brussilov, whose military talents were marred by
a strain of demagogy and time-serving ; Kornilov had resigned his
governorship of Petrograd ; Gourko was relieved of his command
of the Western group, and was succeeded by Denikin. In these days
Kerenski, convinced that an immediate offensive was necessary to
tighten the discipline and restore the moral of the armies, flew
from front to front, exhorting, upbraiding, inspiring. With his
hoarse voice and burning eyes he was the kind of figure to move
the wildest audience, and his lightning campaign had its effect
among the troops. By the middle of June Brussilov reported that
the Russian forces were fast recovering from their green-sickness.

522 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

Kerenski did more, for he succeeded in instilling the spirit of the
offensive even into large sections of the socialist parties. For a
little they seemed to shake off the spell of Lenin and his friends,
and to be tending towards the view that victory in the field could
alone safeguard the Revolution.

But during the month of June it was becoming very clear that
the decorous socialists from the Western nations, M. Thomas,
M. Vandervelde, and Mr. Henderson, were making no headway.
They were classed as " imperialists " by the majority of the Soviets.
The idea of the Stockholm Conference had grown apace, and the
essence of that scheme was a re-creation of the bankrupt Inter-
nationale. The net spread by Berlin was plain enough, but Russian
socialists were too drunken with the new wine of dogma to be wary.
They had no further concern with the Alliance, which had been
devised by militarists and imperialists ; they thought in terms
not of nations but of classes ; the causes for which the war had
been undertaken now seemed to them a tale of little meaning.
Hence they would not distinguish between men of their own per-
suasion in Allied and in enemy countries. " We expect," they
told the Western delegates, " of the conference of socialists of
belligerent and neutral countries the creation of an Internationale,
which will permit the working classes of the whole world to struggle
in concert for the general peace, and to break the bonds which
unite them by force to Governments and classes imbued with
imperialist tendencies which prevent peace. . . . We consider
that the conference can only succeed if socialists regard themselves
not as representatives of the two belligerent parties, but as repre-
sentatives of a single movement of the working classes towards
the common aim of general peace." The difficulty was that,
whatever might be the views of Russia and her Allies, these were
not the views of the Central Powers. The delegates of Berlin and
Vienna, with a Government brief in their pocket, were already
moving on Stockholm.

On 16th June the All-Russia Congress of Soviets opened in
Petrograd under the presidency of Tcheidze — 1,090 delegates, repre-
senting 305 bodies. The Swiss Zimmerwaldian, Robert Grimm,
had already been expelled from the country, and the first act of
the Congress was a triumph for the party of order — a ratification
of the expulsion by 640 votes to 120. Trotski, whose Bolshevik
following was about one-tenth of the whole, delivered a furious
attack upon the Coalition Ministry, and especially upon Kerenski.
He was answered by Skobelev and Tseretelli, the latter of whom

i9i7] THE SOVIET CONGRESS. 523

had become the leader of the saner elements in the Soviets. " We
desire," they said, " to hasten the conclusion of a new treaty in
which the principles proclaimed by the Russian democracy will be
recognized as the basis of the international policy of the Allies. A
separate peace is impossible. Such a peace would bring Russia into
a new war on the side of the German coalition, and would mean
leaving one coalition only to enter into another." They explained
that the Russian Government was taking steps to summon an
inter-Allied conference for the revision of treaties, always excepting
the London Agreement under which all the Allies had pledged them-
selves not to conclude a separate peace. Then came weighty
reports from the different socialist Ministers. Kerenski gave an
account of his visits to the front. Pieshekhanov urged the gravity
of the food question. Even Tchernov, not usually addicted to
moderation, warned his hearers that they must proceed by cau-
tious steps, for socialism could not be achieved in a day. A
resolution was carried to dissolve the Duma, since at a meeting a
few days earlier Miliukov and Rodzianko had cast contempt upon
internationalism. On the whole the Congress behaved discreetly,
and gave honest support to the Ministry on the greater matters.

But the debates made it very clear how brittle was the whole
machinery of government. Even when Soviets and Ministry
were agreed, it seemed impossible to use force against disorder.
The session was constantly interrupted by the necessity of dealing
with a preposterous incident in Petrograd. A group of Leninites,
armed with machine guns, took possession of a house in the suburbs,
and " held up " the neighbourhood. They declared that they
were only exercising legitimate political activities, and the militia
sent to expel them promptly fraternized with them. Neither
Congress nor Ministry could do anything, and the resolutions in
favour of the restoration of order were ironically punctuated by
the processions of the anarchists from their suburban fortress.
The Leninites remained undisturbed until, on 1st July, came the
news of the Galician offensive. Then self-confidence awoke in the
Government, the house was surrounded, and the garrison marched
off to the prison below the Winter Palace. It was an instructive
commentary upon the situation. The Government depended
wholly upon fleeting waves of public opinion ; normally that
opinion was against any use of force, but it occasionally hardened,
and then drastic measures could be taken. It provided the
answer to those critics who clamoured for Lvov or Kerenski to
use the strong hand. After the golden chance of the first two days

524 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

of the coup d'etat had been missed, the strong hand would have
tumbled the last precarious remnants of national order into chaos.

IV.

Kerenski had his will, and the Russian armies made one last
effort at a serious offensive. Except for a local attack on the
Stokhod in the first week of April, the enemy had not attempted
to reap in the field for his own advantage the harvest of the Revolu-
tion. He was too wary to do anything that might weld the dis-
united forces of Russia once more into a nation. Rather he chose
to encourage anarchy by inaction, and his offensive lay in the work-
shops of Petrograd and Moscow, and in the debating societies
along the Russian front. But the Revolution had given him im-
mediate military gains. Germany, though she still maintained
some seventy-six divisions in the East, had been able to skim
them for her " shock-troops," and to use that front as a rest-camp
for units sorely battered in the West. Austria had removed to
the Isonzo whole divisions and a great number of batteries to
resist Cadorna's assaults in May and June. The Central Powers
had made up their minds that for the moment there was no fear
of a Russian offensive, and the long line from the Baltic to the
Carpathians was loosely held. But they had it in their power to
bring up reserves speedily in case of danger, for they had communica-
tions still working well, while those of Russia shared in the general
confusion of the Revolution. The enemy dispositions on the front
were much the same as they had been at the close of 1916. The
German group, under Prince Leopold of Bavaria, extended from
the Baltic to just south of Brzezany. The Austrian group filled
the gap between it and Mackensen's Rumanian command, and
its left wing, in front of Halicz and astride the Dniester, was the
Austro-German army, under Count Bothmer.

The Russian front in Galicia ran west of Brody and east of
Brzezany and Halicz ; across the Dniester it just covered Stanislau,
which had been the limit of Lechitski's advance the previous
August. From Brody south to the neighbourhood of Zborov lay
the Eleventh Army, which had once been Sakharov's and was now
under General Erdelli. South of it to the Dniester was the Seventh
Army, which Tcherbachev had commanded in 1916. Tcherbachev
was now on the Rumanian front, and his place was taken by
General Byelkovitch. Between the Dniester and the Carpathians
Lechitski's old Ninth Army had given place to the Eighth Army,

igiy] THE LAST RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE. 525

which Kaledin had led in 1916 on the Styr. Its new commander
was Kornilov, aforetime military Governor of Petrograd, a little
square man like a Kirghiz Cossack, whose escape from an Austrian
prison and wild journey across Hungary to Bucharest had made
him a popular hero when Russia had still an ear for gallant tales.
When Brussilov became Commander-in-Chief he had handed over
the charge of the south-western group of armies to General Gutor,
but he himself supervised every detail of the coming offensive. For
it he had collected all the best fighting material that Russia could
produce. He had the pick of the Finnish, Caucasian, and Siberian
regiments ; he had the cream of the Cossack cavalry ; and he had
by way of " shock-troops " some of those strange " battalions of
death " who were vowed to perish to a man rather than surrender.
He was well aware that he was making a gambler's throw. He
could not hope to find reserves of the same quality when his picked
troops were depleted. He had a chaotic hinterland behind him,
where the transport must needs be ragged, and in Kiev people were
thinking more of dividing up the land and winning independence
for the Ukraine than of the enemy at their gates. But there was
just the chance that a brilliant success and an example of gallantry
and devotion might bring the tides of unrest into ordered channels,
and shame the faint hearts into resolution. Kerenski was with
the troops in the uniform of a private soldier, labouring to put his
own fire into their hearts. And somewhere among the battalions,
Berving as a junior officer, was Guchkov, once Minister of War.

Brussilov's plan was to strike for the nearest place of importance
in enemy hands, and this he found in the nodal point of Lemberg.*
His strategy was ingenious. A frontal attack upon Lemberg from
the direction of Brody, along the high ground forming the water-
shed between the Dniester and the Bug, was out of the question,
for there the enemy had his strongest defences. If he sought to
outflank him on the south he was faced with the long river-canons
which run to the Dniester, shallow at their source, but deep-cut
and marshy nearer their confluence with the main stream. Brus-
silov's plan was to make the attempt in the Brzezany sector with
the Seventh Army, and then to draw the Eleventh into the battle,
as if he were about to extend his operations to the north. When
he had thus puzzled the enemy, he proposed to fling in Kaledin's
Eighth Army on the south bank of the Dniester against Halicz,

* There were to be simultaneous attacks by the northern group from the Riga
bridgehead, at Dvinsk, at Lake Narotch, and south of Smorgon. The last attack,
launched on 21st July, seriously alarmed the Germans.

526 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June-July

and ultimately, if things prospered, against the vital point of
Stryj, which would mean the outflanking of Lemberg. The sector
for the first attack was some eighteen miles long, from Zborov,
on the Strypa, along the east bank of the Tseniovka to its junction
with the Zlota Lipa at the village of Potutory. Here the enemy's
position defended the important point of Brzezany, through which
ran the lateral railway that fed his front. The country was one
of steep, wooded ridges, and around Koniuchy was a large tract
of forest. It was the district where in the preceding September
the right wing of Tcherbachev's Seventh Army had struggled in
vain. It was now held by the enemy with ten divisions — three
Austrian in front of Koniuchy, two Turkish before Brzezany, and
five German divisions thence to the Dniester.

The artillery " preparation " began at 4.40 a.m. on the morning
of Friday, 29th June. All next day the bombardment continued,
and during the morning of Sunday, 1st July, till just after noon
the infantry of the Seventh Army crossed the parapets. Kerenski
had already issued a stirring order of the day : —

" Soldiers ! The country is in danger. Catastrophe threatens
liberty and the Revolution. It is time for the Army to be up and
doing. Your Commander-in-Chief, who is so well acquainted with
victory, reckons that every day of further delay strengthens the enemy,
and that only a decisive blow can destroy his plans. . . . Let all
peoples know that it is not from weakness that we speak of peace.
Let them know that liberty has made our military power still greater.
Officers and soldiers, know that all Russia blesses your exploits. In
the name of liberty, in the name of the future of our country, in the
name of an honourable and stable peace, I order you ' Forward ! ' "

It was indeed the hour of crisis in the history of the Revolution,
and for a little it seemed as if Kerenski had succeeded, and the
Revolutionary armies of Russia had proved their prowess beyond
question. That first day the Austrian lines crumbled. By the
evening Koniuchy was taken and three trench systems, and the
Tseniovka was crossed. Next day the attack was resumed, and
Potutory, at the mouth of the Tseniovka, fell, while the passage
of the Zlota Lipa was forced south of Brzezany. By that evening
there had fallen to the Russians some 18,000 prisoners, in spite of the
flagrant indiscipline of many of their units. Next day, the Eleventh
Army was in action north of the Tarnopol-Lemberg railway, and the
heights west and south-west of Zborov were captured. British and
Belgian armoured cars played a gallant part in these operations,
for the weather was dry, and on the high ridges the ground was

1917] KORNILOV TAKES HALICZ. 527

passable. On 3rd and 4th July came the enemy counter-attacks,
feeble as yet, for the Austrian divisions had been caught napping,
and fresh reserves had not yet arrived. The Seventh Army was
pressing direct on Brzezany, and the Eleventh Army operating
between Koniuchy and Zborov. The blow had been delivered at
the junction of the German and Austrian group commands, and the
activity of the Eleventh Army seemed to presage a new movement
against the main Lemberg front. Thither the reserves were hur-
ried, and nothing was done to strengthen the line south of the
Dniester.

While the struggle raged on the Zlota Lipa there began on
Saturday, 7th July, a bombardment by Kornilov's Eighth Army
on a sector of some ten miles from the Dniester below Jezupol
southward along the sandy loops of the Black Bistritza, where lay
the Austrian IV. Army. At noon on Sunday, 8th July, the Russian
infantry attacked, and the result was a serious breach in the enemy's
line. Kornilov carried the whole western bank of the Black Bis-
tritza, took the town of Jezupol with its bridge, and many villages.
This brought him to the wooded slopes of the Czarny Las, over
which the Cossacks pursued the fleeing Austrians for eight miles, as
far as the river Lukwa, which enters the Dniester just below Halicz.
The booty of the day was 131 officers, 7,000 rank and file, and forty-
eight guns, including twelve heavy guns. Next day the enemy fell
back to the Lomnitza, and 1,000 more prisoners were taken. Halicz,
which covered Bothmer's right, was now in danger of being out-
flanked from the south, while it was being assaulted from the east.
At midday on Tuesday, 10th July, Halicz fell to a joint attack
by Kornilov's right and Tcheremisov's left, and 2,000 prisoners
were taken. At least two German divisions had been hurried down
from Bothmer's command, but they failed to stem the tide. One
Austrian division had lost two-thirds of its strength ; one German
had lost half. Meantime Kornilov was across the Lomnitza, and
next day he entered the town of Kalusch, west of that stream.
This was the high-water mark of Brussilov's success. Stryj was
the next objective, and at Kalusch Kornilov had already covered
half the distance between it and Stanislau. If Stryj fell, Bothmer's
line on the Brzezany ridge must follow. It would not give Lemberg
at once to the Russians, but it would compel the evacuation of by
far the strongest of Lemberg's defences.

But the impetus of the Revolutionary armies was now ex-
hausted. The picked battalions had done their work, and had
paid the penalty. The ordinary units were weakened by deser-

528 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

tion and long indiscipline ; the communications were bad ; the
hinterland of the armies was disorganized ; and though the dele-
gates of the Soldiers' Committees had often led their men gallantly
into action, ardour could not fill the place of orderly training.
Moreover, the enemy had recovered from his first surprise. He
had brought his reserves up, and had twice recovered Kalusch,
only to lose it when the Russian bayonets came into play. The
weather broke, the floods rose, and all three Russian armies found
their movements checked. Kornilov during a week of swaying
battles struggled gallantly on. His front was a sharp salient,
and he strove to broaden it by winning the left bank of the upper
Lomnitza towards the Carpathians. But on the 16th he was
compelled to evacuate Kalusch, and retire everywhere to the
right bank of the stream.

The 16th was the day of the Leninite outbreak in Petrograd,
a date known beforehand to the German command. Kerenski had
already left the front and gone to Kiev to debate Ukrainian inde-
pendence with the patriots of Little Russia. On the 20th he
hastened back to Petrograd to deal with the disorders of the capital.
The day before had come the Austro-German revanche. The main
threat was against the Eleventh Army in the region between the
upper streams of the Sereth and the Zlota Lipa. It was not made
in any great force, or attended by any mighty bombardment ;
it had no other aim than to relieve the stress south of the Dniester ;
it succeeded not of its own strength, but because canker had
ruined the defence. At ten o'clock on the morning of that day
one regiment holding an important sector simply abandoned its
position. The rot spread, and before the evening the whole front
was a rabble. A gap twenty-five miles wide was created, through
which the enemy streamed. Next day, Friday, the 20th, the
mischief continued, and the debacle of the Eleventh Army com-
pelled the retirement of the Seventh and Eighth. By Saturday
evening the German horse were in the streets of Tarnopol ; by
Sunday the enemy had advanced his front thirty miles ; and by
Monday Tarnopol was securely in his hands. The gains of 1916
in Galicia had been wiped out in a day.

Let the telegram sent to Kerenski by the Commissary and
Committees of the Eleventh Army record the tragic facts : —

" A fatal crisis has occurred in the moral of the troops recently sent
forward against the enemy by the heroic efforts of the conscientious
minority. Most of the military units are in a state of complete dis-
organization. Their spirit for an offensive has utterly disappeared.

i9i7] THE DOWNFALL. 529

and they no longer listen to the orders of their leaders, and neglect all
the exhortations of their comrades, even replying to them by threats
and shots. Some elements voluntarily evacuate their positions with-
out even waiting for the approach of the enemy. Cases are on record
in which an order to proceed with all haste to such and such a spot
to assist comrades in distress has been discussed for several hours at
meetings, and the reinforcements consequently delayed for several
hours. . . . For a distance of several hundred versts long files of
deserters, both armed and unarmed men, who are in good health and
robust, but who have utterly lost all shame, are proceeding to the rear
of the army. Frequently entire units desert in this manner. . . .
We unanimously recognize that the situation demands extreme meas-
ures and extreme efforts, for everything must be risked to save the
Revolution from catastrophe. Orders have been given to-day to fire
upon deserters and runaways. Let the Government find courage to
shoot those who by their cowardice are selling Russia and the
Revolution."

The tale is too pitiful to linger over. The brethren of the men
who had conquered at Rava Russka and Przasnysz, who had car-
ried out the greatest retreat in history, who had fought with
clubs and fists and sword-bayonets when they had no rifles — whose
resolution no weight of artillery could daunt, and whose ardour
no privations could weaken — who had come in their simple hardi-
hood to the pinnacle of human greatness — had now sunk into a
mob of selfish madmen, forgetful of their old virtues, and babbling
of uncomprehended pedantries. In their retreat they looted,
ravished, and murdered with hideous barbarity. Most pitiful was
the case of those who still remained true to their salt, and were shot
or trodden down by the panic-stricken and drunken horde, and of
officers, who loved their men like children, and saw their life's work
ruined, and themselves engulfed in a common shame. No great
thing, it is true, can wholly fail. The exploits of Russia during the
first years of war can never die. Their memory must beyond doubt
revive to be a treasure and an inspiration for the Russia yet to be.
But at the moment to Brussilov's heart-broken captains, striving
during those awful July days to stay the rout in the Galician
valleys, it seemed that a horror of great darkness had fallen upon
the world, and that the best life-blood of their country had been
idly shed.

CHAPTER LXXX.

THE ITALIAN FRONT IN THE SUMMER OF I917.
May 12-September 18, 1917.

The Capture of Monte Kuk and Monte Santo — The Fight for Hermada — The Bain-
sizza Plateau won — The Struggle for San Gabriele — Cadorna closes his Offen-
sive.

During the first three months of 1917 there was a constant bicker-
ing along the fronts in the Trentino, the Dolomites, and on the
Isonzo, but no movement other than an occasional trench raid.
Italy was busy behind the lines preparing for a great effort, and
the work of these winter months compared even with the sustained
activity in northern France. Since the summer of 1916 2,000
miles of military roads had been constructed by the Austrians
between the Adige and Cadore, and they imitated their opponents
by a lavish preparation of " wireways," some of them having a
length of from twenty-five to forty miles. They had at least
thirty-six divisions on the front, of which some sixteen were on
the Isonzo line. Italy was not behind in her effort. She raised
and trained new regiments ; she vastly increased her batteries
and munitions ; and she brought her aircraft fleet to a strength
considerably beyond that of her enemy. Her engineers gave
special attention to the Isonzo area. Along the top of the ridge,
on the right bank from Sabotino to Caporetto, a vast system of
high-level roads was constructed, and hundreds of heavy guns
were emplaced behind the crest. The Italian bridgehead beyond
the river at Plava could be reached only by a single narrow road
from Verhovlje, closely overlooked by the enemy, and this fact
had largely accounted for the failure to capture Monte Kuk in
August 1916, when Gorizia fell. Capello now made a second road
to Plava from Monte Corada, better sheltered from Austrian eyes,
and descending the hillside in thirty-two marvellous hairpin bends.
The omens seemed to point to a Teutonic offensive as soon as

' 630

i9i7] CAPTURE OF KUK AND SANTO. 53i

the weather improved, and it was the business of Cadorna to fore-
stall it. He had hoped to attack in April, but the lateness of the
spring forced him to hold his hand. His plan was to engage the
enemy on the whole Isonzo line, from Tolmino to the sea, by an
intense artillery action, so as to puzzle him as to where exactly
the infantry were to be launched. At the same time, by showing
a vigorous front in the Trentino he would hold off the assault
which the enemy had for some weeks threatened in that quarter.
When the appointed day came, he would strike hard with his left
on the Isonzo against the Austrian position on the steep heights
from Santo to north of Plava ; and then, as soon as the enemy
had concentrated his reserves there, launch a great attack on the
southern Carso toward Hermada.

On 12th May began the Italian bombardment, in which British
and French heavy artillery assisted, and by the morning of the
14th it had attained a hurricane fury. The main section of attack
was that between Globna, a mile north of Plava, and the defile of
Salcano, almost in the suburbs of Gorizia ; but there were demon-
strations elsewhere, so that the whole fighting front was nearly
twenty miles long. The effect of the guns was so crushing that
the Austrian first trenches disappeared, and Italian raiders re-
turned with batches of dazed and broken prisoners. The Italians
had but the one bridgehead, that of Plava ; but on the morning
of Monday, the 14th, they succeeded in flinging over a second
bridge a little downstream, opposite Zagora. About noon the
infantry advanced. There were subsidiary actions south of the
Vippacco and at Fajti Hrib, on the Vertoibizza, and at Hill 174,
north of Tivoli. But these were only distractive. The great
effort was from Plava to Salcano, where Capello's Second Army
was directed against the heights east of the river. Success came
slowly at first. On the left the Udine Brigade won Hill 383, east
of Plava, and the Florence Brigade, pushing their way gallantly
through a devastating fire, reached Hill 535, a northern spur of
Monte Kuk. The Avellino Brigade crossed by the new bridge at
Zagora, and took the fortress of Zagomila. On the right the Campo-
basso Brigade struggled up the slopes of Monte Santo. It was a
creditable day, but as yet far from victory. The attack was for
the most part held in the Austrian second line, which was 800 feet
above the stream.

During the darkness two battalions of Bersaglieri and Alpini
surprised the enemy and forced a passage of the river near Bodrez,
between Plava and Tolmino, where they organized a bridgehead

532 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

and held their ground. At dawn the attack on the hills was re-
sumed along all the line. The Florence Brigade, a little after
midday, reached the northern summit of Monte Kuk (Hill 611) ;
and the Avellino, working up from Zagora, took the southern crest,
and drove the enemy from Hill 524, one of the spurs of Monte
Vodice. Less fortunate was the Campobasso Brigade, which
found that it could not maintain itself on the ridge of Monte Santo,
and had to withdraw well below the summit line. This tremendous
fighting, under a May sun, and up steep wooded slopes of nearly
2,000 feet, had given Cadorna the western gate of the Bainsizza
plateau, and observation over all the rear of Monte Santo and
the enemy communications for the front on San Gabriele.

It was not to be expected that the Austrians would lose such
key-points without a struggle to regain them. Wednesday, the
16th, was a day of incessant counter-attacks, not only against
Kuk and Vodice, but against the central Carso position. They
gained nothing, and the Italians worked their way slowly along
the ridge towards Santo, gaining the highest summit of Vodice
(Hill 652). New Austrian batteries, which had been brought from
the Russian front and established on the Carso, were hastily sent
north of Gorizia. The fight lasted till the 22nd, and was waged
not only on the Isonzo, but on the west of Lake Garda, in the Adige
valley, and on the front between Asiago and the Val Sugano, the
fiercest assault being on the Tooth of Pasubio, a rock tower of the
peak which was the key of the Italian line west of Asiago. The
honours remained with Cadorna, who added to his gains Hill 363,
east of Plava, and the villages of Globna and Palliovo. Meantime,
on the 18th, the bridgehead detachment of Bersaglieri and Alpini
far to the north at Bodrez, having fulfilled its task of worry-
ing the enemy's flanks, was withdrawn across the river. It had
been a brave adventure. A handful of men had crossed before
dawn, building a rough bridge which in an hour or two was destroyed
by Austrian shells. They were then left with some hundreds of
prisoners in their hands, and a flooded river behind them. They
sent back their captives by means of a cable ferry, and prepared to
maintain the fort against all comers. For four days they stood
their ground, beating off every attack, and even advancing far up
the mountain side — two battalions holding a front of two miles.

The result of the first stage of Cadorna's offensive was all that
could be desired. The prisoners numbered 7,113, including 163
officers ; 18 guns were captured, and a vast quantity of trench
mortars and machine guns. The Italians had nearly all the rocky

1917] THE ADVANCE IN THE CARSO. 533

eastern bastion of the Isonzo from Hill 363 opposite Plava, by way
of Monte Kuk and the twin peaks of Vodice, to the saddle of Hill
603, and thence along the western slopes of Santo. Already their
guns were hammering the hinterland of Santo and San Gabriele.

The second act of the drama opened on 23rd May, on the front
between the southern edge of the Carso and the Adriatic, where
was the right wing of the Duke of Aosta's Third Army. There
the coast road to Trieste was blocked by the steep Hermada,
which in turn was defended from the west by a reedy marsh to
be crossed only by narrow causeways. On the evening of the
22nd there had been a heavy bombardment, principally in the
Santo and San Gabriele section, but there had been comparative
quiet on the Carso. But at six o'clock on the morning of the
23rd every gun of the Third Army opened fire, and for ten hours
their fury continued, till at four in the afternoon the Italian in-
fantry crossed their parapets. The Duke of Aosta's left wing
demonstrated against the line from Volkovnjak southward by
Hills 378 and 363. The main attack was that of the centre and
right wing, where the Bologna Brigade carried the Austrian trenches
south of the Kostanjevica-Hudi Log road, turned the latter village
from the south-east, and swept beyond Lukatic. The right wing
took Jamiano, stormed the village of Bagni among the coast marshes
west of the mouth of the Timavo, and won the low hills marked
92, 97, 77, and 58. One hundred and thirty airplanes, including
a group of hydroplanes, assisted in the battle. The result was
that by the evening the Austrian first and second positions had
gone, from Kostanjevica to the sea. The enemy, deceived by the
feint beyond Gorizia and in the northern Carso, was completely
taken by surprise, and, violent as were his counter-attacks, they
were tardy and disorganized. Before the day ended, the Italians
had taken more than 9,000 prisoners, including 300 officers.

At dawn on Thursday, 24th May, the fight was renewed in
that strange tricolour country of red chalk, white limestone, and
emerald grass. Two British monitors, assisted by Italian light
craft and seaplanes, bombarded the seaboard in rear of the Austrian
line ; for though the road and railway from Trieste were sheltered
by a low ridge of coastal hills, there were exposed gaps at Nabresina
and Prosecco. The Barletta Brigade continued to press on the
left of the line. The centre, consisting of the Padua and Mantua
Brigades, operated against the Hudi Log salient, and won the
Hills 235 and 241 north of the Jamiano-Brestovica road. The
right — the Tuscan, Arezzo, and Bergamo Brigades along with part

534 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [May

of the 2nd Brigade of Bersaglieri — drove the enemy back to a line
running from the village of Flondar to the mouth of the Timavo.
On Friday, the 25th, the struggle continued. The left wing of the
Third Army fought its way through a fierce barrage from the north
towards Kostanjevica. The centre carried Hudi Log and its
labyrinthine salient, and for a moment won a footing in Kostan-
jevica itself. Its ultimate line was from Hill 202, south-east of
Hudi Log, to Hill 251, south of Kostanjevica. The right wing,
attacking at four in the afternoon, carried Flondar, and pushed
outposts on to the heights which lie between Medeazza and San
Giovanni. For the first time the Italians stood on the skirts of
Hermada.

Next day and the following the weather was bad and the
progress was slower, though ground was gained everywhere on the
right and centre, the Timavo was crossed, and the village of San
Giovanni taken. On Monday, the 28th, the 45th Division, on the
extreme right, took the little seaside hill marked 28, but could
not maintain itself there under the fire from Hermada. Still the
marshes had been passed, and the Italian line was firmly on Her-
mada's skirts, facing the main rampart across the shallow valley
beyond Medeazza. Already the south face of the great fortress
had been dismantled of its guns, which were withdrawn to safer
emplacements in the rear. The Italian troops had suffered greatly,
for the five days' battle had been fought on the most arduous
battle-ground on earth. In that stony place trenches could not
be easily improvised, and since the old Austrian lines had been
crushed to atoms, the Italians had, as a rule, to face counter-attacks
in the open. Accordingly a halt was called to rest and refit, and
by 30th May, when the weather finally broke, the battle had vir-
tually died away.

The second stage of Cadorna's offensive had prospered well,
though not in accordance with the extreme hopes of its promoters.
Prisoners numbered 16,568, including 441 officers ; 20 guns were
taken, and many more were destroyed by the enemy through
fear of capture ; and a great quantity of stores of all kinds fell
as booty to the attack. Between Kostanjevica and the sea the
Italian line had been advanced from one and a half to two and a
half miles on a five-mile front, the difficult marsh country had been
crossed, and a footing had been won on the slopes of Hermada.
But the two pivots of the Austrian line still stood firm — the heights
around Kostanjevica in the north, and Hermada itself, with its
tunnelled rocks and splintered oak woods. The great gain for

igiy] THE FIGHT FOR HERMADA. 535

Cadorna was that he had won elbow-room. He had broken through
the larger part of the intricate trench works which had so long
constrained him. The whole action from the 14th to the 28th of
May was one of the most solid successes yet won by Italian arms.
Thirty-eight Austrian guns had been taken, and 23,680 prisoners,
including 604 officers. It was notable that the Austrians claimed
some 14,000 prisoners, and probably with truth. Troops which
advanced too far in assault in such a country were either destroyed
or made captive, for there was little chance of digging in and estab-
lishing a post which could be linked up with the main line.

Cadorna's success had inspired profound uneasiness in von Arz,
who had succeeded Conrad von Hoetzendorff as Chief of the Austrian
Staff. All through the Carso battle he had attacked without ceas-
ing in the Kuk and Vodice region, in the hope of diverting the
Third Army from its purpose. A council of war was held at Laibach,
and an urgent summons for help was sent to Berlin. Guns and
troops were hurried from the stagnant Russian front, but they
arrived too late to effect much during the course of the battle.
In the belief, however, that the new Italian line must be rudi-
mentary and ill-sited, a great counter-stroke was determined upon
for the first days of June.

It began on 1st June with a heavy bombardment of the ridge
of Fajti Hrib, and infantry attacks on Hill 174 at Tivoli, and the
southern crest of Vodice. These lasted through the next day,
and on Sunday, the 3rd, the artillery bombardment covered the
whole Carso front from San Marco to Flondar. The Italian counter-
battery work was excellent ; but that evening the Austrian guns
redoubled their violence, and their infantry gained some ground
on the ridge of San Marco, only to lose it under a counter-attack.
On the morning of Monday, the 4th, a great effort was made against
Fajti Hrib by two picked Sturmtruppen battalions of Hungarians
and Tyrolese. They attacked on two sides of a rectangular salient,
and won a footing in the Italian positions. Then came the Italian
curtain fire on the saddle between Fajti and Hill 464, which cut off
the spearhead of the attack from its shaft. By the evening the
Tiber and the Massa Carrara Brigades had retaken the ground and
annihilated the storming party. That same day there was severe
fighting farther north on the line between Versic and Jamiano,
the southern pivot of the Carso front. The battle swayed with
varying fortunes, but the troops of the 61st Division finally beat
off the enemy, and remained in secure possession of what they had
won. South of Jamiano the situation was more difficult. There

536 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

the new Italian front was strategically badly placed, and in the
struggle of the 5th the outposts were driven in, and the right wing
of the Third Army forced back from Flondar and from the slopes
of Hermada — a loss of from one-third of a mile to a mile and a
quarter on a front of some three miles. This remained the sole
Austrian gain from the counter-stroke, and it had been won at the
expense of heavy losses and by the use of large new reserves.
Four fresh divisions from the Russian front were identified during
the two days' action.

With the cessation of the Austrian counter-attacks the battle
died down on the Julian front. It had cost the enemy 24,000
prisoners and not less than 100,000 in dead and wounded. It
had brought the Italians to the true gates of Trieste — the edge of
Hermada in the south, and, in the north, of the Bainsizza plateau,
which was the key of San Gabriele and San Daniele and the Ter-
novanerwald. Only those who were intimately familiar with that
countryside could realize the enormous strain which such a cam-
paign put upon the endurance of an army. The Julian battles
must be short, for flesh and blood could not bear the prolonged
agony of the effort demanded. Hence, during the remainder of
June, the centre of interest swung northward to the high moun-
tains. In a history where only broad lines of strategy and major
actions can be considered, a thousand brilliant episodes must be
left unchronicled. In no part of the European battle-ground were
these more frequent than along the intricate front of the Trentino
and Cadore. Such were the wonderful achievements in the Primiero
district in the summer and autumn of 1916 ; the fighting around
the Drei Zinne in the Cortina Dolomites during April 1917 ; the
struggle for the Tooth of Pasubio during the May offensive ; and
the achievement of the troops of the 52nd Division in June on
the Asiago plateau, where they carried the rock- wall rising from
the Val Sugana and known as the Line of Portule, taking a thousand
prisoners, and won and held the summit of Monte Ortigara.

After midsummer 1917, Cadorna was compelled to reconsider
with care his whole plan of campaign. The strenuous offensive
which he had conducted for two years on 470 miles of front had
taken his lines almost everywhere inside the enemy borders ;
but since the frontier had been long before designed by Austria
not for defence but for offence, mere gain of ground had not
brought him near a decision. In May and June he had won
conspicuous strategical points ; but clearly this battle in sections

1917] CADORNA ASKS FOR REINFORCEMENTS. 537

could not continue for ever. He reviewed his forces, and found
them too weak in artillery for what was pre-eminently a war of
guns. The struggle among the hills of the Carso and the Isonzo
was costly, and the enemy, refreshed with drafts from the Russian
front, was now the quicker of the two sides to recover from losses.
But he believed that beyond San Gabriele and the Iron Gates of
the Carso lay a mighty prize for the conqueror — not a city or a
province alone, but the destruction of Austria's fighting power.
For such a prize he needed the help of his allies, and accordingly
the second stage of his summer offensive, which had been originally
fixed for July, was postponed till the matter could be discussed in
Paris and London.

There was as yet no Allied War Council in permanent session,
so the affair resolved itself into informal negotiations with the
governments of France and Britain. Cadorna's proposal was
not unreasonable. He asked for batteries, and for such troops
as could be spared from the French and Flanders fronts, in order to
produce a momentum which would result not in the gain of a ridge
or a peak, but the clearing of the way to Trieste and open warfare.
Unfortunately, the Allies were already committed to extensive
operations. Haig had his great Flanders campaign, for which the
plans had long been laid, and Petain was nursing back his armies
to offensive vigour with a view to attacks at Verdun and the
Chemin des Dames. British and French batteries were available ;
but no infantry could be spared till the main Western operations
were over, and by that time the season would be too late for
Cadorna's scheme. In this refusal there was no lack of good will
towards Italy, or of admiration for her brilliant campaigning. On
purely military grounds it was right to put the emphasis on the
Western front. There stood Germany, the great enemy, and no
defeat of Austria in the field would strike at the heart of the German
power. It was abundantly clear that the Dual Monarchy, even
if it wished, could not break from its entanglements ; and though
the Italian flag had waved over Trieste by September, little would
have been won towards the main purpose of the war. For the
Allies to forgo their assault upon the German line and to concen-
trate with Italy against Austria would have been to ignore the
true centre of gravity in the campaign. There were critics —
civilians, for the most part — who saw in the refusal a prime strategic
blunder. With Allied help, they said, Cadorna might have stormed
his way to Trieste and Laibach, and have repeated the exploit of
Napoleon in 1797. The answer to such fantasies was that, even if

538 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

he had, it would not have produced any real decision, and it would
have exposed the Flanders and French fronts to a perilous German
counter-stroke. Moreover, the Napoleon of 1797 was a dangerous
object of imitation. His plan was militarily unsound. He suc-
ceeded by bluff rather than by strategy. Had Thugut and the
civilians in Vienna not lost their nerve and overruled the Archduke
Charles, it is more than likely that Bonaparte's career would have
ended in disaster among the Styrian hills.*

Cadorna was therefore left to his own resources. He had many
difficulties in his way. He was fighting against time, for the fiasco
in Galicia in July had proved beyond doubt that Russia must be
written off the Allied assets, and that the trickle of Austrian troops
from Galicia would presently become a steady flow. His men

* The position of Bonaparte in 1797 deserves a note. In 1796, while the Arch-
duke Charles foiled the attempts of Jourdan and Moreau to advance on Vienna from
the Rhine, Bonaparte in Italy had forced Piedmont to make peace, had occupied
Lombardy, and had besieged Mantua. On February 2, 1797, Mantua fell, and the
Archduke Charles, now on the Piave and heavily outnumbered, believed that Bona-
parte would march into Tyrol and join hands with the French on the Rhine. Joubert's
force of 20,000, then at Trent, looked like the vanguard of such a movement. Bona-
parte, however, resolved to march on Vienna by the Mur and Miirz valleys and the
Semmering pass. On 16th March he was across the Tagliamento, while the Arch-
duke Charles retreated by Gorizia towards Laibach, detaching small Austrian forces
to hold the passes on the Fella and at Plezzo. Bonaparte reached Gorizia on 19th
March, and ordered Massena to advance on Tarvis, Guyeux to move by Cividale and
Caporetto, and Serrurier to march up the east bank of the Isonzo — all three divisions
to meet at Tarvis, while Bernadotte was to follow the Archduke. By 24th March
Bonaparte reached Tarvis, where he found the three divisions ; while the Archduke,
followed by Bernadotte, crossed the Loibl pass and reached Klagenfurt on 28th
March. That day Bonaparte advanced from Tarvis and occupied Villach, while the
Archduke retired from Klagenfurt through St. Veit. The pursuit continued up the
Mur valley, the Austrians fighting rearguard actions, till on 6th April the Archduke
reached Bruck at the junction of the Mur and the Miirz. His forces were increasing,
and he hoped to make a stand west of the Semmering pass. Bonaparte was clearly
anxious, and at the end of March had made a proposal to Austria for peace ; for he
had news of a rising in his rear, and he knew that to force the Semmering would be a
difficult task. The statesmen in Vienna were still more alarmed, and, against the
wishes of the Archduke, concluded an armistice on 7th April. On iSth April the
preliminaries of peace were signed at Leoben. Bonaparte had won by successful
bluff, without the crucial test of a fight for the Semmering. He had assets which
were not with Cadorna in 1917. He began with far superior numbers, and knew
that the Austrians could not hold the river crossings against him or delay more than
a few days his march into Carinthia. Even if we assume that Cadorna had been able
to reach Klagenfurt, the strategy of the Archduke would still have been available for
the enemy with increased advantages. For a stand in the western Semmering valley
Austria would have had as a main line of supply the Semmering railway, and, as
communications for flank forces to hold the ridges of the Styrian Alps, the lines from
Linz and Salzburg on the right and the line from Hungary by Gratz on the left.
Cadorna's advance would have been into an ugly re-entrant between high mountain
walls. Further, in 191 7 the Austrians had a united command and interior lines,
while in 1797 there was no such unity of command, and there was imminent peril
from Hoche's large army on the Rhine. The campaign is fully discussed in General
von Horsetzky's Feldziige der letzen 100 Jahre.

1917] THE PERIL OF ITALY. 539

were weary, for the strain of the Italian fighting was almost beyond
the endurance of flesh and blood. No progress could be made
except at the expense of desperate valour and suffering ; and to
hold the positions won, as was proved by the Alpini's brilliant
exploit in June on the Ortigara, was scarcely less costly than to
win them. The bravest soldiers in the world will grow dispirited
when they see their best efforts still far from any tangible victory.
Moreover, the country behind him was full of danger signals.
There was industrial trouble in Milan and Turin. The civil Gov-
ernment was out of favour ; the Prime Minister, Boselli, was an
old man of eighty ; and Orlando, the Minister of the Interior, had
shown little firmness in handling domestic discontents. The foes
of Italy were not only before her gates but in her own household.
The land was full of pacificist talk, and, in spite of Cadorna's appeal,
nothing had been done to check peace propaganda among the
troops. Italy's heavy losses made only too good a text for such
discourses, and the Vatican Peace Note of 1st August, especially
the phrase about " useless slaughter," was used to give the weak-
kneed and treacherous elements among the people the impression
that they had the support of the Holy See. Cadorna's new offen-
sive, therefore, carried the political as well as the military fortunes
of Italy. He must succeed greatly and soon, or there was danger
of losing all.

There were three main redoubts which might be regarded as
the keys of the Austrian front between Plezzo and the sea. One
was the Lorn position, guarding on the south the enemy bridgehead
at Tolmino and the Idria and Baca valleys, by the latter of which
ran the railway to Vienna. The second was Monte San Gabriele,
the key of the Ternovanerwald, which, till it was won, barred
Italy's progress east of Gorizia. The third was Hermada, on the
seashore. Of the three, San Gabriele was the most vital and the
most difficult. It might be turned, but it could not be taken by
direct assault. It was, accordingly, Cadorna's intention to " feel "
a long length of the enemy front by a general attack to find where,
if anywhere, lay the weak spot. Once that was found, the attack
could be pressed hard with the object of winning ultimately one
or other of the three keys. It was the greatest effort made by
Italy since the fall of Gorizia. The summer battles of 1917 had
been on short fronts, and had lasted only for a few days. This
was an operation on a line of thirty miles, and it was meant, if
successful, to continue till the first snowfall.

At Gorizia the Isonzo bends to the north-west, and then in a

540 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

wide curve to the north-east towards Tolmino. At the first bend
Monte Santo towers above the eastern bank, and below it the
Chiapovano valley makes a break in the rim of hills. South of
that valley runs the chain of Monte San Gabriele and Monte San
Daniele, the northern defence of the Gorizian plain. North and
north-west of it, beginning from Monte Santo, is the line of heights
on the left bank of the Isonzo, running to where the Baca valley
enters from the east below the hill of Santa Lucia. The battles
of May had given Cadorna all the hills above the river north of the
Chiapovano valley as far as Plava, with the exception of Monte
Santo. The enemy still held San Gabriele and the ridges south and
east of it. Between the Chiapovano and the Baca valleys a loop
of the river enclosed the high broken region called the Bainsizza
plateau, bounded on the west by the hills lining the Isonzo. This
upland was cut by glens descending to the Isonzo, and had many
peaks and subsidiary plateaux ; but it formed a region where
transport was comparatively easy, and its possession was the key
of the Austrian position above the river. If it could be carried,
Monte Santo would fall, and San Gabriele and the other heights
of the Ternovanerwald might be turned in flank. Cadorna held
the eastern rim of the Isonzo valley from Plava to just short of
Monte Santo; north of Plava the Austrians were on the west
bank. It was clear that the Bainsizza could not be won by an
advance from the narrow front of Kuk and Vodice. The eastern
rim must be carried north of Plava to allow of a broad front and a
converging attack.

On the morning of Saturday, 18th August, in hot, clear weather,
a great bombardment began along the whole line from Tolmino
to the sea. In the afternoon Capello's Second Army moved north-
east from Plava, and seized the foot of the little Rohot valley,
which divides Monte Kuk from the Bainsizza plateau. That
night the work of crossing the river from Plava to Santa Lucia
was begun. It was no light task to force that swift moat, where
at every easy crossing-place were strong Austrian machine-gun
posts. By dawn on the 19th fourteen bridges had been constructed ;
and during the morning, while mist lay thick in the gorges, the
Italians broke through the front line of the enemy defence. Half-
way up the slopes they met the second line of caverns and re-
doubts. On the crest was a third line ; while behind it, radiating
from the central peak of Jelenik, was a strong support system.
The frontal Italian attack pushed up the Rohot glen, but found a
stubborn resistance in the reserve position behind Descla. Mean-

1917] THE BAINSIZZA PLATEAU. 541

time on their left the 1st and 5th Bersaglieri Brigades, advancing
between Canale and the Avscek gorge, pierced the enemy defence
north of Jelenik, and by the evening gained a position from the
Avscek to the hill called Kuk 611. Farther north the eastern rim
of the valley was won opposite Doblar, but beyond that the pre-
cipitous fall of the hills to the river from the Lorn plateau prevented
an extension northward of the front of attack. The Lorn was
vital, for it dominated Tolmino and the Baca and Idria valleys ;
but the only route to it was from the Avscek glen by way of the
small Kal plateau. After heavy fighting the Italians won the
western edge of the Kal, but between them and the Lorn was still
the deep wooded gorge of the Vogercek torrent.

South of Gorizia the Duke of Aosta's Third Army was not less
hotly engaged. The 23rd Corps, under General Diaz, carried the
village of Selo, and in the Hermada section the ground was regained
which had been lost in June to the Austrian counter-attack. In
the northern part of the Carso progress was slower, though the
Pallanza Brigade won an important position south-east of Fajti
Hrib. Elsewhere on the long front there were only artillery en-
gagements. That first day taught Cadorna all he wanted. He
now knew that the weak spot in the enemy's defence was on the
heights of the middle Isonzo, and he strove to increase his advan-
tage before Boroevitch could bring up his reserves.

On Monday, 20th August, the 1st and 5th Bersaglieri Brigades,
with the Elba Brigade in support, had pushed east of Vrh and
Kuk 611, and turned the Jelenik position. It yielded the next day,
for fortunately it was held by Czech troops, and the Italians poured
through the gap across the Bainsizza. For the moment it seemed
as if in this section open warfare had been restored. On the morn-
ing of the 23rd the Florence and Udine Brigades attacked to the
east of the Rohot glen against the height of Kobilek, while other
troops advanced east of Vodice and drove the enemy into the
Concha di Gargaro, thereby threatening the rear of Monte Santo.
That same day, on the south, the Italians forced the saddle which
separates Monte Santo from Monte San Gabriele. The garrison
on the former hill was now isolated, and on the following day,
the 24th, the place fell. By this day, the sixth of the battle,
over 20,000 prisoners had been taken.

Capello was now moving freely across the Bainsizza plateau.
But his task was difficult, for he had few roads ; his transport had
to climb the 2,000 feet of steep cliffs from the Isonzo ; the weather
was scorching ; water was scarce, and the enemy was fighting

542 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

stubborn rearguard actions in the broken country. At the southern
end the Austrians had been forced into the Chiapovano valley ;
but farther north the Italian advance was stayed at the hill of
Volnik, some two miles west of the Chiapovano. It was inevitable
that in an assault in such a terrain the Italian infantry should out-
run their artillery, and the enemy was able to get off the bulk of
his guns.

North of the Avscek glen there was a more serious check.
General Badoglio, who in May had been responsible for the capture
of Kuk and Vodice, was dispatched to take charge of the opera-
tions there ; * but he found the Austrian artillery concentration
so strong on the Lom plateau that even his energy could make no
headway. Two months later this failure was to bear disastrous
fruits. On the 30th Cadorna sent in his cavalry at the southern
end of the Chiapovano valley, in the hope of forcing the northern
spurs of San Gabriele. The time for cavalry, however, had passed.
The war of movement had ended, and the defence had found
positions on which they could stand. The first phase of the battle
was over, and there was need for a pause and a readjustment
while the engineers toiled at new roads. It was the same in the
Carso, where during the first week the right of the Third Army
had won ground above San Giovanni di Duino and Medeazza, on
the slopes of Hermada, and the 23rd Corps had broken through the
main Austrian system from Kostanjevica across the Brestovica
valley. There the advance halted, for some of the guns and
reserves of the Third Army were needed for the struggle at San
Gabriele.

The second phase began on 3rd September. San Gabriele was
obviously in danger. Some time before, the Italians had worked
their way up its southern spurs, Santa Caterina and Hill 343. The
fall of Monte Santo had given them the Sella di Dol, the saddle
between the two heights, and on the last day of August they had
won Hill 526 and Veliki Hrib, and pushed along the northern ridge
to point 552. San Gabriele is a long ridge, 646 metres at its highest
point, which falls steeply towards Gorizia and towards the east
and north, but on the west drops by gentler slopes to the Isonzo.
The ridge at its widest is about 800 yards, and its total length is
some 2,000. The actual summit is very steep, not unlike one of the
castrol or saucepan hills common in South Africa. The place had
been made one huge fortress, honeycombed with caverns and

* He had been Capello's Chief of Staff in May, and was now in command of the
2nd Corps.

THE ISONZO AND CARSO
FRONTS.

1917] SAN GABRIELE. 543

tunnels, and it now represented a promontory in the Austrian
lines, surrounded by the Italians on three sides, and linked to the
main front only on the north-east.

On 4th September the place was in Cadorna's hands, except
for the last few hundred yards below the summit. On the morning
of that day he attacked with three columns — along the crest from
Veliki Hrib, on the north-east slopes, and on the south just east of
Santa Caterina. After a desperate struggle the main part of the
summit was carried — a fight for a natural fortress within as narrow
limits of movement as any old battle for town or castle. The
enemy could not allow the situation to remain as it was. The fall
of San Gabriele meant the ultimate opening of the road from
Gorizia to Trieste. For ten days one of the fiercest of the lesser
battles of the war was waged on those few thousand square feet of
rock and dust. Thirty-one fresh Austrian battalions were thrown
into the melee. The enemy forced the Italians off the top to a
line just under the crest ; then Cadorna's guns devastated the
summit, and the Italians returned. It was a battle of appalling
losses, for both defence and attack were implacable. By the
middle of September the crest was roughly divided between
Cadorna and Boroevitch, and the latter was entitled to claim
that he had blocked the Italian movement which would have
threatened his lines east of Gorizia.

On the other hand, the action of San Gabriele enabled Capello
to consolidate his position on the Bainsizza plateau, which other-
wise might have been precarious. There new roads were made for
guns and supplies, water was provided, and trenches perfected,
while every spare Austrian soldier was being used at San Gabriele.
At the close of the month two successful local actions greatly
improved the line. On 28th September an awkward Austrian
position was captured on Veliki Hrib, and on the 29th troops of
the Venice and Tortona Brigades made a useful advance south of
Podlaka and Madoni at the south-east corner of the Bainsizza.
During September heavy Austrian counter-strokes were launched
on the Carso between Kostanjevica and the sea. In the northern
part the 23rd Corps, assisted by a British group of heavy howitzers,
beat off all attacks ; but in the south the Italian right was com-
pelled on 5th September once again to retire from the slopes of
Hermada, and San Giovanni di Duino was lost. The Third Army
did not attempt to recover the ground, for a great movement on
Hermada was part of Cadorna's autumn plan when the campaign
of the Second Army should be finished.

544 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

But by the middle of September the Italian Commander-
in-Chief had reluctantly come to the conclusion that he must
relinquish those further plans. In a month's continuous battles
he had achieved a very real success. He had taken well over
30,000 prisoners and large quantities of guns and materiel. The
fighting of his men had been heroic beyond all praise, and San
Gabriele must rank in history with those feats of arms which
reveal the extreme tenacity of the human spirit. But he had paid
a heavy price in his 155,000 casualties, though the enemy had lost
correspondingly. His troops, too, suffered much from sickness,
which brought the total casualties for the whole summer up to
nearly three-quarters of a million. He was still far too weak in
artillery, in spite of loans from the Allies, and he saw no way of
procuring the necessary strength. Moreover, the position which
he had gained on the Bainsizza was not satisfactory as a jumping-
off ground. The centre was too much in advance of the flanks.
The Austrian position on the Lom and at Tolmino was a menace
which must be removed before a new advance was practicable,
and its removal meant an operation for which he had not the
strength. The Italian Julian front had become a salient within a
salient. Above all, his losses had compelled him to fill up his
units with new drafts which had not yet been tested. The flower of
his armies had suffered in the long summer battles, and he dared
not risk a new campaign until he was once more certain of his men.

Accordingly, on 18th September, he cancelled all arrangements
for a further offensive, and informed the Allies that his main
operations were at an end. The Allies acquiesced, but it would
appear that they did not realize the full meaning of Cadorna's
decision. He understood, with a completeness not possible as yet
to the French and British staffs, the disastrous possibilities in-
volved in the defection of Russia. The Italian front, it was as-
sumed by them, would relapse into the comparative quiet which had
hitherto attended the close of Cadorna's offensives. Eleven of the
sixteen British batteries were withdrawn, and certain French guns,
now on their way, were countermanded before they had been once in
action. Her allies did not realize that the forces of Italy had fought
themselves, as the phrase goes, to a standstill, and that the nation
behind them, scared by the vast losses and at the mercy of treach-
erous propaganda, was in no position to aid in their recuperation.
Cadorna's summary methods of discipline — up to date he had dis-
missed 217 generals, 255 full colonels, and 335 battalion commanders
— had filled the armies with officers unknown to their men. The

1917] GERMANY TAKES THE REINS. 545

strategic position on the Isonzo was dangerous at the best, and
its peril was centupled by the weariness and discontent of the
Italian troops and the new plans of the enemy. Boroevitch had
also been fought to a standstill. In spite of his reserves from
Galicia the Bainsizza and San Gabriele had shaken his strength
to its foundations, and he informed his Government that he could
not resist a twelfth Isonzo battle. Accordingly Germany agreed
to stiffen his line with German troops, and to ease the position by
an attack on the grand scale.* Of this coming offensive the Italian
Headquarters were fully informed ; they could even guess with
reasonable confidence its locality ; but they hesitated about how
to meet it. Capello would have anticipated it by an Italian attack ;
the alternative was to do as the Germans did in the West in March,
and fall back to an invincible position. But, since the Trentino
defences had been allowed to decay, such a retirement must be
drastic, and would involve the giving up of all the ground won
since May 1915. Cadorna delayed and was lost. He was still
considering his policy when the avalanche overtook him.
• LudendorfTs My War Memories (Eng. trans.), II., p. 48a.

CHAPTER LXXXI.

THE THIRD YEAR OF WAR: THE CHANGE IN THE
STRATEGIC POSITION.

June 28, 1916-June 28, 1917.

The "Mathematical Certainty" of 1917— The New Factor— Tactical Developments
— Landing of first American Troops — The Year at Sea — Gravity of Sub-
marine Peril — America sends Destroyers — Revision of War Aims — Economic
Position of the Belligerents — A New Europe.

In the present chapter we have to consider a new phase of the
strategic position in sharp contrast to those which preceded it.
The first year of war closed in a general obscurity, from which no
deduction was possible. With the second the factors seemed to
have become clear and static, and the problems to be slowly moving
towards solution. But at the close of the third year the outlines
were blurred again. What had seemed granite rock had crumbled
into sand. Accepted metaphors, such as " Germany a beleaguered
fortress," were losing their relevance, and postulates, like the
Allied command of the sea and the enemy war on two fronts, were
clamouring for revision. The third anniversary of the Serajevo
tragedy saw a dramatic change in the position of the belligerents.

At the end of June 1916 the Germans in the West had exhausted
their capacity for the offensive, and the long Allied battle-line*
from the North Sea to the Adriatic was about to move forward.
While Brussilov was pressing hard in Volhynia and Galicia and the
Bukovina, the Battle of the Somme began, and by the close of the
year it had effected its main purpose. We have already seen in
detail the results of that great fight, which was up to date the
most sustained effort of the campaign. It forced the enemy from
positions which he thought impregnable, gravely depleted his
man-power, dislocated his staff-work, and disorganized his whole
military machine. It compelled him to make superhuman efforts
to increase his forces, and to construct a new defensive position

546

1917] THE NEW FACTOR OF 1917. 547

to be the bulwark of his French and Belgian occupations. All
along the Western front the Allies were successful. At Verdun,
before the close of 1916, Nivelle, by shattering counter-strokes, had
won back what Germany had gained in the spring and summer.
Cadorna had taken Gorizia, and had pushed well into the Carso
fastnesses. On the Russian front Brussilov, after routing three
Austrian armies, had been stayed before Halicz in September ;
and during the autumn and early winter Mackensen and Falkenhayn
had overrun the Dobrudja and Wallachia, taken Bucharest, and
driven the Rumanians to the line of the Sereth. But this victory,
won against a small and ill-equipped nation, was the solitary success
of the Central Powers. On all the main battle-grounds they had
been unmistakably beaten in the field.

To the most conservative observer at the beginning of 1917
it seemed almost a matter of mathematical certainty that during
that year the Teutonic Alliance must suffer the final military defeat
which would mean the end of the war. No larger effort would be
required from Russia than Brussilov's attack of 1916 ; let that be
repeated, and the Western Allies would do the rest. The Allied
plan was a great combined advance as soon as the weather per-
mitted, for an attack in spring would leave the whole summer and
autumn in which to reap the fruits. The enemy must be driven
back on his Siegfried Line during the first months of the year,
and then must come the combined blow on the pivots of his laet
defences. Russia, now well supplied with munitions, would take
the field at the first chance, and Cadorna would press forward
against Trieste. In the Balkans Sarrail would engage the two
Bulgarian armies, and even if he could not break them, he could
pin them down and ease Rumania's case. In the East Yudenitch
would press south from the Caucasus, and the British armies of
Syria and Mesopotamia would press northward, and between them
the Turkish forces would be hemmed in and the campaign in that
area brought to a decision. On paper the scheme seemed perfect ;
as far as human intelligence could judge, it was feasible ; but in
war there may suddenly appear a new and unlooked-for factor
which shatters the best-laid plan.

That new factor was the Russian Revolution. In April 1917,
when the offensive was due to start, it was still a doubtful quantity,
but some consequences were at once apparent. The disorganization
of the Russian armies prevented Yudenitch's movement from the
Caucasus. It enabled limited German reinforcements to be sent
westward against France and Britain. It gave much-tried Austria

548 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

a breathing-space, and allowed her to strengthen her Isonzo and
Carso fronts. Above all, it introduced uncertainty, which to a
strategic plan is as grit in the bearings of a machine. A new
vague element had appeared, which, like the addition of some
ingredient to a chemical combination, altered subtly and radically
all the original components. The great spring offensive miscarried,
though many local victories were won. The pivots of the Siegfried
Line were not broken. The contemplated " drive " of the Turkish
armies in the East did not succeed. Partly this was due to ele-
ments of weakness in the Allied armies, to the comparative failure
of Nivelle on the Aisne, and to the confused methods of Sarrail
at Salonika. Partly it was due to weather, which is beyond the
authority of any General Staff. But the main cause was the
increased strength of the enemy caused by the defection of Russia
from the battle-line.

At the close of June 1917 the position of the Allies had many
elements of strength. During the preceding year France and
Britain had captured from the German armies 165,000 rank and
file, 3,500 officers, nearly a thousand guns, and some 3,000 lesser
pieces. They had won almost all the chief observation posts of the
enemy in the West — the Bapaume ridge, the Chemin des Dames,
the Moronvillers hills, Vimy and Messines. Since the blow on the
Siegfried pivots had failed, Sir Douglas Haig was making ready
another plan, and by his victory at Messines on 7th June, presently
to be related, had cleared his flanks for the new movement. Italy
had won substantial victories on the Isonzo heights and on the
Carso. Though the Balkan attack had miscarried, Venizelos was
now in power in Greece, and the danger to the lear of the Salonika
army had gone. Sir Archibald Murray had been checked at Gaza,
but Sir Stanley Maude had taken Bagdad, and had pushed his
front well to the north and east of that city. America had entered
the war, and was preparing with all her might to play an adequate
part. Finally, there were rumours that Russia was about to take
the offensive ; and those who did not realize the complete chaos
of that country talked wisely of what might be accomplished by a
revolutionary army, where each soldier fought under the inspiration
of the new wine of liberty.

The situation had, therefore, hopeful aspects, but to the careful
observer it seemed that that hope did not rest on reasoned calcula-
tions. The harsh fact was that the great plan of 1917, of which
the Somme and indeed all the Allied fighting and preparation
since 1915 had been the logical preliminaries, had proved impossible.

1917] TACTICAL DEVELOPMENTS. 549

New plans could be made, but they would not be the same. For
the elements were no longer calculable. By the failure of one great
partner the old military cohesion of the Alliance had gone. Some-
thing might still be hoped for from Russia, but nothing could be
taken for granted. The beleaguering forces which had sat for
three years round the German citadel were wavering and straggling
on the East. The war on two fronts, which had been Germany's
great handicap, looked as if it might change presently to a war
on a single front. Whatever victories might be won during the
remainder of 1917, it was now clear that the decisive blow could
not be delivered. The Teutonic Alliance, just when it was begin-
ning to crumble, had been given a new tenure of life.

The year had been fruitful in tactical developments. The
Somme saw the principle of limited objectives first put methodic-
ally into practice — a principle which led to brilliant success at the
winter battles of Verdun, at Arras, and most notably at Messines,
and in regard to which Nivelle's attack at the Aisne was the excep-
tion that proved the rule. It saw, too, a valuable advance in
artillery tactics in the shape of the Allied device of the " creeping
barrage." On the enemy side the chief novelty was the use of
" shock troops " for the counter-attack. In the main battle area
he had been continuously on the defensive, and his method had
been to hold his front line lightly, and rely on a massed counter-
attack before the offensive had secured its ground. This was for
the normal sector, but in the Siegfried Line he trusted to the
immense strength of his positions and his endless well-placed
machine guns to prevent any loss of ground. Neither mode of
defence wholly succeeded. By the end of June he had already
lost seven miles of the Siegfried Line ; and on the rest of the battle-
field he had, with the solitary exception of Fresnoy, failed to win
back any ground by his counter-attacks. But this failure did not
invalidate his tactical scheme. He was playing for time, hus-
banding his man-power, and dragging out the contest till his
submarine campaign should bring Britain to her knees. He was
successful in so far that he was able to stave off a decisive blow,
and he was busy perfecting other devices which were to give his
opponents serious food for thought later in the year. Notably he
was elaborating his method of defence in depth, and feeling his way
towards the use of " shock-troops," not for the counter-stroke only,
but for a surprise offensive on the largest scale. The defensive of
the German High Command was no supine or unintelligent thing.

550 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

On one side the enemy showed remarkable energy. Before
the close of the Somme he had realized his weakness in the air,
and had appointed General von Hoppner, the Chief of Staff of
Otto von Below's VI. Army, to control all his flying service.
The result was a striking advance in effectiveness. Before Arras,
indeed, he was beaten from the field, but only at the cost of a heavy
Allied sacrifice. Hoppner perfected new types of battle planes,
notably the two Albatrosses ; he was the chief promoter of the
Gotha bomb-carrier, which was soon to become a familiar name in
England ; he improved the personnel of the service ; he concen-
trated on the production of high-powered engines ; and he greatly
increased the output of the standardized factories. The command
of the air, as has already been noted, could never be an absolute
thing. On the whole, the Allies had the superiority ; but there were
long spells when the battle was drawn, and at moments the honours
seemed to be with the other side. It was a ceaseless struggle
both for the airmen at the front and for the factories at home,
and a single error in foresight or a single strike of workmen might
incline the wavering balance against the side responsible for it.

But developments in tactics and materiel were as yet of secondary
importance compared with the great question of man-power. We
have seen the difficulties of the Central Powers up to the spring
of 1917, when the Russian Revolution gave them a new lease
of life. All the combatants were suffering from the depletion of
their ranks. France had reached her maximum at an earlier stage,
and was naturally anxious to conserve her remaining resources.
She was holding roughly two-thirds of the Western front ; but as
the main operations were in the British section, the enemy's strength
per mile against the latter was more than double his strength per
mile against the French. It was clear that a further increase
could only come from Britain, whose exhaustion was conspicuously
less than that of her neighbour. But for Britain the problem of
reserves was far from easy, for she could not give undivided atten-
tion to the question of men for the front, since she was the chief
munitioner of all the Allies. She had some two and a quarter
million men engaged in shipbuilding, munitions, and kindred work ;
she had well over five millions under arms, of whom nearly three
and a quarter millions were in expeditionary forces, and of these
nearly two and a quarter millions in France and Flanders. Her
losses had not been on the French scale, but her non-combatant
commitments were far greater. Hence for her the balance must
be most delicately hung. More men must be got to face the German

igiy] AMERICA'S MOBILIZATION. 551

divisions released from the East, for each month of the war had
made it clearer that no decision could be won without a crushing
numerical superiority. Moreover, these men must be ready in
time, so that they could be fully trained before entering the line ;
for every dispatch of Sir Douglas Haig insisted upon the folly of
flinging raw troops into a modern battle. But the reinforcements
came slowly. In the spring of 1917 Sir William Robertson, in a
public speech, asked for half a million new levies by July. He did
not get them, for the conflicting claims could not be balanced. The
country passed through acute phases of opinion, in which the build-
ing of new tonnage, the production of food supplies at home, the
construction of a vast airplane programme, seemed successively
the major needs. But vital as these were, the great permanent
demand was numbers for the fighting line. It was idle to put a
limit to the number of men required for the army. Everybody
was needed who could conceivably be spared from vital industries.
For without a great preponderance of numbers on the front the
most ample munitionment carried by the most impregnable mer-
cantile navy could not give victory.

It was to this problem especially that America's entry into the
war seemed to provide an answer. Her measures were instant
and comprehensive, and from the day of the declaration of war
she flung herself whole-heartedly into the work of preparation.
Her resources were enormous, for within a few years it was calcu-
lated that she could put fifteen millions of men into the line and
provide some hundreds of thousand millions sterling of money.
But she had to go through the preliminaries which her allies had
faced two years earlier, and at this stage of the contest, if her
assistance was to be effective, it must be furiously speeded up.
America's effort must be made against time. Her first step was
to introduce compulsory service under a system of selective con-
scription. The measure was passed by Congress on 28th April,
and in five months a million and a half soldiers were in training.
The regular army was brought up to its full strength of 400,000
by voluntary enlistment ; the National Guard was brought up
to half a million ; the ballot for conscripts gave some 700,000.
Vast camps sprang up throughout the country like mushrooms in
a night. The mobilization of America for war was hurried on in all
other branches of national effort. More than 20,000 million dollars
was voted, of which 7,000 millions were loans to America's allies.
The immense sum of £128,000,000 was set aside for airplane con-
tracts. A huge programme of merchant shipbuilding was entered

552 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

upon by means of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which was
soon to complete an ocean-going merchantman in seventy days.
The President was given power to assist the Allied blockade by
putting an embargo on certain exports to neutral countries, and he
did not let the weapon rust. Controllers of food and the other
chief commodities were appointed, as in Britain. Treason and
espionage were put down with that high hand which can only be
used by a democracy sure of itself.

Monday, 25th June, was an eventful day, for it saw the landing
of the first units of American troops in France. They were only
forerunners, to prepare the way for those who should follow ;
for there were few troops as yet available for the field, and the small
regular army had to be distributed as stiffening among the new
divisions. The American Commander-in-Chief was Major-General
Pershing, who had been a conspicuous figure in the Spanish war
and on the Mexican frontier — a man still in early middle life, with
many years of practical campaigning behind him. The old American
army had been small, but its officers had followed the life for the
love of it, and were to a high degree professional experts. For
its size, the staff was probably equal to any in the world. Those
who watched the first American soldiers on the continent of Europe —
grave young men, with lean, shaven faces, a quick, springy walk,
and a superb bodily fitness — found their memories returning to
Gettysburg and the Wilderness, where the same stock had shown an
endurance and heroism not surpassed in the history of mankind.
And they were disposed to agree with the observer who remarked
that it had taken a long time to get America into the war, but
that it would take much longer to get her out.

The year in naval warfare had been inconspicuous so far as
above-water actions were concerned. The essay of Jutland was
not repeated. British battleships and the battle cruisers lay idle in
harbour, or patrolled seas where there was no sign of the enemy.
There was, indeed, much sporadic raiding. During the first months
of 1917 the Seeadler repeated in the South Atlantic the exploits
of the Moewe the previous year ; the German flotillas from Zee-
brugge and Ostend were busy about the British shores. On 22nd
January Commander Tyrwhitt's forces met an enemy destroyer
division off the Dutch coast, and sank one vessel and scattered the
rest. Then followed a series of German raids on the Kent and
Suffolk coasts, and the bombardment of the much-tried little seaport
towns. In April the British counter-attacked with some success,

1917] THE YEAR AT SEA. 553

and in a brilliant action off Dover, on the night of 20th April, the
Broke, commanded by Commander Evans, the Antarctic explorer,
and the Swift, Commander Peck, engaged five or six vessels, and
sank at least two of them. On 5th June the Dover patrol bom-
barded Ostend so effectually as to destroy most of the work-
shops and for a time make the harbour untenable ; while Tyr-
whitt's Harwich flotilla engaged six destroyers, and sank one and
severely damaged another. It was very clear that these Belgian
bases were a perpetual menace to our shores and to the safety of the
Allied trade. Not only did they serve as the home of the aircraft
which were beginning to make bold assaults upon England, but
they were the source of the raiding flotillas and the harbour of all
the smaller submarines. The mind of the High Command in the
field was more and more turning towards the smoking out of this
nest of mischief by a land attack, as at once the best offensive and
defensive possible.

But if the year was barren of fleet actions, it was none the less
destined to form an epoch in naval history, for the early weeks of
1917 saw the submarine become the most potent single weapon of
war. We have seen in earlier chapters how, during the summer
and autumn of 1916, the range of Germany's under-water craft
had been extended and their numbers largely increased. So far
she had been restrained, not by considerations of decency or of
international law, but solely by the fear of bringing America into
the contest. Now, largely as the result of the Somme, she had
made up her mind that at all costs she must deal a final blow to
her main enemy if she were to avoid a general defeat. She believed
that the economic condition of Britain was very grave, and that
by a mighty effort she might force starvation upon that people,
cripple their military effort, and bring them to their senses. She
had reasoned out the matter carefully, and was confident of her
conclusions. She ran a desperate risk, but the stakes were worth
it. America might declare war ; but that price would not be too
high to pay for the destruction of Britain as a fighting force, and
perhaps as a coherent state. When the German Government
yielded to the policy of the General Staff, it was because they
believed that they were gambling on a certainty.

On 31st January Germany announced the danger zone to the
world. All the waters in a wide radius round Britain, France, and
Italy, as well as in the Eastern Mediterranean, were declared to
be blockaded areas. A narrow lane was left at first for shipping
to Greece. The ensuing campaign was waged in deadly earnest.

554 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

The weekly tables which the British Admiralty issued as from 25th
February showed a heavy and growing destruction of British and
Allied tonnage. During the month of April we lost some 550,000
tons gross of shipping,* and there were those who, looking at the
brilliant Arras offensive, declared that the problem for Germany was
to defeat Britain at sea before the British army could win on land.
On 21st February Admiral von Capelle told the Reichstag that the
expectations attached to the U-boat campaign by the German people
had been fully justified by results. The end of April was popularly
fixed as the limit of British endurance under this new attack ;
then it was postponed to August ; but May passed and August came,
and there was no sign of yielding. To that extent Germany's
gamble failed. It brought in America against her, but it was very
far from forcing Britain to sue for peace. The military stores car-
ried overseas to the fighting fronts were in September 1917 more
than twice what they had been in January.

Nevertheless, the situation was sufficiently grave. From the
beginning of the war till February 1, 1917, we had lost some four
and a half million tons to the enemy ; we lost approximately that
amount in the first seven months of the new submarine warfare.
At this rate the Allied tonnage would presently be reduced to a
point which would forbid not only the decent provisioning of the
civilian peoples at home, but the maintenance of the armies at
the fighting fronts. To meet the menace, five lines of policy must
be pursued concurrently. All unnecessary imports from overseas
must be firmly checked. Home production, both of food and of raw
materials such as ores and timber, must be immensely increased.
New tonnage must be built, or borrowed where it could be had.
Existing merchant shipping must be protected as far as possible
by escorts and by the organization of convoys. Finally, a truceless
war must be waged against the U-boats, in the hope that the point
would be reached when we could sink them faster than Germany
could build them.

British statesmen made earnest appeals to their countrymen,
and met with a willing response. By the early summer of 1917
Great Britain had grown into one vast market garden, and every

* In one fortnight 122 ocean-going vessels were lost — a rate of 25 per cent, in
this class. If neutral shipping was included the April losses were nearly 900,000 tons.
The statistics will be fuund in J. A. Salter's Allied Shipping Control, 1921. Cf. Admiral
Sims: "Could Germany have had 50 submarines constantly at work on the great
shipping routes in the winter and spring of 1917 — before we had learned how to
handle the situation — nothing could have prevented her from winning the war." —
The Victory at Sea, p. 21.

1917] THE SUBMARINE CAMPAIGN. 555

type of citizen had become an amateur food-producer. There
were periodic shortages of certain articles of diet, and the supply
of certain imported materials, such as pulp for paper-making,
steadily declined. But on the whole the British people showed an
adaptability in the crisis with which their best friends had scarcely
credited them. The shipbuilding programmes were enlarged and
speeded up. During peace time Britain had produced some two
millions of new tonnage a year. In 1915 this figure fell to 688,000 ;
in 1916 to 538,000. During the first six months of 1917 the tonnage
built was 484,000, and in his speech of 16th August the Prime
Minister told the House of Commons that the total new tonnage
built at home and acquired from abroad during the year would
be 1,900,000, When we consider that this was almost the amount
of peace construction, and reflect on the depletion and diversion
of British man-power, the achievement must seem highly creditable.
The convoy system, opposed at the start by the whole merchant
service, was successful, and in the Atlantic presently gave good
results.* As for our offensive against the submarine, it proceeded
slowly but surely, by a multitude of devices the tale of which cannot
be told in this place. Our system of naval intelligence was per-
fected, and our aircraft became deadly weapons both for the
detection and destruction of the German craft. The enemy losses
increased slightly during the first quarter of the year ; during the
second quarter they rose more sharply ; and after June the curve
mounted steeply. It must be realized that our problem both of
defence and offence was far more difficult than when submarine
attacks were confined to the Narrow Seas. It was possible to defend
our channels and estuaries by a dozen methods which could not be
used against craft operating in the wide ocean.

The main problem for the Allies during the first year of war
was men for the field ; it was munitions during the second, and
tonnage in the third. The deadly enemy offensive was now on
the sea. This problem affected all the Allies ; but it bore most
heavily on Britain, partly because of her large necessary import
trade, partly because of her position as universal provider. It
was beyond her power to solve it by the immediate creation of new
tonnage to replace losses, since, in building up her armies and
munition factories, she had drawn too largely on her strength for
any large effort in a new direction. The solution lay with America,
and in a special degree it was America's contribution to the conduct

* The first convoy of slow ships from Gibraltar arrived safely on 20th May.
Next day the system was officially adopted for all merchant shipping.

556 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

of the war. It was Germany's submarine policy which had brought
the United States into the struggle, and the daily record of cold-
blooded barbarities was the most potent appeal to her citizens to
wage war in earnest. Germany conducted her campaign without
pity, and the torpedoing of hospital ships like the Gloucester Castle,
the Dover Castle, the Lanfranc, and the Donegal did more, perhaps,
to rouse American feeling than the not less barbarous treatment of
humble merchantmen. From the beginning America realized her
responsibility in this matter, but she had a long way to travel
before she could carry policy into deeds ; for there was some
fumbling over the question at the start, and needless delay in the
first stages of preparation. If she could produce six million tons of
new shipping a year the problem was solved, even if there was no
decline in the scale of German successes. The task was well within
her power, for it required only a tenth of her annual output of steel
and a mere fraction of her great labour reserves. It was in a peculiar
sense her own problem, for unless she provided the ships her armies
could never make war in Europe. Without the new tonnage her
admirable military activity was merely beating the air.

Meantime the Navy was the first part of America's fighting
force to take the field beside her Allies. On 4th May a squadron of
American destroyers arrived at Queenstown, and a second followed
a fortnight later. The vessels were admirable in construction, and
their officers and crews were true seamen, who earned at once the
respect of their British colleagues. In June, when Admiral Sir
Lewis Bayly, commanding on the Irish coast, went on leave, Admiral
W. S. Sims took his place, and the Stars and Stripes floated for the
first time in history from a British headquarters. Such was the
start of a very splendid brotherhood in arms. The main weapon
against the submarine was the destroyer, but more than half the
British destroyers were retained with the Grand Fleet, and others
were needed for the Mediterranean. America's first task was,
therefore, to supply the necessary craft for submarine-chasing and
convoy work. The second, which began the following year, was the
construction of a great mine barrage over the 250 miles of sea
between Norway and the north of Scotland.

It was not to be expected that the new and startling develop-
ments of naval war should leave the administration of the British
Admiralty unchanged. We have seen that by the close of 1916
Sir Edward Carson had become First Lord, and Sir John Jellicoe
First Sea Lord. Presently Sir Eric Geddes, the Director-General
of Military Transportation, was brought in as Controller of the

Admiral William Sowden Sims

1917] CABINET CHANGES. 557

Navy — the revival of an historic office which gave him the super-
vision of new construction. In June there was a further readjust-
ment, and in July Sir Edward Carson entered the War Cabinet
as Minister without portfolio, and Sir Eric Geddes succeeded him
as First Lord. The functions of the Board of Admiralty were
divided into " operations " and " maintenance," and the members
were grouped into two committees accordingly. The operations
committee was made up of the First Sea Lord and those officers
responsible for the details of strategy ; the maintenance com-
mittee consisted of the officers responsible for personnel, materiel,
supplies, construction, and finance. The effect of the change was
threefold. It brought into Admiralty administration men from
the fleets who had recent fighting experience and were still young.
It separated the two functions of command and supply, which
required different talents and training. Above all, it made possible
a real Naval Staff, a thinking department which had laid upon it
the duty of deducing the logical lessons from the new facts of sea
warfare, and working out future plans on a basis of accurate know-
ledge. Much naval theory had gone into the melting-pot, and the
creeds of 1914 had to be drastically revised. It stood to reason
that the younger men, who had themselves been forced to grapple
in bitter earnest with the new imperious needs, should be largely
used to frame the tactics and strategy of reply.

Important as were the naval developments, the most significant
events of the year had been in the sphere of politics. France and
Italy had not changed conspicuously the personnel of their civil
Governments, save that in March M. Ribot had succeeded M.
Briand in France as Prime Minister. In Germany, in June 1917
Bethmann-Hollweg still held — though with a weakening hand —
the reins of power. But in Britain a radically new Government had
appeared, and in Russia a new world. Everywhere the atmosphere
had become different. The half-forgotten general purposes and
the immediate strategical aims, which had filled men's minds in
the early years of war, were giving place to a craving for first
principles, and, on Germany's part, to a feverish diplomacy based
on this new instinct. The movement had begun with the Emperor's
offer of peace terms in December 1916 ; for, though the offer had
been summarily rejected by the Allies, it had set a ferment working
in the mind of all the world. The tremendous events of the spring
in Petrograd and the entry of America into the struggle changed
the outlook of every belligerent people. Henceforth not the

558 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

methods but the aims of the war became the common subject of
speculation and controversy. Offensives ceased to be military
only, and became political, and the idealist and the idealogue
emerged from their closets.

The development was a salutary one, and, as we shall see, it
had an immense and immediate effect upon every phase of the
campaign. It both cleared and narrowed the issues between the
combatants. The Allies had entered on the contest with a very
simple and honourable conception of the goal they strove for, but
by the spring of 1917 all had grown a little hazy as to their precise
objective. Each of them had one primary aim — to crush finally,
not the German people or the German state, but that evil thing
which had become dominant there, and which made the world unsafe
for peace or liberty. Once that thing were crushed, there was little
need for talk about guarantees, for the main peril would have gone.
Until it was crushed, no guarantee which the wit of man could devise
would safeguard civilization. But there were a number of secondary
purposes which each of the Allies held, and which they were apt
to talk of as conditions of peace. In these purposes were not in-
cluded the relinquishment by Germany of the territories occupied,
and the restitution of Belgium and Serbia ; such were not terms
of peace, but the necessary pre-conditions without which no dis-
cussion of peace was possible. By secondary purposes were meant
the various territorial adjustments spoken of in connection with
France and Italy, and such matters as the much-canvassed eco-
nomic restrictions on the Central Powers. These were not primary
aims : they were matters of machinery which were of value only
in so far as they gave effect to the primary aim. It was possible
to be convinced on the main issue, and yet to be doubtful about
the merit of more than one of the secondary aims. The latter
were for the most part safeguards and guarantees, and if the
primary aim were forgotten and negotiations were attempted on
their basis, then the most rigid and excessive guarantees must be
sought to give security. But if the primary aim was accomplished,
all the secondary aims took on a new complexion.

There was some perception of this truth in two phrases which
were variously interpreted — the demand of the Russian revolu-
tionaries for " no indemnities and no annexations," and President
Wilson's famous phrase, " Peace without victory." The Allies'
object in the war was to make a world where law, not force, should
rule, and where the smallest people should be secure in peace and
freedom. It was not to redistribute territory, except in so far as

1917] AMERICA AND WAR AIMS. 559

that was necessary to the main end. Every secondary aim must
therefore be tested by the main purpose. " Peace without victory "
was a true formula, if by it was meant that the Allies did not want
a victory which would leave a lasting sense of bitterness and in-
justice, and so defeat their chief aim. " No annexations or in-
demnities " was also a just formula, if annexations were considered
as a spoil of conquest and not as contributing to the main purpose.
But in another sense no peace could come without victory —
final victory over a perverted Prussianism ; and annexations and
indemnities might be essential if they were a logical part of the
general purpose of pacification.

Now, America had entered into the war without any interest
in secondary aims. She knew that the point was not whether this
or that territorial change should be made, but that the mischief
should be rooted out of Germany and the world. To say that France
fought for Alsace-Lorraine and Italy for Trieste and the Trentino,
or Britain for the safety of India, was to adopt a formula too narrow
for the facts. America's appearance compelled all the Allies to
revise their notions and return to the first things. It helped them
to distinguish between method and purpose, between machinery
and design. It was the duty of the whole Alliance to test every-
thing by a single question : Would it help towards that lasting
peace and that cleaner and better world which they fought to
create ?

The appearance of Bolshevism in Russia, which denied all the
axioms of Western liberalism, was the reason of another speculative
confusion that about this period became observable in the minds
of the Allies. Nationalism had been the first Allied oriflamme,
and since the Bolshevists scouted nationalism, the Allies were
inclined to deify it unwisely. The phrase " self-determination " *
became popular in statements of war aims — a fatal phrase, for it
tended to decry the co-ordinating union of peoples and defend a
chaos of feeble statelets, economically weak and politically unstable.
Self-determination implies a self to determine, a certain degree of
self-conscious nationality before independence is desirable. To
allow any racial oddment to start house on its own account
would produce not freedom but anarchy, and undo the long work
of civilization. As against this false particularism, which was to
produce bitter fruits in the Old World, America might be looked

* The phrase is the German Selbstbestimmunqsrecht, first used in the 1848
revolution. Its modern use dates from the Zimmerwald Conference. President
Wilson never committed himself to the particular expression.

560 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

to to champion the true nationalism, for half a century before
she had given her best blood to ensure its triumph.

Moreover, America emphasized and brought into the fore-
ground the greatest of the methods for the realization of the Allied
purpose. There were many at the time who were inclined to
dismiss all questions of a League of Nations and an international
peace-making authority as academic and irrelevant. This was
not the view of President Wilson and the American people, nor
was it the view of the Allied leaders. If there was any horizon
beyond the battle-smoke, the question of international right and
an adequate machinery to enforce it was the most fundamental
which the Allies could consider. It was far more practical than
discussions about where certain new border-lines should run —
questions which at this stage of the war no one had the data to
settle. To belittle the importance of what was coming to be called
" internationalism " was to obscure one of the most vital aspects
of the common purpose. No speech of the year so moved the British
nation as that delivered by General Smuts in May at the dinner
given in his honour by both Houses of Parliament, when he ex-
pounded the doctrine of the British Empire as historically the first
instalment of a greater League — " the only system in history in
which a large number of nations has been living in unity."

But with the true internationalism came the false — the fanatical
creed which would have destroyed all the loyalties and sanctions
of patriotism, and put in their place a materialistic absorption in
class interests. War, which with most men intensifies local affec-
tion and national devotion, has with those of a certain type the
effect of dissipating the homely intimacies of race and country
and substituting for them a creed of class selfishness and dogmatic
abstractions. Such men are the intellectual outlaws of society.
They may be honest, able, and brave, but they are inhuman ;
and though they can destroy they can never build, for enduring
institutions must be founded on human nature. Nevertheless in
the long strain of war there come moments when such dogmas
have a fatal appeal, and in the first half of 19 17 they gained ground
among the deracines of all countries. They spread like wildfire
in Russia, where they found conditions naturally favourable ;
they were preached by the remnants of the old Internationale in
Switzerland, Holland, and Scandinavia ; they were welcomed by
the left wing of French socialism, and by the same group in Italy ;
while in Britain they found adherents in the Independent Labour
Party, as well as among the handful of professional wreckers who

1917] THE TRUE INTERNATIONALISM. 561

are always abroad in any great industrial society. The true inter-
nationalism includes nationalism, and provides a safeguard for
nationalities. These men were the foes of all national units, and
were, consciously or unconsciously, the opponents of the war.
They tended always to become apologists for Germany, and spirit-
ually they had more kinship with the unfeatured universalism of
German autocracy than with the rich and varied liberties of Western
civilization.

It was necessary for all the belligerents to take account of this
new attitude of mind. The Allies were gradually compelled to
emphasize the genuine internationalism of their aims, though their
statesmen were slow in recognizing the necessity. Germany after
her fashion, as we shall see later, turned the movement to her own
purpose. Meantime, in his speech at Glasgow on 29th June, the
British Prime Minister, following President Wilson, put the issue
in a new form. The menace of Prussianism could be got rid of
in two ways — either by a crushing field victory, or by the revolt of
the German people themselves against the false gods which they
had worshipped. In both cases the result would be the same —
the degradation of a heresy in the eyes of those who had pinned
their faith to it. " We shall enter," said Mr. Lloyd George, " into
negotiations with a free Government in Germany with a different
attitude of mind, a different temper, a different spirit, with less
suspicion, with more confidence, than we should with a sort which
we knew to be dominated by the aggressive and arrogant spirit
of Prussian militarism. The Allied Governments would, in my
judgment, be acting wisely if they drew that distinction in their
general attitude towards the discussion of the terms of peace."
Such an appeal was clearly on delicate ground. If unwisely
phrased, it might appear to be an interference with the domestic
concerns of Germany, which would rally her people to a more
vigorous resistance. But beyond doubt, as thus delivered, it met
with a response from certain powerful elements among the Central
Powers ; and, as we shall see in a later chapter, their political
tactics were directed towards a democratization of their govern-
ment which should have the maximum of show and the minimum
of substance, and the preaching of a version of internationalism
which came easy to men who had small regard for any nationalism
but their own.

In June 1917, at the end of the third year of war, the attitude
of the Central Powers — or, more correctly, that of Germany, their
master — towards war aims showed a decline in the unanimity

562 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

which had marked it during the earlier stages of the campaign.
So far Germany had made no explicit public statement of her
demands. In his speech to the Reichstag on 15th May the Imperial
Chancellor recused to disclose his peace terms. In the absence of
official evidence Germany's war aims could only be gathered from
the utterances of her press and public men, and they tended to
wide divergency among themselves. But on one point it may be
said that all were unanimous. Any settlement must recognize
that the Central Powers had not been defeated. There must be
no net loss in territory or revenues as compared with the position
in August 1914. On this matter the issue with the Allies was
abundantly clear.

The great majority of the German people would have put it
otherwise. They claimed that Germany had been victorious,
and that peace must bring to her a net gain. Only the Minority
Socialists and a small section of the Majority were prepared as yet
to accept a peace on the status quo ante basis. There was great
difference of opinion as to what the gains should be, and the dif-
ference was determined by the various views held of Germany's
true interests. We may distinguish five main war aims. In the
first two years of war most Germans had held all the five, but after
Verdun and the Somme had taught moderation the various schools
were inclined to concentrate on one of the batch. The first,
which was the creed of the Tan-Germans and the extreme annexa-
tionists, included the " freedom of the seas " — by which they meant
the increase of German sea-power to a level with Britain's ; the
annexation of the Belgian coast as well as of sundry French Channel
ports ; the annexation of the Briey mining district and frontier
fortresses like Longwy. The second was the Mittel-Europa school
of Naumann, which sought the creation of a Central European
bloc of states, militarily, politically, and economically united.
The third, led chiefly by Paul Rohrbach, had for its prime aim the
control of the Ottoman Empire and the extension of Germany's
sphere of influence to the Persian Gulf. The fourth, inspired by
Delbriick and Solf, preached a German colonial empire, especially
in Africa. The fifth demanded large annexations of Russian soil
in Courland and Lithuania, so that by agricultural settlement
there should be an expansion not only of German power but of
the German people.

Few now held all five aims, though many combined several in
their creeds. The Pan-German was critical of Mittel-Europa, and
men like Delbriick were strongly opposed to annexation in the

1917] THE ECONOMIC POSITION. 563

West. But all, even the most modest, sought some solid gain
on the balance for Germany, and were thus in hopeless conflict
with the views of the Allies. All, too — even the most extravagant
— were encouraged by the German Government with a view to a
margin for future bargaining. Nevertheless there was serious
disquiet even among those who planned out most hopefully the
scheme of Germany's gains. To the General Staff the debacle of
Russia had come as a godsend to help them to resist the deadly
pressure in the West. It enabled them to think once again in
terms of an offensive on land, though they still looked to the sub-
marine campaign to weaken Britain's effort and to strangle Amer-
ica's at birth. But the ferment in the East was not without its
perils. The disease of revolution might spread into their own
decorous sheepfold, and against the wild intangible forces let loose
in Russia no military science could strive. The " shining sword "
could not do battle with phantoms. Hence they were compelled
to admit new factors into their problem, and grapple with data
abhorrent to their orderly minds.

Two main schools of thought remained distinct among the
rulers of Germany. The military chiefs and the fanatics of Pan-
Germanism still believed that a little more endurance, a little more
sacrifice, would bring the Allies to their knees, and enable Germany
to secure gains which would make all her losses worth while, and
ensure her future on the grandiose lines which they had planned.
The other, the politiques, urged that a stalemate had come, and that
the balance should now be struck. For against the German war
map they saw the solid economic advantages which the Allies
possessed, both for the present and for the future. The spectre
of post-bellum conditions haunted their minds. Unless she could
barter her territorial occupations for economic assistance, Germany
might have her hands far over Europe and Asia, and yet be dying
at the heart.

The economic position of all the belligerents had become grave
by the end of the third year of war. By July 1917 Britain had spent
well over 5,000 millions, of which more than one-third was raised
by taxes, and two-thirds by the proceeds of loans. It was a colossal
indebtedness which faced her, and it had been incurred not wholly
on her own account, for over a thousand millions were loans to her
Allies, and about 160 millions loans to her own Dominions. She
carried on her back the financial burden of her European confed-
erates, and with it all her credit seemed unweakened, and the

564 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

elasticity of her revenue-producing power undiminished. New
taxes habitually produced more than their budget estimates, and
alone among the European belligerents she remained on a gold
basis. She was spending now at a rate of close upon seven millions
a day ; but as the figure included her advances to Allies, the daily
cost of the war was rather less than the four and a half millions
spent by Germany. In one respect Britain differed from her col-
leagues and opponents. Germany financed the war almost wholly
by loans ; France, till the end of 1916, had imposed practically
no new taxes ; while Britain had trebled her taxation, so that on
an average every man, woman, and child within her borders con-
tributed three shillings a day towards the cost of the campaigns.
The immediate difficulty of foreign purchases had been solved by
America's appearance as an ally, and it might fairly be claimed
that, for a country approaching the fourth year of a world-wide
war, Britain was in a state of reasonable financial health. France
was in a similar state ; Italy was being " carried " by her neigh-
bours ; and the resources of America were good for another decade.

The Central Powers were in a simpler though far less sound
position. Germany, who " carried " the others, had a huge debt,
already above 6,000 millions, and increasing at the rate of two
thousand millions a year. To pay interest upon it in full would
consume the entire surplus production of her people in peace. At
present she was paying it out of further borrowings. She had
merged the two structures of private and public credit, and peace
without indemnities would lead inevitably to the downfall of
both, and the reduction of her Government bonds to the position
of the paper of a defaulting South American republic. Before the
war her citizens groaned under a budget of 160 millions ; peace
without indemnities would compel them to raise 400 millions for
the payment of interest alone. To find a solution would be a giant's
task, but for the present it did not trouble her. Victory would solve
the problem, and defeat in any case would spell bankruptcy. She
had staked everything on the war, and awaited the issue with a
gambler's fortitude.

For the actual conduct of operations the financial position of a
country, as we have seen, is the less important, provided money,
by one device or another, can be obtained. But the economic
position, which may be influenced, indeed, by unsound finance
in the direction of inflated prices, is a matter of the most urgent
gravity. The submarine campaign was a serious blow to the
economic strength of all the Allies. It was serious, but not crush-

1917] STRINGENCY IN GERMANY. 565

ing ; it complicated every question of supply, but it did not make
them insoluble. The pressure was most severe on Italy, who was
a heavy importer of grain and coal, and found herself crippled in
her war industries, and faced with an awkward problem for the
coming winter. Among the Central Powers the situation was
worse. Turkey had long been suffering from naked famine.
Bulgaria was on very short commons. In Austria there was
starvation in Istria, Bosnia, and German Bohemia, and all-night
queues in the cities for the bare necessaries of life. The milk supply
of Vienna had dropped to a sixth, and the output of beer to one-
sixteenth. In Germany the food supply was better than it had
been the year before, for the stocks were more carefully admin-
istered ; but its quality was poor, and there was gastric disease
everywhere throughout the country. The clothing of the people
had gone to pieces, and the footgear had become anything from
sabots to dancing-pumps. But the most serious fact was the lack
of machinery. Every scrap available was used for war purposes,
and the little left in private hands could not be renewed, or even
kept in order, because of the lack of lubricants. For the same
reason transportation was in an evil case. The rolling stock was
falling into disrepair, and the permanent ways could not be properly
cared for owing to the scarcity of labour and material. The result
was that even military traffic suffered. At one time it had taken
six days to move a division from East to West ; it now took nearer
a fortnight.

All this made for intense discomfort, and a consequent lowering
of spirits. But the main inducement to depression was the doubt
as to what would be Germany's fate after the war, whatever the
issue. Nothing short of an overwhelming victory would give
salvation ; and this was clearly impossible, except in the minds
of a few dreamers. She had a vast paper issue ; but she could
do nothing with it, for it was not accepted beyond her borders.
She was very much in the position of the ancient Greek city state,
which could play any pranks it liked with its currency at home
but had nothing valid for foreign exchange. But she had con-
siderable stocks of manufactured goods, and she had a fair gold
reserve ; and with these she hoped to pay for the imports necessary
to restart her industrial life. They might suffice, or they might
not, for her requirements in the way of imports would be stupen-
dous. Moreover, the Allies controlled all the world's producing
grounds of raw material, without which she must be speedily bank-
rupt. She could not force them to share ; and they might well

566 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

refuse to share, for they had their own stocks to build up. Eco-
nomically she was at their mercy ; and to those in Germany who
faced this fact squarely, all talk of the " war map " and shining
swords must have seemed foolish bluster. Her deeds had made
her a blackleg in the trade union of nations, since she had defied
the law of the common interest. She had arrayed against her a
world which could in the long run starve her to death.

To those of Germany's citizens who were preoccupied with
such perplexed forecasts the results of her unrestricted submarine
campaign must have foreboded ill. For more than one neutral
followed the example of the United States, and declared war or
broke off relations. Every month brought news of some new
recruit to the ranks of her enemies. In March it was China ; in
April it was Cuba and Panama ; and by the autumn of 1917, of
the South American states only the Argentine and Chile had not
declared against her. Eighteen countries had proclaimed war,
and nine more had severed diplomatic connections. It was the
verdict of the civilized world on the wrongdoer, and — more impor-
tant for Germany — it was the verdict of those countries which
between them possessed the monopoly of the raw materials with-
out which she could not live.

The European neutrals were in a position of growing embarrass-
ment and discomfort. Scandinavia lost heavily in ships from the
German submarines, and its trade was grievously crippled. Food
conditions were worse, perhaps, in Sweden, Holland, and Switzer-
land, than among most of the belligerent Allies. Spain for a moment
seemed about to break with the Central Powers ; but the strong
Germanophil elements among her people compelled her Govern-
ment to pocket its pride. The Allied blockade, owing to America's
action, was enormously tightened, for President Wilson's decree
of 9th June prohibited the export without special Government
licence of any article or commodity which could conceivably be
of use to the enemy. The main difficulty which had always con-
fronted the British blockade policy was the necessity of consider-
ing American interests, and that handicap was now removed.
The chancelleries of Europe, during the summer of 19 17, were
filled with the complaints of helpless neutrals ; and history may
well pity the fate of those small nations thus ground between the
upper and the nether millstones.

About this time an argument which made for optimism began
to be heard in Britain. The business of the Allies was to destroy
Germany's power for evil, by defeating and discrediting those

1-917] THE ALLIES' ADVANTAGES. 567

elements in her Government which had been responsible for her
outrage on civilization. The break-up of Germany's military
machine in the field would have achieved this end ; but the same
purpose might be gained if her existing regime were so discredited
by failure that the break-up came from within her own borders.
That would follow if the Allies succeeded in wrecking Germany's
hope for the future. It was too often forgotten what was the
decisive weapon in war. Now, as ever, it was economic pressure.
When countries were small and self-supporting, this was exercised
by the defeat of their armies and the invasion and occupation of
their territories, so that their life was paralyzed. But in modern
war, when the defensive had become all-powerful, another method
must be found. Had the Allies been able to break through Ger-
many's trench system and drive her to the Rhine and beyond,
that success would have been only a preliminary to the determining
and final pressure caused by the dislocation of her whole economic
life. But while Haig and Petain were battering on the Western
gate, that final pressure was already being exercised. The Allies
controlled all the oversea trade routes and all the world's chief
supply grounds of raw material. Compared with such assets and
gains the war map of Bethmann-Hollweg was a child's toy. With-
out any final field victory the Allies already had secured the results
of the greatest field victory : they were choking Germany, and
ruining her future as much as if they had forced Hindenburg back
to the Elbe.

Such an answer to pessimism was in its essence sound, but it
needed qualification. To rid the world of Prussianism something
more was wanted. The thing must be made a sport and contempt
to Germany herself, and while an overwhelming military debacle
would have ensured this, the slow and indirect forces of economic
pressure could not produce the same moral effect on the German
temperament. Before victory was won there must be a recogni-
tion of failure in every German mind, and that was still postponed.
Prussianism still sat enthroned, for it had persuaded its votaries
that this was a defensive struggle, and that it alone stood between
the people and the malice of their enemies. Not till it was revealed
to the humblest eye as the sole begetter of the war, the parent of
all the ills which had descended upon the nation, the wanton
devilry which had shattered the edifice their fathers had builded,
would civilization have won the victory it needed. Again, the
Allied siege, stringent as it was, had its weak points. The sub-
marine counter-attack was not yet under control, and the condi-

568 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

tion of Russia might still permit the enemy so to add to his material
resources as to obtain a new lease of endurance long enough to
defeat the Allied strategy. These crucial matters in the midsummer
of 1917 were still in the balance. On the knees of the gods yet
lay the major issues of the campaign.

It was still a war of the rank and file. Neither in civilian
statesmanship nor in the high military commands had any leader
appeared who greatly exceeded the common stature of mankind.
There were many able men in every country, but the ship seemed
too vast and the currents too infinite for any single hand to control
the helm. A hundred clung to it ; but often it mastered them,
and the vessel swung rudderless to wind and tide. A new star
had blazed up in the East in Kerenski, but already it seemed that
his fires were paling. The two most conspicuous statesmen at the
close of the year were beyond doubt the British Prime Minister
and the American President. They had scarcely one quality in
common. The one was imaginative, reckless, homely, volcanic,
essentially human ; the other measured, discreet, impersonal,
oracular, and aloof. The monarchy produced the democrat ; the
republic the autocrat. But both had courage and resolution to
inspire their people ; both spoke urbi et orbi ; both stood out as
clear-cut and dominant personalities from among many fleeting
shadows.

Among the soldiers of the Central Powers the reputation of
Ludendorff had so grown that it was in danger of eclipsing the
legendary fame of Hindenburg himself. Here was a man of first-
rate executive power, who knew with complete certainty what he
sought. Mackensen still stood highest among the German generals
in the field. Among the Allies, Petain and Capello had increased
their reputations ; and two British commanders, Sir Herbert
Plumer and Sir Stanley Maude, had revealed the traditional British
merits of stamina, forethought, and common sense. It was no
insular prejudice, too, which saw in the British Commander-in-
Chief one who had a claim to rank among the most indispensable
soldiers of the campaign. The delicate duty of working in harmony
with France was performed with infinite tact and good-will. Fortune
favoured him as little as she had favoured Sir John Moore ; but he
met her buffets with an inflexible patience and an unfailing courage,
and on the Somme, at Arras, and at Messines he showed himself
a most competent exponent of the new methods of war.

To sum up : the outlook for the Allies at the close of June

1917] THE NEW EUROPE. 569

1917 had not the hope of the previous midsummer, or the apparent
assurance of the beginning of the year. The sky had suddenly
become mysteriously clouded. Wherever in the West they had
attacked the enemy they had beaten him ; but the final victory
in the field, which was theirs by right, seemed to be slipping
from their grasp owing to the defection of Russia. Britain's mas-
tery of the sea, too, seemed in danger of failing her at the most
vital moment owing to the new campaign under water — a cam-
paign with which by June she had got on terms, but which she
had not succeeded in checking. In that obviously lay the imme-
diate crisis Unless it could be reduced within limits, everything
— the military efficiency of the Allied armies, the potentialities of
America, the industrial pre-eminence of Britain, even the life and
security of the British people — was in dire jeopardy. By June
the solution had not been found, and the future was still misty.
Moreover, the essential problems of the war were becoming blurred.
Up till then the campaign had been fought on data which were
familiar and calculable. The material and human strength of
each belligerent was known, and the moral of each was confidently
assessed. But suddenly new factors had appeared out of the void,
and what had seemed solid ground became sand and quagmire.
It was the old Europe which waged war up till the first months
of 1917, but a new Europe had come into being by midsummer,
in which nothing could be taken for granted. Everywhere in the
world there was the sound of things breaking.

CHAPTER LXXXII.

THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES.

June i-November 10, 1917.

Haig's Flanders Policy — Sir Herbert Plumer — Battle of Messines — The Preliminaries
of Third Ypres — The " Pill-boxes " — The Attack of 31st July — The Weather
— The Attack of 16th August — The September and October Actions — Capture
of Passchendaele — Summary of Battle.

I.

The Battle of Arras had died down before the end of May, and
Sir Douglas Haig, having protracted the fighting in that area so
long as the French on the Aisne required his aid, was now free to
turn his attention to the plan which he had elaborated seven months
before. This was an offensive against the enemy forces in Flanders,
with the aim of clearing the Belgian coast and turning the northern
flank of the whole German defence system in the West. It was a
scheme which, if successful, promised the most profound and far-
reaching results. It would destroy the worst of the submarine
bases ; it would restore to Belgium her lost territory, and thereby
deprive the enemy of one of his cherished bargaining assets ; it
would cripple his main communications with the depots of the
lower Rhineland. It offered the chance of a blow at a vital spot
within a reasonable time. It was true that conditions had changed
since the plan was first matured. The two months' conflict at
Arras had used up a certain part of the British reserves. More
important, the disastrous turn of the Russian situation would
enable the Germans to add greatly to their strength both in muni-
tions and in men. Time, therefore, was the essence of the business.
The blow must be struck at the earliest possible hour, for delay
meant aggrandizement for the enemy.

But if the prize for success was high, the difficulties of the

670

1917] THE YPRES AREA. 571

enterprise were great. For twelve months the front between the
sea and the Lys had been all but stagnant. It had been for the
first two years the chief cockpit of British arms, and the enemy
had spent infinite ingenuity and labour on perfecting his defences.
In the half-moon of hills * round Ypres and the ridge of Wytschaete
and Messines he had view-points which commanded the whole
countryside, and especially the British line within the Salient.
Any preparations for attack would be conducted under his watchful
eye. Moreover, the heavy, waterlogged clay of the flats where
our front lay was terribly at the mercy of weather, and in rain
became a bottomless swamp, so that any attack must be in the
position of a horseman taking a stiff fence from a bad jumping-off
ground. Lastly, the Germans were acutely conscious of the im-
portance of the terrain, and there was little chance of taking them
by surprise.

In the beginning of June the enemy in the Ypres area lay as
follows. North of Ypres he was west of the canal between Steen-
Straate and Boesinghe. East of Ypres his front curved in a shallow
arc, following the high ground called the Pilkem ridge, by Wieltje
and Hooge, which was the westernmost of the low tiers of hill
which enclosed the Salient. From Observatory Ridge south of
Hooge his line turned south-westward by Mount Sorrel and Hill 60
across the Ypres-Comines Canal to a point just south of the hamlet
of St. Eloi. It then became a rounded salient, following the western
skirts of the promontory formed by the Wytschaete-Messines
ridge. At the south end of this ridge it turned eastward down
the valley of the Steenebeek, crossed the Douve, and passed east
of St. Yves to the banks of the Lys. The apex of the Ypres Salient
had been Becelaere in October 1914 ; in April 1915 it had been
Broodseinde ; and by the end of the Second Battle of Ypres it
had contracted to Verlorenhoek and Hooge. During subsequent
fighting it had shrunk still further, so that now the enemy front
was only some two miles from the town. Not only was the eastern
high ground wholly in the enemy's hands, but at the southern re-
entrant Hill 60 gave him direct observation over the Salient, and
the Wytschaete-Messines ridge commanded Ypres itself, and every
yard of the British positions. The village of Wytschaete stood 260
feet high on the loftiest point, and Messines, at the south end of
the ridge, gave a prospect over the Lys valley and enfiladed the

• The extreme insignificance of these hills should be remembered. Ypres itself
is 82 feet above the sea, so Wytschaete's 260 feet of height does not represent much
compared to the general level of the country.

572 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

British lines on the Douve. If Haig intended to break out from
the Salient, he must first clear the Germans off the southern ridges.
Till that was achieved the British would be fighting blindly against
an enemy with a hundred eyes.

In June the German front from the sea to the Oise was held
by the Army Group of the Bavarian Crown Prince. The IV. Army,
from the coast to the Douve, was under General Sixt von Armin,
who had commanded the 4th Corps at the Somme, and had shown
himself one of the most original and fruitful tacticians on the
German side. South of him lay the VI. Army, where Otto von Below
had replaced Falkenhausen,* the right wing of which extended for
a little way north of the Lys. Armin expected an assault even
before our bombardment began, and he rightly diagnosed that its
terrain would be the Messines ridge. There lay the 4th Corps,
and on 1st June its commander, General von Laffert, issued an
order to his troops which accurately defined the limits of the British
attack. He ordered that all measures designed for defence and
counter-attack should be carefully tested ; the absolute retention of
the natural strong points of Wytschaete and Messines had become
of the utmost importance for the domination of the whole Wyt-
schaete salient ; these strong points, therefore, must not fall, even
temporarily, into the enemy's hands. Armin was anxious but
confident. He had a position strong by nature, and enormously
fortified by art. He had ample reserves of men, and he had brought
up many new batteries, which were disposed mainly north and
south of the Wytschaete salient, so as to enfilade any British
advance and be themselves safe from capture. He had a number
of new anti-tank guns, and in the flatfish ground at each end of
the ridge he experimented in the construction of those concrete
" pill-boxes " which were later to prove so serious an obstacle to
the British advance from Ypres. His plan was to hold his front
line lightly, but to have strong reserves in rear to defend any posi-
tion of importance. Behind these were his battle reserves, to be
used for counter-attacks ; for his tactical policy was to trust to
counter-attack before the enemy had secured his ground, rather
than to fight desperately for every yard. For such tactics it was
essential that the moment of the real offensive should be instantly
grasped, and if possible foreseen. The reserves must be moved at
once ; but it would be fatal if they were moved because of a feint,
for in that case they would fall under our barrage and be depleted

* Falkenhausen succeeded Bissing as Governor-General of Belgium. Otto von
Below handed over his command in Macedonia to von Scholtz.

19*7] SIR HERBERT PLUMER. 573

before the time had come for their use. Armin had judged rightly
about the terrain ; but, as it happened, he could not define the hour.
In no British attack had Haig succeeded in concealing the locale,
but in all he had perplexed the enemy as to the exact time of assault.
The British front was held by the Second Army, which had not
altered its position since the spring of 1915. The First Army had
fought at Festubert, and had borne the brunt of Loos. The Fourth
and Fifth Armies had conducted the Battle of the Somme. The
First, Third, and Fifth Armies had been engaged at Arras. But
the last great action of the Second Army had been Second Ypres.
It had seen much bitter fighting in 1916 round Hooge and The
Bluff ; but it had taken no part as an army in any major battle,
though its divisions had been drawn upon for the Somme and
Arras. To hold a long front not actively engaged, and to provide
reinforcements for other armies, is one of the most difficult duties
which can fall to the lot of a general. Corporate unity seems to
have gone from his command, and it needs patience and resolution
to keep up that vigilance and esprit de corps which are essential
in war. The Second Army was fortunate in its leader. Sir Her-
bert Plumer, now sixty years of age, had in the highest degree the
traditional virtues of the British soldier, and especially of those
county line regiments which have always been the backbone of
the British army. He had fought with his regiment, the York and
Lancaster, in the Sudan in 1884 ; he had served in the Matabele
rebellion ; in the South African War he had contributed to the
relief of Mafeking, had taken Pietersburg, and had hunted De
Wet in the Cape Colony. At the Second Battle of Ypres he had
shown a rapidity of decision and an imperturbability of temper
which had turned the tide in that grim encounter. But his finest
work had been accomplished during the long months of comparative
inaction which followed. He had been a true warden of the Flan-
ders marches, and had watched over every mile of that front, so
that our energy in defence and in the minor offensives of trench
warfare never slackened. Assisted by a most competent staff, he
had inspired throughout his army a complete trust in their leader,
and had welded all types — old regulars, Territorials, New Army —
into one tempered weapon. There were no jealousies under his
command, and every man in it knew that competence and faith-
fulness would be recognized and rewarded. Moreover, for a year
and more he had been making ready for the offensive in which he
was to play the chief part. Methodical and patient preparation
had been carried by him to the pitch of genius.

574 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

To understand the battle it is necessary to examine more closely
the topography of the Wytschaete-Messines ridge. Seen from the
western hills, such as Kemmel, behind the British lines, it appeared
to be an inconsiderable slope merging in the north in the low ridges
east of Ypres, but breaking down in the south to the Lys valley
in a steeper gradient. The landmarks on it were the ruins of the
White Chateau at Hollebeke, the dust-heap which once was Wyt-
schaete village, and the tooth of the ruined church of Messines.
Viewed from below, from the British trenches in the marshy flats
of the Steenebeek, it was more imposing — a low hillside seamed
with white trenches, and dotted with the debris of old woods — a
bald, desolated height, arid as a brickfield, rising from the rank
grass and yellow mustard of no-man's-land. The German first-
line trenches curved along the foot of the slope, and their second-
line system made an inner curve on the crest of the ridge. To the
north the Germans held Hill 60 and the Mound at St. Eloi, and
had constructed strong fortifications in the grounds of the White
Chateau, and along the road called the Damm Strasse which led
from Hollebeke to Wytschaete. But, as in all salients, the most
important defence was the chord which cut the arc — what the
German called Sehnenstellung — and which was intended as the
rear defence should the front of the salient be carried. The third
German system was such a chord, running from Mount Sorrel in
the north, a little east of the village of Oosttaverne, to Gapaard in
the south. This line was the proper base of the salient. A mile
east of it lay the fourth and final German position in that area
which reached the Lys at the town of Warneton. The Oostta-
verne line was the British objective in the action, for its capture
would mean that the salient had gone and the whole ridge was
in our hands. To reach it the enemy front must be penetrated to
a depth of two and a half miles. Its length was about six miles ;
but if the curve of the main salient was followed without reckon-
ing the many minor salients and re-entrants, the whole battle
frontage was nearly ten. It should be remembered, too, that,
apart from the main enemy lines, the whole western face of the
ridge, and all the little woods to the north and north-west, were
a maze of skilfully sited trenches and redoubts, designed to bring
flanking fire to bear upon any ground won by the attack.

The British front of assault was held by three of the six corps
of the Second Army. From opposite Mount Sorrel, astride the
Ypres-Comines Canal to the Grand Bois just north of Wytschaete,
lay the 10th Corps under Sir T. L. N. Morland, with the 23rd Division

1917] THE WYTSCHAETE-MESSINES RIDGE. 575

on its left, the 47th Division in the centre, the 41st Division on the
right, and the 24th Division in support. Opposite Wytschaete
was the 9th Corps, under Sir A. Hamilton-Gordon, with the 19th,
16th, and 36th Divisions in line from left to right, and the nth
Division in support. South lay the 2nd Australian Corps, under Sir
A. J. Godley, with the 25th Division on its left, the New Zealand
Division as its centre, the 3rd Australian Division on its right
astride the Douve, and the 4th Australian Division in support.
The two southern corps had the task of the direct assault on the
ridge, while the 10th Corps, with a much longer front, had to clear
the hillocks towards the Ypres Salient, and advance upon the ridge
and the Oosttaverne line from its northern flank.

The Wytschaete-Messines ridge had seen no fighting since the
close of 1914. At the end of October in that year, during the
First Battle of Ypres, Allenby's weary cavalry, assisted by Indian
and British infantry, had made for two days a gallant stand at
Messines before they were forced into the flats. In December a
combined attack had been made by French and British troops on
the woods of Petit Bois and Maedelsteed, west of Wytschaete, but
the position had proved too strong to carry. Thereafter, while the
battle had raged as near as St. Eloi in the north and Fromelles in
the south, the Messines area had been an enclave of quiet. But
for nearly two years an offensive had been going on underground.
As early as July 1915 it had been resolved to make use of the clay
stratum below our position for extensive mining operations, and
in January 19 16 we had gone seriously to work. We used in our
tunnelling companies some of the best expert talent in the world,
men who in private life had received large salaries from mining
corporations. It was work attended by endless difficulties and
dangers. Water-bearing strata would suddenly be encountered,
which necessitated damming and pumping work on a big scale.
The enemy was busy counter-mining, and we had to be ever on
the watch to detect his progress, and by camouflets * to blow in
his galleries. At some points the struggle was continuous and
desperate, especially after February 1, 1917. At The Bluff, for
instance, between January 16, 1916, and June 7, 1917, twenty-
seven camouflets were blown, seventeen by the British and ten by
the enemy. The Spanbroekmolen mine, south-west of Wytschaete,
had its gallery destroyed ; for three months it was cut off, and
only reopened by a great effort the day preceding the Messines

• A camouflet is a mine with a small charge, intended only to destroy an enemy
shaft, and not to make a crater.

576 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

attack. But the most dramatic case was that of Hill 60, where
the enemy drove a gallery which was bound to cut ours. He was
allowed to proceed, since it was ascertained that if our attack took
place on the day arranged he would just fail to reach us. In all
we dug twenty-four mines, and some of these were ready a year
before the attack. We constructed some five miles of galleries,
and charged them with over a million pounds of ammonal. Four
were outside the front ultimately selected for our attack, and one
was destroyed by the enemy. But on the evening of 6th June
nineteen were waiting for zero hour.

From the last days of May a pitiless bombardment had assailed
the enemy area, devastating his front line and searching out his
rear positions. The last remnants of Wytschaete and Messines
villages disappeared. The woods on the slopes ceased to be tat-
tered, and became fields of stumps. In that hot, dry weather a
cloud of dust hung all day long about the slopes, and at night
they blazed like the boulevard of a great city. Our raiding activity
was unceasing, and from dazed prisoners and from many captured
letters we learned of the miseries of the enemy. British aircraft
spent their days over the German hinterland, and prevented any
enemy planes from learning the extent of our preparation. " Our
machines never even get so far as our front lines," wrote a German
officer. In one fight five British planes encountered twenty-seven
German, wrecked eight, and returned safely home. Between
1st June and 6th June we destroyed twenty-four enemy machines,
and drove down twenty-three out of control, at the cost of ten of
our own.

On the evening of Wednesday, 6th June, the weather broke in
a violent thunderstorm. Torrents of rain fell, and from the baked
earth rose a warm mist which enfolded the ground like a cloak.
During the night the heavens were overcast, so that the full moon
was not seen, and only a luminous glow told of its presence. But
at 2.30 a.m. on the 7th the skies cleared, the moon rode out, and
to a watcher on the hills to the west the whole landscape stood
forth in a sheen made up of moonlight and the foreglow of dawn.
Our bombardment had abated, but during the night the enemy
had grown nervous. He had put up rockets and flares calling
for a barrage, and his guns began to pour forth shrapnel and high
explosives. Somewhere north of Wytschaete a dump had caught
fire, and sent up tongues of red flame. As the dawn broadened
our guns seemed to cease, though the enemy's were still active.
The air was full of the hum of our bombing and reconnoitring

1917] THE MINES. 577

planes flying eastward, and our balloons were going up — tawny
patches against the June sky. Then came a burst of German
high explosives, and then, at precisely ten minutes past three, a
sound compared to which all other noises were silence.

From Hill 60 in the north to the edge of Messincs, with a shock
that made the solid earth quiver like a pole in the wind, nineteen
volcanoes leaped to heaven. Nineteen sheets of flame seemed to
fill the world. For a moment it looked as if the earth, under a
magician's wand, had been contorted into gigantic toadstools.
The black cloud-caps seemed as real as the soil beneath them.
Then they shook and wavered and thinned, leaving a brume of
dust, rosy and golden atop with the rising sun. And at the same
moment, while the ears were still throbbing with the concussion
of the mines, every British gun opened on the enemy. Flashes
of many colours stabbed the wall of dust, the bursts of shrapnel
stood out white against it, and smoke barrages from our trenches
burrowed into its roots. The sun was now above the horizon, and
turned the fringes of the cloud to a hot purple and crimson. No
battle had ever a more beautiful and terrible staging. And while
the debris of the explosion still hung in the air the British divisions
of assault went over their parapets.

They entered at once upon a world like the nether pit — poisonous
with gas fumes, twisted and riven out of all character, a maze of
quarried stone, moving earth, splintered concrete, broken wire,
and horrible fragments of humanity. In most places the German
front lines had been blown out of existence. A few nerve-shattered
survivors were taken prisoner in the dug-outs that had escaped
destruction, and here and there a gallant machine-gun officer, who
had miraculously survived, obeyed his orders till death took him.
Let us follow from south to north the progress of the British advance.

The 3rd Australian Division, facing the extreme right of Otto
von Below's VI. Army, pushed across the Douve on duckboard
bridges, and, assisted by a tank, drove the enemy by the early
afternoon from the southern slopes of the Messines ridge. This
safeguarded our right flank, and enabled the New Zealand Division
to move securely on Messines village. The latter swarmed across
the Steenebeek and, climbing the hill on the side where the Armen-
tieres road dipped to the flats, cleared Messines by seven o'clock.
It was now reinforced by the 4th Australians, who moved on to
the redoubt called Fanny's Farm, half a mile to the north-east. A
tank cleared out the garrison, and by midday the 2nd Australian
Corps had won their main objective.

578 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

Farther north the 36th (Ulster) Division, with the 25th Division
on its right, had moved from the trenches north of Wulverghem
against that part of the ridge which lay between Messines and
Wytschaete. They had before them a peculiarly difficult problem.
On the western slope, midway between the two villages, lay the Bois
de l'Enfer and the concrete fort of l'Enfer, and to the south an-
other nest of redoubts which was known as Hell Farm. To reach
the crest the division had to move down the exposed western slope
of the Steenebeek valley, cross the stream, ascend the opposite
slope, and carry the various Hell positions. Beyond the crest were
strong trench lines, and a long open slope all the way to Oostta-
verne and Gapaard. From their starting- place it was 2,000 yards
to the crest. The German position had been held by the 40th
Saxons ; but on the evening of the 6th June they were relieved by
the famous 3rd Bavarians, so that the two divisions had to face an
unwearied and most gallant enemy.

During the night before the attack the Cheshires in the 25th
Division had moved into no-man's-land, and dug a trench for their
starting-point next day. Hence the enemy barrage, when it began,
fell behind them. The explosion of the Spanbroekmolen mine
gave the divisions some cover when they raced down the Steenebeek
slopes. Across the stream they rushed and up the ridge, and soon
the Cheshires were at work among the Hell redoubts. By stern
hand-to-hand fighting they cleared them out, and presently the
divisions were on the crest line, where a broad highway linked
Messines and Wytschaete. There they halted for reserves, and
then swept through the trench system east of the road. Linked
up with the Australians, they took Middle Farm and Despagne
Farm, and by midday were up against the Oosttaverne line.

Wytschaete fell to the left wing of the Ulstermen and the
16th (South Ireland) Division, when for the first time for generations
were seen Irish units, widely sundered by politics and creed, fighting
in generous rivalry for a common cause. The immediate obstacle,
the wood called Petit Bois, was wiped out of being by a mine
explosion. The Irish drove on into Wytschaete Wood, tearing
through the uncut wire, and overwhelming machine-gun nests by
the speed of their onset. By eight o'clock they were opposite the
northern and western defences of Wytschaete, while the Ulstermen
were waiting at the southern end of the village. Long before
noon the place was carried, and the Irish were moving down the
road to Oosttaverne. In the early hours of the day this division
had sustained a grievous loss. The brother of the Irish Nationalist

1917] FINAL OBJECTIVES TAKEN. 579

leader, Major William Redmond, was hit by a shell fragment, and
died a few hours later. Though far beyond military age, he had
enlisted early in the war, and had steadfastly endured those hard-
ships of campaigning which do not come easily to a man well
advanced in middle life. He had striven all his days for Irish unity,
and he had put his precepts most gallantly into practice. He lived
to see that union of spirit for one moment realized, not in the dusty
coulisses of politics, but in the nobler arena of battle, and it was
an Ulster ambulance that bore him from the field. Meantime, on
the left of the Irish and beyond the Wytschaete-Vierstraat road
the 19th Division was moving on the northern butt of the ridge.
It carried the Grand Bois, and soon was over the crest and through
the German second system beyond the Ypres-Armentieres road.
By midday it was fighting in Oosttaverne Wood, and was early
in the afternoon on the edge of Oosttaverne itself.

On the British left the situation was more complex, for the

tactical problem was far less simple than the straightforward assault

on the ridge. Morland's 10th Corps had to fight astride a canal in

a confused country of hillocks and ravines and nondescript woods.

The extreme left, the North England troops of the 23rd Division,

had the easiest task. Around Mount Sorrel and Armagh Wood

the German front had been blown to pieces. Hill 60, with its

elaborate defences, had virtually disappeared. Our losses were

trifling, and one battalion won its objective with only ten casualties.

But the Londoners of the 47th Division had a harder task. Few

divisions had borne themselves more gallantly in the war, and Loos

and High Wood were only two of their many battle honours. They

were held by machine-gun fire from the spoil banks on each side

of the Ypres-Comines Canal ; and, with the 41st Division on the

right, had to fight for the strongholds of Ravine Wood and Battle

Wood, the White Chateau, and the long, fortified line of the Damm

Strasse. The last had been well broken up by our bombardment,

but in the grounds and outbuildings of the Chateau and around the

dry lake there was sharp fighting. By the early afternoon, however,

the 10th Corps had gained its final objectives, with the exception

of a small part of the eastern end of Battle Wood and a few strong

points on the canal banks. The flank was therefore safe, and the

British centre lay parallel to the Oosttaverne line, between 400 and

700 yards to the west of it. Our guns had advanced, and the time

had come for the final attack. It was launched about three o'clock,

and at 3.45 we entered the village of Oosttaverne. At four the nth

and 19th Divisions had broken the Oosttaverne line east of the

580 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [June

village, and captured twelve guns. Before darkness fell the whole
of the line was in our hands, and Plumer had gained his final
objective.

The counter-attack which Armin had planned was slow to de-
velop. On the afternoon of the 7th there was a small attempt on
the right of our front, which was easily repulsed by the Australians.
During the night we secured our gains, and on the morning of the
8th cleared a few remaining lengths of German trench. Not till
that evening was there any sign of a counter-stroke. At 7 p.m.,
after an intense bombardment, the Germans attacked along nearly
the whole length of our new line, and at every point were repulsed.
The surprise and shock of the action of the 7th had been too great
to permit of a speedy recovery. During the next few days the
Australians took the farm of La Potterie, little more than a mile
west of Warneton and the village of Gapaard, on the Ypres- Warne-
ton road. The position of the right wing of Otto von Below's
VI. Army between St. Yves and the Lys was now untenable. It
gradually withdrew to La Basse Ville, and by the 14th the whole
of the old German positions north of the Lys, both front and support
lines, had fallen into our hands. That evening we attacked again
on both our flanks, clearing out some of the strong points north
of the Ypres-Comines Canal, and forcing the enemy on the south
back to the line of the river Warnave.

Sir Herbert Plumer's task had been brilliantly and fully accom-
plished. In a single day's fighting he had advanced two and a half
miles on a front of nearly ten ; he had wiped out the German
salient, and carried also its chord ; he had stormed positions on the
heights which the enemy regarded as impregnable ; his losses were
extraordinarily small, and he had taken 7,200 prisoners, 67 guns,
94 trench mortars, and 294 machine guns. The Battle of Messines
will rank in history with Nivelle's two victories at Verdun in the
winter of 1916 as a perfect instance of the success of the limited
objective. It could not be a normal type of battle. The elaborate
preparation, the concentration of guns, and the careful rehearsal
of every part demanded time and quiet which cannot be commonly
reckoned on in war. But Plumer had achieved what deserves to
be regarded as in its own fashion a tactical masterpiece.

Meantime, in order to mask the preparations which were being
made for the main enterprise of the summer — the break-out from
the Ypres Salient — General Home's Third Army undertook various
small offensives. On 14th June it carried by a surprise attack the
enemy lines on the crest of Infantry Hill south-east of Arras, taking

1917] THE CANADIANS AT LENS. 581

175 prisoners in two minutes. On the 15th it took a sector of
the Hindenburg Line north-east of Bullecourt. For some weeks
Canadian and English troops had been active in the neighbourhood
of Lens, and on the 24th the 46th (North Midland) Division carried
Hill 65, south-west of the town, forcing the enemy to withdraw
on both sides of the Souchez river. On the 26th the Canadians
took La Coulotte, and on the morning of the 2Sth were in the
outskirts of Avion. That evening General Home devised an
ingenious bluff. Elaborate demonstrations were made by means
of the discharge of gas and smoke to convince the enemy that he
was about to be attacked on the twelve-mile front from Gavrelle
to Hulluch, and a bogus raid was carried out south-east of Loos.
The real attack was made on a front of 2,000 yards in front of Oppy,
and by the Canadians and North Midlanders astride the Souchez
river. They gained all their objectives, including the southern
part of the ruins of Avion and the hamlet of Eleu dit Leauvette,
on the Lens-Arras road, together with 300 prisoners and many
machine guns. More important, they succeeded in puzzling the
enemy as to what was the aim of the main offensive. Messines
pointed to Lille as much as to Ypres, and the activity at Lens
suggested that the British aim might be to cut in to the north
and south of Lille, and wrest the great French industrial city from
the enemy.

II.

The preliminary work of Messines was over by 12th June, but
it was not till late in July that the day for the major advance could
be fixed. The break-out from the Ypres Salient was the residuum
left to Haig of the great Flanders offensive, which should have
been begun before the end of April. The preparation for it had
been impeded by the necessity of turning his attention to other
areas, and when at last his hands seemed free new obstacles arose
which meant further postponements. To increase his reserves he
begged the French to take over part of his defensive front. This
they were unable to do, but asked that they should have a hand
in the Flanders attack, which Haig reluctantly conceded. His
own and Joffre's fears were justified ; France was averse to facing
the truth that her armies should be left for some time to the rdle
of the defensive. She wished to share in any advance, but yet
could not take the responsibility for it, and at the same time would
not shorten the front of Britain, on whom the onus of the offensive

582 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

fell. There were many discussions and weary delays before Anthoine
brought the French First Army to the British left from Boesinghe
northward, and the best of the summer weather was lost.

The plan, as it was finally put into action, bristled with diffi-
culties which might have deterred a less stout-hearted commander
than Sir Douglas Haig. It was in some degree a race against
time. If a true strategic purpose was to be effected before winter,
the first stages must be quickly passed. The high ground east
of the Salient must be won in a fortnight, to enable the British to
move against the German bases in West Flanders and clear the
coast-line. Moreover, it was now evident that the Russian front
was crumbling ; already divisions and batteries had come west-
ward, and those left behind had been skimmed for shock-troops.
Soon the process would proceed more rapidly, and the British
would be faced with an accumulation of reserves strong enough to
bar their way. Again, the nature of the terrain made any offen-
sive a gamble with the weather. A dry autumn like that of 1914
would be well enough, but a repetition of the Somme experience
must spell disaster. The Salient was, after Verdun, the most
tortured of the Western battlefields. Constant shelling of the low
ground west of the ridges had blocked or diverted the streams
and the natural drainage and turned it into a sodden wilderness.
Much rain would make of it a morass where tanks could not be
used, and transport could scarcely move, and troops would be
exposed to the last degree of misery. Finally, it was ill ground
to debouch from ; for though we had won the Messines heights,
the enemy still held the slopes which, in semicircular tiers, rise to
the main ridge of Passchendaele, and had direct observation over
all the land west to the canal and the ruins of Ypres. Whatever
might be the strength and skill of the Germans, they were less for-
midable than the barriers which Nature herself might place in the
British path.

But the commander of the German IV. Army was no despicable
antagonist. He had suffered a sharp defeat at Messines ; but he
had the type of mind which reacts against failure, and, as on the
Somme a year before, he set himself to adapt his defence to the
British mode of attack. During the first half of 1917 the enemy's
major plan had been that of retirement through various fortified
zones. He was still strictly on the defensive, and his aim was to
allow the Allies to waste their strength in making small territorial
gains which had no real strategic value. He had successively lost
all his most important observation points ; but he had still on

1917] SIXT VON ARMIN. 583

most parts of his front those immense entrenchments, constructed
largely by the labour of Russian prisoners, which could only be
captured piecemeal after a great expense of shells. In Flanders
the nature of the ground did not permit of a second Siegfried Line.
Deep dug-outs and concrete-lined trenches were impossible because
of the waterlogged soil, and he was compelled to find new tactics.
Armin's solution was the " pill-box " which we have already noted
at Messines. These were small concrete forts, sited among the
ruins of a farm or in some derelict piece of woodland, often raised
only a yard or two above the ground level, and bristling with
machine guns. The low entrance was at the rear, and the ordinary
pill-box held from twenty to forty men. It was easy to make,
for the wooden or steel framework could be brought up on any
dark night and filled with concrete. They were echeloned in depth
with great skill ; and, in the wiring, alleys were left so that an
unwary advance would be trapped among them and exposed to
enfilading fire. Their small size made them a difficult mark for
heavy guns, and since they were protected by concrete at least
three feet thick, they were impregnable to the ordinary barrage
of field artillery.

The enemy's plan was to hold his first line — which was often
a mere string of shell-craters linked by a trench — with few men,
who would fall back before an assault. He had his guns well behind,
so that they should not be captured in the first rush, and would
be available for a barrage when his opponents were entangled in
the " pill-box " zone. Finally, he had his reserves in the second
line, ready for the counter-stroke before the attack could secure
the ground won. It will be seen that these tactics were admirably
suited for the exposed and contorted ground of the Salient. Any
attack would be allowed to make some advance ; but if the German
plan worked well, this advance would be short lived, and would be
dearly paid for. Instead of the cast-iron front of the Siegfried
area, the Flanders line would be highly elastic, but would spring
back into position after pressure with a deadly rebound.*

* Just before the battle the Germans used two new and deadly forms of gas in
their Blue Cross and Yellow Cross shell. The progress of the gas weapon since the
German use of chlorine in April 1915 deserves a brief note. The first step was to use
in cloud attacks a preparation of phosgene, a more deadly gas, and to develop gas
shells which had the advantage of being independent of the wind. Early in 1917
they introduced a lethal gas shell (Green Cross), containing diphosgene, and a variant,
Green Cross I., containing 50 per cent, of chlorpicrin. In July 191 7 Blue Cross
shell appeared containing a non-persistent gas made from arsenic compounds, and
Yellow Cross shell, containing dichlorethyl sulphide, which had practically no smell
and could remain for days on the surface of the ground. This latter, which we called

584 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

The new offensive involved a complete redistribution of the
Allied forces. The front of the Third Army, under Sir Julian Byng,
who had succeeded to Allenby's command, was greatly extended,
and now covered all the ground between Arras and the junction
with the French. This released Sir Hubert Gough's Fifth Army
and Sir Henry Rawlinson's Fourth Army for service in the north.
In early June French troops had held the front on the Yser between
St. Georges and the sea. These were now relieved by the British
Fourth Army. The Belgian forces on the canal drew in their
right from Boesinghe to Noordschoote, and that section was
occupied by the French First Army of six divisions, under Anthoine,
who had commanded the Sixth Army in spring in the Moronvillers
battle. From Boesinghe to the Zillebeke-Zandvoorde road south-
east of Ypres lay the British Fifth Army, and on its right the
Second Army as far as the Lys. From Armentieres to Arras Sir
Henry Home's First Army held the front. The main striking
forces were Gough's and Anthoine's ; but it was intended that
Home should undertake, by way of distraction, certain movements
against Lens, and that Plumer should threaten to the south of the
Salient, so as to compel the enemy to distribute his artillery fire.

The appearance of Rawlinson on the coast in the second half of
June gravely alarmed the German Command. It seemed to indicate
an attack along the shore, assisted by our Fleet at sea, which had
long been a favourite subject of German speculation. They re-
solved to anticipate it by depriving the British of their bridgehead
east of the canalized Yser. The dunes formed a belt of dry land
along the coast about a mile wide, where movement was possible
in any weather ; but south of them lay a flat country criss-crossed
with streams and ditches which could be easily flooded so as to
bar the advance of an enemy. The Allied line, which from Dix-
mude northward lay on the west bank of the Yser, crossed to
the east bank south of Nieuport. This gave us a bridge-end
about two miles long, and from 600 to 1,200 yards deep, from the
Plasschendaele Canal south of Lombartzyde to the sea. Half-way

mustard gas, was far the deadliest gas which the enemy evolved. In 191 7 Germany
was turning out a million gas shells a month. On the Allied side the defence was very
soon perfected, and the British box-respirator was a complete protection against the
ordinary gas cloud and the Green Cross and Blue Cross shell. At first chlorine was
the only gas which Britain could produce, and our production of gas shells was slow
in developing. We did not get mustard gas of our own till September 1918. Our
most efficient form of gas offensive was probably the Livens Projector, a kind of rude
trench mortar lobbing heavy gas bombs, which was first used towards the close of tha
Battle of the Somme.

1917] LOSS OF THE NIEUPORT BRIDGEHEAD. 585

a dyke known as the Geleide Creek intersected our front. If the
enemy could drive us across the Yser, he would have a stronger
defensive position in the event of a coastal advance.

Very early on the morning of Tuesday, 10th July, an intense
bombardment broke out against the bridgehead. There was a
heavy gale blowing, which accounted for the absence of British
naval support. In the dune and polder country trenches were
impossible, and the British defence consisted of breastworks built
in the sand. These were speedily flattened out, and all the bridges
across the Yser north of the Geleide dyke were destroyed, as well
as the bridges over the dyke itself. The bombardment continued
all day, and at 6.30 in the evening troops of a German Naval
Division advanced in three waves. The bridgehead between the
Geleide Creek and the shore was held by two battalions of the 1st
Division, the 1st Northamptons and the 2nd King's Royal Rifles.
Since all communications were destroyed, they were unable to fall
back ; and for an hour, against overwhelming numbers, and in
positions from which all cover had gone, they maintained a most
gallant defence. By eight o'clock the action was over, and the
two battalions had disappeared as units, though during that and
the following night some seventy men and four officers managed
to swim the Yser and return to our lines. The northern part of
the bridgehead was captured ; but south of the Geleide dyke,
opposite Lombartzyde, where our position had greater depth, and
some of the Yser bridges were still intact, the assault was held, and
the enemy driven out of our lines by a counter-attack. The affair
was trivial and easily explicable : the bridgehead was at the mercy
of a sudden attack in force unless we had chosen to take very
special measures to defend it. It was another instance of what
the past two years had abundantly proved — that any advanced
trench system could be taken by the side which was prepared to
mass sufficient troops and guns.

Meantime through July the preparations for the great Salient
battle were being assiduously pressed on. The shell of Ypres did
not provide, either above ground or underground, the cover for the
assembling of troops which Arras had afforded ; consequently the
labours of our tunnelling companies were heavy and incessant.
Our aircraft did marvellous work in locating enemy batteries, and
our guns in destroying them. So good was our counter-battery
work that the enemy frequently withdrew his guns, and thus com-
pelled us to postpone our attack in order that the new positions
might be located. All through July our bombardment continued,

586 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July

till every corner of the Salient was drenched with our fire. We
made constant raids and gas attacks, the latter with deadly effect ;
and it is worth noting that the place where the enemy seems to
have suffered most from this weapon was precisely the region astride
the Poelcappelle road where in April 19 15 he had made his first
gas attack on the French and the Canadians. Towards the end
of the month there were signs that Armin might upset our plans by
a withdrawal to his rear defences, and we had to keep jealous
watch on the enemy's movements. On 27th July, in the Boesinghe
area, it was discovered that his front trenches were unoccupied,
and that he had fallen back some distance, whether out of fear of
mines like those at Messines or from the sheer weight of our bom-
bardment. Anthoine's right wing and Gough's left accordingly
crossed the canal, and occupied the German front and support
lines on a front of 3,000 yards. They held their ground till the
attack began, and managed by night to throw seventeen bridges
across the canal in their rear.

The front of attack was fifteen miles long, from the Lys river
to a little north of Steenstraate, but the main effort was planned
for the seven and a half miles between Boesinghe and the Zillebeke-
Zandvoorde road. The Allied line ran from the canal in a curve
south-eastward through the village of Wieltje and along the foot
of the low slope, which may be defined by the points Pilkem,
Bellewaarde, Hooge, and Sanctuary Wood. Thence it ran south
across the Ypres-Comines Canal to the Oosttaverne line, and thence
to the Lys opposite La Basse Ville. It was the business of the
French to clear the land between the canal and that mysterious
creek which in its lower reaches is called the Martjevaart, and
farther up the St. Jansbeek. Their right had to cover much ground,
for it had to keep pace with Gough's left. The task of the British
Fifth Army was, by a series of bounds, to capture the enemy's
first defences situated on the forward slope of the rising ground,
and his second position sited along the crest, and at the same time
to secure the crossings of the Steenebeek, the muddy ditch which
flows by St. Julien to join the St. Jansbeek, north-east of Bix-
schoote. If this could be done at once and the weather favoured,
a strong defensive flank could be formed for a break-through in
the direction of Thourout towards the north-east. In the Fifth
Army were four corps of assault : from left to right, the 14th,
under Lord Cavan — the Guards and 38th Divisions ; the 18th,
under Lieutenant-General Ivor Maxse — 51st and 39th Divisions; the
19th, under Lieutenant-General Watts — 55th and 15th Divisions ;

1917] THE ATTACK OF 31st JULY. 587

and the 2nd, under Lieutenant-General Jacob — 8th, 18th, 30th, and
24th Divisions. The Second Army, on their right, had a strictly
limited objective. Its right was ordered to take La Basse Ville,
on the Lys, and its left to capture Hollebeke village, and clear
the difficult ground north of the bend of the Ypres-Comines Canal
and east of Battle Wood. Against the British attack alone the
enemy had thirteen divisions in line, including the 3rd Guard
Division, and four Bavarian — the 4th, 10th, 16th, and 6th Reserve.

The last week of July was dull, cloudy weather, with poor
visibility for air work. On the morning of Monday, the 30th,
came a heavy thunderstorm, and rain fell in the afternoon. All
day the Allied bombardment continued at its height, and during
the drizzling night. The rain stopped towards dawn, but a thick
mist remained, and the ground was plashy and the skies overcast
as zero hour drew near. There was a short lull in the firing after
three ; but precisely at 3.50 a.m. on the 31st the whole Allied
front broke into flame. Under cover of discharges of thermit
and blazing oil, and a barrage of exceptional weight, the infantry
crossed their parapets, and the battle began.

The whole of the German front position fell at once. Anthoine
crossed the canal and took Steenstraate. Verlorenhoek fell to the
15th Division, which that day added to a record of victories which
included Martinpuich and Feuchy. Farther south, pushing
through Sanctuary Wood and Shrewsbury Forest, we carried the
chateau of Hooge and the lake of Bellewaarde, and came to the
foot of that lift of the Menin road which was the pillar of the
enemy's position on the heights. The Allies then pressed on to
the attack on the second position, and by nine in the morning
the whole of it north of W'esthoek was in their hands. Frezen-
berg, after a stubborn fight, was won by the 15th Division ; the
39th Division troops entered St. Julien ; and the 38th (Welsh)
Division took Pilkem and annihilated the Fusilier regiment of
the 3rd Prussian Guards. Pommern Redoubt, north of Frezen-
berg, was won by the 55th Division of West Lancashire Territorials.
The 51st Highland Territorials and the Guards seized the crossings
of the Steenebeek. In a captured German document, which pro-
vided a " black list " of the British divisions, the 51st was given
first place, and the enemy that day had no reason to revise his
judgment. On the centre and left of our attack all our final objec-
tives had been gained, and at one or two points we had gone beyond
them. The French, for example, took Bixschoote ; the Guards

588 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [July-Atjg.

advanced beyond the Steenebeek ; and at one point in our centre
we reached and penetrated the enemy's third trench system, that
known as the Gheluvelt-Langemarck line.

More slow and difficult was the fighting on the right of the
Fifth Army along the Menin road. Stirling Castle, the strong
point which dominated Ypres south of the highway, was taken.
But before the shell-shattered patches called Glencorse Wood and
Inverness Copse the enemy had massed strongly for defence, for
they were the key of his whole position ; and the attacking brigades
— Lancashire, Irish, and Scots — clung with difficulty to their foot-
ing on the ridge, but could go no farther. In the afternoon, when
a downpour of rain had begun to fall, the enemy counter-attacked
from south of the Menin road to north of St. Julien. In spite of
poor visibility owing to the thick weather, our artillery held him,
though we had to fall back from all but the western skirts of West-
hoek. Our advanced troops north of St. Julien were also for the
most part withdrawn to the line of the Steenebeek. By the evening
the position was that everywhere we had carried the German first
line, and had gained all the crest of the first ridge, and so denied
the enemy observation over the Salient. From Westhoek to St.
Julien we had taken the German second line, and north of St.
Julien were well beyond it. On two-thirds of our front in the
Salient we had won our first objectives, while, of the remaining
third, we had just fallen short of our extreme aim on one-half,
and on the other had exceeded it. On the whole battlefield we
had taken over 6,000 prisoners, including 133 officers. It was no
small triumph for an attack in foul weather over some of the most
difficult country in which armies ever fought.

The subsidiary action fought by the Second Army was an
unbroken success. On the right, after a fifty minutes' struggle,
the New Zealand Division had carried La Basse Ville. North-
ward as far as Hollebeke we confined ourselves to advancing our
front a few hundred yards to a line of strong points and fortified
farms. On Plumer's left the 41st Division pushed half a mile
down the valley of the Roosebeek, and on one side of the Ypres-
Comines Canal took the village of Hollebeke, and on the other the
rubble-heap which had been Klein Zillebeke. Once again after
three years we held that classic soil where, at the close of a dark
November day, Cavan's brigade of Guards and Kavanagh's dis-
mounted Household Cavalry had turned the last wave of the
German assault.

According to plan, the next day should have seen a second blow

1917] THE WEATHER BREAKS. 5S9

with cumulative force. But the weather had joined the enemy.
From midday on 1st August for four days and four nights without
intermission fell the rain. Even when it stopped on the 5th there
followed days of sombre skies and wet mists and murky clouds.
The misery of our troops, huddled in their impromptu lines or
strung out in shell-holes, cannot be pictured in words. Nor can
the supreme disappointment of the High Command. After months
of thought and weeks of laborious preparation, just when a brilliant
start had been made, they saw their hopes dashed to the ground.
An offensive was still possible, but it could not be the offensive
planned. The time-schedule was fatally dislocated. The situa-
tion is best described in the unemotional words of Sir Douglas
Haig's dispatch : " The low-lying, clayey soil, torn by shells and
sodden by rain, turned to a succession of vast muddy pools. The
valleys of the choked and overflowing streams were speedily trans-
formed into long stretches of bog, impassable except by a few well-
defined tracks, which became marks for the enemy's artillery.
To leave these tracks was to risk death by drowning, and in the
course of the subsequent fighting on several occasions both men
and pack animals were lost in this way. In these conditions
operations of any magnitude became impossible, and the resump-
tion of our offensive was necessarily postponed until a period of
fine weather should allow the ground to recover. As had been the
case in the Arras battle, this unavoidable delay in the development
of our offensive was of the greatest service to the enemy. Valuable
time was lost, the troops opposed to us were able to recover from
the disorganization produced by our first attack, and the enemy
was given the opportunity to bring up reinforcements."

For a fortnight we held our hand. To advance was a stark
impossibility till the countryside was a little drier, for though
we had won positions on the heights, our communications ran
through the spongy Salient. The enemy's counter-attacks were
to some extent also crippled by the weather. Those on the night
of the first day of the battle were aimed at driving us off the high
ground north of the Menin road, and regaining his second-line
system between Frezenberg and St. Julien. They failed to shake
us ; but it was considered wise, in order to escape the heavy shell-
ing, to withdraw our men temporarily from St. Julien itself, though
we still held a bridgehead on the Steenebeek, north of the village.
On 3rd August we reoccupied St. Julien, and consolidated our
positions on the right bank of the Steenebeek by a line of points

5Q0 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

which linked us with the French. On ioth August we took the
whole of Westhoek, and thereby won the last point in the old
German second position which gave any chance of observation
over Ypres. There the enemy counter-attacked violently and
fruitlessly on the two following days. Meantime the French had
cleared the ground around the Kortekeer Cabaret and its famous
crossroads, and had forced their way well across the peninsula
between the Yser Canal and the Martjevaart.

In the middle of the month there was a short break in the
storms, and Haig took advantage of it for a new attack. He began
by a highly successful subsidiary action in the south, designed to
threaten an important position of the enemy, and prevent him
massing all his strength before the Salient. We have seen how,
during the Battle of Arras and the lesser operations of July, the
Canadian Corps had eaten into the defences of Lens from the
south and south-west. The new attack came from the north-east,
on a front of 4,000 yards, on a line south-east of Loos, running
roughly from the Lens-Bethune road to the Bois Hugo. On
September 15, 1915, at the Battle of Loos, troops of the 15th
Division had swarmed across Hill 70 east of the village, and some
had even penetrated into Cite St. Auguste, the mining suburb of
Lens beyond the railway line. The latter never returned, and
Hill 70, after a gallant defence against odds, was relinquished
before the close of the battle. Ever since then the place had
been a thorn in our side, for it gave the enemy good observation.
On 15th August, at 4.25 in the morning, the Canadians swept over
Hill 70, and south of it crossed the Lens-La Bassee road, and took
the faubourgs of Cite St. Laurent and Cite St. Emile. North of it
they won the little Bois Rase and the western half of the Bois
Hugo. All their objectives were gained, except a short length of
trench west of Cite St. Auguste, which fell the following afternoon.
During the morning of the 15th counter-attacks by the German
local reserves were easily beaten off, and in the evening a division
of the German Guard was thrown in without better success. It
was caught in the open by the deadly rifle and machine-gun fire
of the Canadians. From the three German divisions opposed to
us that day we took 1,120 prisoners.

Next day, the 16th, saw the second stage of the Ypres struggle.
The Fifth Army was directed against the German third position,
the Gheluvelt-Langemarck line, which ran from the Menin road
along the second of the tiers of ridges which rimmed the Salient
on the east. These tiers, the highest and most easterly of which

1917] THE ATTACK OF 16th AUGUST. 591

was the famous Passchendaele crest, had the common features
that they all sprang from one southern boss or pillar, the point
on the Menin road marked 64 metres, which we knew as Clapham
Junction, and all as they ran northward lost elevation. The day
was destined to show at its best Armin's new defensive methods.
The weather was still thick and damp, making aerial observation
difficult, and therefore depriving us of timely notice of the enemy's
counter-attacks. His front was sown with " pill-boxes," the
tactical device which as yet we scarcely understood, and had not
found a weapon to meet. The ground was sloppy, and made
tangled and difficult with broken woods. The conditions were
ideal for the practice of that method which Armin had fore-
shadowed at Messines and had now definitely embraced — that
system of " elastic defence," in the words of the official dispatch,
" in which his forward trench lines were held only in sufficient
strength to disorganize the attack, while the bulk of his forces
were kept in close reserve, ready to deliver a powerful and imme-
diate blow which might recover the positions overrun by our troops
before we had had time to consolidate them."

The attack took place at dawn, 4.45 a.m., and on the Allies
left and left centre had an immediate success. The French cleared
the whole peninsula between the Yser Canal and the Martjevaart,
and, wading through deep floods, captured the strongly fortified
bridgehead of Drie Grachten. The British left, the 29th and 20th
Divisions, pressed on beyond the Bixschoote-Langemarck road,
and took the hamlet of Wijdendrift. At first they were checked
in the outskirts of Langemarck ; but by eight o'clock they held
the village, and by nine they had won their final objective, the
portion of the German third-line system half a mile farther north.
But very different was the fate of the British centre. North and
north-east of St. Julien, and between the Wieltje-Passchendaele
and the Ypres-Zonnebeke roads, it came up against the full strength
of the " pill-boxes." A number fell to us, and all day we struggled
on in the mud, losing heavily from the concealed machine-gun fire.
In some places our men reached their final objectives, but they could
not abide in them. Enemy counter-attacks later in the morning
forced us back, and at the close of the day we were little beyond
our starting-point. Our Langemarck gains were, however, secured,
for the 55th, 48th, and nth Divisions had established a defensive
flank on a line from east of Langemarck to north of St. Julien.

On the British right the fighting was still more desperate. On
the Menin road we had already passed the highest point, Hill 64,

592 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Aug.

and were moving on the wood of Herenthage, which we called
Inverness Copse, and which lay on the slopes towards Gheluvelt.
This wood was intersected by the highway, and north of it lay
the Nonnenbosch, with its southern outlier, which we knew as
Glencorse Wood. East of Glencorse Wood was the big Polygon
Wood, with the remains of a racecourse in the heart of it. In all
this area our advance was most stubbornly contested, and at the
end of the action we had done no more than gain a fraction of the
western edge of Glencorse Wood, and advance a little way north
of Westhoek. Taking the battle-ground as a whole, as a result of
the day we had made a considerable gap in the German third
line, and taken over two thousand prisoners and thirty guns.

The rest of the month was one long downpour. We made a
few small gains — notably on the 19th, 22nd, and 27th, when,
with the assistance of tanks, we improved our position on a two-
mile front between St. Julien and the Ypres-Roulers railway, and
took a number of strong points and fortified farms. On the 22nd
we also attacked along the Menin road, and after six days' con-
tinuous fighting made some way in Glencorse Wood, and won
the western edge of Inverness Copse.

This second stage of the battle was beyond doubt a serious
British check. We had encountered a new tactical device of the
enemy, and it had defeated us. The Fifth Army had fought with
the most splendid gallantry, but its courage had been largely
fruitless. We had beyond doubt caused the enemy serious losses,
but he had taken a heavier toll of our own ranks. Fine brigades
had been hurled in succession against a concrete wall, and had been
sorely battered. For almost the first time in the campaign there
was a sense of discouragement abroad on our front. Men felt
that they were being sacrificed blindly ; that every fight was a
soldiers' fight, and that such sledge-hammer tactics were too crude
to meet the problem. For a moment there was a real ebb of con-
fidence in British leadership. That such a feeling should exist
among journalists and politicians matters little ; but it matters
much if it is found among troops in the field. Especially the
reputation of Sir Hubert Gough was affected, and the trust of the
Fifth Army in its commander was shaken. He was believed to
have shown himself a little stiff and unresourceful, a repute which
was to have an unfortunate effect upon the career of a most gallant
soldier. Seven months later he suffered the consequences of this
unpopularity by being relieved of his command after a battle for
which he deserved only praise.

1917] PLUMER EXTENDS HIS FRONT. 593

Haig accordingly brought upon the scene the man who was
rapidly coming to recognition as the most accomplished of army
commanders. The front of the Second Army was extended north-
ward, and Sir Herbert Plumer took over the attack upon the
southern portion of the enemy front on the Menin road. The
better part of a month was spent in preparation, while Plumer
patiently thought out the problem. Sorely tried — too sorely
tried — divisions were taken out of the line to rest, and the dis-
positions on the whole front of assault were readjusted. Espe-
cially our artillery tactics were revised, in order to cope with the
" pill-boxes." In the early days of September the weather im-
proved, and the sodden Salient began slowly to dry. That is to
say, the mud hardened into something like the seracs of a glacier,
and the streams became streams again, and not lagoons. But
the process was slow, and it was not till the third week of the
month that the next stage in the battle could begin.

The new eight-mile front of attack ran from the Ypres-Staden
railway north of Langemarck to the Ypres-Comines Canal north
of Hollebeke. On the left and centre our objectives were narrowly
limited, averaging about three-quarters of a mile ; but Plumer on
the right had the serious task of pushing for a mile along the Menin
road. The " pill-box " problem had been studied, and a solution,
it was believed, had been found, not by miraculous ingenuity, but
by patience and care. The little fortalices had been methodically
reconnoitred, and our heavy barrage so arranged as to cover each
mark. Even when a direct hit was not attained, it was believed
that the concussion of the great shells might loosen some of the
lesser structures, while fumes, smoke, and gas would make the
life of the inmates difficult. One famous division followed with
complete success another plan. Having located the " pill-box,"
the field-gun barrage lengthened on both sides of it ; which enabled
the advancing troops, hugging their barrage, to get round its un-
protected rear.

Wednesday, 19th September, was a clear blowing day, but at
nine o'clock in the evening the rain began, and fell heavily all that
night. At dawn the drizzle stopped, but a wet mist remained,
which blinded our air reconnaissance. At 5.40 a.m. on the 20th
the attack was launched. Presently the fog cleared, and the
sun came out, and our airplanes were able to fight in line with
the infantry, attacking enemy trenches and concentrations with
machine-gun fire. The ground was knee-deep in mud, but the whole

594 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Sept.

British line pressed forward. The Fifth Army's left north of the
Zonnebeke-Langemarck road — the 47th and 51st Divisions — won
all its objectives by midday. South of them the 55th was not less
successful in the appalling mud south-east of St. Julien. Perhaps
the most remarkable achievement was that of the Scottish and
South African brigades of the 9th Division, which, advancing on
both sides of the Ypres-Roulers railway, won their final objectives
in three hours. They carried a line of fortified farms, the two
important redoubts called Zonnebeke and Bremen, and the hamlet
of Zevenkote.

The crux of the battle lay in the area of the Second Army,
and the vital point was the work of its centre along the Menin
road. There lay the key of the enemy's position, and there in
defence he had already sent in sixteen divisions. That day the
fighting was extended well south of the highroad. Plumer's right
— the 19th Division — cleared the small woods north of the Ypres-
Comines Canal. Farther north the 39th and 41st Divisions pushed
through the eastern fringe of Shrewsbury Forest, across the stream
called the Bassevillebeek, which drains to the Lys, with its hideous
cluster of ponds called Dumbarton Lakes, and up the slopes of the
Tower Hamlets spur, on the eastern side of which lay Gheluvelt.
Here they encountered heavy machine-gun fire from the ridge
between Veldhoek and the Tower Hamlets. On their left the 23rd
Division had been brilliantly successful. It had carried the
whole of Inverness Copse, and had captured Veldhoek itself, as a
result of which late in the day we were able to establish ourselves
across the Tower Hamlets spur. The Australians, on Plumer's
left, had for their first task the clearing of the rest of Glencorse
Wood and the Nonnenbosch. This they achieved early in the
morning, and by 10 a.m. had taken Polygonveld, at the north-
western corner of the great Polygon Wood. For a little they were
held up at Black Watch Corner, at the south-western angle ; but
by midday they had passed it, and had secured the whole western
half of the wood up to the racecourse, thus reaching their final
objectives.

This day's battle cracked the kernel of the German defence
in the Salient. It showed a limited advance, and the total of
3,000 prisoners had been often exceeded in a day's fighting ; but
every inch of the ground won was vital. We had carried the
southern pillar on which the security of the Passchendaele ridge
depended. Few struggles in the campaign were more desperate, or
carried out on a more gruesome battlefield. The maze of quag-

1917] SUCCESS OF 20th SEPTEMBER. 595

mires, splintered woods, ruined husks of " pill-boxes," water-filled
shell-holes, and foul creeks which made up the land on both sides
of the Menin road was a sight which to the recollection of most
men must seem like a fevered nightmare. It was the classic soil
on which during the First Battle of Ypres the 1st and 2nd Divisions
had stayed the German rush for the Channel. Then it had been a
broken but still recognizable and featured countryside ; now the
elements seemed to have blended with each other to make of it
a limbo outside mortal experience and almost beyond human
imagining. Only on some of the contorted hills of Verdun could
a parallel be found. The battle of 20th September was a proof
to what heights of endurance the British soldier may attain. It
was an example, too, of how thought and patience may achieve
success in spite of every disadvantage of weather, terrain, and
enemy strength.

Armin could not accept meekly the losses of the 20th. That
afternoon and evening he made no less than eleven counter-attacks.
Most of them failed, but east of St. Julien he retook a farm which
we did not win back till the next day. North-east of Langemarck
a short length of German trench held out till the 23rd. On the
21st, and for the four days following, he attacked north-east of
St. Julien, and very fiercely on the front between the Tower Hamlets
and the Polygon Wood. On the 25th the Germans got into our
lines north of the Menin road ; but after a struggle of many hours,
the 33rd and the 5th Australian Divisions succeeded in ejecting
them. In the meantime preparations were being hastened on for
the next stage. We had now won all the interior ridges of the
Salient and the southern pillar ; but we were not yet within strik-
ing distance of the north part of the main Passchendaele ridge.
To attain this, we must lie east of Zonnebeke and the Polygon
Wood at the foot of the final slopes. Moreover, we must act
quickly. We were well aware that the enemy intended a counter-
attack in force, and it was our object to anticipate him.

We struck again on 26th September. The weather was fine,
and for a brief week it ceased to be an element in the German
defensive. Our front of attack was the six-mile stretch from
north-east of St. Julien to south of the Tower Hamlets. The new
advance was as precise and complete as its predecessor of the
20th. At ten minutes to six our infantry moved forward. On
our left the 58th and 59th Divisions pushed on both sides of the
Wieltje-Passchendaele road to the upper course of the Haanebeek.

596 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

In the centre, after some sharp fighting along the Ypres-Roulers
railway line, the 3rd Division took the ruins of Zonnebeke village
— which had been the apex of the Salient when we evacuated it
in May 1915. Farther south the Australians carried the remainder
of the Polygon Wood ; while they also assisted the sorely tried
33rd and 39th Divisions on their right, which were struggling in
the maze of creeks and trenches beyond Veldhoek. These divi-
sions, though they had suffered one of the enemy's severest counter-
strokes the day before, nevertheless were able to join in the general
advance. One dramatic performance fell to their share. They
relieved two companies of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders,
who had been isolated the night before, and had held out for twelve
hours in the midst of the enemy.

The last days of fine weather were employed by the Germans
in some of the most resolute counter-attacks of the battle. The
troops which they had intended to use in their frustrated offensive
of the 26th were now employed to undo the effects of our advance.
There were seven attacks during the day, notably in the area
between the Reutelbeek and the Polygon Wood. Then came a
pause, while the enemy collected his shattered strength ; and on
the last day of the month he began again with two flammenwerfer
attacks north of the Menin road. Five more followed next day in
the same place, and one south of the Roulers railway. Nothing
came of them, except the temporary loss of two advanced posts
south-east of the Polygon Wood. The last took place on 3rd
October, close to the Menin road, but it was broken up by our guns
before it reached our lines.

That night the weather broke, and a gale from the south-west
brought heavy rains. It was the old ill-luck of our army, for on
the 4th we had planned the next stage of the battle. But if the
weather was ill-timed, not so was our attack. The enemy had
brought up three fresh divisions, with a view to recovering his
losses of the 26th. Ten minutes past six was his zero hour, and by
good fortune and good guiding six o'clock was ours. Our barrage
burst upon his infantry when it was forming up for the assault,
and cut great swathes in its ranks. While the Germans were yet
in the confusion of miscarried plans our bayonets were upon them.
Our objective was the line of the main ridge east of Zonnebeke,
the southern part of what was called the Passchendaele heights,
along which ran the north road from Becelaere. Our main front
was the seven miles from the Ypres-Staden railway to the Menin
road, though we also advanced a short distance south of that

THE THIRD BATTLE OF
YPRES.

1917] CAPTURE OF GRAFENSTAFEL SPUR. 597

highway. By midday every objective had been gained. The
achievement of Messines and the first day of Arras was repeated.
The enemy, caught on the brink of an attack of his own, was not
merely repulsed : a considerable part of his forces was destroyed.

The British left was directed along the Poelcappelle road, in a
country so nearly flat that the chief feature was a hill marked 19
metres. After a sharp struggle we won this position, lost it, and
regained it before evening. Farther south we entered Poelcappelle
village, and occupied its western half. The valley of the Stroom-
beek was a sea of mud, but the 48th Division forced its way across
it. In our centre lay the area of the projected German attack —
the Grafenstafel ridge jutting west from the Passchendaele heights,
and the central part of the heights themselves. The New Zealand
Division, struggling across the swamps of the upper Haanebeek,
took the village of Grafenstafel and won the crest of the spur.
On their right, the Australians carried Molenaarelsthoek and
Broodseinde, and drove the 4th Prussian Guards from the ridge
summit, pressing beyond the Becelaere-Passchendaele road. South-
ward, again, the 7th Division traversed the crest and took Noor-
demdhoek, while the 21st Division on their right took the village
of Reutel and cleared the tangled ground east of the Polygon
Wood. Thence as far as the Menin road there was desperate
fighting in the hollows of the Reutelbeek and the Polygonbeek,
where the 5th Division stormed the Polderhoek Chateau. A
little after midday we had gained all our final objectives. We
had broken up forty German battalions, and had taken over 5,000
prisoners, including 138 officers. The counter-attacks which fol-
lowed— there were no less than eight between the Menin road
and Reutel— won back little ground. From Mount Sorrel, in the
south, we held 9,000 yards of the crest of the ultimate ridge, and
our grip of the Grafenstafel spur gave us a good defensive flank
on the north. Above all, we had succeeded in nullifying Armin's
tactics of defence ; and we captured documents which made it
plain that the German High Command were wavering, and in-
clined to a return to their old method of holding their front line
in force. Sir Herbert Plumer's leadership had been abundantly
justified.

But October had set in, storm followed storm, and Haig had
to reconsider his plan of campaign. Weather and a dozen other
malignant accidents had wrecked the larger scheme of a Flanders
offensive. Gone was the hope of clearing the coast or of driving

598 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.

the enemy out of his Flemish bases. What had been laboriously
achieved at the end of ten weeks had been in the programme for
the first fortnight. It was only a preliminary ; the main objectives
lay beyond the Passchendaele ridge. The weather had compelled
us to make our advance by stages, widely separated in time, with
the result that the enemy had been able to bring up his reserves
and reorganize his defence. Our pressure could not be cumulative,
and we had been unable to reap the full fruits of each success.

There was, therefore, no chance of any decisive operation in
the Flanders area, and it became a serious question for Haig
whether the Ypres operations should be continued. If October
should bring the kind of weather which it had shown the year
before on the Somme, the Salient would be an ugly fighting ground.
The extremity of Russia was permitting more and more German
divisions to be transferred to the West, which would not make
our task easier. On the other hand, we had not won the last
even of the limited preliminary objectives ; for we did not control
the whole Passchendaele ridge, and it might well be urged that,
till we did, we had not secured our own position or made difficult
the enemy's against the coming winter. Moreover, the French
were preparing a great attack on the Aisne heights for the last
week of the month, and it was desirable that the German mind
should be kept engrossed with the northern line. Also events of
high importance were in train in Italy, and the attack towards
Cambrai in November had been decided upon — which made it
essential to fix the enemy's attention on the Flanders front. Bal-
ancing the pros and cons of the matter, Haig resolved to continue
his offensive on a modified scale * till the end of October, or such
time as would give our men the chance of reaching Passchendaele.

The last stages of the Third Battle of Ypres were probably the
muddiest combats ever known in the history of war. It rained
incessantly — sometimes clearing to a drizzle or a Scots mist, but
relapsing into a downpour on any day fixed for our attack. The
British movements became an accurate barometer : whenever it
was more than usually tempestuous it was safe to assume that some
zero hour was near. Tuesday, the 9th, was the day fixed for an
advance on a broad front by both French and British ; but all day
on the 7th and 8th it rained, and the night of the 8th was black
darkness above and a melting earth beneath. It was a difficult task

* In the last stage — from 5th October to 10th November — the scale of fighting
was considerably reduced. In the last fortnight the number of British divisions
which attacked was approximately the same as the number used on a single day, the
31st July.

1917] THE FRENCH IN HOUTHULST FOREST. 599

assembling troops under such conditions ; but the thing was ac-
complished, and at twenty minutes past five in the dripping dawn
of the 9th our infantry moved forward. The operations of the
4th had bulged our centre between Poelcappelle and Bccelaere,
and it was necessary to bring up our left wing. Hence, though
we attacked everywhere from the Polygon Wood northward, our
main effort was on the six miles from a point east of Zonnebeke
to the north-west of Langemarck ; while the French, on our left,
continued the front of assault to the edge of the St. Jansbeek,
south of Draaibank.

In the north the French * and the British Guards Division,
advancing side by side, had won all their objectives by the early
afternoon. They crossed the St. Jansbeek, carried the hamlets
of St. Janshoek, Mangelaare, Veldhoek, and Koekuit, and estab-
lished themselves on the skirts of the great Houthulst Forest, the
northern pillar of the German line. South of the Ypres-Staden
railway the 29th, 4th, and nth Divisions fought their way east
of the Poelcappelle-Houthulst road, and captured the whole of the
ruins of Poelcappelle. In the centre the Australians and the 66th,
49th, and 48th Divisions moved nearer to Passchendaele along
the main ridge, taking the hamlets of Nieuwemolen and Keerse-
laarhoek. The day was successful, for our final objectives were
almost everywhere attained, and over 2,000 prisoners were taken.

It was Haig's intention to press on the advance, for the weather
and the landscape were such that there was less hardship in going
on than in staying still in lagoons and shell-craters, where com-
fort or security was unattainable. The next attack was fixed for
Friday, the 12th ; but the rain fell in sheets during the night of
the nth, and the movement was countermanded soon after it had
begun. Nevertheless we made some progress between the Roulers
railway and Houthulst Forest, and 1,000 prisoners were taken.
Such fighting was the last word in human misery, for the country
was now one irreclaimable bog, and the occasional hours of watery
sunshine had no power to dry it. " You might as well try,"
wrote one observer, " to empty a bath by holding lighted matches
over it." But Haig still kept his eye on Passchendaele, for the
Cambrai preparations were maturing and the French attack on
the Aisne heights was now drawing very near. So the battle
among the shell-holes and swamps continued.

On the 22nd we pushed east of Poelcappelle, and crept a little

* Anthoine's First Army achieved excellent results at a wonderfully low cost.
In its three months' fighting it had only 8,527 casualties, of whom 1,625 were killed.

600 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Oct.-Nov.

farther into the Houthulst Wood. On the 25th we had a stroke
of fortune, for a strong wind blew from the west which slightly
hardened the ground. On the 26th the rain returned, but at a
quarter to six in the morning we attacked on a front from the
Roulers railway to beyond Poelcappelle. From Passchendaele the
Bellevue spur runs westward, and between it and the Grafenstafel
spur is the valley of a brooklet called the Ravebeek, a tributary of
the Stroombeek. Along this stream the 4th and 3rd Canadian
Divisions moved against the main ridge, and won the little hill
just south of Passchendaele village. Their left had a hard struggle
on the Bellevue spur, where the old main Staden-Zonnebeke line
of the German defences ran ; but the place was carried in the
afternoon at the second attempt, and by the evening the Canadians
held all their objectives. On the left of the Canadians the 63rd
(Royal Naval) and the 58th Divisions continued the advance in
the low-lying ground north of the Bellevue ridge. That day on
our right British troops entered Gheluvelt for the first time since
the First Battle of Ypres. Their rifles, however, were choked with
mud, and they were compelled to withdraw before the enemy's
counter-attack.

On that day, the 26th, the French on our left were busy bridg-
ing the St. Jansbeek, in its lower course west of Draaibank. Their
object was to clear the ground called the Merckem peninsula,
between the Blankaart Lake, the Martjevaart or St. Jansbeek,
and the Yser Canal. On the 27th they were in action along with
the Belgians on their left, who crossed the Yser at Knockehoek.
The Allies won the villages of Aschhoop, Kippe, and Merckem,
and reached the southern shore of the Blankaart Lake. By the
morning of the 28th the whole of the Merckem peninsula had been
cleared of the enemy. This success menaced from the west the
Forest of Houthulst.

On 30th October came the attack on Passchendaele itself. At
5.50 a.m., in a clear, cold dawn, the 4th and 3rd Canadian Divisions
attacked from the top of the Ravebeek valley and along the crest
of the ridge, while the 58th and 63rd Divisions moved up the
Paddebeek rivulet which runs north of the Bellevue spur. At ten
in the morning the rain began again, and the strength of the
enemy position, and the desperate resistance of the 5th and nth
Bavarian Divisions which held it, made the day one of the severest
in the battle. The Canadians won Crest Farm, south of the
village, and carried also the spur to the west, and held it against
five counter-attacks. They forced their way into the outskirts of

1917J CAPTURE OF PASSCHENDAELE. 601

Passchendaele ; but the appalling condition of the Paddcbeek
valley prevented the Londoners and the Royal Naval Division
from advancing far, so that the Canadian front formed a sharp
salient.

But the end was not far off. Some days of dry weather fol-
lowed, during which small advances were made to improve our
position. At 6 a.m. on Tuesday, 6th November, the 2nd and ist
Canadian Divisions swept forward again, carried the whole of
Passchendaele, and pushed northward to the Goudberg spur.
Four days later they increased their gains, so that all the vital part
of the main ridge of West Flanders was in British hands. We
dominated the enemy's hinterland in the flats towards Roulers
and Thourout, and he had the prospect of a restless winter under
our direct observation. The Third Battle of Ypres had wiped out
the Salient where for three years we had been at the mercy of the
German guns.

III.

The great struggle which we have considered was strategically
a British failure. We did not come within measurable distance
of our major purpose, and that owing to no fault in generalship
or fighting virtue, but through the maleficence of the weather in
a land where weather was all in all. We gambled upon a normal
August, and we did not get it. The sea of mud which lapped around
the Salient was the true defence of the enemy. Consequently the
battle, which might have had a profound strategic significance in
the campaign, became merely an episode in the war of attrition,
a repetition of the Somme tactics, though conspicuously less suc-
cessful and considerably more costly than the fighting of 1916.
Since 31st July we had taken 24,065 prisoners, 74 guns, 941 machine
guns, and 138 trench mortars. We had drawn in seventy-eight
German divisions, of which eighteen had been engaged a second
or a third time. But, to set against this, our own losses had been
severe, and the enemy had now a big reservoir for reinforcements.
Already forty fresh divisions were in process of transference to
the West from the Russian front, apart from drafts to replace
losses in other units.

Third Ypres was the costliest battle up to date fought by a
British army, for the casualties from 31st July to 10th November
were in killed, wounded, and missing 230,000 men. For the gain of
a trivial ridge and a few miles of mud the price might well be deemed

602 A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. [Nov.

fantastic ; but such a judgment would miss the true reason of the
action. It was fought out of dire necessity, at the entreaty of
France, lest a worse thing should befall. At all costs it was needful
to prevent a German attack in the West during the summer and
autumn of 1917 while Petain was nursing his armies back to health.
On the whole it achieved this purpose of distraction, as Luden-
dorff's own narrative bears witness. It delayed the attack on the
Dvina, which was the end of Russia in the field ; it delayed the
attack on Italy, and when that came diverted troops to Flanders
that would have otherwise increased the danger at Caporetto ; it
gave France six months of ease, and enabled Petain to stage two
highly successful small-scale attacks which restored the moral
of his men. Above all, it gravely reduced the number of Ger-
many's best shock-troops, and so benefited the Allies in their fiery
trial of the following spring. If it be argued that it was too pro-
tracted and that the last stages might have been foregone, to
point to the preparations for the Cambrai battle would seem to be
sufficient answer. Haig had to fight so as to strain the enemy to
the uttermost, and if in his effort he himself suffered heavily he
had counted the cost. Like Russia at Tannenberg, like France
at Verdun, Britain at Third Ypres sacrificed herself for the common
cause.

One outstanding fact in the struggle was the superb endur-
ance and valour of the new British armies, fighting under con-
ditions which for horror and misery had scarcely been paralleled
in war. To them the Commander-in-Chief paid a fitting tribute :
" Throughout the northern operations our troops have been
fighting over ground every foot of which is sacred to the memory
of those who, in the First and Second Battles of Ypres, fought
and died to make possible the victories of the armies which to-day
are rolling back the tide stayed by their sacrifices. It is no dispar-
agement of the gallant deeds performed on other fronts to say
that, in the stubborn struggle for the line of hills which stretches
from Wytschaete to Passchendaele, the great armies that to-day
are shouldering the burden of our Empire have shown themselves
worthy of the regiments which, in October and November of 1914,
made Ypres take rank for ever amongst the most glorious of
British battles." Ypres was indeed to Britain what Verdun was
to France — the hallowed soil which called forth the highest virtue
of her people, a battle-ground where there could be no failure
without loss of honour. The armies which fought there in the
autumn of 1917 were very different from the few divisions which

1917] SUMMARY OF THE BATTLE. 603

had held the fort during the earlier struggles. But there were
links of connection. The Guards, by more than one fine advance,
were recompensed for the awful tension of October 1914, when at
Gheluvelt and Klein Zillebeke some of their best battalions had
been destroyed. And it fell to Canada, by the crowning victory
at Passchendaele, to avenge the gas attack of April 1915, when
only her dauntless two brigades stood between Ypres and the
enemy.

The battlefield of the old Salient was now as featureless as the
Sahara or the mid-Atlantic. All landmarks had been obliterated ;
the very ridges and streams had changed their character. The
names which still crowded the map had no longer any geographical
counterpart ; they were no more than measurements on a plane,
as abstract as the points of the mathematician. It was war bared
to the buff, stripped of any of the tattered romance which has
clung to older fields. And yet in its very grossness it was war
sublimated, for the material appanages had vanished. The quaint
Flemish names belonged not now to the solid homely earth ; they
seemed rather points on a spiritual map, marking advance and
retreat in the gigantic striving of the souls of peoples.

End of Volume III.

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