Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated), page 990
To the French command this prospect was not discouraging. They believed that the War could be won only on the front which was on French or Belgian soil, and that steady attack — la guerre d’usure — would presently wear down resistance. Such a plan, since surprise was impossible, could only succeed by so great an accumulation of munitions and men as would by brute force blast a way through. It underrated the enemy’s material strength and the stubbornness of his spirit. This unimaginative loyalty to the commonplace was to cripple the Allied strategy at the moment when it had the chance of a free field, and before its blunders had made escape impossible.
To Britain it fell to make an effort to break this bondage, and, because she made it half-heartedly, to fail. The Western Front was clearly the main theatre of war, but was it necessarily the decisive theatre? Might not an effort elsewhere so weaken Germany that defeat in the West would become inevitable? The British Government early in January, having received an urgent appeal for help from Russia, began to ask themselves questions. Was there nothing to be said for the traditional British strategy of using our naval power to apply military force at unexpected points? Was there not a danger that Joffre’s policy of attrition might be so slow as to entail the bankruptcy of the conqueror? We were confronted in Europe with a veritable fortress, but, if the principal gates were strongly held, were there no unguarded back-doors? A great scheme-making began among Ministers and their technical advisers. Lord Fisher favoured a descent on the Schleswig-Holstein coast; Mr. Lloyd George’s fancy dwelt at first on Salonika; but in the end the plan which won unanimous support was Mr. Churchill’s for the clearing of the Dardanelles and the taking of Constantinople. Success there would give immense and perhaps decisive results, for it would open the way for supplies to Russia, would bring in Italy and the wavering Balkan Powers on the Allied side, would put Turkey out of the war, and would make possible a deadly flank assault against Austria, Germany’s ally.
In the words of the official historian of the enterprise, the Western Front was a gamble with pounds for a gain of pence, the Dardanelles scheme a good chance of pounds for a stake of pennies. For the wager at the first was small. It was proposed to make the attack by sea alone, and to use in it some of our older battleships, destined presently for the scrap-heap. There were obvious dangers, and the weight of historical authority was against the success of ships’ guns against land forts, but it was fair to argue that the advance in naval gunnery and the use of aeroplanes for spotting had changed the situation.
What followed is a tragic example of an opportunity missed, and of a great enterprise nullified by a failure of nerve. On March 18th the attack on the Straits was launched. Most of the forts were silenced, and the thing seemed to be proceeding well until suddenly three battleships were lost from drifting mines. The action was broken off, and Admiral de Robeck declined to renew it until an army was ready to support him. Turkey at her last gasp was to her amazement given a breathing-space, of which she made brilliant use. Her resistance that day was the last effort of which she was at the moment capable, for she was almost destitute of munitions. Her Government had its papers packed, and was ready to leave for the uplands of Asia Minor. It was the drifting mines which decided our naval staff, and their presence was a fantastic accident. Ten days before a little Turkish steamer, the Nousret, had eluded the British night patrol of destroyers and laid a new line of twenty mines in Eren Kui Bay. On March 16th some of these mines were found and destroyed by our sweepers, but we did not realise that they were part of a line of mines, and so we did not look for more. Had we made a different deduction there would have been no casualties on the 18th, and de Robeck on the 19th or 20th would have taken his fleet into the Sea of Marmora. The officer in charge of the little Nousret probably never knew of the fatefulness of a deed which altered the whole course of the War.
Britain was now committed to a joint expedition, for it appeared that there were troops available for an attack by land. But success depended upon the provision of adequate forces, and that again depended upon a temporary defensive on the Western Front and a refraining from expensive assaults. Lord Kitchener unhappily halted between two opinions. He chose to fight at Gallipoli with only the loose fringe of British military strength, which was patently insufficient even for a first blow, and reinforcements for which could only be wrung from the West in the face of bitter opposition. It was the old story of the Sibylline books. We purchased failure in the end at a price which a month or two before would have assured triumphant success. Mr. Churchill’s summary is the bare truth:
Three divisions in February could have occupied the Gallipoli peninsula with little fighting; five could have captured it after March 18th; seven were insufficient by the end of April, but nine might just have done it. Eleven might have sufficed at the beginning of July. Fourteen were to prove insufficient on August 7th.
The story of the Dardanelles is one of the noblest and cruellest in the War. Had it been possible for the Allies to forgo their futile offensives in the West in 1915, for which they were not ready, to hold the line there to the stalemate which Germany’s preoccupation in Russia would not have permitted her to break, and to concentrate on cutting their way through to Constantinople, they would have succeeded, and the final battle on the Western Front would have been antedated by months, perhaps by years. But such prevision is for the immortals and not for fallible men; and in the spring of 1915 there seemed to be cogent reasons for the wrong conclusion. The tale of the campaign is one of superb feats of arms, from the landing on April 25th to the final August failure at Suvla, when fine troops were squandered by old and feeble generals. Of the commander-in-chief, Sir Ian Hamilton, it may fairly be said that he made few mistakes, and that he showed a resource and a resolution which were only too rare in British leadership. Si Pergama dextra defendi possent etiam hac defensa fuissent. The expedition closed with a miracle, when at the end of the year the peninsula was evacuated, in defiance of all precedent, without a casualty. The European shore of the Narrows had now become not less famous than the opposite coast and the plain of Troy. Had the fashion endured of linking the strife of men with the gods, what strange myth would not have sprung from this rescue of British troops in the teeth of winter gales and uncertain seas! It would have been rumoured, as at Troy, that Poseidon had done battle for his children.
II
On the Western Front 1915 was a year of dupes. France, passionately eager to recover her lost territory, fell into a strategic coma, with the consequence that her armies and those of Britain were hurled idly against a fortress-wall and broken. We believed that each assault weakened the enemy’s resisting power, and by a fantastic arithmetic convinced ourselves that his losses were out of all proportion to our own, when the truth was that the attrition fell on the attack rather than on the defence.
The strength of the German fortifications was now recognised, and a theory of the offensive was developed. If a sufficiently powerful artillery fire was accumulated upon a section of the front, parapets and wire entanglements could be blown to pieces, and if the artillery, lengthening its range, were able to put a barrage between the enemy and his supports, then infantry might advance in comparative safety. The difficulty came with the next step. The British attack at Neuve Chapelle in March, and the attempts at Festubert and in the Artois in the early summer, failed because of the narrowness of the front of assault. To tear a rent no more than five miles wide meant that time was given for local reserves to come up and hold the gap, so that the enemy’s front hardened like concrete before the advance.
In April the Germans introduced a new weapon by their use of poison gas in the action known as the Second Battle of Ypres, but, having inadequate reserves, they were unable to exploit their success. The innovation was in defiance of the etiquette of civilised war, but it was no more inhumane than shells and bayonets and liquid fire. One consequence of that action, in which Britain suffered especially, was to draw popular attention to our weakness in munitions, and to inaugurate a strenuous campaign for increased production. In September Joffre gathered his strength for a great effort on each side of the wide salient now formed by the German lines in France. The assault was to be in Champagne and in the Artois, delivered on broad fronts, and preceded by a sustained and intensive bombardment, which it was hoped would smooth the path for the infantry, but which at the same time gave ample notice to the enemy. The French advance conspicuously failed; that of the British between Lens and La Bassée won at Loos a remarkable initial success, which could not be exploited because of the bungling of the British High Command and the supineness of the French on our right.
The chief lesson of Loos was the need of still more artillery power, a lesson readily learned; but there was a further moral which was only drawn by the discerning few — that, even with a wide front of attack, in a frontal assault of which the enemy was forewarned, wearied troops would be met by fresh reserves, and the battle would become stereotyped and end in stalemate. There was another omen, too, to which all were blind. In the first hours of Loos a Highland brigade advanced four miles, and passed beyond all but the last German trench line. Behind them there was no tactical plan, and no certainty of support, and their feat was set down as a noble madness. Nevertheless that madness contained the seeds of future success, for it had in it the rudiments of “infiltration” — the tactics by which storm-troops found weak places in a front and filtered through. Three years later, when we had learned what the enemy could teach us, the same method was applied by a master hand to break in turn each of the German defences.
Sir John French’s conduct of Loos made his position impossible, and before the end of the year he was relieved of his command. He had many of the best qualities of the British soldier: he was humane, kindly, in close touch with his men; but he was too old and too set in his ways for this kind of war. He had himself little to contribute in the way of ideas, and his mind was shut to those of other people. He fought confusedly and gallantly by a plan which was not of his making, and which he often imperfectly understood. Haig, his successor, was of a different stamp. With greater steadfastness of character, he had far higher powers of mind. He, too, had prepossessions to get rid of, and, for one of his dogged, precise and conservative temperament, the process was slow. On this point alone he can be fairly criticised. There is a close parallel with Foch. The Frenchman was at the start too hasty and high-flying, the Scot too rigid and deliberate. When disaster and disappointment had sobered the one and quickened and clarified the mind of the other, they became great soldiers.
On the Eastern Front the year began with brighter promise for Russia. The winter battles in Masuria had indeed driven her back to the Niemen, but she had still her hold on Galicia, where in March she captured Przemysl, and she still menaced the Carpathian passes. Austria, foreseeing that Italy would soon take the field against her, threatened to make a separate peace unless her ally came to her rescue. Hindenburg and Ludendorff pressed her case, and Falkenhayn, who was contemplating a great attack upon the British right in France, unwillingly consented to use in the East his fresh reserves. It was a momentous decision, for a German attack upon the ill-munitioned British Army, before its new troops were ready, might have decided the war. The German generals in the East, and the Austrian Conrad, believed that by a great effort Russia could be finally put out of action. Falkenhayn differed; she would be crippled, he thought, but no more; and he would consent only to a limited operation, which if necessary could be broken off to permit of a transfer of troops to the West.
Yet the attack which opened on May 2nd on the line of the Donajetz was so brilliantly directed and so overwhelmingly successful that at first it seemed as if Hindenburg’s dream had come true. It was led by Mackensen, a master of speed and surprise, and his chief of staff was Seeckt, who after the war was to rebuild the German Army. Tactically it was the forerunner of the method of infiltration. Although outnumbered by nearly half a million, Mackensen in three days was in open country, and in a fortnight had advanced ninety-five miles. By the end of May the Russians were behind the San and the Dniester. In June Lemberg was retaken, and there was no enemy left in Galicia. The task was now to cut off the Warsaw salient, and on August 4th Warsaw fell. But Russia was now retreating on better communications, and, though Kovno and Brest Litovsk and Vilna were abandoned, by the autumn she had found a line on which she could stand. For Germany it was a conspicuous triumph in the field, and she now had Poland in her hands. But her enemy was unconquered, for Russia had retreated into those wastes of wood and water which had baffled Napoleon. . . . She was presently to retreat into more impenetrable wastes of the spirit.
On the rout of Russia there followed the overrunning of Serbia. Bulgaria, at last convinced of where her interests lay, threw in her lot with Germany, and in October German, Austrian and Bulgarian armies, under the direction of Mackensen, advanced against the little country from north and east. The Allies could give no effective aid, though weak British and French forces had landed at Salonika. The Serbs, a race of natural warriors who had few superiors, were driven in retreat through the Albanian mountains, and scarcely 100,000 soldiers reached the coast. British and Italian ships carried them to Corfu, where the remnant was rested and refitted and next year joined the Allies at Salonika. With the retreat went the aged King Peter, in whose strange soul burned the stubborn courage of his people. “I have struggled a great deal in my life,” he said, “and I am tired, bruised and broken. But I shall not die before I see the victory of my country.”
The year closed for Britain in shadows. Nowhere on the globe had the Allies improved their position. The various battles in the West had won little and cost much. Russia had retreated almost off the fighting map. Serbia had disappeared. Italy had entered the alliance, but was making little progress on her difficult fronts. The Gallipoli expedition had failed conspicuously, and had only been saved by a miracle from destruction. Our army in Mesopotamia, having attempted a vain dash for Bagdad, was now beleaguered in Kut. Our troops at Salonika were holding on grimly to a narrow littoral. The German submarine menace was daily growing, and the liner Lusitania and many merchant vessels had been sunk. German aircraft were bombing our coasts from the Thames to the Tyne, and official secrecy increased the rumours of our casualties. The honours of the year lay clearly with the enemy.
The inevitable result was criticism, the angry and often unjust criticism of a confused people. Hatred of the enemy was growing, fed by true and false tales of atrocities, and, since Britain is always a poor hater, the new mood made her acutely uncomfortable. The purpose of the nation was beyond question, but it was not being told what to do in order to achieve it. Men clutched at any proposal for organisation and discipline. Drink was the enemy, said Mr. Lloyd George, and the consequence was a dispute in which all sense of proportion was lost. In the end a compromise was reached under which Government control was established in scheduled areas, and the King set the example of voluntary abnegation by ordering that during the War no intoxicants should be served in the royal household. The country, it was widely felt, was not yet organised for war, and the questions of man-power for the armies and labour for the factories began to trouble the public mind. But first, as is the British habit, the critical blast fell on the civilian Government.
The fighting in the spring had made acute the business of munitions. The War Office was blamed for the shortage, though the blame was post-dated, for the improvement in the situation in September was to the War Office’s credit. A Munitions Committee was formed in April, and a Ministry of Munitions in June, with Mr. Lloyd George as the presiding genius. He had found in the conduct of the War a cause which absorbed that energy which had once been given to domestic reform. A change in the Government was naturally demanded, and at the close of May the old Liberal Ministry was replaced by a coalition, which brought into the Cabinet Conservatives like Mr. Balfour, Lord Curzon, Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Austen Chamberlain and Mr. Bonar Law, and a representative of Labour in Mr. Arthur Henderson. One grotesque result was that Mr. Churchill, who was like a panther among polar bears, was relegated to the lowest Cabinet post, and that Lord Haldane, the Army’s creator, was left out altogether. The new Cabinet had no great merit beyond its novelty, for, though it was composed of able men, the machine was too cumbrous for swift and consistent action. The most hopeful fact was that in the work of the Munitions Ministry an attempt was at last being made to enlist business talent in the public service. It was not till November that the mechanism was improved by the creation of a small strategic Cabinet of five — the Prime Minister himself, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Balfour, Mr. Bonar Law and Mr. Lloyd George.
There was also heard for the first time criticism of our military leadership. Lord Kitchener had lost much of his earlier prestige, for he had had to bear the blame for all our failures. But there were profounder causes of disquiet. The nation was militarily too uninstructed to grasp the faults of our battle tactics in the West, but many were beginning to realise that, taking the War as a whole, we lacked any serious and consistent strategic plan. We had made adventures without counting the cost, we had drifted into impossible situations, and had suffered the enemy to dictate our line of policy. Reasonable men had come to believe that a reform of our military machine, and not a shuffling of Ministers, was the vital question. The first need was for a competent General Staff at home, for Lord Kitchener had been compelled to act as his own General Staff, and before the end of the year Sir William Robertson was brought back to the War Office. It was an improvement in our domestic mechanism, but it left untouched the more urgent question of a central command for all the Allies in the West.
But the two subjects which most agitated the popular mind were the temper of Labour and the matter of conscription. There had long been troubles on the Clyde, in South Wales and elsewhere, and the new munitions policy, with its wholesale suspension of trade union rules, increased the tension. Much foolish and unjust recrimination followed, which did not help matters, and till the end of the War, in spite of the high wages, industrial troubles were always on a hair-trigger. It was inevitable. There was a work-weariness as well as a war-weariness, factory-shock as well as shell-shock. British Labour reflected the mood of the country; it had its moments of revolt and discontent as well as its steady hours of resolution. As the demand for an increase of the armies became more clamant it assumed a special importance. The first step was Lord Derby’s attempt to organise recruiting on a more scientific basis. By the end of the year it was apparent that this organised voluntaryism had failed. The figures were published early in 1916, and after that it was only a matter of months till conscription followed.
