Sketch 69Sketch 69.
Sketch 69.
The first outpost actions with the enemy, and even the more vigorous struggles when full contact had been established with this third army arrived thus from the south-east, only led the Austrian commander deeper into his mistaken calculation; for upon theSunday, August 23rd, a local success was achieved which seems to be magnified by the Austrians into a decisive check administered to the enemy. If this was their view, they were soon to be undeceived. In those very days which saw the greatest peril in the West, the last days of August, during which the Franco-British Allies were falling back from the Sambre, pursued by the numbers we have seen upon an earlier page, the third and the second Russian armies effected their junction, the moment of their first joining hands being apparently that same Monday, the 24th of August, during which Sir John French was falling back upon Maubeuge. By the middle of the ensuing week they had already advanced with a very heavy numerical superiority upon the part of the Russians, which threatened to involve the Austrian second army in disaster. If that went, the first army was at the mercy of the victors upon the south, and with every day that passed the chance of collapse increased. Now, too late (so far as we can judge), the second Austrian army disposed itself for retreat, but that retreat was not allowed to proceed in the orderly fashion which itscommander had decided, and in the event part of it turned into a rout, all of it developed into a definite disaster for the enemy, and as conspicuous a success for our ally. That this success was not decisive, as this great war must count decisions, the reader will perceive before its description is concluded; but it set a stamp upon the whole of the war in the East, which months of fighting have not removed but rather accentuated. It delivered the province of Galicia into the hands of Russia, it brought that Power to the Carpathians, it ultimately compelled Germany to decide upon very vigorous action of her own immediately in Poland, and it may therefore be justly said to have changed the face of the war.
To this great series of actions, which history will probably know by the name of Lemberg, we will now turn.
When this large Russian movement against the right of von Auffenberg's army, and the considerable Russian concentration there, was clearly discerned, the Austrian force was immediately augmented, and it was not until after the first stages of the conflict we are about to describe thatit counted the full numbers mentioned above. But, even so reinforced, it was inadequate for the very heavy task which there fell upon it. It is not to be denied that its heterogeneous composition—that is, its necessary weakness in quality—affected its value; but the principal factor in its ill success was still the superiority of Russian numbers in this field, and this, in its turn, proceeded from a rapidity and completeness in the Russian mobilization for which the enemy had never made provision.
The action of the Russian left against von Auffenberg was twofold: Russky, from the north, was coming across the river Bug, and struck an Austrian entrenched line in front of Lemberg. His numbers permitted him to turn that entrenched line, or, at any rate, to threaten its turning, for Russky's right stretched almost to within cavalry touch of Tomasow. In combination with this movement, and strictly synchronizing with it, Brussilov was advancing from the Sereth River. Both these movements were being carried out full during the last days of August.
Sketch 70Sketch 70.
Sketch 70.
It was on Friday, the 28th of thatmonth, that Tarnopol fell, as we have seen, into the hands of the Russians, and that Brussilov was, therefore, able to effect his junction with Russky in the north, and this success was the occasion of the first of those bayonet actions on a large scale wherein the Russians throughout the war continued to show suchconsiderable personal superiority over their opponents.
When Tarnopol had gone, not on account of the loss of their geographical point, but because its occupation rendered the junction of the Russian armies possible, and their advance in one great concave line upon Lemberg, it was no longer doubtful that von Auffenberg had lost this preliminary campaign.
There are moments in war where the historian can fix a turning-point, although the decision itself shall not yet have been reached. Thus, in the campaign of 1793 between the French Revolution and its enemies, Turcoing was not a decisive action, but it was the necessary breeder of the decisive actions that followed. And in the same way Tarnopol, though but a local success, decided Lemberg. In the last days of August all von Auffenberg's right had to fall back rather rapidly upon entrenched positions to the south and east of Lemberg itself, just as his left had had to fall back on similar positions against Russky.
The action for Lemberg itself opened, by a curious coincidence, the campaignwhich was the anniversary of the first fighting round Sedan, and closed precisely at the moment when the tide of German advance in the West was turned.
Forty-eight hours decided the issue. It was, perhaps, Russky's continual extended threat to envelop the left of the Austrian position and to come upon Auffenberg's communications which was the chief factor in the result; but that result was, after the junction of the two Russian armies, no longer really in doubt. The first heavy assault upon the trenches had taken place upon the Wednesday morning at dawn; before nightfall of Thursday the two extremes of the Austrian line were bent back into such a horseshoe that any further delay would have involved complete disaster. It is true that the central trenches in front—that is, to the east of the great town—still held secure, and had not, indeed, been severely tried. But it remains true that von Auffenberg had committed the serious error of risking defeat in front of such a city. And here some digression upon the nature of this operation may be of service to the reader, because it is one which reoccurs more thanonce in the first phases of the war, and must, in the nature of things, occur over and over again before the end of it.
Examples of it already appeared in the first six months of the war, in the case of Lille and in the case of Lodz; and it is a necessarily recurrent case in all modern warfare.
A greatmoderntown, particularly if it has valuable industries, is a lure as powerful over the modern commander as was a capital or the seat of any government or even a fortress for those of earlier times. To abandon such a centre is to let fall into the enemy's hands opportunities for provisionment andmachineryfor his further supply; it is to allow great numbers of one's nationals to pass as hostages into his power; it is nearly always to give up to him the junction of several great railways; it is to permit him to levy heavy indemnities, and even, if he is in such a temper, to destroy in great quantities the accumulated wealth of the past.
On account of all this, it requires a single eye to the larger issues of war, and a sort of fanaticism for pure strategy in a commander before he will consent to fallbehind a position of such political and material value, and to let it fall to his opponent.
But, on the other hand, such a position is as bad in strategical value as it is good in material and political value.
If you suffer defeat in front of a great modern town, and have to retreat through it under the blows of the victorious enemy, you are in the worst possible position for conducting that retreat. The streets of the town (but few of which will run parallel to your course and can, therefore, serve as avenues of escape for your army) are so many defiles in which your columns will get hopelessly congested. The operation may be compared to the pouring of too much liquid into a funnel which has too small an orifice. Masses of your transport will remain clogged outside the place; you run the risk of a partial and perhaps of a complete disaster as the enemy presses on.
There is very much more than this. A great town cannot but contain, if you have long occupied it, the material of your organization; you will probably abandon documents which the enemy should notsee. You will certainly, in the pressure of such a flight, lose accumulated stores. Again, the transverse streets are so many points of "leakage," into which your congested columns will bulge out and get confused. Again, you will be almost necessarily dealing with the complication of a mass of civilian conditions which should never be allowed to interrupt a military operation.
In general, to fight in front of a great town, when the chances are against you, is as great an error as to fight in front of a marsh with few causeways; so far as mere topography is concerned, it is a greater error still.
Lemberg did not, indeed, fulfil all these conditions. It is very large (not far from a quarter of a million people), with all its suburbs it is nearly two miles in extreme extent, and its older or central part is a confusion of narrow streets; but it is not highly industrialized, and the position of the Austrian armies was such that the retreat could be effected mainly from either side of the built area, particularly as the main enemy pressure had not come in front of the city along the Busk Road,but far to the east and south in the open field. But Lemberg was an exceedingly important railway centre (seven lines converge there), and it contained an immense amount of war munitions. When, therefore, the retreat was tardily undertaken, the fact that the more precipitate retirement had begun in front of the city and not behind it was of considerable effect in what followed.
To some extent von Auffenberg, in spite of the tardiness of his decision to retire, had protected his retreat. The main line of that retreat was established for him, of course, by the main Galician railway, which runs back from Lemberg to Przemysl. He prepared a position some two days' march behind Lemberg, and defended with a rearguard at Grodek the belated withdrawal of his main force. But from the nature of the Russian advance, Russky, upon von Auffenberg's left, perpetually threatened this railway; and Brussilov, upon his right, pressed the rapidly-melting mass of the varied contingents opposed to him through the difficult, hilly, and woody country of the foothills.
Sketch 71Sketch 71.
Sketch 71.
It was upon the Friday, September 4th, that the Austrian evacuation of Lemberg was complete, and that the Russian administration was established in the town. Before Monday, the 7th, the Austrian right had already half converted their retirement into a rout, and the great captures of prisoners and of guns had begun. That important arm, the irregular light cavalry of the Russians, notably the great Cossack contingent, found its opportunity, and the captures began upon a scale far exceeding anything which the war had hitherto shown or was to showfor at least the next six months. The matter is of more importance, to our judgment of the war, in its quality than in its scale. In the very same week at Tannenberg nearly as many Russians had been eliminated from the Russian forces as Austrians were here eliminated from the Austrian forces. But the point is that, whereas in the Battle of Tannenberg envelopment, with its consequent slaughter of men who cannot escape and its wholesale captures, left the rest of the Russian army with itsmoralintact, the Austrian losses were the product of a partial dissolution, and affected the whole of their southern army. First and last one-third of it had fallenas prisonersinto Russian hands, apart from the enormous number of killed and removed wounded. It could only just be said that that army remained in being upon Monday, the 7th September, with which date this section of my work ends. The other Austrian army to the north, its flank thus uncovered, was compelled to fall back rapidly, though the forces in front of it were small; and the Austro-Hungarian service never fully recovered from this great blow.
The province of East Prussia is of a character peculiar in the German Empire and in Europe.
That character must be grasped if the reader is to understand what fortunes attended the war in this region; for it is a district which in its history, in its political value, and in its geographical arrangements has very powerfully affected the whole of the campaign.
Historically this district is the cradle of that mixed race whose strict, narrow, highly defined, but quite uncreative policy has now piqued, now alarmed, civilized Europe for almost two hundred years.
Sketch 72Sketch 72.
Sketch 72.
The Prussian, or rather the Prussian aristocracy, which, by achieving the leadership of Germany, has flung so heavy a mass at Europe, originated in the rough admixture of certain West German and Christian knights with the vague pagan population of the Eastern Baltic plain, which, until almost the close of the Middle Ages, was still a field for missionary effort and for crusade. It was the business of the Teutonic knights to tame this march ofChristendom. They accomplished their work almost out of sight of the governing empire, the Papacy, and Christendom in general, with what infamies history records. The district thus occupied was not withinthe belt of that high Polish culture which is one of the glories of Europe. Nations may not inexactly be divided into those who seek and those who avoid the sea. The Poles are of the latter type. This belt, therefore, ofBorussia(whence our word Prussia is derived)—roughly from the Vistula up on to the Bight of Libau—was held by the Teutonic knights in a sort of savage independence. The Christian faith, which it had been their pretext and at first their motive to spread, took little root; but they did open those avenues whereby the civilization which Germany itself had absorbed from the south and west could filter in; and the northern part of the district, that along the sea (which is the least marshy, and, as that poor country goes, the least barren), was from the close of the Middle Ages German-owned, though for some generations nominally adherent to the Polish crown. The Polish race extended no farther northward in the present province than the lake country of its southern half, and even there suffered an admixture of Lithuanian and German blood.
That lake country well merits aparticular description, for its topography has powerfully affected the war in the East; but for the moment we must chiefly grasp the political character following upon the history of this land. The chief noble of "Borussia," the governing duke, acquired, not from the empire nor perhaps in the eyes of Europe, but from the Polish monarchy, the title of king, and it must never be forgotten that the capital at Berlin, and the "Mark"—that is, the frontier march—of Brandenburg, though now the centre, are neither the origins nor the pride of the Hohenzollern power. They were kings of Prussia because Prussia was extraneous to the European system. There came a moment, as I have pointed out in an earlier page in this book, when the Prussian kingship and the electorate of Brandenburg coincided in one person. All men of education know, and all men whatsoever feel, what influence an historical origin will have upon national outlook. East Prussia, therefore, remains to-day something of a political fetish. Its towns may be called colonies of the Germans, the birthplaces or the residences of men famous in the German story. Itscountry-sides, although still largely inhabited by a population of servile memories and habits not thoroughly welded with their masters, do not take up great space in the view the German takes of the region. He sees rather the German landowner, the German bailiff, the German schoolmaster, and the numerous German tenants of the wealthier type who, though a minority, form the chief part of this social system. We shall see later what this miscalculation cost the great landowners during the Russian invasion, but we must note in passing that it is a miscalculation common to every people. Only that which is articulate in the States stands out large in the social perspective during periods of order and of peace.
The Prussian royal house, the Prussian aristocracy, have then for this bastion towards the east an especial regard, which has not been without its sentimental influence upon the course of the war; and that regard is very highly increased by the artificial political boundaries of modern times.
East Prussia is, for the Germans as a whole, their rampart against the Slav; and though, beyond the present purely political and only century-old frontier, a largeGerman-speaking population is to be discovered (especially in the towns under Russian rule), yet such is the influence of a map upon a people essentially bookish in their information, that East Prussia stands to the whole German Empire, as well as to its wealthier inhabitants, for a proof of the German power to withstand the dreaded pressure of the Russian from the East.
It was to be expected, therefore, that two strategical consequences would flow from these non-strategical conditions: first, that the Russians would be tempted—though, no doubt, in very small force for such a secondary operation—to raid a district towards which the enemy's opinion was so sensitive; secondly, that enemy would be tempted, after each such effort, to extend a disproportionate force in ridding the country of such raids.
The Germans, for all the dictates of pure strategics, would hardly hold firm under the news that Slav soldiers were in the farms and country-houses, and were threatening the townsfolk of East Prussia. The Russians, though no direct advantage was to be gained, and though the bulk of their force must be used elsewhere, wouldcertainly be drawn to move into East Prussia in spite of the known and peculiarly heavy difficulties to an advance which that province presented.
What were those difficulties?
They were of two kinds, the second of which has been, perhaps, unduly emphasized at the expense of the first.
The first was, that the Baltic extreme of this region lay at the very end of the longest possible line the Russians could move on. Even supposing their front extended (as soon it did) from the Carpathians to the sea, this Baltic piece was the end of the line and farthest from their material bases and their sources of equipment. It was badly served with railways, difficult of access from the soil lying to the east, and backed by that sparsely inhabited belt of Russian territory in which the modern capital of St. Petersburg has been artificially erected, but which is excentric to the vital process of Russia. As a fact, even after eight months of war, let alone in the first phases which we are here about to describe, the extreme end of this line was not attempted by the Russians at all.
Next to this extreme position, which was the first handicap, comes the region of the lakes, the nature of which was the second handicap.
The Masurian Lake district can best be appreciated by some description of its geology and its landscape. It was probably moulded by the work of ice in the past. Great masses of ice have ground out, in their very slow progress towards the sea over the very slight incline northwards of that line, hollows innumerable, and varying from small pools to considerable lakes; the ice has left, upon a background of sand, patches of clay, which hold the waters of all this countryside in brown stretches of shallow mere, and in wider extents of marsh and bog. The rare travellers who explore this confusion of low rounded swells and flats carry back with them to better lands a picture of one grossly monotonous type continuing day upon day. Pine and birch woods, often ordered with the regularity and industry of the German forest organization, but often also straggling and curiously stunted and small, break or confuse the view upon either side.
The impression of the district is most clearly conveyed from some sandy summit, bare of trees, whence a man may overlook, though not from any great height, the desolate landscape for some miles. He obtains from such a view neither the sense of forest which wooded lands of great height convey in spite of their clearings, nor the sense of endless plain which he would find farther to the east or to the north. He perceives through the singularly clear air in autumn brown heaths and plains set here and there with the great stretches of woodland and farmsteads, the stubble of which is soon confused by the eye in the distance with the barren heaths around. In winter, the undulating mass of deep and even snow is marked everywhere by the small, brown, leafless trees in their great groupings, and by the pines, as small, and weighted with the burden of the weather; but much the most striking of the things seen in such a landscape are the stretches of black water, or, if the season be hard, of black ice which, save when the snow has recently fallen, fierce winds will commonly have swept bare.
The military character of such a regionwill be clear. It is, in the technical language of military art, a labyrinth ofdefiles. Care has been expended upon the province, especially in the last two generations, and each narrow passage between the principal sheets of water carries a road, often a hard causeway. A considerable system of railways takes advantage of the same natural narrow issues; but even to those familiar with the country, the complexity of these narrow dry gates or defiles, and their comparative rarity (contrasted with the vast extent of waterlogged soil or of open pool), render an advance against any opposition perilous, and even an unopposed advance slow, and dependent upon very careful Staff work. Columns in their progress are for hours out of touch one with the other, and an unexpected check in some one narrow must be met by the force there present alone, for it will not be able to obtain immediate reinforcement.
Again, all this line, with its intermixture of sand and clay, which is due to its geological origin, is a collection of traps for any commander who has not thoroughly studied his lines of advance or ofretreat—one might almost say for any commander who has not had long personal experience of the place. There will be across one mere a belt of sand or gravel, carrying the heaviest burdens through the shallow water as might a causeway. Its neighbour, with a surface precisely twin, with the same brown water, fringed by the same leaves and dreary stretches of stunted wood, will be deep in mud, but a natural platform may stretch into a lake and fail the column which uses it before the farther shore is reached. In the strongest platforms of this kind gaps of deep clay or mud unexpectedly appear. But even with these deceptions, a column is lucky which has only to deal in its march with open water and firm banks; for the whole place is sown with what were formerly the beds of smaller meres, and are now bogs hardened in places, in others still soft—the two types of soil hardly distinguishable.
During any orderly advance, an army proceeding through the Masurian Lakes will strictly confine itself to the great causeways and to the railway. During any retreat in which it is permitted to observe the same order it will be similarlyconfined to the only possible issues; but let the retreat be confused, and disaster at once threatens.
A congested column attempting to spread out to the right or to the left will fall into marsh. Guns which it has attempted to save by the crossing of a ford will sooner or later find mud and be abandoned. Men will be drowned in the unexpected deeps, transport embedded and lost; and apart from all this vast wastage, the confusion of units will speedily put such a brake upon the whole process of retirement that envelopment by an enemy who knows the district more thoroughly is hardly to be avoided.
It was this character in the dreary south of East Prussia which was the cause of Tannenberg, and as we read the strategical plan of that disaster, we must keep in mind the view so presented of an empty land, thus treacherous with marsh and reed and scrub and stretches of barren flat, which may be heath, or may be a horse's height and more of slightly covered slime.
The first phase of the business lasts until the 24th of August, beginning withthe 7th of that month, and may be very briefly dealt with.
Two Russian armies, numbering altogether perhaps 200,000 men, or at the most a quarter of a million, advanced, the one from the Niemen, the other from the Narew—that is, the one from the east, the other from the south, into East Prussia. The Germans had here reserve troops, in what numbers we do not know, but perhaps half the combined numbers of the Russian invasion, or perhaps a little more. The main shock was taken upon the eastern line of invasion at Gumbinnen; the Germans, defeated there, and threatened by the continued advance of the other army to the west of them, which forbade their retreat westward, fell back in considerable disorder upon Königsberg, lost masses of munitions and guns, and were shut up in that fortress. The defeat at Gumbinnen occupied four days—from the 16th to the 20th of August.
Meanwhile the Russian army which was advancing from the Narew had struck a single German army corps—the 20th—in the neighbourhood of Frankenau.The Russian superiority in numbers was very great; the German army corps was turned and divided. Half of it fled westward, abandoning many guns and munitions; the other half fled north-eastward towards Königsberg, and the force as a whole disappeared from the field. The Russians pushed their cavalry westward; Allenstein was taken, and by the 25th of August the most advanced patrols of the Russians had almost reached the Vistula.
The necessity for retaking East Prussia by the Germans was a purely political one. The vast crowd of refugees flying westward spread panic within the empire. The personal feeling of the Emperor and of the Prussian aristocracy in the matter of the defeated province was keen. Had that attempt to retake East Prussia failed, military history would point to it as a capital example of the error of neglecting purely strategical for political considerations. As a fact, it succeeded beyond all expectation, and its success is known as the German victory of Tannenberg.
The nature of this victory may be grasped from the accompanying sketch map.
From the town of Mlawa, just within Russian Poland, beyond the frontier, runs, coming up from Warsaw, a railway to Soldau, just upon the Prussian side of the frontier. At Soldau three railways converge—one from the east, one going west to Niedenberg and the junction of Ortelsberg, a third coming in from the north-east and Eylau.
Sketch 73Sketch 73.
Sketch 73.
From Eylau, through Osterode, themain international line runs through Allenstein, and so on eastward, while a branch from this goes through Passenheim to the junction at Ortelsberg.
Here, then, you have a quadrilateral of railways about fifty miles in length. Within that quadrilateral is extremely bad country—lakes, marshes, and swamps—and the only good roads within it are those marked in single lines upon my sketch—the road from Allenstein through Hohenstein to Niedenberg, and the road from Niedenberg to Passenheim. As one goes eastwards on that road from Niedenberg to Passenheim, in the triangle Niedenberg-Passenheim-Ortelsberg, the country gets worse and worse, and is a perfect labyrinth of marsh, wood, and swamp. The development of the action in such a ground was as follows:—
The Russian commander, Samsonoff, with his army running from Allenstein southwards, was facing towards the west. He had with him perhaps 200,000 men, perhaps a trifle less. His reconnaissance was faulty, partly because the aeroplanes could discover little in that wooded country, partly because the Staff work wasimperfect, and his Intelligence Department not well informed by his cavalry patrols. He thought he had against him to the west only weak forces. As a fact, the Germans were sending against him what they themselves admit to be 150,000 men, and what were quite possibly nearer 200,000, for they had drawn largely upon the troops within Germany. They had brought round by sea many of the troops shut up in Königsberg, and they had brought up the garrisons upon the Vistula. Further, they possessed, drawn from these garrisons, a great superiority in that arm which throughout all the earlier part of the great war was the German stand-by—heavy artillery, and big howitzers capable of use in the field.
On Wednesday, 26th August, Samsonoff first discovered that he had a formidable force in front of him.
It was under the command of von Hindenburg, a man who had studied this district very thoroughly, and who, apart from his advantage in heavy artillery, knew that difficult country infinitely better than his opponents. During the Wednesday, the 26th, Hindenburg stood upon thedefensive, Samsonoff attacking him upon the line Allenstein-Soldau. At the end of that defensive, the attack on which was badly hampered in so difficult a country, von Hindenburg massed men upon his right near Soldau. This move had two objects: first, by pushing the Russians back there to make them lose the only good road and railway by which they could retire south upon their communications into the country whence they had come; secondly, to make them think, in their natural anxiety for those communications, that his main effort would be delivered there to the south. As a fact, it was his intention to act elsewhere. But the effect of his pressure along the arrowawas to give the Russian line by the evening of that Wednesday, the 26th of August, the form of the line 1 upon Sketch 73.
The advantage he had thus gained in front of Soldau, Hindenburg maintained by rapid and successful entrenchment; and the next day, Thursday, 27th August, he moved great numbers round by railway to his left near Allenstein, and appeared there with a great local superiorityin numbers and in heavy guns. By the evening of that day, then, the 27th, he had got the Russian line into the position 2, and the chief effort was being directed along the arrowb. On the 28th and 29th the pressure continued, and increased here upon the north; the Russian right was pushed back upon Passenheim, for which there was a most furious fight; and by the evening of the 29th Samsonoff's whole body was bent right round into the curve of the line 3, and vigorous blows were being dealt against it along the arrowc, which bent it farther and farther in.
It was clearly evident by that evening, the 29th of August, that Samsonoff must retreat; but his opportunities for such a retreat were already difficult. All he had behind him was the worst piece in the whole country—the triangle Passenheim-Ortelsberg-Niedenberg—and his main avenue of escape was a defile between the lake which the railway at Ortelsberg uses.
His retirement became hopelessly congested. Further pressure along the arrowd, during the 30th and 31st, broke that retirement into two halves, one half (asat 5) making off eastwards, the other half (as at 4) bunched together in a hopeless welter in a country where every egress was blocked by swamp and mire, and subjected to the pounding of the now concentrated ring of heavy guns. The body at 5 got away in the course of the 1st and 2nd of September, but only at the expense of leaving behind them great numbers of guns, wounded, and stragglers. The body at 4 was, in the military sense of the word, "annihilated." It numbered at least two army corps, or 80,000 men, and of these it is probable that 50,000 fell into the hands of the enemy, wounded and unwounded. The remainder, representing the killed, and the chance units that were able to break out, could hardly have been more than 20,000 to 30,000 men.
Such was the victory of Tannenberg—an immensely successful example of that enveloping movement which the Germans regarded as their peculiar inheritance; a victory in nature recalling Sedan, and upon a scale not inferior to that battle.
The news of that great triumph reachedBerlin upon Sedan Day, at the very moment when the corresponding news from the West was that von Kluck had reached the gates of Paris, and had nothing in front of him but the broken and inferior armies of a disastrous defeat.
At this point it is well to pause and consider an element of the vastest consequence to the whole conduct of these great campaigns—I mean the element of German confidence.
Here we have a nation which has received within a fortnight of its initial large operations, within the first five weeks of a war which it had proudly imposed upon its enemies, the news of a victory more startlingly triumphant than its most extreme expectation of success had yet imagined possible.
Let the reader put himself into the position of a German subject in his own station of life, a town dweller, informed as is the English reader by a daily press, which has come to be his sole source of opinion, enjoying or suffering that almost physicalself-satisfaction and trust in the future which is, unfortunately, not peculiar to the North German, but common in varying degree to a whole school of morals to-day. Let him remember that this man has been specially tutored and coached into a complete faith in the superiority of himself and his kind over the rest of the human race, and this in a degree superior even to that in which other nations, including our own, have indulged after periods of expanding wealth and population.
Let the reader further remember that in this the Germans' rooted faith their army was for them at once its cause and its expression; then only can he conceive what attitude the mind of such men would assume upon the news from East and from West during those days—the news of the avalanche in France and the news of Tannenberg. It would seem to the crowd in Berlin during the great festival which marked the time that they were indeed a part of something not only necessarily invincible, but of a different kind in military superiority from other men.
These, from what would seem every quarter of the globe, had been gathered tooppose him, merely because the German had challenged his two principal enemies. Though yet far from being imperilled by so universal a movement, he crushes it utterly, and in a less time than it takes for a great nation to realize that it is under arms, he is overwhelmed by the news not of his enemy's defeat, but rather of his annihilation. Miles of captured guns and hour upon hour of marching columns of prisoners are the visible effect of his triumph and the confirmation of it; and he hears, after the awful noise of his victories, a sort of silence throughout the world—a silence of awe and dread, which proclaims him master. It is the anniversary of Sedan.
I do not set down this psychological phenomenon for the mere pleasure of its description, enormous as that phenomenon is, and worthy of description as it is. I set it down because I think that only in an appreciation of it can one understand the future development of the war. After the Battle of Metz, after the sweep down upon Paris from the Sambre, after this immense achievement of Tannenberg, the millioned opinion of a now united North Germany was fixed. It wasso fixed that even a dramatically complete disaster (and the German armies have suffered none) might still leave the North German unshaken in his confidence. Defeats would still seem to him but episodes upon a general background, whose texture was the necessary predominance of his race above the lesser races of the world. This is the mood we shall discover in all that Germany does from that moment forward. It is of the first importance to realize it, because that mood is, so to speak, the chemical basis of all the reactions that follow. That mood, disappointed, breeds fury and confusion; in the event of further slight successes, it breeds a vast exaggeration of such success; in the presence of any real though but local advance, it breeds the illusion of a final victory.
It is impossible to set down adequately in these few pages this intoxication of the first German victories. It must be enough to recall to the reader that the strange mood with which we have to deal was also one of a century's growth, a century during which not only in Germany, but in Scandinavia, in the universities (and many other cliques) of England, even largely in theUnited States, a theory had grown and prospered that something called "the Teutonic race" was the origin of all we valued; that another thing, called in one aspect "the Latin" or in another aspect "the Celt," was something in the one case worn out, in the other negligible through folly, instability, and decay. The wildest history gathered round this absurd legend, not only among the Germans but wherever the "Teutonic theory" flourished, and the fatuous vanity of the North German was fed by the ceaseless acceptance of that legend on the part of those who believed themselves to be his kinsmen.
They still believe it. In every day that passes the press of Great Britain reveals the remains of this foolery. And while the real person, England, is at grips with another real thing, Prussia, which is determined to kill her by every means in its power, the empty theorizing of professors who do not seethings, but only the imaginary figures of their theories, continues to regard England as in some way under a German debt, and subject to the duty of admiring her would-be murderer.
Before leaving this digression, I wouldfurther remind the reader that nowhere in the mass of the British population is this strange theory of German supremacy accepted, and that outside the countries I have named not even the academic classes consider it seriously. In the eyes of the Frenchman, the Italian, and the Pole, the North German is an inferior. His numbers and his equipment for war do not affect that sentiment, for it is recognized that all he has and does are the product of a lesson carefully learned, and that his masters always were and still are the southern and the western nations, with their vastly more creative spirit, their hardier grip in body as in mind, their cleaner souls, and their more varied and developed ideals.
If this was the mood of the German people when the war in its first intense moment had, as it were, cast into a permanent form the molten popular soul, what was that of the nation which the Germans knew in their hearts, in spite of the most pitiable academic illusion, to be the permanent and implacable enemy—I mean the French people?
Comprehend the mood of the French,contrast and oppose it to that of the Germans, and you will have viewed almost in its entirety the spiritual theatre of this gigantic struggle. No don's talk of "Slav" or "Teuton," of "progressive" or "backward" nations, mirrors in any way the realities of the great business. This war was in some almost final fashion, and upon a scale quite unprecedented, the returning once again of those conflicting spirits which had been seen over the multitudes in the dust of the Rhone valley when Marius came up from Italy and met the chaos in the North. They had met again in the damp forests of the Ardennes and the vague lands beyond the Rhine, when the Roman auxiliaries of the decline pushed out into the Germanies to set back the frontiers of barbarism. It was the clash between strong continuity, multiple energies, a lucid possession of the real world, a creative proportion in all things—all that we call the ancient civilization of Europe—and the unstable, quickly growing, quickly dissolving outer mass which continually learns its lesson from the civilized man, and yet can never perfectly learn thatlesson; which sees itself in visions and has dreams of itself: which now servilely accepts the profound religion of its superior; now, the brain fatigued by mysteries, shakes off that burden which it cannot comprehend.
By an accident comparatively recent, the protagonist of chaos in these things happened to be that rigid but curiously amorphous power which Prussia has wielded for many years to no defined end. The protagonist upon the other side of the arena was that same Romanized Gaul which had ever since the fall of the Empire least lost the continuity with the past whereby we live.
But the defender of ancient things was (again by an accident in what is but a moment for universal history) the weaker power. In the tremendous issue it looked as though numbers and values had fallen apart, and as though the forces of barbarism, though they could never make, would now at last permanently destroy.
In what mood, I say, did the defenders of the European story enter the last and most perilous of their debates? We must be able to answer that question if we are tounderstand even during the course of the war its tendency and its probable end.
By the same road, the valley of the Oise, which had seen twenty times before lesser challenges of the kind, the North had rushed down. It was a gauge of its power that all the West was gathered there in common, with contingents from Britain in the heart of the press.
The enemy had come on in a flood of numbers: the defence, and half as much as the defence, and more again. The line swung down irresistible, with the massy weight of its club aimed at Paris. If the eastern forts at Toul and at Verdun and the resistance before Nancy had held back its handle, that resistance had but enabled it to pivot with the freer swing. Not only had there fallen back before its charge all the arrayed armies of the French and their new Ally, but also all that had counted in the hopes of the defenders had failed. All that the last few years had promised in the new work of the air, all that a generation had built up of permanent fortified work, had been proved impotent before the new siege train. Thebarrier fortresses of the Meuse, Liége and Namur, had gone up like paper in a fire. Maubeuge was at its last days. Another week's bombardment and the ring of Verdun would be broken.
The sweep has no parallel in the monstrous things of history. Ten days had sufficed for the march upon the capital. Nor had there been in that ten days a moment's hope or an hour of relaxation.
No such strain has yet been endured, so concentrated, so exact an image of doom.
And all along the belt of that march the things that were the sacrament of civilization had gone. Rheims was possessed, the village churches of the "Island of France" and of Artois were ruins or desolations. The peasantry already knew the destruction of something more than such material things, the end of a certain social pact which war in Christendom had spared. They had been massacred in droves, with no purpose save that of terror; they had been netted in droves, the little children and the women with the men, into captivity. The track ofthe invasion was a wound struck not, as other invasions have been, at some territory or some dynasty; it was a wound right home to the heart of whatever is the West, of whatever has made our letters and our buildings and our humour between them. There was a death and an ending in it which promised no kind of reconstruction, and the fools who had wasted words for now fifty years upon some imagined excellence in the things exterior to the tradition of Europe, were dumb and appalled at the sight of barbarism in action—in its last action after the divisions of Europe had permitted its meaningless triumph for so long. Were Paris entered, whether immediately or after that approaching envelopment of the armies, it would be for destruction; and all that is not replaceable in man's work would be lost to our children at the hands of men who cannot make.
The immediate approach of this death and the cold wind of it face to face produced in the French people a singular reaction, which even now, after eight months of war, is grimly seen. Their irony was resolved into a strained silence.Their expectation was halted and put aside. They prophesied no future; they supported the soul neither with illusions nor with mere restraint; but they threw their whole being into a tension like that of the muscles of a man's face when it is necessary for him to pass and to support some overmastering moment. There was no will at issue with the small group of united wills whose place was at the headship of the army. The folly of the politicians had not only ceased, but had fallen out of memory.
It is no exaggeration to say that the vividness of that self-possession for a spring annihilated time. It was not a fortnight since the blow had come of the 15th Corps breaking before Metz, and the stunning fall of Namur. But to the mind of the People it was already a hundred years, and conversely the days that passed did not pass in hours, or with any progression, but stood still.
There was to come—it was already in the agony of birth—the moment, a day and a night, in which one effort rolled the wave right back. That effort did not release the springs of the national soul.They remained stretched to the utmost. By a character surely peculiar to this unexampled test of fire, no relaxation came as, month after month, the war proceeded.
But the passage of so many days, with the gradual broadening of vision and, in time, the aspect, though distant, of slow victory; the creeping domination acquired over the mass of spiritually sodden things that had all but drowned the race; the pressure of the hand tightening upon the throat of the murderer; released a certain high potential which those who do not know it can no more comprehend than a savage can comprehend the lightning which civilized man regulates and holds in the electric wire. And this potential made, and is making, for an intense revenge.
That is the vision that should remain with those who desire to understand the future the war must breed, and that is the white heat of energy which will explain very terrible things, still masked by the future, and undreamt of here.