As the Russians for lack of transport were not able to follow up their success at Lublin, the succeeding weeks showed it to be far from a decisive victory. The Austrian army soon recovered itself. In comparison with Russia, both Austria and Germany were highly organized industrial nations. They had not only been able to put larger forces into the field at the outset than their adversaries, but they had the resources in guns and rifles, and in the factories for the manufacture of munitions, which enabled them to increase their actual fighting forces faster than their adversaries, and to supply them with larger quantities of munitions.
The German army was established in well-chosen positions in France, which might be impregnable against even forces as superior as three to one; the Austrian army was safely established in front of the Russians. Both the French and the Russians were short of munitions, and particularly of guns of heavier caliber, and of high-explosive shells, which had become most essential in trench warfare. Relatively, the Germans were depending upon their guns to hold the Aisne line, while the Allies were depending upon the flesh and blood of infantry. Germany was rushing every trained man she had to the front and training a million volunteers. Now she could spare troops moved by her efficient railroad system, taking advantage of the interior line for Von Hindenburg to make a drive toward Warsaw, where he repeated the same maneuver, in keeping with German practice of the advance to the Marne. After his drive, he fell back from Warsaw, and intrenched for the winter.
An unskilled garrison of Belgians held Antwerp, which was on the flank of the German forces in Belgium. The fall of this fortress meant the release of a considerable force of Germans, and allowed their heavier concentration toward northwesternFrance. Having failed to defeat the French at the Marne, which would have dropped not only the ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne, but also Havre, like ripe plums into their basket, the Germans next sought to take Calais, which is twenty-two miles from the coast of England. With Calais went the possession of all Belgium, a strip of northern France, and a foothold on the coast within twenty-two miles of England, and with the free sweep of the Atlantic past the narrow English Channel in front. Von Moltke, the chief of the German staff, who was retired about this time, was said to have still favored the greater conception of a decisive victory over the French army by an attack on Verdun instead of on the Channel ports; and the kaiser's own idea was said to have prevailed against his.
Now the allied armies in the west were to face a test second only to that of the Marne. The British army, which had been in the neighborhood of Soissons, had moved down to the left flank, hoping to assist in a successful turning movement. Their little force was being increased by every reserve that they could muster and arm. From India they brought their native troops, long-service men trained by British officers. These, at a time when every man of any kind was needed, were thrown into the crucible of the coming conflict, which reached its climax during the last days of October in the chill rains and mists of Flanders, with rich fields of a flat country turned into a glutinous mud.
Meanwhile, in a futile attempt, the British rushed small forces of marines to the assistance of the Antwerp garrison. With Antwerp theirs, the Germans were free to concentrate against the Channel ports. Once more the offensive was entirely with them in the west. They even brought into action some of the regiments of volunteers who had been enlisted in August; and following the German system of expending a fresh regiment in a single charge, these new levies were sent in masses to the attack. The Belgians, including those who escaped from Antwerp and from being driven into Holland, rested their left on the sea. Some sixty thousand were all they could muster out of a population of seven millions for the defense of the sliver ofcountry that still remained under their flag. A type of man-of-war which was supposed to be antedated, the monitor, with its low draft and powerful guns was brought into action by the British in protecting the Belgians, who finally saved themselves by flooding their front.
Next to the Belgians was a French army, and next to them the British army, which shared with the French the brunt of the attack in that sector around the old town of Ypres, which was to give its name to the Ypres salient, the bloodiest region of this war, and of any war in the history of Europe.
So far as one can learn, the losses of the British and the French here were about 150,000, and of the Germans, about 250,000. Within the succeeding year, probably another 200,000 men of both sides were killed and wounded in the same locality. At the lowest estimate, 100,000 men have been killed outright in the Ypres salient, without either side gaining any appreciable advantage. British regiments held in the first battle of Ypres in some cases when they had a loss of 80 per cent.
Both Germans and Allies fought in icy water up to their hips. Many who survived succumbed to the cold. Lacking proper artillery support, the British used to cheer when the Germans charged, as that meant the end of shell fire, and they could come to close quarters with the bayonet. Little by little, but grudgingly, they had to yield against that persistent foe. The German staff was at its best in its organized offensive, and the British at their best "sticking," as they call it—and the prize was an arm of salt water, to be all Ally or part German. When the Germans gave up the struggle, they had the advantage of ground and the British stayed where they were. Whether or not the Allies should have evacuated Ypres and the deadly Ypres salient and withdrawn to better strategic positions will ever be a subject of discussion; but the loss of the city at the time would have had a moral effect on the situation of the Allies, and the political consideration may have outweighed the military.
Thus the campaign of the first summer and fall came to an end. The Allies had failed in their hope of keeping the German within his borders; and the German had failed to win any decisivevictory which could enforce peace on all or any one of the Allies.
The casualties, on account of the vast numbers engaged, had been staggering. Germany held a small strip of Poland, and about the same amount of territory in France that she was to hold a year later, while Russia held a large section of Galicia. Where the armies had operated, lay broad belts of ruins, destroyed at enormous cost by shell fire. The moralist might well ask if the nations would have entered the war if they could have foreseen the result of their first four months' struggle.
For any adequate understanding of the strategy of the war as a whole, the trench line from Switzerland to Flanders must be extended to the east of England across the North Sea to Iceland. This war has again demonstrated the enormous value of sea power.
Glance at a map of the globe and you will see how small a portion of it is occupied by the great nations of Europe, which for 2,000 years have been the most vital and influential political, commercial, and intellectual force in the world. The present nations are for the most part only the modern expression of the vigorous races which Cæsar found and conquered. They have been in continual competition and in frequent wars.
The Russians have had only a little hold on the sea—in the Black Sea and in the Baltic; the Germanic peoples have had the Baltic and the North Sea; France faces the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; and only twenty-two miles from France is the island of Britain and Ireland, and other little islands, or what are known as the British Isles, whose superficial area is less than that of France or Germany.
Look again at the map, at the location of the British Isles and Germany. Mark them in black, if you will, and those two little points represent the two great antagonists in the war. Then turn the globe around slowly, and you come to Canada, stretching from the frontier of the United States to the Arctic, and acrossthe Pacific to Australia and Hongkong, the Straits Settlements and Ceylon, India, and then in Africa, the most valuable of all its area—and you have the dominions and the colonies of the British Empire!
Between Germany and the rest of the world is the British navy. Every German ship which sails the trade routes of the earth must go past the British threshold. Germany, with a rapidly increasing population, with an imperial patriotism which discouraged emigration to foreign countries, wished to extend her domain; she wanted room in which German national ambition could expand.
Through all her history, Britain has had one eye on the continent and one on the seas. Continental affairs concerned her only so far as they meant the rise of any power which might threaten her dominion of the seas. The silver-pewter streak of channel kept her safe from invasion by any continental power, yet she could land troops across the Channel and throw the weight of her forces in the balance when her dominion was threatened. It is her boast that she has always won the "last battle," which is sufficient. She had only 30,000 troops in the allied army under Wellington, which delivered the finishing blow to Napoleon.
Twenty years ago, when the German navy was in its infancy, her policy was one of splendid isolation. France then was the second naval power, and Russia the third. The British naval program was superior to any two continental powers. The increase in German population and in trade and wealth brought with it an increase in the German navy, until Germany, with her ally, Austria, became the threatening continental factor to British security.
Now Britain formed a combination for defense with Russia and France. Her military part was to send 120,000 troops across the Channel to cooperate with the French army against the Germans. She was the only one of the great nations, except the United States, that depended upon a regular army, which was occupied mostly in policing her empire. Aside from her regulars, her only military organization were her Territorials, whichwere something on the same order as the American National Guard.
The number of men which she could throw across the Channel was therefore insignificant, compared to the great hordes of the European armies. Her real part was command of the sea. She was either to destroy the German navy or make it helpless in interfering with allied trade on the seas. Her Government was Liberal, her people as a whole skeptical of the possibility of a European war. For centuries they had been bred to believe that her security was in her fleet. She had long enjoyed her empire, she possessed immense capital, and her inclination was toward complacency, while Germany's was that of the eager newcomer to power.
The situation in Ireland on account of the passage of the Home Rule Bill had become so strained that many people believed civil war to be inevitable. The conviction of the German Ambassador in London, as well as most German observers, was that Britain would not actually enter the war, when the test came. Upon her decision, it is now evident, depended the fate of Europe. With England out, the French army could not have saved France. For then, Germany could have had the freedom of the seas. Her navy would have sent the French into harbor, closing not only every French, but every Russian port to the entrance of supplies and munitions, which would have meant food scarcity in France, and utter scarcity of munitions in Russia.
German troops could have landed in France to the rear of the French army. The whole complexion of the war would have been changed. So well laid were their plans, so sure were they of their numbers of men and guns, which they could promptly concentrate, that there seems little question of the ability of the Central Powers to have crushed France in the first three months of the war, and then to have won a decisive victory over Russia, bringing home from either country great indemnities, and, with Germany, if she choose, annexing northern France and Belgium.
Thus the Central Powers would have established themselves so strongly as the dominant nations of Europe, that Germany withher seventy millions of people could have directed her energy as the next step in her career against the Mistress of the Seas.
Had Belgium not been invaded, it is questionable if the British public would have favored joining in the war. But this aroused public indignation to the breaking point in support of the war members of the cabinet. Sir Edward Grey, the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, had his way.
The British navy was as thoroughly prepared for an emergency as the German army. It had no illusions as to the nature of its task or of its responsibility to the nation. Britain had superior resources in shipbuilding to Germany. She had a fleet superior in every class of ship, and she had led the world in naval progress—both her dreadnoughts and her battle cruisers being of a later type than her rival's. Her desire, inevitably, was that the German fleet should come out at once and give battle. Confident of the outcome, she contemplated the removal of her rival from the seas at a single blow.
German naval policy was as careful to avoid this test as British was to invite it. The German navy was kept safely at anchor in Kiel, protected by immense fortress guns, by elaborate mine fields, scores of submarines and destroyers, and by numerous nets against the approach of any British submarine. There was no way for any enemy to reach it except by the air. The Germans would have located any British attempt to attack their navy, as it might have meant the loss of important British fighting units which would have given the Germans more nearly equal chances of victory if they chose to precipitate an engagement. Sir John Jellicoe, in command of the fleet, however, refused to take any risks of losing his units. He kept his fleet in harbor, ready at any moment to steam out into the North Sea for action. Throughout the war to this writing, not one of his great first-class battleships has fired a shot, with the exception of theQueen Elizabeth, which took part in the bombardment of the Dardanelles forts.
Superiority of gun power has been sufficient to keep England safe from invasion, German merchant ships from sailing the seas, protect the sea passage of millions of troops, and insure the occupation of the German colonies by British expeditionaryforces. Except as it was raised over a submarine or commerce raider, the German flag was swept from the sea within the first six months of the war.
There has been no naval battle at all commensurate with the strength of the two fleets. Each time that a British and German ship have met in action, the overwhelming importance of speed and of gun range have been demonstrated. Speed and range enabled Von Spee to destroy Cradock's squadron at Coronel off Chile, with almost no loss to himself. Later at the Falkland Islands he suffered the same fate at the hands of Sturdee, who, with his second-class battle cruisers, had the speed and range of the German third-class.
Again, in the battle off Dogger Bank, theBlücher, the second-class battle cruiser which had only 26 knots, was left behind by her sisters, the German first-class battle cruisers, while she was pounded into the sea by theLion, theTiger, and thePrincess Mary, which were driving ahead at 30 knots. The honors of the war, so far as the offensive goes, therefore, have been with the last battle cruiser.
German naval policy, no less wise for its own ends than for the British, has depended upon the submarine, whose importance may be easily exaggerated and easily underestimated. No submarine can approach the major fighting ships of a great fleet when that fleet is properly protected by torpedo-defense guns and fast destroyers and light cruisers. The deciding test of a submarine's power in this respect was the fruitless attempts of the best German submarines to reach theLionwith a deathblow, when crippled, after the battle off Dogger Bank, she was being towed home at 5 knots an hour, under the protection of the destroyers.
However, any isolated vessel, whether a merchantman or a man-of-war, is at the mercy of a submarine, which hunts the seas for this kind of target. It has only to lie in wait on the trade routes until its prey appears, submerging in case of danger. Then a torpedo sent home and a valuable piece of property goes to the bottom of the sea. What resourceful brigandage is to traffic on the highways, the German submarine became to British traffic on the seas. It is the sniper of naval warfare, but cannot givebattle. It must find its protection under the sea, while all freight and all passengers, all the world's business is done on the surface of the sea; and the great guns of the dreadnoughts command the surface.
George V, King of Great Britain and Emperor of India.
George V, King of Great Britain and Emperor of India.
When brigandage becomes highly organized, it means enormous expense in increased police work, particularly if you cannot trail the brigands to their hiding places and force them to capitulate. In this case the brigands' hiding places are under the protection of powerful fortress guns and mine fields in secure harbors.
The British navy, with over three thousand ships, including mine sweepers and auxiliaries of all sorts under Sir John Jellicoe's command, was forced to go to immense expense and pains in combating the submarine campaign. Many submarines were taken; but the Germans kept on building them. It was a war against an unseen and cunning foe, which required ceaseless vigilance and painstaking effort. The amount of material, as well as the amount of ships required in order to combat the submarines and also to keep the patrol intact from the British channel to Iceland, could it be enumerated, would stagger the imagination. Meanwhile, England had to go on building new dreadnoughts and cruisers and destroyers at top speed, with a view to increasing her rate of naval superiority over the Germans. Once the German fleet had come out and been beaten, then the British would be secure in victory, and they could spare many guns for the army and devote all their energy to the land campaign.
While the Germans had a "fleet in being," they had an important counter for peace negotiations. They were as rightly advised in sticking to their harbor, as the British in holding their command of the sea without risking their units by trying to force an entrance into harbors equipped with every known defense of modern warfare.
In all instances the British army must wait for material if navy demands were unsatisfied. With the tide of fortune going against the Russians and French on the Continent, the original agreement for only 120,000 men became entirely perfunctory, in view of the tragic necessity of more troops to be thrown against the CentralPowers on the Continent. With a large proportion of her regular officers killed in the first two months of the war, Britain had to undertake the preparation of a vast army without adequate drill masters or leaders. She had to make wholly untrained civilians into soldiers while the war was being waged. This took time, but less time than for the manufacture of rifles and guns. She had everything necessary for supplying her navy, but ridiculously inadequate plants for supplying a force of soldiers so immense. Thus England had scores of battalions of excellently drilled soldiers prepared to go to France before there were any rifles for them to fight with, or before they had the all-important artillery for their support in battle.
In the early months of the war probably she was not awake to the necessity of the situation. Besides, her manufacturers, still confident of an early victory over Germany, were more interested in permanently gaining markets which the Germans would lose than in making munitions. The war was not brought home to the Englishman as it was to the German and the Frenchman, by having bloody lines of trenches on his own soil. Every British soldier was fighting across the seas in the defense of the soil of another nation. Naturally, in many cases, he was slow to a realization that this also was his own national defense. But by the volunteer system alone, England enlisted over two million men before conscription was threatened.
In order to centralize authority under a single man, Lord Kitchener was intrusted with the stupendous task of organizing the new army and seeing that it was properly equipped. He had foreseen at the start that the war would be long and that it would be nearly two years before England could throw anything like an armed force adequately representing her population into the struggle on the Continent. He had to train his officers at the same time that he trained his men and build guns and make rifles.
Meanwhile, the German army system was complete. Indeed, there was no want of men with military experience in any one of the continental countries to act as drill masters. England was attempting a feat equaled only in our Civil War, where vastarmies of untrained men were raised. But in this case, the enemy was not composed also of recruits, but of men trained under universal service by a staff which had traditions of preparedness as a basis for the preparation before the war, while the British staff and the British army had been trained in the handling of small, mobile forces in policing their empire. But as the months wore on, it was evident that the military decision of the war might rest with this new army when the other armies were exhausted, when at last it reached the front in full force with adequate arms and equipment in the hope of repeating history, thanks to the command of the sea which gave Britain time to prepare—by winning the last battle.
Had Britain lost command of the sea early in the war, she would have been utterly helpless. The Germans could readily have landed a force that would have taken London in six weeks. Even this would have been an unnecessary military action. For, with her food supply shut off by German ships, Britain would have had to throw up her hands and ask for terms.
The Dominion of Canada, Australasia and South Africa would have found themselves in the position of isolated nations, dependent for the time being upon their own resources for defense. Their loyalty to the British Empire has not been the least wonderful of the many wonderful results of this war. They have sent legions of volunteers across the seas to France and Gallipoli to fight beside the British and the French. As for Hongkong, the Straits Settlements, Ceylon, India, and all the colonies of the empire, they would have been Germany's for the occupation. Such is the meaning of sea power. But the British navy being superior to the German, held Germany in siege.
Germany must make the best possible use of her comprehensive industrial organization and of her preparedness for war and throw the greatest possible number of men into the fighting line at the earliest possible moment. She was practically in a race against time; and time was with the Allies. Whilethey retained command of the sea the United States and other neutral nations overseas, once their plants for manufacture were completed, could pour out supplies of munitions.
Germany's foreign trade was practically at a standstill. From the port of Hamburg her argosies of manufactures no longer went forth to the world in return for raw material. Her many ships, from the enormous passenger steamers to the small tramps which had brought her tribute with their carrying trade, were idle. She could manufacture, then, only for home consumption and all her plants that had been manufacturing for export began producing for her armies. The energies of the one hundred and twenty-five millions of people, men, women and children, in Germany and Austria-Hungary were wholly occupied in making war. Their object must be to push the walls back as far as they could, and so to punish Russia or France that one or the other would yield a separate peace. The aim of British statesmanship must be to hold the Allies together at any expense and keep Germany from breaking the siege. If more nations could be brought in against Germany, that would strengthen the siege lines and lengthen the front the Central Powers were building.
Through the winter of 1914-15 the diplomats of the Allies and the Central Powers in Rome fought for Italy's hand with all the skill and resources of trained European diplomacy. Responding to the sentiment for the recovery of Trentino and Trieste which she considered ethnologically and geographically a part of her domain she was to throw in her fortunes with the Allies against her old enemy, Austria.
Serbia had her troops still on the boundary of the Danube and the Save. Rumania, facing Austria with Russia on her flank, also much courted, was even more coy than Italy. Bulgaria, with her excellent army, was on the flank of Serbia and blocked the road to Turkey. Little Greece was another state watching the conflict with the selfish interest of a small spectator, trying to judge which side would be the victor.
Russia of the steppes and the multitudes of men was short of munitions; her plants were incapable of making sufficientsupplies. The Baltic was closed to her by the German navy, Archangel was frozen in and the closing of the passage of the Dardanelles shut her off from the Mediterranean. She was in touch with the sea only in the Far East, with the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains between her and the manufacturing regions of the United States. Her crop of wheat, which she exchanged for manufactured goods in time of peace was no less interned than the manufactured products of Germany. If the Dardanelles were opened she could empty her granaries and receive arms and munitions in return. Therefore, the first winter of the war, while their main armies were intrenched in colder climes, both sides turned their attention to the southeast. In November the Turks had joined the Central Powers, thus flying in the face of the historical Turkish policy, so cleverly applied by Abdul Hamid, in playing one European power against another and profiting by their international differences.
For many years German diplomacy, capital and enterprise had been busy building up German influence in Asia Minor. Abdul Hamid had been overthrown under the leadership of Enver Pasha and other officers who had been trained in Germany according to German military methods and who had absorbed the German ideas. Von der Goltz, a German general, had reorganized the Turkish army. The access of Turkey to the Central Powers formed the addition of another thirty million people, which gave them one hundred and fifty million on their side.
Through the assistance of the Turks, the Germans never for a moment deserting their idea of keeping the initiative and forcing their enemies to follow it, threatened an offensive against the Suez Canal, which was abortive, but served the purpose of requiring British preparation for its defense. Germany saw more than mere military advantage in the Turkish adventure. She was reaching out into the Mohammedan world which stretches across Persia and Asia Minor, through little known and romantic regions, to India where, as a part of her Indian Empire, England rules more Mohammedans than the population of the German Empire. The unrest which was reported to have been ripe in India for the last decade might thus be brought toa head in a rebellion against British authority; as it might, too, in Egypt, the Sultan of Turkey being the Padishah or head of the Mohammedan faith.
At least Britain would be forced to maintain larger garrisons than usual both in Egypt and India against any threat of insurrection. Among all who have had to deal with the Oriental peoples, and particularly those who know them as intimately as the British rulers of India, the importance of power—and publicly demonstrated power—is fully understood. To the average British Indian or Egyptian subject, Britain has been an unconquerable country, the mistress of the world.
Many reasons united in calling for some action on the part of the British to offset that of the Germans. With Russia in retreat the Balkan States, which had regarded her prowess as irresistible, were losing their faith in the Allies. One successful blow would do more to dispel their skepticism and to bring Italy in on the side of the Allies than sheafs of diplomatic cablegrams and notes. During such a crisis every message in the game of war diplomacy becomes only a polite calling card that represents armed men.
The British decided to take the initiative though their new army had as yet received hardly sufficient training to make them soldiers and their supply of rifles, guns and munitions was insufficient. Indeed, England was just beginning to awaken fully to the fact that the forces of France and Russia alone were insufficient to cope on land with the Central Powers, particularly now that the weight of Turkey was thrown in the balance.
With her casualties three times the number of her original expeditionary force, with more than the original number of her army engaged in Flanders, she undertook an offensive against Constantinople itself. Second-class men-of-war which were not required with the grand fleet and a single first-class dreadnought of the latest type, theQueen Elizabeth, in conjunction with a French squadron, bombarded and reduced the ancient forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles and then attacked those in the narrows. British bluejackets even smoked their pipes and cracked jokes as they sat on the crest of Achi Baba, which becamean impregnable Turkish position after the British Mediterranean force was landed. Had theQueen Elizabethbeen able to fire an army corps ashore, the corps could have marched on into Constantinople.
The success or failure of the Gallipoli expedition depended upon surprise. Superficially it seems a colossal blunder. There are inside facts about it which have never been disclosed. Greece, it is supposed, agreed to send troops, but at the last moment changed her mind. Undoubtedly the expedition was an important influence in bringing Italy in. There was a fatal delay in its departure from Alexandria. Too much time elapsed between the preparatory bombardment and the landing. The Turks had been forewarned what to expect. They had leisure for concentration and preparation. On a narrow front of difficult shore where the landing was to be made, they had stretched their barbed-wire entanglements into the sea itself, while along the beach were carefully concealed machine guns and back of them ample forces of men and artillery.
No effort in history was ever more gallant than that of the British force, including the Australians, which threw itself ashore in the face of simply insurmountable obstacles and fire, under the cover of the guns of the men-of-war. As a surprise, the affair was a complete failure. Its only chance of success being as a surprise, most competent military leaders and experts agree that this was sufficient reason, in a military sense, for an immediate withdrawal; yet British stubbornness would not yield.
Indeed, the Gallipoli expedition was a political move, a violation of the true military principle—that you should always go against the main body of your enemy, which was at this time on the frontiers of Russia and France. Of course the effort was not entirely without its compensations; no expedition is, which holds any part of the enemy's troops in place in front of your own. The pressure was withdrawn from the Russians in the Caucasus and also further adventures from the outskirts of Asia Minor toward India in stirring up the Mohammedan population were for the time abated.
The attempt to reach the heart of Turkish power, the sultan's capital itself, by opening these famous straits and sending British ships to lay Constantinople under their guns, was a splendid conception worthy the military imagination of the daring ages when the British Empire was built and the days of the Spanish Main, but the only criterion in the ghastly business of war remains success.
Yet the spring of 1915 opened with no rebellion in India except sporadic outbreaks of the frontier tribes which are always recurring, while Egypt itself remained peaceful. The Germans inaugurated their second year's campaign by closing the Belgo-Dutch frontier and by the administrative use of every possible means for safeguarding their movements on the western front, which would indicate that they were to undertake another effort for the Channel ports. This was an obvious feint to conceal an effort elsewhere. Instead of using troops to make it, they tried out for the first time a form of warfare which was not new in the consideration of any army, though it had not been used because it was considered inhuman.
With the wind blowing in the right direction, the Germans released an immense cloud of chlorine gas. Its gravity held it close to the ground as it swept down upon the British and French in the famous Ypres salient. The effort was successful beyond their expectation, more successful than they realized and had they had sufficient reserves to press on, they might have broken the allied line at this point.
The effect of the gas was that of a horrible form of asphyxiation; the soldiers who did not succumb retreated in face of a weapon which could not be countered by any in their possession. The casualties were heavy, the sufferings of the wounded indescribable in their torment. From the military point of view, which holds that war is killing and that any method whatsoever is warrantable, the attack was a success as it gained ground, and for the time being confused the enemy. But it was a form of attack which could succeed only once. After the soldiers were provided with proper respirators containing a chemical antidote, they were in no danger of being "gassed." Among those in thethick of the gas attack were the first Canadian contingent, who bore themselves with unflinching fortitude, not only that, but after the first surprise of the attack was over, the survivors charged with rare heroism.
Strategy which formerly meant the swift movement of a few thousand troops to one flank or another overnight, or in a two or three-hour march, now means the concentration of hundreds of thousands by railway trains upon a particular point and of many thousands of guns and enormous quantities of material of every kind from shells to that for building railroads to keep up with your advance.
But the general of to-day no less than the general of yesterday, would always know where his enemy is most vulnerable, and strike him at that point. In the spring of 1915, the line of least resistance for the German army was obviously to the east where the loose organization of the Russian army, lacking munitions, was stretched over a front of over a thousand miles.
The French were better off in munitions, and their army and the British had a front of four hundred and fifty miles of intact trench line. It is estimated that in order to hold a battle front with modern troops, about three thousand men to the mile are required. This does not mean that there are three thousand actually on every mile; but counting the thin line in the trenches, the thicker line in the reserve trenches and the soldiers who are out of the trenches resting and the battalions in reserve and the reserve supplies of men in the depots who can promptly be brought into action.
For example, to hold a mile of the famous Ypres salient might require double the number of men necessary to hold a mile where the lay of the ground was in the favor of your troops. Owing to the use of motor trucks and to railway trains, whenever there is an attack, concentration of men at any point is very rapid. Holding to this rule, the Germans maintained all through the summer of 1915, 1,500,000 men on their western front, and they had that number at least to spare for their eastern front. Field Marshal von Hindenburg said that by hammering he wouldget Warsaw, and he was to keep his word with stolid German persistence. Napoleon, who had depended upon the number of his guns, would have fully appreciated the Austro-German plan of action against Russia.
The Russian army has been compared to cotton wool. The farther you went into Russia, the more cotton wool there was. The Russian army would yield, but there never seemed any end of it. Gaining a passive victory over the Russian army has also been compared to brushing the snow off the front doorstep. The more you brushed, the more snow banked up. Russia could afford to lose territory equivalent to the area of all France without having received a vital blow. Russia has plenty of room in which to retreat, as Napoleon learned. She is confident in the safety of her distances. When the enemy falls back she follows on his heels.
At the end of the winter, 1914-15, she was still in the possession of a large portion of Galicia. But the Germans were preparing a battering ram which their generals thought irresistible. Their plan now was to deliver so hard a blow at the Russian that he would be forced to yield a separate peace. Von Mackensen formed his unprecedented phalanx of soldiery and of artillery in Galicia and destroying all the fortifications and covering the trenches with torrents of shell fire he skillfully worked his legions forward, first breaking the Przemysl line, which compelled a general retreat, and then breaking the Lemberg line. Thus, having beaten back the Russian left wing, the Austro-Germans turned their attention to the Warsaw front and there repeated the same organized machine method of warfare. There were no brilliant strokes of genius, but merely the use of superior systems of railroads in making the concentration; of trained engineers and workmen in advancing the railroad lines; of systematic overwhelming attacks at critical points, directed by the unsurpassed German staff organization.
With the fall of Warsaw the Russian army was inevitably badly broken. They had lost multitudes of prisoners, and staggering quantities of material. But still it remained an intact army. It was not decisively beaten. The prisoners were takenby brigades, regiments, and divisions—thousands of them in reserve, without a rifle in their hands, as they waited their turn to pick up the rifle of a dead man. For six months, March to August, the greatest of all campaigns in numbers of troops and length of line continued in the east, Von Mackensen and the Austrians striking in the south and Von Hindenburg in the north. Its details will be read in the history which follows. Characteristic of either adversary was his method. The German with concentration of population, resources, artillery, soldiery, and organization, and the Russian part, glamorous, slow, yielding to the terrific blows, flowing back like an ebb tide, and taking his time, never risking a decision, his army never surrounded or cut in two.
While Von Hindenburg's guns were hammering the Russians in front, German political influence was occupied in Petrograd in the rear, where certain official circles were under German influence in the hope of getting Russia to capitulate. The situation was the most critical for the Allies since the Battle of the Marne. A most influential court party was undoubtedly in favor of capitulation. Russia was bleeding cruelly. She was suffering the psychological as well as the material effects of defeat. In Paris and London the possibility of having to go on with the war without the Russian's assistance had become a serious consideration. In short, the fate of Europe was then in the hands of diplomatic and court intrigue.
According to the accounts it was the mass of the Russian people whose pressure undoubtedly defeated the aims of German diplomacy. Uninformed of the real situation, conscious only of the enormous cost of the war in blood and treasure, their spirit of race patriotism was undaunted. They realized if Russians in high places did not, that surrender by Russia then meant a defeat, which would set the Russian power back for another fifty years. England could make peace and be in possession of more territory than she had at the beginning of the war. France could be certain of retaining what she had before the war. But Russia had not only lost Poland, but the Slav had bowed the knee to the Teuton.
At the same time there was widespread unrest among the Russian people. They felt that they had deserved victory, but had been denied it. It was not a question of the grand duke's skill in conducting the retreat from Warsaw, or his indomitable will and sturdy patriotism, but of satisfying popular sentiment. The announcement that the czar himself was to take command unified and heartened the Russian people, who felt that "The Little Father" was the natural God-given head of the army.
There was discontent in Russia too, with the situation on the western front. All the news that Russia had from France was of an occasional hundred or five-hundred-yard trench won or lost, while the Russian army had been swept from Galicia and been swept back again and had gone through the fearful ordeal of the retreat of July and August. Why shouldn't France and Britain do something to release the pressure on the Russians? For not the least of the advantages the Central Powers had had was single-headed direction. They represented one united force, working out a consistent and simple plan of campaign. But Russia, England, and France had to cooperate in council.
With Russia so hard pressed and with the danger of her yielding to the Germans so deeply impressed on London and Paris there was nothing for the French staff to do but to respond by some sort of action in loyalty to her allies as a matter of military necessity if not of military wisdom. The attacks in Artois had fully demonstrated the arduousness and cost of any such undertaking, particularly until there was an unlimited supply of shells to draw on. A gain of two or three miles' depth on a front meant no positive advance for either side, but rather a waste of life. Indeed, any considerable attack on that western trench line which did not actually break the line must be considered a failure. And against their will, no doubt, the French and British undertook another offensive on September 25, 1915.
On many sections of the western front the nature of the ground makes an attack absolutely unfeasible. The place chosen by the French was the Champagne region, in the neighborhood of the great army review ground of Châlons. It is a rolling, sterile country, dotted with sparse roads. There is a thin loamover a subsoil of chalk—excellent for the defensive, but also permitting the rapid movement of artillery troops in dry weather.
So far as can be learned the Germans had already given up their offensive in Russia before the French began theirs. At least they were well advised that the French offensive was under way, and they needed to know it only a week beforehand, in order to transfer reserves from their eastern front, which they brought to the number of 300,000, concentrating them mostly in the Champagne region, where they were to be needed. Coincident with the Champagne attack, the British, who are for command purposes a part of the French army, launched one in the region of Loos.
In northern France the country was extremely difficult, and as unsuited for offense as the rest of the ground occupied by the British. Aside from their object in assisting the Russians, the French hoped to break the line. In this they failed. Over a twelve-mile front they gained depths varying from one-half to three miles; and altogether, with the British, they took some 25,000 prisoners and 160 guns. Both the numbers of prisoners and of guns were small compared with the "bags" on the eastern front. But the character of the fighting, the heavy volume of artillery fire and extraordinary coordination of the first-class fighting units by the most skilled armies in history, make this action memorable in military annals in the same way as the German attack on Verdun in the following February. The ground lost in no wise endangered the German tenancy of their line.
Along the Italian front the summer had developed something of the same kind of stalemate that had existed in France. Fighting in the Alpine country so favored the defense that the Austrians did not have more than three or four hundred thousand troops engaged in holding the Italians in position. Therefore it had been easy for anyone taking a superficial view to exaggerate the military value of Italy's entry into the war. The Austrian troops had fought with extreme tenacity, for naturally the Austrian staff had sent against the Italians all those troops in FranzJosef's heterogeneous empire who had any racial antagonism against the Italians, including those who had been lukewarm in fighting against the Slav.
Unquestionably, honors at the end of the campaign in 1915 were with Germany. She had held her line solidly in the west. She had stripped the country of northern France and Belgium of all the machinery of its factories which would be useful to her. She had been relieved of any necessity of feeding the Belgian population, or of the menace that would have come from the threat of a famine in either Belgium or northern France by the American Food Commission which at first had received supplies from America to carry on their work, and later had depended almost altogether upon grants from the French and English Governments and upon large voluntary contributions from England. In the east she had gained territory almost equal in area to that of Prussia itself. All Poland was hers. Her governor general ruled Warsaw. Her situation as to food supplies was improved by the occupation of immense productive areas. She had made war with all her energy, and in want of able-bodied men to gather her own harvests, she had used the hosts of prisoners which she had taken from Russia. But, despite her victories, bravely and skillfully won, she was still a nation in siege, with no communication with the outside world, except through neutral countries.
In the second winter with uninterrupted energy she again turned toward the southeast for another military adventure. Rumania still held fast to her neutrality. In Bulgaria the Central Powers were to succeed in gaining a fourth ally, which in sheer military advantage was probably worth more than the accession of Italy to her enemies. Though Russia had won her freedom for Bulgaria in '76, no sentiment drew her to Russia's assistance when Russia was losing. No statesmanship is more matter of fact than that of the Balkans. Bulgaria had an old score to settle with Serbia, which had joined Rumania and Greece against her in making the Second Balkan War, after she had borne the brunt of the first against Turkey. Then, besides, the military temptation offered the Bulgarian staff was irresistible.Serbia had been through two wars before the heavy drain of this one. A country of swineherds and miserable villages, dependent for munitions upon England and the Allies—she was caught in a wedge, with Bulgaria on the one side and the Austro-Hungarian advance on the other. At the most the Central Powers had probably no more than 300,000 troops—about the same number that the Bulgars had. Against such a combination, Serbia, caught between the blades of a pair of scissors, could make no successful resistance unless assistance came from England and France, which the British and French public demanded should be sent. There was no hope of sufficient allied forces reaching Serbia in time to rescue her, but the Allies, particularly the British, could not afford to see Saloniki occupied by the Austro-Germans or by their friends, the Bulgarians. Up to the Balkan War Saloniki was Turkish; then it became Greek. This excellent port had long been the goal of Austrian ambition, which sought an outlet to the Mediterranean, no less than the traditional policy of Russia was aimed at the occupation of Constantinople.
In the Crimean War France and England fought to thwart Russia's designs on Turkey and now France and England were prepared to oppose Austria's designs on Saloniki.
In order to defend Saloniki British and French troops must land on the soil of Greece and march across the Greco-Serbian frontier, which was no doubt one of the reasons that had kept the Allies from sending forces before, in order to assist the Serbians on the Danube and Save in closing "the ring of steel."
Venizelos, the Greek statesman, who had been the Greek Bismarck in the extension of the Greek domain in the Balkan War, had taken sides with the Allies; and he favored concessions by Greece as well as Serbia to Bulgaria, in order to satisfy Bulgarian ambitions and keep her from striking hands with the Central Powers, while the King of Greece, with the Queen, a sister of the kaiser, had decidedly pro-German leanings. The Greeks had a most difficult part, even for Levantine diplomacy, to play. If they cast their fortunes with the Allies and theTeutons won, then they could count upon the Central Powers not only taking Saloniki away from them, but bringing themselves practically under Germanic domination. If they openly espoused the German side, then as the country depended upon the sea, their ports would be blockaded, if not bombarded by the allied fleets. In the event of an allied victory over the Central Powers they were certain that Saloniki would not be annexed by the Allies, bitter as they were against Greece because she was supposed to have broken her pledged word to assist them in the Gallipoli expedition. Following a policy of drift and protest, the Greeks consented to the British and French landing troops at Saloniki and to their making it a base of action.
Certain forces were sent into Serbia before the Serbian army had been completely driven back, and whatever the public thought, certainly with no expectation of gaining a victory over the Bulgarians. This obvious movement was only for the purpose of gaining time for fortifying a line around Saloniki and bringing sufficient men and guns to defend it.
German diplomacy and staff work had not in all of the war gained a more important technical advantage for less cost in time, money, and troops, than it had in the fall of 1915 in the Balkans when they made the Bulgars to serve as they had the Turks, to secure their ends. At last the British withdrew from Gallipoli with such small losses that the evacuation of this position on an exposed coast is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant pieces of military maneuvering of its kind in all history. No credit is ever given for retreats. But this was a good deal more than a retreat. It was withdrawing from a beach in face of a well-armed enemy. The story of it—as yet unwritten—will some day bring a tribute to British military skill from professional soldiers, if not from the lay public.
The Bulgarians decided not to invade Greece; the Greeks made no attack. Those who looked forward to the war being settled in the Balkans, and to Saloniki becoming another Port Arthur, had missed their calculations. But every gun and every man that the Allies had to maintain at Saloniki might be a gun and a man kept idle, when they might be needed elsewhere.
The Germans having disposed of Serbia, had at the same time forced the further dissipation of English and French troops. That they could once more turn to the main theatre of the war and try to push back the siege wall in another direction. Meantime, Turkey had been doing their bidding in another quarter. The natural response of the British to any threat to their Indian Empire was to take the offensive, for this was one certain way to impress the Oriental mind. Having annexed Egypt and Cyprus and occupied the German colonies throughout the world, Britain now proceeded to the extension of her Asiatic domain. The threat of Mohammedan insurrection was met by an invasion of Mohammedan regions.
Her expedition toward Bagdad, had it not been in the midst of the greatest war in all history, would perhaps have been the most spectacular and interesting of all the small campaigns in remote regions which have gradually extended British influence. It marched through Mesopotamia and the Garden of Eden. The Turks under German direction replied with an offensive which in turn put General Townshend's army in siege, requiring that it should have relief.
The self-interest of each one of the parties to the war is evident, with the exception of Turkey. Why she ever entered in on the side of Germany, or on either side, is a puzzle. She was the one to lose in any event. German success meant German domination. German failure must mean that Russia would realize her ambition to take Constantinople, and the British must further strengthen their empire at her expense.
For many decades the British and Russian empires have glowered at each other across the dividing belts of Thibet, Afghanistan, and Persia. The fear of a Russian invasion of India haunted British statesmen until the German power became so threatening that England struck hands with France and Russia. Now while the British were advancing northward, the Russians made a southerly move to her assistance. The grand duke, who had been sent to the Caucasus in February, 1916, took the offensive and captured the fortress of Erzerum, an action which was bound to relieve pressure on the British. Thus, the Turk whohad been led to believe that he was to regain Egypt and recover some of his lost territory, was simply losing more. Indeed, after Saloniki, despite the talk to that effect, the far-seeing Germans neither carried out their threatened attempt to invade Egypt, nor, as many expected, were they drawn from the main theatre of war by dispatching troops by rail to Turkey. In dissipating the allied troops by their threats, they had taken care not to dissipate their own.
Thus Germany would supply Turkey with officers, and all her munitions, but she would not risk an army on the other side of Bulgaria with a long line of communications threatened by the Allies from Saloniki and Dedeagatch.
The approach of the spring of 1916 found them facing much the same problem as in the spring of 1915. Despite the territory they had gained, to ask for peace was to imply that their economic situation was weaker and their casualties heavier than they were willing to admit. Even if their economic situation was strong and the reserves plentiful, any suggestion that they were ready for negotiations must convince the Allies that they were reaching the end of their resources. There could be no doubt of Russia's immense reserves of men. It was only a question with her as to whether or not she could make them into an efficient army properly equipped and supplied, and whether or not she would be able to maintain her organization and railway facilities and sufficient forces at the actual fighting front to strike a successful blow against her enemies.
On the western front there had been an enormous accession of munitions during the winter, while the British new army with two million men yet to go under fire was gradually getting its rifles and guns. Victory comes in war either when you are exhausted or when you have taken from the enemy his capital or something of such vital importance to him that he must yield in order to recover it. Neither France nor Russia was by any means in that pass. Belgium had merely become a dead land, a shop within a garden, cut off from all trade, when it had been a nation of manufacturers and traders.
Germany, unless she were exhausted in men and supplies,could not consider any peace which did not accord her the results of her gains, while she was still in possession of much of the enemy's territory, and she still maintained the power of the offensive. The purpose of the Allies was to contain her, to strengthen "the ring of steel." Her own purpose must be to strike some vital blow which would win a separate peace either from Russia or France. The moment she gave up her offensive and settled down to the defensive, which was naturally against the policy of her staff and the vigorous nature of her people, she was acknowledging that she had reached the limit of her prowess. Then the Allies, with the sea at their command, would bid her await their pleasure—unless she had so far exhausted them that they considered a decided victory over her hopeless, and they made a compromise.
Saloniki now being an incident of her military past, the next plan of her staff was an effort on Verdun, the great fortress which occupied a salient in the French siege line. Here, as elsewhere when she attacked, she concentrated both her own and the Austrian heavy artillery, and following the system of intense artillery preparation, threw in her waves of infantry. This blow was struck at the most inclement season of the year, in February snow and slush and rain, as if to anticipate the allied attack which was generally thought bound to come later in the spring when sufficient munitions had been accumulated on the western front and the weather was favorable.
By this time experts who had thought the war would be decided in the Balkans had again realized that it never pays to desert the simple military principle that the decision comes between the main bodies of armies and not in remote regions from any clash of subsidiary forces.
Paris or Petrograd in the hands of the Germans might mean such a decision. Certainly, should the western front be broken by either side, it would be the most telling blow of the war in both the moral and the military sense. But after all, was the line of least resistance for Germany the line of the western front? Would she really strike her great blow of 1916—if she still had the power to strike one—against the western ratherthan the eastern front? Hitherto, attacks had succeeded against Russia.
It was in Russia that she had had her success. German officers had always stated their confidence that with their superior gun fire and tactics they could always force the Russians back. Could they press back the French and the British?
When would the war end? seemed as unanswerable to the lay observer in the spring of 1916 as in the spring of 1915. How long was the fearful attrition to go on? Could either side ever strike a decisive blow, or would the eventual result be a bloody stalemate, with England still in command of the sea?
The significant generic lesson of the war is not in the power of artillery, but the power of all material organization, when nations set out to gain their ends by force: its military lesson was that both sides had pretty well followed sound policy considering the situation, despite armchair critics who knew nothing of inside facts.
Europe was spending $100,000,000 or more a day in the business of destruction—of life and of property. A broad belt of ruins spread across France and Belgium for 450 miles; a broader one of 1,000 miles across Galicia and Russia. No nation engaged could be said to be victorious except the Japanese. Japan had gained Kiao-chau; strengthened her influence in China enormously, and was making immense profits by working her arsenals and every plant at full speed making munitions for Russia.
The United States at peace, preparing to make munitions as fast as she could, and able to produce only 3,000 rifles a week for the Allies on the 1st of December, 1915, and 5,000 a week March 1, 1916, was enjoying an era of "boom" prosperity, thanks to the eager market of nations whose own production was arrested while their workers were at war. From the gloom of London and Paris, where men and women had given up all luxuries, the transatlantic voyage brought you to New York, which was the only gay capital in the world, enjoying all the privileges of extravagance when money is plentiful.
This has been a war of machinery; but the old rule has been true that development in any weapon of offense has been countered by further development of means of defense. Nor is the theoretical power of weapons ever equaled by their actual power when the test of war comes. With self-preservation remaining the first law of nature, man is in nothing so skillful as in avoiding the enemy's blows.
When one watches a 15-inch gun fired and hears its 2,000-pound shell go screaming through the air, his concept of its destructive action is exaggerated by imagination, and further confirmed if he sees that shell burst inside a house, reducing its interior to wreckage. But the shell may not hit the house; it may fall in an open field and merely make a crater in the earth. Besides, someone must be in the house when it is hit if there are to be any casualties; and it is quite possible that a single person present might be dug out of the debris unharmed. Vulnerable as man's flesh is, he remains a pretty small object on the landscape. If he knows that his house is in danger of being struck he then either goes into the cellar at the first alarm, after having covered his floor with sandbags, or he may take to a dugout in his yard.
When one has seen ten 15-inch shells strike a town of 25,000 inhabitants in a busy hour of the day and only half a dozen persons killed and injured, he may learn a contempt for shell fire which, however, is promptly turned into a tragic respect when one of the same sort of shells strikes in a stone-paved courtyard where a hundred soldiers are at their evening meal, and two-thirds of them are killed and wounded.
The bursting of a shrapnel shell and its spray of low-velocity bullets is also theoretically most destructive, but a roof of 6-inch boards will furnish perfect protection from the bullets. Mother Earth remains the best protection there is from fire. No rifle bullet can penetrate through a 3-foot thickness of sandbags. A 6 or 8-inch high-explosive shell, which is the largest caliberpracticable for trench warfare, may burst near a double layer of bags of stone rubble without hurting anyone in a cellar 30 feet underneath. The rain of shrapnel bullets which mows the barbed wire in front of a trench, as hail mows ripening grain, will not reach a single man in the trench to the rear, if he keeps his head down.
At first thought it seems utterly inconsistent when bullets carry effectively a mile and a half, and guns carry twenty miles, that infantry should be fighting so close that they can throw bombs at each other from distances of 15 and 20 yards. The very destructiveness of modern weapons has contributed toward this result.
There has never been anything like so many guns used in battle, and never have they been capable of such rapid fire. The field gun can fire consistently eight or ten shots a minute, thanks to its modern recoil cylinder and to the steadiness of aim, and literally establish a "curtain of fire" with its torrent of bullets shot down from the air and the cataracts of earth shot up by the bursting of high-explosive shells in the ground, which no infantry can pass.
A machine gun behind a shield firing 500 shots a minute is practically safe from rifle fire, and soldiers intrenched on either side of it add to its volume their own more accurate fire from their rifles. Infantry in the open, though they were not subjected to the fearful concentration of artillery fire, could not survive through a mile of machine-gun and rifle-swept space. Successful advances against anything but very inferior numbers badly armed become impossible in any frontal attack in the open. Thus all modern infantry operations must have more or less a siege character, as the only practicable means of approach is by digging your way forward. The spade has become almost as important a weapon as the rifle.
Impatience with digging, which was characteristic of the early days of the American Civil War, and which has been generally resented by all armies in the past, has now become second nature to every soldier, because its value is brought home to him by the most telling kind of lesson in experience—death. He puts earthbetween himself and the enemy's fire as instinctively as one holds up his hand to ward off a blow.
In trench fighting all that is exposed of a man firing is his head and shoulders, which accounts for the high percentage of dead to wounded in this war. In other wars it has been as one to five; while in this war, on the western front, it has varied from as one to two and three. If the trenches are brought extremely close together then either side is safe from the other's artillery fire, because there is as much danger of hitting your own trench as the enemy's with your shells. A distance of 20 or 30 yards meant that at any time either side could start in throwing bombs or grenades by hand across that one definitely neutral country—the zone of death between the trenches. Beyond that range up to the average range, trench mortars which "lobbed" a charge of high explosive from trench to trench could be used. Thus the war of machinery became a war of explosives. Anything that could be dropped into the trench and burst might kill or wound some of the enemy, which meant debit on their side of the ledger in a war of attrition and exhaustion. The higher the angle of flight the more likely the charge actually to fall into the narrow ditch in the earth, instead of breaking its force against the wall, which accounts for the superiority of the howitzer with its high angle of flight and shorter range to the gun with its lower trajectory and longer range.
Thus there can be no limitation to the amount of artillery and the quantities of explosives serviceable in this kind of warfare. No one of the armies has ever had anything like enough shells. None ever can. Five hundred guns of all ranges set back of one another from 3,000 to 20,000 yards' range to a mile could be placed, or 225,000 for the western front, and they could readily use five million shells a day in this contest of munitions and manufacturing resources.
All armies had to conserve their ammunition, and in parts of the line, which were known as "quiet corners," for tactical reasons the stalemate was almost peaceful, either side holding its fire unless the other became restless. But between the trenches which had remained in the same position for many months, noliving thing was visible day after day except a rabbit or a field mouse where the ground birds made their nests, and there the piping of birds joined with the song of the bullets. Except for occasional snipers' shots at the sight of anything moving on the enemy's parapet, the day wore monotonously on—when to expose the head for half a minute meant death.
Naturally the trenches do not run straight. They bend in and out at sharp angles in order to localize the explosions of shells; they are so narrow in most places that two men can pass with difficulty. A few soldiers are on guard, the rest may be lying about their dugouts or probably engaged in building new traverses or in putting up new layers of sandbags or deepening their dugouts. They become beavers rather than warriors, day laborers with spade and shovel rather than knights. There is no marching and countermarching; they have no use for the skirmish drill or the maneuver ground. Sharpshooters with clamped rifles watch for a target patiently as fishermen for a bite.
Back from the first line trench runs a winding communication trench, a foot or more deeper than the average man's height and the turns in its walls stop any bullets which otherwise might sweep its length in enfilade. In the reserve trenches are other men in burrows who have not even the excitement of sniping. They do nothing but wait and dig, repairing damages wrought by occasional shells on dull days.
At any hour the enemy may suddenly decide to attack and they may find their houses pounded down about their heads and perhaps half of a company wiped out in a quarter of an hour. Then other communication trenches lead back until finally you are in the open country out of the range of bullets, but not outside the range of shells. Here the munition caissons and the transport wagons come up by night bringing the food for men and guns which is taken up to the hungry mouths under the cover of darkness; and here, on an average day, one will occasionally observe the passing of an ambulance with its green roof and sides which melts it into the road and the landscape—and processions of ambulances when there is battle. All thedetail of army existence is as precise as that of the best organized industrial plant.
As you walk along you will spy at intervals a hidden battery, perhaps in a house, perhaps in a hedge, perhaps in a group of trees, perhaps beautifully roofed over with sod, so that it is invisible from the air. You rarely look up without seeing an aeroplane flying overhead. When there is action, you will see many. A faint pur comes out of the heavens and two planes are seen circling as they exchange bullets from their machine guns. Another plane is turning to the right and left and ducking to avoid the thistle blows of smoke which burst from the shrapnel shells fired by the antiaircraft guns.
Follow the course of the long procession of motor trucks which feed the army and you arrive at one of the great supply depots which every day send out the precise quota of supplies that are needed, with every motor truck having its schedule and keeping that schedule with the accuracy of a first-class passenger train. Follow the ambulances back from station to station, where the wounded men are examined to see if they are suffering from a hemorrhage and whether they are able to stand the farther journey and do not need an immediate operation, and you are brought to the immense base hospitals in a closely guarded and well ordered camp where every sanitary tradition known to modern life is absolutely enforced. One of these hospitals had twelve thousand beds and in the offensive of September 25, 1915, it discharged seven thousand patients in a day.
Soldiers are restricted to the neighborhood of their billets and officers themselves must have passes if they travel outside the region occupied by their battalions. Everyone is a policeman under an intricate system guarding every detail of army secrets from any spy and from those gallant aviators who risk antiaircraft gunfire in the hope of bringing home some information to their side.
Never has the Intelligence Service of an army had so many secrets to guard; never has it required such complicated measures of protection against espionage. In Napoleonic times, it was enough to know that your adversary was marching a hundredthousand men along parallel roads. This your cavalry scouts might discover; or a spy who had crossed the frontier in an unfrequented place might be watching the enemy's army and counting his numbers as they passed. Now the frontier is an intact line of trenches.
The spies of Richelieu's day have been surpassed in this, our day—with their stories yet to be told. Many a man who spoke the enemy's language well has put on the enemy's uniform, joined one of his scouting parties between the trenches in the darkness, entered the enemy's trenches, heard all the talk and slipped back to his own lines safely. If apprehended, his fate was certain—death.
The most efficient spy, of course, is the one with military training He knows the value of what he sees. Usually he is an officer of good family who has been cashiered for gambling or debt and takes a desperate chance out of patriotism and the hope of atonement. Naturally, the easiest route for spies was through Holland and Switzerland which became the gateway of passing spies and the playground of espionage and counterespionage. Gradually the restrictions tightened for all neutral travelers from capital to capital, while none were permitted to go into the zones of the armies, some twenty or thirty miles from the trenches.
The problem of the Intelligence Corps is much like that of putting the parts of a picture puzzle together. A line from a newspaper in one part of the world, a line from a newspaper in another taken in connection with a photograph, an excerpt from a letter found on a prisoner or a fact got from a prisoner by skillful catechism, might develop a valuable contributory item. The amount of information procured by either side about the other was only less amazing to the outsider than how it was obtained. Again, events revealed amazing ignorance. Most baffling and most secret of all branches is this, whose work is both gaining and conserving information, and just as professional, just as carefully prepared before the war as any other.