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+Project Gutenberg's A General Sketch of the European War, by Hilaire Belloc
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A General Sketch of the European War
+       The First Phase
+
+Author: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2006 [EBook #18042]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A
+GENERAL SKETCH
+OF THE
+EUROPEAN WAR
+
+BY
+HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+THE FIRST PHASE
+
+
+THOMAS NELSON & COMPANY
+LONDON, EDINBURGH, PARIS, AND NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+_First published June 1, 1915_
+_Reprinted June 1915_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                    7
+
+
+PART I.
+
+THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.
+
+(1) THE GERMAN OBJECT                                          17
+
+(2) CONFLICT PRODUCED BY THE CONTRAST OF THIS GERMAN
+      ATTITUDE OR WILL WITH THE WILLS OF OTHER NATIONS         23
+
+(3) PRUSSIA                                                    27
+
+(4) AUSTRIA                                                    39
+
+(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR                           50
+
+(6) THE IMMEDIATE OCCASION OF THE WAR                          64
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE FORCES OPPOSED.
+
+(1) THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF THE BELLIGERENTS              80
+
+      The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of
+      the Germanic Body                                        86
+
+      The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of
+      the Allies                                              121
+
+(2) THE OPPOSING STRENGTHS                                    136
+
+      The Figures of the First Period, say to
+      October 1-31, 1914                                      145
+
+      The Figures of the Second Period, say to
+      April 15-June 1, 1915                                   151
+
+(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR                           164
+
+
+PART III.
+
+THE FIRST OPERATIONS.
+
+(1) THE BATTLE OF METZ                                        316
+
+(2) LEMBERG                                                   322
+
+(3) TANNENBERG                                                345
+
+(4) THE SPIRITS IN CONFLICT                                   365
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+It is the object of this book, and those which will succeed it in the
+same series, to put before the reader the main lines of the European
+War as it proceeds. Each such part must necessarily be completed and
+issued some little time after the events to which it relates have
+passed into history. The present first, or introductory volume, which
+is a preface to the whole, covers no more than the outbreak of
+hostilities, and is chiefly concerned with an examination of the
+historical causes which produced the conflict, an estimate of the
+comparative strength of the various combatants, and a description of
+the first few days during which these combatants took up their
+positions and suffered the first great shocks of the campaigns in East
+and West.
+
+But in order to serve as an introduction to the remainder of the
+series, it is necessary that the plan upon which these books are to
+be constructed should be clearly explained.
+
+There is no intention of giving in detail and with numerous exact maps
+the progress of the campaigns. Still less does the writer propose to
+examine disputed points of detail, or to enumerate the units employed
+over that vast field. His object is to make clear, as far as he is
+able, those great outlines of the business which too commonly escape
+the general reader.
+
+This war is the largest and the weightiest historical incident which
+Europe has known for many centuries. It will surely determine the
+future of Europe, and in particular the future of this country. Yet
+the comprehension of its movements is difficult to any one not
+acquainted with the technical language and the special study of
+military history; and the reading of the telegrams day by day, even
+though it be accompanied by the criticisms of the military experts in
+the newspapers, leaves the mass of men with a most confused conception
+of what happened and why it happened.
+
+Now, it is possible, by greatly simplifying maps, by further
+simplifying these into clear diagrams, still more by emphasizing what
+is essential and by deliberately omitting a crowd of details--by
+showing first the framework, as it were, of any principal movement,
+and then completing that framework with the necessary furniture of
+analysed record--to give any one a conception both of what happened
+and of how it happened.
+
+It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over which
+the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to the author
+of this), so to describe such ground to the reader that he will in
+some sort be able to see for himself the air and the view in which the
+things were done: thus more than through any other method will the
+things be made real to him. The aim, therefore, of these pages, and of
+those that will succeed them, is to give such a general idea of the
+campaigns as a whole as will permit whoever has grasped it a secure
+comprehension of the forces at work, and of the results of those
+forces. It is desired, for example, that the reader of these pages
+shall be able to say to himself: "The Germanic body expected to
+win--and no wonder, for it had such and such advantages in number and
+in equipment.... The first two battles before Warsaw failed, and I can
+see why. It was because the difficulties in Russian supply were met by
+a contraction of the Russian line.... The 1st German Army was
+compelled to retreat before Paris, and I can now see why that was so:
+as it turned to envelop the Allied line, a great reserve within the
+fortified zone of Paris threatened it, and forced it back."
+
+These main lines, and these only, are attempted in the present book,
+and in those that are to follow it in this series.
+
+The disadvantage of such a method is, of course, that the reader must
+look elsewhere for details, for the notices of a particular action,
+and the records of particular regiments. He must look for these to the
+large histories of the war, which will amply supply his curiosity in
+good time. But the advantage of the method consists in that it
+provides, as I hope, a foundation upon which all this bewildering
+multitude of detailed reading can repose.
+
+I set out, then, to give, as it were, the alphabet of the campaign,
+and I begin in this volume with the preliminaries to it--that is, its
+great political causes, deep rooted in the past; the particular and
+immediate causes which led to the outbreak of war; an estimate of the
+forces engaged; and the inception of hostilities.
+
+
+PLAN OF THIS BOOK.
+
+This first volume will cover three parts. In Part I. I shall write of
+The Causes of the War. In Part II. I shall Contrast the Forces
+Opposed. In Part III. (the briefest) I shall describe the First Shock.
+
+In Part I., where I deal first with the general or historical causes
+of the war, later with the particulars, I shall:--
+
+1. Define the German object which led up to it.
+
+2. Show how this object conflicted with the wills of other nations.
+
+3. Briefly sketch the rise of Prussia and of her domination over North
+Germany.
+
+4. Define the position of Austria-Hungary in the matter, and thus
+close the general clauses.
+
+5. The particular causes of the war will next be dealt with; the
+curious challenge thrown down to Great Britain by the German Fleet
+_before_ the German Empire had made secure its position on the
+Continent; the French advance upon Morocco; the coalition of the
+Balkan States against the remainder of the Turkish Empire in Europe.
+
+6. Lastly, in this First Part, I shall describe the immediate occasion
+of the war and its surroundings: the ultimatum issued by the
+Austro-Hungarian Government to the little kingdom of Servia.
+
+In Part II. I will attempt to present the forces opposed at the
+outbreak of war.
+
+First, the contrast in the geographical position of the Germanic
+Allies with their enemies, the French, the English, and the Russians.
+Secondly, the numbers of trained men prepared and the numbers of
+reserves available in at least the first year to the various numbers
+in conflict. Thirdly, the way in which the various enemies had thought
+of the coming war (which was largely a matter of theory in the lack of
+experience); in what either party has been right, and in what wrong,
+as events proved; and with what measure of foresight the various
+combatants entered the field.
+
+In Part III, I will very briefly describe the original armed
+dispositions for combat at the outbreak of war, the German aim upon
+the West, and the German orders to the Austrians upon the East; the
+overrunning of Belgium, and the German success upon the Sambre; then
+the pursuit of the Franco-British forces to the line Paris-Verdun, up
+to the eve of the successful counter-offensive undertaken by them in
+the first week of September. I will end by describing what were the
+contemporary events in the Eastern field: in its northern part the
+overrunning of East Prussia by the Russians, and the heavy blow which
+the Germans there administered to the invader; in its southern the
+Austrian opposition to the Russians on the Galician borders, and the
+breakdown of that opposition at Lemberg.
+
+My terminal date for this sketch will be the 5th of September.
+
+
+
+
+A GENERAL SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR.
+
+PART I.
+
+THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.
+
+
+War is the attempt of two human groups each to impose its will upon
+the other by force of arms. This definition holds of the most
+righteous war fought in self-defence as much as it does of the most
+iniquitous war of mere aggression. The aggressor, for instance,
+proposes to take the goods of his victim without the pretence of a
+claim. He is attempting to impose his will upon that victim. The
+victim, in resisting by force of arms, is no less attempting to impose
+his will upon the aggressor; and if he is victorious does effectually
+impose that will: for it is his will to prevent the robbery.
+
+Every war, then, arises from some conflict of wills between two human
+groups, each intent upon some political or civic purpose, conflicting
+with that of his opponent.
+
+War and all military action is but a means to a non-military end, to
+be achieved and realized in peace.
+
+Although arguable differences invariably exist as to the right or
+wrong of either party in any war, yet the conflicting wills of the two
+parties, the irreconcilable political objects which each has put
+before itself and the opposition between which has led to conflict,
+can easily be defined.
+
+They fall into two classes:--
+
+1. The general objects at which the combatants have long been aiming.
+
+2. The particular objects apparent just before, and actually
+provoking, the conflict.
+
+In the case of the present enormous series of campaigns, which occupy
+the energies of nearly all Europe, the general causes can be easily
+defined, and that without serious fear of contradiction by the
+partisans of either side.
+
+On the one hand, the Germanic peoples, especially that great majority
+of them now organized as the German Empire under the hegemony of
+Prussia, had for fully a lifetime and more been possessed of a certain
+conception of themselves which may be not unjustly put into the form
+of the following declaration. It is a declaration consonant with most
+that has been written from the German standpoint during more than a
+generation, and many of its phrases are taken directly from the
+principal exponents of the German idea.
+
+
+(I) THE GERMAN OBJECT.
+
+"We the Germans are in spirit one nation. But we are a nation the
+unity of which has been constantly forbidden for centuries by a number
+of accidents. None the less that unity has always been an ideal
+underlying our lives. Once or twice in the remote past it has been
+nearly achieved, especially under the great German emperors of the
+Middle Ages. Whenever it has thus been nearly achieved, we Germans
+have easily proved ourselves the masters of other societies around us.
+Most unfortunately our very strength has proved our ruin time and
+again by leading us into adventures, particularly adventures in
+Italy, which took the place of our national ideal for unity and
+disturbed and swamped it. The reason we have been thus supreme
+whenever we were united or even nearly united lay in the fact, which
+must be patent to every observer, that our mental, moral, and
+physical characteristics render us superior to all rivals. The German
+or Teutonic race can everywhere achieve, other things being equal,
+more than can any other race. Witness the conquest of the Roman Empire
+by German tribes; the political genius, commercial success, and final
+colonial expansion of the English, a Teutonic people; and the peculiar
+strength of the German races resident within their old homes on the
+Rhine, the Danube, the Weser, and the Elbe, whenever they were not
+fatally disunited by domestic quarrel or unwise foreign ideals. It was
+we who revivified the declining society of Roman Gaul, and made it
+into the vigorous mediæval France that was ruled from the North. It
+was we who made and conquered the heathen Slavs threatening Europe
+from the East, and who civilized them so far as they could be
+civilized. We are, in a word, and that patently not only to ourselves
+but to all others, the superior and leading race of mankind; and you
+have but to contrast us with the unstable Celt--who has never produced
+a State--the corrupt and now hopelessly mongrel Mediterranean or
+'Latin' stock, the barbarous and disorderly Slav, to perceive at once
+the truth of all we say.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 1.]
+
+"It so happens that the various accidents which interrupted our
+strivings for unity permitted other national groups, inferior morally
+and physically to our own, to play a greater part than such an
+inferiority warranted; and the same accidents permitted men of
+Teutonic stock, not inhabiting the ancient homes of the Teutons, but
+emigrated therefrom and politically separated from the German Empire,
+to obtain advantages in which we ourselves should have had a share,
+but which we missed. Thus England, a Teutonic country, obtained her
+vast colonial empire while we had not a ship upon the sea.
+
+"France, a nation then healthier than it is now, but still of much
+baser stock than our own, played for centuries the leading part in
+Western Europe; she is even to-day 'over-capitalized,' as it were,
+possessing a far greater hold over the modern world than her real
+strength warrants. Even the savage Slavs have profited by our former
+disunion, and the Russian autocracy not only rules millions of
+German-speaking subjects, but threatens our frontiers with its great
+numbers of barbarians, and exercises over the Balkan Peninsula, and
+therefore over the all-important position of Constantinople, a power
+very dangerous to European culture as a whole, and particularly to our
+own culture--which is, of course, by far the highest culture of all.
+
+"Some fifty years ago, acting upon the impulse of a group of great
+writers and thinkers, our statesmen at last achieved that German unity
+which had been the unrealized ideal of so many centuries. In a series
+of wars we accomplished that unity, and we amply manifested our
+superiority when we were once united by defeating with the greatest
+ease and in the most fundamental fashion the French, whom the rest of
+Europe then conceived to be the chief military power.
+
+"From that moment we have incontestably stood in the sight of all as
+the strongest people in the world, and yet because other and lesser
+nations had the start of us, our actual international position, our
+foreign possessions, the security that should be due to so supreme an
+achievement, did not correspond to our real strength and abilities.
+England had vast dependencies, and had staked out the unoccupied world
+as her colonies. We had no colonies and no dependencies. France,
+though decadent, was a menace to our peace upon the West. We could
+have achieved the thorough conquest and dismemberment of France at any
+time in the last forty years, and yet during the whole of that time
+France was adding to her foreign possessions in Tunis, Madagascar, and
+Tonkin, latterly in Morocco, while we were obtaining nothing. The
+barbarous Russians were increasing constantly in numbers, and somewhat
+perfecting their insufficient military machine without any
+interference from us, grave as was the menace from them upon our
+Eastern frontier.
+
+"It was evident that such a state of things could not endure. A nation
+so united and so immensely strong could not remain in a position of
+artificial inferiority while lesser nations possessed advantages in no
+way corresponding to their real strength. The whole equilibrium of
+Europe was unstable through this contrast between what Germany might
+be and what she was, and a struggle to make her what she might be
+from what she was could not be avoided.
+
+"Germany must, in fulfilment of a duty to herself, obtain colonial
+possessions at the expense of France, obtain both colonial possessions
+and sea-power at the expense of England, and put an end, by campaigns
+perhaps defensive, but at any rate vigorous, to the menace of Slav
+barbarism upon the East. She was potentially, by her strength and her
+culture, the mistress of the modern world, the chief influence in it,
+and the rightful determinant of its destinies. She must by war pass
+from a potential position of this kind to an actual position of
+domination."
+
+Such was the German mood, such was the fatuous illusion which produced
+this war. It had at its service, as we shall see later, _numbers_,
+and, backed by this superiority of numbers, it counted on victory.
+
+
+(2) CONFLICT PRODUCED BY THE CONTRAST OF THIS GERMAN ATTITUDE OR
+WILL WITH THE WILLS OF OTHER NATIONS.
+
+When we have clearly grasped the German attitude, as it may thus be
+not unfairly expressed, we shall not find it difficult to conceive
+why a conflict between such a will and other wills around it broke
+out.
+
+We need waste no time in proving the absurdity of the German
+assumptions, the bad history they involve, and the perverse and
+twisted perspective so much vanity presupposes. War can never be
+prevented by discovering the moral errors of an opponent. It comes
+into being because that opponent does not believe them to be moral
+errors; and in the attempt to understand this war and its causes, we
+should only confuse ourselves if we lost time over argument upon
+pretensions even as crassly unreal as these.
+
+It must be enough for the purposes of this to accept the German will
+so stated, and to see how it necessarily conflicts with the English
+will, the French will, the Russian will, and sooner or later, for that
+matter, with every other national will in Europe.
+
+In the matter of sea-power England would answer: "Unless we are
+all-powerful at sea, our very existence is imperilled." In the matter
+of her colonies and dependencies England would answer: "We may be a
+Teutonic people or we may not. All that kind of thing is pleasant talk
+for the academies. But if you ask whether we will allow any part of
+our colonies to become German or any part of our great dependencies to
+fall under German rule, the answer is in the negative."
+
+The French would answer: "We do not happen to think that we are either
+decadent or corrupt, nor do we plead guilty to any other of your vague
+and very pedantic charges; but quite apart from that, on the concrete
+point of whether we propose to be subjugated by a foreign Power,
+German or other, the answer is in the negative. Our will is here in
+conflict with yours. And before you can proceed to any act of mastery
+over us, you will have to fight. Moreover, we shall not put aside the
+duty of ultimately fighting you so long as a population of two
+millions, who feel themselves to be French (though most of them are
+German-speaking) and who detest your rule, are arbitrarily kept in
+subjection by you in Alsace-Lorraine."
+
+The Russians would reply: "We cannot help being numerically stronger
+than you, and we do not propose to diminish our numbers even if we
+could. We do not think we are barbaric; and as to our leadership of
+the Slav people in the Balkans, that seems as right and natural to us,
+particularly on religious grounds, as any such bond could be. It may
+interfere with your ambitions; but if you propose that we should
+abandon so obvious an attitude of leadership among the Slavs, the
+answer is in the negative." There is here, therefore, again a conflict
+of wills.
+
+In general, what the German peoples desired, based upon what they
+believed themselves to be, was sharply at issue with what the English
+people, what the French people, what the Russian people respectively
+desired. Their desires were also based upon what _they_ believed
+themselves to be, and they thought themselves to be very different
+from what Germany thought them to be. The English did not believe that
+they had sneaked their empire; the French did not believe that they
+were moribund; the Russians did not believe that they were savages.
+
+It was impossible that the German will should impose itself without
+coming at once into conflict with these other national wills. It was
+impossible that the German ideal should seek to realize itself without
+coming into conflict with the mere desire to live, let alone the
+self-respect, of everybody else.
+
+And the consequence of such a conflict in ideals and wills translated
+into practice was this war.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the war would not have come nor would it have taken the shape that
+it did, but for two other factors in the problem which we must next
+consider. These two other factors are, first, the position and
+tradition of Prussia among the German States; secondly, the peculiar
+authority exercised by the Imperial House of Hapsburg-Lorraine at
+Vienna over its singularly heterogeneous subjects.
+
+
+(3) PRUSSIA.
+
+The Germans have always been, during their long history, a race
+inclined to perpetual division and sub-division, accompanied by war
+and lesser forms of disagreement between the various sections. Their
+friends have called this a love of freedom, their enemies political
+incompetence; but, without giving it a good or a bad name, the plain
+fact has been, century after century, that the various German tribes
+would not coalesce. Any one of them was always willing to take service
+with the Roman Empire, in the early Roman days, against any one of the
+others, and though there have been for short periods more or less
+successful attempts to form one nation of them all in imitation of the
+more civilized States to the west and south, these attempts have never
+succeeded for very long.
+
+But it so happens that about two hundred years ago, or a little more,
+there appeared one body of German-speaking men rather different from
+the rest, and capable ultimately of leading the rest, or at least a
+majority of the rest.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 2.]
+
+I use the words "German-speaking" and "rather different" because this
+particular group of men, though speaking German, were of less pure
+German blood than almost any other of the peoples that spoke that
+tongue. They were the product of a conquest undertaken late in the
+Middle Ages by German knights over a mixed Pagan population,
+Lithuanian and Slavonic, which inhabited the heaths and forests along
+the Baltic Sea. These German knights succeeded in their task, and
+compelled the subject population to accept Christianity, just as the
+Germans themselves had been compelled to accept it by their more
+powerful and civilized neighbours the French hundreds of years before.
+The two populations of this East Baltic district, the large majority
+which was Slavonic and Lithuanian, and the minority which was really
+German, mixed and produced a third thing, which we now know as the
+_Prussian_. The cradle of this Prussian race was, then, all that flat
+country of which Königsberg and Danzig are the capitals, but
+especially Königsberg--"King's Town"--where the monarchs of this
+remote people were crowned. By an historical accident, which we need
+not consider, the same dynasty was, after it had lost all claim to
+separate kingship, merged in the rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg, a
+somewhat more German but still mixed district lying also in the Baltic
+plain, but more towards the west, and the official title of the
+Prussian ruler somewhat more than two hundred years ago was the
+Elector of Brandenburg. These rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg were a
+family bearing the title of Hohenzollern, a castle in South Germany,
+by which name they are still distinguished. The palace of these
+Hohenzollerns was henceforward at Berlin.
+
+Now, much at the same time that the civil wars were being fought in
+England--that is, not quite three hundred years ago--the Reformation
+had produced in Germany also very violent quarrels. Vienna, which was
+the seat of the Imperial House, stood for the Catholic or traditional
+cause, and most Germans adhered to that cause. But certain of the
+Northern German principalities and counties took up the side of the
+Reformation. A terrible war, known as the Thirty Years' War, was
+fought between the two factions. It enormously reduced the total
+population of Germany. In the absence of exact figures we only have
+wild guesses, such as a loss of half or three-quarters. At any rate,
+both from losses from the adherence of many princes to the Protestant
+cause and from the support lent to that cause for political reasons by
+Catholic France, this great civil war in Germany left the Protestant
+part more nearly equal in numbers to the Catholic part, and, among
+other things, it began to make the Elector of Brandenburg with his
+Prussians particularly prominent as the champion of the Protestant
+cause. For, of all the warring towns, counties, principalities, and
+the rest, Prussia had in particular shown military aptitude.
+
+From that day to this the advance of Prussia as, first, the champion,
+then the leader, and at last the master of Northern Germany as a whole
+(including many Catholic parts in the centre and the south), has been
+consistent and almost uninterrupted. The "Great Elector" (as he was
+called) formed an admirable army some two hundred years ago. His
+grandson Frederick formed a still better one, and by his great
+capacities as a general, as well as by the excellence of his troops,
+gave Prussia a military reputation in the middle of the eighteenth
+century which has occasionally been eclipsed, but has never been
+extinguished.
+
+Frederick the Great did more than this. He codified and gave
+expression, as it were, to the Prussian spirit, and the manifestation
+of that spirit in international affairs is generally called the
+"Frederician Tradition."
+
+This "Frederician Tradition" must be closely noted by the reader,
+because it is the principal moral cause of the present war. It may be
+briefly and honestly put in the following terms:--
+
+"The King of Prussia shall do all that may seem to advantage the
+kingdom of Prussia among the nations, notwithstanding any European
+conventions or any traditions of Christendom, or even any of those
+wider and more general conventions which govern the international
+conduct of other Christian peoples."
+
+For instance, if a convention of international morals has arisen--as
+it did arise very strongly, and was kept until recent times--that
+hostilities should not begin without a formal declaration of war, the
+"Frederician Tradition" would go counter to this, and would say: "If
+ultimately it would be to the advantage of Prussia to attack without
+declaration of war, then this convention may be neglected."
+
+Or, again, treaties solemnly ratified between two Governments are
+generally regarded as binding. And certainly a nation that never kept
+such a treaty for more than a week would find itself in a position
+where it was impossible to make any treaties at all. Still, if upon a
+vague calculation of men's memories, the acuteness of the
+circumstance, the advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to
+the advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a
+treaty should be broken.
+
+It will be apparent that what is called the "Frederician Tradition,"
+which is the soul of Prussia in her international relations, is not an
+unprincipled thing. It has a principle, and that principle is a
+patriotic desire to strengthen Prussia, which particular appetite
+overweighs all general human morals and far outweighs all special
+Christian or European morals.
+
+This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the
+Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or in
+acts of treason and bad faith. What it means is that, wherever they
+are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do _this_, which is to the advantage
+of my country but opposed to European and common morals, or _that_,
+which is consonant with those morals but to the disadvantage of my
+country?" they choose the former and not the latter course.
+
+Prussia, endowed with this doctrine and possessed of a most excellent
+military organization and tradition, stood out as the first military
+power in Europe until the French Revolution. The wars of the French
+Revolution and of Napoleon upset this prestige, and in the battle of
+Jena (1806) seemed to have destroyed it. But it was too strong to be
+destroyed. The Prussian Government was the first of Napoleon's allies
+to betray Napoleon _after_ the Russians had broken his power (1812).
+They took part with the other Allies in finishing off Napoleon after
+the Russian campaign (1813-14); they were present with decisive effect
+upon the final field of Waterloo (1815), and remained for fifty years
+afterwards the great military power they had always been. They had
+further added to their dominions such great areas in Northern
+Germany, beyond the original areas inhabited by the true Prussian
+stock, that they were something like half of the whole Northern German
+people when, in 1864, they entered into the last phase of their
+dominion. They began by asking Austria to help them in taking from
+Denmark, a small and weak country, not only those provinces of hers
+which spoke German, but certain districts which were Danish as well.
+France and England were inclined to interfere, but they did not yet
+understand the menace Prussia might be in the future, and they
+neglected to act. Two years later Prussia suddenly turned upon
+Austria, her ally, defeated her in a very short campaign, and insisted
+upon Austria's relinquishing for the future all claims over any part
+of the German-speaking peoples, save some ten millions in the valley
+of the Middle Danube and of the Upper Elbe. Four years later again, in
+1870, Prussia having arranged, after various political experiments
+which need not be here detailed, for the support of all the German
+States except Austria, fought a war with France, in which she was
+immediately and entirely successful, and in the course of which the
+rulers of the other German States consented (1) to give the
+Hohenzollern-Prussian dynasty supreme military power for the future
+over them, under the hereditary title of German Emperors; (2) to form
+a united nation under the more or less despotic power of these
+emperors.
+
+This latter point, the national unity, though really highly
+centralized at Berlin, especially on the military side, was softened
+in its rigour by a number of very wise provisions. A great measure of
+autonomy was left to the more important of the lesser States,
+particularly Catholic Bavaria; local customs were respected; and,
+above all, local dynasties were flattered, and maintained in all the
+trappings of sovereign rank.
+
+From that date--that is, for the last forty-four years--there has been
+a complete _Northern_ Germany, one strong, centralized, and thoroughly
+co-ordinated nation, in which the original Prussian domination is not
+only numerically far the greatest element, but morally overshadows all
+the rest. The spiritual influence ruling this state issues from Berlin
+and from the Prussian soul, although a large minority consist of
+contented but respectful Catholics, who, in all national matters,
+wholly sympathize with and take their cue from the Protestant North.
+
+So far one may clearly see what kind of power it is that has initiated
+the German theory of supremacy which we have described above, is
+prepared to lead it to battle, and is quite certain of leading it to
+victory.
+
+But we note--the fatal mark in all German history--that the unity is
+not complete. The ten millions of Austrian Germans were, when Prussia
+achieved this her highest ambition, deliberately left outside the new
+German Empire. And this was done because, in Prussian eyes, a
+so-called "German unity" was but a means to an end, and that end the
+aggrandizement of the Hohenzollern dynasty. To include so many
+southern and Catholic Germans would have endangered the mastery of
+Berlin. The fact that Austria ruled a number of non-German subjects
+far larger than her Austrian population would further have endangered
+the Hohenzollern position had Austria been admitted to the new German
+Empire, and had the consolidation of all Germans into one true state
+been really and loyally attempted. Lastly, it would have been
+impossible to destroy the historic claims to leadership of the
+Imperial Hapsburgs, and that, more than anything else, was the rivalry
+the Hohenzollerns dreaded. Once more had the Germans proved themselves
+incapable of, and unwilling to submit to, the discipline of unity.
+What part, then, was Austria, thus left out, to play in the
+international activity of Prussia in the future? What part especially
+was she to play when Prussia, at the head of Northern Germany, should
+go out to impose the will of that Germany and of herself upon the rest
+of the world? That is the next question we must answer before we can
+hope to understand the causes of the present war in their entirety.
+
+
+(4) AUSTRIA.
+
+Austria, or, more strictly speaking, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
+means no more than the congeries of States governed each separately
+and all in combination by the head of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine.
+Of these various States only one is German-speaking as a whole, and
+that is the Austrian State proper, the "Eastern States" (for that is
+what the word "Austria" originally meant) which Christendom erected
+round the Roman and Christian frontier town of Vienna to withstand the
+pressure of the heathen Slavs and Mongol Magyars surging against it
+upon this frontier.
+
+The complexity of the various sections which make up the realm of the
+present Emperor Francis Joseph, the present head of the House of
+Hapsburg-Lorraine, would be only confusing if it were detailed in so
+general a description as this. We must be content with the broad lines
+of the thing, which are as follows:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 3.]
+
+From the Upper Danube and its valley--all the basin of it, one may
+say, down to a point about twenty miles below Vienna--is the original
+Austrian State; German-speaking as a whole, and the historic centre of
+the entire agglomeration. East of this is the far larger state of
+Hungary, and Hungary is the valley of the river Danube, from where the
+German-speaking boundary cuts it, just below Vienna down to the Iron
+Gates, up to the crest of the Carpathians. These two great units of
+Austria proper and of Hungary have round them certain frills or edges.
+On the north are two great bodies, Slav in origin, Bohemia and
+Galicia; on the south another Slav body, separated from the rest for
+centuries by the eruption of the Magyars from Asia in the Dark Ages,
+and these Slav bodies are represented by Croatia, by much of Dalmatia,
+and latterly by Bosnia and Herzegovina, which have been governed by
+Austria for a generation, and formally annexed by her with the consent
+of Europe seven years ago. Finally, there is a strip, or, to be more
+accurate, there are patches of Italian-speaking people, all along the
+coasts of the Adriatic, and occupying the ports governed by Austria
+along the eastern and northern coast of that sea. There is also a belt
+of Alpine territory of Italian speech--the Trentino--still in Austrian
+hands.
+
+This very general description gives, however, far too rough an idea of
+the extraordinarily complicated territories of the House of Hapsburg.
+Thus, there are considerable German-speaking colonies in Hungary, and
+these, oddly enough, are more frequent in the east than in the west
+of that State. Again, the whole western slope of the Carpathians is,
+so far as the mass of the population is concerned, Roumanian in
+tongue, custom, and race. Bohemia, though Slavonic in origin, is
+regularly enframed along its four sides by belts of German-speaking
+people, and was mainly German-speaking until a comparatively recent
+revival of its native Slavonic tongue, the Czech. Again, though the
+Magyar language is Mongolian, like the Turkish, centuries of Christian
+and European admixture have left very little trace of the original
+race. Lastly, in all the north-eastern corner of this vast and
+heterogeneous territory, something like a quarter of the population is
+Jewish.
+
+The Western student, faced with so extraordinary a puzzle of race and
+language, may well wonder what principle of unity there is lying
+behind it, and, indeed, this principle of unity is not easy to find.
+
+Some have sought it in religion, pointing out that the overwhelming
+majority of these various populations are Catholic, in communion with
+Rome; and, indeed, this Catholic tincture or colour has a great deal
+to do with the Austro-Hungarian unity; and of late years the chief
+directing policy of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine has been to pose as
+the leader of the Catholic Slavs against the Slavs belonging to the
+Greek Church.
+
+But this principle of unity is not the true one, for two reasons:
+first, that the motive leading the House of Hapsburg to the difficult
+task of so complicated a government is not a religious motive; and,
+secondly, because this religious unity is subject to profound
+modification. Hungary, though Catholic in its majority, contains, and
+is largely governed by, powerful Protestant families, who are
+supported by considerable bodies of Protestant population. The Greek
+Church is the religious profession of great numbers along the Lower
+Danube valley and to the south of the river Save. There are in Bosnia
+a considerable number of Mahomedans even, and I have already mentioned
+the numerous Jewish population of the north-east, particularly in
+Galicia.
+
+The true principle of unity in what has hitherto been the
+Austro-Hungarian Empire is twofold. It consists, first, in the
+reigning family, considerable personal attachment to which is felt in
+every section of its dominions, utterly different as these are one
+from another; and, secondly (a more important point), in the
+historical development of the State.
+
+It is this last matter which explains all, and which can make us
+understand why a realm so astonishingly ill constructed was brought
+into the present struggle as one force, and that force a force allied
+to, and in a military sense identical with, modern Prussian Germany.
+
+For the historical root of Austria-Hungary is German. Of its
+population (some fifty-one millions) you may say that only about a
+quarter are German-speaking (less than another quarter are
+Magyar-speaking, most of the rest Slavonic in speech, together with
+some proportion of Roumanian and Italian).
+
+But it is from this German _quarter_ and from the emperor at their
+head that the historical growth of the State depends, because this
+German _quarter_ was the original Christian nucleus and the civilized
+centre, which had for its mission the reduction of Slavonic and Magyar
+barbarism. The Slavs of the Bohemian quadrilateral were subjected,
+not indeed by conquest, but by a process of culture, to Vienna. The
+crown of Hungary, when it fell by marriage to the Hapsburgs, continued
+that tradition; and when the Empress Maria-Theresa, in the last
+century, participated in the abominable crime of Frederick the Great
+of Prussia, and took her share of the dismembered body of Poland (now
+called the Austrian province of Galicia), that enormous blunder was,
+in its turn, a German blunder undertaken under the example of Northern
+Germany, and as part of a movement German in spirit and origin. The
+same is true even of the very latest of the Austrian developments, the
+annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The act was that of Vienna, but
+the spirit behind it, perhaps the suggestion of it, and the support
+that made it possible came from Berlin.
+
+In a word, if you could interrogate the Genius of the Hapsburgs and
+ask it for what their dominion stood, it would tell you that for
+uninterrupted centuries they had stood for the German effort to
+repress or to overcome pressure upon the German peoples from the
+East. And that is still their rôle. They have come into this war, for
+instance, as the servants of Prussia, not because Prussia threatened
+or overawed them, but because they felt they had, in common with
+Prussia, the mission of withstanding the Slav, or of tolerating the
+Slav only as a subject; because, that is, they feared, and were
+determined to resist, Russia, and the smaller Slavonic States, notably
+Servia to the south, which are in the retinue of Russia.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We may sum up, then, and say that the fundamental conflict of wills in
+Europe, which has produced this general war, is a conflict between the
+German will, organized by Prussia to overthrow the ancient Christian
+tradition of Europe (to _her_ advantage directly; and indirectly, as
+she proposes, to the advantage of a supposedly necessary German
+governance of the world under Prussian organization), and the will of
+the more ancient and better founded Western and Latin tradition to
+which the sanctity of separate national units profoundly appeals, and
+a great deal more which is, in their eyes, civilization. In this
+conflict, Prussia has called upon and received the support of not only
+the German Empire, which she controls, but also the Hapsburg monarchy,
+controlling the organized forces of Austria-Hungary; while there has
+appeared against this strange Prussian claim all that values the
+Christian tradition of Europe, and in particular the doctrine of
+national freedom, with very much else--which very much else are the
+things by which we of the civilized West and South, who have hitherto
+proved the creators of the European world, live and have our being.
+Allied with us, by the accident that this same German claim threatens
+them also, is the young new world of the Slavs.
+
+It is at this final point of our examination that we may see the
+immensity of the issues upon which the war turns. The two parties are
+really fighting for their lives; that in Europe which is arrayed
+against the Germanic alliance would not care to live if it should fail
+to maintain itself against the threat of that alliance. It is for them
+life and death. On the other side, the Germans having propounded this
+theory of theirs, or rather the Prussians having propounded it for
+them, there is no rest possible until they shall either have "made
+good" to our destruction, or shall have been so crushed that a
+recurrence of the menace from them will for the future be impossible.
+
+There is here no possibility of such a "draw" or "stalemate" as was
+the result, for instance, of the reduction of Louis XIV.'s ambition,
+or of the great revolutionary effort throughout Europe which ended
+with the fall of Napoleon. Louis XIV.'s ambition cast over Europe,
+which received it favourably, the colour of French culture. The
+Revolutionary Wars were fought for a principle which, if it did not
+appeal universally to men, appealed at least to all those millions
+whose instincts were democratic in every country. But in this war
+there is no such common term. No one outside the districts led by
+Prussia desires a Prussian life, and perhaps most, certainly many, of
+those whom Prussia now leads are in different degrees unwilling to
+continue a Prussian life. The fight, in a word, is not like a fight
+with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign away some property,
+or make you acknowledge some principle to which you are already half
+inclined; it is like a fight with a man who says, "So long as I have
+life left in me, I will make it my business to kill you." And fights
+of that kind can never reach a term less absolute than the destruction
+of offensive power in one side or the other. A peace not affirming
+complete victory in this great struggle could, of its nature, be no
+more than a truce.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So much for the really important and the chief thing which we have to
+understand--the general causes of the war.
+
+Now let us turn to the particular causes. We shall find these to be,
+not like the general causes, great spiritual attitudes, but, as they
+always are, a sequence of restricted and recent _events_.
+
+
+(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR.
+
+After the great victories of Prussia a generation ago (the spoliation
+of Denmark in 1864, the supremacy established over Austria in 1866,
+the crushing defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine,
+with two millions of people in 1870-1), Europe gradually drifted into
+being an armed camp, the great forces of which were more or less in
+equilibrium. Prussia had, for the moment at least, achieved all that
+she desired. The French were for quite twenty years ardently desirous
+of recovering what they had lost; but Europe would not allow the war
+to be renewed, and Prussia, now at the head of a newly constituted
+German Empire, made an arrangement with Austria and with Italy to curb
+the French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before
+this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support
+them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking
+another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling
+gradually deadened. It did not disappear--any incident might have
+revived it--but the anxious desire for immediate war when the
+opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the
+process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all
+the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock, every one very
+heavily armed, the principal antagonists, France and Germany, armed
+to their utmost, but the European States, as a whole, unwilling to
+allow any one of them to break the peace.
+
+It was about this moment that Prussia committed what the future
+historian will regard, very probably, as the capital blunder in her
+long career of success. She began to build a great fleet. Here the
+reader should note two very important consequences of the great
+Prussian victories which had taken place a generation before. The
+first was the immense expansion of German industrialism. Germany, from
+an agricultural State, became a State largely occupied in mining,
+smelting, spinning, and shipbuilding; and there went with this
+revolution, as there always goes with modern industrialism, a large
+and unhealthy increase of population. The German Empire, after its war
+with France, was roughly equal to the population of the French; but
+the German Empire, after this successful industrial experiment, the
+result of its victories, was much more than half as large again in
+population as the French (68 to 39).
+
+Secondly, the German Empire developed a new and very large maritime
+commerce. This second thing did not follow, as some have imagined it
+does, from the first. Germany might have exported largely without
+exporting in her own ships. The creation of Germany's new mercantile
+marine was a deliberate part of the general Prussian policy of
+expansion. It was heavily subsidized, especially directed into the
+form of great international passenger lines, and carefully
+co-ordinated with the rest of the Prussian scheme throughout the
+world.
+
+At a date determined by the same general policy, and somewhat
+subsequent to the first creation of this mercantile marine, came the
+decision to build a great fleet. Now, it so happens that Great Britain
+alone among the Powers of Europe depends for her existence upon
+supremacy at sea, and particularly upon naval superiority in the
+Narrow Seas to the east and the south of the British islands.
+
+Such a necessity is, of course, a challenge to the rest of the world,
+and it would be ridiculous to expect the rest of the world to accept
+that challenge without protest. But a necessity this naval policy of
+Great Britain remains none the less. The moment some rival or group
+of rivals can overcome her fleet, her mere physical livelihood is in
+peril. She cannot be certain of getting her food. She cannot be
+certain of getting those foreign materials the making up of which
+enables her to purchase her food. Further, her dominions are scattered
+oversea, and supremacy at sea is her only guarantee of retaining the
+various provinces of her dominion.
+
+It is a case which has happened more than once before in the history
+of the world. Great commercial seafaring States have arisen; they have
+always had the same method of government by a small, wealthy class,
+the same ardent patriotism, the same scattered empire, and the same
+inexorable necessity of maintaining supremacy at sea. Only one Power
+had hitherto rendered this country anxious for the Narrow Seas: that
+Power was France, and it only controlled one-half of the two branches
+of the Narrow Seas, the North Sea and the Channel. It had been for
+generations a cardinal piece of English policy that the French Fleet
+should be watched, the English Fleet maintained overwhelmingly
+superior to it, and all opportunities for keeping France engaged with
+other rivals used to the advantage of this country. On this account
+English policy leant, on the whole, towards the German side, during
+all the generation of rivalry between France and Germany which
+followed the war of 1870.
+
+But when the Germans began to build their fleet, things changed. The
+Germans had openly given Europe to understand that they regarded
+Holland and Belgium, and particularly the port of Antwerp, as
+ultimately destined to fall under their rule or into their system.
+Their fleet was specifically designed for meeting the British Fleet;
+it corresponded to no existing considerable colonial empire, and
+though the development of German maritime commerce was an excuse for
+it, it was only an excuse. Indeed, the object of obtaining supremacy
+at sea was put forward fairly clearly by the promoters of the whole
+scheme. Great Britain was therefore constrained to transfer the weight
+of her support to Russia and to France, and to count on the whole as a
+force opposed, for the first time in hundreds of years, to North
+Germany in the international politics of Europe. Similarity of
+religion (which is a great bond) and a supposed identity (and partly
+real similarity) of race were of no effect compared with this
+sentiment of necessity.
+
+Here it is important to note that the transference of British support
+from one continental group to another neither produced aggression by
+Great Britain nor pointed to any intention of aggression. It is a
+plain matter of fact, which all future history will note, that the
+very necessity in English eyes of English supremacy at sea, and the
+knowledge that such a supremacy was inevitably a provocation to
+others, led to the greatest discretion in the use of British naval
+strength, and, in general, to a purely defensive and peaceful policy
+upon the part of the chief maritime power. It would, indeed, have been
+folly to have acted otherwise, for there was nothing to prevent the
+great nations, our rivals, if they had been directly menaced by the
+British superiority at sea, from beginning to build great fleets,
+equal or superior to our own. Germany alone pursued this policy, with
+no excuse save an obvious determination to undo the claim of the
+British Fleet.
+
+I have called this a blunder, and, from the point of view of the
+German policy, it was a blunder. For if the Prussian dynasty set out,
+as it did, to make itself the chief power in the world, its obvious
+policy was to deal with its enemies in detail. It ought not, at any
+cost, to have quarrelled with Russia until it had finally disposed of
+France. If it was incapable, through lack of subtlety, to prevent the
+Franco-Russian group from forming, it should at least have made itself
+the master of that group before gratuitously provoking the rivalry of
+Great Britain. But "passion will have all now," and the supposedly
+cold and calculating nature of Prussian effort has about it something
+very crudely emotional, as the event has shown. From about ten years
+ago Prussian Germany had managed to array against itself not only the
+old Franco-Russian group but Great Britain as well.
+
+This arrangement would not, however, have led to war. Equilibrium was
+still perfectly maintained, and the very strong feeling throughout all
+the great States of Europe that a disturbance of the peace would mean
+some terrible catastrophe, to be avoided at all costs, was as
+powerful as ever.
+
+The true origin of disturbance, the first overt act upon which you can
+put your finger and say, "Here the chain of particular causes leading
+to the great war begins," was the revolution in Turkey. This
+revolution took place in the year 1908, and put more or less
+permanently into power at Constantinople a group of men based upon
+Masonic influence, largely Western in training, largely composed of
+Jewish elements, known as the "Young Turks."
+
+The first result of this revolution, followed as it inevitably was by
+the temporary weakening in international power which accompanies all
+civil war at its outset, was the declaration by Austria that she would
+regard the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina--hitherto only
+administrated by her and nominally still Turkish--as her own
+territory.
+
+It was but a formal act, but it proved of vast consequence. It was an
+open declaration by a Germanic Power that the hopes of the Servians,
+the main population of the district and a Slav nation closely bound
+to Russia in feeling, were at an end; that Servia must content herself
+with such free territory as she had, and give up all hope of a
+completely independent State uniting all Servians within its borders.
+It was as though Austria had said, "I intend in future to be the great
+European Power in the Balkans, Slav though the Balkans are, and I
+challenge Russia to prevent me." The Russian Government, thus
+challenged, would perhaps have taken the occasion to make war had not
+the French given it to be understood that they would not imperil
+European peace for such an object. The Prussian Government of the
+German Empire had, in all this crisis, acted perhaps as the leader,
+certainly as the protector and supporter of Austria; and when France
+thus refused to fight, and Russia in turn gave way, the whole thing
+was regarded, not only in Germany but throughout the world, as
+equivalent to an armed victory. Observers whose judgment and criticism
+are of weight, even in the eyes of trained international agents,
+proclaimed what had happened to be as much a Prussian success as
+though the Prussian and Austrian armies had met in the field and had
+defeated the Russian and the French forces.
+
+The next step in this series was a challenge advanced by Germany
+against that arrangement whereby Morocco, joining as it did to French
+North Africa, should be abandoned to French influence, so far as
+England was concerned, in exchange for the French giving up certain
+rights of interference they had in the English administration of
+Egypt, and one or two other minor points. Germany, advancing from a
+victorious position acquired over the Bosnian business, affirmed (in
+the year 1911) her right to be consulted over the Moroccan settlement.
+Nor were the French permitted to occupy Morocco until they had ceded
+to Germany a portion of their African colony of the Congo. This
+transaction was confused by many side issues. German patriots did not
+regard it as a sufficient success, though French patriots certainly
+regarded it as a grave humiliation. But perhaps the chief consequence
+of the whole affair was the recrudescence in the French people as a
+whole of a temper, half forgotten, which provoked them to withstand
+the now greatly increased power of the German Empire and of its ally,
+and to determine that if such challenges were to continue unchecked
+during the coming years, the national position of France would be
+forfeited.
+
+Following upon this crisis came, in the next year--still a consequence
+of the Turkish Revolution--the sudden determination of the Balkan
+States, including Greece, to attack Turkey. It was the King of
+Montenegro (a small Slav State which had always maintained its
+independence) who fired the first shot upon the 8th of October, 1912,
+with his own hand. In the course of that autumn the Balkan Allies were
+universally successful, failed only in taking Constantinople itself,
+reduced Turkey in Europe to an insignificant strip of territory near
+the capital itself, and proceeded to settle the conquered territory
+according to an agreement made by them before the outbreak of
+hostilities.
+
+But here the Germanic Powers again intervened. The defeated Turkish
+Army had been trained by German officers upon a German system; the
+expansion of German and Austrian political military influence
+throughout the Near East was a cardinal part of the German creed and
+policy. Through Austria the Balkans were to be dominated at last, and
+Austria, at this critical moment, vetoed the rational settlement which
+the allied Balkan States had agreed to among themselves. She would not
+allow the Servians to annex those territories inhabited by men of
+their race, and to reach their natural outlet to the sea upon the
+shores of the Adriatic. She proposed the creation of a novel State of
+Albania under a German prince, to block Servia's way to the sea. She
+further proposed to Servia compensation by way of Servia's annexing
+the territory round Monastir, which had a Bulgarian population, and to
+Bulgaria the insufficient compensation of taking over, farther to the
+east, territory that was not Bulgarian at all, but mixed Greek and
+Turkish.
+
+The whole thing was characteristically German in type, ignoring and
+despising national feeling and national right, creating artificial
+boundaries, and flagrantly sinning against the European sense of
+patriotism. A furious conflict between the various members of the
+former Balkan Alliance followed; but the settlement which Austria had
+virtually imposed remained firm, and the third of the great Germanic
+steps affirming the growing Germanic scheme in Europe had been taken.
+
+But it had been taken at the expense of further and very gravely
+shaking the already unstable armed equilibrium of Europe.
+
+The German Empire foresaw the coming strain; a law was passed
+immediately increasing the numbers of men to be trained to arms within
+its boundaries, and ultimately increasing that number so largely as to
+give to Germany alone a very heavy preponderance--a preponderance of
+something like thirty per cent.--over the corresponding number trained
+in France.
+
+To this move France could not reply by increasing her armed forces,
+because she already took every available man. She did the only
+possible thing under the circumstances. She increased by fifty per
+cent. the term during which her young men must serve in the army,
+changing that term from two years to three.
+
+The heavy burden thus suddenly imposed upon the French led to very
+considerable political disputes in that country, especially as the
+parliamentary form of government there established is exceedingly
+unpopular, and the politicians who live by it generally despised.
+When, therefore, the elections of last year were at hand, it seemed as
+though this French increase of military power would be in jeopardy.
+Luckily it was maintained, in spite of the opposition of fairly honest
+but uncritical men like Jaurés, and of far less reputable professional
+politicians.
+
+Whether this novel strain upon the French people could have been long
+continued we shall never know, for, in the heat of the debates
+provoked by this measure and its maintenance, came the last events
+which determined the great catastrophe.
+
+
+(6) THE IMMEDIATE OCCASION OF THE WAR.
+
+We have seen how constantly and successfully Austria had supported the
+general Prussian thesis in Europe, and, in particular, the
+predominance of the German Powers over the Slav.
+
+We have seen how, in pursuit of this policy, the sharpest friction was
+always suffered at the danger-point of _Servia_. Servia was the Slav
+State millions of whose native population were governed against their
+will by Austro-Hungarian officials. Servia was the Slav State mortally
+wounded by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And Servia was
+the Slav State which Austria had in particular mortified by forbidding
+her access to the Adriatic, and by imposing upon her an unnatural
+boundary, even after her great victories of the Balkan War.
+
+The heir to the Hapsburgs--the man who, seeing the great age of his
+uncle, might at any moment ascend the throne--was the Archduke
+Francis. He had for years pursued one consistent policy for the
+aggrandizement of his House, which policy was the pitting of the
+Catholic Slavs against the Orthodox Slavs, thereby rendering himself
+in person particularly odious to the Orthodox Serbs, so many of whose
+compatriots and co-religionists were autocratically governed against
+their will in the newly annexed provinces.
+
+To the capital of these provinces, Sarajevo, he proceeded in state in
+the latter part of last June, and there, through the emissaries of
+certain secret societies (themselves Austrian subjects, but certainly
+connected with the population of independent Servia, and, as some
+claimed, not unconnected with the Servian Government itself), he was
+assassinated upon Saturday, the 28th of June, 1914.
+
+For exactly a month, the consequences of this event--the provocation
+which it implied to Austria, the opportunity which it gave the
+Hapsburgs for a new and more formidable expression of Germanic power
+against the Slavs--were kept wholly underground. _That is the most
+remarkable of all the preliminaries to the war._ There was a month of
+silence after so enormous a moment. Why? In order to give Germany and
+Austria a start in the conflict already long designed. Military
+measures were being taken secretly, stores of ammunition overhauled,
+and all done that should be necessary for a war which was premeditated
+in Berlin, half-feared, half-desired in Vienna, and dated for the end
+of July--after the harvest.
+
+The Government of Berlin was, during the whole of this period,
+actively engaged in forcing Austria forward in a path to which she was
+not unwilling; and, at last, upon the 23rd of July, Europe was amazed
+to read a note sent by the Imperial Governor at Vienna to the Royal
+Government in the Servian capital of Belgrade, which note was of a
+kind altogether unknown hitherto in the relations between Christian
+States. This note demanded not only the suppression of patriotic, and
+therefore anti-Austrian, societies in Servia (the assassins of the
+Crown Prince had been, as I have said, not Servian but Austrian
+subjects), but the public humiliation of the Servian Government by an
+apology, and even an issue of the order of the day to the Servian
+Army, so recently victorious, abasing that army to the worst
+humiliation. The note insisted upon a specific pledge that the Servian
+Government should renounce all hope of freeing the Servian nation as a
+whole from foreign government, and in many another clause subjected
+this small nation to the most thorough degradation ever suggested by a
+powerful European people towards a lesser neighbour.
+
+So far, though an extreme hitherto unknown in European history had
+been reached, the matter was one of degree. Things of the same sort,
+less drastic, had been known in the past.
+
+But what was novel in the note, and what undoubtedly proceeded from
+the suggestion of the Prussian Government (which was in all this the
+real agent behind Austria), _was the claim of the Austrian Government
+to impose its own magistrates upon the Servian courts, and to condemn
+at will those subjects of the Servian king and those officers holding
+his commission whom Austria might select so to condemn, and that to
+penalties at the goodwill and pleasure of Austria alone_. In other
+words, Austria claimed full rights of sovereignty within the territory
+of her small neighbour and enemy, and the acceptation of the note by
+Servia meant not only the preponderance of Austria for the future over
+the Slavs of the Balkans, but her continued and direct power over that
+region in the teeth of national and religious sentiment, and in clean
+despite of Russia.
+
+So strong was the feeling still throughout Europe in favour of
+maintaining peace and of avoiding the awful crash of our whole
+international system that Russia advised Servia to give way, and the
+Germanic Powers were on the eve of yet another great success, far more
+important and enduring than anything they had yet achieved. The only
+reservation which Servia was permitted by the peaceful Powers of
+Europe, and in particular by Russia, to make was that, upon three
+points which directly concerned her sovereignty, Austria should admit
+the decision of a Court of Arbitration at the Hague. But the
+time-limit imposed--which was the extraordinarily short one of
+forty-eight hours--was maintained by Austria, and upon the advice, as
+we now know, of Berlin, no modification whatever in the demands was
+tolerated. Upon the 25th, therefore, the Austrian Minister left
+Belgrade. There followed ten days, the exact sequence of events in
+which must be carefully noted if we are to obtain a clear view of the
+origin of the war.
+
+Upon that same day, Saturday, July 25th, the English Foreign Office,
+through Sir Edward Grey, suggested a scheme whereby the approaching
+cataclysm (for Russia was apparently determined to support Servia)
+might be averted. He proposed that all operations should be suspended
+while the Ambassadors of Germany, Italy, and France consulted with him
+in London.
+
+What happened upon the next day, Sunday, is exceedingly important.
+The German Government refused to accept the idea of such a conference,
+but at the same time the German Ambassador in London, Prince
+Lichnowski, was instructed to say that the principle of such a
+conference, or at least of mediation by the four Powers, was agreeable
+to Berlin. _The meaning of this double move was that the German
+Government would do everything it could to retard the entry into the
+business of the Western Powers, but would do nothing to prevent
+Russia, Servia, and the Slav civilization as a whole from suffering
+final humiliation or war._
+
+That game was played by Germany clumsily enough for nearly a full
+week. Austria declared war upon Servia upon Monday the 27th; but we
+now know that her intention of meeting Russia halfway, when she saw
+that Russia would not retire, was stopped by the direct intervention
+of the Prussian Government. In public the German Foreign Office still
+pretended that it was seeking some way out of the crisis. In private
+it prevented Austria from giving way an inch from her extraordinary
+demands. And all the while Germany was secretly making her first
+preparations for war.
+
+It might conceivably be argued by a special pleader that war was not
+the only intention of Berlin, as most undoubtedly it had not been the
+only intention of Vienna. Such a plea would be false, but one can
+imagine its being advanced. What is not capable even of discussion is
+the fact that both the Germanic Powers, under the unquestioned
+supremacy of Prussia, _were_ determined to push Russia into the
+dilemma between an impossible humiliation and defeat in the field.
+They allowed for the possibility that she would prefer humiliation,
+because they believed it barely possible (though all was ready for the
+invasion of France at a moment already fixed) that the French would
+again fail to support their ally. But war was fixed, and its date was
+fixed, with Russia, or even with Russia and France, and the Germanic
+Powers arranged to be ready before their enemies. In order to effect
+this it was necessary to deceive the West at least into believing that
+war could after all be avoided.
+
+One last incident betrays in the clearest manner how thoroughly
+Prussia had determined on war, and on a war to break out at her own
+chosen moment. It was as follows:
+
+As late as Thursday, the 30th of July, Austria was still willing to
+continue a discussion with Russia. The Austrian Government on that day
+expressed itself as willing to reopen negotiations with Russia. The
+German Ambassador at Vienna got wind of this. He communicated it at
+once to Berlin. _Germany immediately stopped any compromise, by
+framing that very night and presenting upon the next day, Friday the
+31st, an ultimatum to Russia and to France._
+
+Now, the form of these two ultimata and the events connected with them
+are again to be carefully noted, for they further illuminate us upon
+the German plan. That to Russia, presented by the German Ambassador
+Portales, had been prepared presupposing the just possible humiliation
+and giving way of Russia; and all those who observed this man's
+attitude and manner upon discovering that Russia would indeed fight
+rather than suffer the proposed humiliation, agreed that it was the
+attitude and manner of an anxious man. The ultimatum to France had,
+upon the contrary, not the marks of coercion, but of unexpected and
+violent haste. If Russia was really going to fight, what could Prussia
+be sure of in the West? It was the second great and crude blunder of
+Prussian diplomacy that, instead of making any efforts to detach
+France from Russia, it first took the abandonment of Russia by France
+for granted, and then, with extreme precipitancy, asked within the
+least possible delay whether France would fight. That precipitancy
+alone lent to the demand a form which ensured the exact opposite of
+what Prussia desired.
+
+This double misconception of the effect of her diplomatic action
+dates, I say, from Friday, the 31st of July, and that day is the true
+opening day of the great war. Upon Sunday, the 2nd of August, the
+German army violated the neutrality of Luxembourg, seizing the railway
+passing through that State into France, and pouring into its neutral
+territory her covering troops. On the same day, the French general
+mobilization was ordered; the French military authorities having lost,
+through the double action of Germany, about five days out of, say,
+eleven--nearly half the mobilization margin--by which space of time
+German preparations were now ahead of theirs.
+
+There followed, before the action state of general European conflict,
+the third German blunder, perhaps the most momentous, and certainly
+the most extraordinary: that by which Germany secured the hitherto
+exceedingly uncertain intervention of England against herself.
+
+Of all the great Powers involved, Great Britain had most doubtfully to
+consider whether she should or should not enter the field.
+
+On the one hand, she was in moral agreement with Russia and France; on
+the other hand, she was bound to them by no direct alliance, and
+successive British Governments had, for ten years past, repeatedly
+emphasized the fact that England was free to act or not to act with
+France according as circumstances might decide her.
+
+Many have criticized the hesitation, or long weighing of circumstance,
+which astonished us all in the politicians during these few days, but
+no one, whether friendly to or critical of a policy of neutrality, can
+doubt that such a policy was not only a possible but a probable one.
+The Parliamentarians were not unanimous, the opposition to the great
+responsibility of war was weighty, numerous, and strong. The
+financiers, who are in many things the real masters of our
+politicians, were all for standing out. In the face of such a
+position, in the crisis of so tremendous an issue, Germany, instead of
+acting as best she could to secure the neutrality of Great Britain,
+simply took that neutrality for granted!
+
+Upon one specific point a specific question was asked of her
+Government. To Great Britain, as we have seen in these pages, the
+keeping from the North Sea coast of all great hostile Powers is a
+vital thing. The navigable Scheldt, Antwerp, the approaches to the
+Straits of Dover, are, and have been since the rise of British
+sea-power, either in the hands of a small State or innocuous to us
+through treaty. Today they are the possession of Belgium, an
+independent State erected by treaty after the great war, and
+neutralized by a further guarantee in 1839. This neutrality of Belgium
+had been guaranteed in a solemn treaty not only by France and England,
+but by Prussia herself; and the British Government put to the French
+and to the Germans alike the question whether (now they were at war)
+that neutrality would be respected. The French replied in the
+affirmative; the Germans, virtually, in the negative. But it must not
+be said that this violation of international law and of her own word
+by Germany automatically caused war with England.
+
+_The German Ambassador was not told that if Belgian territory was
+violated England would fight_; he was only told that if that territory
+were violated England _might_ fight.
+
+The Sunday passed without a decision. On Monday the point was, as a
+matter of form, laid before Parliament, though the House of Commons
+has no longer any real control over great national issues. In a speech
+which certainly inclined towards English participation in the war
+should Germany invade Belgium, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs
+summed up the situation before a very full House.
+
+In the debate that followed many, and even passionate, speeches were
+delivered opposing the presence of England in the field and claiming
+neutrality. Some of these speeches insisted upon the admiration felt
+by the speaker for modern Germany and Prussia; others the ill judgment
+of running the enormous risk involved in such a campaign. These
+protests will be of interest to history, but the House of Commons as a
+whole had, of course, no power in the matter, and sat only to register
+the decisions of its superiors. There was in the Cabinet resignation
+of two members, in the Ministry the resignation of a third, the
+threatened resignation of many more.
+
+Meanwhile, upon that same day, August 3rd, following with
+superstitious exactitude the very hour upon which, on the very same
+day, the French frontier had been crossed in 1870, the Germans entered
+Belgian territory.
+
+The Foreign Office's thesis underlying the declaration of its
+spokesman, Sir Edward Grey, carried the day with the politicians in
+power, and upon Tuesday, August 4th, Great Britain joined Russia and
+France, at war with the Prussian Power. There followed later the
+formal declaration of war by France as by England against Austria, and
+with the first week in August the general European struggle had
+opened.
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE FORCES OPPOSED.
+
+
+Here, then, at the beginning of August 1914, are the five great Powers
+about to engage in war.
+
+Russia, France, and Great Britain, whom we will call the Allies, are
+upon one side; the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, whom we will
+call the Germanic Powers, are upon the other.
+
+We must at the outset, if we are to understand the war at all, see how
+these two combatant groups stood in strength one against the other
+when the war broke out. And to appreciate this contrast we must know
+two things--their geographical situation, and their respective weight
+in arms. For before we can judge the chances of two opponents in war,
+we have to know how they stand physically one to the other upon the
+surface of the earth, or we cannot judge how one will attack the
+other, or how each will defend itself against the other. And we must
+further be able to judge the numbers engaged both at the beginning of
+the struggle and arriving in reinforcement as the struggle proceeds,
+because upon those numbers will mainly depend the final result.
+
+Having acquired these two fundamental pieces of information, we must
+acquire a third, which is _the theories of war_ held upon either side,
+and some summary showing which of these theories turned out in
+practice to be right, and which wrong.
+
+For, after a long peace, the fortune of the next war largely depends
+upon which of various guesses as to the many changes that have taken
+place in warfare and in weapons will be best supported by practice,
+and what way of using new weapons will prove the most effective. Until
+the test of war is applied, all this remains guess-work; but under the
+conditions of war it ceases to be guess-work, and becomes either
+corroborated by experience or exploded, as the case may be. And of two
+opponents after a long peace, that one which has had the most
+foresight and has guessed best what the effect of changes in armament
+and the rest will effect in practice is that one who has the best
+chance of victory.
+
+We are going, then, in this Second Part, of the little book, to see,
+first, the geographical position of the belligerents; secondly, their
+effective numbers; and, thirdly, what theories of war each held, and
+how far each was right or wrong.
+
+
+(1) THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF THE BELLIGERENTS.
+
+The position of the original belligerent countries (excluding Turkey)
+upon the map of Europe was that which will be seen upon the
+accompanying sketch map.
+
+Of this belligerent area, which is surrounded by a thick black line,
+the part left white represents the territory of the Allies at the
+origin of the war--Great Britain, France, Russia, and Servia. This
+reservation must, however, be made: that in the case of Russia only
+the effective part is shown, and only the European part at that;
+Arctic Russia and Siberia are omitted. The part lightly shaded with
+cross lines represents the Germanic body--to wit, the German Empire
+and Austria-Hungary.
+
+1. The first thing that strikes the eye upon such a map is the great
+size of the Germanic body.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 4.]
+
+When one reads that "Germany" was being attacked by not only France
+and England, but also Russia; when one reads further that in the Far
+East, in Asia, Japan was putting in work for the Allies; and when one
+goes on to read that Belgium added her effort of resistance to the
+"German" invasion, one gets a false impression that one single nation
+was fighting a vast coalition greatly superior to it. Most people had
+an impression of that kind, in this country at least, at the outset of
+the war. It was this impression that led to the equally false
+impression that "Germany" must necessarily be beaten, and probably
+quickly beaten.
+
+The truth was, of course, that we were fighting something very much
+bigger than "Germany." We set out to fight something more than twice
+as big as Germany in area, and very nearly twice as big as the German
+Empire in mere numbers. For what we set out to fight was not the
+German Empire, but the German Empire _plus_ the whole of the dominions
+governed by the Hapsburg dynasty at Vienna.
+
+How weighty this Germanic body was geographically is still more
+clearly seen if we remember that Russia north of St. Petersburg is
+almost deserted of inhabitants, and that the true European areas of
+population which are in conflict--that is, the fairly well populated
+areas--are more accurately represented by a modification of the map
+on page 81 in some such form as that on page 84, where the comparative
+density of population is represented by the comparative distances
+between the parallel cross-lines.
+
+2. The next thing that strikes one is the position of the neutral
+countries. Supposing Belgium to have remained neutral, or, rather, to
+have allowed German armies to pass over her soil without actively
+resisting, the Germanic body would have been free to trade with
+neutral countries, and to receive support from their commerce, and to
+get goods through them over the whole of their western front, with the
+exception of the tiny section which stands for the frontier common to
+France and Germany. On the north, supposing the Baltic to be open, the
+Germanic body had a vast open frontier of hundreds of miles, and
+though Russia closed most of the eastern side, all the Roumanian
+frontier was open, and so was the frontier of the Adriatic, right away
+from the Italian border to Cattaro. So was the Swiss frontier and the
+Italian.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 5.]
+
+Indeed, if we draw the Germanic body by itself surrounded by a
+frontier of dots, as in the accompanying sketch, and mark in a thick
+line upon that frontier those parts which touched on enemy's
+territory, and were therefore closed to supply, we shall be
+immediately arrested by the comparatively small proportion of that
+frontier which is thus closed.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 6.]
+
+It is well to carry this in mind during the remainder of our study of
+this war, because it has a great effect upon the fighting power of
+Germany and Austria after a partial--but very partial--blockade is
+established by the Allied and especially by the British naval power.
+
+3. The third thing that strikes one in such a map of the belligerent
+area is the way in which the Germanic body stands in the middle facing
+its two groups of enemies East and West.
+
+
+_The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Germanic Body_.
+
+With this last point we can begin a comparison of the advantages and
+disadvantages imposed by geographical conditions upon the two
+opponents, and first of these we will consider the geographical
+advantages and disadvantages of the Germanic body--that is, of the
+Austrian and German Empires--passing next to the corresponding
+advantages and disadvantages of the Allies.
+
+The advantages proceeding from geographical position to Germany in
+particular, and to the Germanic body as a whole, gravely outweigh the
+disadvantages. We will consider the disadvantages first.
+
+The chief disadvantage under which the Germanic body suffered in this
+connection was that, from the outset of hostilities, it had to fight,
+as the military phrase goes, upon two fronts. That is, the commanders
+of the German and Austrian armies had to consider two separate
+campaigns, to keep them distinct in their minds, and to co-ordinate
+them so that they should not, by wasting too many men on the East or
+the West, weaken themselves too much on the other side of the field.
+
+To this disadvantage some have been inclined to add that the central
+position of Austria and Germany in Europe helped the British and
+Allied blockade (I repeat, a very partial, timid, and insufficient
+blockade) of their commerce.
+
+But this view is erroneous. The possibility of blockading
+Austria-Hungary and Germany from imports across the ocean was due not
+to their central but to their continental position; to the fact that
+they were more remote from the ocean than France and Great Britain. It
+had nothing to do with their central position between the two groups
+of the Allies.
+
+Supposing, for instance, that Germany and Austria-Hungary had stood
+where Russia stands, and that Western Europe had been in alliance
+against them. Then they would have been in no way central; their
+position would have been an extreme position upon one side; and yet,
+so far as blockading goes, the blockade of them would have been
+infinitely easier.
+
+Conversely, if Germany and Austria had been in the west, where Great
+Britain and France are, their enemies lying to the east of them could
+not have blockaded them at all.
+
+As things are the blockade that has been established exists but is
+partial. As will be seen upon the following sketch map, the British
+Fleet, being sufficiently powerful, can search vessels the cargoes of
+which might reach the Germanic body directly through the Strait of
+Gibraltar (1), the Strait of Dover (2), or the North Sea between
+Scotland and Norway (3). But it is unable to prevent supplies reaching
+the Germanic body from Italy, whether by land or by sea (4), or
+through Switzerland (5), or through Holland (6), or through Denmark
+(7), or across the frontier of Roumania (8); or, so long as the German
+Fleet is strongest in the Baltic, by way of Norway and Sweden across
+the Baltic (9).
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 7.]
+
+The blockading fleet is even embarrassed as to the imports the
+Germanic body receives indirectly through neutral countries--that is,
+imports not produced in the importing countries themselves, but
+provided through the neutral countries as middlemen.
+
+It is embarrassed in three ways.
+
+(_a_) Because it does not want to offend the European neutral
+countries, which count in the general European balance of power.
+
+(_b_) Because it does not wish to offend Powers outside Europe which
+are neutral in this war, and particularly the United States. Such
+great neutral Powers are very valuable not only for their moral
+support if it can be obtained, but on account of their great financial
+resources untouched by this prolonged struggle, and, what lies behind
+these, their power of producing materials which the Allies need just
+as much as Austria and Germany do.
+
+(_c_) Because, even if you watch the supplies of contraband to
+neutrals, and propose to stop supplies obviously destined for German
+use, you cannot prevent Germany from buying the same material "made
+up" by the neutral: for example, an Italian firm can import copper ore
+quite straightforwardly, smelt it, and offer the metal in the open
+market. There is nothing to prevent a German merchant entering that
+market and purchasing, unless Italy forbids all export of copper,
+which it is perfectly free not to do.
+
+To leave this side question of blockade, and to return to the relative
+advantages and disadvantages of our enemy's central position, we may
+repeat as a summary of its disadvantages the single truth that it
+compels our enemy to fight upon two fronts.
+
+All the rest is advantage.
+
+It is an advantage that Germany and Austria-Hungary, as a corollary to
+their common central position, are in some part of similar race and
+altogether of a common historical experience. For more than a hundred
+years every part of the area dominated by the Germanic body--with the
+exception of Bosnia and Alsace-Lorraine--has had a fairly intimate
+acquaintance with the other part. The Magyars of Hungary, the Poles of
+Galicia, of Posen, of Thorn, the Croats of the Adriatic border, the
+Czechs of Bohemia, have nothing in race or language in common with
+German-speaking Vienna or German-speaking Berlin. But they have the
+experience of generations uniting them with Vienna and with Berlin.
+In administration, and to some extent in social life, a common
+atmosphere spreads over this area, nearly all of which, as I have
+said, has had something in common for a hundred years, and much of
+which has had something in common for a thousand.
+
+In a word, as compared with the Allies, the Germanic central body in
+Europe has a certain advantage of moral homogeneity, especially as the
+governing body throughout is German-speaking and German in feeling.
+
+That is the first point of advantage--a moral one.
+
+The second is more material. The Governments of the two countries,
+their means of communication and of supply, are all in touch one with
+another. Those governments are working in one field within a ring
+fence, and working for a common object. They are not only spiritually
+in touch; they are physically in touch. An administrator in Berlin can
+take the night express after dinner and breakfast with his
+collaborator in Vienna the next morning.
+
+It so happens, also, that the communications of the two Germanic
+empires are exactly suited to their central position. There is
+sufficient fast communication from north to south to serve all the
+purposes necessary to the intellectual conduct of a war; there is a
+most admirable communication from east to west for the material
+conduct of that war upon two fronts. Whenever it may be necessary to
+move troops from the French frontier to the Russian, or from the
+Russian to the French, or for Germany to borrow Hungarian cavalry for
+the Rhine, or for Austria to borrow German army corps to protect
+Galicia, all that is needed is three or four days in which to entrain
+and move these great masses of men. There is no area in Europe which
+is better suited by nature for thus fighting upon two land frontiers
+than is the area of the combined Austrian and German Empire.
+
+With these three points, then--the great area of our enemy in Europe,
+his advantage through neutral frontiers, and his advantage in
+homogeneity of position between distant and morally divided
+Allies--you have the chief marks of the geographical position he
+occupies, in so far as this is the great central position of
+continental Europe.
+
+But it so happens that the Germanic body in general, and the German
+Empire in particular, suffer from grave geographical disadvantages
+attached to their political character. And of these I will make my
+next points.
+
+The Germanic body as a whole suffers by its geographical disposition,
+coupled with its political constitution, a grave disadvantage in its
+struggle against the Allies, particularly towards the East, because
+just that part of it which is thrust out and especially assailable by
+Russia happens to be the part most likely to be disaffected to the
+whole interests of the Germanic body; and how this works I will
+proceed to explain.
+
+Here are two oblongs--A, left blank, and B, lightly shaded. Supposing
+these two oblongs combined to represent the area of two countries
+which are in alliance, and which are further so situated that B is the
+weaker Power to the alliance both (1) in his military strength, and
+(2) in his tenacity of purpose. Next grant that B is divided by the
+dotted line, CD, into two halves--B not being one homogeneous State,
+but two States, B1 and B2.
+
+Next let it be granted that while B1 is more likely to remain attached
+in its alliance to A, B2 is more separate from the alliance in moral
+tendency, and is also materially the weaker half of B. Finally, let
+the whole group, AB, be subject to the attack of enemies from the
+right and from the left (from the right along the arrows XX, and from
+the left along the arrows YY) by two groups of enemies represented by
+the areas M and N respectively.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 8.]
+
+It is obvious that in such a situation, if A is the chief object of
+attack, and is the Power which has both provoked the conflict and made
+itself the chief object of assault by M and N, A is by this
+arrangement in a position _politically_ weak.
+
+That is, the strategical position of A is gravely embarrassed by the
+way in which his ally, B, separated into the two halves, B1 and B2,
+stands with regard to himself. B2 is isolated and thrust outward. The
+enemy, M, upon the right, attacking along the lines XX, may be able to
+give B2 a very bad time before he gets into the area of B1, and long
+before he gets into the area of the stronger Power, A. It is open to M
+so to harass B2 that B2 is prepared to break with B1 and give up the
+war; or, if the bond between B2 and B1 is strong enough, to persuade
+B1 to give up the struggle at the same time that he does. And if B2 is
+thus harassed to the breaking-point, the whole alliance, A plus B,
+will lose the men and materials and wealth represented by B2, and
+_may_ lose the whole shaded area, B, leaving A to support singly for
+the future the combined attacks of M and N along the lines of attack,
+XX and YY.
+
+Now, that diagram accurately represents the political embarrassment in
+strategy of the German-Austro-Hungarian alliance. B1 is Austria and
+Bohemia; B2 is Hungary; A is the German Empire; M is the Russians; N
+is the Allies in the West. With a geographical arrangement such as
+that of the Germanic alliance, a comparatively small proportion of the
+Russian forces detached to harry the Hungarian plain can make the
+Hungarians, who have little moral attachment to the Austrians and none
+whatever to the Germans, abandon the struggle to save themselves;
+while it is possible that this outlier, being thus detached, will drag
+with it its fellow-half, the Austrian half of the dual monarchy, cause
+the Government of the dual monarchy to sue for peace, and leave the
+German Empire isolated to support the undivided attention of the
+Russians from the East and of the French from the West.
+
+It is clear that if a strong Power, A, allied with and dependent for
+large resources in men upon a weaker Power, B, is attacked from the
+left and from the right, the ideal arrangement for the strong Power,
+A, would be something in the nature of the following diagram (Sketch
+9), where the weaker Power stands protected in the territory of the
+stronger Power, and where of the two halves of the weaker Power, B2,
+the less certain half, is especially protected from attack.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 9.]
+
+Were Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Rhineland, upon the one
+hand, the Hungarian plain, Russian Poland, and East Prussia, upon the
+other hand, united in one strong, patriotic, homogeneous
+German-speaking group with the Government of Berlin and the Baltic
+plain, and were Bavaria, Switzerland, the Tyrol, Bohemia, to
+constitute the weaker and less certain ally, while the least certain
+half of that uncertain ally lay in Eastern Bohemia and in what is now
+Lower Austria, well defended from attack upon the East, the conditions
+would be exactly reversed, and the Austro-German alliance would be
+geographically and politically of the stronger sort. As it is, the
+combined accidents of geography and political circumstance make it
+peculiarly vulnerable.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 10.]
+
+Having already considered in a diagram the way in which the
+geographical disposition of Austria-Hungary weakens Germany in the
+face of the Allies, let us translate that diagram into terms of actual
+political geography. These two oblongs, with their separate parts,
+are, as a fact, as follows: Where A is the German Empire, the shaded
+portion, B, is Austria-Hungary, and this last divided into B1, the
+more certain Austrian part, and B2, the less certain exposed
+Hungarian part, the latter of which is only protected from Russian
+assault by the Carpathian range of mountains, CCC, with its passes at
+DDD. M, the enemy on the right, Russia, is attacking the alliance, AB,
+along XX; while the enemy on the left, N, France and her Allies, is
+attacking along the lines YY.
+
+Hungary, B2, is not only geographically an outlier, but politically is
+the weakest link in the chain of the Austro-Germanic alliance. The
+area of Hungary is almost denuded of men, for most of these have been
+called up to defend Germany, A, and in particular to prevent the
+invasion of Germany's territory in Silesia at S. The one defence
+Hungary has against being raided and persuaded to an already tempting
+peace is the barrier of the Carpathian mountains, CCC. When or if the
+passes shall be in Russian possession and the Russian cavalry reappear
+upon the Hungarian side of the hills, the first great political
+embarrassment of the enemy will have begun--I mean the first great
+political embarrassment to his strategy.
+
+(_a_) Shall he try to defend those passes above all? Then he must
+detach German corps, and detach them very far from the areas which are
+vital to the core of the alliance--that is, to the German Empire, A.
+
+(_b_) Shall he use only Hungarian troops to defend Hungary? Then he
+emphasizes the peculiar moral isolation of Hungary, and leaves her
+inclined, if things go ill, to make a separate peace.
+
+(_c_) Shall he abandon Hungary? And let the Russians do what they will
+with the passes over the Carpathians and raid the Hungarian plain at
+large? Then he loses a grave proportion of his next year's wheat, much
+of his dwindling horse supply, his almost strangled sources of petrol.
+He tempts Roumania to come in (for a great sweep of Eastern Hungary is
+nationally Roumanian); and he loses the control in men and financial
+resources of one-half of his Allies if the danger and the distress
+persuade Hungary to stand out. For the Hungarians have no quarrel
+except from their desire to dominate the southern Slavs; to fight
+Austria's battles means very little to them, and to fight Germany's
+battles means nothing at all.
+
+There is, of course, much more than this. If Hungary dropped out,
+could Austria remain? Would not the Government at Vienna, rather than
+lose the dual monarchy, follow Hungary's lead? In that case, the
+Germanic alliance would lose at one stroke eleven-twenty-fifths of its
+men. It would lose more than half of its reserves of men, for the
+Austrian reserve is, paradoxically enough, larger than the German
+reserve, though not such good material.
+
+Admire how in every way this geographical and political problem of
+Hungary confuses the strategical plan of the German General Staff!
+They cannot here act upon pure strategics. They _cannot_ treat the
+area of operations like a chessboard, and consider the unique object
+of inflicting a military defeat upon the Russians. Their inability to
+do so proceeds from the fact that this great awkward salient,
+Hungarian territory, is not politically subject to Berlin, is not in
+spiritual union with Berlin; may be denuded of men to save Berlin, and
+is the most exposed of all our enemy's territory to attack. Throughout
+the war it will be found that this problem perpetually presents itself
+to the Great General Staff of the Prussians: "How can we save Hungary
+without weakening our Eastern line? If we abandon Hungary, how are we
+to maintain our effectives?"
+
+Such, in detail, is the political embarrassment to German strategy
+produced by the geographical situation and the political traditions of
+Hungary itself, and of Hungary's connection with the Hapsburgs at
+Vienna. Let us now turn to the even more important embarrassment
+caused to German strategy by the corner positions of the four
+essential areas of German territory.
+
+This last political weakness attached to geographical condition
+concerns the German Empire alone.
+
+Let us suppose a Power concerned to defend itself against invasion and
+situated between two groups of enemies, from the left and from the
+right, we will again call that Power A, the enemy upon the right M,
+and the enemy upon the left N, the first attacking along the lines XX,
+and the second along the lines YY.
+
+Let us suppose that A has _political_ reasons for particularly
+desiring to save from invasion four districts, the importance of
+which I have indicated on Sketch 12 by shading, and which I have
+numbered 1, 2, 3, 4.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 11.]
+
+Let us suppose that those four districts happen to lie at the four
+exposed corners of the area which A has to defend. The Government of A
+knows it to be essential to success in the war that his territory
+should not be invaded. Or, at least, if it is invaded, it must not,
+under peril of collapse, be invaded in the shaded areas.
+
+It is apparent upon the very face of such a diagram, that with the
+all-important shaded areas situated in the corners of his
+quadrilateral, A is heavily embarrassed. He must disperse his forces
+in order to protect all four. If wastage of men compels him to
+shorten his line on the right against M, he will be immediately
+anxious as to whether he can dare sacrifice 4 to save 2, or whether he
+should run the dreadful risk of sacrificing 2 to save 4.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 12.]
+
+If wastage compels him to shorten his defensive line upon the left, he
+is in a similar quandary between 1 and 3.
+
+The whole situation is one in which he is quite certain that a
+defensive war, long before he is pushed to extremities, will compel
+him to "scrap" one of the four corners, yet each one is, for some
+political reason, especially dear to him and even perhaps necessary to
+him. Each he desires, with alternating anxieties and indecisions, to
+preserve at all costs from invasion; yet he cannot, as he is forced
+upon the defensive, preserve all four.
+
+Here, again, the ideal situation for him would be to possess against
+the invader some such arrangement as is suggested by Sketch 11. In
+this arrangement, if one were compelled unfortunately to consider four
+special districts as more important than the mass of one's territory,
+one would have the advantage of knowing that they were clearly
+distinguishable into less and more important, and the further
+advantage of knowing that the more important the territory was, the
+more central it was and the better protected against invasion.
+
+Thus, in this diagram, the government of the general oblong, A, may
+distinguish four special zones, the protection of which from invasion
+is important, but which vary in the degree of their importance. The
+least important is the outermost, 1; the more important is an inner
+one, 2; still more important is 3; and most important of all is the
+black core of the whole.
+
+Some such arrangement has been the salvation of France time and time
+again, notably in the Spanish wars, and in the wars of Louis XIV., and
+in the wars of the Revolution. To some extent you have seen the same
+thing in the present war.
+
+To save Paris was exceedingly important, next came the zone outside
+Paris, and so on up to the frontier.
+
+But with the modern German Empire it is exactly the other way, and the
+situation is that which we found in Sketch 12; the four external
+corners are the essentials which must be preserved from invasion, and
+if any one of them goes, the whole political situation is at once in
+grave peril.
+
+The strategical position of modern Germany is embarrassed because each
+of these four corners must be saved by the armies. 1 is
+Belgium--before the war indifferent to Germany, but now destined to be
+vital to her position--2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is
+Silesia, and the German commanders, as well as the German Government,
+must remain to the last moment--if once they are thrown on the
+defensive--in grave indecision as to which of the four can best be
+spared when invasion threatens; or else, as is more probable, they
+must disperse their forces in the attempt to hold all four at once. It
+is a situation which has but rarely occurred before in the history of
+war, and which has always proved disastrous.
+
+Germany then must--once she is in Belgium--hold on to Belgium, or she
+is in peril; she must hold on to East Prussia, or she is in peril; she
+must hold on to Alsace-Lorraine, or she is in peril; and she must hold
+on to Silesia, or it is all up with her. If there were some common
+strategical factor binding these four areas together, so that the
+defence of one should involve and aid the defence of all, the
+difficulties thus imposed upon German strategy would be greatly
+lessened. Though even then the mere having to defend four outlying
+corners instead of a centre would produce confusion and embarrassment
+the moment numerical inferiority had appeared upon the side of the
+defence. But, as a fact, there is no such common factor.
+Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium, East Prussia and Silesia, stand
+strategically badly separated one from the other. Even the two on the
+East and the two on the West, though apparently forming pairs upon the
+map, are not dependent on one system of communications, and are cut
+off from each other by territory difficult or hostile, while between
+the Eastern and the Western group there is a space of five hundred
+miles.
+
+Let us, before discussing the political embarrassment to strategy
+produced by these four widely distant and quite separate areas,
+translate the diagram in the terms of a sketch map.
+
+On the following sketch map, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia,
+and Silesia are shaded, as were the four corners of the diagram. No. 1
+is Belgium, 2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is Silesia. The
+area occupied by the German Empire, including its present occupation
+of Belgium, is marked by the broad outline; and the areas shaded
+represent, not the exact limits of the four territories that are so
+important, but those portions of them which are essential: the
+non-Polish portion of Silesia, the non-Polish portion of East Prussia,
+the plain of Belgium, and all Alsace-Lorraine.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 13.]
+
+Now the reason that each of these must at all costs be preserved from
+invasion is, as I have said, different in each case, and we shall do
+well to examine what those reasons are; for upon them depends the
+political hesitation they inevitably, cause to arise in the plans of
+the Great General Staff.
+
+1. _Belgium._ The military annexation of Belgium has been a result of
+the war, and, from the German point of view, an unexpected result.
+Germany both hoped and expected that her armies would pass through
+Belgium as they did, in fact, pass through Luxembourg. The resistance
+of Belgium produced the military annexation of that country; the reign
+of terror exercised therein has immobilized about 100,000 of the
+German troops who would otherwise be free for the front; the checking
+of the advance into France has turned the German general political
+objective against England, and, to put the matter in the vaguest but
+most fundamental terms, the German mind has gradually come, since
+October, to regard the retention of Belgium as something quite
+essential. And this because:--(_a_) It gives a most weighty asset in
+the bargaining for peace. (_b_) It gives a seaboard against England.
+(_c_) It provides ample munition, house-room, and transport facility,
+without which the campaign in North-eastern France could hardly be
+prolonged. (_d_) It puts Holland at the mercy of Germany, for she can,
+by retaining Belgium, strangle Dutch trade, if she chooses to divert
+her carriage of goods through Belgian ports. (_e_) It is a specific
+conquest; the Government will be able to say to the German people, "It
+is true we had to give up this or that, but Belgium is a definite new
+territory, the occupation of which and the proposed annexation of
+which is a proof of victory." (_f_) The retention of Belgium has been
+particularly laid down as the cause of quarrel between Great Britain
+and Germany; to retain Belgium is to mark that score against what is
+now the special enemy of Germany in the German mind. (_g_) Antwerp is
+the natural port for all the centre of Europe in commerce westward
+over the ocean. (_h_) With Belgium may go the Belgian colonies--that
+is, the Congo--for the possession of which Germany has worked
+ceaselessly year in and year out during the last fifteen years by a
+steady and highly subsidized propaganda against the Belgian
+administration. She has done it through conscious and unconscious
+agents; by playing upon the cupidity of French and British
+Parliamentarians, of rum shippers, upon religious differences, and
+upon every agency to her hand.
+
+We may take it, then, that the retention of Belgium is in German eyes
+now quite indispensable. "If I abandon Belgium," she says, "it is much
+more than a strategic retreat; it is a political confession of
+failure, and the moral support behind me at home will break down."
+
+If I were writing not of calculable considerations, but of other and
+stronger forces, I should add that to withdraw from Belgium, where so
+many women and children have been massacred, so many jewels of the
+past befouled or destroyed, so wanton an attack upon Christ and His
+Church delivered, would be a loss of Pagan prestige intolerably
+strong, and a triumph of all that against which Prussia set out to
+war.
+
+2. _Alsace-Lorraine._ But Alsace-Lorraine is also "indispensable." We
+have seen on an earlier page what the retention of that territory
+means. Alsace-Lorraine is the symbol of the old victory. It is the
+German-speaking land which the amazingly unreal superstitions of
+German academic pedantry discovered to be something sacredly necessary
+to the unity of an ideal Germany, though the people inhabiting it
+desired nothing better than the destruction of the Prussian name. It
+is more than that. It is the bastion beyond the Rhine which keeps the
+Rhine close covered; it is the two great historic fortresses of
+Strassburg and Metz which are the challenge Germany has thrown down
+against European tradition and the civilization of the West; it is
+something which has become knit up with the whole German soul, and to
+abandon it is like a man abandoning his title or his name, or
+surrendering his sword. Through what must not the German mind pass
+before its directors would consent to the sacrifice of such a
+fundamentally symbolic possession? There is defeat in the very
+suggestion; and the very suggestion, though it has already occurred to
+the Great General Staff, and has already, I believe, been mentioned in
+one proposal for peace, would be intolerable to the mass of the
+enemy's opinion.
+
+3. _East Prussia._ East Prussia is sacred in another, but also an
+intense fashion. It is the very kernel of the Prussian monarchy. When
+Berlin was but a market town for the Electors of Brandenburg, those
+same Electors had contrived that East Prussia, which was outside the
+empire, should be recognized as a kingdom. Frederick the Great's
+father, while of Brandenburg an Elector, was in Prussia proper a king,
+a man who had emancipated that cradle of the Prussian power. The
+province in all save its southern belt (which is Polish) is the very
+essence of Prussian society: a mass of serfs, technically free,
+economically abject, governed by those squires who own them, their
+goods, and what might be their soil. The Russians wasted East Prussia
+in their first invasion, and they did well though they paid so heavy a
+price, for to wound East Prussia was to wound the very soul of that
+which now governs the German Empire. When the landed proprietors fled
+before the Russian invasion, and when there fled with them the
+townsfolk, the serfs rose and looted the country houses. In a way
+quite different from Belgium, quite different from Alsace-Lorraine,
+East Prussia is essential. Forces will and must be sent periodically
+to defend that territory, however urgently they may be needed
+elsewhere, as the pressure upon Germany increases. The German
+commanders, if they forget East Prussia for a moment in the
+consideration of the other essential points, will, the moment their
+eyes are turned upon East Prussia again, remember with violent emotion
+all that the province means to the reigning dynasty and its
+supporters, and they will do anything rather than let that frontier
+go. The memory of the first invasion is too acute, the terror of its
+repetition too poignant, to permit its abandonment.
+
+4. _Silesia._ Silesia, for quite other reasons (and remember that
+these different reasons for defending such various points are the
+essence of the embarrassment in which German strategy will find
+itself), must be saved. It has been insisted over and over again in
+these pages what Silesia means. Its meaning is twofold. If Silesia
+goes, the safest, the most remote from the sea, the most independent
+of imports of the German industrial regions, is gone. Silesia is,
+again, the country of the great proprietors. Amuse yourselves by
+remembering the names of Pless and of Lichnowsky. There are dozens of
+others. But, most important of all, Silesia is what Belgium is not,
+what Alsace-Lorraine is not, what East Prussia is not--it is the
+strategic key. Who holds Silesia commands the twin divergent roads to
+Berlin northwards, to Vienna southwards. Who holds Silesia holds the
+Moravian Gate. Who holds Silesia turns the line of the Oder, and
+passes behind the barrier fortresses which Germany has built upon her
+Eastern front. Who holds Silesia strikes his wedge in between the
+German-speaking north and the German-speaking south, and joins hands
+with the Slavs of Bohemia. Not that we should exaggerate the Slav
+factor, for religion and centuries of varying culture disturb its
+unity. But it is something. The Russian forces are Slav; the
+resurrection of Poland has been promised; the Czechs are not
+submissive to the German claim of natural mastery, and whoever holds
+Silesia throws a bridge between Slav and Slav if his aims are an
+extension of power in that race. For a hundred reasons Silesia must be
+saved.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now put yourself in the position of the men who must make a decision
+between these four outliers--Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia,
+and Silesia--and understand the hesitation such divergent aims impose
+upon them. Hardly are they prepared to sacrifice one of the four when
+the defensive problem becomes acute, but its claims will be pressed in
+every conceivable manner--by public sentiment, by economic
+considerations, by mere strategy, by a political tradition, by the
+influence of men powerful with the Prussian monarchy, whose homes and
+wealth are threatened. "If I am to hold Belgium, I must give up
+Alsace. How dare I do that? To save Silesia I must expose East
+Prussia. How dare I? I am at bay, and the East must at all costs be
+saved. I will hold Prussia and Silesia, but to withdraw from Belgium
+and from beyond the Rhine is defeat." The whole thing is an embroglio.
+That conclusion is necessary and inexorable. It would not appear at
+all until, or if, numerical weakness imposed on the enemy a gradual
+concentration of the defensive; but once that numerical weakness has
+come, the fatal choices must be made. It may be that a strict, silent,
+and virile resolution, such as saved France this summer, a
+preparedness for particular sacrifices calculated beforehand, will
+determine first some one retirement and then another. It may
+be--though it is not in the modern Prussian temperament--that a
+defensive as prolonged as possible will be attempted even with
+inferior numbers, and that, as circumstances may dictate,
+Alsace-Lorraine or Belgium, Silesia or East Prussia will be the first
+to be deliberately sacrificed; but one must be, and, it would seem,
+another after, and in the difficulty of choice a wound to the German
+strategy will come.
+
+The four corners are differently defensible--Alsace-Lorraine and
+Belgium only by artifice, and with great numbers of men; Silesia only
+so long as Austria (and Hungary) stand firm. East Prussia has her
+natural arrangement of lakes to make invasion tedious, and to permit
+defence with small numbers.
+
+Between the two groups, Eastern and Western, is all the space of
+Germany--the space separating Aberdeen from London. Between each part
+of each pair, in spite of an excellent railway system, is the block in
+the one case of the Ardennes and the Eifel, in the other of empty,
+ill-communicated Poland. But each is strategically a separate thing;
+the political value of each a separate thing; the embarrassment
+between all four insuperable.
+
+Such is the situation imposed by the geography of the European
+continent upon our enemies, with the opportunities and the drawbacks
+which that situation affords and imposes.
+
+I repeat, upon the balance, our enemies had geographical opportunities
+far superior to our own.
+
+Our power of partial blockade (to which I will return in a moment) is
+more than counterbalanced by the separation which Nature has
+determined between the two groups of Allies. The ice of the North, the
+Narrows of the Dardanelles, establish this, as do the Narrows of the
+Scandinavian Straits.
+
+The necessity of fighting upon two fronts, to which our enemies are
+compelled, is more than compensated by that natural arrangement of the
+Danube valley and of the Baltic plain which adds to the advantage of a
+central situation the power of rapid communication between East and
+West; while the chief embarrassment of our enemies in their
+geographical arrangement, which is the outlying situation of Hungary
+coupled with the presence of four vital regions at the four external
+corners of the German Empire, is rather political than geographical in
+nature.
+
+I will now turn to the converse advantages and disadvantages afforded
+and imposed by geographical conditions upon the Allies.
+
+
+_The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Allies._
+
+It has been apparent from the above in what way the geographical
+circumstance of Germany and Austria-Hungary advantaged and
+disadvantaged those two empires in the course of a war against East
+and West.
+
+Let us next see how the Allies were advantaged and disadvantaged by
+their position.
+
+1. The first great disadvantage which the Allies most obviously suffer
+is their separation one from the other by the Germanic mass.
+
+The same central position which gives Germany and Austria-Hungary
+their power of close intercommunion, of exactly coordinating all their
+movements, of using their armies like one army, and of dealing with
+rapidity alternate blows eastward and westward, produces contrary
+effects in the case of the Allies. Even if hourly communication were
+possible by telegraph between the two main groups, French and Russian,
+that would not be at all the same thing as personal, sustained, and
+continuous contact such as is enjoyed by the group of their enemies.
+
+But, as a fact, even the very imperfect and indirect kind of contact
+which can be established by telegraphing over great distances is
+largely lacking. The French and the Russians are in touch. The
+commanders can and do pursue a combined plan. But the communication of
+results and the corresponding arrangement of new dispositions are
+necessarily slow and gravely interrupted. Indeed, it is, as we shall
+see in a moment, one of the main effects of geography upon this
+campaign that Russia must suffer during all its early stages a very
+severe isolation.
+
+In general, the Allies as a whole suffer from the necessity under
+which they find themselves of working in two fields, remote the one
+from the other by a distance of some six hundred miles, not even
+connected by sea, and geographically most unfortunately independent.
+
+2. A second geographical disadvantage of the Allies consists in the
+fact that one of them, Great Britain, is in the main a maritime Power.
+
+That this has great compensating advantages we shall also see, but for
+the moment we are taking the disadvantages separately, and, so
+counting them one by one, we must recognize that England's being an
+island (her social structure industrialized and free from
+conscription, her interests not only those of Europe but those of such
+a commercial scattered empire as is always characteristic of secure
+maritime Powers) produces, in several of its aspects, a geographical
+weakness to the Allied position, and that for several reasons, which I
+will now tabulate:--
+
+(_a_) The position of England in the past, her very security as an
+island, has led her to reject the conception of universal service. She
+could only, at the outset of hostilities, provide a small
+Expeditionary Force, the equivalent at the most of a thirtieth of the
+Allied forces.
+
+(_b_) Her reserves in men who could approach the continental field in,
+say, the first year, even under the most vigorous efforts, would never
+reach anything like the numbers that could be afforded by a conscript
+nation. The very maximum that can be or is hoped for by the most
+sanguine is the putting into the field, after at least a year of war,
+of less than three-sixteenths of the total Allied forces, although her
+population is larger than that of France, and more than a third that
+of the enemy.
+
+(_c_) She is compelled to garrison and defend, and in places to
+police, dependencies the population of which will in some cases
+furnish no addition to the forces of the Allies, and in all cases
+furnish but a small proportion.
+
+(_d_) The isolation of her territory by the sea, coupled with her
+large population and its industrial character, makes Britain
+potentially the most vulnerable point in the alliance.
+
+So long as her fleet is certainly superior to that of the enemy, and
+has only to meet oversea attack, this vulnerability is but little
+felt; but once let her position at sea be lost, or even left
+undecided, or once let the indiscriminate destruction of commercial
+marine be seriously begun, and she is at the mercy of that enemy. For
+she cannot feed herself save by supplies from without, and she cannot
+take part in the supplying of armies with men and munitions upon the
+continent.
+
+(_e_) She is open to fear aggression upon any one of her independent
+colonies oversea, and yet she is not able to draw upon them for the
+whole of their potential strength, or, indeed, for more than a very
+small proportion of it. In other words, the British Fleet guarantees
+some fifteen million of European race beyond the seas from attack by
+the enemy, but cannot draw from these fifteen million more than an
+insignificant fraction of the million of men and more which, fully
+armed, they might furnish; nor has she any control over their finance,
+so as to be able to count upon the full weight of their wealth; nor
+can she claim their resources in goods and munitions. She can only
+obtain these by paying for them.
+
+There is here a very striking contrast between her position and that
+of the Germanic Powers.
+
+(_f_) Her isolation and maritime supremacy, coupled with her
+industrial character, make her during the strain of equipment the
+workshop of the Allies. That this is a great advantage is evident; but
+the disadvantage attaching to it is that very large proportions of her
+manhood are necessarily withdrawn from the field for the purposes of
+her shipbuilding, her communications, her manufactory of arms and all
+kinds of supplies, her seafaring work, both civil and military.
+
+Of the two other main Allies, the French disadvantage may be thus
+summarized, and it is slight:--
+
+(_a_) The French political frontier, as established since the defeat
+of the French in 1871, is an open frontier. It has no natural features
+upon which the defensive can rely. In the lack of this the French
+fortified at very heavy expense that portion of their frontier which
+faced their certain enemy, and established a line from Verdun to
+Belfort calculated to check the first movement of his offensive. But
+all the two hundred miles to the north of this, the whole line between
+Verdun and the North Sea, was virtually open. There were, indeed,
+certain fortified places upon that line, but they formed no
+consecutive system, and, as their armaments grew old, they were not
+brought up to date. The truth is, that the defence of France upon this
+frontier was really left to the co-operation of Belgium. If, as was
+believed to be almost certain, Prussian morals being what they are,
+the Prussian guarantee to respect Belgian neutrality would be torn up
+at the outbreak of war, then three great fortresses--Liége, Namur, and
+Antwerp--would hold up the enemy's advance in this quarter, and
+perform the function of delay which the obsolete armament of the
+north-eastern French frontier could not perform. We shall see, when we
+come to the conflicting theories of warfare held by the various
+belligerents, what a grievous miscalculation this was, and how largely
+it accounted for the first disasters of the war. But, at any rate, let
+us remember, as our first point, the absence of any natural line of
+defence in France as against a German invasion, remembering, also,
+that the French would necessarily, at the beginning of any war, be
+upon the defensive on account of their inferior numbers. Had France,
+for instance, had along her frontiers, and just within them, such a
+line as Germany possesses in the Rhine, she would have fallen back at
+the outset upon that line. But she has no such advantage.
+
+(_b_) The second disadvantage of the French geographically is one
+immixed with political considerations. The French have for centuries
+produced, and have for two thousand years believed in, central
+government. For at least three hundred years all the life of the
+nation has centred upon Paris; all the railways and all the great
+system of roads and most of the waterways of the north similarly have
+Paris for their nucleus. Now, this central ganglion of the whole
+French organism is but 120 miles from the frontier, ten days' easy
+marching. An enemy coming in from the north-east not only finds no
+natural obstacle in his way, but has Paris as nearly within his grasp
+as, say, Cologne is within the grasp of a French invasion of North
+Germany. This feature has had the most important consequences upon the
+whole of French history. It was particularly the determining point of
+1870.
+
+To meet the handicap, the French of our generation have combined two
+policies.
+
+First, they have fortified the whole region of Paris so thoroughly
+that it has sometimes been called "a fortified province;" an area of
+nearly thirty miles across at its narrowest, and of something like
+from seven to eight hundred square miles, is comprised within this
+plan.
+
+The weakness of this in the face of modern fire will again be dealt
+with when we come to the conflicting theories upon war established
+during the long peace.
+
+Secondly, the French established a policy whereby, if Paris were
+menaced in a future campaign, the Government should abandon that
+central point, and, in spite of the grave inconvenience proceeding
+from the way in which all material communications centred upon the
+capital and all established offices were grouped there, would withdraw
+the whole central system of government to Bordeaux, and leave Paris to
+defend itself, precisely as though it were of no more importance than
+any other fortified point. They would recognize the strategic values
+of the district; they would deliberately sacrifice its political and
+sentimental value. They would never again run the risk of losing a
+campaign because one particular area of the national soil happened to
+be occupied. The plans of their armies and the instructions of their
+Staff particularly warned commanders against disturbing any defensive
+scheme by too great an anxiety to save Paris.
+
+If this were the disadvantage geographically of France, what was that
+of Russia?
+
+Russia's geographical disadvantage was twofold. First, she had no
+outlet to an open sea in Europe save through the arctic port of
+Archangel. This port was naturally closed for nearly half the year,
+and how long it might be artificially kept partially open by
+ice-breakers it remained for the war to prove. But even if it were
+kept open the whole year in this precarious fashion, it lay on the
+farther side of hundreds of miles of waste and deserted land connected
+only with the active centre of Russia by one narrow-gauge line of
+railway with very little rolling stock. The great eastern port of
+Vladivostok was nearly as heavily handicapped, and its immense
+distance from the scene of operations in the West, with which it was
+only connected by a line six thousand miles long, was another
+drawback. Russia might, indeed, by the favour of neutrals or of
+Allies, use warm water ports. If the Turks should remain neutral and
+permit supply to reach her through the Dardanelles, the Black Sea
+ports were open all the year round, and Port Arthur (nearly as far off
+as Vladivostok) was also open in the Far East. But the Baltic, in a
+war with Germany, was closed to her. Certain goods from outside could
+reach her from Scandinavia, round by land along the north of the
+Baltic, but very slowly and at great expense. It so happened also
+that, as the war proceeded, this question of supply became
+unexpectedly important, because all parties found the expenditure of
+heavy artillery high-explosive ammunition far larger than had been
+calculated for, and Russia was particularly weak therein and dependent
+upon the West. This disadvantage under which Russia lay was largely
+the cause of her embarrassment, and of the prolongation of hostilities
+in the winter that followed the declaration of war.
+
+The fact that Russia was ill supplied with railways, and hardly
+supplied at all with hard roads (in a climate where the thaw turned
+her deep soil into a mass of mud) is political rather than
+geographical, but it must be remembered in connection with this
+difficulty of supply.
+
+If these, then, were the various disadvantages which geographical
+conditions had imposed upon the Allies, what were the corresponding
+advantages?
+
+They were considerable, and may be thus tabulated:--
+
+1. The western Allies stood between their enemies and the ocean. If
+they could maintain superiority at sea through the great size and
+efficiency of the British Fleet, and through its additional power when
+combined with the French, they could at the least embarrass, and
+perhaps ultimately starve out the enemy in certain essential materials
+of war. They could not reduce the enemy to famine, for with care his
+territories, so long as they were not ravaged, would be just
+self-supporting. The nitrates for his explosives the enemy could also
+command, and, in unlimited quantity, iron and coal. But the raw
+material of textiles for his clothing, cotton for his explosives,
+copper for his shell, cartridge cases, and electrical instruments,
+antimony for the hardening of the lead necessary to his small-arm
+ammunition, to some extent petrol for his aeroplanes and his
+motor-cars, and india-rubber for his tyres and other parts of
+machinery, he must obtain from abroad. That he would be able in part
+to obtain these through the good offices of neutrals was probable; but
+the Allied fleets in the West would certainly closely watch the extent
+of neutral imports, and attempt, with however much difficulty and with
+however partial success, to prevent those neutrals acting as a mere
+highroad by which such goods could pass into Germany and Austria. They
+would hardly allow, especially in the later phases of the war, Italy
+and Switzerland, Holland and Scandinavia, to act as open avenues for
+the supply of the Germanic body. Though they would have to go warily,
+and would find it essential to remain at peace with the nations whose
+commerce they thus hampered and in some sense controlled, the Allies
+in the West could in some measure, greater or less, embarrass the
+enemy in these matters.
+
+Conversely, they could supply themselves freely with tropical and
+neutral goods, and even with munitions of war obtained from across the
+ocean, from Africa and from America.
+
+So long as North-western France and the ports of Great Britain were
+free from the enemy this partial blockade would endure, and this
+freedom of supply for France and Britain from overseas would also
+endure.
+
+2. The Allies had further the geographical advantage of marine
+transport for their troops--an important advantage to the French, who
+had a recruiting ground in North Africa, and to the British, who had a
+recruiting ground in their dominions oversea, and, above all, an
+advantage in that it permitted the constant reinforcement of the
+continental armies by increasing contingents arriving from these
+islands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of geographical advantages attaching to the position of Russia only
+one can be discovered, and it consists in the immense extent and unity
+of the Russian Empire. This permitted operations upon a western front
+from the Baltic to the Carpathians, or rather to the Roumanian border,
+which vast line could never be firmly held against them by the enemy
+when once the Russians had trained and equipped a superior number of
+men. The German forces were sufficient, as events proved, long to
+maintain a strict cordon upon the shorter front between the Swiss
+frontiers and the sea, but upon the other side of the great field,
+between the Baltic and the Carpathians, they could never hope to
+establish one continued wall of resistance.
+
+
+(2) THE OPPOSING STRENGTHS.
+
+When nations go to war their probable fortunes, other things being
+equal, are to be measured in numbers.
+
+Other things being equal, the numbers one party can bring against the
+other in men, coupled with the numbers of weapons, munitions, and
+other material, will decide the issue.
+
+But in European civilization other things are more or less equal.
+Civilian historians are fond of explaining military results in many
+other ways, particularly in terms of moral values that will flatter
+the reader. But a military history, however elementary, is compelled
+to recognize the truth that normally modern war in Europe has followed
+the course of numbers.
+
+Among the very first, therefore, of the tasks set us in examining the
+great struggle is a general appreciation of the numbers that were
+about to meet in battle, and of their respective preparation in
+material.
+
+More than the most general numbers--more than brief, round
+statements--I shall not attempt. I shall not do more than state upon
+such grounds as I can discover proportions in the terms of single
+units--as, to say that one nation stood to another in its immediate
+armed men as eight to five, or as two to twenty. Neither shall I give
+positive numbers in less than the large fractions of a million. But,
+even with such large outlines alone before one, the task is
+extraordinarily difficult.
+
+It will almost certainly be found, when full details are available
+after the war, that the most careful estimates have been grievously
+erroneous in some particular. Almost every statement of fact in this
+department can be reasonably challenged, and the evidence upon matters
+which in civilian life are amply recorded and easily ascertainable is,
+in this department, everywhere purposely confused or falsified.
+
+To the difficulty provided by the desire for concealment necessary in
+all military organization, one must add the difficulty presented by
+the cross categories peculiar to this calculation. You have to
+consider not only the distinction between active and reserve, but also
+between men and munitions, between munitions available according to
+one theory of war, and munitions available according to another. You
+have to modify statical conclusions by dynamic considerations (thus
+you have to modify the original numbers by the rate of wastage, and
+the whole calculus varies progressively with the lapse of time as the
+war proceeds).
+
+In spite of these difficulties, I believe it to be possible to put
+before the general reader a clear and simple table of the numbers a
+knowledge of which any judgment of the war involves, and to be fairly
+certain that this table will, when full details are available, be
+discovered not too inaccurate.
+
+We must begin by distinguishing between the two sets of numbers with
+which we have to deal--the numbers of men, and the amount of munitions
+which these men have to use.
+
+The third essential element, equipment, we need not separately
+consider, because, when one says "men" in talking of military affairs,
+one only means equipped, trained, and organized men, for no others can
+be usefully present in the field.
+
+Let us start, then, with some estimate of the number of men who are
+about to take part in battle; let us take for our limits the
+convenient limits of a year, and let us divide that space of time
+arbitrarily into three parts or periods.
+
+There was a first period in which the nations opposed brought into the
+field the men available in the first few weeks for immediate action.
+It is not possible to set a precise limit, and to say, "This period
+covers the first six" or "the first eight weeks;" but we can say
+roughly that, when we are speaking of this first period, we mean the
+time during which men for whom the equipment was all ready, whose
+progress and munitioning had all been organized, were being as rapidly
+as possible brought into play. Such an estimate is not equivalent to
+an estimate of the very first numbers that met in the shock of battle;
+those numbers were far smaller, and differed according to the rate of
+mobilization and the intention of the various parties. The estimate is
+only that of the total number which the various parties could, and
+therefore did, bring into play before men not hitherto trained as
+soldiers, or trained but not believed to be required in the course of
+the campaign--according as that campaign had been variously foreseen
+by various governments--came in to swell the figures.
+
+The conclusion of this first period would come, of course, gradually
+in the case of every combatant, and would come more rapidly in the
+case of some than in the case of others. But we are fairly safe if we
+take the general turning-point from the first period to the second to
+be the month of October 1914. The second period had begun for
+some--notably for Germany--with the first days of that month; it had
+already appeared for all, especially for England, before the beginning
+of November.
+
+The second period is marked for all the combatants by the bringing
+into play of such forces as, for various reasons, the Government of
+each had once hoped would not be required. The German Empire might
+have marked them as not required, in the reasonable hope that victory
+would be quickly assured. The British Government might, from a very
+different standpoint, have believed them not to be required, because
+it regarded the work of its continental Allies as sufficient to gain
+the common object, etc. But in the case of all, however various the
+motives, the particular mark of this second period is the straining to
+put into the field newly trained and equipped bodies which in the
+first period were, it was imagined, neither needed nor perhaps
+available.
+
+This second period merges very gradually into the third, or final,
+period, which is that of the last effort possible to the belligerents.
+There comes a moment before the end of the first year when, in the
+case of most of the belligerents, every man who is available at all
+has been equipped, trained, and put forward, and after which there is
+nothing left but the successive batches of yearly recruits growing up
+from boyhood to manhood.
+
+Although Britain is in a peculiar position, and Russia, through her
+tardiness in equipment, in a peculiar position of another kind, yet
+one may fairly say that the vague margin between the second period of
+growth and the third period of finality appears roughly somewhere
+round the month of June. It will fall earlier with Germany, a good
+deal earlier with France; but from the middle of May at earliest to
+the end of June at latest may be said to mark the entry of the
+numerical factor into its third and final phase.
+
+Let us take these three periods one by one.
+
+The first period is by far the most important to our judgment of the
+campaign; a misapprehension of it has warped most political statements
+made in this country, and most contemporary judgments of the war as a
+whole. It is impossible to get our view of the great European
+struggle--of its nature in the bulk--other than fantastically wrong,
+if we misapprehend the opening numbers with which it was waged.
+
+There are three ways of getting at those numbers.
+
+The first and worst way is the consulting of general statistics
+published before the war broke out. Thus we may see in almanacs the
+French army put down as a little over four million, the German at the
+same amount, the Russian at about five million, and so forth.
+
+These figures have no relation to reality, because they omit a hundred
+modifying considerations--such as the age of the reserves, the degree
+of training of the reserves, the organization prepared for the
+enrolment of untrained men, etc. The only element in them which is of
+real value is the statistics--when we can obtain them--of men actually
+present with the colours before mobilization, to which one may add,
+perhaps--or at any rate in the case of France and Germany--the numbers
+of the _active_ reserve immediately behind the conscript army in
+peace.
+
+The second method, which is better, but imperfect, is that which has
+particularly appealed to technical writers. It consists in numbering
+_units_; in noting the headquarters and the tale of army corps and of
+independent divisions.
+
+The fault of this method is twofold. First, that only actual
+experience can tell one whether units are really being maintained
+during peace at full strength; and secondly, that only actual
+experience discovers how many new units can and will be created when
+war is joined. In other words, the fault of this method (necessary
+though it is as an adjunct to all military calculations) lies in its
+divorce from the reality of numbers.
+
+At the end of the retreat from Moscow each army corps of the Grand
+Army still preserved its name, each regiment its nominal identity. And
+the roll was called by Ney, for instance, before the Beresina,
+division by division and regiment by regiment, and even in the
+regiments company by company; but in most of these last there was no
+one to answer, and there is a story of one regiment for which one
+surviving man answered with regularity until he also died. What fights
+is numbers of living men--not headings; and if five army corps are
+present, each having lost two-fifths of its men, three full army corps
+are a match for them.
+
+The third method is that of commonsense. We must deduce from the
+results obtained, from the fronts covered, from the energy remaining
+after known losses, from the reports of intelligence, from the avenues
+of communication available, what least and what largest numbers can be
+present. We must correct such conclusions by our previous knowledge of
+the way in which each service regards its strength, which most depends
+upon reserves, how each uses his depots and drafts, what machinery it
+has for training the untrained and for equipping them. This
+complicated survey taken, we can arrive at general figures.[1]
+
+Using that method, and applying it to the present campaign, I think we
+shall get something like the following.
+
+
+_The Figures of the First Period, say to October 1-31, 1914._
+
+Germany put across the Rhine in the first period (without counting a
+certain small proportion of Hungarian cavalry and Austrian artillery)
+rather more than two and a quarter million men. She put into the
+Eastern field first a quarter of a million, which rapidly grew to half
+a million, and before the end of October to nearly a million; a
+balance of rather more than another million she used for filling gaps
+and for keeping her strength at the full, and also in particular
+cases (as in her violent attempt to break out through Flanders, or
+rather the beginning of that attempt) for the immediate reinforcement
+of a fighting line. Say that Germany put into the field altogether
+five million men in the first period, and you are saying too much. Say
+that she put into the field altogether in the first period four and a
+quarter million men, and you are saying probably somewhat too little.
+
+France met the very first shock with about a million men, which
+gradually grew in the fighting line to about a million and a half.
+Here the limit of the French force immediately upon the front will
+probably be set. The numbers continued to swell long before the end of
+the first period and well on into the second, but they were kept in
+reserve. Counting the men drafted in to supply losses and the reserve,
+it is not unwise to put at about two and a half million men the
+ultimate French figure, of which one and a half million formed, before
+the end of the first period, the immediate fighting force.
+
+Austria was ordered by the Germans to put into the field, as an
+initial body to check any Russian advance and to confuse the beginning
+of Russian concentration, about a million men; which in the first
+period very rapidly grew to two million, and probably before the end
+of the first period to about two million and a half.
+
+Russia put into the field during the first weeks of the war some
+million and a quarter, which grew during the first period (that is,
+before the coming of winter had created a very serious handicap, to
+which allusion will presently be made) to perhaps two million and a
+half at the very most. I put that number as an outside limit.
+
+Servia, of men actually present and able to fight, we may set down at
+a quarter of a million; and Belgium, if we like, at one hundred
+thousand--though the Belgian service being still in a state of
+transition, and the degree of training very varied within it, that
+minor point is disputable. Indeed it is better, in taking a general
+survey, to consider only the five Great Powers concerned.
+
+Of these the fifth, Great Britain, though destined to exercise by sea
+power and by her recruiting field a very great ultimate effect upon
+the war, could only provide, in this first period upon the Continent,
+an average of one hundred thousand men. To begin with, some
+seventy-five thousand, dwindling through losses to little more than
+fifty thousand, replenished and increased to about one hundred and
+twenty-five thousand, and approaching, as the end of the first period
+was reached, one hundred and fifty thousand men actually present upon
+the front.
+
+We can now set down these figures in the shape of simple units, and
+see how the numerical chances stood at the opening of the campaign.
+
+The enemy sets out with =32= men, of whom he bids =10= men against the
+Russians, and sends =22= against the French. The Russians meet the
+=10= men with about =12=, and the French meet the =22= with about
+=10=; but as they have not the whole =22= to meet in the first shock,
+they are struck rather in the proportion of =10= to =16= or =17=,
+while the presence of the British contingent makes them rather more
+than =10½=. But these initial figures rapidly change with the growth
+of the armies, and before the first period is over the Germans have
+=22= in the West against =15= French and =1= British, making =16=;
+while in the East the Russian =12= has grown to, say, =24=, but the
+Austro-Germans in the East, against those =24=, have grown to be quite
+=32=. And there is the numerical situation of the first period
+clearly, and I think accurately, put, _supposing the wastage to be
+equal in proportion throughout all the armies_. The importance of
+appreciating these figures is that they permit us to understand why
+the enemy was morally certain of winning, quite apart from his right
+judgment on certain disputed theories of war (to which I shall turn in
+a moment), and quite apart from his heavy secret munitioning, which
+was of such effect in the earlier part of the campaign. He was ready
+with forces which he knew would be overwhelming, and how superior he
+was thus numerically in that first period can best be appreciated, I
+think, by a glance at the diagram on the next page.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 14.]
+
+It is no wonder that he made certain of a decisive success in the
+West, and of the indefinite holding up or pushing back of the Russian
+forces in the East. It is no wonder that he confidently expected a
+complete victory before the winter, and the signing of peace before
+the end of the year. To that end all his munitioning, and even the
+details of his tactics, were directed.
+
+
+_The Figures of the Second Period, say to April 15-June 1, 1915._
+
+The second period saw in the West, and, in the enemy's case, a very
+great change proceeding by a number of minute steps, but fairly rapid
+in character.
+
+The French numbers could not grow very rapidly, because the French had
+armed every available man. They could bring in a certain number of
+volunteers; but neither was it useful to equip the most of the older
+men, nor could they be spared from those duties behind the front line
+which the much larger population of the enemy entrusted to men who,
+for the most part, had received no regular training. The French did,
+however, in this second period, gradually grow to some two and a half
+million men, behind which, ready to come in for the final period, were
+about a third of a million young recruits.
+
+Great Britain discovered a prodigious effort. She had already,
+comparatively early in the second period, put across the sea nearly
+half a million men, and drafts were perpetually arriving as the second
+period came to a close; while behind the army actually upon the
+Continent very large bodies--probably another million in
+number--hastily trained indeed, and presented with a grave problem in
+the matter of officering, but of excellent material and _moral_, were
+ready to appear, before the end of the second period or at its close,
+the moment their equipment should be furnished. Counting the British
+effort and the French together, one may say that, without regard to
+wastage, the Allies in the West grew in the second period from the
+original 16 to over 30, and might grow even before the second period
+was over to 35 or even more.
+
+On the enemy's side (neglecting wastage for the moment) there were the
+simplest elements of growth. Each Power had docketed every untrained
+man, knew his medical condition, where to find him, where and how to
+train him. The German Empire had during peace taken about one-half of
+its young men for soldiers. It had in pure theory five million
+untrained men in the reserve, excluding the sick, and those not
+physically efficient for service.
+
+In practice, however, a very large proportion of men, even of the
+efficients, must be kept behind for civilian work; and in an
+industrial country such as Germany, mainly urban in population, this
+proportion is particularly large. We are safe in saying that the
+German army would not be reinforced during the second period by more
+than two and a half million men. These were trained in batches of some
+800,000 each; the equipment had long been ready for them, and they
+appeared mainly as drafts for filling gaps, but partly as new
+formations in groups--the first going in or before November, the
+second in or before February. A third and last group was expected to
+have finished this rather elementary training somewhere about the end
+of April, so that May would complete the second period in the German
+forces.
+
+Austria-Hungary, by an easily appreciable paradox, possessed, though
+but 80 per cent. of the Germans in population, a larger available
+untrained reserve. This was because that empire trained a smaller
+proportion of its population by far than did the Germans. It is
+probable that Austria-Hungary was able to train and put forward during
+the second period some three million men.
+
+It is a great error, into which most critics have fallen, to
+underestimate or to neglect the Austro-Hungarian factor in the enemy's
+alliance. Without thus nearly doubling her numbers, Germany could not
+have fought France and Russia at all, and a very striking feature of
+all the earlier weeks of 1915 was the presence in the Carpathians of
+increasing Austro-Hungarian numbers, which checked for more than three
+months all the Russian efforts upon that front.
+
+Say that Austria-Hungary nearly doubled her effectives (apart from
+wastage) in this second period, and you will not be far wrong.
+
+Russia, which upon paper could almost indefinitely increase during the
+second period her numbers in the field, suffered with the advent of
+winter an unexpected blow. Her equipment, and in particular her
+munitioning (that is, her provision of missiles, and in especial of
+heavy shell), must in the main come from abroad. Now the German
+command of the Baltic created a complete blockade on the eastern
+frontier of Russia, save upon the short Roumanian frontier; and the
+entry of Turkey into the campaign on the side of the enemy, which
+marked the second period, completed that blockade upon the south, and
+shut upon Russia the gate of the Dardanelles. The port of Archangel in
+the north was ice-bound, or with great difficulty kept partially open
+by ice-breakers, and was in any case only connected with Russia by one
+narrow-gauge and lengthy line; while the only remaining port of
+Vladivostok was six thousand miles away, and closed also during a part
+of the winter.
+
+In this situation it was impossible for the great reserves of men
+which Russia counted on to be put into the field, and the Russians
+remained throughout the whole of this second period but little
+stronger than they had been at the end of the first. If we set them
+down at perhaps somewhat over three millions (excluding wastage)
+towards the end of this second period, we shall be near to a just
+estimate.
+
+We can now sum up and say that, _apart from wastage_, the forces
+arrayed against each other after this full development should have
+been about 120 men for the central powers of the enemy--35 (and
+perhaps ultimately 40) men against them upon the West, and, until
+sufficient Russian equipment could at least be found, only some 30 men
+against them upon the East.
+
+Luckily such figures are wholly changed by the enormous rate of the
+enemy's wastage. The Russians had lost men almost as rapidly as the
+enemy, but the Russian losses could be and were made good. The
+handicap of the blockade under which Russia suffered permitted her to
+maintain only a certain number at the front, but she could continually
+draft in support of those numbers; and though she lost in the first
+seven months of the war quite four hundred thousand in prisoners, and
+perhaps three-quarters of a million in other casualties, her strength
+of somewhat over three millions was maintained at the close of the
+first period.
+
+In the same way drafts had further maintained the British numbers. The
+French had lost not more than one-fifth of a million in prisoners, and
+perhaps a third of a million or a little more in killed and
+permanently disabled--that is, unable to return to the fighting line.
+In the case of both the French and the British sanitary conditions
+were excellent.
+
+You have, then, quite 35 for your number in the West, and quite 33 for
+your number in the East of the Allied forces at the end of the winter;
+but of your enemy forces you may safely deduct 45-50 might be a truer
+estimate; and it is remarkable that those who have watched the matter
+carefully at the front are inclined to set the total enemy losses
+higher than do the critics working at home. But call it only 45 (of
+which 5 are prisoners), and you have against the 68 Allies in East and
+West no more at the end of this second period than 75 of the enemy.
+
+The following diagram illustrates in graphic form the change that six
+months have produced.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 15.]
+
+In other words, at the end of the winter and with the beginning of the
+spring, although the enemy still has a numerical preponderance, it is
+no longer the overwhelming thing it was when the war began, and that
+change in numbers explains the whole change in the campaign.
+
+The enemy was certain of winning mainly because he was fighting more
+than equal in the East, and at first nearly two to one, later quite
+four to three, in the West. Those are the conditions of the late
+summer of 1914. 1915, before it was a third over, had seen the numbers
+nearly equalized. With the summer of 1915 we might hope to see the
+numbers at last reversed, and, after so many perilous months, a total
+(not local) numerical majority at last appearing upon the side of the
+Allies. If ever this condition shall arrive before the enemy can
+accomplish a decisive result in either field the tide will have
+turned.
+
+The third period belongs at the moment of writing to the future. All
+we can say of it is that it presents for the enemy no considerable
+field of recruitment; but while in the West it offers no increase to
+the French, it does offer another five units at least, and possibly
+another six or eight, to the British; and to the Russians, if the
+blockade can be pierced at any point, or if the change of weather,
+coupled with the broadening of the gauge of the railway to Archangel,
+permits large imports, an almost indefinite increase in
+number--certainly an increase of two millions, or twenty of the units
+we were dealing with in the figures given above.
+
+So much, then, for the numerical factor in men which dominates the
+whole campaign.
+
+When we turn from this to the second factor--that of munitions--we
+discover something which can be dealt with far more briefly, but which
+follows very much the same line.
+
+The enemy in the first period of the war had, if anything, an even
+greater superiority in munitioning than in men. This superiority was
+due to two distinct causes. In the first place, as we shall see in a
+few pages, his theory upon a number of military details was well
+founded; in the second place, _he made war at his own chosen moment,
+after three years of determined and largely secret preparation_.
+
+As to the first point:--
+
+We may take as a particular example of these theories of war the
+enemies' reliance upon heavy artillery--and in particular upon the
+power of the modern high explosive and the big howitzer--to destroy
+permanent fortification rapidly, and to have an effect in the field,
+particularly in the preparation of an assault, which the military
+theories of the Allies had wrongly underestimated. It is but one
+example out of many. It must serve for the rest, and it will be dealt
+with more fully in the next section. The Germans to some extent, and
+much more the Austrians, prepared an immensely greater provision of
+heavy ammunition than their opponents, and entered the field with
+large pieces of a calibre and in number quite beyond anything that
+their opponents had at the outset of the campaign.
+
+As to the second point:--
+
+No peaceful nations, no nations not designing a war at their own hour,
+lock up armament which may be rendered obsolete, or, in equipment more
+extensive than the reasonable chances of a campaign may demand, the
+public resources which it can use on what it regards as more useful
+things. Such nations, to use a just metaphor, "insure" against war at
+what they think a reasonable rate. But if some one Government in
+Europe is anarchic in its morals, and proposes, while professing
+peace, to declare war at an hour and a day chosen by itself, it will
+obviously have an overwhelming advantage in this respect. The energy
+and the money which it devotes to the single object of preparation
+cannot possibly be wasted; and, if its sudden aggression is not fixed
+too far ahead, will not run the risk of being sunk in obsolete
+weapons.
+
+Now it is clearly demonstrable from the coincidence of dates, from the
+exact time required for a special effort of this kind, and from the
+rate at which munitions and equipment were accumulated, that the
+Government at Berlin came to a decision in the month of July 1911 to
+force war upon Russia and upon France immediately after the harvest of
+1914; and of a score of indications which all converge upon these
+dates, not one fails to strike them exactly by more than a few weeks
+in the matter of preparation, by more than a few days in the date at
+which war was declared.
+
+Under those circumstances, Berlin with her ally at Vienna had the
+immense numerical advantage over the French and the Russians when war
+was suddenly forced upon those countries on the 31st of July last
+year.
+
+But, as in the case of men, the advantage would only be overwhelming
+during the first period. The very fact that the war had to be won
+quickly involved an immense expenditure of heavy ammunition in the
+earlier part of it, and this expenditure, if it were not successful,
+would be a waste.
+
+It takes about five months to produce a heavy piece, and the rate of
+production of heavy ammunition, though slow, is measurable. At the
+moment of writing this, towards the close of the second period, the
+balance is not yet redressed, but it is in a fair way to be redressed.
+The imperfect and too tardy blockade to which the enemy is somewhat
+timidly subjected is a factor in aid of this; and we may be fairly
+confident that, if a third period is reached before the enemy shall
+have the advantage of a decision, there will be a preponderance of
+munitioning upon the Allied side in the West and the East which will
+be, if anything, of superior importance to the approaching
+preponderance in numbers.
+
+Having thus briefly surveyed the opposing strength of either
+combatant, checked and measured as it varied with the progress of the
+war, we will turn to the _moral_ opposition of military theory
+between the one party and the other, and show how here again that,
+_save in the most important matter of all, grand strategy_, the enemy
+was on the highroad to the victory which he confidently and, for that
+matter, reasonably expected.
+
+
+(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR.
+
+The long peace which the most civilized parts of Europe had enjoyed
+for now a generation left more and more uncertain the value of
+theories upon the conduct of war, which theories had for the most part
+developed as mere hypotheses untested by experience during that
+considerable period. The South African and the Manchurian war had
+indeed proved certain theories sound and others unsound, so far as
+their experience went; but they were fought under conditions very
+different from those of an European campaign, and the progress of
+material science was so rapid in the years just preceding the great
+European conflict that the mass of debated theories still remained
+untried at its outbreak.
+
+The war in its first six months thoroughly tested these theories, and
+proved, for the greater part of them, which were sound in practice and
+which unsound. I will tabulate them here, and beg the special
+attention of the reader, because upon the accuracy of these forecasts
+the first fortunes of the war depended.
+
+I. A German theory maintained that, with the organization of and the
+particular type of discipline in the German service, attacks could be
+delivered in much closer formation than either the French or the
+English believed to be possible.
+
+The point is this: After a certain proportion of losses inflicted
+within a certain limit of time, troops break or are brought to a
+standstill. That was the universal experience of all past war. When
+the troops that are attacking break or are brought to a standstill,
+the attack fails. But what you cannot determine until you test the
+matter in actual war is what numbers of losses in what time will thus
+destroy an offensive movement. You cannot determine it, because the
+chief element in the calculation is the state of the soldier's mind,
+and that is not a measurable thing. One had only the lessons of the
+past to help one.
+
+The advantages of attacking in close formation are threefold.
+
+(_a_) You launch your attack with the least possible delay. It is
+evident that spreading troops out from the column to the line takes
+time, and that the more extended your line the more time you consume
+before you can strike.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 16.]
+
+If I have here a hundred units advancing in a column towards the place
+where they are to attack (and to advance in column is necessary,
+because a broad line cannot long keep together), then it is evident
+that if I launched them to the attack thus:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 17.]
+
+packed close together, I get them into that formation much more
+quickly than if, before attacking, I have to spread them out thus:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 18.]
+
+(_b_) The blow which I deliver has also evidently more weight upon it
+at a given point. If I am attacking a hundred yards of front with a
+hundred units of man and missile power, I shall do that front more
+harm in a given time than if I am attacking with only fifty such
+units.
+
+(_c_) In particular circumstances, where troops _have_ to advance on a
+narrow front, as in carrying a bridge or causeway or a street or any
+other kind of defile, my troops, if they can stand close formation and
+the corresponding punishment it entails, will be more likely to
+succeed than troops not used to or not able to bear such close
+formation. Now, such conditions are very numerous in war. Troops are
+often compelled, if they are to succeed, to rush narrow gaps of this
+kind, and their ability to do so is a great element in tactical
+success.
+
+I have here used the phrase "if they can stand close formation and the
+corresponding punishment it entails," and that is the whole point.
+There are circumstances--perhaps, on the whole, the most numerous of
+all the various circumstances in war--in which close formation, if it
+can be used, is obviously an advantage; but it is equally self-evident
+that the losses of troops in close formation will be heavier than
+their losses in extended order. A group is a better target than a
+number of dispersed, scattered points.
+
+Now, the Germans maintained in this connection not only, as I have
+said, that they could get their men to stand the punishment involved
+in close formation, but also that:--
+
+(_a_) The great rapidity of such attacks would make the _total_ and
+_final_ wastage less than was expected, and further:--
+
+(_b_) That the heavy wastage, such as it was, was worth while, because
+it would lead to very rapid strategical decision as well as tactical.
+In other words, because once you had got your men to stand these heavy
+_local_ losses and to suffer heavy _initial_ wastage, you would win
+your campaign in a short time, so that the high-rate wastage not being
+prolonged need not be feared.
+
+Well, in the matter of this theory, the war conclusively proved the
+following points:--
+
+(_a_) The Germans were right and the Allies were wrong with regard to
+the mere possibility of using close formations. The German temper,
+coupled with the type of discipline in the modern German service, did
+prove capable of compelling men to stand losses out of all proportion
+to what the Allies expected they could stand, and yet to continue to
+advance neither broken nor brought to a standstill. But--
+
+(_b_) The war also proved that, upon the whole, and taking the
+operations in their entirety, such formations were an error. In case
+after case, a swarm of Germans advancing against inferior numbers got
+home after a third, a half, or even more than a half of their men had
+fallen in the first few minutes of the rush. But in many, many more
+cases this tactical experiment failed. Those who can speak as
+eye-witnesses tell us that, though the occasions on which such attacks
+actually broke were much rarer than was expected before the war began,
+yet the occasions on which the attack was thrown into hopeless
+confusion, and in which the few members of it that got home had lost
+all power to do harm to the defenders, were so numerous that the
+experiment must be regarded as, upon the whole, a failure. It may be
+one that no troops but Germans could employ. It is certainly not one
+which any troops, after the experience of this war, will copy.
+
+(_c_) Further, the war proved even more conclusively that the wastage
+was not worth while. The immense expense in men only succeeded where
+there was an overwhelming superiority in number. The strategical
+result was not arrived at quickly (as the Germans had expected)
+through this tactical method, and after six months of war, the enemy
+had thrown away more than twice and nearly three times as many men as
+he need have sacrificed had he judged sanely the length of time over
+which operations might last.
+
+II. Another German theory had maintained that modern high explosives
+fired from howitzers and the accuracy of their aim controlled by
+aircraft would rapidly and promptly dominate permanent fortification.
+
+This theory requires explanation. Its partial success in practice was
+the most startling discovery and the most unpleasant one to the Allies
+of the early part of the war.
+
+In the old days, say up to ten years ago or less, permanent
+fortification mounting heavy guns was impregnable to direct assault if
+it were properly held and properly munitioned. It could hold out for
+months. Its heavy guns had a range superior to any movable guns that
+could be brought against it--indeed, so very heavily superior that
+movable guns, even if they were howitzers, would be smashed or their
+crews destroyed long before the fortress was seriously damaged by
+them.
+
+A howitzer is but a form of mortar, and all such pieces are designed
+to lob a projectile instead of throwing it. The advantage of using
+these instruments when you are besieging permanent works is that you
+can hide them behind an obstacle, such as a hill, and that the heavy
+gun in the fortress cannot get its shell on to them because that shell
+has a flatter trajectory. The disadvantage is that the howitzer has a
+very much shorter range than the gun size for size.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 19.]
+
+Here is a diagram showing how necessarily true this is. The howitzer,
+lobbing its shell with a comparatively small charge, has the advantage
+of being able to hide behind a steep bit of ground, but on such a
+trajectory the range is short. The gun in the fortress does not lob
+its shell, but throws it. The course of the gun shell is much more
+straight. It therefore can only hit the howitzer and its crew
+indirectly by exploding its shell just above them. Until recently, the
+gun was master of the howitzer for three reasons:--
+
+First, because the largest howitzers capable of movement and of being
+brought up against any fortress and shifted from one place of
+concealment to another were so small that their range was
+insignificant. Therefore the circumference on which they could be used
+was also a small one; their opportunities for hiding were consequently
+reduced; the chances of their emplacement being immediately spotted
+from the fortress were correspondingly high, and the big gun in the
+fortress was pretty certain to overwhelm the majority of them at
+least. It is evident that the circumference αβγ offers far more
+chances of hiding than the circumference ABC, but a still more
+powerful factor in favour of the new big howitzer is the practical one
+that at very great ranges in our climate the chances of spotting a
+particular place are extremely small. Secondly, because the explosives
+used, even when they landed and during the short time that the
+howitzer remained undiscovered and unheard, were not sufficiently
+powerful nor, with the small howitzers then in existence, sufficiently
+large in amount in each shell to destroy permanent fortification.
+Thirdly, because the effect of the aim is always doubtful. You are
+firing at something well above yourself, and you could not tell very
+exactly where your howitzer shell had fallen.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 20.]
+
+What has modified all this in the last few years is--
+
+First, the successful bringing into the field of very large howitzers,
+which, though they do lob their shells, lob them over a very great
+distance. The Austrians have produced howitzers of from 11 to 12
+inches in calibre, which, huge as they are, can be moved about in the
+field and fired from any fairly steady ground; and the Germans have
+probably produced (though I cannot find actual proof that they have
+used them with effect) howitzers of more than 16 inches calibre, to be
+moved, presumably, only upon rails. But 11-inch was quite enough to
+change all the old conditions. It must be remembered that a gun varies
+as the _cube_ of its calibre. A 12-inch piece is not twice as powerful
+as a 6-inch. It is _eight times_ as powerful. The howitzer could now
+fire from an immense distance. The circumference on which it worked
+was very much larger; its opportunities for finding suitable steep
+cover far greater. Its opportunities for moving, if it was endangered
+by being spotted, were also far greater; and the chances of the gun in
+the fortress knocking it out were enormously diminished.
+
+Secondly, the high explosives of recent years, coupled with the vast
+size of this new mobile howitzer shell, is capable, when the howitzer
+shell strikes modern fortification, of doing grievous damage which,
+repeated over several days, turns the fort into a mass of ruins.
+
+Thirdly, the difficulty of accurate aiming over such distances and of
+locating your hits so that they destroy the comparative small area of
+the fort is got over by the use of aircraft, which fly above the fort,
+note the hits, and signal the results.
+
+Now, the Germans maintained that under these quite recently modified
+conditions not even the best handled and heaviest gunned permanent
+fort could hold out more than a few days. The French believed that it
+could, and they trusted in the stopping power not only of individual
+works (such as the fortress of Manonvilliers on the frontier), but
+more especially of great rings of forts, such as surround Liége,
+Namur, Verdun, etc., and enclose an area within the security of which
+large bodies of troops can be held ready, armies which no one would
+dare to leave behind them without having first reduced them to
+surrender.
+
+The very first days of the war proved that the German theory was right
+and the French wrong. The French theory, upon which such enormous
+funds had been expended, had been perfectly right until within quite
+recent years the conditions had changed. Port Arthur, for instance,
+only ten years ago, could hold out for months and months. In this war
+no individual fort has held out for more than eleven days.
+
+It might be imagined under such circumstances that the very existence
+of fortresses was doomed; yet we note that Verdun continues to make a
+big bulge in the German line four months after the first shots fell on
+its forts, and that the Germans are actively restoring the great
+Belgian rings they have captured at Liége, Antwerp, and Namur.
+
+Why is this? It is because another German theory has proved right in
+practice.
+
+III. This German theory which has proved right in practice is what may
+be called "the mobile defence of a fortress." It proposes no longer to
+defend upon expensive permanent works precisely located upon the map,
+but upon a number of improvised batteries in which heavy guns can move
+somewhat behind field-works concealed as much as possible, numerous
+and constructed rapidly under the conditions of the campaign. Such
+works dotted round the area you desire to defend are quite a different
+thing to reduce from isolated, restricted, permanent forts. In the
+first place, the enemy does not know where they are; in the second
+place, you can make new ones at short notice; in the third place, if a
+howitzer does spot your heavy gun, you can move it or its neighbours
+to a new position; in the fourth place, the circumference you are
+defending is much larger, and the corresponding area that the
+besiegers have to search with their fire more extended. Thus, in the
+old forts round Verdun, about a dozen permanent works absolutely fixed
+and ascertainable upon the map, and covering altogether but a few
+acres, constituted the defence of the town. Before September was out
+the heavy guns had been moved to trenches far advanced into the field
+to the north and east, temporary rails had been laid down to permit
+their lateral movement--that is, to let them shift from a place where
+they had perhaps been spotted to a new place, under cover of darkness,
+and the sectors thus thrown out in front of the old fortifications in
+this improvised mobile fashion were at least three times as long as
+the line made by the ring of old forts, while the area that had to be
+searched was perhaps a hundred times as large. For in the place of the
+narrowly restricted permanent fort, with, say, ten heavy guns, you had
+those same ten heavy guns dotted here and there in trenches rapidly
+established in half a dozen separate, unknown, and concealed spots,
+along perhaps a mile of wooded hill, and free to operate when moved
+over perhaps double that front.
+
+IV. _In Grand Strategy a German general theory of strategics was
+opposed to a French general theory of strategics, and upon which of
+the two should prove right depended, much more than on any of the
+previous points, the ultimate issue of the campaign._
+
+This is far the most important point for the reader's consideration.
+It may be said with justice that no one can understand this war who
+has not grasped the conflict between these two fundamental conceptions
+of armed bodies in action, and the manner in which (by the narrowest
+and most fortunate margin!) events in the first phase of the war
+justified the French as against the German school.
+
+I must therefore beg the reader's leave to go somewhat thoroughly into
+the matter, for it is the foundation of all that will follow when we
+come to the narration of events and the story of the Western battle
+which began in the retreat from the Sambre and ended in the Battle of
+the Marne.
+
+The first postulate in all military problems is that, other things
+being equal, numbers are the decisive factor in war. This does not
+mean that absolute superiority of numbers decides a campaign
+necessarily in favour of the superior power. What it means is that _in
+any particular field_, if armament and discipline are more or less
+equal on the two sides, the one that has been able to mass the greater
+number _in that field_ will have the victory. He will disperse or
+capture his enemy, or at the least he will pin him and take away his
+_initiative_--of which word "initiative" more later. Now, this field
+in which one party has the superior numbers can only be a portion of
+the whole area of operations. But if it is what is called the decisive
+portion, then he who has superior numbers _in the decisive time and
+place_ will win not only there but everywhere. His local victory
+involves consequent success along the whole of his line.
+
+For instance, supposing five men are acting against three. Five is
+more than three; and if the forces bear upon each other equally, the
+five will defeat the three. But if the five are so badly handled that
+they get arranged in groups of two, two, and one, and if the three are
+so well handled that they strike swiftly at the first isolated two and
+defeat them, thus bringing up the next isolated two, who are in their
+turn defeated, the three will, at the end of the struggle, have only
+one to deal with, and the five will have been beaten by the three
+because, although five is larger than three, yet _in the decisive time
+and place_ the three never have more than two against them. It may be
+broadly laid down that the whole art of strategics consists for the
+man with superior numbers in bringing all his numbers to bear, and for
+the man with inferior numbers in attempting by his cunning to compel
+his larger opponent to fight in separated portions, and to be defeated
+in detail.
+
+As in every art, the developments of these elementary first principles
+become, with variations of time and place, indefinitely numerous and
+various. Upon their variety depends all the interest of military
+history. And there is one method in particular whereby the lesser
+number may hope to pin and destroy the power of the greater upon which
+the French tradition relied, and the value of which modern German
+criticism refused.
+
+Before going into that, however, we must appreciate the mental
+qualities which led to the acceptance of the theory upon the one side
+and its denial upon the other.
+
+The fundamental contrast between the modern German military temper and
+the age-long traditions of the French service consists in this: That
+the German theory is based upon a presumption of superiority, moral,
+material, and numerical. The theory of the French--as their national
+temperament and their Roman tradition compel them--is based upon an
+_envisagement_ of inferiority: moral, material, and numerical.
+
+There pervades the whole of the modern German strategic school this
+feeling: "I shall win if I act and feel as though I was bound to win."
+There pervades the whole French school this sentiment: "I have a
+better chance of winning if I am always chiefly considering how I
+should act if I found myself inferior in numbers, in material, and
+even in moral at any phase in the struggle, especially at its origins,
+but even also towards its close."
+
+This contrast appears in everything, from tactical details to the
+largest strategical conception, and from things so vague and general
+as the tone of military writings, to things so particular as the
+instruction of the conscript in his barrack-room. The German soldier
+is taught--or was--that victory was inevitable, and would be as swift
+as it would be triumphant: the French soldier was taught that he had
+before him a terrible and doubtful ordeal, one that would be long, one
+in which he ran a fearful risk of defeat, and one in which he might,
+even if victorious, have to wear down his enemy by the exercise of a
+most burdensome tenacity. In the practice of the field, the contrast
+appeared in the French use of a great reserve, and the German contempt
+for such a precaution: in the elaborate thinking out of the use of a
+reserve, which is the core of French military thought; in the
+superficial treatment of the same, which is perhaps the chief defect
+of Germany.
+
+It would be of no purpose to debate here which of these two mental
+attitudes, with all their consequences, is either morally the better
+or in practice the more successful. The French and Latin tradition
+seems to the German pusillanimous, and connected with that decadence
+which he perceives in every expression of civilization from Athens to
+Paris. The modern German conception seems to the French theatrical,
+divorced from reality, and hence fundamentally weak. Either critic may
+be right or either wrong. Our interest is to follow the particular
+schemes developing from that tone of mind. We shall see how, in the
+first phases of the war, the German conception strikingly justified
+itself for more than ten days; how, after a fortnight, it was
+embarrassed by its opponent; and how at the end of a month the German
+initiative was lost under the success--only barely achieved after
+dreadful risk--of the French plan.
+
+That plan, inherited from the strategy of Napoleon, and designed in
+particular to achieve the success of a smaller against a larger
+number, may be most accurately defined as _the open strategic square_,
+and its leading principle is "the method of detached reserves."
+
+This strategic conception, which I shall now describe, and which (in a
+diagram it is put far too simply) underlies the whole of the
+complicated movements whereby the French staved off disaster in the
+first weeks of the war, is one whose whole object it is to permit the
+inferior number to bring up a _locally_ superior weight against a
+_generally_ superior enemy in the decisive time and at the decisive
+place.
+
+Let us suppose that a general commanding _twelve_ large units--say,
+twelve army corps--knows that he is in danger of being attacked by an
+enemy commanding no less than _sixteen_ similar units.
+
+Let us call the forces of the first or weaker general "White," and
+those of the second or stronger general "Black."
+
+It is manifest that if White were merely to deploy his line and await
+the advance of Black thus,
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 21.]
+
+he would be outflanked and beaten; or, in the alternative, Black might
+mass men against White's centre and pierce it, for Black is vastly
+superior to White in numbers. White, therefore, must adopt some
+special disposition in order to avoid immediate defeat.
+
+Of such special dispositions one among many is the French Open
+Strategic Square.
+
+This disposition is as follows:--
+
+White arranges his twelve units into four quarters of three each, and
+places one quarter at each corner of a square thus:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 22.]
+
+We will give them titles, and call them A, B, C, and D.
+
+If, as is most generally the case in a defensive campaign at its
+opening, White cannot be certain from which exact direction the main
+blow is coming, he may yet know that it is coming from some one
+general direction, from one sector of the compass at least, and he
+arranges his square to face towards that sector.
+
+For instance, in the above diagram, he may not know whether the blow
+is coming from the precise direction 1, or 2, or 3, but he knows that
+it is coming somewhere within the sector XY.
+
+Then he will draw up his square so that its various bodies all face
+towards the average direction from which the blow may come.
+
+The SIZE of his square--which is of great importance to the
+result--he makes as restricted as possible, _subject to two prime
+conditions_. These conditions are:--
+
+First, that there shall be room for the troops composing each corner
+to be deployed--that is, spread out for fighting. Secondly, that there
+shall be room between any two corners (A and C, for instance) for a
+third corner (D, for instance) to move in between them and spread out
+for fighting in support of them. He makes his square as close and
+restricted as possible, because his success depends--as will be seen
+in a moment--upon the rapidity with which any one corner can come up
+in support of the others. But he leaves enough room for the full
+numbers to spread out for fighting, because otherwise he loses in
+efficiency; and he leaves room enough between any two squares for a
+third one to come in, because the whole point of the formation is the
+aid each corner can bring to the others.
+
+In this posture he awaits the enemy.
+
+That enemy will necessarily come on in a lengthy line, lengthy in
+proportion to the number of his units. For it is essential to the
+general commanding _superior_ numbers to make the _whole_ of the
+superior numbers tell, and this can only be done if they march along
+parallel roads, and these roads are sufficiently wide apart for the
+various columns to have plenty of room to deploy--that is, to spread
+out into a fighting line--when the shock comes.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 23.]
+
+This extended line of Black marching thus against White strikes White
+first upon some one corner of his square. Suppose that corner to be
+corner A. Then the position when contact is established and the first
+serious fighting begins is what you will observe in the above diagram.
+A is the corner (now spread out for fighting) which gets the first
+shock.
+
+Note you (for this is the crucial point of the whole business) that
+upon the exposed corner A will fall a very dangerous task indeed. A
+will certainly be attacked by forces superior to itself. Normally
+forces more than half as large again as A will be near enough to A to
+concentrate upon him in the first shock. The odds will be at least as
+much as five to three, the Black units, 4, 5, and 6, will be right on
+A, and 3 and 7 will be near enough to come in as well in the first day
+or two of the combat, while possibly 2 may have a look in as well.
+
+A, thus tackled, has become what may be called "the _operative corner_
+of the square." It is his task "to retreat and hold the enemy" while
+B, C, and D, "the masses of manoeuvre," swing up. But under that
+simple phrase "operative corner" is hidden all the awful business of a
+fighting retreat: it means leaving your wounded behind you, marching
+night and day, with your men under the impression of defeat; leaving
+your disabled guns behind you, keeping up liaison between all your
+hurrying, retreating units, with a vast force pressing forward to your
+destruction. A's entire force is deliberately imperilled in order to
+achieve the success of the plan as a whole, and upon A's tenacity, as
+will be seen in what follows, the success of that plan entirely
+depends.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 24.]
+
+Well, while A is thus retreating--say, from his old position at A_1 on
+the foregoing diagram to such a position as A_2, with Black swarming
+up to crush him--the other corners of the square, B, C, and D, receive
+the order to "swing"--that is, to go forward inclining to the left or
+the right according to the command given.
+
+Mark clearly that, until the order is given, the general commanding
+Black cannot possibly tell whether the "swing" will be directed to
+the left or to the right. Either B will close up against A, C spread
+out farther to the left, and D come in between A and C (which is a
+"swing" to the left) as in Sketch 25, or C will close up against A, B
+will spread well out to the right, and D come up between A and B, as
+in Sketch 26 (which is a "swing" to the right).
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 25.]
+
+Until the "swing" actually begins, Black, the enemy, cannot possibly
+tell whether it is his left-hand units (1 to 8) or his right-hand
+units (9 to 16) which will be affected. One of the two ends of his
+line will have to meet White's concentrated effort; the other will be
+left out in the cold. Black cannot make dispositions on the one
+hypothesis or on the other. Whichever he chose, White would, of
+course, swing the other way and disconcert him.
+
+Black, therefore, has to keep his line even until he knows which way
+White is going to swing.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 26.]
+
+Let us suppose that White swings to the left.
+
+Mark what follows. The distances which White's units have got to go
+are comparatively small. B will be up at A's side, and so will D in a
+short time after the swing is over, and when the swing is completed,
+the position is after this fashion. Black's numbers, 1 to 9 inclusive,
+find themselves tackled by all Black's twelve. There is a superiority
+of number against Black on his right, White's left, and the remaining
+part of Black's line (10 to 16 inclusive), is out in the cold.
+
+If it were a tactical problem, and all this were taking place in a
+small field, Black's left wing, 10-16, would, of course, come up at
+once and redress the balance. But being a strategical problem, and
+involving very large numbers and very great distances, Black's left
+wing, 10-16, can do nothing of the kind. For Black's left wing, 10-16,
+_cannot possibly get up in time_. Long before it has arrived on the
+scene, White's 12 will have broken Black's 9 along Black's right wing.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 27.]
+
+There are three elements which impose this delay upon Black's left
+wing.
+
+First, to come round in aid of the right wing means the marching
+forward of one unit after another, so that each shall overlap the
+last, and so allow the whole lot to come up freely. This means that
+the last unit will have to go forward six places before turning, and
+that means several days' marching. For with very large bodies, and
+with a matter of 100 miles to come up, all in one column, it would be
+an endless business (Sketch 28).
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 28.]
+
+Next you have the delay caused by the _conversion of direction_
+through a whole right angle. That cause of delay is serious. For when
+you are dealing with very large bodies of men, such as half a dozen
+army corps, to change suddenly from the direction S (see Sketch 29)
+for which your Staff work was planned, and to break off at a moment's
+notice in direction E, while you are on the march towards S, is
+impossible. You have to think out a whole new set of dispositions,
+and to re-order all your great body of men. White was under no such
+compulsion, for though he had to swing, the swing faced the same
+general direction as his original dispositions. And the size of the
+units and the distances to be traversed--the fact that the problem is
+strategical and not tactical--is the essence of the whole thing. If,
+for instance, you have (as in Sketch 30) half a dozen, not army corps,
+but mere battalions of 1,000 men, deployed over half a dozen miles of
+ground, AB, and advancing in the direction SS, and they are suddenly
+sent for in the direction E, it is simple enough. You form your 6,000
+men into column; in a few hours' delay they go off in the direction
+E, and when they get to the place where they are wanted, the column
+can spread out quickly again on the front CD, and soon begin to take
+part in the action. But when you are dealing with half a dozen army
+corps--240,000 men--it is quite another matter. The turning of any one
+of these great bodies through a whole right angle is a lengthy
+business. You cannot put a quarter of a million men into one
+column--they would take ages to deploy--so you must, as we have seen,
+make each unit of them overlap the next before the turn can begin.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 29.]
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 30.]
+
+Nor is that all the delay involved. It would never do for these six
+separate corps to come up in driblets and get defeated in detail; 10,
+11, and 12 will have to wait until 13, 14, 15, and even 16, have got
+up abreast of them--and that is the third cause of delay.
+
+Here are three causes of delay which, between them and accumulated,
+have disastrous effect; and in general we may be certain that where
+very large bodies and very extensive stretches of territory are
+concerned, that wing of Black which has been left out in the cold can
+never come up in time to retrieve the situation created by White's
+twelve pinning Black's engaged wing of only nine.
+
+If the square has worked, and if the twelve White have pinned the
+right-hand wing of Black, 1 to 9 inclusive, there is nothing for Black
+to do but to order his right wing, 1 to 9, to retreat as fast as
+possible before superior numbers, and to order his left wing, 10 to
+16, to fall back at the same time and keep in line; and you then have
+the singular spectacle of twelve men compelling the retreat of and
+pursuing sixteen.
+
+_That is exactly what happened in the first three weeks of active
+operations in the West. The operative corner A in the annexed diagram
+was the Franco-British force upon the Sambre. The retirement of that
+operative corner and its holding of the enemy was what is called in
+this country "The Retreat from Mons." BB are the "masses of manoeuvre"
+behind A. The swinging up of these masses involving the retirement of
+the whole was the Battle of the Marne._
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 31.]
+
+Now, it is evident that in all this everything depends upon the
+tenacity and military value of the operative corner, which is exposed
+and sacrificed that the whole scheme of the Open Square may work.
+
+If that operative corner is destroyed as a force--is overwhelmed or
+dispersed or surrounded--while it is fighting its great odds, the
+whole square goes to pieces. Its centre is penetrated by the enemy,
+and the army is in a far worse plight than if recourse had never been
+had to the open strategic square at all. For if the operative corner,
+A, is out of existence before the various bodies forming the
+"manoeuvring mass" behind it have had time to "swing," then the enemy
+will be right in their midst, and destroying, in overwhelming force,
+these remaining _separated_ bodies in detail.
+
+It was here that the German strategic theory contrasted so violently
+with the French. The Germans maintained that an ordeal which Napoleon
+might have been able to live through with his veterans and after
+fifteen years of successful war, a modern conscript army, most of its
+men just taken from civilian life and all of short service, would
+never endure. They believed the operative corner would go to pieces
+and either be pounded to disintegration, or outflanked, turned, and
+caught in the first days of the shock before the rest of the square
+had time to "work." The French believed the operative corner would
+stand the shock, and, though losing heavily, would remain in being.
+They believed that the operative corner of the square would, even
+under modern short service and large quasi-civilian reserve
+conditions, remain an army. They staked their whole campaign upon that
+thesis, and they turned out to be right. But they only just barely won
+through, and by the very narrowest margin. Proving right as they did,
+however, the success of their strategical theory changed the whole
+course of the war.
+
+With this contrast of the great opposing theories considered, I come
+to the conclusion of my Second Part, which examines the forces
+opposed. I will now turn to the Third Part of my book, which concerns
+the first actual operations from the Austrian note to the Battle of
+the Marne.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Thus, after these lines were written, I had occasion in _Land and
+Water_ to estimate the garrison of Przemysl before the figures were
+known. The element wherewith to guide one's common sense was the known
+perimeter to be defended; and arguing from this, I determined that a
+minimum of not less than 100,000 men would capitulate. I further
+conceived that the total losses could hardly be less than 40,000, and
+I arrived at an original force of between three and four corps.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 32.]
+
+
+
+
+PART III.
+
+THE FIRST OPERATIONS.
+
+
+In any general view of the great war which aims both at preserving
+proportion between its parts, and at presenting especially the main
+lines in relief, the three weeks between the German sudden forcing of
+war and the seventeen or eighteen days between the English declaration
+and the main operations upon the Sambre, will have but a subsidiary
+importance. They were occupied for at least half the period in the
+mobilization of the great armies. They were occupied for the second
+half of the period in the advance across the Rhine of German numbers
+greatly superior to the Allies, and also through the plain of Northern
+Belgium. The operation, as calculated by the German General Staff, was
+delayed by but a very few days--one might almost say hours--by the
+hastily improvised resistance of Liége, and the imperfect defence of
+their country which was all the Belgian forces, largely untrained,
+could offer.
+
+We must, therefore, pass briefly enough over that preliminary period,
+though the duty may be distasteful to the reader, on account of the
+very exaggerated importance which its operations took, especially in
+British eyes.
+
+For this false perspective there were several reasons, which it is
+worth while to enumerate, as they will aid our judgment in obtaining a
+true balance between these initial movements and the great conflicts
+to which they were no more than an introduction.
+
+1. War, as a whole, had grown unfamiliar to Western Europe. War on
+such a scale as this was quite untried. There was nothing in
+experience to determine our judgment, and after so long a peace,
+during which the habits of civil life had ceased to be conventioned
+and had come to seem part of the necessary scheme of things, the first
+irruption of arms dazzled or confounded the imagination of all.
+
+2. The first shock, falling as it did upon the ring fortress of
+Liége, at once brought into prominence one of the chief questions of
+modern military debate, the value of the modern ring fortress, and
+promised to put to the test the opposing theories upon this sort of
+stronghold.
+
+3. The violation of Belgian territory, though discounted in the
+cynical atmosphere of our time, when it came to the issue was, without
+question, a stupendous moral event. It was the first time that
+anything of this sort had happened in the history of Christian Europe.
+Historians unacquainted with the spirit of the past may challenge that
+remark, but it is true. One of the inviolable conventions, or rather
+sacred laws, of our civilization was broken, which is that European
+territory not involved in hostilities by any act of its Government is
+inviolable to opposing armies. The Prussian crime of Silesia, nearly
+two centuries before, the succeeding infamies of 1864, and the forgery
+of the Ems dispatch, the whole proclaimed tradition of contempt for
+the sanctities of Christendom, proceeding from Frederick the Great,
+had indeed accustomed men to successive stages in the decline of
+international morals; but nothing of the wholly crude character which
+this violation of Belgium bore was to be discovered in the past, even
+of Prussia, and posterity will mark it as a curious term and possibly
+a turning-point in the gradual loss of our common religion, and of the
+moral chaos accompanying that loss.
+
+4. The preparations of this country by land were not complete. Those
+of the French were belated compared with those of the Germans, and the
+prospect of even a short delay in the falling of the blow was
+exaggerated in value by all the intensity of that anxiety with which
+the blow was awaited.
+
+To proceed from these preliminaries to the story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The German Army had for its ultimate object, when it should be fully
+mobilized, the passage of the greater part of its forces over the
+Belgian Plain.
+
+This Belgian Plain has for now many centuries formed the natural
+avenue for an advance upon the Gauls.
+
+It has been represented too often as a sort of meeting-place, where
+must always come the shock between what is called Latin civilization
+and the Germanic tribes. But this view is both pedantic and
+historically false. There never was here a shock or conflict between
+two national ideals. What is true is, that civilization spread far
+more easily up from the Gauls through that fertile land towards the
+forests of Germany, and that when the Roman Empire broke down, or
+rather when its central government broke down, the frontier garrisons
+could here depend upon wealthier and more numerous populations for the
+support of their local government. That body of auxiliary soldiers in
+the Roman army which was drawn from the Frankish tribes ruled here
+when Rome could no longer rule. It was from Tournai that the father of
+Clovis exercised his power; and in the resettlement of the local
+governments in the sixth century, the Belgian Plain was the avenue
+through which the effort of the civilized West was directed towards
+the Rhine. It has Roman Cologne for its outpost; later it evangelized
+the fringes of German barbarism, and later still conquered them with
+the sword. All through the succeeding centuries the ambitions of kings
+in France, or of emperors upon the Rhine, were checked or satisfied in
+that natural avenue of advance. Charlemagne's frontier palace and
+military centre facing the Pagans was rather at Aix than at Trèves or
+Metz; and though the Irish missionaries, who brought letters and the
+arts and the customs of reasonable men to the Germans, worked rather
+from the south, the later forced conversion of the Saxons, which
+determined the entry of the German tribes as a whole into Christendom,
+was a stroke struck northwards from the Belgian Plain. Cæsar's
+adventurous crossing of the Rhine was a northern crossing. The
+Capetian monarchy was saved on its eastern front at Bouvines, in that
+same territory. The Austro-Spanish advance came down from it, to be
+checked at St. Quentin. Louis XIV.'s main struggle for power upon the
+marches of his kingdom concentrated here. The first great check to it
+was Marlborough's campaign upon the Meuse; the last battle was within
+sound of Mons, at Malplaquet. The final decision, as it was
+hoped--the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo--again showed what this
+territory meant in the military history of the West. It was following
+upon this decision that Europe, in the great settlement, decided to
+curb the chaos of future war by solemnly neutralizing the Belgian
+Plain for ever; and to that pact a seal was set not only by the French
+and the British, but also by the Prussian Government, with what
+results we know.
+
+The entries into this plain are very clearly defined by natural
+limits. It is barred a few hours' march beyond the German frontier by
+the broad and deep river Meuse, which here runs from the rough and
+difficult Ardennes country up to the Dutch frontier. The whole passage
+is no more than twelve miles across, and at the corner of it, where
+the Meuse bends, is the fortress of Liége. West of this fortress the
+upper reaches of the river run, roughly east and west upon Namur, and
+after Namur turn south again, passing through a very deep ravine that
+extends roughly from the French town of Mezières to Namur through the
+Ardennes country. The Belgian Plain is therefore like a bottle with a
+narrow neck, a bottle defined by the Dutch frontier and the Middle
+Meuse on either side, and a neck extending only from the Ardennes
+country to the Dutch frontier, with the fortress of Liége barring the
+way. Now the main blow was to be delivered ultimately upon the line
+Namur-Charleroi-Mons. That is, the situation was roughly that of the
+accompanying diagram: by the bottle neck at D the whole mass of troops
+must pass--or most of them--which are later to strike on the front AB.
+To reach that front was available to the invader the vast network of
+Belgian railways RRR crammed with rolling stock, and provided such
+opportunities for rapid advance as no other district in Europe could
+show. But all this system converged upon the main line which ran
+through the ring of forts round Liége, L, and so passed through
+Aix-la-Chapelle, A, and to Germany.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 33.]
+
+The German Government, therefore, could not be secure of its intention
+to pass great bodies through the Belgian Plain until Liége was
+grasped, and it was determined to grasp Liége long before the
+mobilization of the German forces was completed. For this purpose only
+a comparatively small force, rapidly gathered, was available. It was
+placed under the command of General von Emmerich, and its first bodies
+exchanged shots with the Belgian outposts early in the afternoon of
+Tuesday, August 4, 1914.
+
+The hour and date should always be remembered for the solemnity which
+attaches to the beginning of any great thing; and the full observer of
+European affairs, who understands what part religion or superstition
+plays in the story of Europe, will note this enormously significant
+detail. The first Germans to cross the violated frontier accomplished
+that act upon the same day and at the same hour as that in which
+their forerunners had crossed the French frontier forty-four years
+before.
+
+The afternoon wore on to night, with no more than a conflict between
+outposts. Just before midnight the cannonade was first heard. It also
+was the moment in which the ultimatum delivered to Germany by this
+country, by a coincidence, expired.[2]
+
+This night attack with guns was only delivered against one sector of
+the Liége forts, and only with field-pieces.
+
+As to the first of these points, it will be found repeated throughout
+the whole of the campaign wherever German forces attack a ring of
+permanent works. For the German theory in this matter (which
+experience has now amply supported) is that since modern permanent
+works _of known and restricted position_ go under to a modern siege
+train if the fire of the latter be fully concentrated and the largest
+pieces available, everything should be sacrificed to the putting into
+the narrowest area of all the projectiles available. The ring once
+broken on a sufficient single sector point is broken altogether.
+
+The second point, that only field-pieces as yet were used (which was
+due to the fact that the siege train was not yet come up), is an
+important indication of the weakness of the defence--on all of which
+the enemy were, of course, thoroughly informed.
+
+There were perhaps 20,000 men in and upon the whole periphery of
+Liége, a matter of over thirty miles, and what was most serious, no
+sufficient equipment or preparation of the forts, or, what was more
+serious still, no sufficient trained body of gunners.
+
+It is almost true to say that the resistance of Liége, such as it was,
+was effected by rifle fire.
+
+With the dawn of August 5th, and in the first four hours of daylight,
+a German infantry attack upon the same south-eastern forts which had
+been subjected to the first artillery fire in the night developed, and
+after some loss withdrew, but shortly after the first of the forts,
+that of Fléron, was silenced. The accompanying sketch map will show
+how wide a gap was left henceforward in the defences. Further, Fléron
+was the strongest of the works upon this side of the river. Seeing
+that, in any case, even if there had been a sufficient number of
+trained gunners in the forts, and a sufficient equipment and full
+preparation of the works for a siege (both of which were lacking),
+the absence of sufficient men to hold the gaps between would in any
+case have been fatal to the defence. With such a new gap as this open
+by the fall of Fléron, the defence was hopeless, even if it were only
+to be counted in hours.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 34.]
+
+It is high praise of the Belgian people and character to point out
+that, after the fall of Fléron, for forty-eight full hours such a gap
+was still contested by men, a great part of whom were little better
+than civilian in training, and who, had they been all tried regulars,
+would have been far too few for their task. General Leman, who
+commanded them, knew well in those early hours of Wednesday, the 5th,
+that the end had already come. He also knew the value of even a few
+hours' hopeless resistance, not perhaps to the material side of the
+Allied strategy, but to the support of those moral forces lacking
+which men are impotent in maintaining a challenge. Not only all that
+Wednesday, the 5th, but all the Thursday, the 6th, he maintained a
+line against the pressure of the invaders with his imperfect and
+insufficient troops.
+
+During those forty-eight hours, the big howitzer, which is the type
+of the heavy German siege train--the 225 mm.--was brought up, and it
+is possible that a couple of the still larger Austrian pieces of 280
+mm. (what we call in this country the 11-inch), which are constructed
+with flat treadles to their wheels to fire from mats laid on any
+reasonably hard surface (such as a roadway), had been brought up as
+well. At any rate, in the course of the Thursday, the fort next
+westward from Fléron, Chaudefontaine, was smashed. The gap was now
+quite untenable, and the first body of German cavalry entered the
+city. The incident has been reported as a _coup de main_, with the
+object of capturing the Belgian general. Its importance to the
+military story is simply that it proved the way to be open. In the
+afternoon and evening of the day, the Belgians were retiring into the
+heart of the city, and it is typical of the whole business that the
+great railway bridge upon which the main communications depended was
+left intact for the Germans to use.
+
+With the morning of Friday, the 7th August, the first bodies of German
+infantry entered the town. The forts on the north and two remaining
+western forts upon the south of the river were still untaken, and
+until a large breach should be made in the northern forts at least,
+the railway communication of the German advance into the Belgian plain
+was still impeded. Great masses of the enemy, and, in proportion to
+those masses, still greater masses of advance stores were brought in.
+
+In all that follows, until we reach the date of Monday, August 24th, I
+propose to consider no more than the fortunes of the troops who passed
+through Belgium to attack the French armies upon the Sambre and the
+Meuse, with the British contingent that had come to their aid. And my
+reasons for thus segregating and dealing later with contemporary
+events in the south will appear in the sequel.
+
+This reservation made--an important one in the scheme of this book--I
+return to what I have called the preliminaries, the advance through
+Belgium.
+
+We have already seen that the reduction of the northern forts of Liége
+was the prime necessity to that advance.
+
+We have also seen that meanwhile it was possible and advisable to
+accumulate stores for the advance as far forward as could be managed,
+and that it was also possible, with caution, to bring certain
+bodies--not the bulk of the army--forward through the Ardennes, to
+command the passages of the Meuse above Liége, between that fortress
+and Namur.
+
+This latter operation was effected by the 12th of August, when the
+town of Huy, with its bridge and its railway leading from the Belgian
+Ardennes right into the Belgian Plain, was seized.
+
+Meanwhile, upon the north of the river Meuse, cavalry and armed
+motor-cars were similarly preparing the way for the general advance
+when the northern forts of Liége should be dominated; and on this same
+Wednesday, August 12th, the most advanced bodies of the invader lay in
+a line roughly north and south from the neighbourhood of Diest along
+the Gethe and thence towards Huy.
+
+Of the outrages committed upon the civilian inhabitants in all these
+country-sides, the Government of which was neutral, and the territory
+of which was by the public law of Europe free not only from such
+novel crimes but from legitimate acts of war, I shall not speak, just
+as I shall not allude, save where they happen to have military
+importance, to the future increase of similar abominations which
+marked the progress of the campaign. For my only object in these pages
+is to lay before the reader a commentary which will explain the
+general strategy of the war.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 35.]
+
+While this advance line of cavalry was engaging in unimportant minor
+actions, or rather skirmishes (grossly exaggerated in the news of
+those days), the attack on the northern forts of Liége, upon which
+everything now depended, was opened. It was upon Thursday, August
+13th, that the 280 mm. howitzers opened upon Loncin. Other of the
+remaining forts were bombarded; but, as in the case of Fléron a week
+before, we need not consider the subsidiary operations, because
+everything depended upon the fort of Loncin, which, as the
+accompanying diagram shows, commanded the railway line westward from
+Liége. General Leman himself was within that work, the batteries
+against which were now operating from _within_ the ring--that is, from
+the city itself, or in what soldiers technically call "reverse"--that
+is, from the side upon which no fort is expected to stand, the side
+which is expected to defend and not to be attacked from. Whether
+Loncin held out the full forty-eight hours, or only forty, or only
+thirty-six, we do not know; but that moral factor to which I have
+already alluded, and which must be fully weighed in war, was again
+strengthened by the nature of such a resistance. For nearly all that
+garrison was dead and its commander found unconscious when the
+complete destruction of the work by the high explosive shells
+permitted the enemy to enter.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 36.]
+
+It was upon Saturday, the 15th of August, that the great bulk of the
+two main German armies set aside for passage through the Belgian Plain
+began to use the now liberated railway, and the week between that date
+and the first great shock upon the Sambre is merely a record of the
+almost uninterrupted advance, concentration, and supply of something
+not far short of half a million men coming forward in a huge tide
+over, above, and round on to, the line Namur-Charleroi-Mons, which was
+their ultimate objective, and upon which the Anglo-French
+body--perhaps half as numerous--had determined to stand.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 37.]
+
+The story of that very rapid advance is merely one of succeeding
+dates. By the 17th the front was at Tirlemont, by the 19th it was
+across the Dyle and running thence south to Wavre (the first army),
+the second army continuing south of this with a little east in it to a
+point in front of Namur. On the 20th there was enacted a scene of no
+military importance (save that it cost the invaders about a day), but
+of some moral value, because it strongly impressed the opinion in this
+country and powerfully affected the imagination of Europe as a whole:
+I mean the triumphal march through Brussels.
+
+Far more important than this display was the opening on the evening of
+the same day, Thursday, August 20th, of the first fire against the
+eastern defences of Namur. This fire was directed upon that evening
+against the two and a half miles of trench between the forts of
+Cognelée and Marchovelette, and in the morning of Friday, the 21st,
+the trenches were given up, and the German infantry was within the
+ring of forts north of the city. The point of Namur, as we shall see
+in a moment, was twofold. First, its fortifications, so long as they
+held out, commanded the crossings both of the Sambre and of the Meuse
+within the angle of which the French defensive lay; secondly, its
+fortified zone formed the support whereupon the whole French right
+reposed. It was this unexpected collapse of the Belgian defence of
+Namur which, coupled with the unexpected magnitude of the forces
+Germany had been able to bring through the Belgian plain, determined
+what was to follow.
+
+Once Namur was entered, the reduction of the forts was not of
+immediate importance, though it was immediately and successfully
+achieved. For the German business was not here, as at Liége, to grasp
+a railway within the zone of the fortifications, but to destroy the
+buttress upon which the French depended for their defensive position,
+and to prevent the French from holding the crossings over the two
+rivers Sambre and Meuse at their junction.
+
+With this entry of the Germans into Namur, their passage of the lines
+upon Friday, August 21st, their capture of the bridgeheads on
+Saturday, August 22nd, we reach the beginning of those great
+operations which threatened for a moment to decide the war in the
+West, and to establish the German Empire in that position to attain
+which it had planned and forced the war upon its appointed day.
+
+It behoves us before entering into the detail of this large affair to
+see the plan of it clearly before our eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have already described that general conception underlying the whole
+modern French school of strategy for which the best title (though one
+liable to abuse by too mechanical an interpretation) is "the open
+strategic square."
+
+I have further warned the reader that, in spite of the way in which
+the intricacy of organization inseparable from great masses and the
+manifold disposition of a modern army will mask the general nature of
+such an operation, that operation cannot be understood unless its
+simplest lines are clear. I have further insisted that in practice
+those lines remain only in the idea of the scheme of the whole, and
+are not to be discovered save in the loosest way from the actual
+positions of men upon the map.
+
+We have seen that this "open strategic square" involved essentially
+two conceptions--the fixed "operative corner" and the swinging
+"manoeuvring masses."
+
+The manoeuvring masses, at this moment when the great German blow fell
+upon the Sambre and the Meuse, and when Namur went down immediately
+before it, were (_a_) upon the frontiers of Alsace and Lorraine, (_b_)
+in the centre of the country, (_c_) near the capital and to the west
+of it, and even, some of them, upon the sea.
+
+The operative corner was this group of armies before Namur on the
+Sambre and Meuse, the 4th French Army under Langle, the 5th French
+Army under Lanrezac, the British contingent under French.
+
+We know from what has been written above in this book that it is the
+whole business of an operative corner to "take on" superior numbers,
+and to hold them as well as possible, even though compelled to
+retreat, until the manoeuvring masses can swing and come up in aid,
+and so pin the enemy.
+
+We further know from what has gone before that the whole crux of this
+manoeuvre lies in the power of the operative corner to stand the
+shock.
+
+It was the business of the French in this operative corner before
+Namur and of their British Allies there to await and, if possible, to
+withstand by a careful choice of position the first shock of enemies
+who would certainly be numerically superior. It was the whole business
+of the German commanders to make the shock overwhelming, in order that
+the operative corner should be pounded to pieces, or should be
+surrounded and annihilated before the manoeuvring masses could swing
+up in aid. Should this destruction of the operative corner take place
+before the manoeuvring masses behind it could swing, the campaign in
+the West was lost to the Allies, and the Germans pouring in between
+the still separated corners of the square were the masters for good.
+
+It behoves us, therefore, if we desire to understand the campaign, to
+grasp how this operative corner stood, upon what defences it relied,
+in what force it was, what numbers it thought were coming against it,
+and what numbers were, as a fact, coming against it.
+
+To get all this clear, it is best to begin with a diagram.
+
+Suppose two lines perpendicular one to the other, and therefore
+forming a right angle, AB and BC. Suppose at their junction, B, a
+considerable zone or segment, SSS, of a circle, as shaded in the
+following diagram. Supposing the line AB to be protected along the
+outer half of it, AK, by no natural obstacle--the state of affairs
+which I have represented by a dotted line αγ; but suppose the second
+half of it, KB, should be protected by a natural obstacle, though not
+a very formidable one--such as I have represented by the continuous
+line γβ. Supposing the perpendicular line BC to be protected by a
+really formidable natural obstacle βδ, and supposing the shaded
+segment of the circle at B to represent a fortified zone (1)
+accessible to any one within the angle KBC, as from the arrow M; (2)
+inaccessible (until it was captured or forced) to any one coming from
+outside the angle, as from the arrows NNN; (3) containing within
+itself, protected by its ring of fortifications, passages, PP, for
+traversing the two natural obstacles, γβ and βδ, which meet at the
+point β.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 38.]
+
+There you have the elements of the position in which the advance
+corner of the great French square was situated just before it took the
+shock of the main German armies. The two lines AB and BC are the
+French and British armies lying behind the Sambre, γβ, and the Middle
+Meuse, βδ, respectively; but the line of the Sambre ceases to protect
+eastward along the dotted line αγ beyond the point up to which the
+river forms a natural obstacle, while from K to B the line is
+protected by the river Sambre itself. The more formidable obstacle,
+βδ, represents the great trench or ravine of the Meuse which stretches
+south from Namur. The town of Namur itself is at B, the junction of
+the two rivers; and the fortified zone, SSS, is the ring of forts
+lying far out all round Namur; while the passages, PP, over the
+obstacles contained within that fortified zone, and accessible to the
+people _inside_ the angle from M, but not to the people _outside_ the
+angle from NNN, are the bridges across both the Sambre and the Meuse
+at Namur.
+
+All this is, of course, put merely diagrammatically, and a diagram is
+something very distant from reality. The "open strategic square" in
+practice comes to mean little more than two main elements--one the
+operative corner, the other a number of separate units disposed in all
+sorts of different places behind, and generally denominated "the
+manoeuvring mass." If you had looked down from above at all the French
+armies towards the end of August, when the first great shock came, you
+would have seen nothing remotely resembling a square.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 39.]
+
+You would have seen something like Sketch 31 where the bodies enclosed
+under the title A were the operative corner; various garrisons and
+armies in the field, enclosed under the title B, were the manoeuvring
+mass. But it is only by putting the matter quite clearly in the
+abstract diagrammatic form that its principle can be grasped.
+
+With this digression I will return and conclude with the main points
+of debate in the use of the open strategic square.
+
+We have seen that the operative corner is in this scheme deliberately
+imperilled at the outset.
+
+The following is a sketch map of the actual position, and it will be
+seen that the topographical features of this countryside are fairly
+represented by Sketch 39; while this other sketch shows how these
+troops that were about to take the shock stood to the general mass of
+the armies.
+
+But to return to the diagram (which I repeat and amplify as Sketch
+41), let us see how the Allied force in the operative corner before
+Namur stood with relation to this angle of natural obstacles, the
+two rivers Sambre and Meuse, and the fortified zone round the point
+where they met.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 40.]
+
+The situation of that force was as follows:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 41.]
+
+Along and behind βγ stretched the 5th Army of the French, prolonged on
+its left by the British contingent. I have marked the first in the
+diagram with the figure 5, the second with the letters Br, and the
+latter portion I have also shaded. At right angles to the French 5th
+Army stretched the French 4th Army, which I have marked with the
+figure 4. It depended upon the obstacle of the Meuse βδ for its
+defence, just as the French 5th Army depended upon the Sambre, γβ. It
+must, of course, be understood that when one says these forces "lay
+along" the aforesaid lines, one does not mean that they merely lay
+behind them. One means that they held the bridges and prepared to
+dispute the crossing of them.
+
+Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves: "There
+will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ, and this
+enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He will perhaps
+be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are. But he will suffer
+under these disadvantages:--
+
+"The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act in
+co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because Y and
+Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by the
+fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect in a
+long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z, could
+only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle--that is, by
+stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the ring of
+forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the arrow X) will
+further be used up in trying to break down the resistance of SSS.
+That will take a good deal of time. If our horizontal line AB holds
+its own, naturally defended as it is, against the attack from V and W,
+while our perpendicular line BC holds its own still more firmly
+(relying on its much better natural obstacle) against YZ, we shall
+have ample time to break the first and worst shock of the enemy's
+attack, and to allow, once we have concentrated that attack upon
+ourselves, the rest of our forces, the masses of manoeuvre, or at any
+rate a sufficient portion of them, to come up and give us a majority
+in _this_ part of the field. We shall still be badly outnumbered on
+the line as a whole; but the resistance of our operative corner,
+relying on the Sambre and Meuse and the fortress of Namur, will gather
+much of the enemy unto itself. It will thus make of this part of the
+field the critical district of the whole campaign. Our masses,
+arriving while we resist, will give us a local superiority here which
+will hold up the whole German line. We may even by great good luck so
+break the shock of the attack as ourselves to begin taking the
+counter-offensive after a little while, and to roll back either Y and
+Z or V and W by the advance of our forces across the rivers when the
+enemy has exhausted himself."
+
+It will be clear that this calculation (whether of the expected and
+probable least favourable issue--a lengthy defence followed by an
+orderly and slow retreat designed to allow the rest of the armies to
+come up--or of the improbable and more favourable issue--the taking of
+the counter-offensive) depended upon two presumptions which the
+commander of the Allies had taken for granted: (1) that the German
+shock would not come in more than a certain admitted maximum, say
+thirty per cent. superiority at the most over the Allied forces at
+this particular point; (2) that the ring of forts round Namur would be
+able to hold out for at least three or four days, and thus absorb the
+efforts of part of the enemy as well as awkwardly divide his forces,
+while that enemy's attack was being delivered.
+
+Both these presumptions were erroneous. The enemy, as we shall see in
+a moment, came on in much larger numbers than had been allowed for.
+Namur, as we have already seen, fell, not in three or four days, but
+instantly--the moment it was attacked. And the result was that,
+instead of an orderly and slow retirement, sufficiently tardy to
+permit of the swinging up of the rest of the French "square"--that is,
+of the arrival of the other armies or manoeuvring masses--there came
+as a fact the necessity for very rapid retirement of the operative
+corner over more than one hundred miles and the immediate peril for
+days of total disaster to it.
+
+To appreciate how superior the enemy proved to be in number, and how
+heavy the miscalculation here was, we must first see what the numbers
+of this Allied operative corner were.
+
+I have in Sketch 42 indicated the approximate positions and relative
+sizes of the three parts of the Allied forces.
+
+Beginning from the left, we have barely two army corps actually
+present of the British contingent in the fighting line: for certain
+contingents of the outermost army corps had not yet arrived. We may
+perhaps call the numbers actually present at French's command when
+contact was taken 70,000 men, but that is probably beyond the mark.
+To the east lay the 5th French Army, three army corps amounting, say,
+to 120,000 men, and immediately south of this along the Meuse lay the
+4th French Army, another three army corps amounting to at the most
+another 120,000 men.
+
+We may then call the whole of the operative corner (if we exclude
+certain cavalry reserves far back, which never came into play) just
+over 300,000 men. That there were as many as 310,000 is improbable.
+
+The French calculation was that against these 300,000 men there would
+arrive at the very most 400,000.
+
+That, of course, meant a heavy superiority in number for the enemy;
+but, as we have seen, the scheme allowed for such an inconvenience at
+the first contact.
+
+That more than 400,000 could strike in the region of Namur no one
+believed, for no one believed that the enemy could provision and
+organize transport for more than that number.
+
+A very eminent English critic had allowed for seven army corps of
+first-line men as all that could be brought across the Belgian Plain.
+The French went so far as to allow for ten, a figure represented by
+the 400,000 men of the enemy they expected.
+
+We had then the Allied forces expecting an attack in about the
+superiority indicated upon this diagram, where the British contingent
+and the two French armies are marked in full, and the supposed enemy
+in dotted lines.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 42.]
+
+Roughly speaking, the Allies were allowing for a thirty per cent.
+superiority.
+
+Now, lying as they did behind the rivers, and with the ring of forts
+around Namur to shield their point of junction and to split the
+enemy's attack, this superiority, though heavy, was not crushing. The
+hopes of the defensive that it would stand firm, or at least retire
+slowly so as to give time for the manoeuvring masses to come up was,
+under this presumption, just. It was even thought possible that, if
+the enemy attacked too blindly and spent himself too much, the
+counter-offensive might be taken after the first two or three days.
+
+As for the remainder of the German forces, it was believed that they
+were stretched out very much in even proportion, without any thin
+places, from the Meuse to Alsace.
+
+Now, as a matter of fact, the German forces were in no such
+disposition. 1. The Germans had added to every army corps a reserve
+division. 2. They had brought through the Belgian plains a very much
+larger number than seven army corps: they had brought nine. 3. They
+had further brought against Namur yet another four army corps through
+the Ardennes, the woods of which helped to hide their progress from
+air reconnaissance. To all this mass of thirteen army corps, each
+army corps half as large again as the active or first line allowed
+for, add some imperfectly trained but certainly large bodies of
+independent cavalry. We cannot accurately say what the total numbers
+of this vast body were, but we can be perfectly certain that more than
+700,000 men were massed in this region of Namur. The enemy was coming
+on, not four against three, but certainly seven against three, and
+perhaps eight or even nine against three.
+
+The real situation was that given in the accompanying diagram (Sketch
+43).
+
+Five corps, each with its extra division, were massed under von Kluck,
+and called the 1st German Army. Four more, including the Guards, were
+present with von Buelow, and stretched up to and against the first
+defences of Namur. Now, around the corner of that fortress, two Saxon
+corps, a Wurtemberg corps, a Magdeburg corps, and a corps of reserve
+under the Duke of Wurtemberg formed the 3rd Army, the right wing of
+which opposed the forts of Namur, the rest of which stretched along
+the line of the Meuse.
+
+Even if the forts of Namur had held out, the position of so hopelessly
+inferior a body as was the Franco-British force, in face of such
+overwhelming numbers, would have been perilous in the extreme. With
+the forts of Namur abandoned almost at the first blow, the peril was
+more than a peril. It had become almost certain disaster.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 43.]
+
+With the fall of Namur, the angle between the rivers--that is, the
+crossings of the rivers at their most difficult part where they were
+broadest--was in the hands of the enemy, and the whole French body,
+the 4th and 5th Armies, was at some time on that Saturday falling
+back.
+
+The exact hour and the details of that movement we do not yet know. We
+do not know what loss the French sustained, we do not know whether any
+considerable bodies were cut off. We do not know even at what hour the
+French General Staff decided that the position was no longer tenable,
+and ordered the general retreat.
+
+All we know is that, so far from being able to hold out two or three
+days against a numerical superiority of a third and under the buttress
+of Namur, the operative corner, with Namur fallen and, not 30 per
+cent., but something more like 130 per cent. superiority against it,
+began not the slow retreat that had been envisaged, but a retirement
+of the most rapid sort.
+
+Such a retirement was essential if the cohesion of the Allied forces
+was to be maintained at all, and if the combined 4th and 5th French
+Armies and British contingent were to escape being surrounded or
+pierced.
+
+By the Saturday night at latest the French retirement was ordered; by
+Sunday morning it was in full progress, and it was proceeding
+throughout the triangle of the Thierarche all that day.
+
+But the rate of that retirement, corresponding to the pressure upon
+the French front, differed very much with varying sections of the
+line. It was heaviest, of course, in those advanced bodies which had
+lain just under Namur. It was least at the two ends of the bow, for
+the general movement was on to the line Maubeuge-Mezières. The farther
+one went east towards Maubeuge, the slower was the necessary movement,
+and to this cause of delay must be added the fact that von Kluck,
+coming round by the extreme German line, had farthest to go, and
+arrived latest against the line of the Allies.
+
+Therefore the British contingent at the western extreme of the Allied
+line felt the shock latest of all, and all that Sunday morning the
+British were still occupied in taking up their positions. They had
+arrived but just in time for what was to follow.
+
+It was not till the early afternoon of the Sunday that contact was
+first taken seriously between Sir John French and von Kluck. At that
+moment the British commander believed, both from a general and
+erroneous judgment which the French command had tendered him and from
+his own air work, that he had in front of him one and a half or at the
+most two army corps; and though the force, as we shall see in a
+moment, was far larger, its magnitude did not appear as the afternoon
+wore on. Full contact was established perhaps between three and four,
+by which hour the pressure was beginning to be severely felt, and upon
+the extreme right of the line it had already been necessary to take up
+defensive positions a little behind those established in the morning.
+But by five o'clock, with more than two good hours of daylight before
+it, the British command, though perhaps already doubtful whether the
+advancing masses of the enemy did not stand for more men, and
+especially for more guns than had been expected, was well holding its
+own, when all its dispositions were abruptly changed by an unexpected
+piece of news.
+
+It was at this moment in the afternoon--that is, about five
+o'clock--that the French General Staff communicated to Sir John French
+information bearing two widely different characteristics: the first
+that it came late; the second that had it not come when it did, the
+whole army, French as well as British, would have been turned.
+
+The first piece of information, far too belated, was the news that
+Namur had fallen, and that the enemy had been in possession of the
+bridge-heads over the Sambre and the Meuse since the preceding day,
+Saturday. Consequent upon this, the enemy had been able to effect the
+passage of the Sambre, not only in Namur itself, but in its immediate
+neighbourhood, and, such passages once secured, it was but a question
+of time for the whole line to fall into the enemy's hands. When
+superior numbers have passed one end of an obstacle it is obvious that
+the rest of the obstacle gradually becomes useless.[3] At what hour
+the French knew that they had to retire, we have not been told. As we
+have seen, the enemy was right within Namur on the early afternoon of
+Saturday, the 22nd, and it is to be presumed that the French
+retirement was in full swing by the Sunday morning, in which case the
+British contingent, which this retirement left in peril upon the
+western extreme of the line, ought to have been warned many hours
+before five o'clock in the afternoon.
+
+To what the delay was due we are again as yet in ignorance, but
+probably to the confusion into which the unexpected fall of Namur and
+the equally unexpected strength of the enemy beyond the Sambre and the
+Meuse had thrown the French General Staff.
+
+At any rate, the news did come thus late, and its lateness was of
+serious consequence to the British contingent, and might have been
+disastrous to it.
+
+The second piece of news, on the other hand, was the saving of it; and
+that second piece of news was the information that Sir John French had
+in front of him not one German army corps, and possibly part or even
+the whole of a second, but at least three. As the matter turned out,
+the British contingent was really dealing first and last with four
+army corps, and the essential part of the news conveyed was that the
+extreme western portion of this large German force _was attempting to
+turn the flank of the whole army_.
+
+It was not only attempting to do so, it was in number sufficient to do
+so; and unless prompt measures were taken, what was now discovered to
+be the general German plan would succeed, and the campaign in the
+West would be in two days decided adversely to the Allies--the same
+space of time in which the campaign of 1815 was decided adversely to
+Napoleon in just these same country-sides.
+
+It is here necessary to describe what this German plan was.
+
+The reader has already seen, when the general principles of the open
+strategic square were described on a previous page, that everything
+depends upon the fate of the operative corner. This operative corner
+in the present campaign had turned out to be the two French armies,
+the 4th and the 5th, upon the Lower Sambre and the Meuse, and the
+British contingent lying to the left of the 5th on the Upper Sambre
+and by Mons.
+
+If the operative corner of a strategic open square is annihilated as a
+military force, or so seriously defeated that it can offer no
+effective opposition for some days, then the whole plan of a strategic
+square breaks to pieces, and the last position of the inferior forces
+which have adopted it is worse than if they had not relied upon the
+manoeuvre at all, but had simply spread out in line to await defeat
+in bulk at the hands of their superior enemy.
+
+Now there are two ways in which a military force can be disposed of by
+its opponent. There are two ways in which it can be--to use the rather
+exaggerated language of military history--"annihilated."
+
+The first is this: You can break up its cohesion by a smashing blow
+delivered somewhere along its line, and preferably near its centre.
+But if you do that, the results will never be quite complete, and may
+be incomplete in any degree according to the violence and success of
+your blow.
+
+The second way is to get round the enemy with your superior numbers,
+to get past his flank, to the back of him, and so envelop him. If that
+manoeuvre is carried out successfully, you bag his forces entire. It
+is to this second manoeuvre that modern Prussian strategy and tactics
+are particularly attached. It is obvious that its fruits are far more
+complete than those of the first manoeuvre, when, or if, it is wholly
+successful. For to get round your enemy and bag him whole is a larger
+result than merely to break him up and leave _some_ of him able to
+re-form and perhaps fight again. Two things needful to such success
+are (_a_) superior numbers, save in case of gross error upon the part
+of the opponents; (_b_) great rapidity of action on the part of the
+outflanking body, coupled, if possible, with surprise. That rapidity
+of action is necessary is obvious; for the party on the flank has got
+to go much farther than the rest of the army. It has to go all the
+length of the arrow (1), and an element of surprise is usually
+necessary. For if the army AA which BB was trying to outflank learned
+of the manoeuvre in time he only has to retreat upon his left by the
+shorter arrow (2) to escape from the threatened clutch.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 45.]
+
+Now, von Kluck with his five army corps, four of which were in
+operation against Sir John French, was well able to count on all
+these elements. He had highly superior numbers, his superiority had
+not been discovered until it was almost too late, and for rapidity of
+action he had excellent railways and a vast equipment of petrol
+vehicles.
+
+What he proposed to do was, while engaging the British contingent of
+less than two army corps with three full army corps of his own, to
+swing his extreme western army corps right round, west through
+Tournai, and so turn the British line. If he succeeded in doing that,
+he had at the same time succeeded in turning the whole of the
+Franco-British forces on the Sambre and Meuse. In other words, he was
+in a fair way to accomplishing the destruction of the operative corner
+of the great square, and consequently, as a last result, the
+destruction of the whole Allied force in the West.
+
+The thing may be represented on a sketch map in this form.
+
+Of von Kluck's five corps, 1 is operating against the junction of the
+English and French lines beyond Binche, 2, 3, and 4 are massing
+against the rather more than one and a half of Sir John French at AA,
+and 5, after the capture of Tournai, is going to take a big sweep
+round in the direction of the arrow towards Cambrai, and so to turn
+the whole line. Meanwhile, the cavalry, still farther west, acting
+independently, is to sweep the country right out to Arras and beyond.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 46.]
+
+The particular titles of corps are of no great value in following the
+leading main lines of a military movement; but it may be worth
+remembering that this "number 5," to which von Kluck had allotted the
+turning movement, was the _Second_ German Corps. With its cavalry it
+numbered alone (and apart from all the other forces of von Kluck which
+were engaging the British line directly) quite three-quarters as many
+men as all that British line for the moment mustered.
+
+It was not possible, from local circumstances which the full history
+of the war, when it is written, will explain, for the British
+contingent to fall back in the remaining hours of daylight upon that
+Sunday.
+
+Belated by at the most twelve hours, as the news of the French
+retirement had been, the British retirement followed it fully twenty
+hours after. It was not until daylight of Monday, the 24th, that all
+the organizations for this retirement were completed, the plans drawn
+up, and the first retrograde movements made.
+
+To permit a retirement before such a great superiority of the enemy to
+be made without disaster, it was necessary to counter-attack not only
+at this inception of the movement, but throughout all the terrible
+strain of the ensuing eight days.
+
+Here it may be necessary to explain why, in any retirement, continual
+counter-attacks on the pursuing enemy are necessary.
+
+It is obvious that, under equal conditions, the pursuing enemy can
+advance as fast as can your own troops which are retreating before
+him. If, therefore, a retreat, once contact has been established,
+consisted in merely walking away from the enemy, that enemy would be
+able to maintain a ceaseless activity against one portion of your
+united force--its rear--which activity would be exercised against
+bodies on the march, and incapable of defence. To take but one example
+out of a hundred: his guns would be always unlimbering, shooting at
+you, then limbering up again to continue the pursuit; unlimbering
+again, shooting again--and so forth; while your guns would never
+reply, being occupied in an unbroken retirement, and therefore
+continually limbered up and useless behind their teams.
+
+A retiring force, therefore, of whatever size--from a company to an
+army--can only safely effect its retirement by detaching one fraction
+from its total which shall hold up the pursuit for a time while the
+main body gets away.
+
+When this detached fraction is wearied or imperilled, another fraction
+relieves it, taking up the same task in its turn; the first fraction,
+which had hitherto been checking the pursuit, falls back rapidly on to
+the main body, under cover of the new rearguard's fire as it turns to
+face the enemy. And the process is kept up, first one, then another
+portion of the whole force being devoted to it, until the retirement
+of the whole body has been successfully effected, and it is well ahead
+of its pursuers and secure.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 47.]
+
+For example: two White army corps, I., II., as in the annexed diagram,
+each of two divisions, 1, 2, and 3, 4, have to retire before a greatly
+superior Black force, _abcde_. They succeed in retiring by the action
+expressed in the following diagram. White corps No. I. first
+undertakes to hold up the enemy while No. II. makes off. No. I.
+detaches one division for the work (Division 2), and for a short time
+it checks the movement of _a_, _b_, and _c_, at least, of the enemy.
+Now _d_ and _e_ press on. But they cannot press on at any pace they
+choose, for an army must keep together, and the check to _a_, _b_, and
+_c_ somewhat retards _d_ and _e_. They advance, say, to the positions
+δε.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 48.]
+
+Next, White corps No. II. stops, puts out one of its divisions (say 4)
+to check _d_ and _e_, while its other division either helps or falls
+back, according to the severity of the pressure, and White corps No.
+I. makes off as fast as it can. _a_, _b_, _c_, no longer checked by a
+White rearguard, are nevertheless retarded from two causes--first,
+the delay already inflicted on them; secondly, that they must not, if
+the army is to keep together, get too far ahead of their colleagues,
+_d_ and _e_, which White corps II. is holding up.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 49.]
+
+Thus, on the second or third day the retreat of White is being secured
+by an increasing gap between pursued and pursuers. The process is
+continued. Every succeeding day--if that process is successful--should
+further widen the gap until White can feel free from immediate
+pressure.
+
+Such is the principle--modified indefinitely in practice by variations
+of ground and numbers--under which a retirement must be conducted if
+it is to have any hope of ultimate success in saving the pursued.
+
+But it is clear that the process must always be a perilous one. Unless
+the most careful co-ordination is maintained between the moving parts
+of the retreat; unless the rearguard in each action falls back only
+_just upon_ and not a _little while after_ the precise moment when it
+can last safely do so; unless the new rearguard comes into play in
+time, etc., etc.--the pursuers may get right in among the pursued and
+break their cohesion; or they may get round them, cut them off, and
+compel them to surrender. In either case the retreating force ceases
+to exist as an army.
+
+In proportion as the pursuers are numerous (mobility being equal)
+compared with the pursued, in that proportion is the peril. And with
+the best luck in the world some units are sure to be cut off, many
+guns lost, all stragglers and nearly all wounded abandoned in the
+course of a pressed retreat, and, above all, there will be the
+increasing discouragement and bewilderment of the men as the strain,
+the losses, and the ceaseless giving way before the enemy continue day
+after day with cumulative effect.
+
+The accomplishment of such a task, the maintenance of the "operative
+corner" in being during its ordeal of retreat before vastly superior
+numbers, and in particular the exceedingly perilous retirement of the
+British contingent at what was, during the first part of the strain,
+the extreme of the line, are what we are now about to follow.
+
+The initial counter-attack, then, on this Monday, the first day of the
+retreat, was undertaken by the 2nd British Division from the region of
+Harmignies, which advanced as though with the object of retaking
+Binche. The demonstration was supported by all the artillery of the
+1st Army Corps, while the 1st Division, lying near Peissant, supported
+this action of the 2nd. While that demonstration was in full activity,
+the 2nd Corps to the west or left (not all of it was yet in the field)
+retired on to the line Dour-Frameries, passing through Quaregnon. It
+suffered some loss in this operation from the masses of the enemy,
+which were pressing forward from Mons. When the 2nd Corps had thus
+halted on the line Dour-Frameries, the 1st Corps, which had been
+making the demonstration, took the opportunity to retire in its turn,
+and fell back before the evening to a line stretching from Bavai to
+Maubeuge.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 50.]
+
+The 2nd Corps had entrenched itself, while the 1st Corps was thus
+falling back upon its right; and when it came to the turn of the 2nd
+Corps to play the part of rearguard in these alternate movements, the
+effort proved to be one of grave peril.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 51.]
+
+Since the whole movement of the enemy was an outflanking movement,
+the pressure upon this left and extreme end of the line was
+particularly severe. The German advance in such highly superior
+numbers overlapped the two British corps to _their_ left or west,
+which was at this moment the extreme end of the Allied Franco-British
+line. They overlapped them as these pursuing Black units overlap the
+lesser retiring White units. It is evident that in such a case the
+last unit in the line at A will be suffering the chief burden of the
+attack. An attempt was made to relieve that burden by sending the and
+Cavalry Brigade in this direction to ride round the enemy's outlying
+body; but the move failed, with considerable loss to the 9th Lancers
+and the 18th Hussars, which came upon wire entanglements five hundred
+yards from the enemy's position. There did arrive in aid of the
+imperilled end of the line reinforcement in the shape of a new body.
+One infantry brigade, the 19th, which had hitherto been upon the line
+of communications, reached the army on this its central left near
+Quarouble and a little behind that village before the morning was
+spent. It was in line before evening. This reinforcement lent some
+strength to the sorely tried 2nd Corps, but it had against it still
+double its own strength in front, and half as much again upon its
+exposed left or western flank, and it suffered heavily.
+
+By the night of that Monday, the 24th of August, however, the whole of
+the British Army was again in line, and stretched from Maubeuge, which
+protected its right, through Bavai, on to the fields between the
+villages of Jenlain and Bry, where the fresh 19th Infantry Brigade had
+newly arrived before the evening, while beyond this extreme left again
+was the cavalry.
+
+The whole operation, then, of that perilous Monday, the first day of
+the retreat, may be planned in general as in Sketch 52. At the
+beginning, at daybreak, you have the three German army corps lying as
+the shaded bodies are given opposite to the unshaded, which represent
+the British contingent of not quite two full army corps. By nightfall
+the British contingent, including now the 19th Brigade of infantry,
+lay in the positions from Maubeuge westward, with the 1st Corps next
+to Maubeuge, the 2nd Corps beyond Bavai, the 1st being commanded by
+Sir Douglas Haig, the 2nd by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien; while the
+Germans lay more or less as the dotted shaded markings are.
+
+The fortress of Maubeuge was, under these circumstances, clearly a
+lure. An army in the field in danger of envelopment will always be
+tempted to make for the nearest fortified zone in order to save
+itself. The British commander was well advised in his judgment to
+avoid this opportunity, and that for two reasons. First, that the
+locking up of any considerable portion of the Anglo-French force in
+its retirement would have jeopardized the chance of that
+counter-offensive which the French hoped sooner or later to initiate;
+secondly, that, as will be seen later, the works of Maubeuge were
+quite insufficient to resist for more than a few days a modern siege
+train.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 52.]
+
+This point of Maubeuge and of its fall must be discussed later; for
+the moment all we need note is that the fortress afforded for a few
+hours--that is, during the night of Monday to Tuesday, the 24th-25th
+August--support to the British line during its first halt upon the
+rapid and perilous retirement from Mons.
+
+Meanwhile the whole of the French 5th Army had been falling back with
+equal rapidity, and upon its right the 4th Army had followed soon; and
+as this French retirement had preceded the retirement of the British,
+its general line lay farther south.
+
+On the other hand, from the nature of the topography in this section
+of the Franco-Belgian border, the units of the French command had to
+fall back farther and more rapidly in proportion as they stretched
+eastward. The attack of the enemy in forces of rather more than two to
+one had come, as we have seen, not only from across the line of the
+Sambre, but, once Namur had fallen, from across the line of the Meuse
+at right angles to the line of the Sambre. Therefore the 5th and the
+4th Armies, contained within the triangle bounded by the Sambre and
+Meuse, retiring from blows struck from the direction of the arrows 1-5
+over all that hilly and wooded country known as the Thiérache, were,
+as to the extreme salient of them at A, compelled to a very rapid
+retirement indeed; and on this Sunday night the French line was
+deflected southward, not without heavy losses, until either on that
+night or on the Monday morning it joined up with the forces which
+stretched northward through and from Mézières. An attempt to
+counter-attack through the precipitous ravines and deep woods on to
+the valley of the Semois had failed, and the line as a whole ran, upon
+this night between the Sunday and the Monday, much as is indicated
+upon the accompanying sketch.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 53.]
+
+From this it will be seen that the British contingent away upon the
+extreme left was in very grave peril, not only because the turning
+movement was wholly directed round their exposed flank, but also
+because, their retirement having come late, they stood too far forward
+in the general scheme at this moment, and therefore more exposed to
+the enemy's blow than the rest of the line. With this it must be
+remembered Tournai had already fallen. It was very imperfectly held by
+a French Territorial brigade, accompanied by one battery of English
+guns; and the entering German force, in a superiority of anything you
+like--two, three, or four to one--easily swept away the resistance
+proffered in this quarter.
+
+These German forces from Tournai had not yet, by the nightfall of
+Monday, come up eastward against the British, but they were on the
+way, and they might appear at any moment. The corps next to them, the
+4th of von Kluck's five, was already operating upon that flank, and
+the next day, Wednesday, 26th of August, was to be the chief day of
+trial for this exposed British wing of the army.
+
+So far the operations of the British Army had not differed greatly
+from the expected or at least one of the expected developments of the
+campaign.
+
+The operative corner, if it should not have the luck, through losses
+or blunders on the part of the enemy, to take the counter-offensive
+after receiving the third shock, is intended to retire, and to draw
+upon itself a maximum of the enemy's efforts.
+
+But between what had been intended as the most probable, and in any
+case perilous, task of this body (which comprised, it will be
+remembered, six French and ultimately two British army corps) turned
+out, within twenty-four hours of the retreat, and within forty-eight
+of the fall of Namur, to be an operation of a difficulty so extreme as
+to imperil the whole campaign, and in this operation it was the
+British force upon the outer left edge of the line--the unsupported
+extremity round which the enemy made every effort to get--which was
+bound to receive the severest treatment. This peculiar burden laid
+upon the Expeditionary Force from this country was, of course, gravely
+increased by the delay in beginning its retreat, which we have seen to
+be due to the delay in the communication to it by the French of the
+news of the fall of Namur. On account of this delay not only was the
+extreme of the line which the British held immediately threatened with
+outflanking, but it still lay somewhat forward of the rest of the
+force. It was in danger of being turned round its exposed edge C, not
+only because it lay on the extreme of the line, but also because,
+instead of occupying its normal position, AB, which it would have
+occupied had the retreat begun with all the rest, it actually occupied
+the position CD, which made it far more likely to be surrounded than
+if it had been a day's march farther back, as it would have been if
+the French Staff work had suffered no delays.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 54.]
+
+There lay in the gap formed by this untoward tardiness in the British
+retirement, at the point M, the fortress of Maubeuge. It was
+garrisoned by French reserves, or Territorial troops, not of the same
+quality as the active army, and its defensive power was, even if the
+old ring of fortress theory had proved sound, of very doubtful order.
+
+The French 5th Army being no longer present to support the British
+right, but having fallen back behind the alignment of that right,
+General Sir John French had no support for what should have been his
+secure flank save this fortress of Maubeuge, and it will be evident
+from the above diagram that the enemy, should he succeed in
+outflanking the British line, would compel it to fall back within the
+ring of forts surrounding Maubeuge. To avoid destruction it would have
+no alternative but to do that. For, counting the forces in front of it
+and the forces trying to get round its back, it was fighting odds of
+two to one.
+
+Maubeuge was a stronghold that had played a great part in the
+revolutionary war. Its resistance in the month of October 1793 had
+made possible the French victory of Wattigines, just outside its
+walls, and had, perhaps, done more than any other feat of arms in that
+year to save the French Revolution from the allied governments of
+Europe. It was, indeed, full of historic memories, from the moment
+when Cæsar had defeated the Nervii upon the Sambre just to the west of
+the town (his camp can still be traced in an open field above the
+river bank) to the invasion of 1815.
+
+But this rôle which it had played throughout French history had not
+led to any illusion with regard to the rôle it might play in any
+modern war; and at the best Maubeuge, in common with the other
+ill-fortified points of the Belgian frontier, suffered from the only
+error--and that a grave one--which their thorough unnational political
+system had imposed upon the military plan of the French. This error
+was the capital error of indecision. No consistent plan had been
+adopted with regard to the fortification of the Belgian frontier.
+
+The French had begun, after the recuperation following upon the war of
+1870, an elaborate and very perfect system of fortification along
+their German frontier--that is, along the new frontier which divided
+the annexed territory of Alsace-Lorraine from the rest of the country.
+They had taken it for granted that the next German attempt would be
+made somewhere between Longwy and Belfort. And they had spent in this
+scheme of fortification, first and last, the cost of a great campaign.
+They had spent some three hundred million pounds; and it will be
+possible for the reader to gauge the magnitude of this effort if he
+will consider that it was a military operation more costly than was
+the whole of the South African War to Great Britain, or of the
+Manchurian War to Russia. The French were wise to have undertaken this
+expense, because it had hitherto been an unheard-of offence against
+European morals that one nation in Christendom should violate the
+declared neutrality of another. And the attack upon Belgium as a means
+of invading France by Germany had not then crossed the mind of any but
+a few theorists who had, so to speak, "marched ahead" of the rapid
+decline in our common religion which had marked now three
+generations.
+
+But when the French had completed this scheme of fortification, Europe
+heard it proposed by certain authorities in Prussia that, as the cost
+of invading France through the now fortified zone would be
+considerable, the German forces should not hesitate to originate yet
+another step in the breakdown of European morality, and to sacrifice
+in their attack upon France the neutrality of Belgium, of which
+Prussia was herself a guarantor.
+
+Men have often talked during this war, especially in England, as
+though the crime accompanying Prussian activities in the field were
+normal to warfare; and this error is probably due to the fact that war
+upon a large scale has never come home to the imagination of the
+country, and that it is without experience of invasion.
+
+Yet it is of the very first importance to appreciate the truth that
+Prussia in this campaign has postulated in one point after another new
+doctrines which repudiate everything her neighbours have held sacred
+from the time when a common Christianity first began to influence the
+states of Europe. The violation of the Belgian territory is on a par
+with the murder of civilians in cold blood, and after admission of
+their innocence, with the massacre of priests, and the sinking without
+warning of unarmed ships with their passengers and crews. To regard
+these things as something normal to warfare in the past is as
+monstrous an historical error as it would be to regard the reign of
+terror during the French Revolution as normal to civil disputes within
+the State. And to appreciate such a truth is, I repeat, of especial
+moment to the understanding of the mere military character of the
+campaign. For if the violation of Belgium in particular had not been
+the unheard of thing it was, the fortification of the Franco-Belgian
+frontier with which we are here concerned would have had a very
+different fortune.
+
+As it was, the French could never quite make up their minds--or rather
+the French parliamentarians could never make up their minds--upon the
+amount of money that might wisely be expended in the defence of this
+neutral border. There were moments when the opinion that Prussia
+would be restrained by no fear of Europe prevailed among the
+professional politicians of Paris. The fortification of the Belgian
+frontier was undertaken in such moments; a full plan of it was drawn
+up. But again doubt would succeed, the very large sums involved would
+appal some new ministry, and the effort would be interrupted. To such
+uncertainty of aim characteristic of parliamentary government in a
+military nation was added, unfortunately, the consideration of the
+line of the Meuse. Liége and Namur were fortresses of peculiar
+strength, Antwerp was thought the strongest thing in Europe; and that
+triangle was conceived, even by many who believed that the violation
+of Belgian territory would take place, as affording a sufficient
+barrier against the immediate invasion of France from the north-east.
+Those who made this calculation did not forget that fortresses are
+nothing without their full complement of men, guns, and stores; but
+they could neither control, nor had they the elements properly to
+appreciate, the deficiency of organization in a foreign and not
+military country.
+
+For all these causes Maubeuge, in common with other points along the
+Belgian frontier less important than itself, was left imperfect. Even
+if the ring fortress had remained after 1905 what it had been before
+that date, and even if modern howitzer fire and modern high explosives
+had not rendered its tenure one of days rather than months, Maubeuge
+was not a first-class fortress. As it was, with fortifications
+unrenewed, and with the ring fortress in any case doomed, Maubeuge was
+a death-trap.
+
+The rôle assigned to the fortress in the original French plan was no
+more than the support of the retiring operative corner, as it
+"retreated, manoeuvred, and held the enemy." Maubeuge was considered
+as part of a line beyond which the operative corner would not have to
+fall before the rest of the square, the "manoeuvring mass," had swung
+up. Hence it was that the French General Staff and its Chief had put
+within the ring of its insufficient forts nothing more than a garrison
+of Territorials--that is, of the older classes of the reserve.
+
+Had the British General accepted the lure of Maubeuge as Bazaine did
+the lure of Metz in 1870, the Expeditionary Force would have been
+destroyed. But it would have been destroyed, not after a long delay,
+as was the army at Metz, but immediately; for Maubeuge was not Metz,
+and the fortress power of resistance of to-day is not that of a
+generation ago. Maubeuge, as a fact, fell within a fortnight of the
+date when this temptation was offered to the sorely pressed British
+army, and had that temptation been yielded to, the whole force would
+have been, in a military sense, annihilated before the middle of
+September.
+
+What preserved it was the immediate decision undertaken upon that
+Monday night to proceed, in spite of the fatigues that were already
+felt after the first day's retreat, with a retirement upon the
+south-west, and to proceed with it as vigorously as possible.
+
+It was not yet daylight upon the morning of Tuesday, August 25th, when
+the move began. The Field-Marshal counted justly upon some exhaustion
+in his immensely superior enemy, especially in those troops of his
+upon the west (the 2nd German Corps) which had to perform the heavy
+marching task of getting round the end of the British line. This
+element, combined with the considerable distance which the British
+marched that morning, saved the army; though not until another week of
+almost intolerable suffering had passed, and not until very heavy
+losses indeed had been sustained. The great Maubeuge-Bavai road, which
+is prolonged to Eth, and which was, roughly, the British front of that
+night, was cleared shortly after sunrise. A couple of brigades of
+cavalry and the divisional cavalry of the 2nd Corps covered the
+operation on the centre of the right, in front of the main body of the
+2nd Corps, while the rest of the cavalry similarly covered the exposed
+western edge and corner of the line.
+
+Delays, with the criticism of which this short summary has no concern,
+had forbidden the whole force which should have been present with the
+British Army in Flanders at the outset of the campaign to arrive in
+time, and the contingents that had already come up had taken the
+shock, as we have already described, in the absence of the 4th
+Division. This 4th Division had only begun to detrain from the
+junction at Le Cateau at the same hour that General Sir John French
+was reading that Sunday message which prompted his immediate
+retirement from before Mons. When the full official history of the war
+comes to be written, few things will prove of more credit to the
+Expeditionary Force and its command than the way in which this belated
+division--belated through no fault of the soldiers--was incorporated
+with the already existing organization, in the very midst of its
+retreat, and helped to support the army. There are few parallels in
+history to the successful accomplishment of so delicate and perilous
+an operation.
+
+At any rate, in less than forty-eight hours after its arrival, the 4th
+Division--eleven battalions and a brigade of artillery--were
+incorporated with the British line just as the whole force was falling
+back upon this Tuesday morning, the 25th; and the newly arrived
+division of fresh men did singular service in the further covering of
+the retirement. General Snow, who was in command of this division,
+was deployed upon a line running from just south of Solesmes, on the
+right, to a point just south of La Chatrie, upon the road from Cambrai
+to Le Cateau, upon his left; and, as will be seen by the accompanying
+sketch map, such a line effectually protected the falling back of the
+rest of the force. Behind it the 1st and the 2nd British Corps fell
+back upon the line Cambrai to Landrecies. The small inset map shows
+how the various points in this two days' retreat stood to one another.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 55.]
+
+This line from Landrecies towards Cambrai had already been in part
+prepared in the course of that day--Tuesday--and entrenched, and it
+may be imagined what inclination affected commanders and men towards
+a halt upon that position. The pressure had been continuous and heavy,
+the work of detraining and setting in line the newly arrived division
+had added to the anxieties of the day, and an occupation of the
+prepared line seemed to impose itself. Luckily, the unwisdom of such a
+stand in the retirement was perceived in time, and the British
+Commander decided not to give his forces rest until some considerable
+natural object superior to imperfect and hurriedly constructed
+trenches could be depended upon to check the enemy's advance. The
+threat of being outflanked was still very grave, and the few hours'
+halt which would have been involved in the alternative decision might,
+or rather would, have been fatal.
+
+The consequences, however, to the men of this decision in favour of
+continual retirement were severe. The 1st Corps did not reach
+Landrecies till ten o'clock at night. They had been upon the move for
+eighteen hours; but even so, the enemy, in that avalanche of advance
+(which was possible to him, as we now know, by the organization of
+mechanical transport), was well in touch. The Guards in Landrecies
+itself (the 4th Brigade) were attacked by the advance body of the 9th
+German Army Corps, which came on in overwhelming numbers right into
+the buildings of the town, debouching from the wood to the north under
+cover of the darkness. Their effort was unsuccessful. They did not
+succeed in piercing or even in decisively confusing the British line
+at this point; and, packed in the rather narrow street of Landrecies,
+the enemy suffered losses equivalent to a battalion in that desperate
+night fighting. But though the enemy here failed to achieve his
+purpose, his action compelled the continued retreat of men who were
+almost at the limit of exhaustion, and who had now been marching and
+fighting for the better part of twenty-four hours.
+
+In that same darkness the 1st Division, under Sir Douglas Haig, was
+heavily engaged south-east of Maroilles. They obtained ultimately the
+aid of two French reserve divisions which lay upon the right of the
+British line, and extricated themselves from the peril they were in
+before dawn. By daylight this 1st Corps was still continuing its
+retirement in the direction of Wassigny, with Guise as its objective.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 56.]
+
+Meanwhile the 2nd Corps, which had not been so heavily attacked, and
+which lay to the west--that is, still upon the extreme of the
+line--had come, before the sunset of that Tuesday, the 25th, into a
+line stretching from Le Cateau to near Caudry, and thence prolonged by
+the 4th Division towards Seranvillers.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 57.]
+
+It will be seen that this line was bent--its left refused. This
+disposition was, of course, designed to meet the ceaseless German
+attempt to outflank on the west; and with the dawn of Wednesday, the
+26th, it was already apparent how serious would be the task before
+this 2nd Corps, which covered all the rest of the army, and, in a
+sense, the whole of the Anglo-French retirement. General Sir Horace
+Smith-Dorrien, who was here in command, was threatened with a disaster
+that might carry in its train disaster to the whole British
+contingent, and ultimately, perhaps, to the whole Franco-British line.
+
+Although the German bodies which were attempting the outflanking had
+not yet all come up, the field artillery of no less than four German
+corps was already at work against this one body, and a general action
+was developing upon which might very well depend the fate of the
+campaign. Indeed, the reader will do well to fix his attention upon
+this day, Wednesday, the 26th August, as the key to all that followed.
+There are always to be found, in the history of war, places and times
+which are of this character--nuclei, as it were, round which the
+business of all that comes before and after seems to congregate. Of
+such, for instance, was the Friday before Waterloo, when Erlon's
+counter-orders ultimately decided the fate of Napoleon; and of such
+was Carnot's night march on October 15, 1793, which largely decided
+the fate of the revolutionary army.
+
+The obvious action to take in such a position as that in which the 2nd
+Corps found themselves was to break contact with the enemy, to call
+for support from the 1st Corps, and to maintain the retreat as
+indefatigably as it had already been maintained in the preceding
+twenty-four hours.
+
+But men have limits to their physical powers, which limits commonly
+appear sharply, not gradually, at the end of a great movement. The 1st
+Corps had been marching and fighting a day and a night, and that after
+a preceding whole day of retirement from before Mons. It was unable to
+execute a further effort. Further, the general in command of the 2nd
+Corps reported that the German pressure had advanced too far to permit
+of breaking contact in the face of such an attack.
+
+It would have been of the utmost use if at this moment a large body of
+French cavalry--no less than three divisions--under General Sordet,
+could have intervened upon that critical moment, the morning of
+Wednesday, the 26th, to have covered the retirement of the 1st Corps.
+They were in the neighbourhood; the British commander had seen their
+commander in the course of the 25th, and had represented his need.
+Through some error or misfortune in the previous movement of this
+corps--such that its horses were incapable of further action through
+fatigue--it failed to appear upon the field in this all-important
+juncture, and General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien was left facing
+overwhelming odds, which in artillery--the arm that was doing all the
+heavy work of that morning--were not less than four to one.
+
+The fact that the retirement was at last made possible was due more
+than anything else to the handling of the British guns upon this day,
+and to the devotion with which the batteries sacrificed themselves to
+the covering of that movement; while the cavalry, as in the preceding
+two days, co-operated in forming a screen for the retreat.
+
+It was about half-past three in the afternoon when the general in
+command of this exposed left flank judged it possible to break
+contact, and to give the order for falling back. The experiment--for
+it seems to have been no more secure than such a word suggests--was
+perilous in the extreme. It was not known whether the consequences of
+this fierce artillery duel against an enemy of four-fold superiority
+had been sufficient to forbid that enemy to make good the pursuit.
+Luckily, as the operation developed, it was apparent that the check
+inflicted upon such enormous odds by the British guns was sufficient
+for its purpose. The enemy had received losses that forbade him to
+move with the rapidity necessary to him if he was to decide the
+matter. He failed to press the retiring 2nd British Corps in any
+conclusive fashion: this 2nd Corps, the left wing, was saved; and with
+it the whole army, and perhaps the whole line.
+
+The retreat of this body, which had thus covered all its comrades,
+continued under terrible conditions of strain (and after so heavy an
+action) right through the afternoon, and on hour after hour through
+the darkness; but though such an effort meant the loss of stragglers
+and of wounded, of guns whose teams had been destroyed, of material,
+and of all that accompanies a perilous retreat, one may justly say
+that well before midnight of that Wednesday, the 26th, the operation
+had proved successful and its purpose was accomplished.
+
+Two more days of almost equal strain were, as we shall see, to be
+suffered by the whole army before it had reached a natural obstacle
+behind which it could draw breath (the river Oise), and might fairly
+be regarded as no longer in peril of destruction; but the breaking
+point that had come on that Wednesday, the 26th, had been successfully
+passed without disaster, and had been so passed, in the main, by
+virtue of the guns.
+
+This critical day, upon which depended the fortunes certainly of the
+British contingent, and in some degree of all the "operative corner"
+of the French plan, turned in favour of the Allies, not only through
+the military excellence of the action which was broken off by Sir
+Horace Smith-Dorrien during the afternoon, but also through the vigour
+and tenacity of the retreat.
+
+I must here beg the reader's leave for a short digression in
+connection with those two phrases--"in favour of," and "vigour."
+History in general treats a retirement, particularly a rapid
+retirement accompanied by heavy losses, as a disaster; and the
+conception that such a movement may seem to the military historian a
+success, and that the energy of its conduct is just as important as
+the energy of an assault, is unfamiliar to most students of civilian
+record. But I am writing here, though an elementary, yet a military
+history; and to the military historian a retreat may be just as much a
+factor in victory as an advance; while the energy and tenacity
+required for its carriage are, if anything, more important than the
+corresponding qualities required for an advance. And in the case of
+this critical day and a half, the Wednesday, August 26th, and the
+Wednesday and Thursday night, August 26th-27th, the preservation of
+the British forces, and to some extent of all that lay east of them,
+was made possible by the very fact that the retirement was prosecuted
+with the utmost rapidity and without a halt. Had the retreat been
+interrupted in the hope of making a stand, or in the hope of repose,
+the whole army would have gone.
+
+Throughout the night, then, with heavy losses from stragglers, and in
+one case with the surrounding and annihilation by wounds and capture
+of nearly a whole battalion (the Gordons), the retreat of the 2nd
+Corps proceeded, and, in line with it, the retreat of the 1st Corps to
+the east.
+
+But this 1st Corps, though set an easier task than the 2nd (which, at
+the extreme of the line, was under the perpetual menace of
+development), did not retire without losses of a serious character. It
+was marching on Guise, just as the 2nd Corps to the west of it was
+marching across the watershed to St. Quentin. The Munster Fusiliers,
+who were on its extreme right, had halted for the night on that same
+evening of the 26th; for the 1st Corps, being less hard pressed, had
+more leisure for such repose. During the night a messenger was sent to
+this body with orders for the resumption of the march next morning. He
+was taken prisoner, and never reached his goal. The Munsters were
+attacked at dawn by the German pursuit in greatly superior numbers,
+surrounded and destroyed, as the Gordons of the 2nd Corps had been;
+the unwounded remnant was compelled to surrender.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 58.]
+
+The whole of Thursday, the 27th, and Friday, the 28th of August, the
+British retreat continued, the 1st Corps following on at the valley of
+the Oise towards La Fère, while the 2nd Corps to the west passed St.
+Quentin, and made for Noyon, in the neighbourhood of the same river
+farther down; and on the night of that Friday the Expeditionary Force
+was at last in line, and in some kind of order, organized for the
+first breathing space possible after so terrible an ordeal.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 59.]
+
+It is clear from the accompanying sketch map that the position the
+British had now reached gave to the whole Allied force a bent contour.
+The French armies to the east lay along line AB, which, had it been
+directly prolonged, would have stretched towards C; but the British
+contingent, which, on account of its extreme position, had suffered
+most heavily, was turned right back on the scheme AD, and even so,
+was still in some peril of being outflanked by the German forces along
+the arrow (1) to the west of it. At this moment the French, whose
+fortunes we shall next describe, found it possible to check the fury
+of the pursuit. The drive of the German masses, which had so nearly
+annihilated the British end of the line, was blocked, and the
+remainder of the great retreat followed a more orderly fashion,
+proceeded at a much slower rate, and approached that term at which a
+counter-offensive might be attempted.
+
+The whole process may be compared to the flood of a very rapid tide,
+which, after the first few hours, is seen to relax its speed
+considerably, and to promise in the immediate future an ebb.
+
+In order to appreciate how this was, let us next consider what the
+larger French forces to the east of the British had been doing. There
+are no details available, very few published records, and it will not
+be possible until an official history of the war appears to give more
+than the most general sketch of the French movements in this retreat;
+but the largest lines are sufficient for our judgment of the result.
+
+It will be remembered that what I have called "the operative corner"
+of the Allied army had stood in the angle between the Sambre and the
+Meuse. It had consisted in the British contingent upon the left, or
+west, in front of Mons; the 5th French Army, composed of three army
+corps, under Lanrezac, to the east of it, along the Sambre, past
+Charleroi; and the 4th French Army, also of three army corps, under
+Langle, along the Middle Meuse, being in general disposition what we
+have upon the accompanying sketch. It had been attacked upon Saturday,
+the 22nd August, by seventeen German army corps--that is, by forces
+double its own. On that same day Namur, at the corner, had fallen into
+complete possession of the Germans, the French retreat had begun, and
+on the following day the English force had, after the regrettable
+delay of half a day, also begun its retirement.
+
+We have seen that the British retirement (following the dotted lines
+upon Sketch 60) had reached, upon the Friday night, the position from
+Noyon to La Fère, marked also in dots upon the sketch.
+
+What had happened meanwhile to their French colleagues upon the east?
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 60.]
+
+The first thing to note is that the fortress of Maubeuge, with its
+garrison of reserve and second line men, had, of course, been at once
+invested by the Germans when the British and French line had fallen
+behind it and left it isolated. The imperfection of this fortress I
+have already described, and the causes of that imperfection. Maubeuge
+commanded the great railway line leading from Belgium to Paris, which
+is the main avenue of supply for an invasion or for a retreat, running
+north-east to south-west on the Belgian frontier upon the capital.
+
+The 5th French Army retired parallel to the British along the belt
+marked in Sketch Map 60 by diagonal lines. At first, as its retirement
+had begun earlier, it was behind, or to the south of, the British, who
+were thus left almost unsupported. It lay, for instance, on Monday,
+the 24th, much along the position 1, at which moment the British Army
+was lying along the position 2. That was the day on which the Germans
+attempted to drive the British into Maubeuge.
+
+But during the succeeding two days the French 5th Army (to which the
+five corps, including the Prussian Guard, under Buelow, were opposed)
+held the enemy fairly well. They were losing, of course, heavily in
+stragglers, in abandoned wounded, and in guns; but their retreat was
+sufficiently strongly organized to keep this section of the line well
+bent up northwards, and just before the British halted for their first
+breathing space along the line La Fère and Noyon, the French 5th Army
+attempted, and succeeded in, a sharp local attack against the superior
+forces that were pursuing them. This local attack was undertaken from
+about the position marked 3 on Sketch 60, and was directed against
+Guise. It was undertaken by the 1st and 3rd French Corps, under
+General Maunoury. He, acting under Lanrezac, gave such a blow to the
+Prussian Guard that he here bent the Prussian line right in.
+
+Meanwhile the 4th French Army, which had also been retiring rapidly
+parallel to the 5th French Army, lay in line with it to the east along
+that continuation of 3 which I have marked with a 4 upon the sketch.
+Farther east the French armies, linking up the operative corner with
+the Alsace-Lorraine frontier, had also been driven back from the Upper
+Meuse, and upon Friday, the 28th of August, when the British halt had
+come between La Fère and Noyon (a line largely protected by the
+Oise), the whole disposition of the Allied forces between the
+neighbourhood of Verdun and Noyon was much what is laid down in the
+accompanying sketch. At A were the British; at B the successful
+counter-offensive of the French 5th Army had checked and bent back the
+Prussian centre under von Buelow; at C, the last section of what had
+been the old operative corner, the army under Langle was thrust back
+to the position here shown, and pressed there by the Wurtembergers and
+the Saxons opposed to it. Meanwhile further French forces, D and E,
+had also been driven back from the Upper Meuse, and were retiring with
+Verdun as a pivot, leaving isolated the little frontier town of
+Longwy. This was not seriously fortified, had held out with only
+infantry work and small pieces, and had not been thought worthy of
+attack by a siege train. It surrendered to the Crown Prince upon
+Friday, 28th August.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 61.]
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 62.]
+
+On that date, then, the two opposing lines might be compared, the one
+to a great encircling arm AA, the elbow of which was bent at Guise,
+the other to a power BB which had struck into the hollow of the elbow,
+and might expect, with further success, to bend the arm so much more
+at that point as to embarrass its general sweep.
+
+Those who saw the position as a whole on this Friday, the 28th of
+August, wondered whether or not the French Commander-in-chief would
+order the continuation of the successful local attack at Guise, and so
+attempt to break the whole German line. He did not give this order,
+and his reasons for retiring in the face of such an opportunity may be
+briefly stated thus:--
+
+1. The French forces in line from Verdun to La Fère, and continued by
+the British contingent to the neighbourhood of Noyon, were still
+gravely inferior to the German forces opposed to them. Even,
+therefore, if the French success at Guise had been pushed farther, and
+had actually broken the German line, either half of the French line
+upon either side of the forward angle would have been heavily
+outnumbered by the two limbs of the enemy opposed to each, and that
+enemy might perfectly well have defeated, though separated, each
+portion of the force opposed to it.
+
+2. To the west, at the position FF on Sketch 62, were acting large
+bodies of the enemy, which had swept, almost without meeting
+resistance, through Arras to Amiens. Against that advance there was
+nothing but small garrisons of French Territorials, which were brushed
+aside without difficulty.
+
+Now these bodies, though they were mainly of cavalry which were
+operating thus to the west, had already cut the main line of
+communications from Boulogne, upon which the British had hitherto
+depended, and were close enough to the Allied left flank to threaten
+it with envelopment, or, rather, to come up in aid of von Kluck at A,
+and make certain what he already could regard as probable--his power
+to get round the British, and turn the whole left of the Allied line.
+
+3. More important even than these two first conclusive considerations
+was the fact that the French Commander-in-chief, had he proposed to
+follow up this success of his subordinate at Guise, would have had to
+change the whole of his general plan, and to waste, or at best to
+delay, the action of his chief factor in that plan. This chief factor
+was the great manoeuvring mass behind the French line which had not
+yet come into play, and the advent of which, at a chosen moment, was
+the very soul of the French strategy.
+
+It is so essential to the comprehension of the campaign to seize this
+last point that, at the risk of repetition, I will restate for the
+reader the main elements of that strategy.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 63.]
+
+I have called it in the earlier pages of this book "the open strategic
+square," and I have shown how this theoretical arrangement was in
+practice complicated and modified so that it came to mean, under the
+existing circumstances of the campaign, the deliberate thrusting forth
+of the fraction called "the operative corner," behind which larger
+masses, "the mass of manoeuvre," were to come up in aid and assume the
+general counter-offensive when the operative corner should have drawn
+the enemy down to that position in which such a general
+counter-offensive would be most efficacious.
+
+To concentrate the great mass of manoeuvre was a business of some
+days, and having ordered its concentration in one district, it would
+be impossible to change the plan at a moment's notice. The district
+into which a great part of this mass of manoeuvre had been
+concentrated--or, rather, was in course of concentration at this
+moment, the 28th August--was the district behind and in the
+neighbourhood of Paris. It lay far from the scene of operation at
+Guise. It was intended to come into play only when the general retreat
+should have reached a line stretching from Verdun to the neighbourhood
+of Paris itself. To have pursued the success at Guise, therefore,
+would have been to waste all this great concentration of the mass of
+manoeuvre which lay some days behind the existing line, and in
+particular to waste the large body which was being gathered behind and
+in the neighbourhood of Paris.
+
+With these three main considerations in mind, and in particular the
+third, which was far the most important, General Joffre determined to
+give up the advantage obtained at Guise, to order the two successful
+army corps under Maunoury, who had knocked the Prussian Guard at that
+point, to retire, and to continue the general retreat until the Allied
+line should be evenly stretched from Paris to Verdun. The whole
+situation may be put in a diagram as follows: You have the Allied line
+in an angle, ABC. You have opposed to it the much larger German forces
+in a corresponding angle, DEF. Farther east you have a continuation of
+the French line, more or less immovable, on the fortified frontier of
+Alsace-Lorraine at M, opposed by a greater immovable German force at
+N. At P you have coming up as far as Amiens large German bodies
+operating in the west, and at Q a small newly-formed French body, the
+6th French Army, supporting the exposed flank of the British
+contingent at A, near Noyon. Meanwhile you have directed towards S,
+behind Paris, and coming up at sundry other points, a concentration of
+the mass of manoeuvre.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 64.]
+
+It is evident that if the French offensive at B which has successfully
+pushed in the German elbow at E round Guise is still sent forward, and
+even succeeds in breaking the German line at E, "the elbow," the two
+limbs into which the Germans will be divided, DE and EF, are each
+superior in number to the forces opposed to them, and that DE in
+particular, with the help of P, may very probably turn AB and its new
+small supporter at Q, roll it up, and begin a decisive victory, while
+the other large German force, EF, may press back or pierce the smaller
+opposed French force, BC.
+
+Meanwhile you would not only be risking this peril, but you would also
+be wasting your great mass of manoeuvre, SS, which is still in process
+of concentration, most of it behind Paris, and which could not
+possibly come into play in useful time at E.
+
+It is far better to pursue the original plan to continue the retreat
+as far as the dotted line from Paris to Verdun, where you will have
+the whole German force at its farthest limit of effort and
+corresponding exhaustion, and where you will have, after the salutary
+delay of the few intervening days, your large mass of manoeuvre, SS,
+close by to Paris and ready to strike.
+
+From such a diagram we see the wisdom of the decision that was taken
+to continue the retirement, and the fruits which that decision was to
+bear.
+
+The whole episode is most eminently characteristic of the French
+military temper, which has throughout the whole of French history
+played this kind of game, and invariably been successful when it has
+attained success from a concentration of energy upon purely military
+objects and a sacrificing of every domestic consideration to the
+single object of victory in foreign war.
+
+It is an almost invariable rule in French history that when the
+military temper of the nation is allowed free play its success is
+assured, and that only when the cross-current of a political object
+disturbs this temper do the French fail, as they failed in 1870, as
+they failed in 1812, or as they failed in the Italian expeditions of
+the Renaissance. By geographical accident, coupled with the
+conditions, economic and other, to which their aggression gives rise,
+the French are nearly always numerically inferior at the beginning of
+a campaign. They have almost invariably begun their great wars with
+defeats and retirements. They have only succeeded when a patient,
+tenacious, and consistently military policy has given them the
+requisite delay to achieve a defensive-offensive plan. It was so
+against Otto the Second a thousand years ago; it was so in the wars of
+the Revolution; it was so in this enormous campaign of 1914. There is
+in their two thousand years of constant fighting one great and
+salutary exception to the rule--their failure against Cæsar; from
+which failure they date the strength of their Roman tradition--still
+vigorous.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The minor fortified posts lying behind the French line were not
+defended. Upon 29th August the French centre fell back behind Rethel,
+the Germans crossed the Aisne, occupied Rheims and Châlons, while the
+British contingent on the left and the French 6th Army now protecting
+its flank continued also to fall back towards Paris. And on Sedan day,
+2nd September, we may regard the great movement as having reached its
+end.
+
+The German advance had nowhere hesitated, save at Guise, and the
+French retirement after their success at Guise can only have seemed to
+the German commanders a further French defeat. Those commanders knew
+their overwhelming numerical superiority against the total of the
+Allied forces--a superiority of some 60 per cent. They may have
+guessed that the French were keeping a considerable reserve; but in
+their imagination that reserve was thought far less than it really
+was, for they could hardly believe that under the strain of the great
+retreat the French commanders would have had the implacable fortitude
+which permitted them to spare for further effort the reinforcements of
+which the retiring army seemed in vital and even in despairing need.
+
+Upon this anniversary of Sedan day it cannot but have appeared to the
+Great General Staff of the enemy that the purpose of their great
+effort in the West was already achieved.
+
+They had reached the gates of Paris. They had, indeed, not yet
+destroyed the enemy's main army in the field, but they had swept up
+garrison after garrison; they had captured, perhaps, 150,000 wounded
+and unwounded men; their progress had been that of a whirlwind, and
+had been marked by a bewildering series of incessant victories. They
+were now in such a situation that either they could proceed to the
+reduction of the forts outside Paris (to which their experience of
+their hitherto immediate reduction of every other permanent work left
+them contemptuous), or they could proceed to break at will the
+insufficient line opposed to them.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 65.]
+
+They stood, on this anniversary of Sedan, in the general situation
+apparent on the accompanying sketch. The 6th French Army was forced
+back right upon the outer works of Paris; the British contingent, to
+its right, lay now beyond the Marne; the 5th French Army, to its right
+again, close along the Seine; the 4th and 3rd continuing the great bow
+up to the neighbourhood of Verdun, three-quarters of the way round
+which fortress the Crown Prince had now encircled; and in front of
+this bent line, in numbers quite double its effectives, pressed the
+great German front over 150 miles of French ground. Upon the left or
+west of the Allies--the German right--stood the main army of von
+Kluck, the 1st, with its supporters to the north and west, that had
+already pressed through Amiens. Immediately to the east of this, von
+Buelow, with the 2nd Army, continued the line. The Saxons and the
+Wurtembergers, a 3rd Army, pressed at the lowest point of the curve in
+occupation of Vitry. To the east, again, beyond and in the Argonne,
+the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia was upon the point of reducing
+Verdun, the permanent works of which fortress had already suffered the
+first days of that bombardment from the new German siege train which
+had hitherto at every experiment completely destroyed the defence in a
+few hours. If we take for the terminal of this first chapter in the
+Great War the morning of 4th September, we may perceive how nearly the
+enemy had achieved his object, to which there now stood as a threat
+nothing more but the French reserves, unexpected in magnitude, though
+their presence was already discovered, which had for the most part
+been gathered in the neighbourhood of and behind the fortified zone of
+Paris.
+
+With this position, of what it meant in immediate alternatives to the
+enemy, I will deal a few pages on at the close of this book, when I
+will also consider in one conspectus on the map the whole of that ten
+days' sweep down from the north, and summarize its effect upon the
+Allied attitude towards the next phase of the war.
+
+But to understand a campaign, one must seize not only the
+topographical positions of troops, nor only their number: one must
+also gauge the temper of their commanders and of the political opinion
+at home behind them, for upon this moral factor everything ultimately
+depends. The men that fight are living men, and the motive power is
+the soul.
+
+It is, therefore, necessary for the reader to appreciate at this
+terminal date, September 2-4, the moral strength of the enemy, and to
+comprehend in what mood of confidence the Germans now lay. With this
+object we must add to the story of the advance on Paris the subsidiary
+events which had accompanied that great sweep into the West. We must
+turn to the "holding up of Russia" upon the East by the Austrian
+forces, and see how the partial failure of this effort (news of which
+was just reaching the Western armies) was quite eclipsed by the
+splendid tidings of Tannenberg. We must see with German eyes the
+secondary but brilliant victory in front of Metz; we must stand in
+their shoes to feel as they did the clearing of Alsace, and to
+comprehend with what contempt they must have watched the false picture
+of the war which the governments and the press of the Allies,
+particularly in Britain, presented to public opinion in their doomed
+territories; and we must, in general, grasp the now apocalyptic temper
+of the nervous, over-strained industrialized population which is the
+tissue of modern Germany.
+
+Not until we have a good general aspect of that mood can we understand
+either the war at this turning-point in its fortunes, or the future
+developments which will be traced in the succeeding volumes of this
+series.
+
+I will, therefore, now turn to the three main elements productive of
+that mood in their historical order: the Battle of Metz, the Austrian
+operations against Russia, and, lastly, the great victory of
+Tannenberg in East Prussia, before concluding this volume with a
+summary of the whole situation in those first days of September, just
+before the tide turned.
+
+
+THE BATTLE OF METZ.
+
+The Battle of Metz, though quite subsidiary to the general operations
+of the war, and upon a scale which later operations have dwarfed, will
+be mentioned with special emphasis in any just account of the great
+war on account of its moral significance.
+
+It took place before the main shock of the armies; it had no decisive
+effect upon the future of the campaign; but it was of the very highest
+weight, informing the German mind, and leading it into that attitude
+of violent exaltation on which I shall later insist in these pages,
+and which largely determined all the first months of the war, with
+their enormous consequences for the future. For the action in front of
+Metz was the first pitched battle fought in Western Europe during our
+generation, and to an unexpected degree it fulfilled in its narrow
+area all the dreams upon which military Germany had been nourished for
+forty years. It thrilled the whole nation with the news, at the very
+outset of hostilities, of a sharp and glorious victory; it seemed a
+presage of far more to come. The Battle of Metz was the limited
+foundation upon which was rapidly erected that triumphant mood that
+lasted long after the tide had turned, and that matured, when bad
+blundering had lost the victory in the West, into the unsoldierly,
+muddled hope that could fail to win, and yet somehow not lose, a
+campaign.
+
+We have seen that the disposition of the French armies at the moment
+when the shock was being delivered through Belgium involved along the
+frontiers of Alsace-Lorraine the presence of considerable forces.
+These, once the operative corner had taken the shock, formed part of
+the mass of manoeuvre, and were destined in large part to swing up in
+aid of the men retreating from the Sambre.
+
+But in the very first days of the war, before the main blow had
+fallen, and when the French General Staff were still in doubt as to
+precisely where the blow _would_ fall, considerable bodies had been
+operating in Alsace and over the Lorraine frontier. The whole range of
+the Vosges was carried in the second week after the British
+declaration of war--that is, between 10th August and 15th August.
+Mulhouse was occupied; upon Monday, the 17th of August, Saarburg, the
+most important railway junction between Strassburg and Metz, was in
+French hands. Up to that date, though such comparatively small forces
+were involved, the French had possessed a very decisive numerical
+superiority. It was not destined to last, for there was moving down
+from the north the now mobilized strength of Germany in this region;
+and a blow struck against the French left, with no less than four
+army corps, was speedily to decide the issue upon this subsidiary
+front.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 66.]
+
+This great force was based upon Metz, from which fortress the action
+will presumably take its name in history. It stretched upon the 20th
+of August from the north of Pont-à-Mousson to beyond Château Salins.
+Before this overwhelming advance the French left rapidly retired. It
+did not retire quickly enough, and one portion of the French force--it
+is believed the 15th Division (that is, the first division of the 15th
+Army Corps)--failed in its task of supporting the shock.
+
+Details of the action are wholly lacking. We depend even for what may
+be said at this date upon little more than rumour. The Germans claimed
+a capture of ten batteries and of the equivalent of as many
+battalions, and many colours. Upon the 21st the whole French left fell
+back, carrying with them as a necessary consequence the centre in the
+Vosges Mountains and the right upon the plains of Alsace. So rapid was
+the retreat that upon the 22nd of August the Bavarians were at
+Lunéville, and marching on Nancy; the extreme right of the German line
+had come within range of the forts north of Toul; and in those same
+hours during which, on that same Saturday, the 22nd of August, the 5th
+French Army in the north fell back at the news of Namur and lost the
+Sambre, those forces on the borders of Alsace-Lorraine had lost all
+the first advantages of their thrust into the lost provinces, had
+suffered defeat in the first striking action of the war, and had put
+Nancy in peril.
+
+Nancy itself was saved. The French counter-offensive was organized on
+the 23rd of August, at a moment when the German line lay from St. Dié
+northwards and westwards up to positions just in front of Nancy. It
+was delivered about a week later. That counter-offensive which
+ultimately saved Nancy belongs to the next volume, for it did not
+develop its strength until after Sedan Day, and after the end of the
+great sweep on Paris.
+
+The situation, then, in this field (the very names of which have such
+great moral effects upon the French and the German minds) was, by the
+2nd of September, as follows:--
+
+The French had suffered in the first considerable action of the war a
+disaster. They had lost their foothold in the annexed provinces. They
+had put the capital of French Lorraine, Nancy, in instant peril. They
+had fallen back from the Vosges. They were beginning, with grave
+doubts of its success, a counter-offensive, to keep the enemy, if
+possible, from entering Nancy. They had lost thousands of men, many
+colours, and scores of guns, and all Germany was full of the news.
+
+
+LEMBERG.
+
+The foundation of the Germanic plan upon the Eastern front at the
+origin of the war was, as we have said, the holding up of Russia
+during her necessarily slow mobilization, while the decisive stroke
+was delivered in the West.
+
+That is the largest view of the matter.
+
+In more detail, we know that the main part of this task was entrusted
+to the Austro-Hungarian forces. The German forces had indeed entered
+and occupied the west fringe of Russian Poland, seizing the small
+industrial belt which lies immediately east of Silesia, and the two
+towns of Czestochowa and Kalish--the latter, in the very centre of the
+bend of the frontier, because it was a big railway depot, and, as it
+were, a gage of invasion; the former, both because the holding of one
+line demanded it (if Kalish and the industrial portion were held), and
+because Czestochowa being the principal shrine of the Poles, some
+strange notion may have passed through the German mind that the
+presence therein of Prussian officers would cajole the Poles into an
+action against Russia. If this were part of the motive (and probably
+it was), it would be a parallel to many another irony in the present
+campaign and its preliminaries, proceeding from the incapacity of the
+enemy to gauge the subtler and more profound forces of a civilization
+to which it is a stranger.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 67.]
+
+This local German move was almost entirely political. The main task,
+as I have said, was left to the Austrians farther south; and,
+proceeding to further detail, we must see the Austrians stretched in a
+line from near the middle Carpathians past the neighbourhood of
+Tomasow towards Tarnow, and this line distinctly divided into two
+armies, a northern and a southern. The two met in an angle in front of
+the great fortress of Przemysl. The northern, or first, army faced, as
+will be seen, directly towards the Russian frontier. It was the
+operative wing; upon its immediate action and on the rapidity of the
+blow it was to deliver depended the success of this first chapter in
+the Eastern war.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 68.]
+
+The southern, or second, army, which stretched all along the Galician
+plain at the foot of the Carpathians to the town of Halicz, had for
+its mission the protection of the first army from the south. It was
+known, or expected, that the first army would advance right into
+Russian Poland, with but inferior forces in front of it. It was
+feared, however, that the main Russian concentration to the south-east
+of it might turn its right flank. The business of the second army was
+to prevent this. The first army (I), being the operative body, was
+more homogeneous in race, more picked in material than the second
+(II), the latter containing many elements from the southern parts of
+the empire, including perhaps not a few disaffected contingents, such
+as certain regiments of Italian origin from the Adriatic border.
+
+So far as we can judge, perhaps--and it is a very rough estimate--we
+may put the whole body which Austria-Hungary was thus moving in the
+first phase of the war beyond the Carpathians at more than 750,000,
+but less than 1,000,000 men. Call the mass 800,000, and one would not
+be far wrong. Of this mass quite a quarter lay in reserve near the
+mountains behind the first army. The remaining three-quarters, or
+600,000 men, were fairly evenly divided between the two groups of the
+first and of the second army--the first, or northern, one being under
+the command of Dankl, the second under that of von Auffenberg. Each
+of these forces was based upon one group of depots of particular
+importance, the northern operative army (I) relying upon Przemysl, and
+the southern one (II) upon Lemberg.
+
+It was less than a week after the first German advance bodies had
+taken the outer forts of Liége when Dankl crossed the frontier,
+heading, with his centre, towards Krosnik and farther towards Lublin.
+His troops were in Russian territory upon the Monday evening or the
+Tuesday, 10th-11th August.
+
+The second army meanwhile stood fulfilling its rôle of awaiting and
+containing any Russians that might strike in upon the south. It had
+advanced no more than watching bodies towards the frontier, such as
+the 35th Regiment of the Austrian Landwehr, which occupied Sokal, and
+smaller units cordonned out southward between that town and Brody.
+Here, at the outset of the large operations that were to follow, it is
+important for the reader to note that everything depended upon the
+resisting power of the second, or southern, army.
+
+Observe the problem. Two men, a left-hand man and a right-hand man,
+go out to engage two other men whom they hope and believe to be
+unready. The left-hand man is particularly confident of being able to
+drive back his opponent, but he knows that sooner or later upon his
+right the second enemy, a stronger man, may come in and disturb his
+action. He says therefore to his right-hand companion: "Stand firm and
+engage and contain the energy of your opponent until I have finished
+with mine. When I have done that, I shall turn round towards you, and
+between us we will finish the second man."
+
+Seeing the paucity of Russian communications, and the physical
+necessity under which the Russians were, on account of the position of
+their depots and centres of mobilization, of first putting the mass of
+their men on the south, the physical impossibility under which they
+lay of putting the mass of their men in the north for the moment, the
+plan was a sound one; _but_ its success depended entirely upon the
+tenacity of the second Austrian army, which would have to meet large,
+and might have to meet superior, numbers.
+
+The first army went forward with very little loss and against very
+little resistance. The Russian forces which were against it, which we
+may call the first Russian army, were inferior in number, and fell
+back, though not rapidly, towards the Bug. It relied to some extent in
+this movement upon the protection afforded by the forts of Zamosc, but
+it was never in any serious danger until, or unless, things went wrong
+in the south. The Austrians remained in contact (but no more), turned
+somewhat eastward in order to keep hold of the foe, when their advance
+was checked by the news, first of unexpected Russian strength, later
+of overwhelming Russian advances towards the south. Long before the
+third week in August, the first Austrian army was compelled to check
+its advance upon the news reaching it from the second, and its
+fortunes, in what it had intended to be a successful invasion of
+Russian Poland, had ended. For the whole meaning of the first Galician
+campaign turns after the 14th of August upon the great Russian advance
+in the south.
+
+It was upon that day, August 14, that the Russian force, under General
+Russky (which we will call the second army), crossed the frontier.
+Its right occupied Sokal, its centre left moved in line with the right
+upon von Auffenberg's force directly before it.
+
+The Russian mobilization had proceeded at a greater pace than the
+enemy had allowed for. The Russian numbers expected in this field
+appeared in far greater strength than this expectation had allowed
+for, and it was soon apparent that von Auffenberg's command would have
+to resist very heavy pressure.
+
+But it would be an error to imagine, as was too hastily concluded in
+the press of Western Europe at the time, that this pressure upon the
+front of the second Austrian army, with its dogged day after day
+fighting and mile by mile advance, was the principal deciding factor
+in the issue. That deciding factor was, in fact, the appearance upon
+the right flank of von Auffenberg of yet another Russian army (which
+we will call the third) under Brussilov. It was the menace of this
+force, unexpected, or at least unexpected in its great strength, which
+really determined the issue, though this was again affected by the
+tardiness of the Austrian retirement. Russky's direct advance upon
+the front of his enemy extended for a week. It had begun when it had
+destroyed the frontier posts upon Friday, the 14th. It was continued
+until the evening of the succeeding Thursday, regularly, slowly, but
+without intermission. It stood upon the Friday, the 21st--the day on
+which the first shots were fired at the main Franco-British forces in
+the West, and the day on which the first shell fell into Charleroi
+station--not more than one day's cavalry advance from the outer works
+of Lemberg, but it was just in that week-end that the pressure of
+Brussilov began to be felt.
+
+This third Russian army had come up from the south-east, supplied by
+the main Odessa railway through Tarnopol. It was manifestly
+threatening the right flank of von Auffenberg, and if a guess may be
+hazarded upon operations on which we have so little detail as yet, and
+which took place so far from our own standpoint, the error of the
+Austrian general seems to have consisted in believing that he could
+maintain himself against this flank attack. If this were the case (and
+it is the most probable explanation of what followed), the error
+would have been due to the same cause which affected all Austrian
+plans in these first days of the war--the mistake as to the rapidity
+with which Russia would complete her preparations.
+
+[Illustration: 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 the Sunday, 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 its commander 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 that it 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.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 70.]
+
+It was on Friday, the 28th of that month, 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 such considerable 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
+campaign which 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 than once 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 great _modern_ town, 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 and _machinery_ for 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 fall behind 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 not see. 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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
+show for 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 its _moral_ intact, 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 fallen _as
+prisoners_ into 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.
+
+
+TANNENBERG.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: 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 of Christendom. 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 within the 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, of _Borussia_
+(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 a particular 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. Its
+country-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 large German-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, would certainly 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 region will be clear. It is, in the
+technical language of military art, a labyrinth of _defiles_. 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 of
+retreat--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 similarly confined 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 with the 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.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 73.]
+
+From Eylau, through Osterode, the main 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 was imperfect, 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 the
+defensive, 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 arrow _a_ was 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
+superiority in 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 arrow _b_. 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 arrow _c_, 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
+arrow _d_, during the 30th and 31st, broke that retirement into two
+halves, one half (as at 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 reached Berlin 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.
+
+
+THE SPIRITS IN CONFLICT.
+
+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 physical self-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 to oppose 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 was so
+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 the United 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 see _things_, 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 would further 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 that lesson; 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 to understand 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. The barrier 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
+of the 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.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] The ultimatum expired at midnight (August 4-5) by Greenwich time,
+11 p.m. (August 4) by German, or Central European, time.
+
+[3] AA is holding the obstacle OO against a superior number BB. There
+are six passages across OO. If BB forces No. 5 and No. 6 he creates
+the situation in the following diagram, where it is obvious that BB is
+now on the flank of AA, and that AA must retire, even if he still
+holds passages 1, 2, 3, and 4. That is what happened when Namur fell.
+The French could hold, and were holding, the Germans along the Sambre,
+above Namur; but the bridges of Namur, which were thought safe behind
+the forts, had fallen into German hands.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 44.]
+
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A General Sketch of the European War, by 
+Hilaire Belloc
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR ***
+
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diff --git a/18042-0.zip b/18042-0.zip
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+Project Gutenberg's A General Sketch of the European War, by Hilaire Belloc
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A General Sketch of the European War
+       The First Phase
+
+Author: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2006 [EBook #18042]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A
+GENERAL SKETCH
+OF THE
+EUROPEAN WAR
+
+BY
+HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+THE FIRST PHASE
+
+
+THOMAS NELSON & COMPANY
+LONDON, EDINBURGH, PARIS, AND NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+_First published June 1, 1915_
+_Reprinted June 1915_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                    7
+
+
+PART I.
+
+THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.
+
+(1) THE GERMAN OBJECT                                          17
+
+(2) CONFLICT PRODUCED BY THE CONTRAST OF THIS GERMAN
+      ATTITUDE OR WILL WITH THE WILLS OF OTHER NATIONS         23
+
+(3) PRUSSIA                                                    27
+
+(4) AUSTRIA                                                    39
+
+(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR                           50
+
+(6) THE IMMEDIATE OCCASION OF THE WAR                          64
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE FORCES OPPOSED.
+
+(1) THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF THE BELLIGERENTS              80
+
+      The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of
+      the Germanic Body                                        86
+
+      The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of
+      the Allies                                              121
+
+(2) THE OPPOSING STRENGTHS                                    136
+
+      The Figures of the First Period, say to
+      October 1-31, 1914                                      145
+
+      The Figures of the Second Period, say to
+      April 15-June 1, 1915                                   151
+
+(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR                           164
+
+
+PART III.
+
+THE FIRST OPERATIONS.
+
+(1) THE BATTLE OF METZ                                        316
+
+(2) LEMBERG                                                   322
+
+(3) TANNENBERG                                                345
+
+(4) THE SPIRITS IN CONFLICT                                   365
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+It is the object of this book, and those which will succeed it in the
+same series, to put before the reader the main lines of the European
+War as it proceeds. Each such part must necessarily be completed and
+issued some little time after the events to which it relates have
+passed into history. The present first, or introductory volume, which
+is a preface to the whole, covers no more than the outbreak of
+hostilities, and is chiefly concerned with an examination of the
+historical causes which produced the conflict, an estimate of the
+comparative strength of the various combatants, and a description of
+the first few days during which these combatants took up their
+positions and suffered the first great shocks of the campaigns in East
+and West.
+
+But in order to serve as an introduction to the remainder of the
+series, it is necessary that the plan upon which these books are to
+be constructed should be clearly explained.
+
+There is no intention of giving in detail and with numerous exact maps
+the progress of the campaigns. Still less does the writer propose to
+examine disputed points of detail, or to enumerate the units employed
+over that vast field. His object is to make clear, as far as he is
+able, those great outlines of the business which too commonly escape
+the general reader.
+
+This war is the largest and the weightiest historical incident which
+Europe has known for many centuries. It will surely determine the
+future of Europe, and in particular the future of this country. Yet
+the comprehension of its movements is difficult to any one not
+acquainted with the technical language and the special study of
+military history; and the reading of the telegrams day by day, even
+though it be accompanied by the criticisms of the military experts in
+the newspapers, leaves the mass of men with a most confused conception
+of what happened and why it happened.
+
+Now, it is possible, by greatly simplifying maps, by further
+simplifying these into clear diagrams, still more by emphasizing what
+is essential and by deliberately omitting a crowd of details--by
+showing first the framework, as it were, of any principal movement,
+and then completing that framework with the necessary furniture of
+analysed record--to give any one a conception both of what happened
+and of how it happened.
+
+It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over which
+the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to the author
+of this), so to describe such ground to the reader that he will in
+some sort be able to see for himself the air and the view in which the
+things were done: thus more than through any other method will the
+things be made real to him. The aim, therefore, of these pages, and of
+those that will succeed them, is to give such a general idea of the
+campaigns as a whole as will permit whoever has grasped it a secure
+comprehension of the forces at work, and of the results of those
+forces. It is desired, for example, that the reader of these pages
+shall be able to say to himself: "The Germanic body expected to
+win--and no wonder, for it had such and such advantages in number and
+in equipment.... The first two battles before Warsaw failed, and I can
+see why. It was because the difficulties in Russian supply were met by
+a contraction of the Russian line.... The 1st German Army was
+compelled to retreat before Paris, and I can now see why that was so:
+as it turned to envelop the Allied line, a great reserve within the
+fortified zone of Paris threatened it, and forced it back."
+
+These main lines, and these only, are attempted in the present book,
+and in those that are to follow it in this series.
+
+The disadvantage of such a method is, of course, that the reader must
+look elsewhere for details, for the notices of a particular action,
+and the records of particular regiments. He must look for these to the
+large histories of the war, which will amply supply his curiosity in
+good time. But the advantage of the method consists in that it
+provides, as I hope, a foundation upon which all this bewildering
+multitude of detailed reading can repose.
+
+I set out, then, to give, as it were, the alphabet of the campaign,
+and I begin in this volume with the preliminaries to it--that is, its
+great political causes, deep rooted in the past; the particular and
+immediate causes which led to the outbreak of war; an estimate of the
+forces engaged; and the inception of hostilities.
+
+
+PLAN OF THIS BOOK.
+
+This first volume will cover three parts. In Part I. I shall write of
+The Causes of the War. In Part II. I shall Contrast the Forces
+Opposed. In Part III. (the briefest) I shall describe the First Shock.
+
+In Part I., where I deal first with the general or historical causes
+of the war, later with the particulars, I shall:--
+
+1. Define the German object which led up to it.
+
+2. Show how this object conflicted with the wills of other nations.
+
+3. Briefly sketch the rise of Prussia and of her domination over North
+Germany.
+
+4. Define the position of Austria-Hungary in the matter, and thus
+close the general clauses.
+
+5. The particular causes of the war will next be dealt with; the
+curious challenge thrown down to Great Britain by the German Fleet
+_before_ the German Empire had made secure its position on the
+Continent; the French advance upon Morocco; the coalition of the
+Balkan States against the remainder of the Turkish Empire in Europe.
+
+6. Lastly, in this First Part, I shall describe the immediate occasion
+of the war and its surroundings: the ultimatum issued by the
+Austro-Hungarian Government to the little kingdom of Servia.
+
+In Part II. I will attempt to present the forces opposed at the
+outbreak of war.
+
+First, the contrast in the geographical position of the Germanic
+Allies with their enemies, the French, the English, and the Russians.
+Secondly, the numbers of trained men prepared and the numbers of
+reserves available in at least the first year to the various numbers
+in conflict. Thirdly, the way in which the various enemies had thought
+of the coming war (which was largely a matter of theory in the lack of
+experience); in what either party has been right, and in what wrong,
+as events proved; and with what measure of foresight the various
+combatants entered the field.
+
+In Part III, I will very briefly describe the original armed
+dispositions for combat at the outbreak of war, the German aim upon
+the West, and the German orders to the Austrians upon the East; the
+overrunning of Belgium, and the German success upon the Sambre; then
+the pursuit of the Franco-British forces to the line Paris-Verdun, up
+to the eve of the successful counter-offensive undertaken by them in
+the first week of September. I will end by describing what were the
+contemporary events in the Eastern field: in its northern part the
+overrunning of East Prussia by the Russians, and the heavy blow which
+the Germans there administered to the invader; in its southern the
+Austrian opposition to the Russians on the Galician borders, and the
+breakdown of that opposition at Lemberg.
+
+My terminal date for this sketch will be the 5th of September.
+
+
+
+
+A GENERAL SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR.
+
+PART I.
+
+THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.
+
+
+War is the attempt of two human groups each to impose its will upon
+the other by force of arms. This definition holds of the most
+righteous war fought in self-defence as much as it does of the most
+iniquitous war of mere aggression. The aggressor, for instance,
+proposes to take the goods of his victim without the pretence of a
+claim. He is attempting to impose his will upon that victim. The
+victim, in resisting by force of arms, is no less attempting to impose
+his will upon the aggressor; and if he is victorious does effectually
+impose that will: for it is his will to prevent the robbery.
+
+Every war, then, arises from some conflict of wills between two human
+groups, each intent upon some political or civic purpose, conflicting
+with that of his opponent.
+
+War and all military action is but a means to a non-military end, to
+be achieved and realized in peace.
+
+Although arguable differences invariably exist as to the right or
+wrong of either party in any war, yet the conflicting wills of the two
+parties, the irreconcilable political objects which each has put
+before itself and the opposition between which has led to conflict,
+can easily be defined.
+
+They fall into two classes:--
+
+1. The general objects at which the combatants have long been aiming.
+
+2. The particular objects apparent just before, and actually
+provoking, the conflict.
+
+In the case of the present enormous series of campaigns, which occupy
+the energies of nearly all Europe, the general causes can be easily
+defined, and that without serious fear of contradiction by the
+partisans of either side.
+
+On the one hand, the Germanic peoples, especially that great majority
+of them now organized as the German Empire under the hegemony of
+Prussia, had for fully a lifetime and more been possessed of a certain
+conception of themselves which may be not unjustly put into the form
+of the following declaration. It is a declaration consonant with most
+that has been written from the German standpoint during more than a
+generation, and many of its phrases are taken directly from the
+principal exponents of the German idea.
+
+
+(I) THE GERMAN OBJECT.
+
+"We the Germans are in spirit one nation. But we are a nation the
+unity of which has been constantly forbidden for centuries by a number
+of accidents. None the less that unity has always been an ideal
+underlying our lives. Once or twice in the remote past it has been
+nearly achieved, especially under the great German emperors of the
+Middle Ages. Whenever it has thus been nearly achieved, we Germans
+have easily proved ourselves the masters of other societies around us.
+Most unfortunately our very strength has proved our ruin time and
+again by leading us into adventures, particularly adventures in
+Italy, which took the place of our national ideal for unity and
+disturbed and swamped it. The reason we have been thus supreme
+whenever we were united or even nearly united lay in the fact, which
+must be patent to every observer, that our mental, moral, and
+physical characteristics render us superior to all rivals. The German
+or Teutonic race can everywhere achieve, other things being equal,
+more than can any other race. Witness the conquest of the Roman Empire
+by German tribes; the political genius, commercial success, and final
+colonial expansion of the English, a Teutonic people; and the peculiar
+strength of the German races resident within their old homes on the
+Rhine, the Danube, the Weser, and the Elbe, whenever they were not
+fatally disunited by domestic quarrel or unwise foreign ideals. It was
+we who revivified the declining society of Roman Gaul, and made it
+into the vigorous mediæval France that was ruled from the North. It
+was we who made and conquered the heathen Slavs threatening Europe
+from the East, and who civilized them so far as they could be
+civilized. We are, in a word, and that patently not only to ourselves
+but to all others, the superior and leading race of mankind; and you
+have but to contrast us with the unstable Celt--who has never produced
+a State--the corrupt and now hopelessly mongrel Mediterranean or
+'Latin' stock, the barbarous and disorderly Slav, to perceive at once
+the truth of all we say.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 1.]
+
+"It so happens that the various accidents which interrupted our
+strivings for unity permitted other national groups, inferior morally
+and physically to our own, to play a greater part than such an
+inferiority warranted; and the same accidents permitted men of
+Teutonic stock, not inhabiting the ancient homes of the Teutons, but
+emigrated therefrom and politically separated from the German Empire,
+to obtain advantages in which we ourselves should have had a share,
+but which we missed. Thus England, a Teutonic country, obtained her
+vast colonial empire while we had not a ship upon the sea.
+
+"France, a nation then healthier than it is now, but still of much
+baser stock than our own, played for centuries the leading part in
+Western Europe; she is even to-day 'over-capitalized,' as it were,
+possessing a far greater hold over the modern world than her real
+strength warrants. Even the savage Slavs have profited by our former
+disunion, and the Russian autocracy not only rules millions of
+German-speaking subjects, but threatens our frontiers with its great
+numbers of barbarians, and exercises over the Balkan Peninsula, and
+therefore over the all-important position of Constantinople, a power
+very dangerous to European culture as a whole, and particularly to our
+own culture--which is, of course, by far the highest culture of all.
+
+"Some fifty years ago, acting upon the impulse of a group of great
+writers and thinkers, our statesmen at last achieved that German unity
+which had been the unrealized ideal of so many centuries. In a series
+of wars we accomplished that unity, and we amply manifested our
+superiority when we were once united by defeating with the greatest
+ease and in the most fundamental fashion the French, whom the rest of
+Europe then conceived to be the chief military power.
+
+"From that moment we have incontestably stood in the sight of all as
+the strongest people in the world, and yet because other and lesser
+nations had the start of us, our actual international position, our
+foreign possessions, the security that should be due to so supreme an
+achievement, did not correspond to our real strength and abilities.
+England had vast dependencies, and had staked out the unoccupied world
+as her colonies. We had no colonies and no dependencies. France,
+though decadent, was a menace to our peace upon the West. We could
+have achieved the thorough conquest and dismemberment of France at any
+time in the last forty years, and yet during the whole of that time
+France was adding to her foreign possessions in Tunis, Madagascar, and
+Tonkin, latterly in Morocco, while we were obtaining nothing. The
+barbarous Russians were increasing constantly in numbers, and somewhat
+perfecting their insufficient military machine without any
+interference from us, grave as was the menace from them upon our
+Eastern frontier.
+
+"It was evident that such a state of things could not endure. A nation
+so united and so immensely strong could not remain in a position of
+artificial inferiority while lesser nations possessed advantages in no
+way corresponding to their real strength. The whole equilibrium of
+Europe was unstable through this contrast between what Germany might
+be and what she was, and a struggle to make her what she might be
+from what she was could not be avoided.
+
+"Germany must, in fulfilment of a duty to herself, obtain colonial
+possessions at the expense of France, obtain both colonial possessions
+and sea-power at the expense of England, and put an end, by campaigns
+perhaps defensive, but at any rate vigorous, to the menace of Slav
+barbarism upon the East. She was potentially, by her strength and her
+culture, the mistress of the modern world, the chief influence in it,
+and the rightful determinant of its destinies. She must by war pass
+from a potential position of this kind to an actual position of
+domination."
+
+Such was the German mood, such was the fatuous illusion which produced
+this war. It had at its service, as we shall see later, _numbers_,
+and, backed by this superiority of numbers, it counted on victory.
+
+
+(2) CONFLICT PRODUCED BY THE CONTRAST OF THIS GERMAN ATTITUDE OR
+WILL WITH THE WILLS OF OTHER NATIONS.
+
+When we have clearly grasped the German attitude, as it may thus be
+not unfairly expressed, we shall not find it difficult to conceive
+why a conflict between such a will and other wills around it broke
+out.
+
+We need waste no time in proving the absurdity of the German
+assumptions, the bad history they involve, and the perverse and
+twisted perspective so much vanity presupposes. War can never be
+prevented by discovering the moral errors of an opponent. It comes
+into being because that opponent does not believe them to be moral
+errors; and in the attempt to understand this war and its causes, we
+should only confuse ourselves if we lost time over argument upon
+pretensions even as crassly unreal as these.
+
+It must be enough for the purposes of this to accept the German will
+so stated, and to see how it necessarily conflicts with the English
+will, the French will, the Russian will, and sooner or later, for that
+matter, with every other national will in Europe.
+
+In the matter of sea-power England would answer: "Unless we are
+all-powerful at sea, our very existence is imperilled." In the matter
+of her colonies and dependencies England would answer: "We may be a
+Teutonic people or we may not. All that kind of thing is pleasant talk
+for the academies. But if you ask whether we will allow any part of
+our colonies to become German or any part of our great dependencies to
+fall under German rule, the answer is in the negative."
+
+The French would answer: "We do not happen to think that we are either
+decadent or corrupt, nor do we plead guilty to any other of your vague
+and very pedantic charges; but quite apart from that, on the concrete
+point of whether we propose to be subjugated by a foreign Power,
+German or other, the answer is in the negative. Our will is here in
+conflict with yours. And before you can proceed to any act of mastery
+over us, you will have to fight. Moreover, we shall not put aside the
+duty of ultimately fighting you so long as a population of two
+millions, who feel themselves to be French (though most of them are
+German-speaking) and who detest your rule, are arbitrarily kept in
+subjection by you in Alsace-Lorraine."
+
+The Russians would reply: "We cannot help being numerically stronger
+than you, and we do not propose to diminish our numbers even if we
+could. We do not think we are barbaric; and as to our leadership of
+the Slav people in the Balkans, that seems as right and natural to us,
+particularly on religious grounds, as any such bond could be. It may
+interfere with your ambitions; but if you propose that we should
+abandon so obvious an attitude of leadership among the Slavs, the
+answer is in the negative." There is here, therefore, again a conflict
+of wills.
+
+In general, what the German peoples desired, based upon what they
+believed themselves to be, was sharply at issue with what the English
+people, what the French people, what the Russian people respectively
+desired. Their desires were also based upon what _they_ believed
+themselves to be, and they thought themselves to be very different
+from what Germany thought them to be. The English did not believe that
+they had sneaked their empire; the French did not believe that they
+were moribund; the Russians did not believe that they were savages.
+
+It was impossible that the German will should impose itself without
+coming at once into conflict with these other national wills. It was
+impossible that the German ideal should seek to realize itself without
+coming into conflict with the mere desire to live, let alone the
+self-respect, of everybody else.
+
+And the consequence of such a conflict in ideals and wills translated
+into practice was this war.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the war would not have come nor would it have taken the shape that
+it did, but for two other factors in the problem which we must next
+consider. These two other factors are, first, the position and
+tradition of Prussia among the German States; secondly, the peculiar
+authority exercised by the Imperial House of Hapsburg-Lorraine at
+Vienna over its singularly heterogeneous subjects.
+
+
+(3) PRUSSIA.
+
+The Germans have always been, during their long history, a race
+inclined to perpetual division and sub-division, accompanied by war
+and lesser forms of disagreement between the various sections. Their
+friends have called this a love of freedom, their enemies political
+incompetence; but, without giving it a good or a bad name, the plain
+fact has been, century after century, that the various German tribes
+would not coalesce. Any one of them was always willing to take service
+with the Roman Empire, in the early Roman days, against any one of the
+others, and though there have been for short periods more or less
+successful attempts to form one nation of them all in imitation of the
+more civilized States to the west and south, these attempts have never
+succeeded for very long.
+
+But it so happens that about two hundred years ago, or a little more,
+there appeared one body of German-speaking men rather different from
+the rest, and capable ultimately of leading the rest, or at least a
+majority of the rest.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 2.]
+
+I use the words "German-speaking" and "rather different" because this
+particular group of men, though speaking German, were of less pure
+German blood than almost any other of the peoples that spoke that
+tongue. They were the product of a conquest undertaken late in the
+Middle Ages by German knights over a mixed Pagan population,
+Lithuanian and Slavonic, which inhabited the heaths and forests along
+the Baltic Sea. These German knights succeeded in their task, and
+compelled the subject population to accept Christianity, just as the
+Germans themselves had been compelled to accept it by their more
+powerful and civilized neighbours the French hundreds of years before.
+The two populations of this East Baltic district, the large majority
+which was Slavonic and Lithuanian, and the minority which was really
+German, mixed and produced a third thing, which we now know as the
+_Prussian_. The cradle of this Prussian race was, then, all that flat
+country of which Königsberg and Danzig are the capitals, but
+especially Königsberg--"King's Town"--where the monarchs of this
+remote people were crowned. By an historical accident, which we need
+not consider, the same dynasty was, after it had lost all claim to
+separate kingship, merged in the rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg, a
+somewhat more German but still mixed district lying also in the Baltic
+plain, but more towards the west, and the official title of the
+Prussian ruler somewhat more than two hundred years ago was the
+Elector of Brandenburg. These rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg were a
+family bearing the title of Hohenzollern, a castle in South Germany,
+by which name they are still distinguished. The palace of these
+Hohenzollerns was henceforward at Berlin.
+
+Now, much at the same time that the civil wars were being fought in
+England--that is, not quite three hundred years ago--the Reformation
+had produced in Germany also very violent quarrels. Vienna, which was
+the seat of the Imperial House, stood for the Catholic or traditional
+cause, and most Germans adhered to that cause. But certain of the
+Northern German principalities and counties took up the side of the
+Reformation. A terrible war, known as the Thirty Years' War, was
+fought between the two factions. It enormously reduced the total
+population of Germany. In the absence of exact figures we only have
+wild guesses, such as a loss of half or three-quarters. At any rate,
+both from losses from the adherence of many princes to the Protestant
+cause and from the support lent to that cause for political reasons by
+Catholic France, this great civil war in Germany left the Protestant
+part more nearly equal in numbers to the Catholic part, and, among
+other things, it began to make the Elector of Brandenburg with his
+Prussians particularly prominent as the champion of the Protestant
+cause. For, of all the warring towns, counties, principalities, and
+the rest, Prussia had in particular shown military aptitude.
+
+From that day to this the advance of Prussia as, first, the champion,
+then the leader, and at last the master of Northern Germany as a whole
+(including many Catholic parts in the centre and the south), has been
+consistent and almost uninterrupted. The "Great Elector" (as he was
+called) formed an admirable army some two hundred years ago. His
+grandson Frederick formed a still better one, and by his great
+capacities as a general, as well as by the excellence of his troops,
+gave Prussia a military reputation in the middle of the eighteenth
+century which has occasionally been eclipsed, but has never been
+extinguished.
+
+Frederick the Great did more than this. He codified and gave
+expression, as it were, to the Prussian spirit, and the manifestation
+of that spirit in international affairs is generally called the
+"Frederician Tradition."
+
+This "Frederician Tradition" must be closely noted by the reader,
+because it is the principal moral cause of the present war. It may be
+briefly and honestly put in the following terms:--
+
+"The King of Prussia shall do all that may seem to advantage the
+kingdom of Prussia among the nations, notwithstanding any European
+conventions or any traditions of Christendom, or even any of those
+wider and more general conventions which govern the international
+conduct of other Christian peoples."
+
+For instance, if a convention of international morals has arisen--as
+it did arise very strongly, and was kept until recent times--that
+hostilities should not begin without a formal declaration of war, the
+"Frederician Tradition" would go counter to this, and would say: "If
+ultimately it would be to the advantage of Prussia to attack without
+declaration of war, then this convention may be neglected."
+
+Or, again, treaties solemnly ratified between two Governments are
+generally regarded as binding. And certainly a nation that never kept
+such a treaty for more than a week would find itself in a position
+where it was impossible to make any treaties at all. Still, if upon a
+vague calculation of men's memories, the acuteness of the
+circumstance, the advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to
+the advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a
+treaty should be broken.
+
+It will be apparent that what is called the "Frederician Tradition,"
+which is the soul of Prussia in her international relations, is not an
+unprincipled thing. It has a principle, and that principle is a
+patriotic desire to strengthen Prussia, which particular appetite
+overweighs all general human morals and far outweighs all special
+Christian or European morals.
+
+This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the
+Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or in
+acts of treason and bad faith. What it means is that, wherever they
+are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do _this_, which is to the advantage
+of my country but opposed to European and common morals, or _that_,
+which is consonant with those morals but to the disadvantage of my
+country?" they choose the former and not the latter course.
+
+Prussia, endowed with this doctrine and possessed of a most excellent
+military organization and tradition, stood out as the first military
+power in Europe until the French Revolution. The wars of the French
+Revolution and of Napoleon upset this prestige, and in the battle of
+Jena (1806) seemed to have destroyed it. But it was too strong to be
+destroyed. The Prussian Government was the first of Napoleon's allies
+to betray Napoleon _after_ the Russians had broken his power (1812).
+They took part with the other Allies in finishing off Napoleon after
+the Russian campaign (1813-14); they were present with decisive effect
+upon the final field of Waterloo (1815), and remained for fifty years
+afterwards the great military power they had always been. They had
+further added to their dominions such great areas in Northern
+Germany, beyond the original areas inhabited by the true Prussian
+stock, that they were something like half of the whole Northern German
+people when, in 1864, they entered into the last phase of their
+dominion. They began by asking Austria to help them in taking from
+Denmark, a small and weak country, not only those provinces of hers
+which spoke German, but certain districts which were Danish as well.
+France and England were inclined to interfere, but they did not yet
+understand the menace Prussia might be in the future, and they
+neglected to act. Two years later Prussia suddenly turned upon
+Austria, her ally, defeated her in a very short campaign, and insisted
+upon Austria's relinquishing for the future all claims over any part
+of the German-speaking peoples, save some ten millions in the valley
+of the Middle Danube and of the Upper Elbe. Four years later again, in
+1870, Prussia having arranged, after various political experiments
+which need not be here detailed, for the support of all the German
+States except Austria, fought a war with France, in which she was
+immediately and entirely successful, and in the course of which the
+rulers of the other German States consented (1) to give the
+Hohenzollern-Prussian dynasty supreme military power for the future
+over them, under the hereditary title of German Emperors; (2) to form
+a united nation under the more or less despotic power of these
+emperors.
+
+This latter point, the national unity, though really highly
+centralized at Berlin, especially on the military side, was softened
+in its rigour by a number of very wise provisions. A great measure of
+autonomy was left to the more important of the lesser States,
+particularly Catholic Bavaria; local customs were respected; and,
+above all, local dynasties were flattered, and maintained in all the
+trappings of sovereign rank.
+
+From that date--that is, for the last forty-four years--there has been
+a complete _Northern_ Germany, one strong, centralized, and thoroughly
+co-ordinated nation, in which the original Prussian domination is not
+only numerically far the greatest element, but morally overshadows all
+the rest. The spiritual influence ruling this state issues from Berlin
+and from the Prussian soul, although a large minority consist of
+contented but respectful Catholics, who, in all national matters,
+wholly sympathize with and take their cue from the Protestant North.
+
+So far one may clearly see what kind of power it is that has initiated
+the German theory of supremacy which we have described above, is
+prepared to lead it to battle, and is quite certain of leading it to
+victory.
+
+But we note--the fatal mark in all German history--that the unity is
+not complete. The ten millions of Austrian Germans were, when Prussia
+achieved this her highest ambition, deliberately left outside the new
+German Empire. And this was done because, in Prussian eyes, a
+so-called "German unity" was but a means to an end, and that end the
+aggrandizement of the Hohenzollern dynasty. To include so many
+southern and Catholic Germans would have endangered the mastery of
+Berlin. The fact that Austria ruled a number of non-German subjects
+far larger than her Austrian population would further have endangered
+the Hohenzollern position had Austria been admitted to the new German
+Empire, and had the consolidation of all Germans into one true state
+been really and loyally attempted. Lastly, it would have been
+impossible to destroy the historic claims to leadership of the
+Imperial Hapsburgs, and that, more than anything else, was the rivalry
+the Hohenzollerns dreaded. Once more had the Germans proved themselves
+incapable of, and unwilling to submit to, the discipline of unity.
+What part, then, was Austria, thus left out, to play in the
+international activity of Prussia in the future? What part especially
+was she to play when Prussia, at the head of Northern Germany, should
+go out to impose the will of that Germany and of herself upon the rest
+of the world? That is the next question we must answer before we can
+hope to understand the causes of the present war in their entirety.
+
+
+(4) AUSTRIA.
+
+Austria, or, more strictly speaking, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
+means no more than the congeries of States governed each separately
+and all in combination by the head of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine.
+Of these various States only one is German-speaking as a whole, and
+that is the Austrian State proper, the "Eastern States" (for that is
+what the word "Austria" originally meant) which Christendom erected
+round the Roman and Christian frontier town of Vienna to withstand the
+pressure of the heathen Slavs and Mongol Magyars surging against it
+upon this frontier.
+
+The complexity of the various sections which make up the realm of the
+present Emperor Francis Joseph, the present head of the House of
+Hapsburg-Lorraine, would be only confusing if it were detailed in so
+general a description as this. We must be content with the broad lines
+of the thing, which are as follows:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 3.]
+
+From the Upper Danube and its valley--all the basin of it, one may
+say, down to a point about twenty miles below Vienna--is the original
+Austrian State; German-speaking as a whole, and the historic centre of
+the entire agglomeration. East of this is the far larger state of
+Hungary, and Hungary is the valley of the river Danube, from where the
+German-speaking boundary cuts it, just below Vienna down to the Iron
+Gates, up to the crest of the Carpathians. These two great units of
+Austria proper and of Hungary have round them certain frills or edges.
+On the north are two great bodies, Slav in origin, Bohemia and
+Galicia; on the south another Slav body, separated from the rest for
+centuries by the eruption of the Magyars from Asia in the Dark Ages,
+and these Slav bodies are represented by Croatia, by much of Dalmatia,
+and latterly by Bosnia and Herzegovina, which have been governed by
+Austria for a generation, and formally annexed by her with the consent
+of Europe seven years ago. Finally, there is a strip, or, to be more
+accurate, there are patches of Italian-speaking people, all along the
+coasts of the Adriatic, and occupying the ports governed by Austria
+along the eastern and northern coast of that sea. There is also a belt
+of Alpine territory of Italian speech--the Trentino--still in Austrian
+hands.
+
+This very general description gives, however, far too rough an idea of
+the extraordinarily complicated territories of the House of Hapsburg.
+Thus, there are considerable German-speaking colonies in Hungary, and
+these, oddly enough, are more frequent in the east than in the west
+of that State. Again, the whole western slope of the Carpathians is,
+so far as the mass of the population is concerned, Roumanian in
+tongue, custom, and race. Bohemia, though Slavonic in origin, is
+regularly enframed along its four sides by belts of German-speaking
+people, and was mainly German-speaking until a comparatively recent
+revival of its native Slavonic tongue, the Czech. Again, though the
+Magyar language is Mongolian, like the Turkish, centuries of Christian
+and European admixture have left very little trace of the original
+race. Lastly, in all the north-eastern corner of this vast and
+heterogeneous territory, something like a quarter of the population is
+Jewish.
+
+The Western student, faced with so extraordinary a puzzle of race and
+language, may well wonder what principle of unity there is lying
+behind it, and, indeed, this principle of unity is not easy to find.
+
+Some have sought it in religion, pointing out that the overwhelming
+majority of these various populations are Catholic, in communion with
+Rome; and, indeed, this Catholic tincture or colour has a great deal
+to do with the Austro-Hungarian unity; and of late years the chief
+directing policy of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine has been to pose as
+the leader of the Catholic Slavs against the Slavs belonging to the
+Greek Church.
+
+But this principle of unity is not the true one, for two reasons:
+first, that the motive leading the House of Hapsburg to the difficult
+task of so complicated a government is not a religious motive; and,
+secondly, because this religious unity is subject to profound
+modification. Hungary, though Catholic in its majority, contains, and
+is largely governed by, powerful Protestant families, who are
+supported by considerable bodies of Protestant population. The Greek
+Church is the religious profession of great numbers along the Lower
+Danube valley and to the south of the river Save. There are in Bosnia
+a considerable number of Mahomedans even, and I have already mentioned
+the numerous Jewish population of the north-east, particularly in
+Galicia.
+
+The true principle of unity in what has hitherto been the
+Austro-Hungarian Empire is twofold. It consists, first, in the
+reigning family, considerable personal attachment to which is felt in
+every section of its dominions, utterly different as these are one
+from another; and, secondly (a more important point), in the
+historical development of the State.
+
+It is this last matter which explains all, and which can make us
+understand why a realm so astonishingly ill constructed was brought
+into the present struggle as one force, and that force a force allied
+to, and in a military sense identical with, modern Prussian Germany.
+
+For the historical root of Austria-Hungary is German. Of its
+population (some fifty-one millions) you may say that only about a
+quarter are German-speaking (less than another quarter are
+Magyar-speaking, most of the rest Slavonic in speech, together with
+some proportion of Roumanian and Italian).
+
+But it is from this German _quarter_ and from the emperor at their
+head that the historical growth of the State depends, because this
+German _quarter_ was the original Christian nucleus and the civilized
+centre, which had for its mission the reduction of Slavonic and Magyar
+barbarism. The Slavs of the Bohemian quadrilateral were subjected,
+not indeed by conquest, but by a process of culture, to Vienna. The
+crown of Hungary, when it fell by marriage to the Hapsburgs, continued
+that tradition; and when the Empress Maria-Theresa, in the last
+century, participated in the abominable crime of Frederick the Great
+of Prussia, and took her share of the dismembered body of Poland (now
+called the Austrian province of Galicia), that enormous blunder was,
+in its turn, a German blunder undertaken under the example of Northern
+Germany, and as part of a movement German in spirit and origin. The
+same is true even of the very latest of the Austrian developments, the
+annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The act was that of Vienna, but
+the spirit behind it, perhaps the suggestion of it, and the support
+that made it possible came from Berlin.
+
+In a word, if you could interrogate the Genius of the Hapsburgs and
+ask it for what their dominion stood, it would tell you that for
+uninterrupted centuries they had stood for the German effort to
+repress or to overcome pressure upon the German peoples from the
+East. And that is still their rôle. They have come into this war, for
+instance, as the servants of Prussia, not because Prussia threatened
+or overawed them, but because they felt they had, in common with
+Prussia, the mission of withstanding the Slav, or of tolerating the
+Slav only as a subject; because, that is, they feared, and were
+determined to resist, Russia, and the smaller Slavonic States, notably
+Servia to the south, which are in the retinue of Russia.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We may sum up, then, and say that the fundamental conflict of wills in
+Europe, which has produced this general war, is a conflict between the
+German will, organized by Prussia to overthrow the ancient Christian
+tradition of Europe (to _her_ advantage directly; and indirectly, as
+she proposes, to the advantage of a supposedly necessary German
+governance of the world under Prussian organization), and the will of
+the more ancient and better founded Western and Latin tradition to
+which the sanctity of separate national units profoundly appeals, and
+a great deal more which is, in their eyes, civilization. In this
+conflict, Prussia has called upon and received the support of not only
+the German Empire, which she controls, but also the Hapsburg monarchy,
+controlling the organized forces of Austria-Hungary; while there has
+appeared against this strange Prussian claim all that values the
+Christian tradition of Europe, and in particular the doctrine of
+national freedom, with very much else--which very much else are the
+things by which we of the civilized West and South, who have hitherto
+proved the creators of the European world, live and have our being.
+Allied with us, by the accident that this same German claim threatens
+them also, is the young new world of the Slavs.
+
+It is at this final point of our examination that we may see the
+immensity of the issues upon which the war turns. The two parties are
+really fighting for their lives; that in Europe which is arrayed
+against the Germanic alliance would not care to live if it should fail
+to maintain itself against the threat of that alliance. It is for them
+life and death. On the other side, the Germans having propounded this
+theory of theirs, or rather the Prussians having propounded it for
+them, there is no rest possible until they shall either have "made
+good" to our destruction, or shall have been so crushed that a
+recurrence of the menace from them will for the future be impossible.
+
+There is here no possibility of such a "draw" or "stalemate" as was
+the result, for instance, of the reduction of Louis XIV.'s ambition,
+or of the great revolutionary effort throughout Europe which ended
+with the fall of Napoleon. Louis XIV.'s ambition cast over Europe,
+which received it favourably, the colour of French culture. The
+Revolutionary Wars were fought for a principle which, if it did not
+appeal universally to men, appealed at least to all those millions
+whose instincts were democratic in every country. But in this war
+there is no such common term. No one outside the districts led by
+Prussia desires a Prussian life, and perhaps most, certainly many, of
+those whom Prussia now leads are in different degrees unwilling to
+continue a Prussian life. The fight, in a word, is not like a fight
+with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign away some property,
+or make you acknowledge some principle to which you are already half
+inclined; it is like a fight with a man who says, "So long as I have
+life left in me, I will make it my business to kill you." And fights
+of that kind can never reach a term less absolute than the destruction
+of offensive power in one side or the other. A peace not affirming
+complete victory in this great struggle could, of its nature, be no
+more than a truce.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So much for the really important and the chief thing which we have to
+understand--the general causes of the war.
+
+Now let us turn to the particular causes. We shall find these to be,
+not like the general causes, great spiritual attitudes, but, as they
+always are, a sequence of restricted and recent _events_.
+
+
+(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR.
+
+After the great victories of Prussia a generation ago (the spoliation
+of Denmark in 1864, the supremacy established over Austria in 1866,
+the crushing defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine,
+with two millions of people in 1870-1), Europe gradually drifted into
+being an armed camp, the great forces of which were more or less in
+equilibrium. Prussia had, for the moment at least, achieved all that
+she desired. The French were for quite twenty years ardently desirous
+of recovering what they had lost; but Europe would not allow the war
+to be renewed, and Prussia, now at the head of a newly constituted
+German Empire, made an arrangement with Austria and with Italy to curb
+the French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before
+this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support
+them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking
+another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling
+gradually deadened. It did not disappear--any incident might have
+revived it--but the anxious desire for immediate war when the
+opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the
+process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all
+the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock, every one very
+heavily armed, the principal antagonists, France and Germany, armed
+to their utmost, but the European States, as a whole, unwilling to
+allow any one of them to break the peace.
+
+It was about this moment that Prussia committed what the future
+historian will regard, very probably, as the capital blunder in her
+long career of success. She began to build a great fleet. Here the
+reader should note two very important consequences of the great
+Prussian victories which had taken place a generation before. The
+first was the immense expansion of German industrialism. Germany, from
+an agricultural State, became a State largely occupied in mining,
+smelting, spinning, and shipbuilding; and there went with this
+revolution, as there always goes with modern industrialism, a large
+and unhealthy increase of population. The German Empire, after its war
+with France, was roughly equal to the population of the French; but
+the German Empire, after this successful industrial experiment, the
+result of its victories, was much more than half as large again in
+population as the French (68 to 39).
+
+Secondly, the German Empire developed a new and very large maritime
+commerce. This second thing did not follow, as some have imagined it
+does, from the first. Germany might have exported largely without
+exporting in her own ships. The creation of Germany's new mercantile
+marine was a deliberate part of the general Prussian policy of
+expansion. It was heavily subsidized, especially directed into the
+form of great international passenger lines, and carefully
+co-ordinated with the rest of the Prussian scheme throughout the
+world.
+
+At a date determined by the same general policy, and somewhat
+subsequent to the first creation of this mercantile marine, came the
+decision to build a great fleet. Now, it so happens that Great Britain
+alone among the Powers of Europe depends for her existence upon
+supremacy at sea, and particularly upon naval superiority in the
+Narrow Seas to the east and the south of the British islands.
+
+Such a necessity is, of course, a challenge to the rest of the world,
+and it would be ridiculous to expect the rest of the world to accept
+that challenge without protest. But a necessity this naval policy of
+Great Britain remains none the less. The moment some rival or group
+of rivals can overcome her fleet, her mere physical livelihood is in
+peril. She cannot be certain of getting her food. She cannot be
+certain of getting those foreign materials the making up of which
+enables her to purchase her food. Further, her dominions are scattered
+oversea, and supremacy at sea is her only guarantee of retaining the
+various provinces of her dominion.
+
+It is a case which has happened more than once before in the history
+of the world. Great commercial seafaring States have arisen; they have
+always had the same method of government by a small, wealthy class,
+the same ardent patriotism, the same scattered empire, and the same
+inexorable necessity of maintaining supremacy at sea. Only one Power
+had hitherto rendered this country anxious for the Narrow Seas: that
+Power was France, and it only controlled one-half of the two branches
+of the Narrow Seas, the North Sea and the Channel. It had been for
+generations a cardinal piece of English policy that the French Fleet
+should be watched, the English Fleet maintained overwhelmingly
+superior to it, and all opportunities for keeping France engaged with
+other rivals used to the advantage of this country. On this account
+English policy leant, on the whole, towards the German side, during
+all the generation of rivalry between France and Germany which
+followed the war of 1870.
+
+But when the Germans began to build their fleet, things changed. The
+Germans had openly given Europe to understand that they regarded
+Holland and Belgium, and particularly the port of Antwerp, as
+ultimately destined to fall under their rule or into their system.
+Their fleet was specifically designed for meeting the British Fleet;
+it corresponded to no existing considerable colonial empire, and
+though the development of German maritime commerce was an excuse for
+it, it was only an excuse. Indeed, the object of obtaining supremacy
+at sea was put forward fairly clearly by the promoters of the whole
+scheme. Great Britain was therefore constrained to transfer the weight
+of her support to Russia and to France, and to count on the whole as a
+force opposed, for the first time in hundreds of years, to North
+Germany in the international politics of Europe. Similarity of
+religion (which is a great bond) and a supposed identity (and partly
+real similarity) of race were of no effect compared with this
+sentiment of necessity.
+
+Here it is important to note that the transference of British support
+from one continental group to another neither produced aggression by
+Great Britain nor pointed to any intention of aggression. It is a
+plain matter of fact, which all future history will note, that the
+very necessity in English eyes of English supremacy at sea, and the
+knowledge that such a supremacy was inevitably a provocation to
+others, led to the greatest discretion in the use of British naval
+strength, and, in general, to a purely defensive and peaceful policy
+upon the part of the chief maritime power. It would, indeed, have been
+folly to have acted otherwise, for there was nothing to prevent the
+great nations, our rivals, if they had been directly menaced by the
+British superiority at sea, from beginning to build great fleets,
+equal or superior to our own. Germany alone pursued this policy, with
+no excuse save an obvious determination to undo the claim of the
+British Fleet.
+
+I have called this a blunder, and, from the point of view of the
+German policy, it was a blunder. For if the Prussian dynasty set out,
+as it did, to make itself the chief power in the world, its obvious
+policy was to deal with its enemies in detail. It ought not, at any
+cost, to have quarrelled with Russia until it had finally disposed of
+France. If it was incapable, through lack of subtlety, to prevent the
+Franco-Russian group from forming, it should at least have made itself
+the master of that group before gratuitously provoking the rivalry of
+Great Britain. But "passion will have all now," and the supposedly
+cold and calculating nature of Prussian effort has about it something
+very crudely emotional, as the event has shown. From about ten years
+ago Prussian Germany had managed to array against itself not only the
+old Franco-Russian group but Great Britain as well.
+
+This arrangement would not, however, have led to war. Equilibrium was
+still perfectly maintained, and the very strong feeling throughout all
+the great States of Europe that a disturbance of the peace would mean
+some terrible catastrophe, to be avoided at all costs, was as
+powerful as ever.
+
+The true origin of disturbance, the first overt act upon which you can
+put your finger and say, "Here the chain of particular causes leading
+to the great war begins," was the revolution in Turkey. This
+revolution took place in the year 1908, and put more or less
+permanently into power at Constantinople a group of men based upon
+Masonic influence, largely Western in training, largely composed of
+Jewish elements, known as the "Young Turks."
+
+The first result of this revolution, followed as it inevitably was by
+the temporary weakening in international power which accompanies all
+civil war at its outset, was the declaration by Austria that she would
+regard the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina--hitherto only
+administrated by her and nominally still Turkish--as her own
+territory.
+
+It was but a formal act, but it proved of vast consequence. It was an
+open declaration by a Germanic Power that the hopes of the Servians,
+the main population of the district and a Slav nation closely bound
+to Russia in feeling, were at an end; that Servia must content herself
+with such free territory as she had, and give up all hope of a
+completely independent State uniting all Servians within its borders.
+It was as though Austria had said, "I intend in future to be the great
+European Power in the Balkans, Slav though the Balkans are, and I
+challenge Russia to prevent me." The Russian Government, thus
+challenged, would perhaps have taken the occasion to make war had not
+the French given it to be understood that they would not imperil
+European peace for such an object. The Prussian Government of the
+German Empire had, in all this crisis, acted perhaps as the leader,
+certainly as the protector and supporter of Austria; and when France
+thus refused to fight, and Russia in turn gave way, the whole thing
+was regarded, not only in Germany but throughout the world, as
+equivalent to an armed victory. Observers whose judgment and criticism
+are of weight, even in the eyes of trained international agents,
+proclaimed what had happened to be as much a Prussian success as
+though the Prussian and Austrian armies had met in the field and had
+defeated the Russian and the French forces.
+
+The next step in this series was a challenge advanced by Germany
+against that arrangement whereby Morocco, joining as it did to French
+North Africa, should be abandoned to French influence, so far as
+England was concerned, in exchange for the French giving up certain
+rights of interference they had in the English administration of
+Egypt, and one or two other minor points. Germany, advancing from a
+victorious position acquired over the Bosnian business, affirmed (in
+the year 1911) her right to be consulted over the Moroccan settlement.
+Nor were the French permitted to occupy Morocco until they had ceded
+to Germany a portion of their African colony of the Congo. This
+transaction was confused by many side issues. German patriots did not
+regard it as a sufficient success, though French patriots certainly
+regarded it as a grave humiliation. But perhaps the chief consequence
+of the whole affair was the recrudescence in the French people as a
+whole of a temper, half forgotten, which provoked them to withstand
+the now greatly increased power of the German Empire and of its ally,
+and to determine that if such challenges were to continue unchecked
+during the coming years, the national position of France would be
+forfeited.
+
+Following upon this crisis came, in the next year--still a consequence
+of the Turkish Revolution--the sudden determination of the Balkan
+States, including Greece, to attack Turkey. It was the King of
+Montenegro (a small Slav State which had always maintained its
+independence) who fired the first shot upon the 8th of October, 1912,
+with his own hand. In the course of that autumn the Balkan Allies were
+universally successful, failed only in taking Constantinople itself,
+reduced Turkey in Europe to an insignificant strip of territory near
+the capital itself, and proceeded to settle the conquered territory
+according to an agreement made by them before the outbreak of
+hostilities.
+
+But here the Germanic Powers again intervened. The defeated Turkish
+Army had been trained by German officers upon a German system; the
+expansion of German and Austrian political military influence
+throughout the Near East was a cardinal part of the German creed and
+policy. Through Austria the Balkans were to be dominated at last, and
+Austria, at this critical moment, vetoed the rational settlement which
+the allied Balkan States had agreed to among themselves. She would not
+allow the Servians to annex those territories inhabited by men of
+their race, and to reach their natural outlet to the sea upon the
+shores of the Adriatic. She proposed the creation of a novel State of
+Albania under a German prince, to block Servia's way to the sea. She
+further proposed to Servia compensation by way of Servia's annexing
+the territory round Monastir, which had a Bulgarian population, and to
+Bulgaria the insufficient compensation of taking over, farther to the
+east, territory that was not Bulgarian at all, but mixed Greek and
+Turkish.
+
+The whole thing was characteristically German in type, ignoring and
+despising national feeling and national right, creating artificial
+boundaries, and flagrantly sinning against the European sense of
+patriotism. A furious conflict between the various members of the
+former Balkan Alliance followed; but the settlement which Austria had
+virtually imposed remained firm, and the third of the great Germanic
+steps affirming the growing Germanic scheme in Europe had been taken.
+
+But it had been taken at the expense of further and very gravely
+shaking the already unstable armed equilibrium of Europe.
+
+The German Empire foresaw the coming strain; a law was passed
+immediately increasing the numbers of men to be trained to arms within
+its boundaries, and ultimately increasing that number so largely as to
+give to Germany alone a very heavy preponderance--a preponderance of
+something like thirty per cent.--over the corresponding number trained
+in France.
+
+To this move France could not reply by increasing her armed forces,
+because she already took every available man. She did the only
+possible thing under the circumstances. She increased by fifty per
+cent. the term during which her young men must serve in the army,
+changing that term from two years to three.
+
+The heavy burden thus suddenly imposed upon the French led to very
+considerable political disputes in that country, especially as the
+parliamentary form of government there established is exceedingly
+unpopular, and the politicians who live by it generally despised.
+When, therefore, the elections of last year were at hand, it seemed as
+though this French increase of military power would be in jeopardy.
+Luckily it was maintained, in spite of the opposition of fairly honest
+but uncritical men like Jaurés, and of far less reputable professional
+politicians.
+
+Whether this novel strain upon the French people could have been long
+continued we shall never know, for, in the heat of the debates
+provoked by this measure and its maintenance, came the last events
+which determined the great catastrophe.
+
+
+(6) THE IMMEDIATE OCCASION OF THE WAR.
+
+We have seen how constantly and successfully Austria had supported the
+general Prussian thesis in Europe, and, in particular, the
+predominance of the German Powers over the Slav.
+
+We have seen how, in pursuit of this policy, the sharpest friction was
+always suffered at the danger-point of _Servia_. Servia was the Slav
+State millions of whose native population were governed against their
+will by Austro-Hungarian officials. Servia was the Slav State mortally
+wounded by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And Servia was
+the Slav State which Austria had in particular mortified by forbidding
+her access to the Adriatic, and by imposing upon her an unnatural
+boundary, even after her great victories of the Balkan War.
+
+The heir to the Hapsburgs--the man who, seeing the great age of his
+uncle, might at any moment ascend the throne--was the Archduke
+Francis. He had for years pursued one consistent policy for the
+aggrandizement of his House, which policy was the pitting of the
+Catholic Slavs against the Orthodox Slavs, thereby rendering himself
+in person particularly odious to the Orthodox Serbs, so many of whose
+compatriots and co-religionists were autocratically governed against
+their will in the newly annexed provinces.
+
+To the capital of these provinces, Sarajevo, he proceeded in state in
+the latter part of last June, and there, through the emissaries of
+certain secret societies (themselves Austrian subjects, but certainly
+connected with the population of independent Servia, and, as some
+claimed, not unconnected with the Servian Government itself), he was
+assassinated upon Saturday, the 28th of June, 1914.
+
+For exactly a month, the consequences of this event--the provocation
+which it implied to Austria, the opportunity which it gave the
+Hapsburgs for a new and more formidable expression of Germanic power
+against the Slavs--were kept wholly underground. _That is the most
+remarkable of all the preliminaries to the war._ There was a month of
+silence after so enormous a moment. Why? In order to give Germany and
+Austria a start in the conflict already long designed. Military
+measures were being taken secretly, stores of ammunition overhauled,
+and all done that should be necessary for a war which was premeditated
+in Berlin, half-feared, half-desired in Vienna, and dated for the end
+of July--after the harvest.
+
+The Government of Berlin was, during the whole of this period,
+actively engaged in forcing Austria forward in a path to which she was
+not unwilling; and, at last, upon the 23rd of July, Europe was amazed
+to read a note sent by the Imperial Governor at Vienna to the Royal
+Government in the Servian capital of Belgrade, which note was of a
+kind altogether unknown hitherto in the relations between Christian
+States. This note demanded not only the suppression of patriotic, and
+therefore anti-Austrian, societies in Servia (the assassins of the
+Crown Prince had been, as I have said, not Servian but Austrian
+subjects), but the public humiliation of the Servian Government by an
+apology, and even an issue of the order of the day to the Servian
+Army, so recently victorious, abasing that army to the worst
+humiliation. The note insisted upon a specific pledge that the Servian
+Government should renounce all hope of freeing the Servian nation as a
+whole from foreign government, and in many another clause subjected
+this small nation to the most thorough degradation ever suggested by a
+powerful European people towards a lesser neighbour.
+
+So far, though an extreme hitherto unknown in European history had
+been reached, the matter was one of degree. Things of the same sort,
+less drastic, had been known in the past.
+
+But what was novel in the note, and what undoubtedly proceeded from
+the suggestion of the Prussian Government (which was in all this the
+real agent behind Austria), _was the claim of the Austrian Government
+to impose its own magistrates upon the Servian courts, and to condemn
+at will those subjects of the Servian king and those officers holding
+his commission whom Austria might select so to condemn, and that to
+penalties at the goodwill and pleasure of Austria alone_. In other
+words, Austria claimed full rights of sovereignty within the territory
+of her small neighbour and enemy, and the acceptation of the note by
+Servia meant not only the preponderance of Austria for the future over
+the Slavs of the Balkans, but her continued and direct power over that
+region in the teeth of national and religious sentiment, and in clean
+despite of Russia.
+
+So strong was the feeling still throughout Europe in favour of
+maintaining peace and of avoiding the awful crash of our whole
+international system that Russia advised Servia to give way, and the
+Germanic Powers were on the eve of yet another great success, far more
+important and enduring than anything they had yet achieved. The only
+reservation which Servia was permitted by the peaceful Powers of
+Europe, and in particular by Russia, to make was that, upon three
+points which directly concerned her sovereignty, Austria should admit
+the decision of a Court of Arbitration at the Hague. But the
+time-limit imposed--which was the extraordinarily short one of
+forty-eight hours--was maintained by Austria, and upon the advice, as
+we now know, of Berlin, no modification whatever in the demands was
+tolerated. Upon the 25th, therefore, the Austrian Minister left
+Belgrade. There followed ten days, the exact sequence of events in
+which must be carefully noted if we are to obtain a clear view of the
+origin of the war.
+
+Upon that same day, Saturday, July 25th, the English Foreign Office,
+through Sir Edward Grey, suggested a scheme whereby the approaching
+cataclysm (for Russia was apparently determined to support Servia)
+might be averted. He proposed that all operations should be suspended
+while the Ambassadors of Germany, Italy, and France consulted with him
+in London.
+
+What happened upon the next day, Sunday, is exceedingly important.
+The German Government refused to accept the idea of such a conference,
+but at the same time the German Ambassador in London, Prince
+Lichnowski, was instructed to say that the principle of such a
+conference, or at least of mediation by the four Powers, was agreeable
+to Berlin. _The meaning of this double move was that the German
+Government would do everything it could to retard the entry into the
+business of the Western Powers, but would do nothing to prevent
+Russia, Servia, and the Slav civilization as a whole from suffering
+final humiliation or war._
+
+That game was played by Germany clumsily enough for nearly a full
+week. Austria declared war upon Servia upon Monday the 27th; but we
+now know that her intention of meeting Russia halfway, when she saw
+that Russia would not retire, was stopped by the direct intervention
+of the Prussian Government. In public the German Foreign Office still
+pretended that it was seeking some way out of the crisis. In private
+it prevented Austria from giving way an inch from her extraordinary
+demands. And all the while Germany was secretly making her first
+preparations for war.
+
+It might conceivably be argued by a special pleader that war was not
+the only intention of Berlin, as most undoubtedly it had not been the
+only intention of Vienna. Such a plea would be false, but one can
+imagine its being advanced. What is not capable even of discussion is
+the fact that both the Germanic Powers, under the unquestioned
+supremacy of Prussia, _were_ determined to push Russia into the
+dilemma between an impossible humiliation and defeat in the field.
+They allowed for the possibility that she would prefer humiliation,
+because they believed it barely possible (though all was ready for the
+invasion of France at a moment already fixed) that the French would
+again fail to support their ally. But war was fixed, and its date was
+fixed, with Russia, or even with Russia and France, and the Germanic
+Powers arranged to be ready before their enemies. In order to effect
+this it was necessary to deceive the West at least into believing that
+war could after all be avoided.
+
+One last incident betrays in the clearest manner how thoroughly
+Prussia had determined on war, and on a war to break out at her own
+chosen moment. It was as follows:
+
+As late as Thursday, the 30th of July, Austria was still willing to
+continue a discussion with Russia. The Austrian Government on that day
+expressed itself as willing to reopen negotiations with Russia. The
+German Ambassador at Vienna got wind of this. He communicated it at
+once to Berlin. _Germany immediately stopped any compromise, by
+framing that very night and presenting upon the next day, Friday the
+31st, an ultimatum to Russia and to France._
+
+Now, the form of these two ultimata and the events connected with them
+are again to be carefully noted, for they further illuminate us upon
+the German plan. That to Russia, presented by the German Ambassador
+Portales, had been prepared presupposing the just possible humiliation
+and giving way of Russia; and all those who observed this man's
+attitude and manner upon discovering that Russia would indeed fight
+rather than suffer the proposed humiliation, agreed that it was the
+attitude and manner of an anxious man. The ultimatum to France had,
+upon the contrary, not the marks of coercion, but of unexpected and
+violent haste. If Russia was really going to fight, what could Prussia
+be sure of in the West? It was the second great and crude blunder of
+Prussian diplomacy that, instead of making any efforts to detach
+France from Russia, it first took the abandonment of Russia by France
+for granted, and then, with extreme precipitancy, asked within the
+least possible delay whether France would fight. That precipitancy
+alone lent to the demand a form which ensured the exact opposite of
+what Prussia desired.
+
+This double misconception of the effect of her diplomatic action
+dates, I say, from Friday, the 31st of July, and that day is the true
+opening day of the great war. Upon Sunday, the 2nd of August, the
+German army violated the neutrality of Luxembourg, seizing the railway
+passing through that State into France, and pouring into its neutral
+territory her covering troops. On the same day, the French general
+mobilization was ordered; the French military authorities having lost,
+through the double action of Germany, about five days out of, say,
+eleven--nearly half the mobilization margin--by which space of time
+German preparations were now ahead of theirs.
+
+There followed, before the action state of general European conflict,
+the third German blunder, perhaps the most momentous, and certainly
+the most extraordinary: that by which Germany secured the hitherto
+exceedingly uncertain intervention of England against herself.
+
+Of all the great Powers involved, Great Britain had most doubtfully to
+consider whether she should or should not enter the field.
+
+On the one hand, she was in moral agreement with Russia and France; on
+the other hand, she was bound to them by no direct alliance, and
+successive British Governments had, for ten years past, repeatedly
+emphasized the fact that England was free to act or not to act with
+France according as circumstances might decide her.
+
+Many have criticized the hesitation, or long weighing of circumstance,
+which astonished us all in the politicians during these few days, but
+no one, whether friendly to or critical of a policy of neutrality, can
+doubt that such a policy was not only a possible but a probable one.
+The Parliamentarians were not unanimous, the opposition to the great
+responsibility of war was weighty, numerous, and strong. The
+financiers, who are in many things the real masters of our
+politicians, were all for standing out. In the face of such a
+position, in the crisis of so tremendous an issue, Germany, instead of
+acting as best she could to secure the neutrality of Great Britain,
+simply took that neutrality for granted!
+
+Upon one specific point a specific question was asked of her
+Government. To Great Britain, as we have seen in these pages, the
+keeping from the North Sea coast of all great hostile Powers is a
+vital thing. The navigable Scheldt, Antwerp, the approaches to the
+Straits of Dover, are, and have been since the rise of British
+sea-power, either in the hands of a small State or innocuous to us
+through treaty. Today they are the possession of Belgium, an
+independent State erected by treaty after the great war, and
+neutralized by a further guarantee in 1839. This neutrality of Belgium
+had been guaranteed in a solemn treaty not only by France and England,
+but by Prussia herself; and the British Government put to the French
+and to the Germans alike the question whether (now they were at war)
+that neutrality would be respected. The French replied in the
+affirmative; the Germans, virtually, in the negative. But it must not
+be said that this violation of international law and of her own word
+by Germany automatically caused war with England.
+
+_The German Ambassador was not told that if Belgian territory was
+violated England would fight_; he was only told that if that territory
+were violated England _might_ fight.
+
+The Sunday passed without a decision. On Monday the point was, as a
+matter of form, laid before Parliament, though the House of Commons
+has no longer any real control over great national issues. In a speech
+which certainly inclined towards English participation in the war
+should Germany invade Belgium, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs
+summed up the situation before a very full House.
+
+In the debate that followed many, and even passionate, speeches were
+delivered opposing the presence of England in the field and claiming
+neutrality. Some of these speeches insisted upon the admiration felt
+by the speaker for modern Germany and Prussia; others the ill judgment
+of running the enormous risk involved in such a campaign. These
+protests will be of interest to history, but the House of Commons as a
+whole had, of course, no power in the matter, and sat only to register
+the decisions of its superiors. There was in the Cabinet resignation
+of two members, in the Ministry the resignation of a third, the
+threatened resignation of many more.
+
+Meanwhile, upon that same day, August 3rd, following with
+superstitious exactitude the very hour upon which, on the very same
+day, the French frontier had been crossed in 1870, the Germans entered
+Belgian territory.
+
+The Foreign Office's thesis underlying the declaration of its
+spokesman, Sir Edward Grey, carried the day with the politicians in
+power, and upon Tuesday, August 4th, Great Britain joined Russia and
+France, at war with the Prussian Power. There followed later the
+formal declaration of war by France as by England against Austria, and
+with the first week in August the general European struggle had
+opened.
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE FORCES OPPOSED.
+
+
+Here, then, at the beginning of August 1914, are the five great Powers
+about to engage in war.
+
+Russia, France, and Great Britain, whom we will call the Allies, are
+upon one side; the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, whom we will
+call the Germanic Powers, are upon the other.
+
+We must at the outset, if we are to understand the war at all, see how
+these two combatant groups stood in strength one against the other
+when the war broke out. And to appreciate this contrast we must know
+two things--their geographical situation, and their respective weight
+in arms. For before we can judge the chances of two opponents in war,
+we have to know how they stand physically one to the other upon the
+surface of the earth, or we cannot judge how one will attack the
+other, or how each will defend itself against the other. And we must
+further be able to judge the numbers engaged both at the beginning of
+the struggle and arriving in reinforcement as the struggle proceeds,
+because upon those numbers will mainly depend the final result.
+
+Having acquired these two fundamental pieces of information, we must
+acquire a third, which is _the theories of war_ held upon either side,
+and some summary showing which of these theories turned out in
+practice to be right, and which wrong.
+
+For, after a long peace, the fortune of the next war largely depends
+upon which of various guesses as to the many changes that have taken
+place in warfare and in weapons will be best supported by practice,
+and what way of using new weapons will prove the most effective. Until
+the test of war is applied, all this remains guess-work; but under the
+conditions of war it ceases to be guess-work, and becomes either
+corroborated by experience or exploded, as the case may be. And of two
+opponents after a long peace, that one which has had the most
+foresight and has guessed best what the effect of changes in armament
+and the rest will effect in practice is that one who has the best
+chance of victory.
+
+We are going, then, in this Second Part, of the little book, to see,
+first, the geographical position of the belligerents; secondly, their
+effective numbers; and, thirdly, what theories of war each held, and
+how far each was right or wrong.
+
+
+(1) THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF THE BELLIGERENTS.
+
+The position of the original belligerent countries (excluding Turkey)
+upon the map of Europe was that which will be seen upon the
+accompanying sketch map.
+
+Of this belligerent area, which is surrounded by a thick black line,
+the part left white represents the territory of the Allies at the
+origin of the war--Great Britain, France, Russia, and Servia. This
+reservation must, however, be made: that in the case of Russia only
+the effective part is shown, and only the European part at that;
+Arctic Russia and Siberia are omitted. The part lightly shaded with
+cross lines represents the Germanic body--to wit, the German Empire
+and Austria-Hungary.
+
+1. The first thing that strikes the eye upon such a map is the great
+size of the Germanic body.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 4.]
+
+When one reads that "Germany" was being attacked by not only France
+and England, but also Russia; when one reads further that in the Far
+East, in Asia, Japan was putting in work for the Allies; and when one
+goes on to read that Belgium added her effort of resistance to the
+"German" invasion, one gets a false impression that one single nation
+was fighting a vast coalition greatly superior to it. Most people had
+an impression of that kind, in this country at least, at the outset of
+the war. It was this impression that led to the equally false
+impression that "Germany" must necessarily be beaten, and probably
+quickly beaten.
+
+The truth was, of course, that we were fighting something very much
+bigger than "Germany." We set out to fight something more than twice
+as big as Germany in area, and very nearly twice as big as the German
+Empire in mere numbers. For what we set out to fight was not the
+German Empire, but the German Empire _plus_ the whole of the dominions
+governed by the Hapsburg dynasty at Vienna.
+
+How weighty this Germanic body was geographically is still more
+clearly seen if we remember that Russia north of St. Petersburg is
+almost deserted of inhabitants, and that the true European areas of
+population which are in conflict--that is, the fairly well populated
+areas--are more accurately represented by a modification of the map
+on page 81 in some such form as that on page 84, where the comparative
+density of population is represented by the comparative distances
+between the parallel cross-lines.
+
+2. The next thing that strikes one is the position of the neutral
+countries. Supposing Belgium to have remained neutral, or, rather, to
+have allowed German armies to pass over her soil without actively
+resisting, the Germanic body would have been free to trade with
+neutral countries, and to receive support from their commerce, and to
+get goods through them over the whole of their western front, with the
+exception of the tiny section which stands for the frontier common to
+France and Germany. On the north, supposing the Baltic to be open, the
+Germanic body had a vast open frontier of hundreds of miles, and
+though Russia closed most of the eastern side, all the Roumanian
+frontier was open, and so was the frontier of the Adriatic, right away
+from the Italian border to Cattaro. So was the Swiss frontier and the
+Italian.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 5.]
+
+Indeed, if we draw the Germanic body by itself surrounded by a
+frontier of dots, as in the accompanying sketch, and mark in a thick
+line upon that frontier those parts which touched on enemy's
+territory, and were therefore closed to supply, we shall be
+immediately arrested by the comparatively small proportion of that
+frontier which is thus closed.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 6.]
+
+It is well to carry this in mind during the remainder of our study of
+this war, because it has a great effect upon the fighting power of
+Germany and Austria after a partial--but very partial--blockade is
+established by the Allied and especially by the British naval power.
+
+3. The third thing that strikes one in such a map of the belligerent
+area is the way in which the Germanic body stands in the middle facing
+its two groups of enemies East and West.
+
+
+_The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Germanic Body_.
+
+With this last point we can begin a comparison of the advantages and
+disadvantages imposed by geographical conditions upon the two
+opponents, and first of these we will consider the geographical
+advantages and disadvantages of the Germanic body--that is, of the
+Austrian and German Empires--passing next to the corresponding
+advantages and disadvantages of the Allies.
+
+The advantages proceeding from geographical position to Germany in
+particular, and to the Germanic body as a whole, gravely outweigh the
+disadvantages. We will consider the disadvantages first.
+
+The chief disadvantage under which the Germanic body suffered in this
+connection was that, from the outset of hostilities, it had to fight,
+as the military phrase goes, upon two fronts. That is, the commanders
+of the German and Austrian armies had to consider two separate
+campaigns, to keep them distinct in their minds, and to co-ordinate
+them so that they should not, by wasting too many men on the East or
+the West, weaken themselves too much on the other side of the field.
+
+To this disadvantage some have been inclined to add that the central
+position of Austria and Germany in Europe helped the British and
+Allied blockade (I repeat, a very partial, timid, and insufficient
+blockade) of their commerce.
+
+But this view is erroneous. The possibility of blockading
+Austria-Hungary and Germany from imports across the ocean was due not
+to their central but to their continental position; to the fact that
+they were more remote from the ocean than France and Great Britain. It
+had nothing to do with their central position between the two groups
+of the Allies.
+
+Supposing, for instance, that Germany and Austria-Hungary had stood
+where Russia stands, and that Western Europe had been in alliance
+against them. Then they would have been in no way central; their
+position would have been an extreme position upon one side; and yet,
+so far as blockading goes, the blockade of them would have been
+infinitely easier.
+
+Conversely, if Germany and Austria had been in the west, where Great
+Britain and France are, their enemies lying to the east of them could
+not have blockaded them at all.
+
+As things are the blockade that has been established exists but is
+partial. As will be seen upon the following sketch map, the British
+Fleet, being sufficiently powerful, can search vessels the cargoes of
+which might reach the Germanic body directly through the Strait of
+Gibraltar (1), the Strait of Dover (2), or the North Sea between
+Scotland and Norway (3). But it is unable to prevent supplies reaching
+the Germanic body from Italy, whether by land or by sea (4), or
+through Switzerland (5), or through Holland (6), or through Denmark
+(7), or across the frontier of Roumania (8); or, so long as the German
+Fleet is strongest in the Baltic, by way of Norway and Sweden across
+the Baltic (9).
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 7.]
+
+The blockading fleet is even embarrassed as to the imports the
+Germanic body receives indirectly through neutral countries--that is,
+imports not produced in the importing countries themselves, but
+provided through the neutral countries as middlemen.
+
+It is embarrassed in three ways.
+
+(_a_) Because it does not want to offend the European neutral
+countries, which count in the general European balance of power.
+
+(_b_) Because it does not wish to offend Powers outside Europe which
+are neutral in this war, and particularly the United States. Such
+great neutral Powers are very valuable not only for their moral
+support if it can be obtained, but on account of their great financial
+resources untouched by this prolonged struggle, and, what lies behind
+these, their power of producing materials which the Allies need just
+as much as Austria and Germany do.
+
+(_c_) Because, even if you watch the supplies of contraband to
+neutrals, and propose to stop supplies obviously destined for German
+use, you cannot prevent Germany from buying the same material "made
+up" by the neutral: for example, an Italian firm can import copper ore
+quite straightforwardly, smelt it, and offer the metal in the open
+market. There is nothing to prevent a German merchant entering that
+market and purchasing, unless Italy forbids all export of copper,
+which it is perfectly free not to do.
+
+To leave this side question of blockade, and to return to the relative
+advantages and disadvantages of our enemy's central position, we may
+repeat as a summary of its disadvantages the single truth that it
+compels our enemy to fight upon two fronts.
+
+All the rest is advantage.
+
+It is an advantage that Germany and Austria-Hungary, as a corollary to
+their common central position, are in some part of similar race and
+altogether of a common historical experience. For more than a hundred
+years every part of the area dominated by the Germanic body--with the
+exception of Bosnia and Alsace-Lorraine--has had a fairly intimate
+acquaintance with the other part. The Magyars of Hungary, the Poles of
+Galicia, of Posen, of Thorn, the Croats of the Adriatic border, the
+Czechs of Bohemia, have nothing in race or language in common with
+German-speaking Vienna or German-speaking Berlin. But they have the
+experience of generations uniting them with Vienna and with Berlin.
+In administration, and to some extent in social life, a common
+atmosphere spreads over this area, nearly all of which, as I have
+said, has had something in common for a hundred years, and much of
+which has had something in common for a thousand.
+
+In a word, as compared with the Allies, the Germanic central body in
+Europe has a certain advantage of moral homogeneity, especially as the
+governing body throughout is German-speaking and German in feeling.
+
+That is the first point of advantage--a moral one.
+
+The second is more material. The Governments of the two countries,
+their means of communication and of supply, are all in touch one with
+another. Those governments are working in one field within a ring
+fence, and working for a common object. They are not only spiritually
+in touch; they are physically in touch. An administrator in Berlin can
+take the night express after dinner and breakfast with his
+collaborator in Vienna the next morning.
+
+It so happens, also, that the communications of the two Germanic
+empires are exactly suited to their central position. There is
+sufficient fast communication from north to south to serve all the
+purposes necessary to the intellectual conduct of a war; there is a
+most admirable communication from east to west for the material
+conduct of that war upon two fronts. Whenever it may be necessary to
+move troops from the French frontier to the Russian, or from the
+Russian to the French, or for Germany to borrow Hungarian cavalry for
+the Rhine, or for Austria to borrow German army corps to protect
+Galicia, all that is needed is three or four days in which to entrain
+and move these great masses of men. There is no area in Europe which
+is better suited by nature for thus fighting upon two land frontiers
+than is the area of the combined Austrian and German Empire.
+
+With these three points, then--the great area of our enemy in Europe,
+his advantage through neutral frontiers, and his advantage in
+homogeneity of position between distant and morally divided
+Allies--you have the chief marks of the geographical position he
+occupies, in so far as this is the great central position of
+continental Europe.
+
+But it so happens that the Germanic body in general, and the German
+Empire in particular, suffer from grave geographical disadvantages
+attached to their political character. And of these I will make my
+next points.
+
+The Germanic body as a whole suffers by its geographical disposition,
+coupled with its political constitution, a grave disadvantage in its
+struggle against the Allies, particularly towards the East, because
+just that part of it which is thrust out and especially assailable by
+Russia happens to be the part most likely to be disaffected to the
+whole interests of the Germanic body; and how this works I will
+proceed to explain.
+
+Here are two oblongs--A, left blank, and B, lightly shaded. Supposing
+these two oblongs combined to represent the area of two countries
+which are in alliance, and which are further so situated that B is the
+weaker Power to the alliance both (1) in his military strength, and
+(2) in his tenacity of purpose. Next grant that B is divided by the
+dotted line, CD, into two halves--B not being one homogeneous State,
+but two States, B1 and B2.
+
+Next let it be granted that while B1 is more likely to remain attached
+in its alliance to A, B2 is more separate from the alliance in moral
+tendency, and is also materially the weaker half of B. Finally, let
+the whole group, AB, be subject to the attack of enemies from the
+right and from the left (from the right along the arrows XX, and from
+the left along the arrows YY) by two groups of enemies represented by
+the areas M and N respectively.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 8.]
+
+It is obvious that in such a situation, if A is the chief object of
+attack, and is the Power which has both provoked the conflict and made
+itself the chief object of assault by M and N, A is by this
+arrangement in a position _politically_ weak.
+
+That is, the strategical position of A is gravely embarrassed by the
+way in which his ally, B, separated into the two halves, B1 and B2,
+stands with regard to himself. B2 is isolated and thrust outward. The
+enemy, M, upon the right, attacking along the lines XX, may be able to
+give B2 a very bad time before he gets into the area of B1, and long
+before he gets into the area of the stronger Power, A. It is open to M
+so to harass B2 that B2 is prepared to break with B1 and give up the
+war; or, if the bond between B2 and B1 is strong enough, to persuade
+B1 to give up the struggle at the same time that he does. And if B2 is
+thus harassed to the breaking-point, the whole alliance, A plus B,
+will lose the men and materials and wealth represented by B2, and
+_may_ lose the whole shaded area, B, leaving A to support singly for
+the future the combined attacks of M and N along the lines of attack,
+XX and YY.
+
+Now, that diagram accurately represents the political embarrassment in
+strategy of the German-Austro-Hungarian alliance. B1 is Austria and
+Bohemia; B2 is Hungary; A is the German Empire; M is the Russians; N
+is the Allies in the West. With a geographical arrangement such as
+that of the Germanic alliance, a comparatively small proportion of the
+Russian forces detached to harry the Hungarian plain can make the
+Hungarians, who have little moral attachment to the Austrians and none
+whatever to the Germans, abandon the struggle to save themselves;
+while it is possible that this outlier, being thus detached, will drag
+with it its fellow-half, the Austrian half of the dual monarchy, cause
+the Government of the dual monarchy to sue for peace, and leave the
+German Empire isolated to support the undivided attention of the
+Russians from the East and of the French from the West.
+
+It is clear that if a strong Power, A, allied with and dependent for
+large resources in men upon a weaker Power, B, is attacked from the
+left and from the right, the ideal arrangement for the strong Power,
+A, would be something in the nature of the following diagram (Sketch
+9), where the weaker Power stands protected in the territory of the
+stronger Power, and where of the two halves of the weaker Power, B2,
+the less certain half, is especially protected from attack.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 9.]
+
+Were Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Rhineland, upon the one
+hand, the Hungarian plain, Russian Poland, and East Prussia, upon the
+other hand, united in one strong, patriotic, homogeneous
+German-speaking group with the Government of Berlin and the Baltic
+plain, and were Bavaria, Switzerland, the Tyrol, Bohemia, to
+constitute the weaker and less certain ally, while the least certain
+half of that uncertain ally lay in Eastern Bohemia and in what is now
+Lower Austria, well defended from attack upon the East, the conditions
+would be exactly reversed, and the Austro-German alliance would be
+geographically and politically of the stronger sort. As it is, the
+combined accidents of geography and political circumstance make it
+peculiarly vulnerable.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 10.]
+
+Having already considered in a diagram the way in which the
+geographical disposition of Austria-Hungary weakens Germany in the
+face of the Allies, let us translate that diagram into terms of actual
+political geography. These two oblongs, with their separate parts,
+are, as a fact, as follows: Where A is the German Empire, the shaded
+portion, B, is Austria-Hungary, and this last divided into B1, the
+more certain Austrian part, and B2, the less certain exposed
+Hungarian part, the latter of which is only protected from Russian
+assault by the Carpathian range of mountains, CCC, with its passes at
+DDD. M, the enemy on the right, Russia, is attacking the alliance, AB,
+along XX; while the enemy on the left, N, France and her Allies, is
+attacking along the lines YY.
+
+Hungary, B2, is not only geographically an outlier, but politically is
+the weakest link in the chain of the Austro-Germanic alliance. The
+area of Hungary is almost denuded of men, for most of these have been
+called up to defend Germany, A, and in particular to prevent the
+invasion of Germany's territory in Silesia at S. The one defence
+Hungary has against being raided and persuaded to an already tempting
+peace is the barrier of the Carpathian mountains, CCC. When or if the
+passes shall be in Russian possession and the Russian cavalry reappear
+upon the Hungarian side of the hills, the first great political
+embarrassment of the enemy will have begun--I mean the first great
+political embarrassment to his strategy.
+
+(_a_) Shall he try to defend those passes above all? Then he must
+detach German corps, and detach them very far from the areas which are
+vital to the core of the alliance--that is, to the German Empire, A.
+
+(_b_) Shall he use only Hungarian troops to defend Hungary? Then he
+emphasizes the peculiar moral isolation of Hungary, and leaves her
+inclined, if things go ill, to make a separate peace.
+
+(_c_) Shall he abandon Hungary? And let the Russians do what they will
+with the passes over the Carpathians and raid the Hungarian plain at
+large? Then he loses a grave proportion of his next year's wheat, much
+of his dwindling horse supply, his almost strangled sources of petrol.
+He tempts Roumania to come in (for a great sweep of Eastern Hungary is
+nationally Roumanian); and he loses the control in men and financial
+resources of one-half of his Allies if the danger and the distress
+persuade Hungary to stand out. For the Hungarians have no quarrel
+except from their desire to dominate the southern Slavs; to fight
+Austria's battles means very little to them, and to fight Germany's
+battles means nothing at all.
+
+There is, of course, much more than this. If Hungary dropped out,
+could Austria remain? Would not the Government at Vienna, rather than
+lose the dual monarchy, follow Hungary's lead? In that case, the
+Germanic alliance would lose at one stroke eleven-twenty-fifths of its
+men. It would lose more than half of its reserves of men, for the
+Austrian reserve is, paradoxically enough, larger than the German
+reserve, though not such good material.
+
+Admire how in every way this geographical and political problem of
+Hungary confuses the strategical plan of the German General Staff!
+They cannot here act upon pure strategics. They _cannot_ treat the
+area of operations like a chessboard, and consider the unique object
+of inflicting a military defeat upon the Russians. Their inability to
+do so proceeds from the fact that this great awkward salient,
+Hungarian territory, is not politically subject to Berlin, is not in
+spiritual union with Berlin; may be denuded of men to save Berlin, and
+is the most exposed of all our enemy's territory to attack. Throughout
+the war it will be found that this problem perpetually presents itself
+to the Great General Staff of the Prussians: "How can we save Hungary
+without weakening our Eastern line? If we abandon Hungary, how are we
+to maintain our effectives?"
+
+Such, in detail, is the political embarrassment to German strategy
+produced by the geographical situation and the political traditions of
+Hungary itself, and of Hungary's connection with the Hapsburgs at
+Vienna. Let us now turn to the even more important embarrassment
+caused to German strategy by the corner positions of the four
+essential areas of German territory.
+
+This last political weakness attached to geographical condition
+concerns the German Empire alone.
+
+Let us suppose a Power concerned to defend itself against invasion and
+situated between two groups of enemies, from the left and from the
+right, we will again call that Power A, the enemy upon the right M,
+and the enemy upon the left N, the first attacking along the lines XX,
+and the second along the lines YY.
+
+Let us suppose that A has _political_ reasons for particularly
+desiring to save from invasion four districts, the importance of
+which I have indicated on Sketch 12 by shading, and which I have
+numbered 1, 2, 3, 4.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 11.]
+
+Let us suppose that those four districts happen to lie at the four
+exposed corners of the area which A has to defend. The Government of A
+knows it to be essential to success in the war that his territory
+should not be invaded. Or, at least, if it is invaded, it must not,
+under peril of collapse, be invaded in the shaded areas.
+
+It is apparent upon the very face of such a diagram, that with the
+all-important shaded areas situated in the corners of his
+quadrilateral, A is heavily embarrassed. He must disperse his forces
+in order to protect all four. If wastage of men compels him to
+shorten his line on the right against M, he will be immediately
+anxious as to whether he can dare sacrifice 4 to save 2, or whether he
+should run the dreadful risk of sacrificing 2 to save 4.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 12.]
+
+If wastage compels him to shorten his defensive line upon the left, he
+is in a similar quandary between 1 and 3.
+
+The whole situation is one in which he is quite certain that a
+defensive war, long before he is pushed to extremities, will compel
+him to "scrap" one of the four corners, yet each one is, for some
+political reason, especially dear to him and even perhaps necessary to
+him. Each he desires, with alternating anxieties and indecisions, to
+preserve at all costs from invasion; yet he cannot, as he is forced
+upon the defensive, preserve all four.
+
+Here, again, the ideal situation for him would be to possess against
+the invader some such arrangement as is suggested by Sketch 11. In
+this arrangement, if one were compelled unfortunately to consider four
+special districts as more important than the mass of one's territory,
+one would have the advantage of knowing that they were clearly
+distinguishable into less and more important, and the further
+advantage of knowing that the more important the territory was, the
+more central it was and the better protected against invasion.
+
+Thus, in this diagram, the government of the general oblong, A, may
+distinguish four special zones, the protection of which from invasion
+is important, but which vary in the degree of their importance. The
+least important is the outermost, 1; the more important is an inner
+one, 2; still more important is 3; and most important of all is the
+black core of the whole.
+
+Some such arrangement has been the salvation of France time and time
+again, notably in the Spanish wars, and in the wars of Louis XIV., and
+in the wars of the Revolution. To some extent you have seen the same
+thing in the present war.
+
+To save Paris was exceedingly important, next came the zone outside
+Paris, and so on up to the frontier.
+
+But with the modern German Empire it is exactly the other way, and the
+situation is that which we found in Sketch 12; the four external
+corners are the essentials which must be preserved from invasion, and
+if any one of them goes, the whole political situation is at once in
+grave peril.
+
+The strategical position of modern Germany is embarrassed because each
+of these four corners must be saved by the armies. 1 is
+Belgium--before the war indifferent to Germany, but now destined to be
+vital to her position--2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is
+Silesia, and the German commanders, as well as the German Government,
+must remain to the last moment--if once they are thrown on the
+defensive--in grave indecision as to which of the four can best be
+spared when invasion threatens; or else, as is more probable, they
+must disperse their forces in the attempt to hold all four at once. It
+is a situation which has but rarely occurred before in the history of
+war, and which has always proved disastrous.
+
+Germany then must--once she is in Belgium--hold on to Belgium, or she
+is in peril; she must hold on to East Prussia, or she is in peril; she
+must hold on to Alsace-Lorraine, or she is in peril; and she must hold
+on to Silesia, or it is all up with her. If there were some common
+strategical factor binding these four areas together, so that the
+defence of one should involve and aid the defence of all, the
+difficulties thus imposed upon German strategy would be greatly
+lessened. Though even then the mere having to defend four outlying
+corners instead of a centre would produce confusion and embarrassment
+the moment numerical inferiority had appeared upon the side of the
+defence. But, as a fact, there is no such common factor.
+Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium, East Prussia and Silesia, stand
+strategically badly separated one from the other. Even the two on the
+East and the two on the West, though apparently forming pairs upon the
+map, are not dependent on one system of communications, and are cut
+off from each other by territory difficult or hostile, while between
+the Eastern and the Western group there is a space of five hundred
+miles.
+
+Let us, before discussing the political embarrassment to strategy
+produced by these four widely distant and quite separate areas,
+translate the diagram in the terms of a sketch map.
+
+On the following sketch map, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia,
+and Silesia are shaded, as were the four corners of the diagram. No. 1
+is Belgium, 2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is Silesia. The
+area occupied by the German Empire, including its present occupation
+of Belgium, is marked by the broad outline; and the areas shaded
+represent, not the exact limits of the four territories that are so
+important, but those portions of them which are essential: the
+non-Polish portion of Silesia, the non-Polish portion of East Prussia,
+the plain of Belgium, and all Alsace-Lorraine.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 13.]
+
+Now the reason that each of these must at all costs be preserved from
+invasion is, as I have said, different in each case, and we shall do
+well to examine what those reasons are; for upon them depends the
+political hesitation they inevitably, cause to arise in the plans of
+the Great General Staff.
+
+1. _Belgium._ The military annexation of Belgium has been a result of
+the war, and, from the German point of view, an unexpected result.
+Germany both hoped and expected that her armies would pass through
+Belgium as they did, in fact, pass through Luxembourg. The resistance
+of Belgium produced the military annexation of that country; the reign
+of terror exercised therein has immobilized about 100,000 of the
+German troops who would otherwise be free for the front; the checking
+of the advance into France has turned the German general political
+objective against England, and, to put the matter in the vaguest but
+most fundamental terms, the German mind has gradually come, since
+October, to regard the retention of Belgium as something quite
+essential. And this because:--(_a_) It gives a most weighty asset in
+the bargaining for peace. (_b_) It gives a seaboard against England.
+(_c_) It provides ample munition, house-room, and transport facility,
+without which the campaign in North-eastern France could hardly be
+prolonged. (_d_) It puts Holland at the mercy of Germany, for she can,
+by retaining Belgium, strangle Dutch trade, if she chooses to divert
+her carriage of goods through Belgian ports. (_e_) It is a specific
+conquest; the Government will be able to say to the German people, "It
+is true we had to give up this or that, but Belgium is a definite new
+territory, the occupation of which and the proposed annexation of
+which is a proof of victory." (_f_) The retention of Belgium has been
+particularly laid down as the cause of quarrel between Great Britain
+and Germany; to retain Belgium is to mark that score against what is
+now the special enemy of Germany in the German mind. (_g_) Antwerp is
+the natural port for all the centre of Europe in commerce westward
+over the ocean. (_h_) With Belgium may go the Belgian colonies--that
+is, the Congo--for the possession of which Germany has worked
+ceaselessly year in and year out during the last fifteen years by a
+steady and highly subsidized propaganda against the Belgian
+administration. She has done it through conscious and unconscious
+agents; by playing upon the cupidity of French and British
+Parliamentarians, of rum shippers, upon religious differences, and
+upon every agency to her hand.
+
+We may take it, then, that the retention of Belgium is in German eyes
+now quite indispensable. "If I abandon Belgium," she says, "it is much
+more than a strategic retreat; it is a political confession of
+failure, and the moral support behind me at home will break down."
+
+If I were writing not of calculable considerations, but of other and
+stronger forces, I should add that to withdraw from Belgium, where so
+many women and children have been massacred, so many jewels of the
+past befouled or destroyed, so wanton an attack upon Christ and His
+Church delivered, would be a loss of Pagan prestige intolerably
+strong, and a triumph of all that against which Prussia set out to
+war.
+
+2. _Alsace-Lorraine._ But Alsace-Lorraine is also "indispensable." We
+have seen on an earlier page what the retention of that territory
+means. Alsace-Lorraine is the symbol of the old victory. It is the
+German-speaking land which the amazingly unreal superstitions of
+German academic pedantry discovered to be something sacredly necessary
+to the unity of an ideal Germany, though the people inhabiting it
+desired nothing better than the destruction of the Prussian name. It
+is more than that. It is the bastion beyond the Rhine which keeps the
+Rhine close covered; it is the two great historic fortresses of
+Strassburg and Metz which are the challenge Germany has thrown down
+against European tradition and the civilization of the West; it is
+something which has become knit up with the whole German soul, and to
+abandon it is like a man abandoning his title or his name, or
+surrendering his sword. Through what must not the German mind pass
+before its directors would consent to the sacrifice of such a
+fundamentally symbolic possession? There is defeat in the very
+suggestion; and the very suggestion, though it has already occurred to
+the Great General Staff, and has already, I believe, been mentioned in
+one proposal for peace, would be intolerable to the mass of the
+enemy's opinion.
+
+3. _East Prussia._ East Prussia is sacred in another, but also an
+intense fashion. It is the very kernel of the Prussian monarchy. When
+Berlin was but a market town for the Electors of Brandenburg, those
+same Electors had contrived that East Prussia, which was outside the
+empire, should be recognized as a kingdom. Frederick the Great's
+father, while of Brandenburg an Elector, was in Prussia proper a king,
+a man who had emancipated that cradle of the Prussian power. The
+province in all save its southern belt (which is Polish) is the very
+essence of Prussian society: a mass of serfs, technically free,
+economically abject, governed by those squires who own them, their
+goods, and what might be their soil. The Russians wasted East Prussia
+in their first invasion, and they did well though they paid so heavy a
+price, for to wound East Prussia was to wound the very soul of that
+which now governs the German Empire. When the landed proprietors fled
+before the Russian invasion, and when there fled with them the
+townsfolk, the serfs rose and looted the country houses. In a way
+quite different from Belgium, quite different from Alsace-Lorraine,
+East Prussia is essential. Forces will and must be sent periodically
+to defend that territory, however urgently they may be needed
+elsewhere, as the pressure upon Germany increases. The German
+commanders, if they forget East Prussia for a moment in the
+consideration of the other essential points, will, the moment their
+eyes are turned upon East Prussia again, remember with violent emotion
+all that the province means to the reigning dynasty and its
+supporters, and they will do anything rather than let that frontier
+go. The memory of the first invasion is too acute, the terror of its
+repetition too poignant, to permit its abandonment.
+
+4. _Silesia._ Silesia, for quite other reasons (and remember that
+these different reasons for defending such various points are the
+essence of the embarrassment in which German strategy will find
+itself), must be saved. It has been insisted over and over again in
+these pages what Silesia means. Its meaning is twofold. If Silesia
+goes, the safest, the most remote from the sea, the most independent
+of imports of the German industrial regions, is gone. Silesia is,
+again, the country of the great proprietors. Amuse yourselves by
+remembering the names of Pless and of Lichnowsky. There are dozens of
+others. But, most important of all, Silesia is what Belgium is not,
+what Alsace-Lorraine is not, what East Prussia is not--it is the
+strategic key. Who holds Silesia commands the twin divergent roads to
+Berlin northwards, to Vienna southwards. Who holds Silesia holds the
+Moravian Gate. Who holds Silesia turns the line of the Oder, and
+passes behind the barrier fortresses which Germany has built upon her
+Eastern front. Who holds Silesia strikes his wedge in between the
+German-speaking north and the German-speaking south, and joins hands
+with the Slavs of Bohemia. Not that we should exaggerate the Slav
+factor, for religion and centuries of varying culture disturb its
+unity. But it is something. The Russian forces are Slav; the
+resurrection of Poland has been promised; the Czechs are not
+submissive to the German claim of natural mastery, and whoever holds
+Silesia throws a bridge between Slav and Slav if his aims are an
+extension of power in that race. For a hundred reasons Silesia must be
+saved.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now put yourself in the position of the men who must make a decision
+between these four outliers--Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia,
+and Silesia--and understand the hesitation such divergent aims impose
+upon them. Hardly are they prepared to sacrifice one of the four when
+the defensive problem becomes acute, but its claims will be pressed in
+every conceivable manner--by public sentiment, by economic
+considerations, by mere strategy, by a political tradition, by the
+influence of men powerful with the Prussian monarchy, whose homes and
+wealth are threatened. "If I am to hold Belgium, I must give up
+Alsace. How dare I do that? To save Silesia I must expose East
+Prussia. How dare I? I am at bay, and the East must at all costs be
+saved. I will hold Prussia and Silesia, but to withdraw from Belgium
+and from beyond the Rhine is defeat." The whole thing is an embroglio.
+That conclusion is necessary and inexorable. It would not appear at
+all until, or if, numerical weakness imposed on the enemy a gradual
+concentration of the defensive; but once that numerical weakness has
+come, the fatal choices must be made. It may be that a strict, silent,
+and virile resolution, such as saved France this summer, a
+preparedness for particular sacrifices calculated beforehand, will
+determine first some one retirement and then another. It may
+be--though it is not in the modern Prussian temperament--that a
+defensive as prolonged as possible will be attempted even with
+inferior numbers, and that, as circumstances may dictate,
+Alsace-Lorraine or Belgium, Silesia or East Prussia will be the first
+to be deliberately sacrificed; but one must be, and, it would seem,
+another after, and in the difficulty of choice a wound to the German
+strategy will come.
+
+The four corners are differently defensible--Alsace-Lorraine and
+Belgium only by artifice, and with great numbers of men; Silesia only
+so long as Austria (and Hungary) stand firm. East Prussia has her
+natural arrangement of lakes to make invasion tedious, and to permit
+defence with small numbers.
+
+Between the two groups, Eastern and Western, is all the space of
+Germany--the space separating Aberdeen from London. Between each part
+of each pair, in spite of an excellent railway system, is the block in
+the one case of the Ardennes and the Eifel, in the other of empty,
+ill-communicated Poland. But each is strategically a separate thing;
+the political value of each a separate thing; the embarrassment
+between all four insuperable.
+
+Such is the situation imposed by the geography of the European
+continent upon our enemies, with the opportunities and the drawbacks
+which that situation affords and imposes.
+
+I repeat, upon the balance, our enemies had geographical opportunities
+far superior to our own.
+
+Our power of partial blockade (to which I will return in a moment) is
+more than counterbalanced by the separation which Nature has
+determined between the two groups of Allies. The ice of the North, the
+Narrows of the Dardanelles, establish this, as do the Narrows of the
+Scandinavian Straits.
+
+The necessity of fighting upon two fronts, to which our enemies are
+compelled, is more than compensated by that natural arrangement of the
+Danube valley and of the Baltic plain which adds to the advantage of a
+central situation the power of rapid communication between East and
+West; while the chief embarrassment of our enemies in their
+geographical arrangement, which is the outlying situation of Hungary
+coupled with the presence of four vital regions at the four external
+corners of the German Empire, is rather political than geographical in
+nature.
+
+I will now turn to the converse advantages and disadvantages afforded
+and imposed by geographical conditions upon the Allies.
+
+
+_The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Allies._
+
+It has been apparent from the above in what way the geographical
+circumstance of Germany and Austria-Hungary advantaged and
+disadvantaged those two empires in the course of a war against East
+and West.
+
+Let us next see how the Allies were advantaged and disadvantaged by
+their position.
+
+1. The first great disadvantage which the Allies most obviously suffer
+is their separation one from the other by the Germanic mass.
+
+The same central position which gives Germany and Austria-Hungary
+their power of close intercommunion, of exactly coordinating all their
+movements, of using their armies like one army, and of dealing with
+rapidity alternate blows eastward and westward, produces contrary
+effects in the case of the Allies. Even if hourly communication were
+possible by telegraph between the two main groups, French and Russian,
+that would not be at all the same thing as personal, sustained, and
+continuous contact such as is enjoyed by the group of their enemies.
+
+But, as a fact, even the very imperfect and indirect kind of contact
+which can be established by telegraphing over great distances is
+largely lacking. The French and the Russians are in touch. The
+commanders can and do pursue a combined plan. But the communication of
+results and the corresponding arrangement of new dispositions are
+necessarily slow and gravely interrupted. Indeed, it is, as we shall
+see in a moment, one of the main effects of geography upon this
+campaign that Russia must suffer during all its early stages a very
+severe isolation.
+
+In general, the Allies as a whole suffer from the necessity under
+which they find themselves of working in two fields, remote the one
+from the other by a distance of some six hundred miles, not even
+connected by sea, and geographically most unfortunately independent.
+
+2. A second geographical disadvantage of the Allies consists in the
+fact that one of them, Great Britain, is in the main a maritime Power.
+
+That this has great compensating advantages we shall also see, but for
+the moment we are taking the disadvantages separately, and, so
+counting them one by one, we must recognize that England's being an
+island (her social structure industrialized and free from
+conscription, her interests not only those of Europe but those of such
+a commercial scattered empire as is always characteristic of secure
+maritime Powers) produces, in several of its aspects, a geographical
+weakness to the Allied position, and that for several reasons, which I
+will now tabulate:--
+
+(_a_) The position of England in the past, her very security as an
+island, has led her to reject the conception of universal service. She
+could only, at the outset of hostilities, provide a small
+Expeditionary Force, the equivalent at the most of a thirtieth of the
+Allied forces.
+
+(_b_) Her reserves in men who could approach the continental field in,
+say, the first year, even under the most vigorous efforts, would never
+reach anything like the numbers that could be afforded by a conscript
+nation. The very maximum that can be or is hoped for by the most
+sanguine is the putting into the field, after at least a year of war,
+of less than three-sixteenths of the total Allied forces, although her
+population is larger than that of France, and more than a third that
+of the enemy.
+
+(_c_) She is compelled to garrison and defend, and in places to
+police, dependencies the population of which will in some cases
+furnish no addition to the forces of the Allies, and in all cases
+furnish but a small proportion.
+
+(_d_) The isolation of her territory by the sea, coupled with her
+large population and its industrial character, makes Britain
+potentially the most vulnerable point in the alliance.
+
+So long as her fleet is certainly superior to that of the enemy, and
+has only to meet oversea attack, this vulnerability is but little
+felt; but once let her position at sea be lost, or even left
+undecided, or once let the indiscriminate destruction of commercial
+marine be seriously begun, and she is at the mercy of that enemy. For
+she cannot feed herself save by supplies from without, and she cannot
+take part in the supplying of armies with men and munitions upon the
+continent.
+
+(_e_) She is open to fear aggression upon any one of her independent
+colonies oversea, and yet she is not able to draw upon them for the
+whole of their potential strength, or, indeed, for more than a very
+small proportion of it. In other words, the British Fleet guarantees
+some fifteen million of European race beyond the seas from attack by
+the enemy, but cannot draw from these fifteen million more than an
+insignificant fraction of the million of men and more which, fully
+armed, they might furnish; nor has she any control over their finance,
+so as to be able to count upon the full weight of their wealth; nor
+can she claim their resources in goods and munitions. She can only
+obtain these by paying for them.
+
+There is here a very striking contrast between her position and that
+of the Germanic Powers.
+
+(_f_) Her isolation and maritime supremacy, coupled with her
+industrial character, make her during the strain of equipment the
+workshop of the Allies. That this is a great advantage is evident; but
+the disadvantage attaching to it is that very large proportions of her
+manhood are necessarily withdrawn from the field for the purposes of
+her shipbuilding, her communications, her manufactory of arms and all
+kinds of supplies, her seafaring work, both civil and military.
+
+Of the two other main Allies, the French disadvantage may be thus
+summarized, and it is slight:--
+
+(_a_) The French political frontier, as established since the defeat
+of the French in 1871, is an open frontier. It has no natural features
+upon which the defensive can rely. In the lack of this the French
+fortified at very heavy expense that portion of their frontier which
+faced their certain enemy, and established a line from Verdun to
+Belfort calculated to check the first movement of his offensive. But
+all the two hundred miles to the north of this, the whole line between
+Verdun and the North Sea, was virtually open. There were, indeed,
+certain fortified places upon that line, but they formed no
+consecutive system, and, as their armaments grew old, they were not
+brought up to date. The truth is, that the defence of France upon this
+frontier was really left to the co-operation of Belgium. If, as was
+believed to be almost certain, Prussian morals being what they are,
+the Prussian guarantee to respect Belgian neutrality would be torn up
+at the outbreak of war, then three great fortresses--Liége, Namur, and
+Antwerp--would hold up the enemy's advance in this quarter, and
+perform the function of delay which the obsolete armament of the
+north-eastern French frontier could not perform. We shall see, when we
+come to the conflicting theories of warfare held by the various
+belligerents, what a grievous miscalculation this was, and how largely
+it accounted for the first disasters of the war. But, at any rate, let
+us remember, as our first point, the absence of any natural line of
+defence in France as against a German invasion, remembering, also,
+that the French would necessarily, at the beginning of any war, be
+upon the defensive on account of their inferior numbers. Had France,
+for instance, had along her frontiers, and just within them, such a
+line as Germany possesses in the Rhine, she would have fallen back at
+the outset upon that line. But she has no such advantage.
+
+(_b_) The second disadvantage of the French geographically is one
+immixed with political considerations. The French have for centuries
+produced, and have for two thousand years believed in, central
+government. For at least three hundred years all the life of the
+nation has centred upon Paris; all the railways and all the great
+system of roads and most of the waterways of the north similarly have
+Paris for their nucleus. Now, this central ganglion of the whole
+French organism is but 120 miles from the frontier, ten days' easy
+marching. An enemy coming in from the north-east not only finds no
+natural obstacle in his way, but has Paris as nearly within his grasp
+as, say, Cologne is within the grasp of a French invasion of North
+Germany. This feature has had the most important consequences upon the
+whole of French history. It was particularly the determining point of
+1870.
+
+To meet the handicap, the French of our generation have combined two
+policies.
+
+First, they have fortified the whole region of Paris so thoroughly
+that it has sometimes been called "a fortified province;" an area of
+nearly thirty miles across at its narrowest, and of something like
+from seven to eight hundred square miles, is comprised within this
+plan.
+
+The weakness of this in the face of modern fire will again be dealt
+with when we come to the conflicting theories upon war established
+during the long peace.
+
+Secondly, the French established a policy whereby, if Paris were
+menaced in a future campaign, the Government should abandon that
+central point, and, in spite of the grave inconvenience proceeding
+from the way in which all material communications centred upon the
+capital and all established offices were grouped there, would withdraw
+the whole central system of government to Bordeaux, and leave Paris to
+defend itself, precisely as though it were of no more importance than
+any other fortified point. They would recognize the strategic values
+of the district; they would deliberately sacrifice its political and
+sentimental value. They would never again run the risk of losing a
+campaign because one particular area of the national soil happened to
+be occupied. The plans of their armies and the instructions of their
+Staff particularly warned commanders against disturbing any defensive
+scheme by too great an anxiety to save Paris.
+
+If this were the disadvantage geographically of France, what was that
+of Russia?
+
+Russia's geographical disadvantage was twofold. First, she had no
+outlet to an open sea in Europe save through the arctic port of
+Archangel. This port was naturally closed for nearly half the year,
+and how long it might be artificially kept partially open by
+ice-breakers it remained for the war to prove. But even if it were
+kept open the whole year in this precarious fashion, it lay on the
+farther side of hundreds of miles of waste and deserted land connected
+only with the active centre of Russia by one narrow-gauge line of
+railway with very little rolling stock. The great eastern port of
+Vladivostok was nearly as heavily handicapped, and its immense
+distance from the scene of operations in the West, with which it was
+only connected by a line six thousand miles long, was another
+drawback. Russia might, indeed, by the favour of neutrals or of
+Allies, use warm water ports. If the Turks should remain neutral and
+permit supply to reach her through the Dardanelles, the Black Sea
+ports were open all the year round, and Port Arthur (nearly as far off
+as Vladivostok) was also open in the Far East. But the Baltic, in a
+war with Germany, was closed to her. Certain goods from outside could
+reach her from Scandinavia, round by land along the north of the
+Baltic, but very slowly and at great expense. It so happened also
+that, as the war proceeded, this question of supply became
+unexpectedly important, because all parties found the expenditure of
+heavy artillery high-explosive ammunition far larger than had been
+calculated for, and Russia was particularly weak therein and dependent
+upon the West. This disadvantage under which Russia lay was largely
+the cause of her embarrassment, and of the prolongation of hostilities
+in the winter that followed the declaration of war.
+
+The fact that Russia was ill supplied with railways, and hardly
+supplied at all with hard roads (in a climate where the thaw turned
+her deep soil into a mass of mud) is political rather than
+geographical, but it must be remembered in connection with this
+difficulty of supply.
+
+If these, then, were the various disadvantages which geographical
+conditions had imposed upon the Allies, what were the corresponding
+advantages?
+
+They were considerable, and may be thus tabulated:--
+
+1. The western Allies stood between their enemies and the ocean. If
+they could maintain superiority at sea through the great size and
+efficiency of the British Fleet, and through its additional power when
+combined with the French, they could at the least embarrass, and
+perhaps ultimately starve out the enemy in certain essential materials
+of war. They could not reduce the enemy to famine, for with care his
+territories, so long as they were not ravaged, would be just
+self-supporting. The nitrates for his explosives the enemy could also
+command, and, in unlimited quantity, iron and coal. But the raw
+material of textiles for his clothing, cotton for his explosives,
+copper for his shell, cartridge cases, and electrical instruments,
+antimony for the hardening of the lead necessary to his small-arm
+ammunition, to some extent petrol for his aeroplanes and his
+motor-cars, and india-rubber for his tyres and other parts of
+machinery, he must obtain from abroad. That he would be able in part
+to obtain these through the good offices of neutrals was probable; but
+the Allied fleets in the West would certainly closely watch the extent
+of neutral imports, and attempt, with however much difficulty and with
+however partial success, to prevent those neutrals acting as a mere
+highroad by which such goods could pass into Germany and Austria. They
+would hardly allow, especially in the later phases of the war, Italy
+and Switzerland, Holland and Scandinavia, to act as open avenues for
+the supply of the Germanic body. Though they would have to go warily,
+and would find it essential to remain at peace with the nations whose
+commerce they thus hampered and in some sense controlled, the Allies
+in the West could in some measure, greater or less, embarrass the
+enemy in these matters.
+
+Conversely, they could supply themselves freely with tropical and
+neutral goods, and even with munitions of war obtained from across the
+ocean, from Africa and from America.
+
+So long as North-western France and the ports of Great Britain were
+free from the enemy this partial blockade would endure, and this
+freedom of supply for France and Britain from overseas would also
+endure.
+
+2. The Allies had further the geographical advantage of marine
+transport for their troops--an important advantage to the French, who
+had a recruiting ground in North Africa, and to the British, who had a
+recruiting ground in their dominions oversea, and, above all, an
+advantage in that it permitted the constant reinforcement of the
+continental armies by increasing contingents arriving from these
+islands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of geographical advantages attaching to the position of Russia only
+one can be discovered, and it consists in the immense extent and unity
+of the Russian Empire. This permitted operations upon a western front
+from the Baltic to the Carpathians, or rather to the Roumanian border,
+which vast line could never be firmly held against them by the enemy
+when once the Russians had trained and equipped a superior number of
+men. The German forces were sufficient, as events proved, long to
+maintain a strict cordon upon the shorter front between the Swiss
+frontiers and the sea, but upon the other side of the great field,
+between the Baltic and the Carpathians, they could never hope to
+establish one continued wall of resistance.
+
+
+(2) THE OPPOSING STRENGTHS.
+
+When nations go to war their probable fortunes, other things being
+equal, are to be measured in numbers.
+
+Other things being equal, the numbers one party can bring against the
+other in men, coupled with the numbers of weapons, munitions, and
+other material, will decide the issue.
+
+But in European civilization other things are more or less equal.
+Civilian historians are fond of explaining military results in many
+other ways, particularly in terms of moral values that will flatter
+the reader. But a military history, however elementary, is compelled
+to recognize the truth that normally modern war in Europe has followed
+the course of numbers.
+
+Among the very first, therefore, of the tasks set us in examining the
+great struggle is a general appreciation of the numbers that were
+about to meet in battle, and of their respective preparation in
+material.
+
+More than the most general numbers--more than brief, round
+statements--I shall not attempt. I shall not do more than state upon
+such grounds as I can discover proportions in the terms of single
+units--as, to say that one nation stood to another in its immediate
+armed men as eight to five, or as two to twenty. Neither shall I give
+positive numbers in less than the large fractions of a million. But,
+even with such large outlines alone before one, the task is
+extraordinarily difficult.
+
+It will almost certainly be found, when full details are available
+after the war, that the most careful estimates have been grievously
+erroneous in some particular. Almost every statement of fact in this
+department can be reasonably challenged, and the evidence upon matters
+which in civilian life are amply recorded and easily ascertainable is,
+in this department, everywhere purposely confused or falsified.
+
+To the difficulty provided by the desire for concealment necessary in
+all military organization, one must add the difficulty presented by
+the cross categories peculiar to this calculation. You have to
+consider not only the distinction between active and reserve, but also
+between men and munitions, between munitions available according to
+one theory of war, and munitions available according to another. You
+have to modify statical conclusions by dynamic considerations (thus
+you have to modify the original numbers by the rate of wastage, and
+the whole calculus varies progressively with the lapse of time as the
+war proceeds).
+
+In spite of these difficulties, I believe it to be possible to put
+before the general reader a clear and simple table of the numbers a
+knowledge of which any judgment of the war involves, and to be fairly
+certain that this table will, when full details are available, be
+discovered not too inaccurate.
+
+We must begin by distinguishing between the two sets of numbers with
+which we have to deal--the numbers of men, and the amount of munitions
+which these men have to use.
+
+The third essential element, equipment, we need not separately
+consider, because, when one says "men" in talking of military affairs,
+one only means equipped, trained, and organized men, for no others can
+be usefully present in the field.
+
+Let us start, then, with some estimate of the number of men who are
+about to take part in battle; let us take for our limits the
+convenient limits of a year, and let us divide that space of time
+arbitrarily into three parts or periods.
+
+There was a first period in which the nations opposed brought into the
+field the men available in the first few weeks for immediate action.
+It is not possible to set a precise limit, and to say, "This period
+covers the first six" or "the first eight weeks;" but we can say
+roughly that, when we are speaking of this first period, we mean the
+time during which men for whom the equipment was all ready, whose
+progress and munitioning had all been organized, were being as rapidly
+as possible brought into play. Such an estimate is not equivalent to
+an estimate of the very first numbers that met in the shock of battle;
+those numbers were far smaller, and differed according to the rate of
+mobilization and the intention of the various parties. The estimate is
+only that of the total number which the various parties could, and
+therefore did, bring into play before men not hitherto trained as
+soldiers, or trained but not believed to be required in the course of
+the campaign--according as that campaign had been variously foreseen
+by various governments--came in to swell the figures.
+
+The conclusion of this first period would come, of course, gradually
+in the case of every combatant, and would come more rapidly in the
+case of some than in the case of others. But we are fairly safe if we
+take the general turning-point from the first period to the second to
+be the month of October 1914. The second period had begun for
+some--notably for Germany--with the first days of that month; it had
+already appeared for all, especially for England, before the beginning
+of November.
+
+The second period is marked for all the combatants by the bringing
+into play of such forces as, for various reasons, the Government of
+each had once hoped would not be required. The German Empire might
+have marked them as not required, in the reasonable hope that victory
+would be quickly assured. The British Government might, from a very
+different standpoint, have believed them not to be required, because
+it regarded the work of its continental Allies as sufficient to gain
+the common object, etc. But in the case of all, however various the
+motives, the particular mark of this second period is the straining to
+put into the field newly trained and equipped bodies which in the
+first period were, it was imagined, neither needed nor perhaps
+available.
+
+This second period merges very gradually into the third, or final,
+period, which is that of the last effort possible to the belligerents.
+There comes a moment before the end of the first year when, in the
+case of most of the belligerents, every man who is available at all
+has been equipped, trained, and put forward, and after which there is
+nothing left but the successive batches of yearly recruits growing up
+from boyhood to manhood.
+
+Although Britain is in a peculiar position, and Russia, through her
+tardiness in equipment, in a peculiar position of another kind, yet
+one may fairly say that the vague margin between the second period of
+growth and the third period of finality appears roughly somewhere
+round the month of June. It will fall earlier with Germany, a good
+deal earlier with France; but from the middle of May at earliest to
+the end of June at latest may be said to mark the entry of the
+numerical factor into its third and final phase.
+
+Let us take these three periods one by one.
+
+The first period is by far the most important to our judgment of the
+campaign; a misapprehension of it has warped most political statements
+made in this country, and most contemporary judgments of the war as a
+whole. It is impossible to get our view of the great European
+struggle--of its nature in the bulk--other than fantastically wrong,
+if we misapprehend the opening numbers with which it was waged.
+
+There are three ways of getting at those numbers.
+
+The first and worst way is the consulting of general statistics
+published before the war broke out. Thus we may see in almanacs the
+French army put down as a little over four million, the German at the
+same amount, the Russian at about five million, and so forth.
+
+These figures have no relation to reality, because they omit a hundred
+modifying considerations--such as the age of the reserves, the degree
+of training of the reserves, the organization prepared for the
+enrolment of untrained men, etc. The only element in them which is of
+real value is the statistics--when we can obtain them--of men actually
+present with the colours before mobilization, to which one may add,
+perhaps--or at any rate in the case of France and Germany--the numbers
+of the _active_ reserve immediately behind the conscript army in
+peace.
+
+The second method, which is better, but imperfect, is that which has
+particularly appealed to technical writers. It consists in numbering
+_units_; in noting the headquarters and the tale of army corps and of
+independent divisions.
+
+The fault of this method is twofold. First, that only actual
+experience can tell one whether units are really being maintained
+during peace at full strength; and secondly, that only actual
+experience discovers how many new units can and will be created when
+war is joined. In other words, the fault of this method (necessary
+though it is as an adjunct to all military calculations) lies in its
+divorce from the reality of numbers.
+
+At the end of the retreat from Moscow each army corps of the Grand
+Army still preserved its name, each regiment its nominal identity. And
+the roll was called by Ney, for instance, before the Beresina,
+division by division and regiment by regiment, and even in the
+regiments company by company; but in most of these last there was no
+one to answer, and there is a story of one regiment for which one
+surviving man answered with regularity until he also died. What fights
+is numbers of living men--not headings; and if five army corps are
+present, each having lost two-fifths of its men, three full army corps
+are a match for them.
+
+The third method is that of commonsense. We must deduce from the
+results obtained, from the fronts covered, from the energy remaining
+after known losses, from the reports of intelligence, from the avenues
+of communication available, what least and what largest numbers can be
+present. We must correct such conclusions by our previous knowledge of
+the way in which each service regards its strength, which most depends
+upon reserves, how each uses his depots and drafts, what machinery it
+has for training the untrained and for equipping them. This
+complicated survey taken, we can arrive at general figures.[1]
+
+Using that method, and applying it to the present campaign, I think we
+shall get something like the following.
+
+
+_The Figures of the First Period, say to October 1-31, 1914._
+
+Germany put across the Rhine in the first period (without counting a
+certain small proportion of Hungarian cavalry and Austrian artillery)
+rather more than two and a quarter million men. She put into the
+Eastern field first a quarter of a million, which rapidly grew to half
+a million, and before the end of October to nearly a million; a
+balance of rather more than another million she used for filling gaps
+and for keeping her strength at the full, and also in particular
+cases (as in her violent attempt to break out through Flanders, or
+rather the beginning of that attempt) for the immediate reinforcement
+of a fighting line. Say that Germany put into the field altogether
+five million men in the first period, and you are saying too much. Say
+that she put into the field altogether in the first period four and a
+quarter million men, and you are saying probably somewhat too little.
+
+France met the very first shock with about a million men, which
+gradually grew in the fighting line to about a million and a half.
+Here the limit of the French force immediately upon the front will
+probably be set. The numbers continued to swell long before the end of
+the first period and well on into the second, but they were kept in
+reserve. Counting the men drafted in to supply losses and the reserve,
+it is not unwise to put at about two and a half million men the
+ultimate French figure, of which one and a half million formed, before
+the end of the first period, the immediate fighting force.
+
+Austria was ordered by the Germans to put into the field, as an
+initial body to check any Russian advance and to confuse the beginning
+of Russian concentration, about a million men; which in the first
+period very rapidly grew to two million, and probably before the end
+of the first period to about two million and a half.
+
+Russia put into the field during the first weeks of the war some
+million and a quarter, which grew during the first period (that is,
+before the coming of winter had created a very serious handicap, to
+which allusion will presently be made) to perhaps two million and a
+half at the very most. I put that number as an outside limit.
+
+Servia, of men actually present and able to fight, we may set down at
+a quarter of a million; and Belgium, if we like, at one hundred
+thousand--though the Belgian service being still in a state of
+transition, and the degree of training very varied within it, that
+minor point is disputable. Indeed it is better, in taking a general
+survey, to consider only the five Great Powers concerned.
+
+Of these the fifth, Great Britain, though destined to exercise by sea
+power and by her recruiting field a very great ultimate effect upon
+the war, could only provide, in this first period upon the Continent,
+an average of one hundred thousand men. To begin with, some
+seventy-five thousand, dwindling through losses to little more than
+fifty thousand, replenished and increased to about one hundred and
+twenty-five thousand, and approaching, as the end of the first period
+was reached, one hundred and fifty thousand men actually present upon
+the front.
+
+We can now set down these figures in the shape of simple units, and
+see how the numerical chances stood at the opening of the campaign.
+
+The enemy sets out with =32= men, of whom he bids =10= men against the
+Russians, and sends =22= against the French. The Russians meet the
+=10= men with about =12=, and the French meet the =22= with about
+=10=; but as they have not the whole =22= to meet in the first shock,
+they are struck rather in the proportion of =10= to =16= or =17=,
+while the presence of the British contingent makes them rather more
+than =10½=. But these initial figures rapidly change with the growth
+of the armies, and before the first period is over the Germans have
+=22= in the West against =15= French and =1= British, making =16=;
+while in the East the Russian =12= has grown to, say, =24=, but the
+Austro-Germans in the East, against those =24=, have grown to be quite
+=32=. And there is the numerical situation of the first period
+clearly, and I think accurately, put, _supposing the wastage to be
+equal in proportion throughout all the armies_. The importance of
+appreciating these figures is that they permit us to understand why
+the enemy was morally certain of winning, quite apart from his right
+judgment on certain disputed theories of war (to which I shall turn in
+a moment), and quite apart from his heavy secret munitioning, which
+was of such effect in the earlier part of the campaign. He was ready
+with forces which he knew would be overwhelming, and how superior he
+was thus numerically in that first period can best be appreciated, I
+think, by a glance at the diagram on the next page.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 14.]
+
+It is no wonder that he made certain of a decisive success in the
+West, and of the indefinite holding up or pushing back of the Russian
+forces in the East. It is no wonder that he confidently expected a
+complete victory before the winter, and the signing of peace before
+the end of the year. To that end all his munitioning, and even the
+details of his tactics, were directed.
+
+
+_The Figures of the Second Period, say to April 15-June 1, 1915._
+
+The second period saw in the West, and, in the enemy's case, a very
+great change proceeding by a number of minute steps, but fairly rapid
+in character.
+
+The French numbers could not grow very rapidly, because the French had
+armed every available man. They could bring in a certain number of
+volunteers; but neither was it useful to equip the most of the older
+men, nor could they be spared from those duties behind the front line
+which the much larger population of the enemy entrusted to men who,
+for the most part, had received no regular training. The French did,
+however, in this second period, gradually grow to some two and a half
+million men, behind which, ready to come in for the final period, were
+about a third of a million young recruits.
+
+Great Britain discovered a prodigious effort. She had already,
+comparatively early in the second period, put across the sea nearly
+half a million men, and drafts were perpetually arriving as the second
+period came to a close; while behind the army actually upon the
+Continent very large bodies--probably another million in
+number--hastily trained indeed, and presented with a grave problem in
+the matter of officering, but of excellent material and _moral_, were
+ready to appear, before the end of the second period or at its close,
+the moment their equipment should be furnished. Counting the British
+effort and the French together, one may say that, without regard to
+wastage, the Allies in the West grew in the second period from the
+original 16 to over 30, and might grow even before the second period
+was over to 35 or even more.
+
+On the enemy's side (neglecting wastage for the moment) there were the
+simplest elements of growth. Each Power had docketed every untrained
+man, knew his medical condition, where to find him, where and how to
+train him. The German Empire had during peace taken about one-half of
+its young men for soldiers. It had in pure theory five million
+untrained men in the reserve, excluding the sick, and those not
+physically efficient for service.
+
+In practice, however, a very large proportion of men, even of the
+efficients, must be kept behind for civilian work; and in an
+industrial country such as Germany, mainly urban in population, this
+proportion is particularly large. We are safe in saying that the
+German army would not be reinforced during the second period by more
+than two and a half million men. These were trained in batches of some
+800,000 each; the equipment had long been ready for them, and they
+appeared mainly as drafts for filling gaps, but partly as new
+formations in groups--the first going in or before November, the
+second in or before February. A third and last group was expected to
+have finished this rather elementary training somewhere about the end
+of April, so that May would complete the second period in the German
+forces.
+
+Austria-Hungary, by an easily appreciable paradox, possessed, though
+but 80 per cent. of the Germans in population, a larger available
+untrained reserve. This was because that empire trained a smaller
+proportion of its population by far than did the Germans. It is
+probable that Austria-Hungary was able to train and put forward during
+the second period some three million men.
+
+It is a great error, into which most critics have fallen, to
+underestimate or to neglect the Austro-Hungarian factor in the enemy's
+alliance. Without thus nearly doubling her numbers, Germany could not
+have fought France and Russia at all, and a very striking feature of
+all the earlier weeks of 1915 was the presence in the Carpathians of
+increasing Austro-Hungarian numbers, which checked for more than three
+months all the Russian efforts upon that front.
+
+Say that Austria-Hungary nearly doubled her effectives (apart from
+wastage) in this second period, and you will not be far wrong.
+
+Russia, which upon paper could almost indefinitely increase during the
+second period her numbers in the field, suffered with the advent of
+winter an unexpected blow. Her equipment, and in particular her
+munitioning (that is, her provision of missiles, and in especial of
+heavy shell), must in the main come from abroad. Now the German
+command of the Baltic created a complete blockade on the eastern
+frontier of Russia, save upon the short Roumanian frontier; and the
+entry of Turkey into the campaign on the side of the enemy, which
+marked the second period, completed that blockade upon the south, and
+shut upon Russia the gate of the Dardanelles. The port of Archangel in
+the north was ice-bound, or with great difficulty kept partially open
+by ice-breakers, and was in any case only connected with Russia by one
+narrow-gauge and lengthy line; while the only remaining port of
+Vladivostok was six thousand miles away, and closed also during a part
+of the winter.
+
+In this situation it was impossible for the great reserves of men
+which Russia counted on to be put into the field, and the Russians
+remained throughout the whole of this second period but little
+stronger than they had been at the end of the first. If we set them
+down at perhaps somewhat over three millions (excluding wastage)
+towards the end of this second period, we shall be near to a just
+estimate.
+
+We can now sum up and say that, _apart from wastage_, the forces
+arrayed against each other after this full development should have
+been about 120 men for the central powers of the enemy--35 (and
+perhaps ultimately 40) men against them upon the West, and, until
+sufficient Russian equipment could at least be found, only some 30 men
+against them upon the East.
+
+Luckily such figures are wholly changed by the enormous rate of the
+enemy's wastage. The Russians had lost men almost as rapidly as the
+enemy, but the Russian losses could be and were made good. The
+handicap of the blockade under which Russia suffered permitted her to
+maintain only a certain number at the front, but she could continually
+draft in support of those numbers; and though she lost in the first
+seven months of the war quite four hundred thousand in prisoners, and
+perhaps three-quarters of a million in other casualties, her strength
+of somewhat over three millions was maintained at the close of the
+first period.
+
+In the same way drafts had further maintained the British numbers. The
+French had lost not more than one-fifth of a million in prisoners, and
+perhaps a third of a million or a little more in killed and
+permanently disabled--that is, unable to return to the fighting line.
+In the case of both the French and the British sanitary conditions
+were excellent.
+
+You have, then, quite 35 for your number in the West, and quite 33 for
+your number in the East of the Allied forces at the end of the winter;
+but of your enemy forces you may safely deduct 45-50 might be a truer
+estimate; and it is remarkable that those who have watched the matter
+carefully at the front are inclined to set the total enemy losses
+higher than do the critics working at home. But call it only 45 (of
+which 5 are prisoners), and you have against the 68 Allies in East and
+West no more at the end of this second period than 75 of the enemy.
+
+The following diagram illustrates in graphic form the change that six
+months have produced.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 15.]
+
+In other words, at the end of the winter and with the beginning of the
+spring, although the enemy still has a numerical preponderance, it is
+no longer the overwhelming thing it was when the war began, and that
+change in numbers explains the whole change in the campaign.
+
+The enemy was certain of winning mainly because he was fighting more
+than equal in the East, and at first nearly two to one, later quite
+four to three, in the West. Those are the conditions of the late
+summer of 1914. 1915, before it was a third over, had seen the numbers
+nearly equalized. With the summer of 1915 we might hope to see the
+numbers at last reversed, and, after so many perilous months, a total
+(not local) numerical majority at last appearing upon the side of the
+Allies. If ever this condition shall arrive before the enemy can
+accomplish a decisive result in either field the tide will have
+turned.
+
+The third period belongs at the moment of writing to the future. All
+we can say of it is that it presents for the enemy no considerable
+field of recruitment; but while in the West it offers no increase to
+the French, it does offer another five units at least, and possibly
+another six or eight, to the British; and to the Russians, if the
+blockade can be pierced at any point, or if the change of weather,
+coupled with the broadening of the gauge of the railway to Archangel,
+permits large imports, an almost indefinite increase in
+number--certainly an increase of two millions, or twenty of the units
+we were dealing with in the figures given above.
+
+So much, then, for the numerical factor in men which dominates the
+whole campaign.
+
+When we turn from this to the second factor--that of munitions--we
+discover something which can be dealt with far more briefly, but which
+follows very much the same line.
+
+The enemy in the first period of the war had, if anything, an even
+greater superiority in munitioning than in men. This superiority was
+due to two distinct causes. In the first place, as we shall see in a
+few pages, his theory upon a number of military details was well
+founded; in the second place, _he made war at his own chosen moment,
+after three years of determined and largely secret preparation_.
+
+As to the first point:--
+
+We may take as a particular example of these theories of war the
+enemies' reliance upon heavy artillery--and in particular upon the
+power of the modern high explosive and the big howitzer--to destroy
+permanent fortification rapidly, and to have an effect in the field,
+particularly in the preparation of an assault, which the military
+theories of the Allies had wrongly underestimated. It is but one
+example out of many. It must serve for the rest, and it will be dealt
+with more fully in the next section. The Germans to some extent, and
+much more the Austrians, prepared an immensely greater provision of
+heavy ammunition than their opponents, and entered the field with
+large pieces of a calibre and in number quite beyond anything that
+their opponents had at the outset of the campaign.
+
+As to the second point:--
+
+No peaceful nations, no nations not designing a war at their own hour,
+lock up armament which may be rendered obsolete, or, in equipment more
+extensive than the reasonable chances of a campaign may demand, the
+public resources which it can use on what it regards as more useful
+things. Such nations, to use a just metaphor, "insure" against war at
+what they think a reasonable rate. But if some one Government in
+Europe is anarchic in its morals, and proposes, while professing
+peace, to declare war at an hour and a day chosen by itself, it will
+obviously have an overwhelming advantage in this respect. The energy
+and the money which it devotes to the single object of preparation
+cannot possibly be wasted; and, if its sudden aggression is not fixed
+too far ahead, will not run the risk of being sunk in obsolete
+weapons.
+
+Now it is clearly demonstrable from the coincidence of dates, from the
+exact time required for a special effort of this kind, and from the
+rate at which munitions and equipment were accumulated, that the
+Government at Berlin came to a decision in the month of July 1911 to
+force war upon Russia and upon France immediately after the harvest of
+1914; and of a score of indications which all converge upon these
+dates, not one fails to strike them exactly by more than a few weeks
+in the matter of preparation, by more than a few days in the date at
+which war was declared.
+
+Under those circumstances, Berlin with her ally at Vienna had the
+immense numerical advantage over the French and the Russians when war
+was suddenly forced upon those countries on the 31st of July last
+year.
+
+But, as in the case of men, the advantage would only be overwhelming
+during the first period. The very fact that the war had to be won
+quickly involved an immense expenditure of heavy ammunition in the
+earlier part of it, and this expenditure, if it were not successful,
+would be a waste.
+
+It takes about five months to produce a heavy piece, and the rate of
+production of heavy ammunition, though slow, is measurable. At the
+moment of writing this, towards the close of the second period, the
+balance is not yet redressed, but it is in a fair way to be redressed.
+The imperfect and too tardy blockade to which the enemy is somewhat
+timidly subjected is a factor in aid of this; and we may be fairly
+confident that, if a third period is reached before the enemy shall
+have the advantage of a decision, there will be a preponderance of
+munitioning upon the Allied side in the West and the East which will
+be, if anything, of superior importance to the approaching
+preponderance in numbers.
+
+Having thus briefly surveyed the opposing strength of either
+combatant, checked and measured as it varied with the progress of the
+war, we will turn to the _moral_ opposition of military theory
+between the one party and the other, and show how here again that,
+_save in the most important matter of all, grand strategy_, the enemy
+was on the highroad to the victory which he confidently and, for that
+matter, reasonably expected.
+
+
+(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR.
+
+The long peace which the most civilized parts of Europe had enjoyed
+for now a generation left more and more uncertain the value of
+theories upon the conduct of war, which theories had for the most part
+developed as mere hypotheses untested by experience during that
+considerable period. The South African and the Manchurian war had
+indeed proved certain theories sound and others unsound, so far as
+their experience went; but they were fought under conditions very
+different from those of an European campaign, and the progress of
+material science was so rapid in the years just preceding the great
+European conflict that the mass of debated theories still remained
+untried at its outbreak.
+
+The war in its first six months thoroughly tested these theories, and
+proved, for the greater part of them, which were sound in practice and
+which unsound. I will tabulate them here, and beg the special
+attention of the reader, because upon the accuracy of these forecasts
+the first fortunes of the war depended.
+
+I. A German theory maintained that, with the organization of and the
+particular type of discipline in the German service, attacks could be
+delivered in much closer formation than either the French or the
+English believed to be possible.
+
+The point is this: After a certain proportion of losses inflicted
+within a certain limit of time, troops break or are brought to a
+standstill. That was the universal experience of all past war. When
+the troops that are attacking break or are brought to a standstill,
+the attack fails. But what you cannot determine until you test the
+matter in actual war is what numbers of losses in what time will thus
+destroy an offensive movement. You cannot determine it, because the
+chief element in the calculation is the state of the soldier's mind,
+and that is not a measurable thing. One had only the lessons of the
+past to help one.
+
+The advantages of attacking in close formation are threefold.
+
+(_a_) You launch your attack with the least possible delay. It is
+evident that spreading troops out from the column to the line takes
+time, and that the more extended your line the more time you consume
+before you can strike.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 16.]
+
+If I have here a hundred units advancing in a column towards the place
+where they are to attack (and to advance in column is necessary,
+because a broad line cannot long keep together), then it is evident
+that if I launched them to the attack thus:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 17.]
+
+packed close together, I get them into that formation much more
+quickly than if, before attacking, I have to spread them out thus:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 18.]
+
+(_b_) The blow which I deliver has also evidently more weight upon it
+at a given point. If I am attacking a hundred yards of front with a
+hundred units of man and missile power, I shall do that front more
+harm in a given time than if I am attacking with only fifty such
+units.
+
+(_c_) In particular circumstances, where troops _have_ to advance on a
+narrow front, as in carrying a bridge or causeway or a street or any
+other kind of defile, my troops, if they can stand close formation and
+the corresponding punishment it entails, will be more likely to
+succeed than troops not used to or not able to bear such close
+formation. Now, such conditions are very numerous in war. Troops are
+often compelled, if they are to succeed, to rush narrow gaps of this
+kind, and their ability to do so is a great element in tactical
+success.
+
+I have here used the phrase "if they can stand close formation and the
+corresponding punishment it entails," and that is the whole point.
+There are circumstances--perhaps, on the whole, the most numerous of
+all the various circumstances in war--in which close formation, if it
+can be used, is obviously an advantage; but it is equally self-evident
+that the losses of troops in close formation will be heavier than
+their losses in extended order. A group is a better target than a
+number of dispersed, scattered points.
+
+Now, the Germans maintained in this connection not only, as I have
+said, that they could get their men to stand the punishment involved
+in close formation, but also that:--
+
+(_a_) The great rapidity of such attacks would make the _total_ and
+_final_ wastage less than was expected, and further:--
+
+(_b_) That the heavy wastage, such as it was, was worth while, because
+it would lead to very rapid strategical decision as well as tactical.
+In other words, because once you had got your men to stand these heavy
+_local_ losses and to suffer heavy _initial_ wastage, you would win
+your campaign in a short time, so that the high-rate wastage not being
+prolonged need not be feared.
+
+Well, in the matter of this theory, the war conclusively proved the
+following points:--
+
+(_a_) The Germans were right and the Allies were wrong with regard to
+the mere possibility of using close formations. The German temper,
+coupled with the type of discipline in the modern German service, did
+prove capable of compelling men to stand losses out of all proportion
+to what the Allies expected they could stand, and yet to continue to
+advance neither broken nor brought to a standstill. But--
+
+(_b_) The war also proved that, upon the whole, and taking the
+operations in their entirety, such formations were an error. In case
+after case, a swarm of Germans advancing against inferior numbers got
+home after a third, a half, or even more than a half of their men had
+fallen in the first few minutes of the rush. But in many, many more
+cases this tactical experiment failed. Those who can speak as
+eye-witnesses tell us that, though the occasions on which such attacks
+actually broke were much rarer than was expected before the war began,
+yet the occasions on which the attack was thrown into hopeless
+confusion, and in which the few members of it that got home had lost
+all power to do harm to the defenders, were so numerous that the
+experiment must be regarded as, upon the whole, a failure. It may be
+one that no troops but Germans could employ. It is certainly not one
+which any troops, after the experience of this war, will copy.
+
+(_c_) Further, the war proved even more conclusively that the wastage
+was not worth while. The immense expense in men only succeeded where
+there was an overwhelming superiority in number. The strategical
+result was not arrived at quickly (as the Germans had expected)
+through this tactical method, and after six months of war, the enemy
+had thrown away more than twice and nearly three times as many men as
+he need have sacrificed had he judged sanely the length of time over
+which operations might last.
+
+II. Another German theory had maintained that modern high explosives
+fired from howitzers and the accuracy of their aim controlled by
+aircraft would rapidly and promptly dominate permanent fortification.
+
+This theory requires explanation. Its partial success in practice was
+the most startling discovery and the most unpleasant one to the Allies
+of the early part of the war.
+
+In the old days, say up to ten years ago or less, permanent
+fortification mounting heavy guns was impregnable to direct assault if
+it were properly held and properly munitioned. It could hold out for
+months. Its heavy guns had a range superior to any movable guns that
+could be brought against it--indeed, so very heavily superior that
+movable guns, even if they were howitzers, would be smashed or their
+crews destroyed long before the fortress was seriously damaged by
+them.
+
+A howitzer is but a form of mortar, and all such pieces are designed
+to lob a projectile instead of throwing it. The advantage of using
+these instruments when you are besieging permanent works is that you
+can hide them behind an obstacle, such as a hill, and that the heavy
+gun in the fortress cannot get its shell on to them because that shell
+has a flatter trajectory. The disadvantage is that the howitzer has a
+very much shorter range than the gun size for size.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 19.]
+
+Here is a diagram showing how necessarily true this is. The howitzer,
+lobbing its shell with a comparatively small charge, has the advantage
+of being able to hide behind a steep bit of ground, but on such a
+trajectory the range is short. The gun in the fortress does not lob
+its shell, but throws it. The course of the gun shell is much more
+straight. It therefore can only hit the howitzer and its crew
+indirectly by exploding its shell just above them. Until recently, the
+gun was master of the howitzer for three reasons:--
+
+First, because the largest howitzers capable of movement and of being
+brought up against any fortress and shifted from one place of
+concealment to another were so small that their range was
+insignificant. Therefore the circumference on which they could be used
+was also a small one; their opportunities for hiding were consequently
+reduced; the chances of their emplacement being immediately spotted
+from the fortress were correspondingly high, and the big gun in the
+fortress was pretty certain to overwhelm the majority of them at least.
+It is evident that the circumference {~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~} offers
+far more chances of hiding than the circumference ABC, but a still more
+powerful factor in favour of the new big howitzer is the practical one
+that at very great ranges in our climate the chances of spotting a
+particular place are extremely small. Secondly, because the explosives
+used, even when they landed and during the short time that the howitzer
+remained undiscovered and unheard, were not sufficiently powerful nor,
+with the small howitzers then in existence, sufficiently large in
+amount in each shell to destroy permanent fortification. Thirdly,
+because the effect of the aim is always doubtful. You are firing at
+something well above yourself, and you could not tell very exactly
+where your howitzer shell had fallen.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 20.]
+
+What has modified all this in the last few years is--
+
+First, the successful bringing into the field of very large howitzers,
+which, though they do lob their shells, lob them over a very great
+distance. The Austrians have produced howitzers of from 11 to 12
+inches in calibre, which, huge as they are, can be moved about in the
+field and fired from any fairly steady ground; and the Germans have
+probably produced (though I cannot find actual proof that they have
+used them with effect) howitzers of more than 16 inches calibre, to be
+moved, presumably, only upon rails. But 11-inch was quite enough to
+change all the old conditions. It must be remembered that a gun varies
+as the _cube_ of its calibre. A 12-inch piece is not twice as powerful
+as a 6-inch. It is _eight times_ as powerful. The howitzer could now
+fire from an immense distance. The circumference on which it worked
+was very much larger; its opportunities for finding suitable steep
+cover far greater. Its opportunities for moving, if it was endangered
+by being spotted, were also far greater; and the chances of the gun in
+the fortress knocking it out were enormously diminished.
+
+Secondly, the high explosives of recent years, coupled with the vast
+size of this new mobile howitzer shell, is capable, when the howitzer
+shell strikes modern fortification, of doing grievous damage which,
+repeated over several days, turns the fort into a mass of ruins.
+
+Thirdly, the difficulty of accurate aiming over such distances and of
+locating your hits so that they destroy the comparative small area of
+the fort is got over by the use of aircraft, which fly above the fort,
+note the hits, and signal the results.
+
+Now, the Germans maintained that under these quite recently modified
+conditions not even the best handled and heaviest gunned permanent
+fort could hold out more than a few days. The French believed that it
+could, and they trusted in the stopping power not only of individual
+works (such as the fortress of Manonvilliers on the frontier), but
+more especially of great rings of forts, such as surround Liége,
+Namur, Verdun, etc., and enclose an area within the security of which
+large bodies of troops can be held ready, armies which no one would
+dare to leave behind them without having first reduced them to
+surrender.
+
+The very first days of the war proved that the German theory was right
+and the French wrong. The French theory, upon which such enormous
+funds had been expended, had been perfectly right until within quite
+recent years the conditions had changed. Port Arthur, for instance,
+only ten years ago, could hold out for months and months. In this war
+no individual fort has held out for more than eleven days.
+
+It might be imagined under such circumstances that the very existence
+of fortresses was doomed; yet we note that Verdun continues to make a
+big bulge in the German line four months after the first shots fell on
+its forts, and that the Germans are actively restoring the great
+Belgian rings they have captured at Liége, Antwerp, and Namur.
+
+Why is this? It is because another German theory has proved right in
+practice.
+
+III. This German theory which has proved right in practice is what may
+be called "the mobile defence of a fortress." It proposes no longer to
+defend upon expensive permanent works precisely located upon the map,
+but upon a number of improvised batteries in which heavy guns can move
+somewhat behind field-works concealed as much as possible, numerous
+and constructed rapidly under the conditions of the campaign. Such
+works dotted round the area you desire to defend are quite a different
+thing to reduce from isolated, restricted, permanent forts. In the
+first place, the enemy does not know where they are; in the second
+place, you can make new ones at short notice; in the third place, if a
+howitzer does spot your heavy gun, you can move it or its neighbours
+to a new position; in the fourth place, the circumference you are
+defending is much larger, and the corresponding area that the
+besiegers have to search with their fire more extended. Thus, in the
+old forts round Verdun, about a dozen permanent works absolutely fixed
+and ascertainable upon the map, and covering altogether but a few
+acres, constituted the defence of the town. Before September was out
+the heavy guns had been moved to trenches far advanced into the field
+to the north and east, temporary rails had been laid down to permit
+their lateral movement--that is, to let them shift from a place where
+they had perhaps been spotted to a new place, under cover of darkness,
+and the sectors thus thrown out in front of the old fortifications in
+this improvised mobile fashion were at least three times as long as
+the line made by the ring of old forts, while the area that had to be
+searched was perhaps a hundred times as large. For in the place of the
+narrowly restricted permanent fort, with, say, ten heavy guns, you had
+those same ten heavy guns dotted here and there in trenches rapidly
+established in half a dozen separate, unknown, and concealed spots,
+along perhaps a mile of wooded hill, and free to operate when moved
+over perhaps double that front.
+
+IV. _In Grand Strategy a German general theory of strategics was
+opposed to a French general theory of strategics, and upon which of
+the two should prove right depended, much more than on any of the
+previous points, the ultimate issue of the campaign._
+
+This is far the most important point for the reader's consideration.
+It may be said with justice that no one can understand this war who
+has not grasped the conflict between these two fundamental conceptions
+of armed bodies in action, and the manner in which (by the narrowest
+and most fortunate margin!) events in the first phase of the war
+justified the French as against the German school.
+
+I must therefore beg the reader's leave to go somewhat thoroughly into
+the matter, for it is the foundation of all that will follow when we
+come to the narration of events and the story of the Western battle
+which began in the retreat from the Sambre and ended in the Battle of
+the Marne.
+
+The first postulate in all military problems is that, other things
+being equal, numbers are the decisive factor in war. This does not
+mean that absolute superiority of numbers decides a campaign
+necessarily in favour of the superior power. What it means is that _in
+any particular field_, if armament and discipline are more or less
+equal on the two sides, the one that has been able to mass the greater
+number _in that field_ will have the victory. He will disperse or
+capture his enemy, or at the least he will pin him and take away his
+_initiative_--of which word "initiative" more later. Now, this field
+in which one party has the superior numbers can only be a portion of
+the whole area of operations. But if it is what is called the decisive
+portion, then he who has superior numbers _in the decisive time and
+place_ will win not only there but everywhere. His local victory
+involves consequent success along the whole of his line.
+
+For instance, supposing five men are acting against three. Five is
+more than three; and if the forces bear upon each other equally, the
+five will defeat the three. But if the five are so badly handled that
+they get arranged in groups of two, two, and one, and if the three are
+so well handled that they strike swiftly at the first isolated two and
+defeat them, thus bringing up the next isolated two, who are in their
+turn defeated, the three will, at the end of the struggle, have only
+one to deal with, and the five will have been beaten by the three
+because, although five is larger than three, yet _in the decisive time
+and place_ the three never have more than two against them. It may be
+broadly laid down that the whole art of strategics consists for the
+man with superior numbers in bringing all his numbers to bear, and for
+the man with inferior numbers in attempting by his cunning to compel
+his larger opponent to fight in separated portions, and to be defeated
+in detail.
+
+As in every art, the developments of these elementary first principles
+become, with variations of time and place, indefinitely numerous and
+various. Upon their variety depends all the interest of military
+history. And there is one method in particular whereby the lesser
+number may hope to pin and destroy the power of the greater upon which
+the French tradition relied, and the value of which modern German
+criticism refused.
+
+Before going into that, however, we must appreciate the mental
+qualities which led to the acceptance of the theory upon the one side
+and its denial upon the other.
+
+The fundamental contrast between the modern German military temper and
+the age-long traditions of the French service consists in this: That
+the German theory is based upon a presumption of superiority, moral,
+material, and numerical. The theory of the French--as their national
+temperament and their Roman tradition compel them--is based upon an
+_envisagement_ of inferiority: moral, material, and numerical.
+
+There pervades the whole of the modern German strategic school this
+feeling: "I shall win if I act and feel as though I was bound to win."
+There pervades the whole French school this sentiment: "I have a
+better chance of winning if I am always chiefly considering how I
+should act if I found myself inferior in numbers, in material, and
+even in moral at any phase in the struggle, especially at its origins,
+but even also towards its close."
+
+This contrast appears in everything, from tactical details to the
+largest strategical conception, and from things so vague and general
+as the tone of military writings, to things so particular as the
+instruction of the conscript in his barrack-room. The German soldier
+is taught--or was--that victory was inevitable, and would be as swift
+as it would be triumphant: the French soldier was taught that he had
+before him a terrible and doubtful ordeal, one that would be long, one
+in which he ran a fearful risk of defeat, and one in which he might,
+even if victorious, have to wear down his enemy by the exercise of a
+most burdensome tenacity. In the practice of the field, the contrast
+appeared in the French use of a great reserve, and the German contempt
+for such a precaution: in the elaborate thinking out of the use of a
+reserve, which is the core of French military thought; in the
+superficial treatment of the same, which is perhaps the chief defect
+of Germany.
+
+It would be of no purpose to debate here which of these two mental
+attitudes, with all their consequences, is either morally the better
+or in practice the more successful. The French and Latin tradition
+seems to the German pusillanimous, and connected with that decadence
+which he perceives in every expression of civilization from Athens to
+Paris. The modern German conception seems to the French theatrical,
+divorced from reality, and hence fundamentally weak. Either critic may
+be right or either wrong. Our interest is to follow the particular
+schemes developing from that tone of mind. We shall see how, in the
+first phases of the war, the German conception strikingly justified
+itself for more than ten days; how, after a fortnight, it was
+embarrassed by its opponent; and how at the end of a month the German
+initiative was lost under the success--only barely achieved after
+dreadful risk--of the French plan.
+
+That plan, inherited from the strategy of Napoleon, and designed in
+particular to achieve the success of a smaller against a larger
+number, may be most accurately defined as _the open strategic square_,
+and its leading principle is "the method of detached reserves."
+
+This strategic conception, which I shall now describe, and which (in a
+diagram it is put far too simply) underlies the whole of the
+complicated movements whereby the French staved off disaster in the
+first weeks of the war, is one whose whole object it is to permit the
+inferior number to bring up a _locally_ superior weight against a
+_generally_ superior enemy in the decisive time and at the decisive
+place.
+
+Let us suppose that a general commanding _twelve_ large units--say,
+twelve army corps--knows that he is in danger of being attacked by an
+enemy commanding no less than _sixteen_ similar units.
+
+Let us call the forces of the first or weaker general "White," and
+those of the second or stronger general "Black."
+
+It is manifest that if White were merely to deploy his line and await
+the advance of Black thus,
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 21.]
+
+he would be outflanked and beaten; or, in the alternative, Black might
+mass men against White's centre and pierce it, for Black is vastly
+superior to White in numbers. White, therefore, must adopt some
+special disposition in order to avoid immediate defeat.
+
+Of such special dispositions one among many is the French Open
+Strategic Square.
+
+This disposition is as follows:--
+
+White arranges his twelve units into four quarters of three each, and
+places one quarter at each corner of a square thus:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 22.]
+
+We will give them titles, and call them A, B, C, and D.
+
+If, as is most generally the case in a defensive campaign at its
+opening, White cannot be certain from which exact direction the main
+blow is coming, he may yet know that it is coming from some one
+general direction, from one sector of the compass at least, and he
+arranges his square to face towards that sector.
+
+For instance, in the above diagram, he may not know whether the blow
+is coming from the precise direction 1, or 2, or 3, but he knows that
+it is coming somewhere within the sector XY.
+
+Then he will draw up his square so that its various bodies all face
+towards the average direction from which the blow may come.
+
+The SIZE of his square--which is of great importance to the
+result--he makes as restricted as possible, _subject to two prime
+conditions_. These conditions are:--
+
+First, that there shall be room for the troops composing each corner
+to be deployed--that is, spread out for fighting. Secondly, that there
+shall be room between any two corners (A and C, for instance) for a
+third corner (D, for instance) to move in between them and spread out
+for fighting in support of them. He makes his square as close and
+restricted as possible, because his success depends--as will be seen
+in a moment--upon the rapidity with which any one corner can come up
+in support of the others. But he leaves enough room for the full
+numbers to spread out for fighting, because otherwise he loses in
+efficiency; and he leaves room enough between any two squares for a
+third one to come in, because the whole point of the formation is the
+aid each corner can bring to the others.
+
+In this posture he awaits the enemy.
+
+That enemy will necessarily come on in a lengthy line, lengthy in
+proportion to the number of his units. For it is essential to the
+general commanding _superior_ numbers to make the _whole_ of the
+superior numbers tell, and this can only be done if they march along
+parallel roads, and these roads are sufficiently wide apart for the
+various columns to have plenty of room to deploy--that is, to spread
+out into a fighting line--when the shock comes.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 23.]
+
+This extended line of Black marching thus against White strikes White
+first upon some one corner of his square. Suppose that corner to be
+corner A. Then the position when contact is established and the first
+serious fighting begins is what you will observe in the above diagram.
+A is the corner (now spread out for fighting) which gets the first
+shock.
+
+Note you (for this is the crucial point of the whole business) that
+upon the exposed corner A will fall a very dangerous task indeed. A
+will certainly be attacked by forces superior to itself. Normally
+forces more than half as large again as A will be near enough to A to
+concentrate upon him in the first shock. The odds will be at least as
+much as five to three, the Black units, 4, 5, and 6, will be right on
+A, and 3 and 7 will be near enough to come in as well in the first day
+or two of the combat, while possibly 2 may have a look in as well.
+
+A, thus tackled, has become what may be called "the _operative corner_
+of the square." It is his task "to retreat and hold the enemy" while
+B, C, and D, "the masses of manoeuvre," swing up. But under that
+simple phrase "operative corner" is hidden all the awful business of a
+fighting retreat: it means leaving your wounded behind you, marching
+night and day, with your men under the impression of defeat; leaving
+your disabled guns behind you, keeping up liaison between all your
+hurrying, retreating units, with a vast force pressing forward to your
+destruction. A's entire force is deliberately imperilled in order to
+achieve the success of the plan as a whole, and upon A's tenacity, as
+will be seen in what follows, the success of that plan entirely
+depends.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 24.]
+
+Well, while A is thus retreating--say, from his old position at A_1 on
+the foregoing diagram to such a position as A_2, with Black swarming
+up to crush him--the other corners of the square, B, C, and D, receive
+the order to "swing"--that is, to go forward inclining to the left or
+the right according to the command given.
+
+Mark clearly that, until the order is given, the general commanding
+Black cannot possibly tell whether the "swing" will be directed to
+the left or to the right. Either B will close up against A, C spread
+out farther to the left, and D come in between A and C (which is a
+"swing" to the left) as in Sketch 25, or C will close up against A, B
+will spread well out to the right, and D come up between A and B, as
+in Sketch 26 (which is a "swing" to the right).
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 25.]
+
+Until the "swing" actually begins, Black, the enemy, cannot possibly
+tell whether it is his left-hand units (1 to 8) or his right-hand
+units (9 to 16) which will be affected. One of the two ends of his
+line will have to meet White's concentrated effort; the other will be
+left out in the cold. Black cannot make dispositions on the one
+hypothesis or on the other. Whichever he chose, White would, of
+course, swing the other way and disconcert him.
+
+Black, therefore, has to keep his line even until he knows which way
+White is going to swing.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 26.]
+
+Let us suppose that White swings to the left.
+
+Mark what follows. The distances which White's units have got to go
+are comparatively small. B will be up at A's side, and so will D in a
+short time after the swing is over, and when the swing is completed,
+the position is after this fashion. Black's numbers, 1 to 9 inclusive,
+find themselves tackled by all Black's twelve. There is a superiority
+of number against Black on his right, White's left, and the remaining
+part of Black's line (10 to 16 inclusive), is out in the cold.
+
+If it were a tactical problem, and all this were taking place in a
+small field, Black's left wing, 10-16, would, of course, come up at
+once and redress the balance. But being a strategical problem, and
+involving very large numbers and very great distances, Black's left
+wing, 10-16, can do nothing of the kind. For Black's left wing, 10-16,
+_cannot possibly get up in time_. Long before it has arrived on the
+scene, White's 12 will have broken Black's 9 along Black's right wing.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 27.]
+
+There are three elements which impose this delay upon Black's left
+wing.
+
+First, to come round in aid of the right wing means the marching
+forward of one unit after another, so that each shall overlap the
+last, and so allow the whole lot to come up freely. This means that
+the last unit will have to go forward six places before turning, and
+that means several days' marching. For with very large bodies, and
+with a matter of 100 miles to come up, all in one column, it would be
+an endless business (Sketch 28).
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 28.]
+
+Next you have the delay caused by the _conversion of direction_
+through a whole right angle. That cause of delay is serious. For when
+you are dealing with very large bodies of men, such as half a dozen
+army corps, to change suddenly from the direction S (see Sketch 29)
+for which your Staff work was planned, and to break off at a moment's
+notice in direction E, while you are on the march towards S, is
+impossible. You have to think out a whole new set of dispositions,
+and to re-order all your great body of men. White was under no such
+compulsion, for though he had to swing, the swing faced the same
+general direction as his original dispositions. And the size of the
+units and the distances to be traversed--the fact that the problem is
+strategical and not tactical--is the essence of the whole thing. If,
+for instance, you have (as in Sketch 30) half a dozen, not army corps,
+but mere battalions of 1,000 men, deployed over half a dozen miles of
+ground, AB, and advancing in the direction SS, and they are suddenly
+sent for in the direction E, it is simple enough. You form your 6,000
+men into column; in a few hours' delay they go off in the direction
+E, and when they get to the place where they are wanted, the column
+can spread out quickly again on the front CD, and soon begin to take
+part in the action. But when you are dealing with half a dozen army
+corps--240,000 men--it is quite another matter. The turning of any one
+of these great bodies through a whole right angle is a lengthy
+business. You cannot put a quarter of a million men into one
+column--they would take ages to deploy--so you must, as we have seen,
+make each unit of them overlap the next before the turn can begin.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 29.]
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 30.]
+
+Nor is that all the delay involved. It would never do for these six
+separate corps to come up in driblets and get defeated in detail; 10,
+11, and 12 will have to wait until 13, 14, 15, and even 16, have got
+up abreast of them--and that is the third cause of delay.
+
+Here are three causes of delay which, between them and accumulated,
+have disastrous effect; and in general we may be certain that where
+very large bodies and very extensive stretches of territory are
+concerned, that wing of Black which has been left out in the cold can
+never come up in time to retrieve the situation created by White's
+twelve pinning Black's engaged wing of only nine.
+
+If the square has worked, and if the twelve White have pinned the
+right-hand wing of Black, 1 to 9 inclusive, there is nothing for Black
+to do but to order his right wing, 1 to 9, to retreat as fast as
+possible before superior numbers, and to order his left wing, 10 to
+16, to fall back at the same time and keep in line; and you then have
+the singular spectacle of twelve men compelling the retreat of and
+pursuing sixteen.
+
+_That is exactly what happened in the first three weeks of active
+operations in the West. The operative corner A in the annexed diagram
+was the Franco-British force upon the Sambre. The retirement of that
+operative corner and its holding of the enemy was what is called in
+this country "The Retreat from Mons." BB are the "masses of manoeuvre"
+behind A. The swinging up of these masses involving the retirement of
+the whole was the Battle of the Marne._
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 31.]
+
+Now, it is evident that in all this everything depends upon the
+tenacity and military value of the operative corner, which is exposed
+and sacrificed that the whole scheme of the Open Square may work.
+
+If that operative corner is destroyed as a force--is overwhelmed or
+dispersed or surrounded--while it is fighting its great odds, the
+whole square goes to pieces. Its centre is penetrated by the enemy,
+and the army is in a far worse plight than if recourse had never been
+had to the open strategic square at all. For if the operative corner,
+A, is out of existence before the various bodies forming the
+"manoeuvring mass" behind it have had time to "swing," then the enemy
+will be right in their midst, and destroying, in overwhelming force,
+these remaining _separated_ bodies in detail.
+
+It was here that the German strategic theory contrasted so violently
+with the French. The Germans maintained that an ordeal which Napoleon
+might have been able to live through with his veterans and after
+fifteen years of successful war, a modern conscript army, most of its
+men just taken from civilian life and all of short service, would
+never endure. They believed the operative corner would go to pieces
+and either be pounded to disintegration, or outflanked, turned, and
+caught in the first days of the shock before the rest of the square
+had time to "work." The French believed the operative corner would
+stand the shock, and, though losing heavily, would remain in being.
+They believed that the operative corner of the square would, even
+under modern short service and large quasi-civilian reserve
+conditions, remain an army. They staked their whole campaign upon that
+thesis, and they turned out to be right. But they only just barely won
+through, and by the very narrowest margin. Proving right as they did,
+however, the success of their strategical theory changed the whole
+course of the war.
+
+With this contrast of the great opposing theories considered, I come
+to the conclusion of my Second Part, which examines the forces
+opposed. I will now turn to the Third Part of my book, which concerns
+the first actual operations from the Austrian note to the Battle of
+the Marne.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Thus, after these lines were written, I had occasion in _Land and
+Water_ to estimate the garrison of Przemysl before the figures were
+known. The element wherewith to guide one's common sense was the known
+perimeter to be defended; and arguing from this, I determined that a
+minimum of not less than 100,000 men would capitulate. I further
+conceived that the total losses could hardly be less than 40,000, and
+I arrived at an original force of between three and four corps.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 32.]
+
+
+
+
+PART III.
+
+THE FIRST OPERATIONS.
+
+
+In any general view of the great war which aims both at preserving
+proportion between its parts, and at presenting especially the main
+lines in relief, the three weeks between the German sudden forcing of
+war and the seventeen or eighteen days between the English declaration
+and the main operations upon the Sambre, will have but a subsidiary
+importance. They were occupied for at least half the period in the
+mobilization of the great armies. They were occupied for the second
+half of the period in the advance across the Rhine of German numbers
+greatly superior to the Allies, and also through the plain of Northern
+Belgium. The operation, as calculated by the German General Staff, was
+delayed by but a very few days--one might almost say hours--by the
+hastily improvised resistance of Liége, and the imperfect defence of
+their country which was all the Belgian forces, largely untrained,
+could offer.
+
+We must, therefore, pass briefly enough over that preliminary period,
+though the duty may be distasteful to the reader, on account of the
+very exaggerated importance which its operations took, especially in
+British eyes.
+
+For this false perspective there were several reasons, which it is
+worth while to enumerate, as they will aid our judgment in obtaining a
+true balance between these initial movements and the great conflicts
+to which they were no more than an introduction.
+
+1. War, as a whole, had grown unfamiliar to Western Europe. War on
+such a scale as this was quite untried. There was nothing in
+experience to determine our judgment, and after so long a peace,
+during which the habits of civil life had ceased to be conventioned
+and had come to seem part of the necessary scheme of things, the first
+irruption of arms dazzled or confounded the imagination of all.
+
+2. The first shock, falling as it did upon the ring fortress of
+Liége, at once brought into prominence one of the chief questions of
+modern military debate, the value of the modern ring fortress, and
+promised to put to the test the opposing theories upon this sort of
+stronghold.
+
+3. The violation of Belgian territory, though discounted in the
+cynical atmosphere of our time, when it came to the issue was, without
+question, a stupendous moral event. It was the first time that
+anything of this sort had happened in the history of Christian Europe.
+Historians unacquainted with the spirit of the past may challenge that
+remark, but it is true. One of the inviolable conventions, or rather
+sacred laws, of our civilization was broken, which is that European
+territory not involved in hostilities by any act of its Government is
+inviolable to opposing armies. The Prussian crime of Silesia, nearly
+two centuries before, the succeeding infamies of 1864, and the forgery
+of the Ems dispatch, the whole proclaimed tradition of contempt for
+the sanctities of Christendom, proceeding from Frederick the Great,
+had indeed accustomed men to successive stages in the decline of
+international morals; but nothing of the wholly crude character which
+this violation of Belgium bore was to be discovered in the past, even
+of Prussia, and posterity will mark it as a curious term and possibly
+a turning-point in the gradual loss of our common religion, and of the
+moral chaos accompanying that loss.
+
+4. The preparations of this country by land were not complete. Those
+of the French were belated compared with those of the Germans, and the
+prospect of even a short delay in the falling of the blow was
+exaggerated in value by all the intensity of that anxiety with which
+the blow was awaited.
+
+To proceed from these preliminaries to the story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The German Army had for its ultimate object, when it should be fully
+mobilized, the passage of the greater part of its forces over the
+Belgian Plain.
+
+This Belgian Plain has for now many centuries formed the natural
+avenue for an advance upon the Gauls.
+
+It has been represented too often as a sort of meeting-place, where
+must always come the shock between what is called Latin civilization
+and the Germanic tribes. But this view is both pedantic and
+historically false. There never was here a shock or conflict between
+two national ideals. What is true is, that civilization spread far
+more easily up from the Gauls through that fertile land towards the
+forests of Germany, and that when the Roman Empire broke down, or
+rather when its central government broke down, the frontier garrisons
+could here depend upon wealthier and more numerous populations for the
+support of their local government. That body of auxiliary soldiers in
+the Roman army which was drawn from the Frankish tribes ruled here
+when Rome could no longer rule. It was from Tournai that the father of
+Clovis exercised his power; and in the resettlement of the local
+governments in the sixth century, the Belgian Plain was the avenue
+through which the effort of the civilized West was directed towards
+the Rhine. It has Roman Cologne for its outpost; later it evangelized
+the fringes of German barbarism, and later still conquered them with
+the sword. All through the succeeding centuries the ambitions of kings
+in France, or of emperors upon the Rhine, were checked or satisfied in
+that natural avenue of advance. Charlemagne's frontier palace and
+military centre facing the Pagans was rather at Aix than at Trèves or
+Metz; and though the Irish missionaries, who brought letters and the
+arts and the customs of reasonable men to the Germans, worked rather
+from the south, the later forced conversion of the Saxons, which
+determined the entry of the German tribes as a whole into Christendom,
+was a stroke struck northwards from the Belgian Plain. Cæsar's
+adventurous crossing of the Rhine was a northern crossing. The
+Capetian monarchy was saved on its eastern front at Bouvines, in that
+same territory. The Austro-Spanish advance came down from it, to be
+checked at St. Quentin. Louis XIV.'s main struggle for power upon the
+marches of his kingdom concentrated here. The first great check to it
+was Marlborough's campaign upon the Meuse; the last battle was within
+sound of Mons, at Malplaquet. The final decision, as it was
+hoped--the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo--again showed what this
+territory meant in the military history of the West. It was following
+upon this decision that Europe, in the great settlement, decided to
+curb the chaos of future war by solemnly neutralizing the Belgian
+Plain for ever; and to that pact a seal was set not only by the French
+and the British, but also by the Prussian Government, with what
+results we know.
+
+The entries into this plain are very clearly defined by natural
+limits. It is barred a few hours' march beyond the German frontier by
+the broad and deep river Meuse, which here runs from the rough and
+difficult Ardennes country up to the Dutch frontier. The whole passage
+is no more than twelve miles across, and at the corner of it, where
+the Meuse bends, is the fortress of Liége. West of this fortress the
+upper reaches of the river run, roughly east and west upon Namur, and
+after Namur turn south again, passing through a very deep ravine that
+extends roughly from the French town of Mezières to Namur through the
+Ardennes country. The Belgian Plain is therefore like a bottle with a
+narrow neck, a bottle defined by the Dutch frontier and the Middle
+Meuse on either side, and a neck extending only from the Ardennes
+country to the Dutch frontier, with the fortress of Liége barring the
+way. Now the main blow was to be delivered ultimately upon the line
+Namur-Charleroi-Mons. That is, the situation was roughly that of the
+accompanying diagram: by the bottle neck at D the whole mass of troops
+must pass--or most of them--which are later to strike on the front AB.
+To reach that front was available to the invader the vast network of
+Belgian railways RRR crammed with rolling stock, and provided such
+opportunities for rapid advance as no other district in Europe could
+show. But all this system converged upon the main line which ran
+through the ring of forts round Liége, L, and so passed through
+Aix-la-Chapelle, A, and to Germany.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 33.]
+
+The German Government, therefore, could not be secure of its intention
+to pass great bodies through the Belgian Plain until Liége was
+grasped, and it was determined to grasp Liége long before the
+mobilization of the German forces was completed. For this purpose only
+a comparatively small force, rapidly gathered, was available. It was
+placed under the command of General von Emmerich, and its first bodies
+exchanged shots with the Belgian outposts early in the afternoon of
+Tuesday, August 4, 1914.
+
+The hour and date should always be remembered for the solemnity which
+attaches to the beginning of any great thing; and the full observer of
+European affairs, who understands what part religion or superstition
+plays in the story of Europe, will note this enormously significant
+detail. The first Germans to cross the violated frontier accomplished
+that act upon the same day and at the same hour as that in which
+their forerunners had crossed the French frontier forty-four years
+before.
+
+The afternoon wore on to night, with no more than a conflict between
+outposts. Just before midnight the cannonade was first heard. It also
+was the moment in which the ultimatum delivered to Germany by this
+country, by a coincidence, expired.[2]
+
+This night attack with guns was only delivered against one sector of
+the Liége forts, and only with field-pieces.
+
+As to the first of these points, it will be found repeated throughout
+the whole of the campaign wherever German forces attack a ring of
+permanent works. For the German theory in this matter (which
+experience has now amply supported) is that since modern permanent
+works _of known and restricted position_ go under to a modern siege
+train if the fire of the latter be fully concentrated and the largest
+pieces available, everything should be sacrificed to the putting into
+the narrowest area of all the projectiles available. The ring once
+broken on a sufficient single sector point is broken altogether.
+
+The second point, that only field-pieces as yet were used (which was
+due to the fact that the siege train was not yet come up), is an
+important indication of the weakness of the defence--on all of which
+the enemy were, of course, thoroughly informed.
+
+There were perhaps 20,000 men in and upon the whole periphery of
+Liége, a matter of over thirty miles, and what was most serious, no
+sufficient equipment or preparation of the forts, or, what was more
+serious still, no sufficient trained body of gunners.
+
+It is almost true to say that the resistance of Liége, such as it was,
+was effected by rifle fire.
+
+With the dawn of August 5th, and in the first four hours of daylight,
+a German infantry attack upon the same south-eastern forts which had
+been subjected to the first artillery fire in the night developed, and
+after some loss withdrew, but shortly after the first of the forts,
+that of Fléron, was silenced. The accompanying sketch map will show
+how wide a gap was left henceforward in the defences. Further, Fléron
+was the strongest of the works upon this side of the river. Seeing
+that, in any case, even if there had been a sufficient number of
+trained gunners in the forts, and a sufficient equipment and full
+preparation of the works for a siege (both of which were lacking),
+the absence of sufficient men to hold the gaps between would in any
+case have been fatal to the defence. With such a new gap as this open
+by the fall of Fléron, the defence was hopeless, even if it were only
+to be counted in hours.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 34.]
+
+It is high praise of the Belgian people and character to point out
+that, after the fall of Fléron, for forty-eight full hours such a gap
+was still contested by men, a great part of whom were little better
+than civilian in training, and who, had they been all tried regulars,
+would have been far too few for their task. General Leman, who
+commanded them, knew well in those early hours of Wednesday, the 5th,
+that the end had already come. He also knew the value of even a few
+hours' hopeless resistance, not perhaps to the material side of the
+Allied strategy, but to the support of those moral forces lacking
+which men are impotent in maintaining a challenge. Not only all that
+Wednesday, the 5th, but all the Thursday, the 6th, he maintained a
+line against the pressure of the invaders with his imperfect and
+insufficient troops.
+
+During those forty-eight hours, the big howitzer, which is the type
+of the heavy German siege train--the 225 mm.--was brought up, and it
+is possible that a couple of the still larger Austrian pieces of 280
+mm. (what we call in this country the 11-inch), which are constructed
+with flat treadles to their wheels to fire from mats laid on any
+reasonably hard surface (such as a roadway), had been brought up as
+well. At any rate, in the course of the Thursday, the fort next
+westward from Fléron, Chaudefontaine, was smashed. The gap was now
+quite untenable, and the first body of German cavalry entered the
+city. The incident has been reported as a _coup de main_, with the
+object of capturing the Belgian general. Its importance to the
+military story is simply that it proved the way to be open. In the
+afternoon and evening of the day, the Belgians were retiring into the
+heart of the city, and it is typical of the whole business that the
+great railway bridge upon which the main communications depended was
+left intact for the Germans to use.
+
+With the morning of Friday, the 7th August, the first bodies of German
+infantry entered the town. The forts on the north and two remaining
+western forts upon the south of the river were still untaken, and
+until a large breach should be made in the northern forts at least,
+the railway communication of the German advance into the Belgian plain
+was still impeded. Great masses of the enemy, and, in proportion to
+those masses, still greater masses of advance stores were brought in.
+
+In all that follows, until we reach the date of Monday, August 24th, I
+propose to consider no more than the fortunes of the troops who passed
+through Belgium to attack the French armies upon the Sambre and the
+Meuse, with the British contingent that had come to their aid. And my
+reasons for thus segregating and dealing later with contemporary
+events in the south will appear in the sequel.
+
+This reservation made--an important one in the scheme of this book--I
+return to what I have called the preliminaries, the advance through
+Belgium.
+
+We have already seen that the reduction of the northern forts of Liége
+was the prime necessity to that advance.
+
+We have also seen that meanwhile it was possible and advisable to
+accumulate stores for the advance as far forward as could be managed,
+and that it was also possible, with caution, to bring certain
+bodies--not the bulk of the army--forward through the Ardennes, to
+command the passages of the Meuse above Liége, between that fortress
+and Namur.
+
+This latter operation was effected by the 12th of August, when the
+town of Huy, with its bridge and its railway leading from the Belgian
+Ardennes right into the Belgian Plain, was seized.
+
+Meanwhile, upon the north of the river Meuse, cavalry and armed
+motor-cars were similarly preparing the way for the general advance
+when the northern forts of Liége should be dominated; and on this same
+Wednesday, August 12th, the most advanced bodies of the invader lay in
+a line roughly north and south from the neighbourhood of Diest along
+the Gethe and thence towards Huy.
+
+Of the outrages committed upon the civilian inhabitants in all these
+country-sides, the Government of which was neutral, and the territory
+of which was by the public law of Europe free not only from such
+novel crimes but from legitimate acts of war, I shall not speak, just
+as I shall not allude, save where they happen to have military
+importance, to the future increase of similar abominations which
+marked the progress of the campaign. For my only object in these pages
+is to lay before the reader a commentary which will explain the
+general strategy of the war.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 35.]
+
+While this advance line of cavalry was engaging in unimportant minor
+actions, or rather skirmishes (grossly exaggerated in the news of
+those days), the attack on the northern forts of Liége, upon which
+everything now depended, was opened. It was upon Thursday, August
+13th, that the 280 mm. howitzers opened upon Loncin. Other of the
+remaining forts were bombarded; but, as in the case of Fléron a week
+before, we need not consider the subsidiary operations, because
+everything depended upon the fort of Loncin, which, as the
+accompanying diagram shows, commanded the railway line westward from
+Liége. General Leman himself was within that work, the batteries
+against which were now operating from _within_ the ring--that is, from
+the city itself, or in what soldiers technically call "reverse"--that
+is, from the side upon which no fort is expected to stand, the side
+which is expected to defend and not to be attacked from. Whether
+Loncin held out the full forty-eight hours, or only forty, or only
+thirty-six, we do not know; but that moral factor to which I have
+already alluded, and which must be fully weighed in war, was again
+strengthened by the nature of such a resistance. For nearly all that
+garrison was dead and its commander found unconscious when the
+complete destruction of the work by the high explosive shells
+permitted the enemy to enter.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 36.]
+
+It was upon Saturday, the 15th of August, that the great bulk of the
+two main German armies set aside for passage through the Belgian Plain
+began to use the now liberated railway, and the week between that date
+and the first great shock upon the Sambre is merely a record of the
+almost uninterrupted advance, concentration, and supply of something
+not far short of half a million men coming forward in a huge tide
+over, above, and round on to, the line Namur-Charleroi-Mons, which was
+their ultimate objective, and upon which the Anglo-French
+body--perhaps half as numerous--had determined to stand.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 37.]
+
+The story of that very rapid advance is merely one of succeeding
+dates. By the 17th the front was at Tirlemont, by the 19th it was
+across the Dyle and running thence south to Wavre (the first army),
+the second army continuing south of this with a little east in it to a
+point in front of Namur. On the 20th there was enacted a scene of no
+military importance (save that it cost the invaders about a day), but
+of some moral value, because it strongly impressed the opinion in this
+country and powerfully affected the imagination of Europe as a whole:
+I mean the triumphal march through Brussels.
+
+Far more important than this display was the opening on the evening of
+the same day, Thursday, August 20th, of the first fire against the
+eastern defences of Namur. This fire was directed upon that evening
+against the two and a half miles of trench between the forts of
+Cognelée and Marchovelette, and in the morning of Friday, the 21st,
+the trenches were given up, and the German infantry was within the
+ring of forts north of the city. The point of Namur, as we shall see
+in a moment, was twofold. First, its fortifications, so long as they
+held out, commanded the crossings both of the Sambre and of the Meuse
+within the angle of which the French defensive lay; secondly, its
+fortified zone formed the support whereupon the whole French right
+reposed. It was this unexpected collapse of the Belgian defence of
+Namur which, coupled with the unexpected magnitude of the forces
+Germany had been able to bring through the Belgian plain, determined
+what was to follow.
+
+Once Namur was entered, the reduction of the forts was not of
+immediate importance, though it was immediately and successfully
+achieved. For the German business was not here, as at Liége, to grasp
+a railway within the zone of the fortifications, but to destroy the
+buttress upon which the French depended for their defensive position,
+and to prevent the French from holding the crossings over the two
+rivers Sambre and Meuse at their junction.
+
+With this entry of the Germans into Namur, their passage of the lines
+upon Friday, August 21st, their capture of the bridgeheads on
+Saturday, August 22nd, we reach the beginning of those great
+operations which threatened for a moment to decide the war in the
+West, and to establish the German Empire in that position to attain
+which it had planned and forced the war upon its appointed day.
+
+It behoves us before entering into the detail of this large affair to
+see the plan of it clearly before our eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have already described that general conception underlying the whole
+modern French school of strategy for which the best title (though one
+liable to abuse by too mechanical an interpretation) is "the open
+strategic square."
+
+I have further warned the reader that, in spite of the way in which
+the intricacy of organization inseparable from great masses and the
+manifold disposition of a modern army will mask the general nature of
+such an operation, that operation cannot be understood unless its
+simplest lines are clear. I have further insisted that in practice
+those lines remain only in the idea of the scheme of the whole, and
+are not to be discovered save in the loosest way from the actual
+positions of men upon the map.
+
+We have seen that this "open strategic square" involved essentially
+two conceptions--the fixed "operative corner" and the swinging
+"manoeuvring masses."
+
+The manoeuvring masses, at this moment when the great German blow fell
+upon the Sambre and the Meuse, and when Namur went down immediately
+before it, were (_a_) upon the frontiers of Alsace and Lorraine, (_b_)
+in the centre of the country, (_c_) near the capital and to the west
+of it, and even, some of them, upon the sea.
+
+The operative corner was this group of armies before Namur on the
+Sambre and Meuse, the 4th French Army under Langle, the 5th French
+Army under Lanrezac, the British contingent under French.
+
+We know from what has been written above in this book that it is the
+whole business of an operative corner to "take on" superior numbers,
+and to hold them as well as possible, even though compelled to
+retreat, until the manoeuvring masses can swing and come up in aid,
+and so pin the enemy.
+
+We further know from what has gone before that the whole crux of this
+manoeuvre lies in the power of the operative corner to stand the
+shock.
+
+It was the business of the French in this operative corner before
+Namur and of their British Allies there to await and, if possible, to
+withstand by a careful choice of position the first shock of enemies
+who would certainly be numerically superior. It was the whole business
+of the German commanders to make the shock overwhelming, in order that
+the operative corner should be pounded to pieces, or should be
+surrounded and annihilated before the manoeuvring masses could swing
+up in aid. Should this destruction of the operative corner take place
+before the manoeuvring masses behind it could swing, the campaign in
+the West was lost to the Allies, and the Germans pouring in between
+the still separated corners of the square were the masters for good.
+
+It behoves us, therefore, if we desire to understand the campaign, to
+grasp how this operative corner stood, upon what defences it relied,
+in what force it was, what numbers it thought were coming against it,
+and what numbers were, as a fact, coming against it.
+
+To get all this clear, it is best to begin with a diagram.
+
+Suppose two lines perpendicular one to the other, and therefore
+forming a right angle, AB and BC. Suppose at their junction, B, a
+considerable zone or segment, SSS, of a circle, as shaded in the
+following diagram. Supposing the line AB to be protected along the
+outer half of it, AK, by no natural obstacle--the state of affairs
+which I have represented by a dotted line {~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}; but suppose the second half of it,
+KB, should be protected by a natural obstacle, though not a very
+formidable one--such as I have represented by the continuous line
+{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}. Supposing the
+perpendicular line BC to be protected by a really formidable natural
+obstacle {~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}, and
+supposing the shaded segment of the circle at B to represent a
+fortified zone (1) accessible to any one within the angle KBC, as from
+the arrow M; (2) inaccessible (until it was captured or forced) to any
+one coming from outside the angle, as from the arrows NNN; (3)
+containing within itself, protected by its ring of fortifications,
+passages, PP, for traversing the two natural obstacles, {~GREEK SMALL
+LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~} and {~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}, which meet at the point {~GREEK
+SMALL LETTER BETA~}.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 38.]
+
+There you have the elements of the position in which the advance
+corner of the great French square was situated just before it took the
+shock of the main German armies. The two lines AB and BC are the French
+and British armies lying behind the Sambre, {~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}, and the Middle Meuse, {~GREEK SMALL
+LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}, respectively; but the line
+of the Sambre ceases to protect eastward along the dotted line {~GREEK
+SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~} beyond the point up to
+which the river forms a natural obstacle, while from K to B the line is
+protected by the river Sambre itself. The more formidable obstacle,
+{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}, represents the
+great trench or ravine of the Meuse which stretches south from Namur.
+The town of Namur itself is at B, the junction of the two rivers; and
+the fortified zone, SSS, is the ring of forts lying far out all round
+Namur; while the passages, PP, over the obstacles contained within that
+fortified zone, and accessible to the people _inside_ the angle from M,
+but not to the people _outside_ the angle from NNN, are the bridges
+across both the Sambre and the Meuse at Namur.
+
+All this is, of course, put merely diagrammatically, and a diagram is
+something very distant from reality. The "open strategic square" in
+practice comes to mean little more than two main elements--one the
+operative corner, the other a number of separate units disposed in all
+sorts of different places behind, and generally denominated "the
+manoeuvring mass." If you had looked down from above at all the French
+armies towards the end of August, when the first great shock came, you
+would have seen nothing remotely resembling a square.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 39.]
+
+You would have seen something like Sketch 31 where the bodies enclosed
+under the title A were the operative corner; various garrisons and
+armies in the field, enclosed under the title B, were the manoeuvring
+mass. But it is only by putting the matter quite clearly in the
+abstract diagrammatic form that its principle can be grasped.
+
+With this digression I will return and conclude with the main points
+of debate in the use of the open strategic square.
+
+We have seen that the operative corner is in this scheme deliberately
+imperilled at the outset.
+
+The following is a sketch map of the actual position, and it will be
+seen that the topographical features of this countryside are fairly
+represented by Sketch 39; while this other sketch shows how these
+troops that were about to take the shock stood to the general mass of
+the armies.
+
+But to return to the diagram (which I repeat and amplify as Sketch
+41), let us see how the Allied force in the operative corner before
+Namur stood with relation to this angle of natural obstacles, the
+two rivers Sambre and Meuse, and the fortified zone round the point
+where they met.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 40.]
+
+The situation of that force was as follows:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 41.]
+
+Along and behind {~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+GAMMA~} stretched the 5th Army of the French, prolonged on its left by
+the British contingent. I have marked the first in the diagram with the
+figure 5, the second with the letters Br, and the latter portion I have
+also shaded. At right angles to the French 5th Army stretched the
+French 4th Army, which I have marked with the figure 4. It depended
+upon the obstacle of the Meuse {~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL
+LETTER DELTA~} for its defence, just as the French 5th Army depended
+upon the Sambre, {~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+BETA~}. It must, of course, be understood that when one says these
+forces "lay along" the aforesaid lines, one does not mean that they
+merely lay behind them. One means that they held the bridges and
+prepared to dispute the crossing of them.
+
+Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves: "There
+will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ, and this
+enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He will perhaps
+be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are. But he will suffer
+under these disadvantages:--
+
+"The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act in
+co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because Y and
+Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by the
+fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect in a
+long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z, could
+only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle--that is, by
+stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the ring of
+forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the arrow X) will
+further be used up in trying to break down the resistance of SSS.
+That will take a good deal of time. If our horizontal line AB holds
+its own, naturally defended as it is, against the attack from V and W,
+while our perpendicular line BC holds its own still more firmly
+(relying on its much better natural obstacle) against YZ, we shall
+have ample time to break the first and worst shock of the enemy's
+attack, and to allow, once we have concentrated that attack upon
+ourselves, the rest of our forces, the masses of manoeuvre, or at any
+rate a sufficient portion of them, to come up and give us a majority
+in _this_ part of the field. We shall still be badly outnumbered on
+the line as a whole; but the resistance of our operative corner,
+relying on the Sambre and Meuse and the fortress of Namur, will gather
+much of the enemy unto itself. It will thus make of this part of the
+field the critical district of the whole campaign. Our masses,
+arriving while we resist, will give us a local superiority here which
+will hold up the whole German line. We may even by great good luck so
+break the shock of the attack as ourselves to begin taking the
+counter-offensive after a little while, and to roll back either Y and
+Z or V and W by the advance of our forces across the rivers when the
+enemy has exhausted himself."
+
+It will be clear that this calculation (whether of the expected and
+probable least favourable issue--a lengthy defence followed by an
+orderly and slow retreat designed to allow the rest of the armies to
+come up--or of the improbable and more favourable issue--the taking of
+the counter-offensive) depended upon two presumptions which the
+commander of the Allies had taken for granted: (1) that the German
+shock would not come in more than a certain admitted maximum, say
+thirty per cent. superiority at the most over the Allied forces at
+this particular point; (2) that the ring of forts round Namur would be
+able to hold out for at least three or four days, and thus absorb the
+efforts of part of the enemy as well as awkwardly divide his forces,
+while that enemy's attack was being delivered.
+
+Both these presumptions were erroneous. The enemy, as we shall see in
+a moment, came on in much larger numbers than had been allowed for.
+Namur, as we have already seen, fell, not in three or four days, but
+instantly--the moment it was attacked. And the result was that,
+instead of an orderly and slow retirement, sufficiently tardy to
+permit of the swinging up of the rest of the French "square"--that is,
+of the arrival of the other armies or manoeuvring masses--there came
+as a fact the necessity for very rapid retirement of the operative
+corner over more than one hundred miles and the immediate peril for
+days of total disaster to it.
+
+To appreciate how superior the enemy proved to be in number, and how
+heavy the miscalculation here was, we must first see what the numbers
+of this Allied operative corner were.
+
+I have in Sketch 42 indicated the approximate positions and relative
+sizes of the three parts of the Allied forces.
+
+Beginning from the left, we have barely two army corps actually
+present of the British contingent in the fighting line: for certain
+contingents of the outermost army corps had not yet arrived. We may
+perhaps call the numbers actually present at French's command when
+contact was taken 70,000 men, but that is probably beyond the mark.
+To the east lay the 5th French Army, three army corps amounting, say,
+to 120,000 men, and immediately south of this along the Meuse lay the
+4th French Army, another three army corps amounting to at the most
+another 120,000 men.
+
+We may then call the whole of the operative corner (if we exclude
+certain cavalry reserves far back, which never came into play) just
+over 300,000 men. That there were as many as 310,000 is improbable.
+
+The French calculation was that against these 300,000 men there would
+arrive at the very most 400,000.
+
+That, of course, meant a heavy superiority in number for the enemy;
+but, as we have seen, the scheme allowed for such an inconvenience at
+the first contact.
+
+That more than 400,000 could strike in the region of Namur no one
+believed, for no one believed that the enemy could provision and
+organize transport for more than that number.
+
+A very eminent English critic had allowed for seven army corps of
+first-line men as all that could be brought across the Belgian Plain.
+The French went so far as to allow for ten, a figure represented by
+the 400,000 men of the enemy they expected.
+
+We had then the Allied forces expecting an attack in about the
+superiority indicated upon this diagram, where the British contingent
+and the two French armies are marked in full, and the supposed enemy
+in dotted lines.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 42.]
+
+Roughly speaking, the Allies were allowing for a thirty per cent.
+superiority.
+
+Now, lying as they did behind the rivers, and with the ring of forts
+around Namur to shield their point of junction and to split the
+enemy's attack, this superiority, though heavy, was not crushing. The
+hopes of the defensive that it would stand firm, or at least retire
+slowly so as to give time for the manoeuvring masses to come up was,
+under this presumption, just. It was even thought possible that, if
+the enemy attacked too blindly and spent himself too much, the
+counter-offensive might be taken after the first two or three days.
+
+As for the remainder of the German forces, it was believed that they
+were stretched out very much in even proportion, without any thin
+places, from the Meuse to Alsace.
+
+Now, as a matter of fact, the German forces were in no such
+disposition. 1. The Germans had added to every army corps a reserve
+division. 2. They had brought through the Belgian plains a very much
+larger number than seven army corps: they had brought nine. 3. They
+had further brought against Namur yet another four army corps through
+the Ardennes, the woods of which helped to hide their progress from
+air reconnaissance. To all this mass of thirteen army corps, each
+army corps half as large again as the active or first line allowed
+for, add some imperfectly trained but certainly large bodies of
+independent cavalry. We cannot accurately say what the total numbers
+of this vast body were, but we can be perfectly certain that more than
+700,000 men were massed in this region of Namur. The enemy was coming
+on, not four against three, but certainly seven against three, and
+perhaps eight or even nine against three.
+
+The real situation was that given in the accompanying diagram (Sketch
+43).
+
+Five corps, each with its extra division, were massed under von Kluck,
+and called the 1st German Army. Four more, including the Guards, were
+present with von Buelow, and stretched up to and against the first
+defences of Namur. Now, around the corner of that fortress, two Saxon
+corps, a Wurtemberg corps, a Magdeburg corps, and a corps of reserve
+under the Duke of Wurtemberg formed the 3rd Army, the right wing of
+which opposed the forts of Namur, the rest of which stretched along
+the line of the Meuse.
+
+Even if the forts of Namur had held out, the position of so hopelessly
+inferior a body as was the Franco-British force, in face of such
+overwhelming numbers, would have been perilous in the extreme. With
+the forts of Namur abandoned almost at the first blow, the peril was
+more than a peril. It had become almost certain disaster.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 43.]
+
+With the fall of Namur, the angle between the rivers--that is, the
+crossings of the rivers at their most difficult part where they were
+broadest--was in the hands of the enemy, and the whole French body,
+the 4th and 5th Armies, was at some time on that Saturday falling
+back.
+
+The exact hour and the details of that movement we do not yet know. We
+do not know what loss the French sustained, we do not know whether any
+considerable bodies were cut off. We do not know even at what hour the
+French General Staff decided that the position was no longer tenable,
+and ordered the general retreat.
+
+All we know is that, so far from being able to hold out two or three
+days against a numerical superiority of a third and under the buttress
+of Namur, the operative corner, with Namur fallen and, not 30 per
+cent., but something more like 130 per cent. superiority against it,
+began not the slow retreat that had been envisaged, but a retirement
+of the most rapid sort.
+
+Such a retirement was essential if the cohesion of the Allied forces
+was to be maintained at all, and if the combined 4th and 5th French
+Armies and British contingent were to escape being surrounded or
+pierced.
+
+By the Saturday night at latest the French retirement was ordered; by
+Sunday morning it was in full progress, and it was proceeding
+throughout the triangle of the Thierarche all that day.
+
+But the rate of that retirement, corresponding to the pressure upon
+the French front, differed very much with varying sections of the
+line. It was heaviest, of course, in those advanced bodies which had
+lain just under Namur. It was least at the two ends of the bow, for
+the general movement was on to the line Maubeuge-Mezières. The farther
+one went east towards Maubeuge, the slower was the necessary movement,
+and to this cause of delay must be added the fact that von Kluck,
+coming round by the extreme German line, had farthest to go, and
+arrived latest against the line of the Allies.
+
+Therefore the British contingent at the western extreme of the Allied
+line felt the shock latest of all, and all that Sunday morning the
+British were still occupied in taking up their positions. They had
+arrived but just in time for what was to follow.
+
+It was not till the early afternoon of the Sunday that contact was
+first taken seriously between Sir John French and von Kluck. At that
+moment the British commander believed, both from a general and
+erroneous judgment which the French command had tendered him and from
+his own air work, that he had in front of him one and a half or at the
+most two army corps; and though the force, as we shall see in a
+moment, was far larger, its magnitude did not appear as the afternoon
+wore on. Full contact was established perhaps between three and four,
+by which hour the pressure was beginning to be severely felt, and upon
+the extreme right of the line it had already been necessary to take up
+defensive positions a little behind those established in the morning.
+But by five o'clock, with more than two good hours of daylight before
+it, the British command, though perhaps already doubtful whether the
+advancing masses of the enemy did not stand for more men, and
+especially for more guns than had been expected, was well holding its
+own, when all its dispositions were abruptly changed by an unexpected
+piece of news.
+
+It was at this moment in the afternoon--that is, about five
+o'clock--that the French General Staff communicated to Sir John French
+information bearing two widely different characteristics: the first
+that it came late; the second that had it not come when it did, the
+whole army, French as well as British, would have been turned.
+
+The first piece of information, far too belated, was the news that
+Namur had fallen, and that the enemy had been in possession of the
+bridge-heads over the Sambre and the Meuse since the preceding day,
+Saturday. Consequent upon this, the enemy had been able to effect the
+passage of the Sambre, not only in Namur itself, but in its immediate
+neighbourhood, and, such passages once secured, it was but a question
+of time for the whole line to fall into the enemy's hands. When
+superior numbers have passed one end of an obstacle it is obvious that
+the rest of the obstacle gradually becomes useless.[3] At what hour
+the French knew that they had to retire, we have not been told. As we
+have seen, the enemy was right within Namur on the early afternoon of
+Saturday, the 22nd, and it is to be presumed that the French
+retirement was in full swing by the Sunday morning, in which case the
+British contingent, which this retirement left in peril upon the
+western extreme of the line, ought to have been warned many hours
+before five o'clock in the afternoon.
+
+To what the delay was due we are again as yet in ignorance, but
+probably to the confusion into which the unexpected fall of Namur and
+the equally unexpected strength of the enemy beyond the Sambre and the
+Meuse had thrown the French General Staff.
+
+At any rate, the news did come thus late, and its lateness was of
+serious consequence to the British contingent, and might have been
+disastrous to it.
+
+The second piece of news, on the other hand, was the saving of it; and
+that second piece of news was the information that Sir John French had
+in front of him not one German army corps, and possibly part or even
+the whole of a second, but at least three. As the matter turned out,
+the British contingent was really dealing first and last with four
+army corps, and the essential part of the news conveyed was that the
+extreme western portion of this large German force _was attempting to
+turn the flank of the whole army_.
+
+It was not only attempting to do so, it was in number sufficient to do
+so; and unless prompt measures were taken, what was now discovered to
+be the general German plan would succeed, and the campaign in the
+West would be in two days decided adversely to the Allies--the same
+space of time in which the campaign of 1815 was decided adversely to
+Napoleon in just these same country-sides.
+
+It is here necessary to describe what this German plan was.
+
+The reader has already seen, when the general principles of the open
+strategic square were described on a previous page, that everything
+depends upon the fate of the operative corner. This operative corner
+in the present campaign had turned out to be the two French armies,
+the 4th and the 5th, upon the Lower Sambre and the Meuse, and the
+British contingent lying to the left of the 5th on the Upper Sambre
+and by Mons.
+
+If the operative corner of a strategic open square is annihilated as a
+military force, or so seriously defeated that it can offer no
+effective opposition for some days, then the whole plan of a strategic
+square breaks to pieces, and the last position of the inferior forces
+which have adopted it is worse than if they had not relied upon the
+manoeuvre at all, but had simply spread out in line to await defeat
+in bulk at the hands of their superior enemy.
+
+Now there are two ways in which a military force can be disposed of by
+its opponent. There are two ways in which it can be--to use the rather
+exaggerated language of military history--"annihilated."
+
+The first is this: You can break up its cohesion by a smashing blow
+delivered somewhere along its line, and preferably near its centre.
+But if you do that, the results will never be quite complete, and may
+be incomplete in any degree according to the violence and success of
+your blow.
+
+The second way is to get round the enemy with your superior numbers,
+to get past his flank, to the back of him, and so envelop him. If that
+manoeuvre is carried out successfully, you bag his forces entire. It
+is to this second manoeuvre that modern Prussian strategy and tactics
+are particularly attached. It is obvious that its fruits are far more
+complete than those of the first manoeuvre, when, or if, it is wholly
+successful. For to get round your enemy and bag him whole is a larger
+result than merely to break him up and leave _some_ of him able to
+re-form and perhaps fight again. Two things needful to such success
+are (_a_) superior numbers, save in case of gross error upon the part
+of the opponents; (_b_) great rapidity of action on the part of the
+outflanking body, coupled, if possible, with surprise. That rapidity
+of action is necessary is obvious; for the party on the flank has got
+to go much farther than the rest of the army. It has to go all the
+length of the arrow (1), and an element of surprise is usually
+necessary. For if the army AA which BB was trying to outflank learned
+of the manoeuvre in time he only has to retreat upon his left by the
+shorter arrow (2) to escape from the threatened clutch.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 45.]
+
+Now, von Kluck with his five army corps, four of which were in
+operation against Sir John French, was well able to count on all
+these elements. He had highly superior numbers, his superiority had
+not been discovered until it was almost too late, and for rapidity of
+action he had excellent railways and a vast equipment of petrol
+vehicles.
+
+What he proposed to do was, while engaging the British contingent of
+less than two army corps with three full army corps of his own, to
+swing his extreme western army corps right round, west through
+Tournai, and so turn the British line. If he succeeded in doing that,
+he had at the same time succeeded in turning the whole of the
+Franco-British forces on the Sambre and Meuse. In other words, he was
+in a fair way to accomplishing the destruction of the operative corner
+of the great square, and consequently, as a last result, the
+destruction of the whole Allied force in the West.
+
+The thing may be represented on a sketch map in this form.
+
+Of von Kluck's five corps, 1 is operating against the junction of the
+English and French lines beyond Binche, 2, 3, and 4 are massing
+against the rather more than one and a half of Sir John French at AA,
+and 5, after the capture of Tournai, is going to take a big sweep
+round in the direction of the arrow towards Cambrai, and so to turn
+the whole line. Meanwhile, the cavalry, still farther west, acting
+independently, is to sweep the country right out to Arras and beyond.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 46.]
+
+The particular titles of corps are of no great value in following the
+leading main lines of a military movement; but it may be worth
+remembering that this "number 5," to which von Kluck had allotted the
+turning movement, was the _Second_ German Corps. With its cavalry it
+numbered alone (and apart from all the other forces of von Kluck which
+were engaging the British line directly) quite three-quarters as many
+men as all that British line for the moment mustered.
+
+It was not possible, from local circumstances which the full history
+of the war, when it is written, will explain, for the British
+contingent to fall back in the remaining hours of daylight upon that
+Sunday.
+
+Belated by at the most twelve hours, as the news of the French
+retirement had been, the British retirement followed it fully twenty
+hours after. It was not until daylight of Monday, the 24th, that all
+the organizations for this retirement were completed, the plans drawn
+up, and the first retrograde movements made.
+
+To permit a retirement before such a great superiority of the enemy to
+be made without disaster, it was necessary to counter-attack not only
+at this inception of the movement, but throughout all the terrible
+strain of the ensuing eight days.
+
+Here it may be necessary to explain why, in any retirement, continual
+counter-attacks on the pursuing enemy are necessary.
+
+It is obvious that, under equal conditions, the pursuing enemy can
+advance as fast as can your own troops which are retreating before
+him. If, therefore, a retreat, once contact has been established,
+consisted in merely walking away from the enemy, that enemy would be
+able to maintain a ceaseless activity against one portion of your
+united force--its rear--which activity would be exercised against
+bodies on the march, and incapable of defence. To take but one example
+out of a hundred: his guns would be always unlimbering, shooting at
+you, then limbering up again to continue the pursuit; unlimbering
+again, shooting again--and so forth; while your guns would never
+reply, being occupied in an unbroken retirement, and therefore
+continually limbered up and useless behind their teams.
+
+A retiring force, therefore, of whatever size--from a company to an
+army--can only safely effect its retirement by detaching one fraction
+from its total which shall hold up the pursuit for a time while the
+main body gets away.
+
+When this detached fraction is wearied or imperilled, another fraction
+relieves it, taking up the same task in its turn; the first fraction,
+which had hitherto been checking the pursuit, falls back rapidly on to
+the main body, under cover of the new rearguard's fire as it turns to
+face the enemy. And the process is kept up, first one, then another
+portion of the whole force being devoted to it, until the retirement
+of the whole body has been successfully effected, and it is well ahead
+of its pursuers and secure.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 47.]
+
+For example: two White army corps, I., II., as in the annexed diagram,
+each of two divisions, 1, 2, and 3, 4, have to retire before a greatly
+superior Black force, _abcde_. They succeed in retiring by the action
+expressed in the following diagram. White corps No. I. first
+undertakes to hold up the enemy while No. II. makes off. No. I.
+detaches one division for the work (Division 2), and for a short time
+it checks the movement of _a_, _b_, and _c_, at least, of the enemy.
+Now _d_ and _e_ press on. But they cannot press on at any pace they
+choose, for an army must keep together, and the check to _a_, _b_, and
+_c_ somewhat retards _d_ and _e_. They advance, say, to the positions
+{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 48.]
+
+Next, White corps No. II. stops, puts out one of its divisions (say 4)
+to check _d_ and _e_, while its other division either helps or falls
+back, according to the severity of the pressure, and White corps No.
+I. makes off as fast as it can. _a_, _b_, _c_, no longer checked by a
+White rearguard, are nevertheless retarded from two causes--first,
+the delay already inflicted on them; secondly, that they must not, if
+the army is to keep together, get too far ahead of their colleagues,
+_d_ and _e_, which White corps II. is holding up.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 49.]
+
+Thus, on the second or third day the retreat of White is being secured
+by an increasing gap between pursued and pursuers. The process is
+continued. Every succeeding day--if that process is successful--should
+further widen the gap until White can feel free from immediate
+pressure.
+
+Such is the principle--modified indefinitely in practice by variations
+of ground and numbers--under which a retirement must be conducted if
+it is to have any hope of ultimate success in saving the pursued.
+
+But it is clear that the process must always be a perilous one. Unless
+the most careful co-ordination is maintained between the moving parts
+of the retreat; unless the rearguard in each action falls back only
+_just upon_ and not a _little while after_ the precise moment when it
+can last safely do so; unless the new rearguard comes into play in
+time, etc., etc.--the pursuers may get right in among the pursued and
+break their cohesion; or they may get round them, cut them off, and
+compel them to surrender. In either case the retreating force ceases
+to exist as an army.
+
+In proportion as the pursuers are numerous (mobility being equal)
+compared with the pursued, in that proportion is the peril. And with
+the best luck in the world some units are sure to be cut off, many
+guns lost, all stragglers and nearly all wounded abandoned in the
+course of a pressed retreat, and, above all, there will be the
+increasing discouragement and bewilderment of the men as the strain,
+the losses, and the ceaseless giving way before the enemy continue day
+after day with cumulative effect.
+
+The accomplishment of such a task, the maintenance of the "operative
+corner" in being during its ordeal of retreat before vastly superior
+numbers, and in particular the exceedingly perilous retirement of the
+British contingent at what was, during the first part of the strain,
+the extreme of the line, are what we are now about to follow.
+
+The initial counter-attack, then, on this Monday, the first day of the
+retreat, was undertaken by the 2nd British Division from the region of
+Harmignies, which advanced as though with the object of retaking
+Binche. The demonstration was supported by all the artillery of the
+1st Army Corps, while the 1st Division, lying near Peissant, supported
+this action of the 2nd. While that demonstration was in full activity,
+the 2nd Corps to the west or left (not all of it was yet in the field)
+retired on to the line Dour-Frameries, passing through Quaregnon. It
+suffered some loss in this operation from the masses of the enemy,
+which were pressing forward from Mons. When the 2nd Corps had thus
+halted on the line Dour-Frameries, the 1st Corps, which had been
+making the demonstration, took the opportunity to retire in its turn,
+and fell back before the evening to a line stretching from Bavai to
+Maubeuge.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 50.]
+
+The 2nd Corps had entrenched itself, while the 1st Corps was thus
+falling back upon its right; and when it came to the turn of the 2nd
+Corps to play the part of rearguard in these alternate movements, the
+effort proved to be one of grave peril.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 51.]
+
+Since the whole movement of the enemy was an outflanking movement,
+the pressure upon this left and extreme end of the line was
+particularly severe. The German advance in such highly superior
+numbers overlapped the two British corps to _their_ left or west,
+which was at this moment the extreme end of the Allied Franco-British
+line. They overlapped them as these pursuing Black units overlap the
+lesser retiring White units. It is evident that in such a case the
+last unit in the line at A will be suffering the chief burden of the
+attack. An attempt was made to relieve that burden by sending the and
+Cavalry Brigade in this direction to ride round the enemy's outlying
+body; but the move failed, with considerable loss to the 9th Lancers
+and the 18th Hussars, which came upon wire entanglements five hundred
+yards from the enemy's position. There did arrive in aid of the
+imperilled end of the line reinforcement in the shape of a new body.
+One infantry brigade, the 19th, which had hitherto been upon the line
+of communications, reached the army on this its central left near
+Quarouble and a little behind that village before the morning was
+spent. It was in line before evening. This reinforcement lent some
+strength to the sorely tried 2nd Corps, but it had against it still
+double its own strength in front, and half as much again upon its
+exposed left or western flank, and it suffered heavily.
+
+By the night of that Monday, the 24th of August, however, the whole of
+the British Army was again in line, and stretched from Maubeuge, which
+protected its right, through Bavai, on to the fields between the
+villages of Jenlain and Bry, where the fresh 19th Infantry Brigade had
+newly arrived before the evening, while beyond this extreme left again
+was the cavalry.
+
+The whole operation, then, of that perilous Monday, the first day of
+the retreat, may be planned in general as in Sketch 52. At the
+beginning, at daybreak, you have the three German army corps lying as
+the shaded bodies are given opposite to the unshaded, which represent
+the British contingent of not quite two full army corps. By nightfall
+the British contingent, including now the 19th Brigade of infantry,
+lay in the positions from Maubeuge westward, with the 1st Corps next
+to Maubeuge, the 2nd Corps beyond Bavai, the 1st being commanded by
+Sir Douglas Haig, the 2nd by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien; while the
+Germans lay more or less as the dotted shaded markings are.
+
+The fortress of Maubeuge was, under these circumstances, clearly a
+lure. An army in the field in danger of envelopment will always be
+tempted to make for the nearest fortified zone in order to save
+itself. The British commander was well advised in his judgment to
+avoid this opportunity, and that for two reasons. First, that the
+locking up of any considerable portion of the Anglo-French force in
+its retirement would have jeopardized the chance of that
+counter-offensive which the French hoped sooner or later to initiate;
+secondly, that, as will be seen later, the works of Maubeuge were
+quite insufficient to resist for more than a few days a modern siege
+train.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 52.]
+
+This point of Maubeuge and of its fall must be discussed later; for
+the moment all we need note is that the fortress afforded for a few
+hours--that is, during the night of Monday to Tuesday, the 24th-25th
+August--support to the British line during its first halt upon the
+rapid and perilous retirement from Mons.
+
+Meanwhile the whole of the French 5th Army had been falling back with
+equal rapidity, and upon its right the 4th Army had followed soon; and
+as this French retirement had preceded the retirement of the British,
+its general line lay farther south.
+
+On the other hand, from the nature of the topography in this section
+of the Franco-Belgian border, the units of the French command had to
+fall back farther and more rapidly in proportion as they stretched
+eastward. The attack of the enemy in forces of rather more than two to
+one had come, as we have seen, not only from across the line of the
+Sambre, but, once Namur had fallen, from across the line of the Meuse
+at right angles to the line of the Sambre. Therefore the 5th and the
+4th Armies, contained within the triangle bounded by the Sambre and
+Meuse, retiring from blows struck from the direction of the arrows 1-5
+over all that hilly and wooded country known as the Thiérache, were,
+as to the extreme salient of them at A, compelled to a very rapid
+retirement indeed; and on this Sunday night the French line was
+deflected southward, not without heavy losses, until either on that
+night or on the Monday morning it joined up with the forces which
+stretched northward through and from Mézières. An attempt to
+counter-attack through the precipitous ravines and deep woods on to
+the valley of the Semois had failed, and the line as a whole ran, upon
+this night between the Sunday and the Monday, much as is indicated
+upon the accompanying sketch.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 53.]
+
+From this it will be seen that the British contingent away upon the
+extreme left was in very grave peril, not only because the turning
+movement was wholly directed round their exposed flank, but also
+because, their retirement having come late, they stood too far forward
+in the general scheme at this moment, and therefore more exposed to
+the enemy's blow than the rest of the line. With this it must be
+remembered Tournai had already fallen. It was very imperfectly held by
+a French Territorial brigade, accompanied by one battery of English
+guns; and the entering German force, in a superiority of anything you
+like--two, three, or four to one--easily swept away the resistance
+proffered in this quarter.
+
+These German forces from Tournai had not yet, by the nightfall of
+Monday, come up eastward against the British, but they were on the
+way, and they might appear at any moment. The corps next to them, the
+4th of von Kluck's five, was already operating upon that flank, and
+the next day, Wednesday, 26th of August, was to be the chief day of
+trial for this exposed British wing of the army.
+
+So far the operations of the British Army had not differed greatly
+from the expected or at least one of the expected developments of the
+campaign.
+
+The operative corner, if it should not have the luck, through losses
+or blunders on the part of the enemy, to take the counter-offensive
+after receiving the third shock, is intended to retire, and to draw
+upon itself a maximum of the enemy's efforts.
+
+But between what had been intended as the most probable, and in any
+case perilous, task of this body (which comprised, it will be
+remembered, six French and ultimately two British army corps) turned
+out, within twenty-four hours of the retreat, and within forty-eight
+of the fall of Namur, to be an operation of a difficulty so extreme as
+to imperil the whole campaign, and in this operation it was the
+British force upon the outer left edge of the line--the unsupported
+extremity round which the enemy made every effort to get--which was
+bound to receive the severest treatment. This peculiar burden laid
+upon the Expeditionary Force from this country was, of course, gravely
+increased by the delay in beginning its retreat, which we have seen to
+be due to the delay in the communication to it by the French of the
+news of the fall of Namur. On account of this delay not only was the
+extreme of the line which the British held immediately threatened with
+outflanking, but it still lay somewhat forward of the rest of the
+force. It was in danger of being turned round its exposed edge C, not
+only because it lay on the extreme of the line, but also because,
+instead of occupying its normal position, AB, which it would have
+occupied had the retreat begun with all the rest, it actually occupied
+the position CD, which made it far more likely to be surrounded than
+if it had been a day's march farther back, as it would have been if
+the French Staff work had suffered no delays.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 54.]
+
+There lay in the gap formed by this untoward tardiness in the British
+retirement, at the point M, the fortress of Maubeuge. It was
+garrisoned by French reserves, or Territorial troops, not of the same
+quality as the active army, and its defensive power was, even if the
+old ring of fortress theory had proved sound, of very doubtful order.
+
+The French 5th Army being no longer present to support the British
+right, but having fallen back behind the alignment of that right,
+General Sir John French had no support for what should have been his
+secure flank save this fortress of Maubeuge, and it will be evident
+from the above diagram that the enemy, should he succeed in
+outflanking the British line, would compel it to fall back within the
+ring of forts surrounding Maubeuge. To avoid destruction it would have
+no alternative but to do that. For, counting the forces in front of it
+and the forces trying to get round its back, it was fighting odds of
+two to one.
+
+Maubeuge was a stronghold that had played a great part in the
+revolutionary war. Its resistance in the month of October 1793 had
+made possible the French victory of Wattigines, just outside its
+walls, and had, perhaps, done more than any other feat of arms in that
+year to save the French Revolution from the allied governments of
+Europe. It was, indeed, full of historic memories, from the moment
+when Cæsar had defeated the Nervii upon the Sambre just to the west of
+the town (his camp can still be traced in an open field above the
+river bank) to the invasion of 1815.
+
+But this rôle which it had played throughout French history had not
+led to any illusion with regard to the rôle it might play in any
+modern war; and at the best Maubeuge, in common with the other
+ill-fortified points of the Belgian frontier, suffered from the only
+error--and that a grave one--which their thorough unnational political
+system had imposed upon the military plan of the French. This error
+was the capital error of indecision. No consistent plan had been
+adopted with regard to the fortification of the Belgian frontier.
+
+The French had begun, after the recuperation following upon the war of
+1870, an elaborate and very perfect system of fortification along
+their German frontier--that is, along the new frontier which divided
+the annexed territory of Alsace-Lorraine from the rest of the country.
+They had taken it for granted that the next German attempt would be
+made somewhere between Longwy and Belfort. And they had spent in this
+scheme of fortification, first and last, the cost of a great campaign.
+They had spent some three hundred million pounds; and it will be
+possible for the reader to gauge the magnitude of this effort if he
+will consider that it was a military operation more costly than was
+the whole of the South African War to Great Britain, or of the
+Manchurian War to Russia. The French were wise to have undertaken this
+expense, because it had hitherto been an unheard-of offence against
+European morals that one nation in Christendom should violate the
+declared neutrality of another. And the attack upon Belgium as a means
+of invading France by Germany had not then crossed the mind of any but
+a few theorists who had, so to speak, "marched ahead" of the rapid
+decline in our common religion which had marked now three
+generations.
+
+But when the French had completed this scheme of fortification, Europe
+heard it proposed by certain authorities in Prussia that, as the cost
+of invading France through the now fortified zone would be
+considerable, the German forces should not hesitate to originate yet
+another step in the breakdown of European morality, and to sacrifice
+in their attack upon France the neutrality of Belgium, of which
+Prussia was herself a guarantor.
+
+Men have often talked during this war, especially in England, as
+though the crime accompanying Prussian activities in the field were
+normal to warfare; and this error is probably due to the fact that war
+upon a large scale has never come home to the imagination of the
+country, and that it is without experience of invasion.
+
+Yet it is of the very first importance to appreciate the truth that
+Prussia in this campaign has postulated in one point after another new
+doctrines which repudiate everything her neighbours have held sacred
+from the time when a common Christianity first began to influence the
+states of Europe. The violation of the Belgian territory is on a par
+with the murder of civilians in cold blood, and after admission of
+their innocence, with the massacre of priests, and the sinking without
+warning of unarmed ships with their passengers and crews. To regard
+these things as something normal to warfare in the past is as
+monstrous an historical error as it would be to regard the reign of
+terror during the French Revolution as normal to civil disputes within
+the State. And to appreciate such a truth is, I repeat, of especial
+moment to the understanding of the mere military character of the
+campaign. For if the violation of Belgium in particular had not been
+the unheard of thing it was, the fortification of the Franco-Belgian
+frontier with which we are here concerned would have had a very
+different fortune.
+
+As it was, the French could never quite make up their minds--or rather
+the French parliamentarians could never make up their minds--upon the
+amount of money that might wisely be expended in the defence of this
+neutral border. There were moments when the opinion that Prussia
+would be restrained by no fear of Europe prevailed among the
+professional politicians of Paris. The fortification of the Belgian
+frontier was undertaken in such moments; a full plan of it was drawn
+up. But again doubt would succeed, the very large sums involved would
+appal some new ministry, and the effort would be interrupted. To such
+uncertainty of aim characteristic of parliamentary government in a
+military nation was added, unfortunately, the consideration of the
+line of the Meuse. Liége and Namur were fortresses of peculiar
+strength, Antwerp was thought the strongest thing in Europe; and that
+triangle was conceived, even by many who believed that the violation
+of Belgian territory would take place, as affording a sufficient
+barrier against the immediate invasion of France from the north-east.
+Those who made this calculation did not forget that fortresses are
+nothing without their full complement of men, guns, and stores; but
+they could neither control, nor had they the elements properly to
+appreciate, the deficiency of organization in a foreign and not
+military country.
+
+For all these causes Maubeuge, in common with other points along the
+Belgian frontier less important than itself, was left imperfect. Even
+if the ring fortress had remained after 1905 what it had been before
+that date, and even if modern howitzer fire and modern high explosives
+had not rendered its tenure one of days rather than months, Maubeuge
+was not a first-class fortress. As it was, with fortifications
+unrenewed, and with the ring fortress in any case doomed, Maubeuge was
+a death-trap.
+
+The rôle assigned to the fortress in the original French plan was no
+more than the support of the retiring operative corner, as it
+"retreated, manoeuvred, and held the enemy." Maubeuge was considered
+as part of a line beyond which the operative corner would not have to
+fall before the rest of the square, the "manoeuvring mass," had swung
+up. Hence it was that the French General Staff and its Chief had put
+within the ring of its insufficient forts nothing more than a garrison
+of Territorials--that is, of the older classes of the reserve.
+
+Had the British General accepted the lure of Maubeuge as Bazaine did
+the lure of Metz in 1870, the Expeditionary Force would have been
+destroyed. But it would have been destroyed, not after a long delay,
+as was the army at Metz, but immediately; for Maubeuge was not Metz,
+and the fortress power of resistance of to-day is not that of a
+generation ago. Maubeuge, as a fact, fell within a fortnight of the
+date when this temptation was offered to the sorely pressed British
+army, and had that temptation been yielded to, the whole force would
+have been, in a military sense, annihilated before the middle of
+September.
+
+What preserved it was the immediate decision undertaken upon that
+Monday night to proceed, in spite of the fatigues that were already
+felt after the first day's retreat, with a retirement upon the
+south-west, and to proceed with it as vigorously as possible.
+
+It was not yet daylight upon the morning of Tuesday, August 25th, when
+the move began. The Field-Marshal counted justly upon some exhaustion
+in his immensely superior enemy, especially in those troops of his
+upon the west (the 2nd German Corps) which had to perform the heavy
+marching task of getting round the end of the British line. This
+element, combined with the considerable distance which the British
+marched that morning, saved the army; though not until another week of
+almost intolerable suffering had passed, and not until very heavy
+losses indeed had been sustained. The great Maubeuge-Bavai road, which
+is prolonged to Eth, and which was, roughly, the British front of that
+night, was cleared shortly after sunrise. A couple of brigades of
+cavalry and the divisional cavalry of the 2nd Corps covered the
+operation on the centre of the right, in front of the main body of the
+2nd Corps, while the rest of the cavalry similarly covered the exposed
+western edge and corner of the line.
+
+Delays, with the criticism of which this short summary has no concern,
+had forbidden the whole force which should have been present with the
+British Army in Flanders at the outset of the campaign to arrive in
+time, and the contingents that had already come up had taken the
+shock, as we have already described, in the absence of the 4th
+Division. This 4th Division had only begun to detrain from the
+junction at Le Cateau at the same hour that General Sir John French
+was reading that Sunday message which prompted his immediate
+retirement from before Mons. When the full official history of the war
+comes to be written, few things will prove of more credit to the
+Expeditionary Force and its command than the way in which this belated
+division--belated through no fault of the soldiers--was incorporated
+with the already existing organization, in the very midst of its
+retreat, and helped to support the army. There are few parallels in
+history to the successful accomplishment of so delicate and perilous
+an operation.
+
+At any rate, in less than forty-eight hours after its arrival, the 4th
+Division--eleven battalions and a brigade of artillery--were
+incorporated with the British line just as the whole force was falling
+back upon this Tuesday morning, the 25th; and the newly arrived
+division of fresh men did singular service in the further covering of
+the retirement. General Snow, who was in command of this division,
+was deployed upon a line running from just south of Solesmes, on the
+right, to a point just south of La Chatrie, upon the road from Cambrai
+to Le Cateau, upon his left; and, as will be seen by the accompanying
+sketch map, such a line effectually protected the falling back of the
+rest of the force. Behind it the 1st and the 2nd British Corps fell
+back upon the line Cambrai to Landrecies. The small inset map shows
+how the various points in this two days' retreat stood to one another.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 55.]
+
+This line from Landrecies towards Cambrai had already been in part
+prepared in the course of that day--Tuesday--and entrenched, and it
+may be imagined what inclination affected commanders and men towards
+a halt upon that position. The pressure had been continuous and heavy,
+the work of detraining and setting in line the newly arrived division
+had added to the anxieties of the day, and an occupation of the
+prepared line seemed to impose itself. Luckily, the unwisdom of such a
+stand in the retirement was perceived in time, and the British
+Commander decided not to give his forces rest until some considerable
+natural object superior to imperfect and hurriedly constructed
+trenches could be depended upon to check the enemy's advance. The
+threat of being outflanked was still very grave, and the few hours'
+halt which would have been involved in the alternative decision might,
+or rather would, have been fatal.
+
+The consequences, however, to the men of this decision in favour of
+continual retirement were severe. The 1st Corps did not reach
+Landrecies till ten o'clock at night. They had been upon the move for
+eighteen hours; but even so, the enemy, in that avalanche of advance
+(which was possible to him, as we now know, by the organization of
+mechanical transport), was well in touch. The Guards in Landrecies
+itself (the 4th Brigade) were attacked by the advance body of the 9th
+German Army Corps, which came on in overwhelming numbers right into
+the buildings of the town, debouching from the wood to the north under
+cover of the darkness. Their effort was unsuccessful. They did not
+succeed in piercing or even in decisively confusing the British line
+at this point; and, packed in the rather narrow street of Landrecies,
+the enemy suffered losses equivalent to a battalion in that desperate
+night fighting. But though the enemy here failed to achieve his
+purpose, his action compelled the continued retreat of men who were
+almost at the limit of exhaustion, and who had now been marching and
+fighting for the better part of twenty-four hours.
+
+In that same darkness the 1st Division, under Sir Douglas Haig, was
+heavily engaged south-east of Maroilles. They obtained ultimately the
+aid of two French reserve divisions which lay upon the right of the
+British line, and extricated themselves from the peril they were in
+before dawn. By daylight this 1st Corps was still continuing its
+retirement in the direction of Wassigny, with Guise as its objective.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 56.]
+
+Meanwhile the 2nd Corps, which had not been so heavily attacked, and
+which lay to the west--that is, still upon the extreme of the
+line--had come, before the sunset of that Tuesday, the 25th, into a
+line stretching from Le Cateau to near Caudry, and thence prolonged by
+the 4th Division towards Seranvillers.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 57.]
+
+It will be seen that this line was bent--its left refused. This
+disposition was, of course, designed to meet the ceaseless German
+attempt to outflank on the west; and with the dawn of Wednesday, the
+26th, it was already apparent how serious would be the task before
+this 2nd Corps, which covered all the rest of the army, and, in a
+sense, the whole of the Anglo-French retirement. General Sir Horace
+Smith-Dorrien, who was here in command, was threatened with a disaster
+that might carry in its train disaster to the whole British
+contingent, and ultimately, perhaps, to the whole Franco-British line.
+
+Although the German bodies which were attempting the outflanking had
+not yet all come up, the field artillery of no less than four German
+corps was already at work against this one body, and a general action
+was developing upon which might very well depend the fate of the
+campaign. Indeed, the reader will do well to fix his attention upon
+this day, Wednesday, the 26th August, as the key to all that followed.
+There are always to be found, in the history of war, places and times
+which are of this character--nuclei, as it were, round which the
+business of all that comes before and after seems to congregate. Of
+such, for instance, was the Friday before Waterloo, when Erlon's
+counter-orders ultimately decided the fate of Napoleon; and of such
+was Carnot's night march on October 15, 1793, which largely decided
+the fate of the revolutionary army.
+
+The obvious action to take in such a position as that in which the 2nd
+Corps found themselves was to break contact with the enemy, to call
+for support from the 1st Corps, and to maintain the retreat as
+indefatigably as it had already been maintained in the preceding
+twenty-four hours.
+
+But men have limits to their physical powers, which limits commonly
+appear sharply, not gradually, at the end of a great movement. The 1st
+Corps had been marching and fighting a day and a night, and that after
+a preceding whole day of retirement from before Mons. It was unable to
+execute a further effort. Further, the general in command of the 2nd
+Corps reported that the German pressure had advanced too far to permit
+of breaking contact in the face of such an attack.
+
+It would have been of the utmost use if at this moment a large body of
+French cavalry--no less than three divisions--under General Sordet,
+could have intervened upon that critical moment, the morning of
+Wednesday, the 26th, to have covered the retirement of the 1st Corps.
+They were in the neighbourhood; the British commander had seen their
+commander in the course of the 25th, and had represented his need.
+Through some error or misfortune in the previous movement of this
+corps--such that its horses were incapable of further action through
+fatigue--it failed to appear upon the field in this all-important
+juncture, and General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien was left facing
+overwhelming odds, which in artillery--the arm that was doing all the
+heavy work of that morning--were not less than four to one.
+
+The fact that the retirement was at last made possible was due more
+than anything else to the handling of the British guns upon this day,
+and to the devotion with which the batteries sacrificed themselves to
+the covering of that movement; while the cavalry, as in the preceding
+two days, co-operated in forming a screen for the retreat.
+
+It was about half-past three in the afternoon when the general in
+command of this exposed left flank judged it possible to break
+contact, and to give the order for falling back. The experiment--for
+it seems to have been no more secure than such a word suggests--was
+perilous in the extreme. It was not known whether the consequences of
+this fierce artillery duel against an enemy of four-fold superiority
+had been sufficient to forbid that enemy to make good the pursuit.
+Luckily, as the operation developed, it was apparent that the check
+inflicted upon such enormous odds by the British guns was sufficient
+for its purpose. The enemy had received losses that forbade him to
+move with the rapidity necessary to him if he was to decide the
+matter. He failed to press the retiring 2nd British Corps in any
+conclusive fashion: this 2nd Corps, the left wing, was saved; and with
+it the whole army, and perhaps the whole line.
+
+The retreat of this body, which had thus covered all its comrades,
+continued under terrible conditions of strain (and after so heavy an
+action) right through the afternoon, and on hour after hour through
+the darkness; but though such an effort meant the loss of stragglers
+and of wounded, of guns whose teams had been destroyed, of material,
+and of all that accompanies a perilous retreat, one may justly say
+that well before midnight of that Wednesday, the 26th, the operation
+had proved successful and its purpose was accomplished.
+
+Two more days of almost equal strain were, as we shall see, to be
+suffered by the whole army before it had reached a natural obstacle
+behind which it could draw breath (the river Oise), and might fairly
+be regarded as no longer in peril of destruction; but the breaking
+point that had come on that Wednesday, the 26th, had been successfully
+passed without disaster, and had been so passed, in the main, by
+virtue of the guns.
+
+This critical day, upon which depended the fortunes certainly of the
+British contingent, and in some degree of all the "operative corner"
+of the French plan, turned in favour of the Allies, not only through
+the military excellence of the action which was broken off by Sir
+Horace Smith-Dorrien during the afternoon, but also through the vigour
+and tenacity of the retreat.
+
+I must here beg the reader's leave for a short digression in
+connection with those two phrases--"in favour of," and "vigour."
+History in general treats a retirement, particularly a rapid
+retirement accompanied by heavy losses, as a disaster; and the
+conception that such a movement may seem to the military historian a
+success, and that the energy of its conduct is just as important as
+the energy of an assault, is unfamiliar to most students of civilian
+record. But I am writing here, though an elementary, yet a military
+history; and to the military historian a retreat may be just as much a
+factor in victory as an advance; while the energy and tenacity
+required for its carriage are, if anything, more important than the
+corresponding qualities required for an advance. And in the case of
+this critical day and a half, the Wednesday, August 26th, and the
+Wednesday and Thursday night, August 26th-27th, the preservation of
+the British forces, and to some extent of all that lay east of them,
+was made possible by the very fact that the retirement was prosecuted
+with the utmost rapidity and without a halt. Had the retreat been
+interrupted in the hope of making a stand, or in the hope of repose,
+the whole army would have gone.
+
+Throughout the night, then, with heavy losses from stragglers, and in
+one case with the surrounding and annihilation by wounds and capture
+of nearly a whole battalion (the Gordons), the retreat of the 2nd
+Corps proceeded, and, in line with it, the retreat of the 1st Corps to
+the east.
+
+But this 1st Corps, though set an easier task than the 2nd (which, at
+the extreme of the line, was under the perpetual menace of
+development), did not retire without losses of a serious character. It
+was marching on Guise, just as the 2nd Corps to the west of it was
+marching across the watershed to St. Quentin. The Munster Fusiliers,
+who were on its extreme right, had halted for the night on that same
+evening of the 26th; for the 1st Corps, being less hard pressed, had
+more leisure for such repose. During the night a messenger was sent to
+this body with orders for the resumption of the march next morning. He
+was taken prisoner, and never reached his goal. The Munsters were
+attacked at dawn by the German pursuit in greatly superior numbers,
+surrounded and destroyed, as the Gordons of the 2nd Corps had been;
+the unwounded remnant was compelled to surrender.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 58.]
+
+The whole of Thursday, the 27th, and Friday, the 28th of August, the
+British retreat continued, the 1st Corps following on at the valley of
+the Oise towards La Fère, while the 2nd Corps to the west passed St.
+Quentin, and made for Noyon, in the neighbourhood of the same river
+farther down; and on the night of that Friday the Expeditionary Force
+was at last in line, and in some kind of order, organized for the
+first breathing space possible after so terrible an ordeal.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 59.]
+
+It is clear from the accompanying sketch map that the position the
+British had now reached gave to the whole Allied force a bent contour.
+The French armies to the east lay along line AB, which, had it been
+directly prolonged, would have stretched towards C; but the British
+contingent, which, on account of its extreme position, had suffered
+most heavily, was turned right back on the scheme AD, and even so,
+was still in some peril of being outflanked by the German forces along
+the arrow (1) to the west of it. At this moment the French, whose
+fortunes we shall next describe, found it possible to check the fury
+of the pursuit. The drive of the German masses, which had so nearly
+annihilated the British end of the line, was blocked, and the
+remainder of the great retreat followed a more orderly fashion,
+proceeded at a much slower rate, and approached that term at which a
+counter-offensive might be attempted.
+
+The whole process may be compared to the flood of a very rapid tide,
+which, after the first few hours, is seen to relax its speed
+considerably, and to promise in the immediate future an ebb.
+
+In order to appreciate how this was, let us next consider what the
+larger French forces to the east of the British had been doing. There
+are no details available, very few published records, and it will not
+be possible until an official history of the war appears to give more
+than the most general sketch of the French movements in this retreat;
+but the largest lines are sufficient for our judgment of the result.
+
+It will be remembered that what I have called "the operative corner"
+of the Allied army had stood in the angle between the Sambre and the
+Meuse. It had consisted in the British contingent upon the left, or
+west, in front of Mons; the 5th French Army, composed of three army
+corps, under Lanrezac, to the east of it, along the Sambre, past
+Charleroi; and the 4th French Army, also of three army corps, under
+Langle, along the Middle Meuse, being in general disposition what we
+have upon the accompanying sketch. It had been attacked upon Saturday,
+the 22nd August, by seventeen German army corps--that is, by forces
+double its own. On that same day Namur, at the corner, had fallen into
+complete possession of the Germans, the French retreat had begun, and
+on the following day the English force had, after the regrettable
+delay of half a day, also begun its retirement.
+
+We have seen that the British retirement (following the dotted lines
+upon Sketch 60) had reached, upon the Friday night, the position from
+Noyon to La Fère, marked also in dots upon the sketch.
+
+What had happened meanwhile to their French colleagues upon the east?
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 60.]
+
+The first thing to note is that the fortress of Maubeuge, with its
+garrison of reserve and second line men, had, of course, been at once
+invested by the Germans when the British and French line had fallen
+behind it and left it isolated. The imperfection of this fortress I
+have already described, and the causes of that imperfection. Maubeuge
+commanded the great railway line leading from Belgium to Paris, which
+is the main avenue of supply for an invasion or for a retreat, running
+north-east to south-west on the Belgian frontier upon the capital.
+
+The 5th French Army retired parallel to the British along the belt
+marked in Sketch Map 60 by diagonal lines. At first, as its retirement
+had begun earlier, it was behind, or to the south of, the British, who
+were thus left almost unsupported. It lay, for instance, on Monday,
+the 24th, much along the position 1, at which moment the British Army
+was lying along the position 2. That was the day on which the Germans
+attempted to drive the British into Maubeuge.
+
+But during the succeeding two days the French 5th Army (to which the
+five corps, including the Prussian Guard, under Buelow, were opposed)
+held the enemy fairly well. They were losing, of course, heavily in
+stragglers, in abandoned wounded, and in guns; but their retreat was
+sufficiently strongly organized to keep this section of the line well
+bent up northwards, and just before the British halted for their first
+breathing space along the line La Fère and Noyon, the French 5th Army
+attempted, and succeeded in, a sharp local attack against the superior
+forces that were pursuing them. This local attack was undertaken from
+about the position marked 3 on Sketch 60, and was directed against
+Guise. It was undertaken by the 1st and 3rd French Corps, under
+General Maunoury. He, acting under Lanrezac, gave such a blow to the
+Prussian Guard that he here bent the Prussian line right in.
+
+Meanwhile the 4th French Army, which had also been retiring rapidly
+parallel to the 5th French Army, lay in line with it to the east along
+that continuation of 3 which I have marked with a 4 upon the sketch.
+Farther east the French armies, linking up the operative corner with
+the Alsace-Lorraine frontier, had also been driven back from the Upper
+Meuse, and upon Friday, the 28th of August, when the British halt had
+come between La Fère and Noyon (a line largely protected by the
+Oise), the whole disposition of the Allied forces between the
+neighbourhood of Verdun and Noyon was much what is laid down in the
+accompanying sketch. At A were the British; at B the successful
+counter-offensive of the French 5th Army had checked and bent back the
+Prussian centre under von Buelow; at C, the last section of what had
+been the old operative corner, the army under Langle was thrust back
+to the position here shown, and pressed there by the Wurtembergers and
+the Saxons opposed to it. Meanwhile further French forces, D and E,
+had also been driven back from the Upper Meuse, and were retiring with
+Verdun as a pivot, leaving isolated the little frontier town of
+Longwy. This was not seriously fortified, had held out with only
+infantry work and small pieces, and had not been thought worthy of
+attack by a siege train. It surrendered to the Crown Prince upon
+Friday, 28th August.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 61.]
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 62.]
+
+On that date, then, the two opposing lines might be compared, the one
+to a great encircling arm AA, the elbow of which was bent at Guise,
+the other to a power BB which had struck into the hollow of the elbow,
+and might expect, with further success, to bend the arm so much more
+at that point as to embarrass its general sweep.
+
+Those who saw the position as a whole on this Friday, the 28th of
+August, wondered whether or not the French Commander-in-chief would
+order the continuation of the successful local attack at Guise, and so
+attempt to break the whole German line. He did not give this order,
+and his reasons for retiring in the face of such an opportunity may be
+briefly stated thus:--
+
+1. The French forces in line from Verdun to La Fère, and continued by
+the British contingent to the neighbourhood of Noyon, were still
+gravely inferior to the German forces opposed to them. Even,
+therefore, if the French success at Guise had been pushed farther, and
+had actually broken the German line, either half of the French line
+upon either side of the forward angle would have been heavily
+outnumbered by the two limbs of the enemy opposed to each, and that
+enemy might perfectly well have defeated, though separated, each
+portion of the force opposed to it.
+
+2. To the west, at the position FF on Sketch 62, were acting large
+bodies of the enemy, which had swept, almost without meeting
+resistance, through Arras to Amiens. Against that advance there was
+nothing but small garrisons of French Territorials, which were brushed
+aside without difficulty.
+
+Now these bodies, though they were mainly of cavalry which were
+operating thus to the west, had already cut the main line of
+communications from Boulogne, upon which the British had hitherto
+depended, and were close enough to the Allied left flank to threaten
+it with envelopment, or, rather, to come up in aid of von Kluck at A,
+and make certain what he already could regard as probable--his power
+to get round the British, and turn the whole left of the Allied line.
+
+3. More important even than these two first conclusive considerations
+was the fact that the French Commander-in-chief, had he proposed to
+follow up this success of his subordinate at Guise, would have had to
+change the whole of his general plan, and to waste, or at best to
+delay, the action of his chief factor in that plan. This chief factor
+was the great manoeuvring mass behind the French line which had not
+yet come into play, and the advent of which, at a chosen moment, was
+the very soul of the French strategy.
+
+It is so essential to the comprehension of the campaign to seize this
+last point that, at the risk of repetition, I will restate for the
+reader the main elements of that strategy.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 63.]
+
+I have called it in the earlier pages of this book "the open strategic
+square," and I have shown how this theoretical arrangement was in
+practice complicated and modified so that it came to mean, under the
+existing circumstances of the campaign, the deliberate thrusting forth
+of the fraction called "the operative corner," behind which larger
+masses, "the mass of manoeuvre," were to come up in aid and assume the
+general counter-offensive when the operative corner should have drawn
+the enemy down to that position in which such a general
+counter-offensive would be most efficacious.
+
+To concentrate the great mass of manoeuvre was a business of some
+days, and having ordered its concentration in one district, it would
+be impossible to change the plan at a moment's notice. The district
+into which a great part of this mass of manoeuvre had been
+concentrated--or, rather, was in course of concentration at this
+moment, the 28th August--was the district behind and in the
+neighbourhood of Paris. It lay far from the scene of operation at
+Guise. It was intended to come into play only when the general retreat
+should have reached a line stretching from Verdun to the neighbourhood
+of Paris itself. To have pursued the success at Guise, therefore,
+would have been to waste all this great concentration of the mass of
+manoeuvre which lay some days behind the existing line, and in
+particular to waste the large body which was being gathered behind and
+in the neighbourhood of Paris.
+
+With these three main considerations in mind, and in particular the
+third, which was far the most important, General Joffre determined to
+give up the advantage obtained at Guise, to order the two successful
+army corps under Maunoury, who had knocked the Prussian Guard at that
+point, to retire, and to continue the general retreat until the Allied
+line should be evenly stretched from Paris to Verdun. The whole
+situation may be put in a diagram as follows: You have the Allied line
+in an angle, ABC. You have opposed to it the much larger German forces
+in a corresponding angle, DEF. Farther east you have a continuation of
+the French line, more or less immovable, on the fortified frontier of
+Alsace-Lorraine at M, opposed by a greater immovable German force at
+N. At P you have coming up as far as Amiens large German bodies
+operating in the west, and at Q a small newly-formed French body, the
+6th French Army, supporting the exposed flank of the British
+contingent at A, near Noyon. Meanwhile you have directed towards S,
+behind Paris, and coming up at sundry other points, a concentration of
+the mass of manoeuvre.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 64.]
+
+It is evident that if the French offensive at B which has successfully
+pushed in the German elbow at E round Guise is still sent forward, and
+even succeeds in breaking the German line at E, "the elbow," the two
+limbs into which the Germans will be divided, DE and EF, are each
+superior in number to the forces opposed to them, and that DE in
+particular, with the help of P, may very probably turn AB and its new
+small supporter at Q, roll it up, and begin a decisive victory, while
+the other large German force, EF, may press back or pierce the smaller
+opposed French force, BC.
+
+Meanwhile you would not only be risking this peril, but you would also
+be wasting your great mass of manoeuvre, SS, which is still in process
+of concentration, most of it behind Paris, and which could not
+possibly come into play in useful time at E.
+
+It is far better to pursue the original plan to continue the retreat
+as far as the dotted line from Paris to Verdun, where you will have
+the whole German force at its farthest limit of effort and
+corresponding exhaustion, and where you will have, after the salutary
+delay of the few intervening days, your large mass of manoeuvre, SS,
+close by to Paris and ready to strike.
+
+From such a diagram we see the wisdom of the decision that was taken
+to continue the retirement, and the fruits which that decision was to
+bear.
+
+The whole episode is most eminently characteristic of the French
+military temper, which has throughout the whole of French history
+played this kind of game, and invariably been successful when it has
+attained success from a concentration of energy upon purely military
+objects and a sacrificing of every domestic consideration to the
+single object of victory in foreign war.
+
+It is an almost invariable rule in French history that when the
+military temper of the nation is allowed free play its success is
+assured, and that only when the cross-current of a political object
+disturbs this temper do the French fail, as they failed in 1870, as
+they failed in 1812, or as they failed in the Italian expeditions of
+the Renaissance. By geographical accident, coupled with the
+conditions, economic and other, to which their aggression gives rise,
+the French are nearly always numerically inferior at the beginning of
+a campaign. They have almost invariably begun their great wars with
+defeats and retirements. They have only succeeded when a patient,
+tenacious, and consistently military policy has given them the
+requisite delay to achieve a defensive-offensive plan. It was so
+against Otto the Second a thousand years ago; it was so in the wars of
+the Revolution; it was so in this enormous campaign of 1914. There is
+in their two thousand years of constant fighting one great and
+salutary exception to the rule--their failure against Cæsar; from
+which failure they date the strength of their Roman tradition--still
+vigorous.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The minor fortified posts lying behind the French line were not
+defended. Upon 29th August the French centre fell back behind Rethel,
+the Germans crossed the Aisne, occupied Rheims and Châlons, while the
+British contingent on the left and the French 6th Army now protecting
+its flank continued also to fall back towards Paris. And on Sedan day,
+2nd September, we may regard the great movement as having reached its
+end.
+
+The German advance had nowhere hesitated, save at Guise, and the
+French retirement after their success at Guise can only have seemed to
+the German commanders a further French defeat. Those commanders knew
+their overwhelming numerical superiority against the total of the
+Allied forces--a superiority of some 60 per cent. They may have
+guessed that the French were keeping a considerable reserve; but in
+their imagination that reserve was thought far less than it really
+was, for they could hardly believe that under the strain of the great
+retreat the French commanders would have had the implacable fortitude
+which permitted them to spare for further effort the reinforcements of
+which the retiring army seemed in vital and even in despairing need.
+
+Upon this anniversary of Sedan day it cannot but have appeared to the
+Great General Staff of the enemy that the purpose of their great
+effort in the West was already achieved.
+
+They had reached the gates of Paris. They had, indeed, not yet
+destroyed the enemy's main army in the field, but they had swept up
+garrison after garrison; they had captured, perhaps, 150,000 wounded
+and unwounded men; their progress had been that of a whirlwind, and
+had been marked by a bewildering series of incessant victories. They
+were now in such a situation that either they could proceed to the
+reduction of the forts outside Paris (to which their experience of
+their hitherto immediate reduction of every other permanent work left
+them contemptuous), or they could proceed to break at will the
+insufficient line opposed to them.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 65.]
+
+They stood, on this anniversary of Sedan, in the general situation
+apparent on the accompanying sketch. The 6th French Army was forced
+back right upon the outer works of Paris; the British contingent, to
+its right, lay now beyond the Marne; the 5th French Army, to its right
+again, close along the Seine; the 4th and 3rd continuing the great bow
+up to the neighbourhood of Verdun, three-quarters of the way round
+which fortress the Crown Prince had now encircled; and in front of
+this bent line, in numbers quite double its effectives, pressed the
+great German front over 150 miles of French ground. Upon the left or
+west of the Allies--the German right--stood the main army of von
+Kluck, the 1st, with its supporters to the north and west, that had
+already pressed through Amiens. Immediately to the east of this, von
+Buelow, with the 2nd Army, continued the line. The Saxons and the
+Wurtembergers, a 3rd Army, pressed at the lowest point of the curve in
+occupation of Vitry. To the east, again, beyond and in the Argonne,
+the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia was upon the point of reducing
+Verdun, the permanent works of which fortress had already suffered the
+first days of that bombardment from the new German siege train which
+had hitherto at every experiment completely destroyed the defence in a
+few hours. If we take for the terminal of this first chapter in the
+Great War the morning of 4th September, we may perceive how nearly the
+enemy had achieved his object, to which there now stood as a threat
+nothing more but the French reserves, unexpected in magnitude, though
+their presence was already discovered, which had for the most part
+been gathered in the neighbourhood of and behind the fortified zone of
+Paris.
+
+With this position, of what it meant in immediate alternatives to the
+enemy, I will deal a few pages on at the close of this book, when I
+will also consider in one conspectus on the map the whole of that ten
+days' sweep down from the north, and summarize its effect upon the
+Allied attitude towards the next phase of the war.
+
+But to understand a campaign, one must seize not only the
+topographical positions of troops, nor only their number: one must
+also gauge the temper of their commanders and of the political opinion
+at home behind them, for upon this moral factor everything ultimately
+depends. The men that fight are living men, and the motive power is
+the soul.
+
+It is, therefore, necessary for the reader to appreciate at this
+terminal date, September 2-4, the moral strength of the enemy, and to
+comprehend in what mood of confidence the Germans now lay. With this
+object we must add to the story of the advance on Paris the subsidiary
+events which had accompanied that great sweep into the West. We must
+turn to the "holding up of Russia" upon the East by the Austrian
+forces, and see how the partial failure of this effort (news of which
+was just reaching the Western armies) was quite eclipsed by the
+splendid tidings of Tannenberg. We must see with German eyes the
+secondary but brilliant victory in front of Metz; we must stand in
+their shoes to feel as they did the clearing of Alsace, and to
+comprehend with what contempt they must have watched the false picture
+of the war which the governments and the press of the Allies,
+particularly in Britain, presented to public opinion in their doomed
+territories; and we must, in general, grasp the now apocalyptic temper
+of the nervous, over-strained industrialized population which is the
+tissue of modern Germany.
+
+Not until we have a good general aspect of that mood can we understand
+either the war at this turning-point in its fortunes, or the future
+developments which will be traced in the succeeding volumes of this
+series.
+
+I will, therefore, now turn to the three main elements productive of
+that mood in their historical order: the Battle of Metz, the Austrian
+operations against Russia, and, lastly, the great victory of
+Tannenberg in East Prussia, before concluding this volume with a
+summary of the whole situation in those first days of September, just
+before the tide turned.
+
+
+THE BATTLE OF METZ.
+
+The Battle of Metz, though quite subsidiary to the general operations
+of the war, and upon a scale which later operations have dwarfed, will
+be mentioned with special emphasis in any just account of the great
+war on account of its moral significance.
+
+It took place before the main shock of the armies; it had no decisive
+effect upon the future of the campaign; but it was of the very highest
+weight, informing the German mind, and leading it into that attitude
+of violent exaltation on which I shall later insist in these pages,
+and which largely determined all the first months of the war, with
+their enormous consequences for the future. For the action in front of
+Metz was the first pitched battle fought in Western Europe during our
+generation, and to an unexpected degree it fulfilled in its narrow
+area all the dreams upon which military Germany had been nourished for
+forty years. It thrilled the whole nation with the news, at the very
+outset of hostilities, of a sharp and glorious victory; it seemed a
+presage of far more to come. The Battle of Metz was the limited
+foundation upon which was rapidly erected that triumphant mood that
+lasted long after the tide had turned, and that matured, when bad
+blundering had lost the victory in the West, into the unsoldierly,
+muddled hope that could fail to win, and yet somehow not lose, a
+campaign.
+
+We have seen that the disposition of the French armies at the moment
+when the shock was being delivered through Belgium involved along the
+frontiers of Alsace-Lorraine the presence of considerable forces.
+These, once the operative corner had taken the shock, formed part of
+the mass of manoeuvre, and were destined in large part to swing up in
+aid of the men retreating from the Sambre.
+
+But in the very first days of the war, before the main blow had
+fallen, and when the French General Staff were still in doubt as to
+precisely where the blow _would_ fall, considerable bodies had been
+operating in Alsace and over the Lorraine frontier. The whole range of
+the Vosges was carried in the second week after the British
+declaration of war--that is, between 10th August and 15th August.
+Mulhouse was occupied; upon Monday, the 17th of August, Saarburg, the
+most important railway junction between Strassburg and Metz, was in
+French hands. Up to that date, though such comparatively small forces
+were involved, the French had possessed a very decisive numerical
+superiority. It was not destined to last, for there was moving down
+from the north the now mobilized strength of Germany in this region;
+and a blow struck against the French left, with no less than four
+army corps, was speedily to decide the issue upon this subsidiary
+front.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 66.]
+
+This great force was based upon Metz, from which fortress the action
+will presumably take its name in history. It stretched upon the 20th
+of August from the north of Pont-à-Mousson to beyond Château Salins.
+Before this overwhelming advance the French left rapidly retired. It
+did not retire quickly enough, and one portion of the French force--it
+is believed the 15th Division (that is, the first division of the 15th
+Army Corps)--failed in its task of supporting the shock.
+
+Details of the action are wholly lacking. We depend even for what may
+be said at this date upon little more than rumour. The Germans claimed
+a capture of ten batteries and of the equivalent of as many
+battalions, and many colours. Upon the 21st the whole French left fell
+back, carrying with them as a necessary consequence the centre in the
+Vosges Mountains and the right upon the plains of Alsace. So rapid was
+the retreat that upon the 22nd of August the Bavarians were at
+Lunéville, and marching on Nancy; the extreme right of the German line
+had come within range of the forts north of Toul; and in those same
+hours during which, on that same Saturday, the 22nd of August, the 5th
+French Army in the north fell back at the news of Namur and lost the
+Sambre, those forces on the borders of Alsace-Lorraine had lost all
+the first advantages of their thrust into the lost provinces, had
+suffered defeat in the first striking action of the war, and had put
+Nancy in peril.
+
+Nancy itself was saved. The French counter-offensive was organized on
+the 23rd of August, at a moment when the German line lay from St. Dié
+northwards and westwards up to positions just in front of Nancy. It
+was delivered about a week later. That counter-offensive which
+ultimately saved Nancy belongs to the next volume, for it did not
+develop its strength until after Sedan Day, and after the end of the
+great sweep on Paris.
+
+The situation, then, in this field (the very names of which have such
+great moral effects upon the French and the German minds) was, by the
+2nd of September, as follows:--
+
+The French had suffered in the first considerable action of the war a
+disaster. They had lost their foothold in the annexed provinces. They
+had put the capital of French Lorraine, Nancy, in instant peril. They
+had fallen back from the Vosges. They were beginning, with grave
+doubts of its success, a counter-offensive, to keep the enemy, if
+possible, from entering Nancy. They had lost thousands of men, many
+colours, and scores of guns, and all Germany was full of the news.
+
+
+LEMBERG.
+
+The foundation of the Germanic plan upon the Eastern front at the
+origin of the war was, as we have said, the holding up of Russia
+during her necessarily slow mobilization, while the decisive stroke
+was delivered in the West.
+
+That is the largest view of the matter.
+
+In more detail, we know that the main part of this task was entrusted
+to the Austro-Hungarian forces. The German forces had indeed entered
+and occupied the west fringe of Russian Poland, seizing the small
+industrial belt which lies immediately east of Silesia, and the two
+towns of Czestochowa and Kalish--the latter, in the very centre of the
+bend of the frontier, because it was a big railway depot, and, as it
+were, a gage of invasion; the former, both because the holding of one
+line demanded it (if Kalish and the industrial portion were held), and
+because Czestochowa being the principal shrine of the Poles, some
+strange notion may have passed through the German mind that the
+presence therein of Prussian officers would cajole the Poles into an
+action against Russia. If this were part of the motive (and probably
+it was), it would be a parallel to many another irony in the present
+campaign and its preliminaries, proceeding from the incapacity of the
+enemy to gauge the subtler and more profound forces of a civilization
+to which it is a stranger.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 67.]
+
+This local German move was almost entirely political. The main task,
+as I have said, was left to the Austrians farther south; and,
+proceeding to further detail, we must see the Austrians stretched in a
+line from near the middle Carpathians past the neighbourhood of
+Tomasow towards Tarnow, and this line distinctly divided into two
+armies, a northern and a southern. The two met in an angle in front of
+the great fortress of Przemysl. The northern, or first, army faced, as
+will be seen, directly towards the Russian frontier. It was the
+operative wing; upon its immediate action and on the rapidity of the
+blow it was to deliver depended the success of this first chapter in
+the Eastern war.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 68.]
+
+The southern, or second, army, which stretched all along the Galician
+plain at the foot of the Carpathians to the town of Halicz, had for
+its mission the protection of the first army from the south. It was
+known, or expected, that the first army would advance right into
+Russian Poland, with but inferior forces in front of it. It was
+feared, however, that the main Russian concentration to the south-east
+of it might turn its right flank. The business of the second army was
+to prevent this. The first army (I), being the operative body, was
+more homogeneous in race, more picked in material than the second
+(II), the latter containing many elements from the southern parts of
+the empire, including perhaps not a few disaffected contingents, such
+as certain regiments of Italian origin from the Adriatic border.
+
+So far as we can judge, perhaps--and it is a very rough estimate--we
+may put the whole body which Austria-Hungary was thus moving in the
+first phase of the war beyond the Carpathians at more than 750,000,
+but less than 1,000,000 men. Call the mass 800,000, and one would not
+be far wrong. Of this mass quite a quarter lay in reserve near the
+mountains behind the first army. The remaining three-quarters, or
+600,000 men, were fairly evenly divided between the two groups of the
+first and of the second army--the first, or northern, one being under
+the command of Dankl, the second under that of von Auffenberg. Each
+of these forces was based upon one group of depots of particular
+importance, the northern operative army (I) relying upon Przemysl, and
+the southern one (II) upon Lemberg.
+
+It was less than a week after the first German advance bodies had
+taken the outer forts of Liége when Dankl crossed the frontier,
+heading, with his centre, towards Krosnik and farther towards Lublin.
+His troops were in Russian territory upon the Monday evening or the
+Tuesday, 10th-11th August.
+
+The second army meanwhile stood fulfilling its rôle of awaiting and
+containing any Russians that might strike in upon the south. It had
+advanced no more than watching bodies towards the frontier, such as
+the 35th Regiment of the Austrian Landwehr, which occupied Sokal, and
+smaller units cordonned out southward between that town and Brody.
+Here, at the outset of the large operations that were to follow, it is
+important for the reader to note that everything depended upon the
+resisting power of the second, or southern, army.
+
+Observe the problem. Two men, a left-hand man and a right-hand man,
+go out to engage two other men whom they hope and believe to be
+unready. The left-hand man is particularly confident of being able to
+drive back his opponent, but he knows that sooner or later upon his
+right the second enemy, a stronger man, may come in and disturb his
+action. He says therefore to his right-hand companion: "Stand firm and
+engage and contain the energy of your opponent until I have finished
+with mine. When I have done that, I shall turn round towards you, and
+between us we will finish the second man."
+
+Seeing the paucity of Russian communications, and the physical
+necessity under which the Russians were, on account of the position of
+their depots and centres of mobilization, of first putting the mass of
+their men on the south, the physical impossibility under which they
+lay of putting the mass of their men in the north for the moment, the
+plan was a sound one; _but_ its success depended entirely upon the
+tenacity of the second Austrian army, which would have to meet large,
+and might have to meet superior, numbers.
+
+The first army went forward with very little loss and against very
+little resistance. The Russian forces which were against it, which we
+may call the first Russian army, were inferior in number, and fell
+back, though not rapidly, towards the Bug. It relied to some extent in
+this movement upon the protection afforded by the forts of Zamosc, but
+it was never in any serious danger until, or unless, things went wrong
+in the south. The Austrians remained in contact (but no more), turned
+somewhat eastward in order to keep hold of the foe, when their advance
+was checked by the news, first of unexpected Russian strength, later
+of overwhelming Russian advances towards the south. Long before the
+third week in August, the first Austrian army was compelled to check
+its advance upon the news reaching it from the second, and its
+fortunes, in what it had intended to be a successful invasion of
+Russian Poland, had ended. For the whole meaning of the first Galician
+campaign turns after the 14th of August upon the great Russian advance
+in the south.
+
+It was upon that day, August 14, that the Russian force, under General
+Russky (which we will call the second army), crossed the frontier.
+Its right occupied Sokal, its centre left moved in line with the right
+upon von Auffenberg's force directly before it.
+
+The Russian mobilization had proceeded at a greater pace than the
+enemy had allowed for. The Russian numbers expected in this field
+appeared in far greater strength than this expectation had allowed
+for, and it was soon apparent that von Auffenberg's command would have
+to resist very heavy pressure.
+
+But it would be an error to imagine, as was too hastily concluded in
+the press of Western Europe at the time, that this pressure upon the
+front of the second Austrian army, with its dogged day after day
+fighting and mile by mile advance, was the principal deciding factor
+in the issue. That deciding factor was, in fact, the appearance upon
+the right flank of von Auffenberg of yet another Russian army (which
+we will call the third) under Brussilov. It was the menace of this
+force, unexpected, or at least unexpected in its great strength, which
+really determined the issue, though this was again affected by the
+tardiness of the Austrian retirement. Russky's direct advance upon
+the front of his enemy extended for a week. It had begun when it had
+destroyed the frontier posts upon Friday, the 14th. It was continued
+until the evening of the succeeding Thursday, regularly, slowly, but
+without intermission. It stood upon the Friday, the 21st--the day on
+which the first shots were fired at the main Franco-British forces in
+the West, and the day on which the first shell fell into Charleroi
+station--not more than one day's cavalry advance from the outer works
+of Lemberg, but it was just in that week-end that the pressure of
+Brussilov began to be felt.
+
+This third Russian army had come up from the south-east, supplied by
+the main Odessa railway through Tarnopol. It was manifestly
+threatening the right flank of von Auffenberg, and if a guess may be
+hazarded upon operations on which we have so little detail as yet, and
+which took place so far from our own standpoint, the error of the
+Austrian general seems to have consisted in believing that he could
+maintain himself against this flank attack. If this were the case (and
+it is the most probable explanation of what followed), the error
+would have been due to the same cause which affected all Austrian
+plans in these first days of the war--the mistake as to the rapidity
+with which Russia would complete her preparations.
+
+[Illustration: 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 the Sunday, 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 its commander 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 that it 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.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 70.]
+
+It was on Friday, the 28th of that month, 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 such considerable 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
+campaign which 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 than once 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 great _modern_ town, 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 and _machinery_ for 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 fall behind 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 not see. 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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
+show for 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 its _moral_ intact, 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 fallen _as
+prisoners_ into 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.
+
+
+TANNENBERG.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: 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 of Christendom. 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 within the 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, of _Borussia_
+(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 a particular 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. Its
+country-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 large German-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, would certainly 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 region will be clear. It is, in the
+technical language of military art, a labyrinth of _defiles_. 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 of
+retreat--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 similarly confined 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 with the 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.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 73.]
+
+From Eylau, through Osterode, the main 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 was imperfect, 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 the
+defensive, 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 arrow _a_ was 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
+superiority in 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 arrow _b_. 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 arrow _c_, 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
+arrow _d_, during the 30th and 31st, broke that retirement into two
+halves, one half (as at 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 reached Berlin 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.
+
+
+THE SPIRITS IN CONFLICT.
+
+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 physical self-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 to oppose 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 was so
+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 the United 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 see _things_, 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 would further 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 that lesson; 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 to understand 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. The barrier 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
+of the 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.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] The ultimatum expired at midnight (August 4-5) by Greenwich time,
+11 p.m. (August 4) by German, or Central European, time.
+
+[3] AA is holding the obstacle OO against a superior number BB. There
+are six passages across OO. If BB forces No. 5 and No. 6 he creates
+the situation in the following diagram, where it is obvious that BB is
+now on the flank of AA, and that AA must retire, even if he still
+holds passages 1, 2, 3, and 4. That is what happened when Namur fell.
+The French could hold, and were holding, the Germans along the Sambre,
+above Namur; but the bridges of Namur, which were thought safe behind
+the forts, had fallen into German hands.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 44.]
+
+
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+Hilaire Belloc
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's A General Sketch of the European War, by Hilaire Belloc
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A General Sketch of the European War
+       The First Phase
+
+Author: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2006 [EBook #18042]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a></span><br />
+
+<h1>A
+GENERAL SKETCH<br />
+OF THE<br />
+EUROPEAN WAR</h1>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>HILAIRE BELLOC</h2>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<h3>THE FIRST PHASE</h3>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<h5>THOMAS NELSON &amp; COMPANY<br />
+LONDON, EDINBURGH, PARIS, AND NEW YORK</h5>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h5><i>First published June 1, 1915</i><br /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>
+<i>Reprinted June 1915</i></h5>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="toc" id="toc"></a><hr />
+<br />
+
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span><br />
+<h3>CONTENTS.</h3>
+<br />
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="80%" summary="Table of Contents">
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">Introduction</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#INTRODUCTION">7</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdc" colspan="4" style="padding-top: 1.5em;"><a href="#PART_I">PART I.</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdc" colspan="4" style="padding-bottom: 1em;">THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(1)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">The German Object</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_I_1">17</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(2)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">Conflict produced by the Contrast of this German
+      Attitude or Will with the Wills of Other Nations</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_I_2">23</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(3)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">Prussia</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_I_3">27</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(4)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">Austria</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_I_4">39</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(5)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">The Particular Causes of the War</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_I_5">50</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(6)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">The Immediate Occasion of the War</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_I_6">64</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdc" colspan="4" style="padding-top: 1.5em;"><a href="#PART_II">PART II.</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdc" colspan="4" style="padding-bottom: 1em;">THE FORCES OPPOSED.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(1)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">The Geographical Position of the Belligerents</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_II_1">80</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td width="5%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td width="5%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl" width="80%">The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Germanic Body</td>
+  <td class="tdr" width="10%"><a href="#PART_II_1a">86</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Allies</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_II_1b">121</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(2)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">The Opposing Strengths</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_II_2">136</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">The Figures of the First Period, say to October 1-31, 1914</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_II_2a">145</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">The Figures of the Second Period, say to April 15-June 1, 1915</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_II_2b">151</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(3)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">The Conflicting Theories of War</td>
+  <td class="tdr">164</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdc" colspan="4" style="padding-top: 1.5em;"><a href="#PART_III">PART III.</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdc" colspan="4" style="padding-bottom: 1em;">THE FIRST OPERATIONS.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(1)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">The Battle of Metz</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_III_1">316</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(2)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">Lemberg</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_III_2">322</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(3)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">Tannenberg</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_III_3">345</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">(4)</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2">The Spirits in Conflict</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#PART_III_4">365</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a><hr />
+<br />
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span><br />
+<h3>INTRODUCTION.<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+<br />
+
+<p>It is the object of this book, and those which will succeed it in the
+same series, to put before the reader the main lines of the European
+War as it proceeds. Each such part must necessarily be completed and
+issued some little time after the events to which it relates have
+passed into history. The present first, or introductory volume, which
+is a preface to the whole, covers no more than the outbreak of
+hostilities, and is chiefly concerned with an examination of the
+historical causes which produced the conflict, an estimate of the
+comparative strength of the various combatants, and a description of
+the first few days during which these combatants took up their
+positions and suffered the first great shocks of the campaigns in East
+and West.</p>
+
+<p>But in order to serve as an introduction to the remainder of the
+series, it is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>necessary that the plan upon which these books are to
+be constructed should be clearly explained.</p>
+
+<p>There is no intention of giving in detail and with numerous exact maps
+the progress of the campaigns. Still less does the writer propose to
+examine disputed points of detail, or to enumerate the units employed
+over that vast field. His object is to make clear, as far as he is
+able, those great outlines of the business which too commonly escape
+the general reader.</p>
+
+<p>This war is the largest and the weightiest historical incident which
+Europe has known for many centuries. It will surely determine the
+future of Europe, and in particular the future of this country. Yet
+the comprehension of its movements is difficult to any one not
+acquainted with the technical language and the special study of
+military history; and the reading of the telegrams day by day, even
+though it be accompanied by the criticisms of the military experts in
+the newspapers, leaves the mass of men with a most confused conception
+of what happened and why it happened.</p>
+
+<p>Now, it is possible, by greatly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>simplifying maps, by further
+simplifying these into clear diagrams, still more by emphasizing what
+is essential and by deliberately omitting a crowd of details&mdash;by
+showing first the framework, as it were, of any principal movement,
+and then completing that framework with the necessary furniture of
+analysed record&mdash;to give any one a conception both of what happened
+and of how it happened.</p>
+
+<p>It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over which
+the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to the author
+of this), so to describe such ground to the reader that he will in
+some sort be able to see for himself the air and the view in which the
+things were done: thus more than through any other method will the
+things be made real to him. The aim, therefore, of these pages, and of
+those that will succeed them, is to give such a general idea of the
+campaigns as a whole as will permit whoever has grasped it a secure
+comprehension of the forces at work, and of the results of those
+forces. It is desired, for example, that the reader of these pages
+shall be able to say to himself: "The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>Germanic body expected to
+win&mdash;and no wonder, for it had such and such advantages in number and
+in equipment.... The first two battles before Warsaw failed, and I can
+see why. It was because the difficulties in Russian supply were met by
+a contraction of the Russian line.... The 1st German Army was
+compelled to retreat before Paris, and I can now see why that was so:
+as it turned to envelop the Allied line, a great reserve within the
+fortified zone of Paris threatened it, and forced it back."</p>
+
+<p>These main lines, and these only, are attempted in the present book,
+and in those that are to follow it in this series.</p>
+
+<p>The disadvantage of such a method is, of course, that the reader must
+look elsewhere for details, for the notices of a particular action,
+and the records of particular regiments. He must look for these to the
+large histories of the war, which will amply supply his curiosity in
+good time. But the advantage of the method consists in that it
+provides, as I hope, a foundation upon which all this bewildering
+multitude of detailed reading can repose.</p>
+
+<p>I set out, then, to give, as it were, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>alphabet of the campaign,
+and I begin in this volume with the preliminaries to it&mdash;that is, its
+great political causes, deep rooted in the past; the particular and
+immediate causes which led to the outbreak of war; an estimate of the
+forces engaged; and the inception of hostilities.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4>PLAN OF THIS BOOK.</h4>
+
+<p>This first volume will cover three parts. In Part I. I shall write of
+The Causes of the War. In Part II. I shall Contrast the Forces
+Opposed. In Part III. (the briefest) I shall describe the First Shock.</p>
+
+<p>In Part I., where I deal first with the general or historical causes
+of the war, later with the particulars, I shall:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>1. Define the German object which led up to it.</p>
+
+<p>2. Show how this object conflicted with the wills of other nations.</p>
+
+<p>3. Briefly sketch the rise of Prussia and of her domination over North
+Germany.</p>
+
+<p>4. Define the position of Austria-Hungary in the matter, and thus
+close the general clauses.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>5. The particular causes of the war will next be dealt with; the
+curious challenge thrown down to Great Britain by the German Fleet
+<i>before</i> the German Empire had made secure its position on the
+Continent; the French advance upon Morocco; the coalition of the
+Balkan States against the remainder of the Turkish Empire in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>6. Lastly, in this First Part, I shall describe the immediate occasion
+of the war and its surroundings: the ultimatum issued by the
+Austro-Hungarian Government to the little kingdom of Servia.</p>
+
+<p>In Part II. I will attempt to present the forces opposed at the
+outbreak of war.</p>
+
+<p>First, the contrast in the geographical position of the Germanic
+Allies with their enemies, the French, the English, and the Russians.
+Secondly, the numbers of trained men prepared and the numbers of
+reserves available in at least the first year to the various numbers
+in conflict. Thirdly, the way in which the various enemies had thought
+of the coming war (which was largely a matter of theory in the lack of
+experience); in what either party has been right, and in what wrong,
+as events <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>proved; and with what measure of foresight the various
+combatants entered the field.</p>
+
+<p>In Part III, I will very briefly describe the original armed
+dispositions for combat at the outbreak of war, the German aim upon
+the West, and the German orders to the Austrians upon the East; the
+overrunning of Belgium, and the German success upon the Sambre; then
+the pursuit of the Franco-British forces to the line Paris-Verdun, up
+to the eve of the successful counter-offensive undertaken by them in
+the first week of September. I will end by describing what were the
+contemporary events in the Eastern field: in its northern part the
+overrunning of East Prussia by the Russians, and the heavy blow which
+the Germans there administered to the invader; in its southern the
+Austrian opposition to the Russians on the Galician borders, and the
+breakdown of that opposition at Lemberg.</p>
+
+<p>My terminal date for this sketch will be the 5th of September.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="PART_I" id="PART_I"></a><hr />
+<br />
+
+<h2>A GENERAL SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR.</h2>
+
+<h2>PART I.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+<br />
+
+<p>War is the attempt of two human groups each to impose its will upon
+the other by force of arms. This definition holds of the most
+righteous war fought in self-defence as much as it does of the most
+iniquitous war of mere aggression. The aggressor, for instance,
+proposes to take the goods of his victim without the pretence of a
+claim. He is attempting to impose his will upon that victim. The
+victim, in resisting by force of arms, is no less attempting to impose
+his will upon the aggressor; and if he is victorious does effectually
+impose that will: for it is his will to prevent the robbery.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>Every war, then, arises from some conflict of wills between two human
+groups, each intent upon some political or civic purpose, conflicting
+with that of his opponent.</p>
+
+<p>War and all military action is but a means to a non-military end, to
+be achieved and realized in peace.</p>
+
+<p>Although arguable differences invariably exist as to the right or
+wrong of either party in any war, yet the conflicting wills of the two
+parties, the irreconcilable political objects which each has put
+before itself and the opposition between which has led to conflict,
+can easily be defined.</p>
+
+<p>They fall into two classes:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>1. The general objects at which the combatants have long been aiming.</p>
+
+<p>2. The particular objects apparent just before, and actually
+provoking, the conflict.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of the present enormous series of campaigns, which occupy
+the energies of nearly all Europe, the general causes can be easily
+defined, and that without serious fear of contradiction by the
+partisans of either side.</p>
+
+<p>On the one hand, the Germanic peoples, especially that great majority
+of them now organized as the German Empire under <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>the hegemony of
+Prussia, had for fully a lifetime and more been possessed of a certain
+conception of themselves which may be not unjustly put into the form
+of the following declaration. It is a declaration consonant with most
+that has been written from the German standpoint during more than a
+generation, and many of its phrases are taken directly from the
+principal exponents of the German idea.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_I_1" id="PART_I_1"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">(I) The German Object.</h4>
+
+<p>"We the Germans are in spirit one nation. But we are a nation the
+unity of which has been constantly forbidden for centuries by a number
+of accidents. None the less that unity has always been an ideal
+underlying our lives. Once or twice in the remote past it has been
+nearly achieved, especially under the great German emperors of the
+Middle Ages. Whenever it has thus been nearly achieved, we Germans
+have easily proved ourselves the masters of other societies around us.
+Most unfortunately our very strength has proved our ruin time and
+again by leading us into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>adventures, particularly adventures in
+Italy, which took the place of our national ideal for unity and
+disturbed and swamped it. The reason we have been thus supreme
+whenever we were united or even nearly united lay in the fact, which
+must be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>patent to every observer, that our mental, moral, and
+physical characteristics render us superior to all rivals. The German
+or Teutonic race can everywhere achieve, other things being equal,
+more than can any other race. Witness the conquest of the Roman Empire
+by German tribes; the political genius, commercial success, and final
+colonial expansion of the English, a Teutonic people; and the peculiar
+strength of the German races resident within their old homes on the
+Rhine, the Danube, the Weser, and the Elbe, whenever they were not
+fatally disunited by domestic quarrel or unwise foreign ideals. It was
+we who revivified the declining society of Roman Gaul, and made it
+into the vigorous medi&aelig;val France that was ruled from the North. It
+was we who made and conquered the heathen Slavs threatening Europe
+from the East, and who civilized them so far as they could be
+civilized. We are, in a word, and that patently not only to ourselves
+but to all others, the superior and leading race of mankind; and you
+have but to contrast us with the unstable Celt&mdash;who has never produced
+a State&mdash;the corrupt and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>now hopelessly mongrel Mediterranean or
+'Latin' stock, the barbarous and disorderly Slav, to perceive at once
+the truth of all we say.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch01.jpg" width="60%" alt="Sketch 1" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 1.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"It so happens that the various accidents which interrupted our
+strivings for unity permitted other national groups, inferior morally
+and physically to our own, to play a greater part than such an
+inferiority warranted; and the same accidents permitted men of
+Teutonic stock, not inhabiting the ancient homes of the Teutons, but
+emigrated therefrom and politically separated from the German Empire,
+to obtain advantages in which we ourselves should have had a share,
+but which we missed. Thus England, a Teutonic country, obtained her
+vast colonial empire while we had not a ship upon the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"France, a nation then healthier than it is now, but still of much
+baser stock than our own, played for centuries the leading part in
+Western Europe; she is even to-day 'over-capitalized,' as it were,
+possessing a far greater hold over the modern world than her real
+strength warrants. Even the savage Slavs have profited by our former
+disunion, and the Russian autocracy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>not only rules millions of
+German-speaking subjects, but threatens our frontiers with its great
+numbers of barbarians, and exercises over the Balkan Peninsula, and
+therefore over the all-important position of Constantinople, a power
+very dangerous to European culture as a whole, and particularly to our
+own culture&mdash;which is, of course, by far the highest culture of all.</p>
+
+<p>"Some fifty years ago, acting upon the impulse of a group of great
+writers and thinkers, our statesmen at last achieved that German unity
+which had been the unrealized ideal of so many centuries. In a series
+of wars we accomplished that unity, and we amply manifested our
+superiority when we were once united by defeating with the greatest
+ease and in the most fundamental fashion the French, whom the rest of
+Europe then conceived to be the chief military power.</p>
+
+<p>"From that moment we have incontestably stood in the sight of all as
+the strongest people in the world, and yet because other and lesser
+nations had the start of us, our actual international position, our
+foreign possessions, the security that should be due to so supreme an
+achievement, did not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>correspond to our real strength and abilities.
+England had vast dependencies, and had staked out the unoccupied world
+as her colonies. We had no colonies and no dependencies. France,
+though decadent, was a menace to our peace upon the West. We could
+have achieved the thorough conquest and dismemberment of France at any
+time in the last forty years, and yet during the whole of that time
+France was adding to her foreign possessions in Tunis, Madagascar, and
+Tonkin, latterly in Morocco, while we were obtaining nothing. The
+barbarous Russians were increasing constantly in numbers, and somewhat
+perfecting their insufficient military machine without any
+interference from us, grave as was the menace from them upon our
+Eastern frontier.</p>
+
+<p>"It was evident that such a state of things could not endure. A nation
+so united and so immensely strong could not remain in a position of
+artificial inferiority while lesser nations possessed advantages in no
+way corresponding to their real strength. The whole equilibrium of
+Europe was unstable through this contrast between what Germany might
+be and what she was, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>a struggle to make her what she might be
+from what she was could not be avoided.</p>
+
+<p>"Germany must, in fulfilment of a duty to herself, obtain colonial
+possessions at the expense of France, obtain both colonial possessions
+and sea-power at the expense of England, and put an end, by campaigns
+perhaps defensive, but at any rate vigorous, to the menace of Slav
+barbarism upon the East. She was potentially, by her strength and her
+culture, the mistress of the modern world, the chief influence in it,
+and the rightful determinant of its destinies. She must by war pass
+from a potential position of this kind to an actual position of
+domination."</p>
+
+<p>Such was the German mood, such was the fatuous illusion which produced
+this war. It had at its service, as we shall see later, <i>numbers</i>,
+and, backed by this superiority of numbers, it counted on victory.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_I_2" id="PART_I_2"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">(2) Conflict produced by the Contrast of this German Attitude<br /> or
+Will with the Wills of Other Nations.</h4>
+
+<p>When we have clearly grasped the German attitude, as it may thus be
+not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>unfairly expressed, we shall not find it difficult to conceive
+why a conflict between such a will and other wills around it broke
+out.</p>
+
+<p>We need waste no time in proving the absurdity of the German
+assumptions, the bad history they involve, and the perverse and
+twisted perspective so much vanity presupposes. War can never be
+prevented by discovering the moral errors of an opponent. It comes
+into being because that opponent does not believe them to be moral
+errors; and in the attempt to understand this war and its causes, we
+should only confuse ourselves if we lost time over argument upon
+pretensions even as crassly unreal as these.</p>
+
+<p>It must be enough for the purposes of this to accept the German will
+so stated, and to see how it necessarily conflicts with the English
+will, the French will, the Russian will, and sooner or later, for that
+matter, with every other national will in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>In the matter of sea-power England would answer: "Unless we are
+all-powerful at sea, our very existence is imperilled." In the matter
+of her colonies and dependencies England would answer: "We may <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>be a
+Teutonic people or we may not. All that kind of thing is pleasant talk
+for the academies. But if you ask whether we will allow any part of
+our colonies to become German or any part of our great dependencies to
+fall under German rule, the answer is in the negative."</p>
+
+<p>The French would answer: "We do not happen to think that we are either
+decadent or corrupt, nor do we plead guilty to any other of your vague
+and very pedantic charges; but quite apart from that, on the concrete
+point of whether we propose to be subjugated by a foreign Power,
+German or other, the answer is in the negative. Our will is here in
+conflict with yours. And before you can proceed to any act of mastery
+over us, you will have to fight. Moreover, we shall not put aside the
+duty of ultimately fighting you so long as a population of two
+millions, who feel themselves to be French (though most of them are
+German-speaking) and who detest your rule, are arbitrarily kept in
+subjection by you in Alsace-Lorraine."</p>
+
+<p>The Russians would reply: "We cannot help being numerically stronger
+than you, and we do not propose to diminish <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>our numbers even if we
+could. We do not think we are barbaric; and as to our leadership of
+the Slav people in the Balkans, that seems as right and natural to us,
+particularly on religious grounds, as any such bond could be. It may
+interfere with your ambitions; but if you propose that we should
+abandon so obvious an attitude of leadership among the Slavs, the
+answer is in the negative." There is here, therefore, again a conflict
+of wills.</p>
+
+<p>In general, what the German peoples desired, based upon what they
+believed themselves to be, was sharply at issue with what the English
+people, what the French people, what the Russian people respectively
+desired. Their desires were also based upon what <i>they</i> believed
+themselves to be, and they thought themselves to be very different
+from what Germany thought them to be. The English did not believe that
+they had sneaked their empire; the French did not believe that they
+were moribund; the Russians did not believe that they were savages.</p>
+
+<p>It was impossible that the German will should impose itself without
+coming at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>once into conflict with these other national wills. It was
+impossible that the German ideal should seek to realize itself without
+coming into conflict with the mere desire to live, let alone the
+self-respect, of everybody else.</p>
+
+<p>And the consequence of such a conflict in ideals and wills translated
+into practice was this war.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 5%;' />
+
+<p>But the war would not have come nor would it have taken the shape that
+it did, but for two other factors in the problem which we must next
+consider. These two other factors are, first, the position and
+tradition of Prussia among the German States; secondly, the peculiar
+authority exercised by the Imperial House of Hapsburg-Lorraine at
+Vienna over its singularly heterogeneous subjects.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_I_3" id="PART_I_3"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">(3) Prussia.</h4>
+
+<p>The Germans have always been, during their long history, a race
+inclined to perpetual division and sub-division, accompanied by war
+and lesser forms of disagreement between the various sections. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>Their
+friends have called this a love of freedom, their enemies political
+incompetence; but, without giving it a good or a bad name, the plain
+fact has been, century after century, that the various German tribes
+would not coalesce. Any one of them was always willing to take service
+with the Roman Empire, in the early Roman days, against any one of the
+others, and though there have been for short periods more or less
+successful attempts to form one nation of them all in imitation of the
+more civilized States to the west and south, these attempts have never
+succeeded for very long.</p>
+
+<p>But it so happens that about two hundred years ago, or a little more,
+there appeared one body of German-speaking men rather different from
+the rest, and capable ultimately of leading the rest, or at least a
+majority of the rest.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch02.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 2" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 2.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I use the words "German-speaking" and "rather different" because this
+particular group of men, though speaking German, were of less pure
+German blood than almost any other of the peoples that spoke that
+tongue. They were the product of a conquest undertaken late in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>Middle Ages by German knights over a mixed Pagan population,
+Lithuanian and Slavonic, which inhabited the heaths and forests along
+the Baltic Sea. These German knights succeeded in their task, and
+compelled the subject population to accept Christianity, just as the
+Germans themselves had been compelled to accept it by their more
+powerful and civilized neighbours the French hundreds of years before.
+The two populations of this East Baltic district, the large majority
+which was Slavonic and Lithuanian, and the minority which was really
+German, mixed and produced a third thing, which we now know as the
+<i>Prussian</i>. The cradle of this Prussian race was, then, all that flat
+country of which K&ouml;nigsberg and Danzig are the capitals, but
+especially K&ouml;nigsberg&mdash;"King's Town"&mdash;where the monarchs of this
+remote people were crowned. By an historical accident, which we need
+not consider, the same dynasty was, after it had lost all claim to
+separate kingship, merged in the rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg, a
+somewhat more German but still mixed district lying also in the Baltic
+plain, but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>more towards the west, and the official title of the
+Prussian ruler somewhat more than two hundred years ago was the
+Elector of Brandenburg. These rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg were a
+family bearing the title of Hohenzollern, a castle in South Germany,
+by which name they are still distinguished. The palace of these
+Hohenzollerns was henceforward at Berlin.</p>
+
+<p>Now, much at the same time that the civil wars were being fought in
+England&mdash;that is, not quite three hundred years ago&mdash;the Reformation
+had produced in Germany also very violent quarrels. Vienna, which was
+the seat of the Imperial House, stood for the Catholic or traditional
+cause, and most Germans adhered to that cause. But certain of the
+Northern German principalities and counties took up the side of the
+Reformation. A terrible war, known as the Thirty Years' War, was
+fought between the two factions. It enormously reduced the total
+population of Germany. In the absence of exact figures we only have
+wild guesses, such as a loss of half or three-quarters. At any rate,
+both from losses from the adherence of many princes to the Protestant
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>cause and from the support lent to that cause for political reasons by
+Catholic France, this great civil war in Germany left the Protestant
+part more nearly equal in numbers to the Catholic part, and, among
+other things, it began to make the Elector of Brandenburg with his
+Prussians particularly prominent as the champion of the Protestant
+cause. For, of all the warring towns, counties, principalities, and
+the rest, Prussia had in particular shown military aptitude.</p>
+
+<p>From that day to this the advance of Prussia as, first, the champion,
+then the leader, and at last the master of Northern Germany as a whole
+(including many Catholic parts in the centre and the south), has been
+consistent and almost uninterrupted. The "Great Elector" (as he was
+called) formed an admirable army some two hundred years ago. His
+grandson Frederick formed a still better one, and by his great
+capacities as a general, as well as by the excellence of his troops,
+gave Prussia a military reputation in the middle of the eighteenth
+century which has occasionally been eclipsed, but has never been
+extinguished.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>Frederick the Great did more than this. He codified and gave
+expression, as it were, to the Prussian spirit, and the manifestation
+of that spirit in international affairs is generally called the
+"Frederician Tradition."</p>
+
+<p>This "Frederician Tradition" must be closely noted by the reader,
+because it is the principal moral cause of the present war. It may be
+briefly and honestly put in the following terms:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The King of Prussia shall do all that may seem to advantage the
+kingdom of Prussia among the nations, notwithstanding any European
+conventions or any traditions of Christendom, or even any of those
+wider and more general conventions which govern the international
+conduct of other Christian peoples."</p>
+
+<p>For instance, if a convention of international morals has arisen&mdash;as
+it did arise very strongly, and was kept until recent times&mdash;that
+hostilities should not begin without a formal declaration of war, the
+"Frederician Tradition" would go counter to this, and would say: "If
+ultimately it would be to the advantage of Prussia to attack without
+declaration <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>of war, then this convention may be neglected."</p>
+
+<p>Or, again, treaties solemnly ratified between two Governments are
+generally regarded as binding. And certainly a nation that never kept
+such a treaty for more than a week would find itself in a position
+where it was impossible to make any treaties at all. Still, if upon a
+vague calculation of men's memories, the acuteness of the
+circumstance, the advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to
+the advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a
+treaty should be broken.</p>
+
+<p>It will be apparent that what is called the "Frederician Tradition,"
+which is the soul of Prussia in her international relations, is not an
+unprincipled thing. It has a principle, and that principle is a
+patriotic desire to strengthen Prussia, which particular appetite
+overweighs all general human morals and far outweighs all special
+Christian or European morals.</p>
+
+<p>This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the
+Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or in
+acts of treason and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>bad faith. What it means is that, wherever they
+are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do <i>this</i>, which is to the advantage
+of my country but opposed to European and common morals, or <i>that</i>,
+which is consonant with those morals but to the disadvantage of my
+country?" they choose the former and not the latter course.</p>
+
+<p>Prussia, endowed with this doctrine and possessed of a most excellent
+military organization and tradition, stood out as the first military
+power in Europe until the French Revolution. The wars of the French
+Revolution and of Napoleon upset this prestige, and in the battle of
+Jena (1806) seemed to have destroyed it. But it was too strong to be
+destroyed. The Prussian Government was the first of Napoleon's allies
+to betray Napoleon <i>after</i> the Russians had broken his power (1812).
+They took part with the other Allies in finishing off Napoleon after
+the Russian campaign (1813-14); they were present with decisive effect
+upon the final field of Waterloo (1815), and remained for fifty years
+afterwards the great military power they had always been. They had
+further added to their dominions such great areas in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>Northern
+Germany, beyond the original areas inhabited by the true Prussian
+stock, that they were something like half of the whole Northern German
+people when, in 1864, they entered into the last phase of their
+dominion. They began by asking Austria to help them in taking from
+Denmark, a small and weak country, not only those provinces of hers
+which spoke German, but certain districts which were Danish as well.
+France and England were inclined to interfere, but they did not yet
+understand the menace Prussia might be in the future, and they
+neglected to act. Two years later Prussia suddenly turned upon
+Austria, her ally, defeated her in a very short campaign, and insisted
+upon Austria's relinquishing for the future all claims over any part
+of the German-speaking peoples, save some ten millions in the valley
+of the Middle Danube and of the Upper Elbe. Four years later again, in
+1870, Prussia having arranged, after various political experiments
+which need not be here detailed, for the support of all the German
+States except Austria, fought a war with France, in which she was
+immediately and entirely successful, and in the course of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>which the
+rulers of the other German States consented (1) to give the
+Hohenzollern-Prussian dynasty supreme military power for the future
+over them, under the hereditary title of German Emperors; (2) to form
+a united nation under the more or less despotic power of these
+emperors.</p>
+
+<p>This latter point, the national unity, though really highly
+centralized at Berlin, especially on the military side, was softened
+in its rigour by a number of very wise provisions. A great measure of
+autonomy was left to the more important of the lesser States,
+particularly Catholic Bavaria; local customs were respected; and,
+above all, local dynasties were flattered, and maintained in all the
+trappings of sovereign rank.</p>
+
+<p>From that date&mdash;that is, for the last forty-four years&mdash;there has been
+a complete <i>Northern</i> Germany, one strong, centralized, and thoroughly
+co-ordinated nation, in which the original Prussian domination is not
+only numerically far the greatest element, but morally overshadows all
+the rest. The spiritual influence ruling this state issues from Berlin
+and from the Prussian soul, although a large minority consist of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>contented but respectful Catholics, who, in all national matters,
+wholly sympathize with and take their cue from the Protestant North.</p>
+
+<p>So far one may clearly see what kind of power it is that has initiated
+the German theory of supremacy which we have described above, is
+prepared to lead it to battle, and is quite certain of leading it to
+victory.</p>
+
+<p>But we note&mdash;the fatal mark in all German history&mdash;that the unity is
+not complete. The ten millions of Austrian Germans were, when Prussia
+achieved this her highest ambition, deliberately left outside the new
+German Empire. And this was done because, in Prussian eyes, a
+so-called "German unity" was but a means to an end, and that end the
+aggrandizement of the Hohenzollern dynasty. To include so many
+southern and Catholic Germans would have endangered the mastery of
+Berlin. The fact that Austria ruled a number of non-German subjects
+far larger than her Austrian population would further have endangered
+the Hohenzollern position had Austria been admitted to the new German
+Empire, and had the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>consolidation of all Germans into one true state
+been really and loyally attempted. Lastly, it would have been
+impossible to destroy the historic claims to leadership of the
+Imperial Hapsburgs, and that, more than anything else, was the rivalry
+the Hohenzollerns dreaded. Once more had the Germans proved themselves
+incapable of, and unwilling to submit to, the discipline of unity.
+What part, then, was Austria, thus left out, to play in the
+international activity of Prussia in the future? What part especially
+was she to play when Prussia, at the head of Northern Germany, should
+go out to impose the will of that Germany and of herself upon the rest
+of the world? That is the next question we must answer before we can
+hope to understand the causes of the present war in their entirety.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_I_4" id="PART_I_4"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">(4) Austria.</h4>
+
+<p>Austria, or, more strictly speaking, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
+means no more than the congeries of States governed each separately
+and all in combination by the head of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine.
+Of these various States only one is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>German-speaking as a whole, and
+that is the Austrian State proper, the "Eastern States" (for that is
+what the word "Austria" originally meant) which Christendom erected
+round the Roman and Christian frontier town of Vienna to withstand the
+pressure of the heathen Slavs and Mongol Magyars surging against it
+upon this frontier.</p>
+
+<p>The complexity of the various sections which make up the realm of the
+present Emperor Francis Joseph, the present head of the House of
+Hapsburg-Lorraine, would be only confusing if it were detailed in so
+general a description as this. We must be content with the broad lines
+of the thing, which are as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch03.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 3" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 3.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>From the Upper Danube and its valley&mdash;all the basin of it, one may
+say, down to a point about twenty miles below Vienna&mdash;is the original
+Austrian State; German-speaking as a whole, and the historic centre of
+the entire agglomeration. East of this is the far larger state of
+Hungary, and Hungary is the valley of the river Danube, from where the
+German-speaking boundary cuts it, just below Vienna down to the Iron
+Gates, up to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>crest of the Carpathians. These two great units of
+Austria proper and of Hungary have round them certain frills or edges.
+On the north are two great bodies, Slav in origin, Bohemia and
+Galicia; on the south another Slav body, separated from the rest for
+centuries by the eruption of the Magyars from Asia in the Dark Ages,
+and these Slav bodies are represented by Croatia, by much of Dalmatia,
+and latterly by Bosnia and Herzegovina, which have been governed by
+Austria for a generation, and formally annexed by her with the consent
+of Europe seven years ago. Finally, there is a strip, or, to be more
+accurate, there are patches of Italian-speaking people, all along the
+coasts of the Adriatic, and occupying the ports governed by Austria
+along the eastern and northern coast of that sea. There is also a belt
+of Alpine territory of Italian speech&mdash;the Trentino&mdash;still in Austrian
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>This very general description gives, however, far too rough an idea of
+the extraordinarily complicated territories of the House of Hapsburg.
+Thus, there are considerable German-speaking colonies in Hungary, and
+these, oddly enough, are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>more frequent in the east than in the west
+of that State. Again, the whole western slope of the Carpathians is,
+so far as the mass of the population is concerned, Roumanian in
+tongue, custom, and race. Bohemia, though Slavonic in origin, is
+regularly enframed along its four sides by belts of German-speaking
+people, and was mainly German-speaking until a comparatively recent
+revival of its native Slavonic tongue, the Czech. Again, though the
+Magyar language is Mongolian, like the Turkish, centuries of Christian
+and European admixture have left very little trace of the original
+race. Lastly, in all the north-eastern corner of this vast and
+heterogeneous territory, something like a quarter of the population is
+Jewish.</p>
+
+<p>The Western student, faced with so extraordinary a puzzle of race and
+language, may well wonder what principle of unity there is lying
+behind it, and, indeed, this principle of unity is not easy to find.</p>
+
+<p>Some have sought it in religion, pointing out that the overwhelming
+majority of these various populations are Catholic, in communion with
+Rome; and, indeed, this Catholic tincture or colour has a great deal
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>to do with the Austro-Hungarian unity; and of late years the chief
+directing policy of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine has been to pose as
+the leader of the Catholic Slavs against the Slavs belonging to the
+Greek Church.</p>
+
+<p>But this principle of unity is not the true one, for two reasons:
+first, that the motive leading the House of Hapsburg to the difficult
+task of so complicated a government is not a religious motive; and,
+secondly, because this religious unity is subject to profound
+modification. Hungary, though Catholic in its majority, contains, and
+is largely governed by, powerful Protestant families, who are
+supported by considerable bodies of Protestant population. The Greek
+Church is the religious profession of great numbers along the Lower
+Danube valley and to the south of the river Save. There are in Bosnia
+a considerable number of Mahomedans even, and I have already mentioned
+the numerous Jewish population of the north-east, particularly in
+Galicia.</p>
+
+<p>The true principle of unity in what has hitherto been the
+Austro-Hungarian Empire is twofold. It consists, first, in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>reigning family, considerable personal attachment to which is felt in
+every section of its dominions, utterly different as these are one
+from another; and, secondly (a more important point), in the
+historical development of the State.</p>
+
+<p>It is this last matter which explains all, and which can make us
+understand why a realm so astonishingly ill constructed was brought
+into the present struggle as one force, and that force a force allied
+to, and in a military sense identical with, modern Prussian Germany.</p>
+
+<p>For the historical root of Austria-Hungary is German. Of its
+population (some fifty-one millions) you may say that only about a
+quarter are German-speaking (less than another quarter are
+Magyar-speaking, most of the rest Slavonic in speech, together with
+some proportion of Roumanian and Italian).</p>
+
+<p>But it is from this German <i>quarter</i> and from the emperor at their
+head that the historical growth of the State depends, because this
+German <i>quarter</i> was the original Christian nucleus and the civilized
+centre, which had for its mission the reduction of Slavonic and Magyar
+barbarism. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>The Slavs of the Bohemian quadrilateral were subjected,
+not indeed by conquest, but by a process of culture, to Vienna. The
+crown of Hungary, when it fell by marriage to the Hapsburgs, continued
+that tradition; and when the Empress Maria-Theresa, in the last
+century, participated in the abominable crime of Frederick the Great
+of Prussia, and took her share of the dismembered body of Poland (now
+called the Austrian province of Galicia), that enormous blunder was,
+in its turn, a German blunder undertaken under the example of Northern
+Germany, and as part of a movement German in spirit and origin. The
+same is true even of the very latest of the Austrian developments, the
+annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The act was that of Vienna, but
+the spirit behind it, perhaps the suggestion of it, and the support
+that made it possible came from Berlin.</p>
+
+<p>In a word, if you could interrogate the Genius of the Hapsburgs and
+ask it for what their dominion stood, it would tell you that for
+uninterrupted centuries they had stood for the German effort to
+repress or to overcome pressure upon the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>German peoples from the
+East. And that is still their r&ocirc;le. They have come into this war, for
+instance, as the servants of Prussia, not because Prussia threatened
+or overawed them, but because they felt they had, in common with
+Prussia, the mission of withstanding the Slav, or of tolerating the
+Slav only as a subject; because, that is, they feared, and were
+determined to resist, Russia, and the smaller Slavonic States, notably
+Servia to the south, which are in the retinue of Russia.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 5%;' />
+
+<p>We may sum up, then, and say that the fundamental conflict of wills in
+Europe, which has produced this general war, is a conflict between the
+German will, organized by Prussia to overthrow the ancient Christian
+tradition of Europe (to <i>her</i> advantage directly; and indirectly, as
+she proposes, to the advantage of a supposedly necessary German
+governance of the world under Prussian organization), and the will of
+the more ancient and better founded Western and Latin tradition to
+which the sanctity of separate national units profoundly appeals, and
+a great deal more which is, in their eyes, civilization. In <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>this
+conflict, Prussia has called upon and received the support of not only
+the German Empire, which she controls, but also the Hapsburg monarchy,
+controlling the organized forces of Austria-Hungary; while there has
+appeared against this strange Prussian claim all that values the
+Christian tradition of Europe, and in particular the doctrine of
+national freedom, with very much else&mdash;which very much else are the
+things by which we of the civilized West and South, who have hitherto
+proved the creators of the European world, live and have our being.
+Allied with us, by the accident that this same German claim threatens
+them also, is the young new world of the Slavs.</p>
+
+<p>It is at this final point of our examination that we may see the
+immensity of the issues upon which the war turns. The two parties are
+really fighting for their lives; that in Europe which is arrayed
+against the Germanic alliance would not care to live if it should fail
+to maintain itself against the threat of that alliance. It is for them
+life and death. On the other side, the Germans having propounded this
+theory of theirs, or rather <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>the Prussians having propounded it for
+them, there is no rest possible until they shall either have "made
+good" to our destruction, or shall have been so crushed that a
+recurrence of the menace from them will for the future be impossible.</p>
+
+<p>There is here no possibility of such a "draw" or "stalemate" as was
+the result, for instance, of the reduction of Louis XIV.'s ambition,
+or of the great revolutionary effort throughout Europe which ended
+with the fall of Napoleon. Louis XIV.'s ambition cast over Europe,
+which received it favourably, the colour of French culture. The
+Revolutionary Wars were fought for a principle which, if it did not
+appeal universally to men, appealed at least to all those millions
+whose instincts were democratic in every country. But in this war
+there is no such common term. No one outside the districts led by
+Prussia desires a Prussian life, and perhaps most, certainly many, of
+those whom Prussia now leads are in different degrees unwilling to
+continue a Prussian life. The fight, in a word, is not like a fight
+with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign away some property,
+or make you <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>acknowledge some principle to which you are already half
+inclined; it is like a fight with a man who says, "So long as I have
+life left in me, I will make it my business to kill you." And fights
+of that kind can never reach a term less absolute than the destruction
+of offensive power in one side or the other. A peace not affirming
+complete victory in this great struggle could, of its nature, be no
+more than a truce.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 5%;' />
+
+<p>So much for the really important and the chief thing which we have to
+understand&mdash;the general causes of the war.</p>
+
+<p>Now let us turn to the particular causes. We shall find these to be,
+not like the general causes, great spiritual attitudes, but, as they
+always are, a sequence of restricted and recent <i>events</i>.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_I_5" id="PART_I_5"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">(5) The Particular Causes of the War.</h4>
+
+<p>After the great victories of Prussia a generation ago (the spoliation
+of Denmark in 1864, the supremacy established over Austria in 1866,
+the crushing defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine,
+with two millions of people in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>1870-1), Europe gradually drifted into
+being an armed camp, the great forces of which were more or less in
+equilibrium. Prussia had, for the moment at least, achieved all that
+she desired. The French were for quite twenty years ardently desirous
+of recovering what they had lost; but Europe would not allow the war
+to be renewed, and Prussia, now at the head of a newly constituted
+German Empire, made an arrangement with Austria and with Italy to curb
+the French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before
+this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support
+them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking
+another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling
+gradually deadened. It did not disappear&mdash;any incident might have
+revived it&mdash;but the anxious desire for immediate war when the
+opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the
+process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all
+the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock, every one very
+heavily armed, the principal antagonists, France and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>Germany, armed
+to their utmost, but the European States, as a whole, unwilling to
+allow any one of them to break the peace.</p>
+
+<p>It was about this moment that Prussia committed what the future
+historian will regard, very probably, as the capital blunder in her
+long career of success. She began to build a great fleet. Here the
+reader should note two very important consequences of the great
+Prussian victories which had taken place a generation before. The
+first was the immense expansion of German industrialism. Germany, from
+an agricultural State, became a State largely occupied in mining,
+smelting, spinning, and shipbuilding; and there went with this
+revolution, as there always goes with modern industrialism, a large
+and unhealthy increase of population. The German Empire, after its war
+with France, was roughly equal to the population of the French; but
+the German Empire, after this successful industrial experiment, the
+result of its victories, was much more than half as large again in
+population as the French (68 to 39).</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, the German Empire developed a new and very large maritime
+commerce. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>This second thing did not follow, as some have imagined it
+does, from the first. Germany might have exported largely without
+exporting in her own ships. The creation of Germany's new mercantile
+marine was a deliberate part of the general Prussian policy of
+expansion. It was heavily subsidized, especially directed into the
+form of great international passenger lines, and carefully
+co-ordinated with the rest of the Prussian scheme throughout the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>At a date determined by the same general policy, and somewhat
+subsequent to the first creation of this mercantile marine, came the
+decision to build a great fleet. Now, it so happens that Great Britain
+alone among the Powers of Europe depends for her existence upon
+supremacy at sea, and particularly upon naval superiority in the
+Narrow Seas to the east and the south of the British islands.</p>
+
+<p>Such a necessity is, of course, a challenge to the rest of the world,
+and it would be ridiculous to expect the rest of the world to accept
+that challenge without protest. But a necessity this naval policy of
+Great Britain remains none the less. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>The moment some rival or group
+of rivals can overcome her fleet, her mere physical livelihood is in
+peril. She cannot be certain of getting her food. She cannot be
+certain of getting those foreign materials the making up of which
+enables her to purchase her food. Further, her dominions are scattered
+oversea, and supremacy at sea is her only guarantee of retaining the
+various provinces of her dominion.</p>
+
+<p>It is a case which has happened more than once before in the history
+of the world. Great commercial seafaring States have arisen; they have
+always had the same method of government by a small, wealthy class,
+the same ardent patriotism, the same scattered empire, and the same
+inexorable necessity of maintaining supremacy at sea. Only one Power
+had hitherto rendered this country anxious for the Narrow Seas: that
+Power was France, and it only controlled one-half of the two branches
+of the Narrow Seas, the North Sea and the Channel. It had been for
+generations a cardinal piece of English policy that the French Fleet
+should be watched, the English Fleet maintained overwhelmingly
+superior to it, and all opportunities for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>keeping France engaged with
+other rivals used to the advantage of this country. On this account
+English policy leant, on the whole, towards the German side, during
+all the generation of rivalry between France and Germany which
+followed the war of 1870.</p>
+
+<p>But when the Germans began to build their fleet, things changed. The
+Germans had openly given Europe to understand that they regarded
+Holland and Belgium, and particularly the port of Antwerp, as
+ultimately destined to fall under their rule or into their system.
+Their fleet was specifically designed for meeting the British Fleet;
+it corresponded to no existing considerable colonial empire, and
+though the development of German maritime commerce was an excuse for
+it, it was only an excuse. Indeed, the object of obtaining supremacy
+at sea was put forward fairly clearly by the promoters of the whole
+scheme. Great Britain was therefore constrained to transfer the weight
+of her support to Russia and to France, and to count on the whole as a
+force opposed, for the first time in hundreds of years, to North
+Germany in the international politics of Europe. Similarity of
+religion (which is a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>great bond) and a supposed identity (and partly
+real similarity) of race were of no effect compared with this
+sentiment of necessity.</p>
+
+<p>Here it is important to note that the transference of British support
+from one continental group to another neither produced aggression by
+Great Britain nor pointed to any intention of aggression. It is a
+plain matter of fact, which all future history will note, that the
+very necessity in English eyes of English supremacy at sea, and the
+knowledge that such a supremacy was inevitably a provocation to
+others, led to the greatest discretion in the use of British naval
+strength, and, in general, to a purely defensive and peaceful policy
+upon the part of the chief maritime power. It would, indeed, have been
+folly to have acted otherwise, for there was nothing to prevent the
+great nations, our rivals, if they had been directly menaced by the
+British superiority at sea, from beginning to build great fleets,
+equal or superior to our own. Germany alone pursued this policy, with
+no excuse save an obvious determination to undo the claim of the
+British Fleet.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>I have called this a blunder, and, from the point of view of the
+German policy, it was a blunder. For if the Prussian dynasty set out,
+as it did, to make itself the chief power in the world, its obvious
+policy was to deal with its enemies in detail. It ought not, at any
+cost, to have quarrelled with Russia until it had finally disposed of
+France. If it was incapable, through lack of subtlety, to prevent the
+Franco-Russian group from forming, it should at least have made itself
+the master of that group before gratuitously provoking the rivalry of
+Great Britain. But "passion will have all now," and the supposedly
+cold and calculating nature of Prussian effort has about it something
+very crudely emotional, as the event has shown. From about ten years
+ago Prussian Germany had managed to array against itself not only the
+old Franco-Russian group but Great Britain as well.</p>
+
+<p>This arrangement would not, however, have led to war. Equilibrium was
+still perfectly maintained, and the very strong feeling throughout all
+the great States of Europe that a disturbance of the peace would mean
+some terrible catastrophe, to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>be avoided at all costs, was as
+powerful as ever.</p>
+
+<p>The true origin of disturbance, the first overt act upon which you can
+put your finger and say, "Here the chain of particular causes leading
+to the great war begins," was the revolution in Turkey. This
+revolution took place in the year 1908, and put more or less
+permanently into power at Constantinople a group of men based upon
+Masonic influence, largely Western in training, largely composed of
+Jewish elements, known as the "Young Turks."</p>
+
+<p>The first result of this revolution, followed as it inevitably was by
+the temporary weakening in international power which accompanies all
+civil war at its outset, was the declaration by Austria that she would
+regard the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina&mdash;hitherto only
+administrated by her and nominally still Turkish&mdash;as her own
+territory.</p>
+
+<p>It was but a formal act, but it proved of vast consequence. It was an
+open declaration by a Germanic Power that the hopes of the Servians,
+the main population of the district and a Slav nation closely <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>bound
+to Russia in feeling, were at an end; that Servia must content herself
+with such free territory as she had, and give up all hope of a
+completely independent State uniting all Servians within its borders.
+It was as though Austria had said, "I intend in future to be the great
+European Power in the Balkans, Slav though the Balkans are, and I
+challenge Russia to prevent me." The Russian Government, thus
+challenged, would perhaps have taken the occasion to make war had not
+the French given it to be understood that they would not imperil
+European peace for such an object. The Prussian Government of the
+German Empire had, in all this crisis, acted perhaps as the leader,
+certainly as the protector and supporter of Austria; and when France
+thus refused to fight, and Russia in turn gave way, the whole thing
+was regarded, not only in Germany but throughout the world, as
+equivalent to an armed victory. Observers whose judgment and criticism
+are of weight, even in the eyes of trained international agents,
+proclaimed what had happened to be as much a Prussian success as
+though the Prussian and Austrian armies <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>had met in the field and had
+defeated the Russian and the French forces.</p>
+
+<p>The next step in this series was a challenge advanced by Germany
+against that arrangement whereby Morocco, joining as it did to French
+North Africa, should be abandoned to French influence, so far as
+England was concerned, in exchange for the French giving up certain
+rights of interference they had in the English administration of
+Egypt, and one or two other minor points. Germany, advancing from a
+victorious position acquired over the Bosnian business, affirmed (in
+the year 1911) her right to be consulted over the Moroccan settlement.
+Nor were the French permitted to occupy Morocco until they had ceded
+to Germany a portion of their African colony of the Congo. This
+transaction was confused by many side issues. German patriots did not
+regard it as a sufficient success, though French patriots certainly
+regarded it as a grave humiliation. But perhaps the chief consequence
+of the whole affair was the recrudescence in the French people as a
+whole of a temper, half forgotten, which provoked them to withstand
+the now <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>greatly increased power of the German Empire and of its ally,
+and to determine that if such challenges were to continue unchecked
+during the coming years, the national position of France would be
+forfeited.</p>
+
+<p>Following upon this crisis came, in the next year&mdash;still a consequence
+of the Turkish Revolution&mdash;the sudden determination of the Balkan
+States, including Greece, to attack Turkey. It was the King of
+Montenegro (a small Slav State which had always maintained its
+independence) who fired the first shot upon the 8th of October, 1912,
+with his own hand. In the course of that autumn the Balkan Allies were
+universally successful, failed only in taking Constantinople itself,
+reduced Turkey in Europe to an insignificant strip of territory near
+the capital itself, and proceeded to settle the conquered territory
+according to an agreement made by them before the outbreak of
+hostilities.</p>
+
+<p>But here the Germanic Powers again intervened. The defeated Turkish
+Army had been trained by German officers upon a German system; the
+expansion of German and Austrian political military influence
+throughout the Near East was a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>cardinal part of the German creed and
+policy. Through Austria the Balkans were to be dominated at last, and
+Austria, at this critical moment, vetoed the rational settlement which
+the allied Balkan States had agreed to among themselves. She would not
+allow the Servians to annex those territories inhabited by men of
+their race, and to reach their natural outlet to the sea upon the
+shores of the Adriatic. She proposed the creation of a novel State of
+Albania under a German prince, to block Servia's way to the sea. She
+further proposed to Servia compensation by way of Servia's annexing
+the territory round Monastir, which had a Bulgarian population, and to
+Bulgaria the insufficient compensation of taking over, farther to the
+east, territory that was not Bulgarian at all, but mixed Greek and
+Turkish.</p>
+
+<p>The whole thing was characteristically German in type, ignoring and
+despising national feeling and national right, creating artificial
+boundaries, and flagrantly sinning against the European sense of
+patriotism. A furious conflict between the various members of the
+former Balkan Alliance followed; but the settlement which Austria <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>had
+virtually imposed remained firm, and the third of the great Germanic
+steps affirming the growing Germanic scheme in Europe had been taken.</p>
+
+<p>But it had been taken at the expense of further and very gravely
+shaking the already unstable armed equilibrium of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>The German Empire foresaw the coming strain; a law was passed
+immediately increasing the numbers of men to be trained to arms within
+its boundaries, and ultimately increasing that number so largely as to
+give to Germany alone a very heavy preponderance&mdash;a preponderance of
+something like thirty per cent.&mdash;over the corresponding number trained
+in France.</p>
+
+<p>To this move France could not reply by increasing her armed forces,
+because she already took every available man. She did the only
+possible thing under the circumstances. She increased by fifty per
+cent. the term during which her young men must serve in the army,
+changing that term from two years to three.</p>
+
+<p>The heavy burden thus suddenly imposed upon the French led to very
+considerable political disputes in that country, especially as the
+parliamentary form of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>government there established is exceedingly
+unpopular, and the politicians who live by it generally despised.
+When, therefore, the elections of last year were at hand, it seemed as
+though this French increase of military power would be in jeopardy.
+Luckily it was maintained, in spite of the opposition of fairly honest
+but uncritical men like Jaur&eacute;s, and of far less reputable professional
+politicians.</p>
+
+<p>Whether this novel strain upon the French people could have been long
+continued we shall never know, for, in the heat of the debates
+provoked by this measure and its maintenance, came the last events
+which determined the great catastrophe.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_I_6" id="PART_I_6"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">(6) The Immediate Occasion of the War.</h4>
+
+<p>We have seen how constantly and successfully Austria had supported the
+general Prussian thesis in Europe, and, in particular, the
+predominance of the German Powers over the Slav.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen how, in pursuit of this policy, the sharpest friction was
+always suffered at the danger-point of <i>Servia</i>. Servia was the Slav
+State millions of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>whose native population were governed against their
+will by Austro-Hungarian officials. Servia was the Slav State mortally
+wounded by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And Servia was
+the Slav State which Austria had in particular mortified by forbidding
+her access to the Adriatic, and by imposing upon her an unnatural
+boundary, even after her great victories of the Balkan War.</p>
+
+<p>The heir to the Hapsburgs&mdash;the man who, seeing the great age of his
+uncle, might at any moment ascend the throne&mdash;was the Archduke
+Francis. He had for years pursued one consistent policy for the
+aggrandizement of his House, which policy was the pitting of the
+Catholic Slavs against the Orthodox Slavs, thereby rendering himself
+in person particularly odious to the Orthodox Serbs, so many of whose
+compatriots and co-religionists were autocratically governed against
+their will in the newly annexed provinces.</p>
+
+<p>To the capital of these provinces, Sarajevo, he proceeded in state in
+the latter part of last June, and there, through the emissaries of
+certain secret societies (themselves Austrian subjects, but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>certainly
+connected with the population of independent Servia, and, as some
+claimed, not unconnected with the Servian Government itself), he was
+assassinated upon Saturday, the 28th of June, 1914.</p>
+
+<p>For exactly a month, the consequences of this event&mdash;the provocation
+which it implied to Austria, the opportunity which it gave the
+Hapsburgs for a new and more formidable expression of Germanic power
+against the Slavs&mdash;were kept wholly underground. <i>That is the most
+remarkable of all the preliminaries to the war.</i> There was a month of
+silence after so enormous a moment. Why? In order to give Germany and
+Austria a start in the conflict already long designed. Military
+measures were being taken secretly, stores of ammunition overhauled,
+and all done that should be necessary for a war which was premeditated
+in Berlin, half-feared, half-desired in Vienna, and dated for the end
+of July&mdash;after the harvest.</p>
+
+<p>The Government of Berlin was, during the whole of this period,
+actively engaged in forcing Austria forward in a path to which she was
+not unwilling; and, at last, upon the 23rd of July, Europe was amazed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>to read a note sent by the Imperial Governor at Vienna to the Royal
+Government in the Servian capital of Belgrade, which note was of a
+kind altogether unknown hitherto in the relations between Christian
+States. This note demanded not only the suppression of patriotic, and
+therefore anti-Austrian, societies in Servia (the assassins of the
+Crown Prince had been, as I have said, not Servian but Austrian
+subjects), but the public humiliation of the Servian Government by an
+apology, and even an issue of the order of the day to the Servian
+Army, so recently victorious, abasing that army to the worst
+humiliation. The note insisted upon a specific pledge that the Servian
+Government should renounce all hope of freeing the Servian nation as a
+whole from foreign government, and in many another clause subjected
+this small nation to the most thorough degradation ever suggested by a
+powerful European people towards a lesser neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>So far, though an extreme hitherto unknown in European history had
+been reached, the matter was one of degree. Things of the same sort,
+less drastic, had been known in the past.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>But what was novel in the note, and what undoubtedly proceeded from
+the suggestion of the Prussian Government (which was in all this the
+real agent behind Austria), <i>was the claim of the Austrian Government
+to impose its own magistrates upon the Servian courts, and to condemn
+at will those subjects of the Servian king and those officers holding
+his commission whom Austria might select so to condemn, and that to
+penalties at the goodwill and pleasure of Austria alone</i>. In other
+words, Austria claimed full rights of sovereignty within the territory
+of her small neighbour and enemy, and the acceptation of the note by
+Servia meant not only the preponderance of Austria for the future over
+the Slavs of the Balkans, but her continued and direct power over that
+region in the teeth of national and religious sentiment, and in clean
+despite of Russia.</p>
+
+<p>So strong was the feeling still throughout Europe in favour of
+maintaining peace and of avoiding the awful crash of our whole
+international system that Russia advised Servia to give way, and the
+Germanic Powers were on the eve of yet another great success, far more
+important and enduring than anything they had yet <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>achieved. The only
+reservation which Servia was permitted by the peaceful Powers of
+Europe, and in particular by Russia, to make was that, upon three
+points which directly concerned her sovereignty, Austria should admit
+the decision of a Court of Arbitration at the Hague. But the
+time-limit imposed&mdash;which was the extraordinarily short one of
+forty-eight hours&mdash;was maintained by Austria, and upon the advice, as
+we now know, of Berlin, no modification whatever in the demands was
+tolerated. Upon the 25th, therefore, the Austrian Minister left
+Belgrade. There followed ten days, the exact sequence of events in
+which must be carefully noted if we are to obtain a clear view of the
+origin of the war.</p>
+
+<p>Upon that same day, Saturday, July 25th, the English Foreign Office,
+through Sir Edward Grey, suggested a scheme whereby the approaching
+cataclysm (for Russia was apparently determined to support Servia)
+might be averted. He proposed that all operations should be suspended
+while the Ambassadors of Germany, Italy, and France consulted with him
+in London.</p>
+
+<p>What happened upon the next day, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>Sunday, is exceedingly important.
+The German Government refused to accept the idea of such a conference,
+but at the same time the German Ambassador in London, Prince
+Lichnowski, was instructed to say that the principle of such a
+conference, or at least of mediation by the four Powers, was agreeable
+to Berlin. <i>The meaning of this double move was that the German
+Government would do everything it could to retard the entry into the
+business of the Western Powers, but would do nothing to prevent
+Russia, Servia, and the Slav civilization as a whole from suffering
+final humiliation or war.</i></p>
+
+<p>That game was played by Germany clumsily enough for nearly a full
+week. Austria declared war upon Servia upon Monday the 27th; but we
+now know that her intention of meeting Russia halfway, when she saw
+that Russia would not retire, was stopped by the direct intervention
+of the Prussian Government. In public the German Foreign Office still
+pretended that it was seeking some way out of the crisis. In private
+it prevented Austria from giving way an inch from her extraordinary
+demands. And all the while <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>Germany was secretly making her first
+preparations for war.</p>
+
+<p>It might conceivably be argued by a special pleader that war was not
+the only intention of Berlin, as most undoubtedly it had not been the
+only intention of Vienna. Such a plea would be false, but one can
+imagine its being advanced. What is not capable even of discussion is
+the fact that both the Germanic Powers, under the unquestioned
+supremacy of Prussia, <i>were</i> determined to push Russia into the
+dilemma between an impossible humiliation and defeat in the field.
+They allowed for the possibility that she would prefer humiliation,
+because they believed it barely possible (though all was ready for the
+invasion of France at a moment already fixed) that the French would
+again fail to support their ally. But war was fixed, and its date was
+fixed, with Russia, or even with Russia and France, and the Germanic
+Powers arranged to be ready before their enemies. In order to effect
+this it was necessary to deceive the West at least into believing that
+war could after all be avoided.</p>
+
+<p>One last incident betrays in the clearest manner how thoroughly
+Prussia had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>determined on war, and on a war to break out at her own
+chosen moment. It was as follows:</p>
+
+<p>As late as Thursday, the 30th of July, Austria was still willing to
+continue a discussion with Russia. The Austrian Government on that day
+expressed itself as willing to reopen negotiations with Russia. The
+German Ambassador at Vienna got wind of this. He communicated it at
+once to Berlin. <i>Germany immediately stopped any compromise, by
+framing that very night and presenting upon the next day, Friday the
+31st, an ultimatum to Russia and to France.</i></p>
+
+<p>Now, the form of these two ultimata and the events connected with them
+are again to be carefully noted, for they further illuminate us upon
+the German plan. That to Russia, presented by the German Ambassador
+Portales, had been prepared presupposing the just possible humiliation
+and giving way of Russia; and all those who observed this man's
+attitude and manner upon discovering that Russia would indeed fight
+rather than suffer the proposed humiliation, agreed that it was the
+attitude and manner of an anxious man. The ultimatum to France had,
+upon the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>contrary, not the marks of coercion, but of unexpected and
+violent haste. If Russia was really going to fight, what could Prussia
+be sure of in the West? It was the second great and crude blunder of
+Prussian diplomacy that, instead of making any efforts to detach
+France from Russia, it first took the abandonment of Russia by France
+for granted, and then, with extreme precipitancy, asked within the
+least possible delay whether France would fight. That precipitancy
+alone lent to the demand a form which ensured the exact opposite of
+what Prussia desired.</p>
+
+<p>This double misconception of the effect of her diplomatic action
+dates, I say, from Friday, the 31st of July, and that day is the true
+opening day of the great war. Upon Sunday, the 2nd of August, the
+German army violated the neutrality of Luxembourg, seizing the railway
+passing through that State into France, and pouring into its neutral
+territory her covering troops. On the same day, the French general
+mobilization was ordered; the French military authorities having lost,
+through the double action of Germany, about five days out of, say,
+eleven&mdash;nearly half the mobilization <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>margin&mdash;by which space of time
+German preparations were now ahead of theirs.</p>
+
+<p>There followed, before the action state of general European conflict,
+the third German blunder, perhaps the most momentous, and certainly
+the most extraordinary: that by which Germany secured the hitherto
+exceedingly uncertain intervention of England against herself.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the great Powers involved, Great Britain had most doubtfully to
+consider whether she should or should not enter the field.</p>
+
+<p>On the one hand, she was in moral agreement with Russia and France; on
+the other hand, she was bound to them by no direct alliance, and
+successive British Governments had, for ten years past, repeatedly
+emphasized the fact that England was free to act or not to act with
+France according as circumstances might decide her.</p>
+
+<p>Many have criticized the hesitation, or long weighing of circumstance,
+which astonished us all in the politicians during these few days, but
+no one, whether friendly to or critical of a policy of neutrality, can
+doubt that such a policy was not only a possible but a probable one.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>The Parliamentarians were not unanimous, the opposition to the great
+responsibility of war was weighty, numerous, and strong. The
+financiers, who are in many things the real masters of our
+politicians, were all for standing out. In the face of such a
+position, in the crisis of so tremendous an issue, Germany, instead of
+acting as best she could to secure the neutrality of Great Britain,
+simply took that neutrality for granted!</p>
+
+<p>Upon one specific point a specific question was asked of her
+Government. To Great Britain, as we have seen in these pages, the
+keeping from the North Sea coast of all great hostile Powers is a
+vital thing. The navigable Scheldt, Antwerp, the approaches to the
+Straits of Dover, are, and have been since the rise of British
+sea-power, either in the hands of a small State or innocuous to us
+through treaty. Today they are the possession of Belgium, an
+independent State erected by treaty after the great war, and
+neutralized by a further guarantee in 1839. This neutrality of Belgium
+had been guaranteed in a solemn treaty not only by France and England,
+but by Prussia herself; and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>British Government put to the French
+and to the Germans alike the question whether (now they were at war)
+that neutrality would be respected. The French replied in the
+affirmative; the Germans, virtually, in the negative. But it must not
+be said that this violation of international law and of her own word
+by Germany automatically caused war with England.</p>
+
+<p><i>The German Ambassador was not told that if Belgian territory was
+violated England would fight</i>; he was only told that if that territory
+were violated England <i>might</i> fight.</p>
+
+<p>The Sunday passed without a decision. On Monday the point was, as a
+matter of form, laid before Parliament, though the House of Commons
+has no longer any real control over great national issues. In a speech
+which certainly inclined towards English participation in the war
+should Germany invade Belgium, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs
+summed up the situation before a very full House.</p>
+
+<p>In the debate that followed many, and even passionate, speeches were
+delivered opposing the presence of England in the field and claiming
+neutrality. Some of these speeches insisted upon the admiration <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>felt
+by the speaker for modern Germany and Prussia; others the ill judgment
+of running the enormous risk involved in such a campaign. These
+protests will be of interest to history, but the House of Commons as a
+whole had, of course, no power in the matter, and sat only to register
+the decisions of its superiors. There was in the Cabinet resignation
+of two members, in the Ministry the resignation of a third, the
+threatened resignation of many more.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, upon that same day, August 3rd, following with
+superstitious exactitude the very hour upon which, on the very same
+day, the French frontier had been crossed in 1870, the Germans entered
+Belgian territory.</p>
+
+<p>The Foreign Office's thesis underlying the declaration of its
+spokesman, Sir Edward Grey, carried the day with the politicians in
+power, and upon Tuesday, August 4th, Great Britain joined Russia and
+France, at war with the Prussian Power. There followed later the
+formal declaration of war by France as by England against Austria, and
+with the first week in August the general European struggle had
+opened.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="PART_II" id="PART_II"></a><hr />
+<br />
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span><br />
+<h2>PART II.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE FORCES OPPOSED.<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+<br />
+
+<p>Here, then, at the beginning of August 1914, are the five great Powers
+about to engage in war.</p>
+
+<p>Russia, France, and Great Britain, whom we will call the Allies, are
+upon one side; the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, whom we will
+call the Germanic Powers, are upon the other.</p>
+
+<p>We must at the outset, if we are to understand the war at all, see how
+these two combatant groups stood in strength one against the other
+when the war broke out. And to appreciate this contrast we must know
+two things&mdash;their geographical situation, and their respective weight
+in arms. For before we can judge the chances of two opponents in war,
+we have to know how they stand physically one to the other upon the
+surface of the earth, or we <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>cannot judge how one will attack the
+other, or how each will defend itself against the other. And we must
+further be able to judge the numbers engaged both at the beginning of
+the struggle and arriving in reinforcement as the struggle proceeds,
+because upon those numbers will mainly depend the final result.</p>
+
+<p>Having acquired these two fundamental pieces of information, we must
+acquire a third, which is <i>the theories of war</i> held upon either side,
+and some summary showing which of these theories turned out in
+practice to be right, and which wrong.</p>
+
+<p>For, after a long peace, the fortune of the next war largely depends
+upon which of various guesses as to the many changes that have taken
+place in warfare and in weapons will be best supported by practice,
+and what way of using new weapons will prove the most effective. Until
+the test of war is applied, all this remains guess-work; but under the
+conditions of war it ceases to be guess-work, and becomes either
+corroborated by experience or exploded, as the case may be. And of two
+opponents after a long peace, that one which has had the most
+foresight and has <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>guessed best what the effect of changes in armament
+and the rest will effect in practice is that one who has the best
+chance of victory.</p>
+
+<p>We are going, then, in this Second Part, of the little book, to see,
+first, the geographical position of the belligerents; secondly, their
+effective numbers; and, thirdly, what theories of war each held, and
+how far each was right or wrong.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_II_1" id="PART_II_1"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">(1) The Geographical Position of the Belligerents.</h4>
+
+<p>The position of the original belligerent countries (excluding Turkey)
+upon the map of Europe was that which will be seen upon the
+accompanying sketch map.</p>
+
+<p>Of this belligerent area, which is surrounded by a thick black line,
+the part left white represents the territory of the Allies at the
+origin of the war&mdash;Great Britain, France, Russia, and Servia. This
+reservation must, however, be made: that in the case of Russia only
+the effective part is shown, and only the European part at that;
+Arctic Russia and Siberia are omitted. The part lightly shaded with
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>cross lines represents the Germanic body&mdash;to wit, the German Empire
+and Austria-Hungary.</p>
+
+<p>1. The first thing that strikes the eye upon such a map is the great
+size of the Germanic body.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch04.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 4" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 4.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When one reads that "Germany" was being attacked by not only France
+and England, but also Russia; when one reads further that in the Far
+East, in Asia, Japan was putting in work for the Allies; and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>when one
+goes on to read that Belgium added her effort of resistance to the
+"German" invasion, one gets a false impression that one single nation
+was fighting a vast coalition greatly superior to it. Most people had
+an impression of that kind, in this country at least, at the outset of
+the war. It was this impression that led to the equally false
+impression that "Germany" must necessarily be beaten, and probably
+quickly beaten.</p>
+
+<p>The truth was, of course, that we were fighting something very much
+bigger than "Germany." We set out to fight something more than twice
+as big as Germany in area, and very nearly twice as big as the German
+Empire in mere numbers. For what we set out to fight was not the
+German Empire, but the German Empire <i>plus</i> the whole of the dominions
+governed by the Hapsburg dynasty at Vienna.</p>
+
+<p>How weighty this Germanic body was geographically is still more
+clearly seen if we remember that Russia north of St. Petersburg is
+almost deserted of inhabitants, and that the true European areas of
+population which are in conflict&mdash;that is, the fairly well populated
+areas&mdash;are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>more accurately represented by a modification of the map
+on page 81 in some such form as that on page 84, where the comparative
+density of population is represented by the comparative distances
+between the parallel cross-lines.</p>
+
+<p>2. The next thing that strikes one is the position of the neutral
+countries. Supposing Belgium to have remained neutral, or, rather, to
+have allowed German armies to pass over her soil without actively
+resisting, the Germanic body would have been free to trade with
+neutral countries, and to receive support from their commerce, and to
+get goods through them over the whole of their western front, with the
+exception of the tiny section which stands for the frontier common to
+France and Germany. On the north, supposing the Baltic to be open, the
+Germanic body had a vast open frontier of hundreds of miles, and
+though Russia closed most of the eastern side, all the Roumanian
+frontier was open, and so was the frontier of the Adriatic, right away
+from the Italian border to Cattaro. So was the Swiss frontier and the
+Italian.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch05.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 5" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 5.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Indeed, if we draw the Germanic body<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>by itself surrounded by a
+frontier of dots, as in the accompanying sketch, and mark in a thick
+line upon that frontier those parts which touched on enemy's
+territory, and were therefore closed to supply, we shall be
+immediately arrested by the comparatively small proportion of that
+frontier which is thus closed.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch06.jpg" width="65%" alt="Sketch 6" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 6.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is well to carry this in mind during <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>the remainder of our study of
+this war, because it has a great effect upon the fighting power of
+Germany and Austria after a partial&mdash;but very partial&mdash;blockade is
+established by the Allied and especially by the British naval power.</p>
+
+<p>3. The third thing that strikes one in such a map of the belligerent
+area is the way in which the Germanic body stands in the middle facing
+its two groups of enemies East and West.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_II_1a" id="PART_II_1a"></a><br />
+<br />
+<p class="cen"><i>The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Germanic Body</i>.</p>
+
+<p>With this last point we can begin a comparison of the advantages and
+disadvantages imposed by geographical conditions upon the two
+opponents, and first of these we will consider the geographical
+advantages and disadvantages of the Germanic body&mdash;that is, of the
+Austrian and German Empires&mdash;passing next to the corresponding
+advantages and disadvantages of the Allies.</p>
+
+<p>The advantages proceeding from geographical position to Germany in
+particular, and to the Germanic body as a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>whole, gravely outweigh the
+disadvantages. We will consider the disadvantages first.</p>
+
+<p>The chief disadvantage under which the Germanic body suffered in this
+connection was that, from the outset of hostilities, it had to fight,
+as the military phrase goes, upon two fronts. That is, the commanders
+of the German and Austrian armies had to consider two separate
+campaigns, to keep them distinct in their minds, and to co-ordinate
+them so that they should not, by wasting too many men on the East or
+the West, weaken themselves too much on the other side of the field.</p>
+
+<p>To this disadvantage some have been inclined to add that the central
+position of Austria and Germany in Europe helped the British and
+Allied blockade (I repeat, a very partial, timid, and insufficient
+blockade) of their commerce.</p>
+
+<p>But this view is erroneous. The possibility of blockading
+Austria-Hungary and Germany from imports across the ocean was due not
+to their central but to their continental position; to the fact that
+they were more remote from the ocean than France and Great Britain. It
+had nothing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>to do with their central position between the two groups
+of the Allies.</p>
+
+<p>Supposing, for instance, that Germany and Austria-Hungary had stood
+where Russia stands, and that Western Europe had been in alliance
+against them. Then they would have been in no way central; their
+position would have been an extreme position upon one side; and yet,
+so far as blockading goes, the blockade of them would have been
+infinitely easier.</p>
+
+<p>Conversely, if Germany and Austria had been in the west, where Great
+Britain and France are, their enemies lying to the east of them could
+not have blockaded them at all.</p>
+
+<p>As things are the blockade that has been established exists but is
+partial. As will be seen upon the following sketch map, the British
+Fleet, being sufficiently powerful, can search vessels the cargoes of
+which might reach the Germanic body directly through the Strait of
+Gibraltar (1), the Strait of Dover (2), or the North Sea between
+Scotland and Norway (3). But it is unable to prevent supplies reaching
+the Germanic body from Italy, whether by land or by sea (4), or
+through Switzerland <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>(5), or through Holland (6), or through Denmark
+(7), or across the frontier of Roumania (8); or, so long as the German
+Fleet is strongest in the Baltic, by way of Norway and Sweden across
+the Baltic (9).</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch07.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 7" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 7.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The blockading fleet is even embarrassed as to the imports the
+Germanic body receives indirectly through neutral countries&mdash;that is,
+imports not produced in the importing countries themselves, but
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>provided through the neutral countries as middlemen.</p>
+
+<p>It is embarrassed in three ways.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) Because it does not want to offend the European neutral
+countries, which count in the general European balance of power.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) Because it does not wish to offend Powers outside Europe which
+are neutral in this war, and particularly the United States. Such
+great neutral Powers are very valuable not only for their moral
+support if it can be obtained, but on account of their great financial
+resources untouched by this prolonged struggle, and, what lies behind
+these, their power of producing materials which the Allies need just
+as much as Austria and Germany do.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) Because, even if you watch the supplies of contraband to
+neutrals, and propose to stop supplies obviously destined for German
+use, you cannot prevent Germany from buying the same material "made
+up" by the neutral: for example, an Italian firm can import copper ore
+quite straightforwardly, smelt it, and offer the metal in the open
+market. There is nothing to prevent a German merchant entering that
+market <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>and purchasing, unless Italy forbids all export of copper,
+which it is perfectly free not to do.</p>
+
+<p>To leave this side question of blockade, and to return to the relative
+advantages and disadvantages of our enemy's central position, we may
+repeat as a summary of its disadvantages the single truth that it
+compels our enemy to fight upon two fronts.</p>
+
+<p>All the rest is advantage.</p>
+
+<p>It is an advantage that Germany and Austria-Hungary, as a corollary to
+their common central position, are in some part of similar race and
+altogether of a common historical experience. For more than a hundred
+years every part of the area dominated by the Germanic body&mdash;with the
+exception of Bosnia and Alsace-Lorraine&mdash;has had a fairly intimate
+acquaintance with the other part. The Magyars of Hungary, the Poles of
+Galicia, of Posen, of Thorn, the Croats of the Adriatic border, the
+Czechs of Bohemia, have nothing in race or language in common with
+German-speaking Vienna or German-speaking Berlin. But they have the
+experience of generations uniting them with Vienna and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>with Berlin.
+In administration, and to some extent in social life, a common
+atmosphere spreads over this area, nearly all of which, as I have
+said, has had something in common for a hundred years, and much of
+which has had something in common for a thousand.</p>
+
+<p>In a word, as compared with the Allies, the Germanic central body in
+Europe has a certain advantage of moral homogeneity, especially as the
+governing body throughout is German-speaking and German in feeling.</p>
+
+<p>That is the first point of advantage&mdash;a moral one.</p>
+
+<p>The second is more material. The Governments of the two countries,
+their means of communication and of supply, are all in touch one with
+another. Those governments are working in one field within a ring
+fence, and working for a common object. They are not only spiritually
+in touch; they are physically in touch. An administrator in Berlin can
+take the night express after dinner and breakfast with his
+collaborator in Vienna the next morning.</p>
+
+<p>It so happens, also, that the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>communications of the two Germanic
+empires are exactly suited to their central position. There is
+sufficient fast communication from north to south to serve all the
+purposes necessary to the intellectual conduct of a war; there is a
+most admirable communication from east to west for the material
+conduct of that war upon two fronts. Whenever it may be necessary to
+move troops from the French frontier to the Russian, or from the
+Russian to the French, or for Germany to borrow Hungarian cavalry for
+the Rhine, or for Austria to borrow German army corps to protect
+Galicia, all that is needed is three or four days in which to entrain
+and move these great masses of men. There is no area in Europe which
+is better suited by nature for thus fighting upon two land frontiers
+than is the area of the combined Austrian and German Empire.</p>
+
+<p>With these three points, then&mdash;the great area of our enemy in Europe,
+his advantage through neutral frontiers, and his advantage in
+homogeneity of position between distant and morally divided
+Allies&mdash;you have the chief marks of the geographical position he
+occupies, in so far as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>this is the great central position of
+continental Europe.</p>
+
+<p>But it so happens that the Germanic body in general, and the German
+Empire in particular, suffer from grave geographical disadvantages
+attached to their political character. And of these I will make my
+next points.</p>
+
+<p>The Germanic body as a whole suffers by its geographical disposition,
+coupled with its political constitution, a grave disadvantage in its
+struggle against the Allies, particularly towards the East, because
+just that part of it which is thrust out and especially assailable by
+Russia happens to be the part most likely to be disaffected to the
+whole interests of the Germanic body; and how this works I will
+proceed to explain.</p>
+
+<p>Here are two oblongs&mdash;A, left blank, and B, lightly shaded. Supposing
+these two oblongs combined to represent the area of two countries
+which are in alliance, and which are further so situated that B is the
+weaker Power to the alliance both (1) in his military strength, and
+(2) in his tenacity of purpose. Next grant that B is divided by the
+dotted line, CD, into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>two halves&mdash;B not being one homogeneous State,
+but two States, B1 and B2.</p>
+
+<p>Next let it be granted that while B1 is more likely to remain attached
+in its alliance to A, B2 is more separate from the alliance in moral
+tendency, and is also materially the weaker half of B. Finally, let
+the whole group, AB, be subject to the attack of enemies from the
+right and from the left (from the right along the arrows XX, and from
+the left along the arrows YY) by two groups of enemies represented by
+the areas M and N respectively.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch08.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 8" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 8.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is obvious that in such a situation, if A is the chief object of
+attack, and is the Power which has both provoked the conflict and made
+itself the chief object <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>of assault by M and N, A is by this
+arrangement in a position <i>politically</i> weak.</p>
+
+<p>That is, the strategical position of A is gravely embarrassed by the
+way in which his ally, B, separated into the two halves, B1 and B2,
+stands with regard to himself. B2 is isolated and thrust outward. The
+enemy, M, upon the right, attacking along the lines XX, may be able to
+give B2 a very bad time before he gets into the area of B1, and long
+before he gets into the area of the stronger Power, A. It is open to M
+so to harass B2 that B2 is prepared to break with B1 and give up the
+war; or, if the bond between B2 and B1 is strong enough, to persuade
+B1 to give up the struggle at the same time that he does. And if B2 is
+thus harassed to the breaking-point, the whole alliance, A plus B,
+will lose the men and materials and wealth represented by B2, and
+<i>may</i> lose the whole shaded area, B, leaving A to support singly for
+the future the combined attacks of M and N along the lines of attack,
+XX and YY.</p>
+
+<p>Now, that diagram accurately represents the political embarrassment in
+strategy of the German-Austro-Hungarian alliance. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>B1 is Austria and
+Bohemia; B2 is Hungary; A is the German Empire; M is the Russians; N
+is the Allies in the West. With a geographical arrangement such as
+that of the Germanic alliance, a comparatively small proportion of the
+Russian forces detached to harry the Hungarian plain can make the
+Hungarians, who have little moral attachment to the Austrians and none
+whatever to the Germans, abandon the struggle to save themselves;
+while it is possible that this outlier, being thus detached, will drag
+with it its fellow-half, the Austrian half of the dual monarchy, cause
+the Government of the dual monarchy to sue for peace, and leave the
+German Empire isolated to support the undivided attention of the
+Russians from the East and of the French from the West.</p>
+
+<p>It is clear that if a strong Power, A, allied with and dependent for
+large resources in men upon a weaker Power, B, is attacked from the
+left and from the right, the ideal arrangement for the strong Power,
+A, would be something in the nature of the following diagram (Sketch
+9), where the weaker Power stands protected in the territory of the
+stronger Power, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>where of the two halves of the weaker Power, B2,
+the less certain half, is especially protected from attack.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch09.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 9" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 9.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Were Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Rhineland, upon the one
+hand, the Hungarian plain, Russian Poland, and East Prussia, upon the
+other hand, united in one strong, patriotic, homogeneous
+German-speaking group with the Government of Berlin and the Baltic
+plain, and were Bavaria, Switzerland, the Tyrol, Bohemia, to
+constitute the weaker and less certain ally, while the least certain
+half of that uncertain ally lay in Eastern Bohemia and in what is now
+Lower Austria, well defended from attack upon the East, the conditions
+would be exactly reversed, and the Austro-German alliance would be
+geographically and politically of the stronger sort. As it is, the
+combined accidents of geography <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>and political circumstance make it
+peculiarly vulnerable.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch10.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 10" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 10.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Having already considered in a diagram the way in which the
+geographical disposition of Austria-Hungary weakens Germany in the
+face of the Allies, let us translate that diagram into terms of actual
+political geography. These two oblongs, with their separate parts,
+are, as a fact, as follows: Where A is the German Empire, the shaded
+portion, B, is Austria-Hungary, and this last divided into B1, the
+more certain Austrian part, and B2, the less <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>certain exposed
+Hungarian part, the latter of which is only protected from Russian
+assault by the Carpathian range of mountains, CCC, with its passes at
+DDD. M, the enemy on the right, Russia, is attacking the alliance, AB,
+along XX; while the enemy on the left, N, France and her Allies, is
+attacking along the lines YY.</p>
+
+<p>Hungary, B2, is not only geographically an outlier, but politically is
+the weakest link in the chain of the Austro-Germanic alliance. The
+area of Hungary is almost denuded of men, for most of these have been
+called up to defend Germany, A, and in particular to prevent the
+invasion of Germany's territory in Silesia at S. The one defence
+Hungary has against being raided and persuaded to an already tempting
+peace is the barrier of the Carpathian mountains, CCC. When or if the
+passes shall be in Russian possession and the Russian cavalry reappear
+upon the Hungarian side of the hills, the first great political
+embarrassment of the enemy will have begun&mdash;I mean the first great
+political embarrassment to his strategy.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>(<i>a</i>) Shall he try to defend those passes above all? Then he must
+detach German corps, and detach them very far from the areas which are
+vital to the core of the alliance&mdash;that is, to the German Empire, A.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) Shall he use only Hungarian troops to defend Hungary? Then he
+emphasizes the peculiar moral isolation of Hungary, and leaves her
+inclined, if things go ill, to make a separate peace.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) Shall he abandon Hungary? And let the Russians do what they will
+with the passes over the Carpathians and raid the Hungarian plain at
+large? Then he loses a grave proportion of his next year's wheat, much
+of his dwindling horse supply, his almost strangled sources of petrol.
+He tempts Roumania to come in (for a great sweep of Eastern Hungary is
+nationally Roumanian); and he loses the control in men and financial
+resources of one-half of his Allies if the danger and the distress
+persuade Hungary to stand out. For the Hungarians have no quarrel
+except from their desire to dominate the southern Slavs; to fight
+Austria's battles means very little to them, and to fight Germany's
+battles means nothing at all.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>There is, of course, much more than this. If Hungary dropped out,
+could Austria remain? Would not the Government at Vienna, rather than
+lose the dual monarchy, follow Hungary's lead? In that case, the
+Germanic alliance would lose at one stroke eleven-twenty-fifths of its
+men. It would lose more than half of its reserves of men, for the
+Austrian reserve is, paradoxically enough, larger than the German
+reserve, though not such good material.</p>
+
+<p>Admire how in every way this geographical and political problem of
+Hungary confuses the strategical plan of the German General Staff!
+They cannot here act upon pure strategics. They <i>cannot</i> treat the
+area of operations like a chessboard, and consider the unique object
+of inflicting a military defeat upon the Russians. Their inability to
+do so proceeds from the fact that this great awkward salient,
+Hungarian territory, is not politically subject to Berlin, is not in
+spiritual union with Berlin; may be denuded of men to save Berlin, and
+is the most exposed of all our enemy's territory to attack. Throughout
+the war it will be found that this problem perpetually presents itself
+to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>the Great General Staff of the Prussians: "How can we save Hungary
+without weakening our Eastern line? If we abandon Hungary, how are we
+to maintain our effectives?"</p>
+
+<p>Such, in detail, is the political embarrassment to German strategy
+produced by the geographical situation and the political traditions of
+Hungary itself, and of Hungary's connection with the Hapsburgs at
+Vienna. Let us now turn to the even more important embarrassment
+caused to German strategy by the corner positions of the four
+essential areas of German territory.</p>
+
+<p>This last political weakness attached to geographical condition
+concerns the German Empire alone.</p>
+
+<p>Let us suppose a Power concerned to defend itself against invasion and
+situated between two groups of enemies, from the left and from the
+right, we will again call that Power A, the enemy upon the right M,
+and the enemy upon the left N, the first attacking along the lines XX,
+and the second along the lines YY.</p>
+
+<p>Let us suppose that A has <i>political</i> reasons for particularly
+desiring to save from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>invasion four districts, the importance of
+which I have indicated on Sketch 12 by shading, and which I have
+numbered 1, 2, 3, 4.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch11.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 11" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 11.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Let us suppose that those four districts happen to lie at the four
+exposed corners of the area which A has to defend. The Government of A
+knows it to be essential to success in the war that his territory
+should not be invaded. Or, at least, if it is invaded, it must not,
+under peril of collapse, be invaded in the shaded areas.</p>
+
+<p>It is apparent upon the very face of such a diagram, that with the
+all-important shaded areas situated in the corners of his
+quadrilateral, A is heavily embarrassed. He must disperse his forces
+in order to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>protect all four. If wastage of men compels him to
+shorten his line on the right against M, he will be immediately
+anxious as to whether he can dare sacrifice 4 to save 2, or whether he
+should run the dreadful risk of sacrificing 2 to save 4.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch12.jpg" width="65%" alt="Sketch 12" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 12.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If wastage compels him to shorten his defensive line upon the left, he
+is in a similar quandary between 1 and 3.</p>
+
+<p>The whole situation is one in which he is quite certain that a
+defensive war, long before he is pushed to extremities, will <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>compel
+him to "scrap" one of the four corners, yet each one is, for some
+political reason, especially dear to him and even perhaps necessary to
+him. Each he desires, with alternating anxieties and indecisions, to
+preserve at all costs from invasion; yet he cannot, as he is forced
+upon the defensive, preserve all four.</p>
+
+<p>Here, again, the ideal situation for him would be to possess against
+the invader some such arrangement as is suggested by Sketch 11. In
+this arrangement, if one were compelled unfortunately to consider four
+special districts as more important than the mass of one's territory,
+one would have the advantage of knowing that they were clearly
+distinguishable into less and more important, and the further
+advantage of knowing that the more important the territory was, the
+more central it was and the better protected against invasion.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, in this diagram, the government of the general oblong, A, may
+distinguish four special zones, the protection of which from invasion
+is important, but which vary in the degree of their importance. The
+least important is the outermost, 1; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>the more important is an inner
+one, 2; still more important is 3; and most important of all is the
+black core of the whole.</p>
+
+<p>Some such arrangement has been the salvation of France time and time
+again, notably in the Spanish wars, and in the wars of Louis XIV., and
+in the wars of the Revolution. To some extent you have seen the same
+thing in the present war.</p>
+
+<p>To save Paris was exceedingly important, next came the zone outside
+Paris, and so on up to the frontier.</p>
+
+<p>But with the modern German Empire it is exactly the other way, and the
+situation is that which we found in Sketch 12; the four external
+corners are the essentials which must be preserved from invasion, and
+if any one of them goes, the whole political situation is at once in
+grave peril.</p>
+
+<p>The strategical position of modern Germany is embarrassed because each
+of these four corners must be saved by the armies. 1 is
+Belgium&mdash;before the war indifferent to Germany, but now destined to be
+vital to her position&mdash;2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is
+Silesia, and the German <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>commanders, as well as the German Government,
+must remain to the last moment&mdash;if once they are thrown on the
+defensive&mdash;in grave indecision as to which of the four can best be
+spared when invasion threatens; or else, as is more probable, they
+must disperse their forces in the attempt to hold all four at once. It
+is a situation which has but rarely occurred before in the history of
+war, and which has always proved disastrous.</p>
+
+<p>Germany then must&mdash;once she is in Belgium&mdash;hold on to Belgium, or she
+is in peril; she must hold on to East Prussia, or she is in peril; she
+must hold on to Alsace-Lorraine, or she is in peril; and she must hold
+on to Silesia, or it is all up with her. If there were some common
+strategical factor binding these four areas together, so that the
+defence of one should involve and aid the defence of all, the
+difficulties thus imposed upon German strategy would be greatly
+lessened. Though even then the mere having to defend four outlying
+corners instead of a centre would produce confusion and embarrassment
+the moment numerical inferiority had appeared upon the side of the
+defence. But, as a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>fact, there is no such common factor.
+Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium, East Prussia and Silesia, stand
+strategically badly separated one from the other. Even the two on the
+East and the two on the West, though apparently forming pairs upon the
+map, are not dependent on one system of communications, and are cut
+off from each other by territory difficult or hostile, while between
+the Eastern and the Western group there is a space of five hundred
+miles.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, before discussing the political embarrassment to strategy
+produced by these four widely distant and quite separate areas,
+translate the diagram in the terms of a sketch map.</p>
+
+<p>On the following sketch map, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia,
+and Silesia are shaded, as were the four corners of the diagram. No. 1
+is Belgium, 2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is Silesia. The
+area occupied by the German Empire, including its present occupation
+of Belgium, is marked by the broad outline; and the areas shaded
+represent, not the exact limits of the four territories that are so
+important, but those portions of them which are essential: the
+non-Polish portion of Silesia, the non-Polish portion of East Prussia,
+the plain of Belgium, and all Alsace-Lorraine.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch13.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 13" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 13.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>Now the reason that each of these must at all costs be preserved from
+invasion is, as I have said, different in each case, and we shall do
+well to examine what those reasons are; for upon them depends the
+political hesitation they inevitably, cause to arise in the plans of
+the Great General Staff.</p>
+
+<p>1. <i>Belgium.</i> The military annexation of Belgium has been a result of
+the war, and, from the German point of view, an unexpected result.
+Germany both hoped and expected that her armies would pass through
+Belgium as they did, in fact, pass through Luxembourg. The resistance
+of Belgium produced the military annexation of that country; the reign
+of terror exercised therein has immobilized about 100,000 of the
+German troops who would otherwise be free for the front; the checking
+of the advance into France has turned the German general political
+objective against England, and, to put the matter in the vaguest but
+most fundamental terms, the German mind has gradually <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>come, since
+October, to regard the retention of Belgium as something quite
+essential. And this because:&mdash;(<i>a</i>) It gives a most weighty asset in
+the bargaining for peace. (<i>b</i>) It gives a seaboard against England.
+(<i>c</i>) It provides ample munition, house-room, and transport facility,
+without which the campaign in North-eastern France could hardly be
+prolonged. (<i>d</i>) It puts Holland at the mercy of Germany, for she can,
+by retaining Belgium, strangle Dutch trade, if she chooses to divert
+her carriage of goods through Belgian ports. (<i>e</i>) It is a specific
+conquest; the Government will be able to say to the German people, "It
+is true we had to give up this or that, but Belgium is a definite new
+territory, the occupation of which and the proposed annexation of
+which is a proof of victory." (<i>f</i>) The retention of Belgium has been
+particularly laid down as the cause of quarrel between Great Britain
+and Germany; to retain Belgium is to mark that score against what is
+now the special enemy of Germany in the German mind. (<i>g</i>) Antwerp is
+the natural port for all the centre of Europe in commerce westward
+over the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>ocean. (<i>h</i>) With Belgium may go the Belgian colonies&mdash;that
+is, the Congo&mdash;for the possession of which Germany has worked
+ceaselessly year in and year out during the last fifteen years by a
+steady and highly subsidized propaganda against the Belgian
+administration. She has done it through conscious and unconscious
+agents; by playing upon the cupidity of French and British
+Parliamentarians, of rum shippers, upon religious differences, and
+upon every agency to her hand.</p>
+
+<p>We may take it, then, that the retention of Belgium is in German eyes
+now quite indispensable. "If I abandon Belgium," she says, "it is much
+more than a strategic retreat; it is a political confession of
+failure, and the moral support behind me at home will break down."</p>
+
+<p>If I were writing not of calculable considerations, but of other and
+stronger forces, I should add that to withdraw from Belgium, where so
+many women and children have been massacred, so many jewels of the
+past befouled or destroyed, so wanton an attack upon Christ and His
+Church delivered, would be a loss of Pagan prestige intolerably
+strong, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>and a triumph of all that against which Prussia set out to
+war.</p>
+
+<p>2. <i>Alsace-Lorraine.</i> But Alsace-Lorraine is also "indispensable." We
+have seen on an earlier page what the retention of that territory
+means. Alsace-Lorraine is the symbol of the old victory. It is the
+German-speaking land which the amazingly unreal superstitions of
+German academic pedantry discovered to be something sacredly necessary
+to the unity of an ideal Germany, though the people inhabiting it
+desired nothing better than the destruction of the Prussian name. It
+is more than that. It is the bastion beyond the Rhine which keeps the
+Rhine close covered; it is the two great historic fortresses of
+Strassburg and Metz which are the challenge Germany has thrown down
+against European tradition and the civilization of the West; it is
+something which has become knit up with the whole German soul, and to
+abandon it is like a man abandoning his title or his name, or
+surrendering his sword. Through what must not the German mind pass
+before its directors would consent to the sacrifice of such a
+fundamentally symbolic <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>possession? There is defeat in the very
+suggestion; and the very suggestion, though it has already occurred to
+the Great General Staff, and has already, I believe, been mentioned in
+one proposal for peace, would be intolerable to the mass of the
+enemy's opinion.</p>
+
+<p>3. <i>East Prussia.</i> East Prussia is sacred in another, but also an
+intense fashion. It is the very kernel of the Prussian monarchy. When
+Berlin was but a market town for the Electors of Brandenburg, those
+same Electors had contrived that East Prussia, which was outside the
+empire, should be recognized as a kingdom. Frederick the Great's
+father, while of Brandenburg an Elector, was in Prussia proper a king,
+a man who had emancipated that cradle of the Prussian power. The
+province in all save its southern belt (which is Polish) is the very
+essence of Prussian society: a mass of serfs, technically free,
+economically abject, governed by those squires who own them, their
+goods, and what might be their soil. The Russians wasted East Prussia
+in their first invasion, and they did well though they paid so heavy a
+price, for to wound <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>East Prussia was to wound the very soul of that
+which now governs the German Empire. When the landed proprietors fled
+before the Russian invasion, and when there fled with them the
+townsfolk, the serfs rose and looted the country houses. In a way
+quite different from Belgium, quite different from Alsace-Lorraine,
+East Prussia is essential. Forces will and must be sent periodically
+to defend that territory, however urgently they may be needed
+elsewhere, as the pressure upon Germany increases. The German
+commanders, if they forget East Prussia for a moment in the
+consideration of the other essential points, will, the moment their
+eyes are turned upon East Prussia again, remember with violent emotion
+all that the province means to the reigning dynasty and its
+supporters, and they will do anything rather than let that frontier
+go. The memory of the first invasion is too acute, the terror of its
+repetition too poignant, to permit its abandonment.</p>
+
+<p>4. <i>Silesia.</i> Silesia, for quite other reasons (and remember that
+these different reasons for defending such various points are the
+essence of the embarrassment in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>which German strategy will find
+itself), must be saved. It has been insisted over and over again in
+these pages what Silesia means. Its meaning is twofold. If Silesia
+goes, the safest, the most remote from the sea, the most independent
+of imports of the German industrial regions, is gone. Silesia is,
+again, the country of the great proprietors. Amuse yourselves by
+remembering the names of Pless and of Lichnowsky. There are dozens of
+others. But, most important of all, Silesia is what Belgium is not,
+what Alsace-Lorraine is not, what East Prussia is not&mdash;it is the
+strategic key. Who holds Silesia commands the twin divergent roads to
+Berlin northwards, to Vienna southwards. Who holds Silesia holds the
+Moravian Gate. Who holds Silesia turns the line of the Oder, and
+passes behind the barrier fortresses which Germany has built upon her
+Eastern front. Who holds Silesia strikes his wedge in between the
+German-speaking north and the German-speaking south, and joins hands
+with the Slavs of Bohemia. Not that we should exaggerate the Slav
+factor, for religion and centuries of varying culture disturb its
+unity. But <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>it is something. The Russian forces are Slav; the
+resurrection of Poland has been promised; the Czechs are not
+submissive to the German claim of natural mastery, and whoever holds
+Silesia throws a bridge between Slav and Slav if his aims are an
+extension of power in that race. For a hundred reasons Silesia must be
+saved.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 5%;' />
+
+<p>Now put yourself in the position of the men who must make a decision
+between these four outliers&mdash;Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia,
+and Silesia&mdash;and understand the hesitation such divergent aims impose
+upon them. Hardly are they prepared to sacrifice one of the four when
+the defensive problem becomes acute, but its claims will be pressed in
+every conceivable manner&mdash;by public sentiment, by economic
+considerations, by mere strategy, by a political tradition, by the
+influence of men powerful with the Prussian monarchy, whose homes and
+wealth are threatened. "If I am to hold Belgium, I must give up
+Alsace. How dare I do that? To save Silesia I must expose East
+Prussia. How dare I? I am at bay, and the East <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>must at all costs be
+saved. I will hold Prussia and Silesia, but to withdraw from Belgium
+and from beyond the Rhine is defeat." The whole thing is an embroglio.
+That conclusion is necessary and inexorable. It would not appear at
+all until, or if, numerical weakness imposed on the enemy a gradual
+concentration of the defensive; but once that numerical weakness has
+come, the fatal choices must be made. It may be that a strict, silent,
+and virile resolution, such as saved France this summer, a
+preparedness for particular sacrifices calculated beforehand, will
+determine first some one retirement and then another. It may
+be&mdash;though it is not in the modern Prussian temperament&mdash;that a
+defensive as prolonged as possible will be attempted even with
+inferior numbers, and that, as circumstances may dictate,
+Alsace-Lorraine or Belgium, Silesia or East Prussia will be the first
+to be deliberately sacrificed; but one must be, and, it would seem,
+another after, and in the difficulty of choice a wound to the German
+strategy will come.</p>
+
+<p>The four corners are differently defensible&mdash;Alsace-Lorraine and
+Belgium only <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>by artifice, and with great numbers of men; Silesia only
+so long as Austria (and Hungary) stand firm. East Prussia has her
+natural arrangement of lakes to make invasion tedious, and to permit
+defence with small numbers.</p>
+
+<p>Between the two groups, Eastern and Western, is all the space of
+Germany&mdash;the space separating Aberdeen from London. Between each part
+of each pair, in spite of an excellent railway system, is the block in
+the one case of the Ardennes and the Eifel, in the other of empty,
+ill-communicated Poland. But each is strategically a separate thing;
+the political value of each a separate thing; the embarrassment
+between all four insuperable.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the situation imposed by the geography of the European
+continent upon our enemies, with the opportunities and the drawbacks
+which that situation affords and imposes.</p>
+
+<p>I repeat, upon the balance, our enemies had geographical opportunities
+far superior to our own.</p>
+
+<p>Our power of partial blockade (to which I will return in a moment) is
+more than counterbalanced by the separation which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>Nature has
+determined between the two groups of Allies. The ice of the North, the
+Narrows of the Dardanelles, establish this, as do the Narrows of the
+Scandinavian Straits.</p>
+
+<p>The necessity of fighting upon two fronts, to which our enemies are
+compelled, is more than compensated by that natural arrangement of the
+Danube valley and of the Baltic plain which adds to the advantage of a
+central situation the power of rapid communication between East and
+West; while the chief embarrassment of our enemies in their
+geographical arrangement, which is the outlying situation of Hungary
+coupled with the presence of four vital regions at the four external
+corners of the German Empire, is rather political than geographical in
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>I will now turn to the converse advantages and disadvantages afforded
+and imposed by geographical conditions upon the Allies.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_II_1b" id="PART_II_1b"></a><br />
+<br />
+<p class="cen"><i>The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Allies.</i></p>
+
+<p>It has been apparent from the above in what way the geographical
+circumstance <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>of Germany and Austria-Hungary advantaged and
+disadvantaged those two empires in the course of a war against East
+and West.</p>
+
+<p>Let us next see how the Allies were advantaged and disadvantaged by
+their position.</p>
+
+<p>1. The first great disadvantage which the Allies most obviously suffer
+is their separation one from the other by the Germanic mass.</p>
+
+<p>The same central position which gives Germany and Austria-Hungary
+their power of close intercommunion, of exactly coordinating all their
+movements, of using their armies like one army, and of dealing with
+rapidity alternate blows eastward and westward, produces contrary
+effects in the case of the Allies. Even if hourly communication were
+possible by telegraph between the two main groups, French and Russian,
+that would not be at all the same thing as personal, sustained, and
+continuous contact such as is enjoyed by the group of their enemies.</p>
+
+<p>But, as a fact, even the very imperfect and indirect kind of contact
+which can be established by telegraphing over great <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>distances is
+largely lacking. The French and the Russians are in touch. The
+commanders can and do pursue a combined plan. But the communication of
+results and the corresponding arrangement of new dispositions are
+necessarily slow and gravely interrupted. Indeed, it is, as we shall
+see in a moment, one of the main effects of geography upon this
+campaign that Russia must suffer during all its early stages a very
+severe isolation.</p>
+
+<p>In general, the Allies as a whole suffer from the necessity under
+which they find themselves of working in two fields, remote the one
+from the other by a distance of some six hundred miles, not even
+connected by sea, and geographically most unfortunately independent.</p>
+
+<p>2. A second geographical disadvantage of the Allies consists in the
+fact that one of them, Great Britain, is in the main a maritime Power.</p>
+
+<p>That this has great compensating advantages we shall also see, but for
+the moment we are taking the disadvantages separately, and, so
+counting them one by one, we must recognize that England's being an
+island (her social structure <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>industrialized and free from
+conscription, her interests not only those of Europe but those of such
+a commercial scattered empire as is always characteristic of secure
+maritime Powers) produces, in several of its aspects, a geographical
+weakness to the Allied position, and that for several reasons, which I
+will now tabulate:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) The position of England in the past, her very security as an
+island, has led her to reject the conception of universal service. She
+could only, at the outset of hostilities, provide a small
+Expeditionary Force, the equivalent at the most of a thirtieth of the
+Allied forces.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) Her reserves in men who could approach the continental field in,
+say, the first year, even under the most vigorous efforts, would never
+reach anything like the numbers that could be afforded by a conscript
+nation. The very maximum that can be or is hoped for by the most
+sanguine is the putting into the field, after at least a year of war,
+of less than three-sixteenths of the total Allied forces, although her
+population is larger than that of France, and more than a third that
+of the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) She is compelled to garrison and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>defend, and in places to
+police, dependencies the population of which will in some cases
+furnish no addition to the forces of the Allies, and in all cases
+furnish but a small proportion.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>d</i>) The isolation of her territory by the sea, coupled with her
+large population and its industrial character, makes Britain
+potentially the most vulnerable point in the alliance.</p>
+
+<p>So long as her fleet is certainly superior to that of the enemy, and
+has only to meet oversea attack, this vulnerability is but little
+felt; but once let her position at sea be lost, or even left
+undecided, or once let the indiscriminate destruction of commercial
+marine be seriously begun, and she is at the mercy of that enemy. For
+she cannot feed herself save by supplies from without, and she cannot
+take part in the supplying of armies with men and munitions upon the
+continent.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>e</i>) She is open to fear aggression upon any one of her independent
+colonies oversea, and yet she is not able to draw upon them for the
+whole of their potential strength, or, indeed, for more than a very
+small proportion of it. In other words, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>British Fleet guarantees
+some fifteen million of European race beyond the seas from attack by
+the enemy, but cannot draw from these fifteen million more than an
+insignificant fraction of the million of men and more which, fully
+armed, they might furnish; nor has she any control over their finance,
+so as to be able to count upon the full weight of their wealth; nor
+can she claim their resources in goods and munitions. She can only
+obtain these by paying for them.</p>
+
+<p>There is here a very striking contrast between her position and that
+of the Germanic Powers.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>f</i>) Her isolation and maritime supremacy, coupled with her
+industrial character, make her during the strain of equipment the
+workshop of the Allies. That this is a great advantage is evident; but
+the disadvantage attaching to it is that very large proportions of her
+manhood are necessarily withdrawn from the field for the purposes of
+her shipbuilding, her communications, her manufactory of arms and all
+kinds of supplies, her seafaring work, both civil and military.</p>
+
+<p>Of the two other main Allies, the French <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>disadvantage may be thus
+summarized, and it is slight:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) The French political frontier, as established since the defeat
+of the French in 1871, is an open frontier. It has no natural features
+upon which the defensive can rely. In the lack of this the French
+fortified at very heavy expense that portion of their frontier which
+faced their certain enemy, and established a line from Verdun to
+Belfort calculated to check the first movement of his offensive. But
+all the two hundred miles to the north of this, the whole line between
+Verdun and the North Sea, was virtually open. There were, indeed,
+certain fortified places upon that line, but they formed no
+consecutive system, and, as their armaments grew old, they were not
+brought up to date. The truth is, that the defence of France upon this
+frontier was really left to the co-operation of Belgium. If, as was
+believed to be almost certain, Prussian morals being what they are,
+the Prussian guarantee to respect Belgian neutrality would be torn up
+at the outbreak of war, then three great fortresses&mdash;Li&eacute;ge, Namur, and
+Antwerp&mdash;would hold up the enemy's advance in this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>quarter, and
+perform the function of delay which the obsolete armament of the
+north-eastern French frontier could not perform. We shall see, when we
+come to the conflicting theories of warfare held by the various
+belligerents, what a grievous miscalculation this was, and how largely
+it accounted for the first disasters of the war. But, at any rate, let
+us remember, as our first point, the absence of any natural line of
+defence in France as against a German invasion, remembering, also,
+that the French would necessarily, at the beginning of any war, be
+upon the defensive on account of their inferior numbers. Had France,
+for instance, had along her frontiers, and just within them, such a
+line as Germany possesses in the Rhine, she would have fallen back at
+the outset upon that line. But she has no such advantage.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) The second disadvantage of the French geographically is one
+immixed with political considerations. The French have for centuries
+produced, and have for two thousand years believed in, central
+government. For at least three hundred years all the life of the
+nation has centred upon Paris; all the railways and all the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>great
+system of roads and most of the waterways of the north similarly have
+Paris for their nucleus. Now, this central ganglion of the whole
+French organism is but 120 miles from the frontier, ten days' easy
+marching. An enemy coming in from the north-east not only finds no
+natural obstacle in his way, but has Paris as nearly within his grasp
+as, say, Cologne is within the grasp of a French invasion of North
+Germany. This feature has had the most important consequences upon the
+whole of French history. It was particularly the determining point of
+1870.</p>
+
+<p>To meet the handicap, the French of our generation have combined two
+policies.</p>
+
+<p>First, they have fortified the whole region of Paris so thoroughly
+that it has sometimes been called "a fortified province;" an area of
+nearly thirty miles across at its narrowest, and of something like
+from seven to eight hundred square miles, is comprised within this
+plan.</p>
+
+<p>The weakness of this in the face of modern fire will again be dealt
+with when we come to the conflicting theories upon war established
+during the long peace.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, the French established a policy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>whereby, if Paris were
+menaced in a future campaign, the Government should abandon that
+central point, and, in spite of the grave inconvenience proceeding
+from the way in which all material communications centred upon the
+capital and all established offices were grouped there, would withdraw
+the whole central system of government to Bordeaux, and leave Paris to
+defend itself, precisely as though it were of no more importance than
+any other fortified point. They would recognize the strategic values
+of the district; they would deliberately sacrifice its political and
+sentimental value. They would never again run the risk of losing a
+campaign because one particular area of the national soil happened to
+be occupied. The plans of their armies and the instructions of their
+Staff particularly warned commanders against disturbing any defensive
+scheme by too great an anxiety to save Paris.</p>
+
+<p>If this were the disadvantage geographically of France, what was that
+of Russia?</p>
+
+<p>Russia's geographical disadvantage was twofold. First, she had no
+outlet to an open sea in Europe save through the arctic port of
+Archangel. This port was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>naturally closed for nearly half the year,
+and how long it might be artificially kept partially open by
+ice-breakers it remained for the war to prove. But even if it were
+kept open the whole year in this precarious fashion, it lay on the
+farther side of hundreds of miles of waste and deserted land connected
+only with the active centre of Russia by one narrow-gauge line of
+railway with very little rolling stock. The great eastern port of
+Vladivostok was nearly as heavily handicapped, and its immense
+distance from the scene of operations in the West, with which it was
+only connected by a line six thousand miles long, was another
+drawback. Russia might, indeed, by the favour of neutrals or of
+Allies, use warm water ports. If the Turks should remain neutral and
+permit supply to reach her through the Dardanelles, the Black Sea
+ports were open all the year round, and Port Arthur (nearly as far off
+as Vladivostok) was also open in the Far East. But the Baltic, in a
+war with Germany, was closed to her. Certain goods from outside could
+reach her from Scandinavia, round by land along the north of the
+Baltic, but very slowly and at great <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>expense. It so happened also
+that, as the war proceeded, this question of supply became
+unexpectedly important, because all parties found the expenditure of
+heavy artillery high-explosive ammunition far larger than had been
+calculated for, and Russia was particularly weak therein and dependent
+upon the West. This disadvantage under which Russia lay was largely
+the cause of her embarrassment, and of the prolongation of hostilities
+in the winter that followed the declaration of war.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that Russia was ill supplied with railways, and hardly
+supplied at all with hard roads (in a climate where the thaw turned
+her deep soil into a mass of mud) is political rather than
+geographical, but it must be remembered in connection with this
+difficulty of supply.</p>
+
+<p>If these, then, were the various disadvantages which geographical
+conditions had imposed upon the Allies, what were the corresponding
+advantages?</p>
+
+<p>They were considerable, and may be thus tabulated:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>1. The western Allies stood between their enemies and the ocean. If
+they could <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>maintain superiority at sea through the great size and
+efficiency of the British Fleet, and through its additional power when
+combined with the French, they could at the least embarrass, and
+perhaps ultimately starve out the enemy in certain essential materials
+of war. They could not reduce the enemy to famine, for with care his
+territories, so long as they were not ravaged, would be just
+self-supporting. The nitrates for his explosives the enemy could also
+command, and, in unlimited quantity, iron and coal. But the raw
+material of textiles for his clothing, cotton for his explosives,
+copper for his shell, cartridge cases, and electrical instruments,
+antimony for the hardening of the lead necessary to his small-arm
+ammunition, to some extent petrol for his aeroplanes and his
+motor-cars, and india-rubber for his tyres and other parts of
+machinery, he must obtain from abroad. That he would be able in part
+to obtain these through the good offices of neutrals was probable; but
+the Allied fleets in the West would certainly closely watch the extent
+of neutral imports, and attempt, with however much difficulty and with
+however <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>partial success, to prevent those neutrals acting as a mere
+highroad by which such goods could pass into Germany and Austria. They
+would hardly allow, especially in the later phases of the war, Italy
+and Switzerland, Holland and Scandinavia, to act as open avenues for
+the supply of the Germanic body. Though they would have to go warily,
+and would find it essential to remain at peace with the nations whose
+commerce they thus hampered and in some sense controlled, the Allies
+in the West could in some measure, greater or less, embarrass the
+enemy in these matters.</p>
+
+<p>Conversely, they could supply themselves freely with tropical and
+neutral goods, and even with munitions of war obtained from across the
+ocean, from Africa and from America.</p>
+
+<p>So long as North-western France and the ports of Great Britain were
+free from the enemy this partial blockade would endure, and this
+freedom of supply for France and Britain from overseas would also
+endure.</p>
+
+<p>2. The Allies had further the geographical advantage of marine
+transport for their troops&mdash;an important advantage to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>French, who
+had a recruiting ground in North Africa, and to the British, who had a
+recruiting ground in their dominions oversea, and, above all, an
+advantage in that it permitted the constant reinforcement of the
+continental armies by increasing contingents arriving from these
+islands.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 5%;' />
+
+<p>Of geographical advantages attaching to the position of Russia only
+one can be discovered, and it consists in the immense extent and unity
+of the Russian Empire. This permitted operations upon a western front
+from the Baltic to the Carpathians, or rather to the Roumanian border,
+which vast line could never be firmly held against them by the enemy
+when once the Russians had trained and equipped a superior number of
+men. The German forces were sufficient, as events proved, long to
+maintain a strict cordon upon the shorter front between the Swiss
+frontiers and the sea, but upon the other side of the great field,
+between the Baltic and the Carpathians, they could never hope to
+establish one continued wall of resistance.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_II_2" id="PART_II_2"></a><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span><br />
+<h4 class="sc">(2) The Opposing Strengths.</h4>
+
+<p>When nations go to war their probable fortunes, other things being
+equal, are to be measured in numbers.</p>
+
+<p>Other things being equal, the numbers one party can bring against the
+other in men, coupled with the numbers of weapons, munitions, and
+other material, will decide the issue.</p>
+
+<p>But in European civilization other things are more or less equal.
+Civilian historians are fond of explaining military results in many
+other ways, particularly in terms of moral values that will flatter
+the reader. But a military history, however elementary, is compelled
+to recognize the truth that normally modern war in Europe has followed
+the course of numbers.</p>
+
+<p>Among the very first, therefore, of the tasks set us in examining the
+great struggle is a general appreciation of the numbers that were
+about to meet in battle, and of their respective preparation in
+material.</p>
+
+<p>More than the most general numbers&mdash;more than brief, round
+statements&mdash;I shall not attempt. I shall not do more than state upon
+such grounds as I can <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>discover proportions in the terms of single
+units&mdash;as, to say that one nation stood to another in its immediate
+armed men as eight to five, or as two to twenty. Neither shall I give
+positive numbers in less than the large fractions of a million. But,
+even with such large outlines alone before one, the task is
+extraordinarily difficult.</p>
+
+<p>It will almost certainly be found, when full details are available
+after the war, that the most careful estimates have been grievously
+erroneous in some particular. Almost every statement of fact in this
+department can be reasonably challenged, and the evidence upon matters
+which in civilian life are amply recorded and easily ascertainable is,
+in this department, everywhere purposely confused or falsified.</p>
+
+<p>To the difficulty provided by the desire for concealment necessary in
+all military organization, one must add the difficulty presented by
+the cross categories peculiar to this calculation. You have to
+consider not only the distinction between active and reserve, but also
+between men and munitions, between munitions available according to
+one theory of war, and munitions available according to another. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>You
+have to modify statical conclusions by dynamic considerations (thus
+you have to modify the original numbers by the rate of wastage, and
+the whole calculus varies progressively with the lapse of time as the
+war proceeds).</p>
+
+<p>In spite of these difficulties, I believe it to be possible to put
+before the general reader a clear and simple table of the numbers a
+knowledge of which any judgment of the war involves, and to be fairly
+certain that this table will, when full details are available, be
+discovered not too inaccurate.</p>
+
+<p>We must begin by distinguishing between the two sets of numbers with
+which we have to deal&mdash;the numbers of men, and the amount of munitions
+which these men have to use.</p>
+
+<p>The third essential element, equipment, we need not separately
+consider, because, when one says "men" in talking of military affairs,
+one only means equipped, trained, and organized men, for no others can
+be usefully present in the field.</p>
+
+<p>Let us start, then, with some estimate of the number of men who are
+about to take part in battle; let us take for our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>limits the
+convenient limits of a year, and let us divide that space of time
+arbitrarily into three parts or periods.</p>
+
+<p>There was a first period in which the nations opposed brought into the
+field the men available in the first few weeks for immediate action.
+It is not possible to set a precise limit, and to say, "This period
+covers the first six" or "the first eight weeks;" but we can say
+roughly that, when we are speaking of this first period, we mean the
+time during which men for whom the equipment was all ready, whose
+progress and munitioning had all been organized, were being as rapidly
+as possible brought into play. Such an estimate is not equivalent to
+an estimate of the very first numbers that met in the shock of battle;
+those numbers were far smaller, and differed according to the rate of
+mobilization and the intention of the various parties. The estimate is
+only that of the total number which the various parties could, and
+therefore did, bring into play before men not hitherto trained as
+soldiers, or trained but not believed to be required in the course of
+the campaign&mdash;according as that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>campaign had been variously foreseen
+by various governments&mdash;came in to swell the figures.</p>
+
+<p>The conclusion of this first period would come, of course, gradually
+in the case of every combatant, and would come more rapidly in the
+case of some than in the case of others. But we are fairly safe if we
+take the general turning-point from the first period to the second to
+be the month of October 1914. The second period had begun for
+some&mdash;notably for Germany&mdash;with the first days of that month; it had
+already appeared for all, especially for England, before the beginning
+of November.</p>
+
+<p>The second period is marked for all the combatants by the bringing
+into play of such forces as, for various reasons, the Government of
+each had once hoped would not be required. The German Empire might
+have marked them as not required, in the reasonable hope that victory
+would be quickly assured. The British Government might, from a very
+different standpoint, have believed them not to be required, because
+it regarded the work of its continental Allies as sufficient to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>gain
+the common object, etc. But in the case of all, however various the
+motives, the particular mark of this second period is the straining to
+put into the field newly trained and equipped bodies which in the
+first period were, it was imagined, neither needed nor perhaps
+available.</p>
+
+<p>This second period merges very gradually into the third, or final,
+period, which is that of the last effort possible to the belligerents.
+There comes a moment before the end of the first year when, in the
+case of most of the belligerents, every man who is available at all
+has been equipped, trained, and put forward, and after which there is
+nothing left but the successive batches of yearly recruits growing up
+from boyhood to manhood.</p>
+
+<p>Although Britain is in a peculiar position, and Russia, through her
+tardiness in equipment, in a peculiar position of another kind, yet
+one may fairly say that the vague margin between the second period of
+growth and the third period of finality appears roughly somewhere
+round the month of June. It will fall earlier with Germany, a good
+deal earlier with France; but from the middle of May at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>earliest to
+the end of June at latest may be said to mark the entry of the
+numerical factor into its third and final phase.</p>
+
+<p>Let us take these three periods one by one.</p>
+
+<p>The first period is by far the most important to our judgment of the
+campaign; a misapprehension of it has warped most political statements
+made in this country, and most contemporary judgments of the war as a
+whole. It is impossible to get our view of the great European
+struggle&mdash;of its nature in the bulk&mdash;other than fantastically wrong,
+if we misapprehend the opening numbers with which it was waged.</p>
+
+<p>There are three ways of getting at those numbers.</p>
+
+<p>The first and worst way is the consulting of general statistics
+published before the war broke out. Thus we may see in almanacs the
+French army put down as a little over four million, the German at the
+same amount, the Russian at about five million, and so forth.</p>
+
+<p>These figures have no relation to reality, because they omit a hundred
+modifying considerations&mdash;such as the age of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>reserves, the degree
+of training of the reserves, the organization prepared for the
+enrolment of untrained men, etc. The only element in them which is of
+real value is the statistics&mdash;when we can obtain them&mdash;of men actually
+present with the colours before mobilization, to which one may add,
+perhaps&mdash;or at any rate in the case of France and Germany&mdash;the numbers
+of the <i>active</i> reserve immediately behind the conscript army in
+peace.</p>
+
+<p>The second method, which is better, but imperfect, is that which has
+particularly appealed to technical writers. It consists in numbering
+<i>units</i>; in noting the headquarters and the tale of army corps and of
+independent divisions.</p>
+
+<p>The fault of this method is twofold. First, that only actual
+experience can tell one whether units are really being maintained
+during peace at full strength; and secondly, that only actual
+experience discovers how many new units can and will be created when
+war is joined. In other words, the fault of this method (necessary
+though it is as an adjunct to all military calculations) lies in its
+divorce from the reality of numbers.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>At the end of the retreat from Moscow each army corps of the Grand
+Army still preserved its name, each regiment its nominal identity. And
+the roll was called by Ney, for instance, before the Beresina,
+division by division and regiment by regiment, and even in the
+regiments company by company; but in most of these last there was no
+one to answer, and there is a story of one regiment for which one
+surviving man answered with regularity until he also died. What fights
+is numbers of living men&mdash;not headings; and if five army corps are
+present, each having lost two-fifths of its men, three full army corps
+are a match for them.</p>
+
+<p>The third method is that of commonsense. We must deduce from the
+results obtained, from the fronts covered, from the energy remaining
+after known losses, from the reports of intelligence, from the avenues
+of communication available, what least and what largest numbers can be
+present. We must correct such conclusions by our previous knowledge of
+the way in which each service regards its strength, which most depends
+upon reserves, how each uses his depots and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>drafts, what machinery it
+has for training the untrained and for equipping them. This
+complicated survey taken, we can arrive at general figures.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>Using that method, and applying it to the present campaign, I think we
+shall get something like the following.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_II_2a" id="PART_II_2a"></a><br />
+<br />
+<p class="cen"><i>The Figures of the First Period, say to October 1-31, 1914.</i></p>
+
+<p>Germany put across the Rhine in the first period (without counting a
+certain small proportion of Hungarian cavalry and Austrian artillery)
+rather more than two and a quarter million men. She put into the
+Eastern field first a quarter of a million, which rapidly grew to half
+a million, and before the end of October to nearly a million; a
+balance of rather more than another million she used for filling gaps
+and for keeping her strength <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>at the full, and also in particular
+cases (as in her violent attempt to break out through Flanders, or
+rather the beginning of that attempt) for the immediate reinforcement
+of a fighting line. Say that Germany put into the field altogether
+five million men in the first period, and you are saying too much. Say
+that she put into the field altogether in the first period four and a
+quarter million men, and you are saying probably somewhat too little.</p>
+
+<p>France met the very first shock with about a million men, which
+gradually grew in the fighting line to about a million and a half.
+Here the limit of the French force immediately upon the front will
+probably be set. The numbers continued to swell long before the end of
+the first period and well on into the second, but they were kept in
+reserve. Counting the men drafted in to supply losses and the reserve,
+it is not unwise to put at about two and a half million men the
+ultimate French figure, of which one and a half million formed, before
+the end of the first period, the immediate fighting force.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>Austria was ordered by the Germans to put into the field, as an
+initial body to check any Russian advance and to confuse the beginning
+of Russian concentration, about a million men; which in the first
+period very rapidly grew to two million, and probably before the end
+of the first period to about two million and a half.</p>
+
+<p>Russia put into the field during the first weeks of the war some
+million and a quarter, which grew during the first period (that is,
+before the coming of winter had created a very serious handicap, to
+which allusion will presently be made) to perhaps two million and a
+half at the very most. I put that number as an outside limit.</p>
+
+<p>Servia, of men actually present and able to fight, we may set down at
+a quarter of a million; and Belgium, if we like, at one hundred
+thousand&mdash;though the Belgian service being still in a state of
+transition, and the degree of training very varied within it, that
+minor point is disputable. Indeed it is better, in taking a general
+survey, to consider only the five Great Powers concerned.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>Of these the fifth, Great Britain, though destined to exercise by sea
+power and by her recruiting field a very great ultimate effect upon
+the war, could only provide, in this first period upon the Continent,
+an average of one hundred thousand men. To begin with, some
+seventy-five thousand, dwindling through losses to little more than
+fifty thousand, replenished and increased to about one hundred and
+twenty-five thousand, and approaching, as the end of the first period
+was reached, one hundred and fifty thousand men actually present upon
+the front.</p>
+
+<p>We can now set down these figures in the shape of simple units, and
+see how the numerical chances stood at the opening of the campaign.</p>
+
+<p>The enemy sets out with <b>32</b> men, of whom he bids <b>10</b> men against the
+Russians, and sends <b>22</b> against the French. The Russians meet the
+<b>10</b> men with about <b>12</b>, and the French meet the <b>22</b> with about
+<b>10</b>; but as they have not the whole <b>22</b> to meet in the first shock,
+they are struck rather in the proportion of <b>10</b> to <b>16</b> or <b>17</b>,
+while the presence of the British contingent makes them rather <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>more
+than <b>10&frac12;</b>. But these initial figures rapidly change with the growth
+of the armies, and before the first period is over the Germans have
+<b>22</b> in the West against <b>15</b> French and <b>1</b> British, making <b>16</b>;
+while in the East the Russian <b>12</b> has grown to, say, <b>24</b>, but the
+Austro-Germans in the East, against those <b>24</b>, have grown to be quite
+<b>32</b>. And there is the numerical situation of the first period
+clearly, and I think accurately, put, <i>supposing the wastage to be
+equal in proportion throughout all the armies</i>. The importance of
+appreciating these figures is that they permit us to understand why
+the enemy was morally certain of winning, quite apart from his right
+judgment on certain disputed theories of war (to which I shall turn in
+a moment), and quite apart from his heavy secret munitioning, which
+was of such effect in the earlier part of the campaign. He was ready
+with forces which he knew would be overwhelming, and how superior he
+was thus numerically in that first period can best be appreciated, I
+think, by a glance at the diagram on the next page.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch14.jpg" width="55%" alt="Sketch 14" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 14.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is no wonder that he made certain of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>a decisive success in the
+West, and of the indefinite holding up or pushing back of the Russian
+forces in the East. It is no wonder that he confidently expected a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>complete victory before the winter, and the signing of peace before
+the end of the year. To that end all his munitioning, and even the
+details of his tactics, were directed.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_II_2b" id="PART_II_2b"></a><br />
+<br />
+<p class="cen"><i>The Figures of the Second Period, say to April 15-June 1, 1915.</i></p>
+
+<p>The second period saw in the West, and, in the enemy's case, a very
+great change proceeding by a number of minute steps, but fairly rapid
+in character.</p>
+
+<p>The French numbers could not grow very rapidly, because the French had
+armed every available man. They could bring in a certain number of
+volunteers; but neither was it useful to equip the most of the older
+men, nor could they be spared from those duties behind the front line
+which the much larger population of the enemy entrusted to men who,
+for the most part, had received no regular training. The French did,
+however, in this second period, gradually grow to some two and a half
+million men, behind which, ready to come in for the final period, were
+about a third of a million young recruits.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>Great Britain discovered a prodigious effort. She had already,
+comparatively early in the second period, put across the sea nearly
+half a million men, and drafts were perpetually arriving as the second
+period came to a close; while behind the army actually upon the
+Continent very large bodies&mdash;probably another million in
+number&mdash;hastily trained indeed, and presented with a grave problem in
+the matter of officering, but of excellent material and <i>moral</i>, were
+ready to appear, before the end of the second period or at its close,
+the moment their equipment should be furnished. Counting the British
+effort and the French together, one may say that, without regard to
+wastage, the Allies in the West grew in the second period from the
+original 16 to over 30, and might grow even before the second period
+was over to 35 or even more.</p>
+
+<p>On the enemy's side (neglecting wastage for the moment) there were the
+simplest elements of growth. Each Power had docketed every untrained
+man, knew his medical condition, where to find him, where and how to
+train him. The German Empire had during peace taken about <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>one-half of
+its young men for soldiers. It had in pure theory five million
+untrained men in the reserve, excluding the sick, and those not
+physically efficient for service.</p>
+
+<p>In practice, however, a very large proportion of men, even of the
+efficients, must be kept behind for civilian work; and in an
+industrial country such as Germany, mainly urban in population, this
+proportion is particularly large. We are safe in saying that the
+German army would not be reinforced during the second period by more
+than two and a half million men. These were trained in batches of some
+800,000 each; the equipment had long been ready for them, and they
+appeared mainly as drafts for filling gaps, but partly as new
+formations in groups&mdash;the first going in or before November, the
+second in or before February. A third and last group was expected to
+have finished this rather elementary training somewhere about the end
+of April, so that May would complete the second period in the German
+forces.</p>
+
+<p>Austria-Hungary, by an easily appreciable paradox, possessed, though
+but 80 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>per cent. of the Germans in population, a larger available
+untrained reserve. This was because that empire trained a smaller
+proportion of its population by far than did the Germans. It is
+probable that Austria-Hungary was able to train and put forward during
+the second period some three million men.</p>
+
+<p>It is a great error, into which most critics have fallen, to
+underestimate or to neglect the Austro-Hungarian factor in the enemy's
+alliance. Without thus nearly doubling her numbers, Germany could not
+have fought France and Russia at all, and a very striking feature of
+all the earlier weeks of 1915 was the presence in the Carpathians of
+increasing Austro-Hungarian numbers, which checked for more than three
+months all the Russian efforts upon that front.</p>
+
+<p>Say that Austria-Hungary nearly doubled her effectives (apart from
+wastage) in this second period, and you will not be far wrong.</p>
+
+<p>Russia, which upon paper could almost indefinitely increase during the
+second period her numbers in the field, suffered with the advent of
+winter an unexpected <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>blow. Her equipment, and in particular her
+munitioning (that is, her provision of missiles, and in especial of
+heavy shell), must in the main come from abroad. Now the German
+command of the Baltic created a complete blockade on the eastern
+frontier of Russia, save upon the short Roumanian frontier; and the
+entry of Turkey into the campaign on the side of the enemy, which
+marked the second period, completed that blockade upon the south, and
+shut upon Russia the gate of the Dardanelles. The port of Archangel in
+the north was ice-bound, or with great difficulty kept partially open
+by ice-breakers, and was in any case only connected with Russia by one
+narrow-gauge and lengthy line; while the only remaining port of
+Vladivostok was six thousand miles away, and closed also during a part
+of the winter.</p>
+
+<p>In this situation it was impossible for the great reserves of men
+which Russia counted on to be put into the field, and the Russians
+remained throughout the whole of this second period but little
+stronger than they had been at the end of the first. If we set them
+down at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>perhaps somewhat over three millions (excluding wastage)
+towards the end of this second period, we shall be near to a just
+estimate.</p>
+
+<p>We can now sum up and say that, <i>apart from wastage</i>, the forces
+arrayed against each other after this full development should have
+been about 120 men for the central powers of the enemy&mdash;35 (and
+perhaps ultimately 40) men against them upon the West, and, until
+sufficient Russian equipment could at least be found, only some 30 men
+against them upon the East.</p>
+
+<p>Luckily such figures are wholly changed by the enormous rate of the
+enemy's wastage. The Russians had lost men almost as rapidly as the
+enemy, but the Russian losses could be and were made good. The
+handicap of the blockade under which Russia suffered permitted her to
+maintain only a certain number at the front, but she could continually
+draft in support of those numbers; and though she lost in the first
+seven months of the war quite four hundred thousand in prisoners, and
+perhaps three-quarters of a million in other casualties, her strength
+of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>somewhat over three millions was maintained at the close of the
+first period.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way drafts had further maintained the British numbers. The
+French had lost not more than one-fifth of a million in prisoners, and
+perhaps a third of a million or a little more in killed and
+permanently disabled&mdash;that is, unable to return to the fighting line.
+In the case of both the French and the British sanitary conditions
+were excellent.</p>
+
+<p>You have, then, quite 35 for your number in the West, and quite 33 for
+your number in the East of the Allied forces at the end of the winter;
+but of your enemy forces you may safely deduct 45-50 might be a truer
+estimate; and it is remarkable that those who have watched the matter
+carefully at the front are inclined to set the total enemy losses
+higher than do the critics working at home. But call it only 45 (of
+which 5 are prisoners), and you have against the 68 Allies in East and
+West no more at the end of this second period than 75 of the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>The following diagram illustrates in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>graphic form the change that six
+months have produced.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch15.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 15" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 15.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In other words, at the end of the winter and with the beginning of the
+spring, although the enemy still has a numerical preponderance, it is
+no longer the overwhelming thing it was when the war began, and that
+change in numbers explains the whole change in the campaign.</p>
+
+<p>The enemy was certain of winning mainly because he was fighting more
+than equal in the East, and at first nearly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>two to one, later quite
+four to three, in the West. Those are the conditions of the late
+summer of 1914. 1915, before it was a third over, had seen the numbers
+nearly equalized. With the summer of 1915 we might hope to see the
+numbers at last reversed, and, after so many perilous months, a total
+(not local) numerical majority at last appearing upon the side of the
+Allies. If ever this condition shall arrive before the enemy can
+accomplish a decisive result in either field the tide will have
+turned.</p>
+
+<p>The third period belongs at the moment of writing to the future. All
+we can say of it is that it presents for the enemy no considerable
+field of recruitment; but while in the West it offers no increase to
+the French, it does offer another five units at least, and possibly
+another six or eight, to the British; and to the Russians, if the
+blockade can be pierced at any point, or if the change of weather,
+coupled with the broadening of the gauge of the railway to Archangel,
+permits large imports, an almost indefinite increase in
+number&mdash;certainly an increase of two millions, or twenty of the units
+we <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>were dealing with in the figures given above.</p>
+
+<p>So much, then, for the numerical factor in men which dominates the
+whole campaign.</p>
+
+<p>When we turn from this to the second factor&mdash;that of munitions&mdash;we
+discover something which can be dealt with far more briefly, but which
+follows very much the same line.</p>
+
+<p>The enemy in the first period of the war had, if anything, an even
+greater superiority in munitioning than in men. This superiority was
+due to two distinct causes. In the first place, as we shall see in a
+few pages, his theory upon a number of military details was well
+founded; in the second place, <i>he made war at his own chosen moment,
+after three years of determined and largely secret preparation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As to the first point:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>We may take as a particular example of these theories of war the
+enemies' reliance upon heavy artillery&mdash;and in particular upon the
+power of the modern high explosive and the big howitzer&mdash;to destroy
+permanent fortification rapidly, and to have an effect in the field,
+particularly in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>the preparation of an assault, which the military
+theories of the Allies had wrongly underestimated. It is but one
+example out of many. It must serve for the rest, and it will be dealt
+with more fully in the next section. The Germans to some extent, and
+much more the Austrians, prepared an immensely greater provision of
+heavy ammunition than their opponents, and entered the field with
+large pieces of a calibre and in number quite beyond anything that
+their opponents had at the outset of the campaign.</p>
+
+<p>As to the second point:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>No peaceful nations, no nations not designing a war at their own hour,
+lock up armament which may be rendered obsolete, or, in equipment more
+extensive than the reasonable chances of a campaign may demand, the
+public resources which it can use on what it regards as more useful
+things. Such nations, to use a just metaphor, "insure" against war at
+what they think a reasonable rate. But if some one Government in
+Europe is anarchic in its morals, and proposes, while professing
+peace, to declare war at an hour and a day chosen by itself, it will
+obviously have <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>an overwhelming advantage in this respect. The energy
+and the money which it devotes to the single object of preparation
+cannot possibly be wasted; and, if its sudden aggression is not fixed
+too far ahead, will not run the risk of being sunk in obsolete
+weapons.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is clearly demonstrable from the coincidence of dates, from the
+exact time required for a special effort of this kind, and from the
+rate at which munitions and equipment were accumulated, that the
+Government at Berlin came to a decision in the month of July 1911 to
+force war upon Russia and upon France immediately after the harvest of
+1914; and of a score of indications which all converge upon these
+dates, not one fails to strike them exactly by more than a few weeks
+in the matter of preparation, by more than a few days in the date at
+which war was declared.</p>
+
+<p>Under those circumstances, Berlin with her ally at Vienna had the
+immense numerical advantage over the French and the Russians when war
+was suddenly forced upon those countries on the 31st of July last
+year.</p>
+
+<p>But, as in the case of men, the advantage <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>would only be overwhelming
+during the first period. The very fact that the war had to be won
+quickly involved an immense expenditure of heavy ammunition in the
+earlier part of it, and this expenditure, if it were not successful,
+would be a waste.</p>
+
+<p>It takes about five months to produce a heavy piece, and the rate of
+production of heavy ammunition, though slow, is measurable. At the
+moment of writing this, towards the close of the second period, the
+balance is not yet redressed, but it is in a fair way to be redressed.
+The imperfect and too tardy blockade to which the enemy is somewhat
+timidly subjected is a factor in aid of this; and we may be fairly
+confident that, if a third period is reached before the enemy shall
+have the advantage of a decision, there will be a preponderance of
+munitioning upon the Allied side in the West and the East which will
+be, if anything, of superior importance to the approaching
+preponderance in numbers.</p>
+
+<p>Having thus briefly surveyed the opposing strength of either
+combatant, checked and measured as it varied with the progress of the
+war, we will turn to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span><i>moral</i> opposition of military theory
+between the one party and the other, and show how here again that,
+<i>save in the most important matter of all, grand strategy</i>, the enemy
+was on the highroad to the victory which he confidently and, for that
+matter, reasonably expected.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_II_3" id="PART_II_3"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">(3) The Conflicting Theories of War.</h4>
+
+<p>The long peace which the most civilized parts of Europe had enjoyed
+for now a generation left more and more uncertain the value of
+theories upon the conduct of war, which theories had for the most part
+developed as mere hypotheses untested by experience during that
+considerable period. The South African and the Manchurian war had
+indeed proved certain theories sound and others unsound, so far as
+their experience went; but they were fought under conditions very
+different from those of an European campaign, and the progress of
+material science was so rapid in the years just preceding the great
+European conflict that the mass of debated theories still remained
+untried at its outbreak.</p>
+
+<p>The war in its first six months <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>thoroughly tested these theories, and
+proved, for the greater part of them, which were sound in practice and
+which unsound. I will tabulate them here, and beg the special
+attention of the reader, because upon the accuracy of these forecasts
+the first fortunes of the war depended.</p>
+
+<p>I. A German theory maintained that, with the organization of and the
+particular type of discipline in the German service, attacks could be
+delivered in much closer formation than either the French or the
+English believed to be possible.</p>
+
+<p>The point is this: After a certain proportion of losses inflicted
+within a certain limit of time, troops break or are brought to a
+standstill. That was the universal experience of all past war. When
+the troops that are attacking break or are brought to a standstill,
+the attack fails. But what you cannot determine until you test the
+matter in actual war is what numbers of losses in what time will thus
+destroy an offensive movement. You cannot determine it, because the
+chief element in the calculation is the state of the soldier's mind,
+and that is not a measurable thing. One had only the lessons of the
+past to help one.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>The advantages of attacking in close formation are threefold.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) You launch your attack with the least possible delay. It is
+evident that spreading troops out from the column to the line takes
+time, and that the more extended your line the more time you consume
+before you can strike.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch16.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 16" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 16.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If I have here a hundred units advancing in a column towards the place
+where they are to attack (and to advance in column is necessary,
+because a broad line cannot long keep together), then it is evident
+that if I launched them to the attack thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch17.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 17" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 17.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>packed close together, I get them into that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>formation much more
+quickly than if, before attacking, I have to spread them out thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch18.jpg" width="65%" alt="Sketch 18" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 18.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) The blow which I deliver has also evidently more weight upon it
+at a given point. If I am attacking a hundred yards of front with a
+hundred units of man and missile power, I shall do that front more
+harm in a given time than if I am attacking with only fifty such
+units.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>(<i>c</i>) In particular circumstances, where troops <i>have</i> to advance on a
+narrow front, as in carrying a bridge or causeway or a street or any
+other kind of defile, my troops, if they can stand close formation and
+the corresponding punishment it entails, will be more likely to
+succeed than troops not used to or not able to bear such close
+formation. Now, such conditions are very numerous in war. Troops are
+often compelled, if they are to succeed, to rush narrow gaps of this
+kind, and their ability to do so is a great element in tactical
+success.</p>
+
+<p>I have here used the phrase "if they can stand close formation and the
+corresponding punishment it entails," and that is the whole point.
+There are circumstances&mdash;perhaps, on the whole, the most numerous of
+all the various circumstances in war&mdash;in which close formation, if it
+can be used, is obviously an advantage; but it is equally self-evident
+that the losses of troops in close formation will be heavier than
+their losses in extended order. A group is a better target than a
+number of dispersed, scattered points.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the Germans maintained in this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>connection not only, as I have
+said, that they could get their men to stand the punishment involved
+in close formation, but also that:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) The great rapidity of such attacks would make the <i>total</i> and
+<i>final</i> wastage less than was expected, and further:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) That the heavy wastage, such as it was, was worth while, because
+it would lead to very rapid strategical decision as well as tactical.
+In other words, because once you had got your men to stand these heavy
+<i>local</i> losses and to suffer heavy <i>initial</i> wastage, you would win
+your campaign in a short time, so that the high-rate wastage not being
+prolonged need not be feared.</p>
+
+<p>Well, in the matter of this theory, the war conclusively proved the
+following points:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) The Germans were right and the Allies were wrong with regard to
+the mere possibility of using close formations. The German temper,
+coupled with the type of discipline in the modern German service, did
+prove capable of compelling men to stand losses out of all proportion
+to what the Allies expected they could stand, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>yet to continue to
+advance neither broken nor brought to a standstill. But&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) The war also proved that, upon the whole, and taking the
+operations in their entirety, such formations were an error. In case
+after case, a swarm of Germans advancing against inferior numbers got
+home after a third, a half, or even more than a half of their men had
+fallen in the first few minutes of the rush. But in many, many more
+cases this tactical experiment failed. Those who can speak as
+eye-witnesses tell us that, though the occasions on which such attacks
+actually broke were much rarer than was expected before the war began,
+yet the occasions on which the attack was thrown into hopeless
+confusion, and in which the few members of it that got home had lost
+all power to do harm to the defenders, were so numerous that the
+experiment must be regarded as, upon the whole, a failure. It may be
+one that no troops but Germans could employ. It is certainly not one
+which any troops, after the experience of this war, will copy.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) Further, the war proved even more conclusively that the wastage
+was not worth while. The immense expense in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>men only succeeded where
+there was an overwhelming superiority in number. The strategical
+result was not arrived at quickly (as the Germans had expected)
+through this tactical method, and after six months of war, the enemy
+had thrown away more than twice and nearly three times as many men as
+he need have sacrificed had he judged sanely the length of time over
+which operations might last.</p>
+
+<p>II. Another German theory had maintained that modern high explosives
+fired from howitzers and the accuracy of their aim controlled by
+aircraft would rapidly and promptly dominate permanent fortification.</p>
+
+<p>This theory requires explanation. Its partial success in practice was
+the most startling discovery and the most unpleasant one to the Allies
+of the early part of the war.</p>
+
+<p>In the old days, say up to ten years ago or less, permanent
+fortification mounting heavy guns was impregnable to direct assault if
+it were properly held and properly munitioned. It could hold out for
+months. Its heavy guns had a range superior to any movable guns that
+could be brought <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>against it&mdash;indeed, so very heavily superior that
+movable guns, even if they were howitzers, would be smashed or their
+crews destroyed long before the fortress was seriously damaged by
+them.</p>
+
+<p>A howitzer is but a form of mortar, and all such pieces are designed
+to lob a projectile instead of throwing it. The advantage of using
+these instruments when you are besieging permanent works is that you
+can hide them behind an obstacle, such as a hill, and that the heavy
+gun in the fortress cannot get its shell on to them because that shell
+has a flatter trajectory. The disadvantage is that the howitzer has a
+very much shorter range than the gun size for size.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch19.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 19" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 19.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here is a diagram showing how <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>necessarily true this is. The howitzer,
+lobbing its shell with a comparatively small charge, has the advantage
+of being able to hide behind a steep bit of ground, but on such a
+trajectory the range is short. The gun in the fortress does not lob
+its shell, but throws it. The course of the gun shell is much more
+straight. It therefore can only hit the howitzer and its crew
+indirectly by exploding its shell just above them. Until recently, the
+gun was master of the howitzer for three reasons:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>First, because the largest howitzers capable of movement and of being
+brought up against any fortress and shifted from one place of
+concealment to another were so small that their range was
+insignificant. Therefore the circumference on which they could be used
+was also a small one; their opportunities for hiding were consequently
+reduced; the chances of their emplacement being immediately spotted
+from the fortress were correspondingly high, and the big gun in the
+fortress was pretty certain to overwhelm the majority of them at
+least. It is evident that the circumference &#945;&#946;&#947; offers far more
+chances of hiding than the circumference ABC, but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>a still more
+powerful factor in favour of the new big howitzer is the practical one
+that at very great ranges in our climate the chances of spotting a
+particular place are extremely small. Secondly, because the explosives
+used, even when they landed and during the short time that the
+howitzer remained undiscovered and unheard, were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>not sufficiently
+powerful nor, with the small howitzers then in existence, sufficiently
+large in amount in each shell to destroy permanent fortification.
+Thirdly, because the effect of the aim is always doubtful. You are
+firing at something well above yourself, and you could not tell very
+exactly where your howitzer shell had fallen.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch20.jpg" width="65%" alt="Sketch 20" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 20.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>What has modified all this in the last few years is&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>First, the successful bringing into the field of very large howitzers,
+which, though they do lob their shells, lob them over a very great
+distance. The Austrians have produced howitzers of from 11 to 12
+inches in calibre, which, huge as they are, can be moved about in the
+field and fired from any fairly steady ground; and the Germans have
+probably produced (though I cannot find actual proof that they have
+used them with effect) howitzers of more than 16 inches calibre, to be
+moved, presumably, only upon rails. But 11-inch was quite enough to
+change all the old conditions. It must be remembered that a gun varies
+as the <i>cube</i> of its calibre. A 12-inch piece is not twice as powerful
+as a 6-inch. It is <i>eight times</i> as powerful. The howitzer <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>could now
+fire from an immense distance. The circumference on which it worked
+was very much larger; its opportunities for finding suitable steep
+cover far greater. Its opportunities for moving, if it was endangered
+by being spotted, were also far greater; and the chances of the gun in
+the fortress knocking it out were enormously diminished.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, the high explosives of recent years, coupled with the vast
+size of this new mobile howitzer shell, is capable, when the howitzer
+shell strikes modern fortification, of doing grievous damage which,
+repeated over several days, turns the fort into a mass of ruins.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, the difficulty of accurate aiming over such distances and of
+locating your hits so that they destroy the comparative small area of
+the fort is got over by the use of aircraft, which fly above the fort,
+note the hits, and signal the results.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the Germans maintained that under these quite recently modified
+conditions not even the best handled and heaviest gunned permanent
+fort could hold out more than a few days. The French believed that it
+could, and they trusted in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>the stopping power not only of individual
+works (such as the fortress of Manonvilliers on the frontier), but
+more especially of great rings of forts, such as surround Li&eacute;ge,
+Namur, Verdun, etc., and enclose an area within the security of which
+large bodies of troops can be held ready, armies which no one would
+dare to leave behind them without having first reduced them to
+surrender.</p>
+
+<p>The very first days of the war proved that the German theory was right
+and the French wrong. The French theory, upon which such enormous
+funds had been expended, had been perfectly right until within quite
+recent years the conditions had changed. Port Arthur, for instance,
+only ten years ago, could hold out for months and months. In this war
+no individual fort has held out for more than eleven days.</p>
+
+<p>It might be imagined under such circumstances that the very existence
+of fortresses was doomed; yet we note that Verdun continues to make a
+big bulge in the German line four months after the first shots fell on
+its forts, and that the Germans are actively restoring the great
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>Belgian rings they have captured at Li&eacute;ge, Antwerp, and Namur.</p>
+
+<p>Why is this? It is because another German theory has proved right in
+practice.</p>
+
+<p>III. This German theory which has proved right in practice is what may
+be called "the mobile defence of a fortress." It proposes no longer to
+defend upon expensive permanent works precisely located upon the map,
+but upon a number of improvised batteries in which heavy guns can move
+somewhat behind field-works concealed as much as possible, numerous
+and constructed rapidly under the conditions of the campaign. Such
+works dotted round the area you desire to defend are quite a different
+thing to reduce from isolated, restricted, permanent forts. In the
+first place, the enemy does not know where they are; in the second
+place, you can make new ones at short notice; in the third place, if a
+howitzer does spot your heavy gun, you can move it or its neighbours
+to a new position; in the fourth place, the circumference you are
+defending is much larger, and the corresponding area that the
+besiegers have to search <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>with their fire more extended. Thus, in the
+old forts round Verdun, about a dozen permanent works absolutely fixed
+and ascertainable upon the map, and covering altogether but a few
+acres, constituted the defence of the town. Before September was out
+the heavy guns had been moved to trenches far advanced into the field
+to the north and east, temporary rails had been laid down to permit
+their lateral movement&mdash;that is, to let them shift from a place where
+they had perhaps been spotted to a new place, under cover of darkness,
+and the sectors thus thrown out in front of the old fortifications in
+this improvised mobile fashion were at least three times as long as
+the line made by the ring of old forts, while the area that had to be
+searched was perhaps a hundred times as large. For in the place of the
+narrowly restricted permanent fort, with, say, ten heavy guns, you had
+those same ten heavy guns dotted here and there in trenches rapidly
+established in half a dozen separate, unknown, and concealed spots,
+along perhaps a mile of wooded hill, and free to operate when moved
+over perhaps double that front.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>IV. <i>In Grand Strategy a German general theory of strategics was
+opposed to a French general theory of strategics, and upon which of
+the two should prove right depended, much more than on any of the
+previous points, the ultimate issue of the campaign.</i></p>
+
+<p>This is far the most important point for the reader's consideration.
+It may be said with justice that no one can understand this war who
+has not grasped the conflict between these two fundamental conceptions
+of armed bodies in action, and the manner in which (by the narrowest
+and most fortunate margin!) events in the first phase of the war
+justified the French as against the German school.</p>
+
+<p>I must therefore beg the reader's leave to go somewhat thoroughly into
+the matter, for it is the foundation of all that will follow when we
+come to the narration of events and the story of the Western battle
+which began in the retreat from the Sambre and ended in the Battle of
+the Marne.</p>
+
+<p>The first postulate in all military problems is that, other things
+being equal, numbers are the decisive factor in war. This does not
+mean that absolute superiority of numbers decides a campaign
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>necessarily in favour of the superior power. What it means is that <i>in
+any particular field</i>, if armament and discipline are more or less
+equal on the two sides, the one that has been able to mass the greater
+number <i>in that field</i> will have the victory. He will disperse or
+capture his enemy, or at the least he will pin him and take away his
+<i>initiative</i>&mdash;of which word "initiative" more later. Now, this field
+in which one party has the superior numbers can only be a portion of
+the whole area of operations. But if it is what is called the decisive
+portion, then he who has superior numbers <i>in the decisive time and
+place</i> will win not only there but everywhere. His local victory
+involves consequent success along the whole of his line.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, supposing five men are acting against three. Five is
+more than three; and if the forces bear upon each other equally, the
+five will defeat the three. But if the five are so badly handled that
+they get arranged in groups of two, two, and one, and if the three are
+so well handled that they strike swiftly at the first isolated two and
+defeat them, thus bringing up the next isolated two, who are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>in their
+turn defeated, the three will, at the end of the struggle, have only
+one to deal with, and the five will have been beaten by the three
+because, although five is larger than three, yet <i>in the decisive time
+and place</i> the three never have more than two against them. It may be
+broadly laid down that the whole art of strategics consists for the
+man with superior numbers in bringing all his numbers to bear, and for
+the man with inferior numbers in attempting by his cunning to compel
+his larger opponent to fight in separated portions, and to be defeated
+in detail.</p>
+
+<p>As in every art, the developments of these elementary first principles
+become, with variations of time and place, indefinitely numerous and
+various. Upon their variety depends all the interest of military
+history. And there is one method in particular whereby the lesser
+number may hope to pin and destroy the power of the greater upon which
+the French tradition relied, and the value of which modern German
+criticism refused.</p>
+
+<p>Before going into that, however, we must appreciate the mental
+qualities which led to the acceptance of the theory upon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>the one side
+and its denial upon the other.</p>
+
+<p>The fundamental contrast between the modern German military temper and
+the age-long traditions of the French service consists in this: That
+the German theory is based upon a presumption of superiority, moral,
+material, and numerical. The theory of the French&mdash;as their national
+temperament and their Roman tradition compel them&mdash;is based upon an
+<i>envisagement</i> of inferiority: moral, material, and numerical.</p>
+
+<p>There pervades the whole of the modern German strategic school this
+feeling: "I shall win if I act and feel as though I was bound to win."
+There pervades the whole French school this sentiment: "I have a
+better chance of winning if I am always chiefly considering how I
+should act if I found myself inferior in numbers, in material, and
+even in moral at any phase in the struggle, especially at its origins,
+but even also towards its close."</p>
+
+<p>This contrast appears in everything, from tactical details to the
+largest strategical conception, and from things so vague and general
+as the tone of military writings, to things so particular as the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>instruction of the conscript in his barrack-room. The German soldier
+is taught&mdash;or was&mdash;that victory was inevitable, and would be as swift
+as it would be triumphant: the French soldier was taught that he had
+before him a terrible and doubtful ordeal, one that would be long, one
+in which he ran a fearful risk of defeat, and one in which he might,
+even if victorious, have to wear down his enemy by the exercise of a
+most burdensome tenacity. In the practice of the field, the contrast
+appeared in the French use of a great reserve, and the German contempt
+for such a precaution: in the elaborate thinking out of the use of a
+reserve, which is the core of French military thought; in the
+superficial treatment of the same, which is perhaps the chief defect
+of Germany.</p>
+
+<p>It would be of no purpose to debate here which of these two mental
+attitudes, with all their consequences, is either morally the better
+or in practice the more successful. The French and Latin tradition
+seems to the German pusillanimous, and connected with that decadence
+which he perceives in every expression of civilization from Athens to
+Paris. The modern <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>German conception seems to the French theatrical,
+divorced from reality, and hence fundamentally weak. Either critic may
+be right or either wrong. Our interest is to follow the particular
+schemes developing from that tone of mind. We shall see how, in the
+first phases of the war, the German conception strikingly justified
+itself for more than ten days; how, after a fortnight, it was
+embarrassed by its opponent; and how at the end of a month the German
+initiative was lost under the success&mdash;only barely achieved after
+dreadful risk&mdash;of the French plan.</p>
+
+<p>That plan, inherited from the strategy of Napoleon, and designed in
+particular to achieve the success of a smaller against a larger
+number, may be most accurately defined as <i>the open strategic square</i>,
+and its leading principle is "the method of detached reserves."</p>
+
+<p>This strategic conception, which I shall now describe, and which (in a
+diagram it is put far too simply) underlies the whole of the
+complicated movements whereby the French staved off disaster in the
+first weeks of the war, is one whose whole object it is to permit the
+inferior number to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>bring up a <i>locally</i> superior weight against a
+<i>generally</i> superior enemy in the decisive time and at the decisive
+place.</p>
+
+<p>Let us suppose that a general commanding <i>twelve</i> large units&mdash;say,
+twelve army corps&mdash;knows that he is in danger of being attacked by an
+enemy commanding no less than <i>sixteen</i> similar units.</p>
+
+<p>Let us call the forces of the first or weaker general "White," and
+those of the second or stronger general "Black."</p>
+
+<p>It is manifest that if White were merely to deploy his line and await
+the advance of Black thus,</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch21.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 21" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 21.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>he would be outflanked and beaten; or, in the alternative, Black might
+mass men against White's centre and pierce it, for Black is vastly
+superior to White in numbers. White, therefore, must adopt some
+special disposition in order to avoid immediate defeat.</p>
+
+<p>Of such special dispositions one among many is the French Open
+Strategic Square.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>This disposition is as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>White arranges his twelve units into four quarters of three each, and
+places one quarter at each corner of a square thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch22.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 22" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 22.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We will give them titles, and call them A, B, C, and D.</p>
+
+<p>If, as is most generally the case in a defensive campaign at its
+opening, White cannot be certain from which exact direction the main
+blow is coming, he may yet know that it is coming from some one
+general direction, from one sector of the compass at least, and he
+arranges his square to face towards that sector.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, in the above diagram, he may not know whether the blow
+is coming <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>from the precise direction 1, or 2, or 3, but he knows that
+it is coming somewhere within the sector XY.</p>
+
+<p>Then he will draw up his square so that its various bodies all face
+towards the average direction from which the blow may come.</p>
+
+<p>The <span class="scfake">SIZE</span> of his square&mdash;which is of great importance to the
+result&mdash;he makes as restricted as possible, <i>subject to two prime
+conditions</i>. These conditions are:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>First, that there shall be room for the troops composing each corner
+to be deployed&mdash;that is, spread out for fighting. Secondly, that there
+shall be room between any two corners (A and C, for instance) for a
+third corner (D, for instance) to move in between them and spread out
+for fighting in support of them. He makes his square as close and
+restricted as possible, because his success depends&mdash;as will be seen
+in a moment&mdash;upon the rapidity with which any one corner can come up
+in support of the others. But he leaves enough room for the full
+numbers to spread out for fighting, because otherwise he loses in
+efficiency; and he leaves room enough between any two squares for a
+third one to come in, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>because the whole point of the formation is the
+aid each corner can bring to the others.</p>
+
+<p>In this posture he awaits the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>That enemy will necessarily come on in a lengthy line, lengthy in
+proportion to the number of his units. For it is essential to the
+general commanding <i>superior</i> numbers to make the <i>whole</i> of the
+superior numbers tell, and this can only be done if they march along
+parallel roads, and these roads are sufficiently wide apart for the
+various columns to have plenty of room to deploy&mdash;that is, to spread
+out into a fighting line&mdash;when the shock comes.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch23.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 23" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 23.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This extended line of Black marching thus against White strikes White
+first upon some one corner of his square. Suppose that corner to be
+corner A. Then the position when contact is established and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>the first
+serious fighting begins is what you will observe in the above diagram.
+A is the corner (now spread out for fighting) which gets the first
+shock.</p>
+
+<p>Note you (for this is the crucial point of the whole business) that
+upon the exposed corner A will fall a very dangerous task indeed. A
+will certainly be attacked by forces superior to itself. Normally
+forces more than half as large again as A will be near enough to A to
+concentrate upon him in the first shock. The odds will be at least as
+much as five to three, the Black units, 4, 5, and 6, will be right on
+A, and 3 and 7 will be near enough to come in as well in the first day
+or two of the combat, while possibly 2 may have a look in as well.</p>
+
+<p>A, thus tackled, has become what may be called "the <i>operative corner</i>
+of the square." It is his task "to retreat and hold the enemy" while
+B, C, and D, "the masses of man&oelig;uvre," swing up. But under that
+simple phrase "operative corner" is hidden all the awful business of a
+fighting retreat: it means leaving your wounded behind you, marching
+night and day, with your men under the impression <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>of defeat; leaving
+your disabled guns behind you, keeping up liaison between all your
+hurrying, retreating units, with a vast force pressing forward to your
+destruction. A's entire force is deliberately imperilled in order to
+achieve the success of the plan as a whole, and upon A's tenacity, as
+will be seen in what follows, the success of that plan entirely
+depends.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch24.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 24" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 24.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Well, while A is thus retreating&mdash;say, from his old position at A_1 on
+the foregoing diagram to such a position as A_2, with Black swarming
+up to crush him&mdash;the other corners of the square, B, C, and D, receive
+the order to "swing"&mdash;that is, to go forward inclining to the left or
+the right according to the command given.</p>
+
+<p>Mark clearly that, until the order is given, the general commanding
+Black <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>cannot possibly tell whether the "swing" will be directed to
+the left or to the right. Either B will close up against A, C spread
+out farther to the left, and D come in between A and C (which is a
+"swing" to the left) as in Sketch 25, or C will close up against A, B
+will spread well out to the right, and D come up between A and B, as
+in Sketch 26 (which is a "swing" to the right).</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch25.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 25" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 25.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Until the "swing" actually begins, Black, the enemy, cannot possibly
+tell whether it is his left-hand units (1 to 8) or his right-hand
+units (9 to 16) which will be affected. One of the two ends of his
+line will have to meet White's concentrated effort; the other will be
+left out in the cold. Black cannot make <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>dispositions on the one
+hypothesis or on the other. Whichever he chose, White would, of
+course, swing the other way and disconcert him.</p>
+
+<p>Black, therefore, has to keep his line even until he knows which way
+White is going to swing.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch26.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 26" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 26.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Let us suppose that White swings to the left.</p>
+
+<p>Mark what follows. The distances which White's units have got to go
+are comparatively small. B will be up at A's side, and so will D in a
+short time after the swing is over, and when the swing is completed,
+the position is after this fashion. Black's numbers, 1 to 9 inclusive,
+find themselves tackled by all Black's twelve. There is a superiority
+of number against <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>Black on his right, White's left, and the remaining
+part of Black's line (10 to 16 inclusive), is out in the cold.</p>
+
+<p>If it were a tactical problem, and all this were taking place in a
+small field, Black's left wing, 10-16, would, of course, come up at
+once and redress the balance. But being a strategical problem, and
+involving very large numbers and very great distances, Black's left
+wing, 10-16, can do nothing of the kind. For Black's left wing, 10-16,
+<i>cannot possibly get up in time</i>. Long before it has arrived on the
+scene, White's 12 will have broken Black's 9 along Black's right wing.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch27.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 27" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 27.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There are three elements which impose this delay upon Black's left
+wing.</p>
+
+<p>First, to come round in aid of the right wing means the marching
+forward of one unit after another, so that each shall <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>overlap the
+last, and so allow the whole lot to come up freely. This means that
+the last unit will have to go forward six places before turning, and
+that means several days' marching. For with very large bodies, and
+with a matter of 100 miles to come up, all in one column, it would be
+an endless business (Sketch 28).</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch28.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 28" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 28.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Next you have the delay caused by the <i>conversion of direction</i>
+through a whole right angle. That cause of delay is serious. For when
+you are dealing with very large bodies of men, such as half a dozen
+army corps, to change suddenly from the direction S (see Sketch 29)
+for which your Staff work was planned, and to break off at a moment's
+notice in direction E, while you are on the march towards S, is
+impossible. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>You have to think out a whole new set of dispositions,
+and to re-order all your great body of men. White was under no such
+compulsion, for though he had to swing, the swing faced the same
+general direction as his original dispositions. And the size of the
+units and the distances to be traversed&mdash;the fact that the problem is
+strategical and not tactical&mdash;is the essence of the whole thing. If,
+for instance, you have (as in Sketch 30) half a dozen, not army corps,
+but mere battalions of 1,000 men, deployed over half a dozen miles of
+ground, AB, and advancing in the direction SS, and they are suddenly
+sent for in the direction E, it is simple enough. You form your 6,000
+men into column; in a few hours' delay they go off in the direction
+E, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>and when they get to the place where they are wanted, the column
+can spread out quickly again on the front CD, and soon begin to take
+part in the action. But when you are dealing with half a dozen army
+corps&mdash;240,000 men&mdash;it is quite another matter. The turning of any one
+of these great bodies through a whole right angle is a lengthy
+business. You cannot put a quarter of a million men into one
+column&mdash;they would take ages to deploy&mdash;so you must, as we have seen,
+make each unit of them overlap the next before the turn can begin.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch29.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 29" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 29.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch30.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 30" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 30.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>Nor is that all the delay involved. It would never do for these six
+separate corps to come up in driblets and get defeated in detail; 10,
+11, and 12 will have to wait until 13, 14, 15, and even 16, have got
+up abreast of them&mdash;and that is the third cause of delay.</p>
+
+<p>Here are three causes of delay which, between them and accumulated,
+have disastrous effect; and in general we may be certain that where
+very large bodies and very extensive stretches of territory are
+concerned, that wing of Black which has been left out in the cold can
+never come up in time to retrieve the situation created by White's
+twelve pinning Black's engaged wing of only nine.</p>
+
+<p>If the square has worked, and if the twelve White have pinned the
+right-hand wing of Black, 1 to 9 inclusive, there is nothing for Black
+to do but to order his right wing, 1 to 9, to retreat as fast as
+possible before superior numbers, and to order his left wing, 10 to
+16, to fall back at the same time and keep in line; and you then have
+the singular spectacle of twelve men compelling the retreat of and
+pursuing sixteen.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span><i>That is exactly what happened in the first three weeks of active
+operations in the West. The operative corner A in the annexed diagram
+was the Franco-British force upon the Sambre. The retirement of that
+operative corner and its holding of the enemy was what is called in
+this country "The Retreat from Mons." BB are the "masses of
+man&oelig;uvre" behind A. The swinging up of these masses involving the
+retirement of the whole was the Battle of the Marne.</i></p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch31.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 31" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 31.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Now, it is evident that in all this everything depends upon the
+tenacity and military value of the operative corner, which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>is exposed
+and sacrificed that the whole scheme of the Open Square may work.</p>
+
+<p>If that operative corner is destroyed as a force&mdash;is overwhelmed or
+dispersed or surrounded&mdash;while it is fighting its great odds, the
+whole square goes to pieces. Its centre is penetrated by the enemy,
+and the army is in a far worse plight than if recourse had never been
+had to the open strategic square at all. For if the operative corner,
+A, is out of existence before the various bodies forming the
+"man&oelig;uvring mass" behind it have had time to "swing," then the
+enemy will be right in their midst, and destroying, in overwhelming
+force, these remaining <i>separated</i> bodies in detail.</p>
+
+<p>It was here that the German strategic theory contrasted so violently
+with the French. The Germans maintained that an ordeal which Napoleon
+might have been able to live through with his veterans and after
+fifteen years of successful war, a modern conscript army, most of its
+men just taken from civilian life and all of short service, would
+never endure. They believed the operative corner would go to pieces
+and either be pounded to disintegration, or outflanked, turned, and
+caught in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>the first days of the shock before the rest of the square
+had time to "work." The French believed the operative corner would
+stand the shock, and, though losing heavily, would remain in being.
+They believed that the operative corner of the square would, even
+under modern short service and large quasi-civilian reserve
+conditions, remain an army. They staked their whole campaign upon that
+thesis, and they turned out to be right. But they only just barely won
+through, and by the very narrowest margin. Proving right as they did,
+however, the success of their strategical theory changed the whole
+course of the war.</p>
+
+<p>With this contrast of the great opposing theories considered, I come
+to the conclusion of my Second Part, which examines the forces
+opposed. I will now turn to the Third Part of my book, which concerns
+the first actual operations from the Austrian note to the Battle of
+the Marne.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 15%;"/>
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Thus, after these lines were written, I had occasion in
+<i>Land and Water</i> to estimate the garrison of Przemysl before the
+figures were known. The element wherewith to guide one's common sense
+was the known perimeter to be defended; and arguing from this, I
+determined that a minimum of not less than 100,000 men would
+capitulate. I further conceived that the total losses could hardly be
+less than 40,000, and I arrived at an original force of between three
+and four corps.</p></div>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span><br />
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch32.jpg" width="95%" alt="Sketch 32" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 32.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="PART_III" id="PART_III"></a><hr />
+<br />
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span><br />
+<h2>PART III.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE FIRST OPERATIONS.</h3>
+<br />
+
+<p>In any general view of the great war which aims both at preserving
+proportion between its parts, and at presenting especially the main
+lines in relief, the three weeks between the German sudden forcing of
+war and the seventeen or eighteen days between the English declaration
+and the main operations upon the Sambre, will have but a subsidiary
+importance. They were occupied for at least half the period in the
+mobilization of the great armies. They were occupied for the second
+half of the period in the advance across the Rhine of German numbers
+greatly superior to the Allies, and also through the plain of Northern
+Belgium. The operation, as calculated by the German General Staff, was
+delayed by but a very few days&mdash;one might almost say <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>hours&mdash;by the
+hastily improvised resistance of Li&eacute;ge, and the imperfect defence of
+their country which was all the Belgian forces, largely untrained,
+could offer.</p>
+
+<p>We must, therefore, pass briefly enough over that preliminary period,
+though the duty may be distasteful to the reader, on account of the
+very exaggerated importance which its operations took, especially in
+British eyes.</p>
+
+<p>For this false perspective there were several reasons, which it is
+worth while to enumerate, as they will aid our judgment in obtaining a
+true balance between these initial movements and the great conflicts
+to which they were no more than an introduction.</p>
+
+<p>1. War, as a whole, had grown unfamiliar to Western Europe. War on
+such a scale as this was quite untried. There was nothing in
+experience to determine our judgment, and after so long a peace,
+during which the habits of civil life had ceased to be conventioned
+and had come to seem part of the necessary scheme of things, the first
+irruption of arms dazzled or confounded the imagination of all.</p>
+
+<p>2. The first shock, falling as it did upon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>the ring fortress of
+Li&eacute;ge, at once brought into prominence one of the chief questions of
+modern military debate, the value of the modern ring fortress, and
+promised to put to the test the opposing theories upon this sort of
+stronghold.</p>
+
+<p>3. The violation of Belgian territory, though discounted in the
+cynical atmosphere of our time, when it came to the issue was, without
+question, a stupendous moral event. It was the first time that
+anything of this sort had happened in the history of Christian Europe.
+Historians unacquainted with the spirit of the past may challenge that
+remark, but it is true. One of the inviolable conventions, or rather
+sacred laws, of our civilization was broken, which is that European
+territory not involved in hostilities by any act of its Government is
+inviolable to opposing armies. The Prussian crime of Silesia, nearly
+two centuries before, the succeeding infamies of 1864, and the forgery
+of the Ems dispatch, the whole proclaimed tradition of contempt for
+the sanctities of Christendom, proceeding from Frederick the Great,
+had indeed accustomed men to successive stages in the decline of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>international morals; but nothing of the wholly crude character which
+this violation of Belgium bore was to be discovered in the past, even
+of Prussia, and posterity will mark it as a curious term and possibly
+a turning-point in the gradual loss of our common religion, and of the
+moral chaos accompanying that loss.</p>
+
+<p>4. The preparations of this country by land were not complete. Those
+of the French were belated compared with those of the Germans, and the
+prospect of even a short delay in the falling of the blow was
+exaggerated in value by all the intensity of that anxiety with which
+the blow was awaited.</p>
+
+<p>To proceed from these preliminaries to the story.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 5%;' />
+
+<p>The German Army had for its ultimate object, when it should be fully
+mobilized, the passage of the greater part of its forces over the
+Belgian Plain.</p>
+
+<p>This Belgian Plain has for now many centuries formed the natural
+avenue for an advance upon the Gauls.</p>
+
+<p>It has been represented too often as a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>sort of meeting-place, where
+must always come the shock between what is called Latin civilization
+and the Germanic tribes. But this view is both pedantic and
+historically false. There never was here a shock or conflict between
+two national ideals. What is true is, that civilization spread far
+more easily up from the Gauls through that fertile land towards the
+forests of Germany, and that when the Roman Empire broke down, or
+rather when its central government broke down, the frontier garrisons
+could here depend upon wealthier and more numerous populations for the
+support of their local government. That body of auxiliary soldiers in
+the Roman army which was drawn from the Frankish tribes ruled here
+when Rome could no longer rule. It was from Tournai that the father of
+Clovis exercised his power; and in the resettlement of the local
+governments in the sixth century, the Belgian Plain was the avenue
+through which the effort of the civilized West was directed towards
+the Rhine. It has Roman Cologne for its outpost; later it evangelized
+the fringes of German barbarism, and later still conquered them <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>with
+the sword. All through the succeeding centuries the ambitions of kings
+in France, or of emperors upon the Rhine, were checked or satisfied in
+that natural avenue of advance. Charlemagne's frontier palace and
+military centre facing the Pagans was rather at Aix than at Tr&egrave;ves or
+Metz; and though the Irish missionaries, who brought letters and the
+arts and the customs of reasonable men to the Germans, worked rather
+from the south, the later forced conversion of the Saxons, which
+determined the entry of the German tribes as a whole into Christendom,
+was a stroke struck northwards from the Belgian Plain. C&aelig;sar's
+adventurous crossing of the Rhine was a northern crossing. The
+Capetian monarchy was saved on its eastern front at Bouvines, in that
+same territory. The Austro-Spanish advance came down from it, to be
+checked at St. Quentin. Louis XIV.'s main struggle for power upon the
+marches of his kingdom concentrated here. The first great check to it
+was Marlborough's campaign upon the Meuse; the last battle was within
+sound of Mons, at Malplaquet. The final decision, as it was
+hoped&mdash;the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo&mdash;again showed what this
+territory meant in the military history of the West. It was following
+upon this decision that Europe, in the great settlement, decided to
+curb the chaos of future war by solemnly neutralizing the Belgian
+Plain for ever; and to that pact a seal was set not only by the French
+and the British, but also by the Prussian Government, with what
+results we know.</p>
+
+<p>The entries into this plain are very clearly defined by natural
+limits. It is barred a few hours' march beyond the German frontier by
+the broad and deep river Meuse, which here runs from the rough and
+difficult Ardennes country up to the Dutch frontier. The whole passage
+is no more than twelve miles across, and at the corner of it, where
+the Meuse bends, is the fortress of Li&eacute;ge. West of this fortress the
+upper reaches of the river run, roughly east and west upon Namur, and
+after Namur turn south again, passing through a very deep ravine that
+extends roughly from the French town of Mezi&egrave;res to Namur through the
+Ardennes country. The Belgian Plain is therefore like a bottle <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>with a
+narrow neck, a bottle defined by the Dutch frontier and the Middle
+Meuse on either side, and a neck extending only from the Ardennes
+country to the Dutch frontier, with the fortress of Li&eacute;ge barring the
+way. Now the main blow was to be delivered ultimately upon the line
+Namur-Charleroi-Mons. That is, the situation was roughly that of the
+accompanying diagram: by the bottle neck at D the whole mass of troops
+must pass&mdash;or most of them&mdash;which are later to strike on the front AB.
+To reach that front was available to the invader the vast network of
+Belgian railways RRR crammed with rolling stock, and provided such
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>opportunities for rapid advance as no other district in Europe could
+show. But all this system converged upon the main line which ran
+through the ring of forts round Li&eacute;ge, L, and so passed through
+Aix-la-Chapelle, A, and to Germany.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch33.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 33" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 33.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The German Government, therefore, could not be secure of its intention
+to pass great bodies through the Belgian Plain until Li&eacute;ge was
+grasped, and it was determined to grasp Li&eacute;ge long before the
+mobilization of the German forces was completed. For this purpose only
+a comparatively small force, rapidly gathered, was available. It was
+placed under the command of General von Emmerich, and its first bodies
+exchanged shots with the Belgian outposts early in the afternoon of
+Tuesday, August 4, 1914.</p>
+
+<p>The hour and date should always be remembered for the solemnity which
+attaches to the beginning of any great thing; and the full observer of
+European affairs, who understands what part religion or superstition
+plays in the story of Europe, will note this enormously significant
+detail. The first Germans to cross the violated frontier accomplished
+that act upon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>the same day and at the same hour as that in which
+their forerunners had crossed the French frontier forty-four years
+before.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon wore on to night, with no more than a conflict between
+outposts. Just before midnight the cannonade was first heard. It also
+was the moment in which the ultimatum delivered to Germany by this
+country, by a coincidence, expired.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>This night attack with guns was only delivered against one sector of
+the Li&eacute;ge forts, and only with field-pieces.</p>
+
+<p>As to the first of these points, it will be found repeated throughout
+the whole of the campaign wherever German forces attack a ring of
+permanent works. For the German theory in this matter (which
+experience has now amply supported) is that since modern permanent
+works <i>of known and restricted position</i> go under to a modern siege
+train if the fire of the latter be fully concentrated and the largest
+pieces available, everything should be sacrificed to the putting into
+the narrowest <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>area of all the projectiles available. The ring once
+broken on a sufficient single sector point is broken altogether.</p>
+
+<p>The second point, that only field-pieces as yet were used (which was
+due to the fact that the siege train was not yet come up), is an
+important indication of the weakness of the defence&mdash;on all of which
+the enemy were, of course, thoroughly informed.</p>
+
+<p>There were perhaps 20,000 men in and upon the whole periphery of
+Li&eacute;ge, a matter of over thirty miles, and what was most serious, no
+sufficient equipment or preparation of the forts, or, what was more
+serious still, no sufficient trained body of gunners.</p>
+
+<p>It is almost true to say that the resistance of Li&eacute;ge, such as it was,
+was effected by rifle fire.</p>
+
+<p>With the dawn of August 5th, and in the first four hours of daylight,
+a German infantry attack upon the same south-eastern forts which had
+been subjected to the first artillery fire in the night developed, and
+after some loss withdrew, but shortly after the first of the forts,
+that of Fl&eacute;ron, was silenced. The accompanying sketch map will show
+how wide a gap was left <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>henceforward in the defences. Further, Fl&eacute;ron
+was the strongest of the works upon this side of the river. Seeing
+that, in any case, even if there had been a sufficient number of
+trained gunners in the forts, and a sufficient equipment and full
+preparation of the works for a siege (both <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>of which were lacking),
+the absence of sufficient men to hold the gaps between would in any
+case have been fatal to the defence. With such a new gap as this open
+by the fall of Fl&eacute;ron, the defence was hopeless, even if it were only
+to be counted in hours.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch34.jpg" width="60%" alt="Sketch 34" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 34.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is high praise of the Belgian people and character to point out
+that, after the fall of Fl&eacute;ron, for forty-eight full hours such a gap
+was still contested by men, a great part of whom were little better
+than civilian in training, and who, had they been all tried regulars,
+would have been far too few for their task. General Leman, who
+commanded them, knew well in those early hours of Wednesday, the 5th,
+that the end had already come. He also knew the value of even a few
+hours' hopeless resistance, not perhaps to the material side of the
+Allied strategy, but to the support of those moral forces lacking
+which men are impotent in maintaining a challenge. Not only all that
+Wednesday, the 5th, but all the Thursday, the 6th, he maintained a
+line against the pressure of the invaders with his imperfect and
+insufficient troops.</p>
+
+<p>During those forty-eight hours, the big <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>howitzer, which is the type
+of the heavy German siege train&mdash;the 225 mm.&mdash;was brought up, and it
+is possible that a couple of the still larger Austrian pieces of 280
+mm. (what we call in this country the 11-inch), which are constructed
+with flat treadles to their wheels to fire from mats laid on any
+reasonably hard surface (such as a roadway), had been brought up as
+well. At any rate, in the course of the Thursday, the fort next
+westward from Fl&eacute;ron, Chaudefontaine, was smashed. The gap was now
+quite untenable, and the first body of German cavalry entered the
+city. The incident has been reported as a <i>coup de main</i>, with the
+object of capturing the Belgian general. Its importance to the
+military story is simply that it proved the way to be open. In the
+afternoon and evening of the day, the Belgians were retiring into the
+heart of the city, and it is typical of the whole business that the
+great railway bridge upon which the main communications depended was
+left intact for the Germans to use.</p>
+
+<p>With the morning of Friday, the 7th August, the first bodies of German
+infantry entered the town. The forts on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>the north and two remaining
+western forts upon the south of the river were still untaken, and
+until a large breach should be made in the northern forts at least,
+the railway communication of the German advance into the Belgian plain
+was still impeded. Great masses of the enemy, and, in proportion to
+those masses, still greater masses of advance stores were brought in.</p>
+
+<p>In all that follows, until we reach the date of Monday, August 24th, I
+propose to consider no more than the fortunes of the troops who passed
+through Belgium to attack the French armies upon the Sambre and the
+Meuse, with the British contingent that had come to their aid. And my
+reasons for thus segregating and dealing later with contemporary
+events in the south will appear in the sequel.</p>
+
+<p>This reservation made&mdash;an important one in the scheme of this book&mdash;I
+return to what I have called the preliminaries, the advance through
+Belgium.</p>
+
+<p>We have already seen that the reduction of the northern forts of Li&eacute;ge
+was the prime necessity to that advance.</p>
+
+<p>We have also seen that meanwhile it was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>possible and advisable to
+accumulate stores for the advance as far forward as could be managed,
+and that it was also possible, with caution, to bring certain
+bodies&mdash;not the bulk of the army&mdash;forward through the Ardennes, to
+command the passages of the Meuse above Li&eacute;ge, between that fortress
+and Namur.</p>
+
+<p>This latter operation was effected by the 12th of August, when the
+town of Huy, with its bridge and its railway leading from the Belgian
+Ardennes right into the Belgian Plain, was seized.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, upon the north of the river Meuse, cavalry and armed
+motor-cars were similarly preparing the way for the general advance
+when the northern forts of Li&eacute;ge should be dominated; and on this same
+Wednesday, August 12th, the most advanced bodies of the invader lay in
+a line roughly north and south from the neighbourhood of Diest along
+the Gethe and thence towards Huy.</p>
+
+<p>Of the outrages committed upon the civilian inhabitants in all these
+country-sides, the Government of which was neutral, and the territory
+of which was by the public law of Europe free not only <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>from such
+novel crimes but from legitimate acts of war, I shall not speak, just
+as I shall not allude, save where they happen to have military
+importance, to the future increase of similar abominations which
+marked the progress of the campaign. For my only object in these pages
+is to lay before the reader a commentary which will explain the
+general strategy of the war.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch35.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 35" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 35.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>While this advance line of cavalry was engaging in unimportant minor
+actions, or rather skirmishes (grossly exaggerated in the news of
+those days), the attack on the northern forts of Li&eacute;ge, upon which
+everything now depended, was opened. It was upon Thursday, August
+13th, that the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>280 mm. howitzers opened upon Loncin. Other of the
+remaining forts were bombarded; but, as in the case of Fl&eacute;ron a week
+before, we need not consider the subsidiary operations, because
+everything depended upon the fort of Loncin, which, as the
+accompanying diagram shows, commanded the railway line westward from
+Li&eacute;ge. General Leman himself was within that work, the batteries
+against which were now operating from <i>within</i> the ring&mdash;that is, from
+the city itself, or in what soldiers technically call "reverse"&mdash;that
+is, from the side upon which no fort is expected to stand, the side
+which is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>expected to defend and not to be attacked from. Whether
+Loncin held out the full forty-eight hours, or only forty, or only
+thirty-six, we do not know; but that moral factor to which I have
+already alluded, and which must be fully weighed in war, was again
+strengthened by the nature of such a resistance. For nearly all that
+garrison was dead and its commander found unconscious when the
+complete destruction of the work by the high explosive shells
+permitted the enemy to enter.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch36.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 36" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 36.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was upon Saturday, the 15th of August, that the great bulk of the
+two main German armies set aside for passage through the Belgian Plain
+began to use the now liberated railway, and the week between that date
+and the first great shock upon the Sambre is merely a record of the
+almost uninterrupted advance, concentration, and supply of something
+not far short of half a million men coming forward in a huge tide
+over, above, and round on to, the line Namur-Charleroi-Mons, which was
+their ultimate objective, and upon which the Anglo-French
+body&mdash;perhaps half as numerous&mdash;had determined to stand.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch37.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 37" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 37.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The story of that very rapid advance is merely one of succeeding
+dates. By the 17th the front was at Tirlemont, by the 19th it was
+across the Dyle and running thence south to Wavre (the first army),
+the second army continuing south of this with a little east in it to a
+point in front of Namur. On the 20th there was enacted a scene of no
+military importance (save that it cost the invaders about a day), but
+of some moral value, because it strongly impressed the opinion in this
+country and powerfully affected the imagination of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>Europe as a whole:
+I mean the triumphal march through Brussels.</p>
+
+<p>Far more important than this display was the opening on the evening of
+the same day, Thursday, August 20th, of the first fire against the
+eastern defences of Namur. This fire was directed upon that evening
+against the two and a half miles of trench between the forts of
+Cognel&eacute;e and Marchovelette, and in the morning of Friday, the 21st,
+the trenches were given up, and the German infantry was within the
+ring of forts north of the city. The point of Namur, as we shall see
+in a moment, was twofold. First, its fortifications, so long as they
+held out, commanded the crossings both of the Sambre and of the Meuse
+within the angle of which the French defensive lay; secondly, its
+fortified zone formed the support whereupon the whole French right
+reposed. It was this unexpected collapse of the Belgian defence of
+Namur which, coupled with the unexpected magnitude of the forces
+Germany had been able to bring through the Belgian plain, determined
+what was to follow.</p>
+
+<p>Once Namur was entered, the reduction <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>of the forts was not of
+immediate importance, though it was immediately and successfully
+achieved. For the German business was not here, as at Li&eacute;ge, to grasp
+a railway within the zone of the fortifications, but to destroy the
+buttress upon which the French depended for their defensive position,
+and to prevent the French from holding the crossings over the two
+rivers Sambre and Meuse at their junction.</p>
+
+<p>With this entry of the Germans into Namur, their passage of the lines
+upon Friday, August 21st, their capture of the bridgeheads on
+Saturday, August 22nd, we reach the beginning of those great
+operations which threatened for a moment to decide the war in the
+West, and to establish the German Empire in that position to attain
+which it had planned and forced the war upon its appointed day.</p>
+
+<p>It behoves us before entering into the detail of this large affair to
+see the plan of it clearly before our eyes.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 5%;' />
+
+<p>I have already described that general conception underlying the whole
+modern French school of strategy for which the best title (though one
+liable to abuse by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>too mechanical an interpretation) is "the open
+strategic square."</p>
+
+<p>I have further warned the reader that, in spite of the way in which
+the intricacy of organization inseparable from great masses and the
+manifold disposition of a modern army will mask the general nature of
+such an operation, that operation cannot be understood unless its
+simplest lines are clear. I have further insisted that in practice
+those lines remain only in the idea of the scheme of the whole, and
+are not to be discovered save in the loosest way from the actual
+positions of men upon the map.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen that this "open strategic square" involved essentially
+two conceptions&mdash;the fixed "operative corner" and the swinging
+"man&oelig;uvring masses."</p>
+
+<p>The man&oelig;uvring masses, at this moment when the great German blow
+fell upon the Sambre and the Meuse, and when Namur went down
+immediately before it, were (<i>a</i>) upon the frontiers of Alsace and
+Lorraine, (<i>b</i>) in the centre of the country, (<i>c</i>) near the capital
+and to the west of it, and even, some of them, upon the sea.</p>
+
+<p>The operative corner was this group of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>armies before Namur on the
+Sambre and Meuse, the 4th French Army under Langle, the 5th French
+Army under Lanrezac, the British contingent under French.</p>
+
+<p>We know from what has been written above in this book that it is the
+whole business of an operative corner to "take on" superior numbers,
+and to hold them as well as possible, even though compelled to
+retreat, until the man&oelig;uvring masses can swing and come up in aid,
+and so pin the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>We further know from what has gone before that the whole crux of this
+man&oelig;uvre lies in the power of the operative corner to stand the
+shock.</p>
+
+<p>It was the business of the French in this operative corner before
+Namur and of their British Allies there to await and, if possible, to
+withstand by a careful choice of position the first shock of enemies
+who would certainly be numerically superior. It was the whole business
+of the German commanders to make the shock overwhelming, in order that
+the operative corner should be pounded to pieces, or should be
+surrounded and annihilated before the man&oelig;uvring masses could
+swing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>up in aid. Should this destruction of the operative corner take
+place before the man&oelig;uvring masses behind it could swing, the
+campaign in the West was lost to the Allies, and the Germans pouring
+in between the still separated corners of the square were the masters
+for good.</p>
+
+<p>It behoves us, therefore, if we desire to understand the campaign, to
+grasp how this operative corner stood, upon what defences it relied,
+in what force it was, what numbers it thought were coming against it,
+and what numbers were, as a fact, coming against it.</p>
+
+<p>To get all this clear, it is best to begin with a diagram.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose two lines perpendicular one to the other, and therefore
+forming a right angle, AB and BC. Suppose at their junction, B, a
+considerable zone or segment, SSS, of a circle, as shaded in the
+following diagram. Supposing the line AB to be protected along the
+outer half of it, AK, by no natural obstacle&mdash;the state of affairs
+which I have represented by a dotted line &#945;&#947;; but suppose the second
+half of it, KB, should be protected by a natural obstacle, though not
+a very formidable <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>one&mdash;such as I have represented by the continuous
+line &#947;&#946;. Supposing the perpendicular line BC to be protected by a
+really formidable natural obstacle &#946;&#948;, and supposing the shaded
+segment of the circle at B to represent a fortified zone (1)
+accessible to any one within the angle KBC, as from the arrow M; (2)
+inaccessible (until it was captured or forced) to any one coming from
+outside the angle, as from the arrows NNN; (3) containing within
+itself, protected by its ring of fortifications, passages, PP, for
+traversing the two natural obstacles, &#947;&#946; and &#946;&#948;, which meet at the
+point &#946;.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch38.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 38" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 38.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>There you have the elements of the position in which the advance
+corner of the great French square was situated just before it took the
+shock of the main German armies. The two lines AB and BC are the
+French and British armies lying behind the Sambre, &#947;&#946;, and the Middle
+Meuse, &#946;&#948;, respectively; but the line of the Sambre ceases to protect
+eastward along the dotted line &#945;&#947; beyond the point up to which the
+river forms a natural obstacle, while from K to B the line is
+protected by the river Sambre itself. The more formidable obstacle,
+&#946;&#948;, represents the great trench or ravine of the Meuse which stretches
+south from Namur. The town of Namur itself is at B, the junction of
+the two rivers; and the fortified zone, SSS, is the ring of forts
+lying far out all round Namur; while the passages, PP, over the
+obstacles contained within that fortified zone, and accessible to the
+people <i>inside</i> the angle from M, but not to the people <i>outside</i> the
+angle from NNN, are the bridges across both the Sambre and the Meuse
+at Namur.</p>
+
+<p>All this is, of course, put merely diagrammatically, and a diagram is
+something very distant from reality. The "open <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>strategic square" in
+practice comes to mean little more than two main elements&mdash;one the
+operative corner, the other a number of separate units disposed in all
+sorts of different places behind, and generally denominated "the
+man&oelig;uvring mass." If you had looked down from above at all the
+French armies towards the end of August, when the first great shock
+came, you would have seen nothing remotely resembling a square.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch39.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 39" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 39.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>You would have seen something like Sketch 31 where the bodies enclosed
+under the title A were the operative corner; various garrisons and
+armies in the field, enclosed under the title B, were the
+man&oelig;uvring mass. But it is only by putting the matter quite clearly
+in the abstract diagrammatic form that its principle can be grasped.</p>
+
+<p>With this digression I will return and conclude with the main points
+of debate in the use of the open strategic square.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen that the operative corner is in this scheme deliberately
+imperilled at the outset.</p>
+
+<p>The following is a sketch map of the actual position, and it will be
+seen that the topographical features of this countryside are fairly
+represented by Sketch 39; while this other sketch shows how these
+troops that were about to take the shock stood to the general mass of
+the armies.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the diagram (which I repeat and amplify as Sketch
+41), let us see how the Allied force in the operative corner before
+Namur stood with relation to this angle of natural obstacles, the
+two rivers Sambre and Meuse, and the fortified zone round the point
+where they met.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch40.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 40" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 40.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>The situation of that force was as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch41.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 41" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 41.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Along and behind &#946;&#947; stretched the 5th Army of the French, prolonged on
+its left by the British contingent. I have marked the first in the
+diagram with the figure 5, the second with the letters Br, and the
+latter portion I have also shaded. At right angles to the French 5th
+Army stretched the French 4th Army, which I have marked with the
+figure 4. It depended upon the obstacle of the Meuse &#946;&#948; for its
+defence, just as the French 5th Army depended upon the Sambre, &#947;&#946;. It
+must, of course, be understood <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>that when one says these forces "lay
+along" the aforesaid lines, one does not mean that they merely lay
+behind them. One means that they held the bridges and prepared to
+dispute the crossing of them.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves: "There
+will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ, and this
+enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He will perhaps
+be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are. But he will suffer
+under these disadvantages:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act in
+co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because Y and
+Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by the
+fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect in a
+long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z, could
+only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle&mdash;that is, by
+stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the ring of
+forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the arrow X) will
+further be used up in trying to break down the resistance of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>SSS.
+That will take a good deal of time. If our horizontal line AB holds
+its own, naturally defended as it is, against the attack from V and W,
+while our perpendicular line BC holds its own still more firmly
+(relying on its much better natural obstacle) against YZ, we shall
+have ample time to break the first and worst shock of the enemy's
+attack, and to allow, once we have concentrated that attack upon
+ourselves, the rest of our forces, the masses of man&oelig;uvre, or at
+any rate a sufficient portion of them, to come up and give us a
+majority in <i>this</i> part of the field. We shall still be badly
+outnumbered on the line as a whole; but the resistance of our
+operative corner, relying on the Sambre and Meuse and the fortress of
+Namur, will gather much of the enemy unto itself. It will thus make of
+this part of the field the critical district of the whole campaign.
+Our masses, arriving while we resist, will give us a local superiority
+here which will hold up the whole German line. We may even by great
+good luck so break the shock of the attack as ourselves to begin
+taking the counter-offensive after a little while, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>to roll back
+either Y and Z or V and W by the advance of our forces across the
+rivers when the enemy has exhausted himself."</p>
+
+<p>It will be clear that this calculation (whether of the expected and
+probable least favourable issue&mdash;a lengthy defence followed by an
+orderly and slow retreat designed to allow the rest of the armies to
+come up&mdash;or of the improbable and more favourable issue&mdash;the taking of
+the counter-offensive) depended upon two presumptions which the
+commander of the Allies had taken for granted: (1) that the German
+shock would not come in more than a certain admitted maximum, say
+thirty per cent. superiority at the most over the Allied forces at
+this particular point; (2) that the ring of forts round Namur would be
+able to hold out for at least three or four days, and thus absorb the
+efforts of part of the enemy as well as awkwardly divide his forces,
+while that enemy's attack was being delivered.</p>
+
+<p>Both these presumptions were erroneous. The enemy, as we shall see in
+a moment, came on in much larger numbers than had been allowed for.
+Namur, as we have <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>already seen, fell, not in three or four days, but
+instantly&mdash;the moment it was attacked. And the result was that,
+instead of an orderly and slow retirement, sufficiently tardy to
+permit of the swinging up of the rest of the French "square"&mdash;that is,
+of the arrival of the other armies or man&oelig;uvring masses&mdash;there came
+as a fact the necessity for very rapid retirement of the operative
+corner over more than one hundred miles and the immediate peril for
+days of total disaster to it.</p>
+
+<p>To appreciate how superior the enemy proved to be in number, and how
+heavy the miscalculation here was, we must first see what the numbers
+of this Allied operative corner were.</p>
+
+<p>I have in Sketch 42 indicated the approximate positions and relative
+sizes of the three parts of the Allied forces.</p>
+
+<p>Beginning from the left, we have barely two army corps actually
+present of the British contingent in the fighting line: for certain
+contingents of the outermost army corps had not yet arrived. We may
+perhaps call the numbers actually present at French's command when
+contact was taken 70,000 men, but that is probably beyond <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>the mark.
+To the east lay the 5th French Army, three army corps amounting, say,
+to 120,000 men, and immediately south of this along the Meuse lay the
+4th French Army, another three army corps amounting to at the most
+another 120,000 men.</p>
+
+<p>We may then call the whole of the operative corner (if we exclude
+certain cavalry reserves far back, which never came into play) just
+over 300,000 men. That there were as many as 310,000 is improbable.</p>
+
+<p>The French calculation was that against these 300,000 men there would
+arrive at the very most 400,000.</p>
+
+<p>That, of course, meant a heavy superiority in number for the enemy;
+but, as we have seen, the scheme allowed for such an inconvenience at
+the first contact.</p>
+
+<p>That more than 400,000 could strike in the region of Namur no one
+believed, for no one believed that the enemy could provision and
+organize transport for more than that number.</p>
+
+<p>A very eminent English critic had allowed for seven army corps of
+first-line men as all that could be brought across the Belgian <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>Plain.
+The French went so far as to allow for ten, a figure represented by
+the 400,000 men of the enemy they expected.</p>
+
+<p>We had then the Allied forces expecting an attack in about the
+superiority indicated upon this diagram, where the British contingent
+and the two French armies are marked in full, and the supposed enemy
+in dotted lines.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch42.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 42" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 42.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Roughly speaking, the Allies were allowing for a thirty per cent.
+superiority.</p>
+
+<p>Now, lying as they did behind the rivers, and with the ring of forts
+around Namur <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>to shield their point of junction and to split the
+enemy's attack, this superiority, though heavy, was not crushing. The
+hopes of the defensive that it would stand firm, or at least retire
+slowly so as to give time for the man&oelig;uvring masses to come up was,
+under this presumption, just. It was even thought possible that, if
+the enemy attacked too blindly and spent himself too much, the
+counter-offensive might be taken after the first two or three days.</p>
+
+<p>As for the remainder of the German forces, it was believed that they
+were stretched out very much in even proportion, without any thin
+places, from the Meuse to Alsace.</p>
+
+<p>Now, as a matter of fact, the German forces were in no such
+disposition. 1. The Germans had added to every army corps a reserve
+division. 2. They had brought through the Belgian plains a very much
+larger number than seven army corps: they had brought nine. 3. They
+had further brought against Namur yet another four army corps through
+the Ardennes, the woods of which helped to hide their progress from
+air <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>reconnaissance. To all this mass of thirteen army corps, each
+army corps half as large again as the active or first line allowed
+for, add some imperfectly trained but certainly large bodies of
+independent cavalry. We cannot accurately say what the total numbers
+of this vast body were, but we can be perfectly certain that more than
+700,000 men were massed in this region of Namur. The enemy was coming
+on, not four against three, but certainly seven against three, and
+perhaps eight or even nine against three.</p>
+
+<p>The real situation was that given in the accompanying diagram (Sketch
+43).</p>
+
+<p>Five corps, each with its extra division, were massed under von Kluck,
+and called the 1st German Army. Four more, including the Guards, were
+present with von Buelow, and stretched up to and against the first
+defences of Namur. Now, around the corner of that fortress, two Saxon
+corps, a Wurtemberg corps, a Magdeburg corps, and a corps of reserve
+under the Duke of Wurtemberg formed the 3rd Army, the right wing of
+which opposed the forts of Namur, the rest of which stretched along
+the line of the Meuse.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>Even if the forts of Namur had held out, the position of so hopelessly
+inferior a body as was the Franco-British force, in face of such
+overwhelming numbers, would have been perilous in the extreme. With
+the forts of Namur abandoned almost at the first blow, the peril was
+more than a peril. It had become almost certain disaster.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch43.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 43" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 43.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>With the fall of Namur, the angle between the rivers&mdash;that is, the
+crossings of the rivers at their most difficult part where they were
+broadest&mdash;was in the hands of the enemy, and the whole <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>French body,
+the 4th and 5th Armies, was at some time on that Saturday falling
+back.</p>
+
+<p>The exact hour and the details of that movement we do not yet know. We
+do not know what loss the French sustained, we do not know whether any
+considerable bodies were cut off. We do not know even at what hour the
+French General Staff decided that the position was no longer tenable,
+and ordered the general retreat.</p>
+
+<p>All we know is that, so far from being able to hold out two or three
+days against a numerical superiority of a third and under the buttress
+of Namur, the operative corner, with Namur fallen and, not 30 per
+cent., but something more like 130 per cent. superiority against it,
+began not the slow retreat that had been envisaged, but a retirement
+of the most rapid sort.</p>
+
+<p>Such a retirement was essential if the cohesion of the Allied forces
+was to be maintained at all, and if the combined 4th and 5th French
+Armies and British contingent were to escape being surrounded or
+pierced.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>By the Saturday night at latest the French retirement was ordered; by
+Sunday morning it was in full progress, and it was proceeding
+throughout the triangle of the Thierarche all that day.</p>
+
+<p>But the rate of that retirement, corresponding to the pressure upon
+the French front, differed very much with varying sections of the
+line. It was heaviest, of course, in those advanced bodies which had
+lain just under Namur. It was least at the two ends of the bow, for
+the general movement was on to the line Maubeuge-Mezi&egrave;res. The farther
+one went east towards Maubeuge, the slower was the necessary movement,
+and to this cause of delay must be added the fact that von Kluck,
+coming round by the extreme German line, had farthest to go, and
+arrived latest against the line of the Allies.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore the British contingent at the western extreme of the Allied
+line felt the shock latest of all, and all that Sunday morning the
+British were still occupied in taking up their positions. They had
+arrived but just in time for what was to follow.</p>
+
+<p>It was not till the early afternoon of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>the Sunday that contact was
+first taken seriously between Sir John French and von Kluck. At that
+moment the British commander believed, both from a general and
+erroneous judgment which the French command had tendered him and from
+his own air work, that he had in front of him one and a half or at the
+most two army corps; and though the force, as we shall see in a
+moment, was far larger, its magnitude did not appear as the afternoon
+wore on. Full contact was established perhaps between three and four,
+by which hour the pressure was beginning to be severely felt, and upon
+the extreme right of the line it had already been necessary to take up
+defensive positions a little behind those established in the morning.
+But by five o'clock, with more than two good hours of daylight before
+it, the British command, though perhaps already doubtful whether the
+advancing masses of the enemy did not stand for more men, and
+especially for more guns than had been expected, was well holding its
+own, when all its dispositions were abruptly changed by an unexpected
+piece of news.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>It was at this moment in the afternoon&mdash;that is, about five
+o'clock&mdash;that the French General Staff communicated to Sir John French
+information bearing two widely different characteristics: the first
+that it came late; the second that had it not come when it did, the
+whole army, French as well as British, would have been turned.</p>
+
+<p>The first piece of information, far too belated, was the news that
+Namur had fallen, and that the enemy had been in possession of the
+bridge-heads over the Sambre and the Meuse since the preceding day,
+Saturday. Consequent upon this, the enemy had been able to effect the
+passage of the Sambre, not only in Namur itself, but in its immediate
+neighbourhood, and, such passages once secured, it was but a question
+of time for the whole line to fall into the enemy's hands. When
+superior numbers have passed one end of an obstacle it is obvious that
+the rest of the obstacle gradually becomes useless.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> At what hour
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>the French knew that they had to retire, we have not been told. As we
+have seen, the enemy was right within Namur on the early afternoon of
+Saturday, the 22nd, and it is to be presumed that the French
+retirement was in full swing by the Sunday morning, in which case the
+British contingent, which this retirement left in peril upon the
+western extreme of the line, ought to have been warned many hours
+before five o'clock in the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>To what the delay was due we are again <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>as yet in ignorance, but
+probably to the confusion into which the unexpected fall of Namur and
+the equally unexpected strength of the enemy beyond the Sambre and the
+Meuse had thrown the French General Staff.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, the news did come thus late, and its lateness was of
+serious consequence to the British contingent, and might have been
+disastrous to it.</p>
+
+<p>The second piece of news, on the other hand, was the saving of it; and
+that second piece of news was the information that Sir John French had
+in front of him not one German army corps, and possibly part or even
+the whole of a second, but at least three. As the matter turned out,
+the British contingent was really dealing first and last with four
+army corps, and the essential part of the news conveyed was that the
+extreme western portion of this large German force <i>was attempting to
+turn the flank of the whole army</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It was not only attempting to do so, it was in number sufficient to do
+so; and unless prompt measures were taken, what was now discovered to
+be the general German plan would succeed, and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>campaign in the
+West would be in two days decided adversely to the Allies&mdash;the same
+space of time in which the campaign of 1815 was decided adversely to
+Napoleon in just these same country-sides.</p>
+
+<p>It is here necessary to describe what this German plan was.</p>
+
+<p>The reader has already seen, when the general principles of the open
+strategic square were described on a previous page, that everything
+depends upon the fate of the operative corner. This operative corner
+in the present campaign had turned out to be the two French armies,
+the 4th and the 5th, upon the Lower Sambre and the Meuse, and the
+British contingent lying to the left of the 5th on the Upper Sambre
+and by Mons.</p>
+
+<p>If the operative corner of a strategic open square is annihilated as a
+military force, or so seriously defeated that it can offer no
+effective opposition for some days, then the whole plan of a strategic
+square breaks to pieces, and the last position of the inferior forces
+which have adopted it is worse than if they had not relied upon the
+man&oelig;uvre at all, but had simply spread out in line to await defeat
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>in bulk at the hands of their superior enemy.</p>
+
+<p>Now there are two ways in which a military force can be disposed of by
+its opponent. There are two ways in which it can be&mdash;to use the rather
+exaggerated language of military history&mdash;"annihilated."</p>
+
+<p>The first is this: You can break up its cohesion by a smashing blow
+delivered somewhere along its line, and preferably near its centre.
+But if you do that, the results will never be quite complete, and may
+be incomplete in any degree according to the violence and success of
+your blow.</p>
+
+<p>The second way is to get round the enemy with your superior numbers,
+to get past his flank, to the back of him, and so envelop him. If that
+man&oelig;uvre is carried out successfully, you bag his forces entire. It
+is to this second man&oelig;uvre that modern Prussian strategy and
+tactics are particularly attached. It is obvious that its fruits are
+far more complete than those of the first man&oelig;uvre, when, or if, it
+is wholly successful. For to get round your enemy and bag him whole is
+a larger result than merely to break him up and leave <i>some</i> of him
+able to re-form and perhaps fight <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>again. Two things needful to such
+success are (<i>a</i>) superior numbers, save in case of gross error upon
+the part of the opponents; (<i>b</i>) great rapidity of action on the part
+of the outflanking body, coupled, if possible, with surprise. That
+rapidity of action is necessary is obvious; for the party on the flank
+has got to go much farther than the rest of the army. It has to go all
+the length of the arrow (1), and an element of surprise is usually
+necessary. For if the army AA which BB was trying to outflank learned
+of the man&oelig;uvre in time he only has to retreat upon his left by the
+shorter arrow (2) to escape from the threatened clutch.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch45.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 45" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 45.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Now, von Kluck with his five army corps, four of which were in
+operation <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>against Sir John French, was well able to count on all
+these elements. He had highly superior numbers, his superiority had
+not been discovered until it was almost too late, and for rapidity of
+action he had excellent railways and a vast equipment of petrol
+vehicles.</p>
+
+<p>What he proposed to do was, while engaging the British contingent of
+less than two army corps with three full army corps of his own, to
+swing his extreme western army corps right round, west through
+Tournai, and so turn the British line. If he succeeded in doing that,
+he had at the same time succeeded in turning the whole of the
+Franco-British forces on the Sambre and Meuse. In other words, he was
+in a fair way to accomplishing the destruction of the operative corner
+of the great square, and consequently, as a last result, the
+destruction of the whole Allied force in the West.</p>
+
+<p>The thing may be represented on a sketch map in this form.</p>
+
+<p>Of von Kluck's five corps, 1 is operating against the junction of the
+English and French lines beyond Binche, 2, 3, and 4 are massing
+against the rather more than one <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>and a half of Sir John French at AA,
+and 5, after the capture of Tournai, is going to take a big sweep
+round in the direction of the arrow towards Cambrai, and so to turn
+the whole line. Meanwhile, the cavalry, still farther west, acting
+independently, is to sweep the country right out to Arras and beyond.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch46.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 46" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 46.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The particular titles of corps are of no great value in following the
+leading main lines of a military movement; but it may be worth
+remembering that this "number 5," to which von Kluck had allotted the
+turning movement, was the <i>Second</i> German Corps. With its cavalry it
+numbered alone (and apart from all the other forces of von Kluck which
+were engaging the British line directly) quite three-quarters as many
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>men as all that British line for the moment mustered.</p>
+
+<p>It was not possible, from local circumstances which the full history
+of the war, when it is written, will explain, for the British
+contingent to fall back in the remaining hours of daylight upon that
+Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>Belated by at the most twelve hours, as the news of the French
+retirement had been, the British retirement followed it fully twenty
+hours after. It was not until daylight of Monday, the 24th, that all
+the organizations for this retirement were completed, the plans drawn
+up, and the first retrograde movements made.</p>
+
+<p>To permit a retirement before such a great superiority of the enemy to
+be made without disaster, it was necessary to counter-attack not only
+at this inception of the movement, but throughout all the terrible
+strain of the ensuing eight days.</p>
+
+<p>Here it may be necessary to explain why, in any retirement, continual
+counter-attacks on the pursuing enemy are necessary.</p>
+
+<p>It is obvious that, under equal <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>conditions, the pursuing enemy can
+advance as fast as can your own troops which are retreating before
+him. If, therefore, a retreat, once contact has been established,
+consisted in merely walking away from the enemy, that enemy would be
+able to maintain a ceaseless activity against one portion of your
+united force&mdash;its rear&mdash;which activity would be exercised against
+bodies on the march, and incapable of defence. To take but one example
+out of a hundred: his guns would be always unlimbering, shooting at
+you, then limbering up again to continue the pursuit; unlimbering
+again, shooting again&mdash;and so forth; while your guns would never
+reply, being occupied in an unbroken retirement, and therefore
+continually limbered up and useless behind their teams.</p>
+
+<p>A retiring force, therefore, of whatever size&mdash;from a company to an
+army&mdash;can only safely effect its retirement by detaching one fraction
+from its total which shall hold up the pursuit for a time while the
+main body gets away.</p>
+
+<p>When this detached fraction is wearied or imperilled, another fraction
+relieves <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>it, taking up the same task in its turn; the first fraction,
+which had hitherto been checking the pursuit, falls back rapidly on to
+the main body, under cover of the new rearguard's fire as it turns to
+face the enemy. And the process is kept up, first one, then another
+portion of the whole force being devoted to it, until the retirement
+of the whole body has been successfully effected, and it is well ahead
+of its pursuers and secure.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch47.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 47" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 47.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For example: two White army corps, I., II., as in the annexed diagram,
+each of two divisions, 1, 2, and 3, 4, have to retire before a greatly
+superior Black force, <i>abcde</i>. They succeed in retiring by the action
+expressed in the following diagram. White corps No. I. first
+undertakes to hold up the enemy while No. II. makes off. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>No. I.
+detaches one division for the work (Division 2), and for a short time
+it checks the movement of <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, and <i>c</i>, at least, of the enemy.
+Now <i>d</i> and <i>e</i> press on. But they cannot press on at any pace they
+choose, for an army must keep together, and the check to <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, and
+<i>c</i> somewhat retards <i>d</i> and <i>e</i>. They advance, say, to the positions
+&#948;&#949;.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch48.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 48" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 48.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Next, White corps No. II. stops, puts out one of its divisions (say 4)
+to check <i>d</i> and <i>e</i>, while its other division either helps or falls
+back, according to the severity of the pressure, and White corps No.
+I. makes off as fast as it can. <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>c</i>, no longer checked by a
+White rearguard, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>are nevertheless retarded from two causes&mdash;first,
+the delay already inflicted on them; secondly, that they must not, if
+the army is to keep together, get too far ahead of their colleagues,
+<i>d</i> and <i>e</i>, which White corps II. is holding up.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch49.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 49" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 49.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Thus, on the second or third day the retreat of White is being secured
+by an increasing gap between pursued and pursuers. The process is
+continued. Every succeeding day&mdash;if that process is successful&mdash;should
+further widen the gap until White can feel free from immediate
+pressure.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the principle&mdash;modified indefinitely in practice by variations
+of ground <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>and numbers&mdash;under which a retirement must be conducted if
+it is to have any hope of ultimate success in saving the pursued.</p>
+
+<p>But it is clear that the process must always be a perilous one. Unless
+the most careful co-ordination is maintained between the moving parts
+of the retreat; unless the rearguard in each action falls back only
+<i>just upon</i> and not a <i>little while after</i> the precise moment when it
+can last safely do so; unless the new rearguard comes into play in
+time, etc., etc.&mdash;the pursuers may get right in among the pursued and
+break their cohesion; or they may get round them, cut them off, and
+compel them to surrender. In either case the retreating force ceases
+to exist as an army.</p>
+
+<p>In proportion as the pursuers are numerous (mobility being equal)
+compared with the pursued, in that proportion is the peril. And with
+the best luck in the world some units are sure to be cut off, many
+guns lost, all stragglers and nearly all wounded abandoned in the
+course of a pressed retreat, and, above all, there will be the
+increasing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>discouragement and bewilderment of the men as the strain,
+the losses, and the ceaseless giving way before the enemy continue day
+after day with cumulative effect.</p>
+
+<p>The accomplishment of such a task, the maintenance of the "operative
+corner" in being during its ordeal of retreat before vastly superior
+numbers, and in particular the exceedingly perilous retirement of the
+British contingent at what was, during the first part of the strain,
+the extreme of the line, are what we are now about to follow.</p>
+
+<p>The initial counter-attack, then, on this Monday, the first day of the
+retreat, was undertaken by the 2nd British Division from the region of
+Harmignies, which advanced as though with the object of retaking
+Binche. The demonstration was supported by all the artillery of the
+1st Army Corps, while the 1st Division, lying near Peissant, supported
+this action of the 2nd. While that demonstration was in full activity,
+the 2nd Corps to the west or left (not all of it was yet in the field)
+retired on to the line Dour-Frameries, passing through Quaregnon. It
+suffered some loss in this operation from the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>masses of the enemy,
+which were pressing forward from Mons. When the 2nd Corps had thus
+halted on the line Dour-Frameries, the 1st Corps, which had been
+making the demonstration, took the opportunity to retire in its turn,
+and fell back before the evening to a line stretching from Bavai to
+Maubeuge.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch50.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 50" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 50.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The 2nd Corps had entrenched itself, while the 1st Corps was thus
+falling back upon its right; and when it came to the turn of the 2nd
+Corps to play the part of rearguard in these alternate movements, the
+effort proved to be one of grave peril.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch51.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 51" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 51.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Since the whole movement of the enemy was an outflanking movement,
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>pressure upon this left and extreme end of the line was
+particularly severe. The German advance in such highly superior
+numbers overlapped the two British corps to <i>their</i> left or west,
+which was at this moment the extreme end of the Allied Franco-British
+line. They overlapped them as these pursuing Black units overlap the
+lesser retiring White units. It is evident that in such a case the
+last unit in the line at A will be suffering the chief burden of the
+attack. An attempt was made to relieve that burden by sending the and
+Cavalry Brigade in this direction to ride round the enemy's outlying
+body; but the move failed, with considerable loss to the 9th Lancers
+and the 18th Hussars, which came upon wire entanglements five hundred
+yards from the enemy's position. There did arrive in aid of the
+imperilled end of the line <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>reinforcement in the shape of a new body.
+One infantry brigade, the 19th, which had hitherto been upon the line
+of communications, reached the army on this its central left near
+Quarouble and a little behind that village before the morning was
+spent. It was in line before evening. This reinforcement lent some
+strength to the sorely tried 2nd Corps, but it had against it still
+double its own strength in front, and half as much again upon its
+exposed left or western flank, and it suffered heavily.</p>
+
+<p>By the night of that Monday, the 24th of August, however, the whole of
+the British Army was again in line, and stretched from Maubeuge, which
+protected its right, through Bavai, on to the fields between the
+villages of Jenlain and Bry, where the fresh 19th Infantry Brigade had
+newly arrived before the evening, while beyond this extreme left again
+was the cavalry.</p>
+
+<p>The whole operation, then, of that perilous Monday, the first day of
+the retreat, may be planned in general as in Sketch 52. At the
+beginning, at daybreak, you have the three German army <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>corps lying as
+the shaded bodies are given opposite to the unshaded, which represent
+the British contingent of not quite two full army corps. By nightfall
+the British contingent, including now the 19th Brigade of infantry,
+lay in the positions from Maubeuge westward, with the 1st Corps next
+to Maubeuge, the 2nd Corps beyond Bavai, the 1st being commanded by
+Sir Douglas Haig, the 2nd by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien; while the
+Germans lay more or less as the dotted shaded markings are.</p>
+
+<p>The fortress of Maubeuge was, under these circumstances, clearly a
+lure. An army in the field in danger of envelopment will always be
+tempted to make for the nearest fortified zone in order to save
+itself. The British commander was well advised in his judgment to
+avoid this opportunity, and that for two reasons. First, that the
+locking up of any considerable portion of the Anglo-French force in
+its retirement would have jeopardized the chance of that
+counter-offensive which the French hoped sooner or later to initiate;
+secondly, that, as will be seen later, the works of Maubeuge were
+quite insufficient <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>to resist for more than a few days a modern siege
+train.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch52.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 52" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 52.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This point of Maubeuge and of its fall must be discussed later; for
+the moment all we need note is that the fortress afforded for a few
+hours&mdash;that is, during the night of Monday to Tuesday, the 24th-25th
+August&mdash;support to the British line during its first halt upon the
+rapid and perilous retirement from Mons.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the whole of the French 5th <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>Army had been falling back with
+equal rapidity, and upon its right the 4th Army had followed soon; and
+as this French retirement had preceded the retirement of the British,
+its general line lay farther south.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, from the nature of the topography in this section
+of the Franco-Belgian border, the units of the French command had to
+fall back farther and more rapidly in proportion as they stretched
+eastward. The attack of the enemy in forces of rather more than two to
+one had come, as we have seen, not only from across the line of the
+Sambre, but, once Namur had fallen, from across the line of the Meuse
+at right angles to the line of the Sambre. Therefore the 5th and the
+4th Armies, contained within the triangle bounded by the Sambre and
+Meuse, retiring from blows struck from the direction of the arrows 1-5
+over all that hilly and wooded country known as the Thi&eacute;rache, were,
+as to the extreme salient of them at A, compelled to a very rapid
+retirement indeed; and on this Sunday night the French line was
+deflected southward, not without heavy losses, until either on that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>night or on the Monday morning it joined up with the forces which
+stretched northward through and from M&eacute;zi&egrave;res. An attempt to
+counter-attack through the precipitous ravines and deep woods on to
+the valley of the Semois had failed, and the line as a whole ran, upon
+this night between the Sunday and the Monday, much as is indicated
+upon the accompanying sketch.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch53.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 53" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 53.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>From this it will be seen that the British contingent away upon the
+extreme left was in very grave peril, not only because the turning
+movement was wholly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>directed round their exposed flank, but also
+because, their retirement having come late, they stood too far forward
+in the general scheme at this moment, and therefore more exposed to
+the enemy's blow than the rest of the line. With this it must be
+remembered Tournai had already fallen. It was very imperfectly held by
+a French Territorial brigade, accompanied by one battery of English
+guns; and the entering German force, in a superiority of anything you
+like&mdash;two, three, or four to one&mdash;easily swept away the resistance
+proffered in this quarter.</p>
+
+<p>These German forces from Tournai had not yet, by the nightfall of
+Monday, come up eastward against the British, but they were on the
+way, and they might appear at any moment. The corps next to them, the
+4th of von Kluck's five, was already operating upon that flank, and
+the next day, Wednesday, 26th of August, was to be the chief day of
+trial for this exposed British wing of the army.</p>
+
+<p>So far the operations of the British Army had not differed greatly
+from the expected or at least one of the expected developments of the
+campaign.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>The operative corner, if it should not have the luck, through losses
+or blunders on the part of the enemy, to take the counter-offensive
+after receiving the third shock, is intended to retire, and to draw
+upon itself a maximum of the enemy's efforts.</p>
+
+<p>But between what had been intended as the most probable, and in any
+case perilous, task of this body (which comprised, it will be
+remembered, six French and ultimately two British army corps) turned
+out, within twenty-four hours of the retreat, and within forty-eight
+of the fall of Namur, to be an operation of a difficulty so extreme as
+to imperil the whole campaign, and in this operation it was the
+British force upon the outer left edge of the line&mdash;the unsupported
+extremity round which the enemy made every effort to get&mdash;which was
+bound to receive the severest treatment. This peculiar burden laid
+upon the Expeditionary Force from this country was, of course, gravely
+increased by the delay in beginning its retreat, which we have seen to
+be due to the delay in the communication to it by the French of the
+news of the fall of Namur. On account of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>this delay not only was the
+extreme of the line which the British held immediately threatened with
+outflanking, but it still lay somewhat forward of the rest of the
+force. It was in danger of being turned round its exposed edge C, not
+only because it lay on the extreme of the line, but also because,
+instead of occupying its normal position, AB, which it would have
+occupied had the retreat begun with all the rest, it actually occupied
+the position CD, which made it far more likely to be surrounded than
+if it had been a day's march farther back, as it would have been if
+the French Staff work had suffered no delays.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch54.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 54" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 54.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There lay in the gap formed by this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>untoward tardiness in the British
+retirement, at the point M, the fortress of Maubeuge. It was
+garrisoned by French reserves, or Territorial troops, not of the same
+quality as the active army, and its defensive power was, even if the
+old ring of fortress theory had proved sound, of very doubtful order.</p>
+
+<p>The French 5th Army being no longer present to support the British
+right, but having fallen back behind the alignment of that right,
+General Sir John French had no support for what should have been his
+secure flank save this fortress of Maubeuge, and it will be evident
+from the above diagram that the enemy, should he succeed in
+outflanking the British line, would compel it to fall back within the
+ring of forts surrounding Maubeuge. To avoid destruction it would have
+no alternative but to do that. For, counting the forces in front of it
+and the forces trying to get round its back, it was fighting odds of
+two to one.</p>
+
+<p>Maubeuge was a stronghold that had played a great part in the
+revolutionary war. Its resistance in the month of October 1793 had
+made possible the French <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>victory of Wattigines, just outside its
+walls, and had, perhaps, done more than any other feat of arms in that
+year to save the French Revolution from the allied governments of
+Europe. It was, indeed, full of historic memories, from the moment
+when C&aelig;sar had defeated the Nervii upon the Sambre just to the west of
+the town (his camp can still be traced in an open field above the
+river bank) to the invasion of 1815.</p>
+
+<p>But this r&ocirc;le which it had played throughout French history had not
+led to any illusion with regard to the r&ocirc;le it might play in any
+modern war; and at the best Maubeuge, in common with the other
+ill-fortified points of the Belgian frontier, suffered from the only
+error&mdash;and that a grave one&mdash;which their thorough unnational political
+system had imposed upon the military plan of the French. This error
+was the capital error of indecision. No consistent plan had been
+adopted with regard to the fortification of the Belgian frontier.</p>
+
+<p>The French had begun, after the recuperation following upon the war of
+1870, an elaborate and very perfect <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>system of fortification along
+their German frontier&mdash;that is, along the new frontier which divided
+the annexed territory of Alsace-Lorraine from the rest of the country.
+They had taken it for granted that the next German attempt would be
+made somewhere between Longwy and Belfort. And they had spent in this
+scheme of fortification, first and last, the cost of a great campaign.
+They had spent some three hundred million pounds; and it will be
+possible for the reader to gauge the magnitude of this effort if he
+will consider that it was a military operation more costly than was
+the whole of the South African War to Great Britain, or of the
+Manchurian War to Russia. The French were wise to have undertaken this
+expense, because it had hitherto been an unheard-of offence against
+European morals that one nation in Christendom should violate the
+declared neutrality of another. And the attack upon Belgium as a means
+of invading France by Germany had not then crossed the mind of any but
+a few theorists who had, so to speak, "marched ahead" of the rapid
+decline in our common religion <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>which had marked now three
+generations.</p>
+
+<p>But when the French had completed this scheme of fortification, Europe
+heard it proposed by certain authorities in Prussia that, as the cost
+of invading France through the now fortified zone would be
+considerable, the German forces should not hesitate to originate yet
+another step in the breakdown of European morality, and to sacrifice
+in their attack upon France the neutrality of Belgium, of which
+Prussia was herself a guarantor.</p>
+
+<p>Men have often talked during this war, especially in England, as
+though the crime accompanying Prussian activities in the field were
+normal to warfare; and this error is probably due to the fact that war
+upon a large scale has never come home to the imagination of the
+country, and that it is without experience of invasion.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is of the very first importance to appreciate the truth that
+Prussia in this campaign has postulated in one point after another new
+doctrines which repudiate everything her neighbours have held sacred
+from the time when a common Christianity first began to influence the
+states <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>of Europe. The violation of the Belgian territory is on a par
+with the murder of civilians in cold blood, and after admission of
+their innocence, with the massacre of priests, and the sinking without
+warning of unarmed ships with their passengers and crews. To regard
+these things as something normal to warfare in the past is as
+monstrous an historical error as it would be to regard the reign of
+terror during the French Revolution as normal to civil disputes within
+the State. And to appreciate such a truth is, I repeat, of especial
+moment to the understanding of the mere military character of the
+campaign. For if the violation of Belgium in particular had not been
+the unheard of thing it was, the fortification of the Franco-Belgian
+frontier with which we are here concerned would have had a very
+different fortune.</p>
+
+<p>As it was, the French could never quite make up their minds&mdash;or rather
+the French parliamentarians could never make up their minds&mdash;upon the
+amount of money that might wisely be expended in the defence of this
+neutral border. There were moments when the opinion that Prussia
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>would be restrained by no fear of Europe prevailed among the
+professional politicians of Paris. The fortification of the Belgian
+frontier was undertaken in such moments; a full plan of it was drawn
+up. But again doubt would succeed, the very large sums involved would
+appal some new ministry, and the effort would be interrupted. To such
+uncertainty of aim characteristic of parliamentary government in a
+military nation was added, unfortunately, the consideration of the
+line of the Meuse. Li&eacute;ge and Namur were fortresses of peculiar
+strength, Antwerp was thought the strongest thing in Europe; and that
+triangle was conceived, even by many who believed that the violation
+of Belgian territory would take place, as affording a sufficient
+barrier against the immediate invasion of France from the north-east.
+Those who made this calculation did not forget that fortresses are
+nothing without their full complement of men, guns, and stores; but
+they could neither control, nor had they the elements properly to
+appreciate, the deficiency of organization in a foreign and not
+military country.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>For all these causes Maubeuge, in common with other points along the
+Belgian frontier less important than itself, was left imperfect. Even
+if the ring fortress had remained after 1905 what it had been before
+that date, and even if modern howitzer fire and modern high explosives
+had not rendered its tenure one of days rather than months, Maubeuge
+was not a first-class fortress. As it was, with fortifications
+unrenewed, and with the ring fortress in any case doomed, Maubeuge was
+a death-trap.</p>
+
+<p>The r&ocirc;le assigned to the fortress in the original French plan was no
+more than the support of the retiring operative corner, as it
+"retreated, man&oelig;uvred, and held the enemy." Maubeuge was considered
+as part of a line beyond which the operative corner would not have to
+fall before the rest of the square, the "man&oelig;uvring mass," had
+swung up. Hence it was that the French General Staff and its Chief had
+put within the ring of its insufficient forts nothing more than a
+garrison of Territorials&mdash;that is, of the older classes of the
+reserve.</p>
+
+<p>Had the British General accepted the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>lure of Maubeuge as Bazaine did
+the lure of Metz in 1870, the Expeditionary Force would have been
+destroyed. But it would have been destroyed, not after a long delay,
+as was the army at Metz, but immediately; for Maubeuge was not Metz,
+and the fortress power of resistance of to-day is not that of a
+generation ago. Maubeuge, as a fact, fell within a fortnight of the
+date when this temptation was offered to the sorely pressed British
+army, and had that temptation been yielded to, the whole force would
+have been, in a military sense, annihilated before the middle of
+September.</p>
+
+<p>What preserved it was the immediate decision undertaken upon that
+Monday night to proceed, in spite of the fatigues that were already
+felt after the first day's retreat, with a retirement upon the
+south-west, and to proceed with it as vigorously as possible.</p>
+
+<p>It was not yet daylight upon the morning of Tuesday, August 25th, when
+the move began. The Field-Marshal counted justly upon some exhaustion
+in his immensely superior enemy, especially in those troops of his
+upon the west (the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>2nd German Corps) which had to perform the heavy
+marching task of getting round the end of the British line. This
+element, combined with the considerable distance which the British
+marched that morning, saved the army; though not until another week of
+almost intolerable suffering had passed, and not until very heavy
+losses indeed had been sustained. The great Maubeuge-Bavai road, which
+is prolonged to Eth, and which was, roughly, the British front of that
+night, was cleared shortly after sunrise. A couple of brigades of
+cavalry and the divisional cavalry of the 2nd Corps covered the
+operation on the centre of the right, in front of the main body of the
+2nd Corps, while the rest of the cavalry similarly covered the exposed
+western edge and corner of the line.</p>
+
+<p>Delays, with the criticism of which this short summary has no concern,
+had forbidden the whole force which should have been present with the
+British Army in Flanders at the outset of the campaign to arrive in
+time, and the contingents that had already come up had taken the
+shock, as we have already described, in the absence of the 4th
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>Division. This 4th Division had only begun to detrain from the
+junction at Le Cateau at the same hour that General Sir John French
+was reading that Sunday message which prompted his immediate
+retirement from before Mons. When the full official history of the war
+comes to be written, few things will prove of more credit to the
+Expeditionary Force and its command than the way in which this belated
+division&mdash;belated through no fault of the soldiers&mdash;was incorporated
+with the already existing organization, in the very midst of its
+retreat, and helped to support the army. There are few parallels in
+history to the successful accomplishment of so delicate and perilous
+an operation.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, in less than forty-eight hours after its arrival, the 4th
+Division&mdash;eleven battalions and a brigade of artillery&mdash;were
+incorporated with the British line just as the whole force was falling
+back upon this Tuesday morning, the 25th; and the newly arrived
+division of fresh men did singular service in the further covering of
+the retirement. General Snow, who was in command of this division,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>was deployed upon a line running from just south of Solesmes, on the
+right, to a point just south of La Chatrie, upon the road from Cambrai
+to Le Cateau, upon his left; and, as will be seen by the accompanying
+sketch map, such a line effectually protected the falling back of the
+rest of the force. Behind it the 1st and the 2nd British Corps fell
+back upon the line Cambrai to Landrecies. The small inset map shows
+how the various points in this two days' retreat stood to one another.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch55.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 55" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 55.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This line from Landrecies towards Cambrai had already been in part
+prepared in the course of that day&mdash;Tuesday&mdash;and entrenched, and it
+may <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>be imagined what inclination affected commanders and men towards
+a halt upon that position. The pressure had been continuous and heavy,
+the work of detraining and setting in line the newly arrived division
+had added to the anxieties of the day, and an occupation of the
+prepared line seemed to impose itself. Luckily, the unwisdom of such a
+stand in the retirement was perceived in time, and the British
+Commander decided not to give his forces rest until some considerable
+natural object superior to imperfect and hurriedly constructed
+trenches could be depended upon to check the enemy's advance. The
+threat of being outflanked was still very grave, and the few hours'
+halt which would have been involved in the alternative decision might,
+or rather would, have been fatal.</p>
+
+<p>The consequences, however, to the men of this decision in favour of
+continual retirement were severe. The 1st Corps did not reach
+Landrecies till ten o'clock at night. They had been upon the move for
+eighteen hours; but even so, the enemy, in that avalanche of advance
+(which was possible to him, as we now <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>know, by the organization of
+mechanical transport), was well in touch. The Guards in Landrecies
+itself (the 4th Brigade) were attacked by the advance body of the 9th
+German Army Corps, which came on in overwhelming numbers right into
+the buildings of the town, debouching from the wood to the north under
+cover of the darkness. Their effort was unsuccessful. They did not
+succeed in piercing or even in decisively confusing the British line
+at this point; and, packed in the rather narrow street of Landrecies,
+the enemy suffered losses equivalent to a battalion in that desperate
+night fighting. But though the enemy here failed to achieve his
+purpose, his action compelled the continued retreat of men who were
+almost at the limit of exhaustion, and who had now been marching and
+fighting for the better part of twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p>In that same darkness the 1st Division, under Sir Douglas Haig, was
+heavily engaged south-east of Maroilles. They obtained ultimately the
+aid of two French reserve divisions which lay upon the right of the
+British line, and extricated <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>themselves from the peril they were in
+before dawn. By daylight this 1st Corps was still continuing its
+retirement in the direction of Wassigny, with Guise as its objective.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch56.jpg" width="65%" alt="Sketch 56" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 56.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the 2nd Corps, which had not been so heavily attacked, and
+which lay to the west&mdash;that is, still upon the extreme of the
+line&mdash;had come, before the sunset of that Tuesday, the 25th, into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>a
+line stretching from Le Cateau to near Caudry, and thence prolonged by
+the 4th Division towards Seranvillers.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch57.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 57" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 57.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It will be seen that this line was bent&mdash;its left refused. This
+disposition was, of course, designed to meet the ceaseless German
+attempt to outflank on the west; and with the dawn of Wednesday, the
+26th, it was already apparent how serious would be the task before
+this 2nd Corps, which covered all the rest of the army, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>and, in a
+sense, the whole of the Anglo-French retirement. General Sir Horace
+Smith-Dorrien, who was here in command, was threatened with a disaster
+that might carry in its train disaster to the whole British
+contingent, and ultimately, perhaps, to the whole Franco-British line.</p>
+
+<p>Although the German bodies which were attempting the outflanking had
+not yet all come up, the field artillery of no less than four German
+corps was already at work against this one body, and a general action
+was developing upon which might very well depend the fate of the
+campaign. Indeed, the reader will do well to fix his attention upon
+this day, Wednesday, the 26th August, as the key to all that followed.
+There are always to be found, in the history of war, places and times
+which are of this character&mdash;nuclei, as it were, round which the
+business of all that comes before and after seems to congregate. Of
+such, for instance, was the Friday before Waterloo, when Erlon's
+counter-orders ultimately decided the fate of Napoleon; and of such
+was Carnot's night march on October 15, 1793, which largely decided
+the fate of the revolutionary army.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>The obvious action to take in such a position as that in which the 2nd
+Corps found themselves was to break contact with the enemy, to call
+for support from the 1st Corps, and to maintain the retreat as
+indefatigably as it had already been maintained in the preceding
+twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p>But men have limits to their physical powers, which limits commonly
+appear sharply, not gradually, at the end of a great movement. The 1st
+Corps had been marching and fighting a day and a night, and that after
+a preceding whole day of retirement from before Mons. It was unable to
+execute a further effort. Further, the general in command of the 2nd
+Corps reported that the German pressure had advanced too far to permit
+of breaking contact in the face of such an attack.</p>
+
+<p>It would have been of the utmost use if at this moment a large body of
+French cavalry&mdash;no less than three divisions&mdash;under General Sordet,
+could have intervened upon that critical moment, the morning of
+Wednesday, the 26th, to have covered the retirement of the 1st Corps.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>They were in the neighbourhood; the British commander had seen their
+commander in the course of the 25th, and had represented his need.
+Through some error or misfortune in the previous movement of this
+corps&mdash;such that its horses were incapable of further action through
+fatigue&mdash;it failed to appear upon the field in this all-important
+juncture, and General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien was left facing
+overwhelming odds, which in artillery&mdash;the arm that was doing all the
+heavy work of that morning&mdash;were not less than four to one.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that the retirement was at last made possible was due more
+than anything else to the handling of the British guns upon this day,
+and to the devotion with which the batteries sacrificed themselves to
+the covering of that movement; while the cavalry, as in the preceding
+two days, co-operated in forming a screen for the retreat.</p>
+
+<p>It was about half-past three in the afternoon when the general in
+command of this exposed left flank judged it possible to break
+contact, and to give the order for falling back. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>experiment&mdash;for
+it seems to have been no more secure than such a word suggests&mdash;was
+perilous in the extreme. It was not known whether the consequences of
+this fierce artillery duel against an enemy of four-fold superiority
+had been sufficient to forbid that enemy to make good the pursuit.
+Luckily, as the operation developed, it was apparent that the check
+inflicted upon such enormous odds by the British guns was sufficient
+for its purpose. The enemy had received losses that forbade him to
+move with the rapidity necessary to him if he was to decide the
+matter. He failed to press the retiring 2nd British Corps in any
+conclusive fashion: this 2nd Corps, the left wing, was saved; and with
+it the whole army, and perhaps the whole line.</p>
+
+<p>The retreat of this body, which had thus covered all its comrades,
+continued under terrible conditions of strain (and after so heavy an
+action) right through the afternoon, and on hour after hour through
+the darkness; but though such an effort meant the loss of stragglers
+and of wounded, of guns whose teams had been destroyed, of material,
+and of all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>that accompanies a perilous retreat, one may justly say
+that well before midnight of that Wednesday, the 26th, the operation
+had proved successful and its purpose was accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>Two more days of almost equal strain were, as we shall see, to be
+suffered by the whole army before it had reached a natural obstacle
+behind which it could draw breath (the river Oise), and might fairly
+be regarded as no longer in peril of destruction; but the breaking
+point that had come on that Wednesday, the 26th, had been successfully
+passed without disaster, and had been so passed, in the main, by
+virtue of the guns.</p>
+
+<p>This critical day, upon which depended the fortunes certainly of the
+British contingent, and in some degree of all the "operative corner"
+of the French plan, turned in favour of the Allies, not only through
+the military excellence of the action which was broken off by Sir
+Horace Smith-Dorrien during the afternoon, but also through the vigour
+and tenacity of the retreat.</p>
+
+<p>I must here beg the reader's leave for a short digression in
+connection with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>those two phrases&mdash;"in favour of," and "vigour."
+History in general treats a retirement, particularly a rapid
+retirement accompanied by heavy losses, as a disaster; and the
+conception that such a movement may seem to the military historian a
+success, and that the energy of its conduct is just as important as
+the energy of an assault, is unfamiliar to most students of civilian
+record. But I am writing here, though an elementary, yet a military
+history; and to the military historian a retreat may be just as much a
+factor in victory as an advance; while the energy and tenacity
+required for its carriage are, if anything, more important than the
+corresponding qualities required for an advance. And in the case of
+this critical day and a half, the Wednesday, August 26th, and the
+Wednesday and Thursday night, August 26th-27th, the preservation of
+the British forces, and to some extent of all that lay east of them,
+was made possible by the very fact that the retirement was prosecuted
+with the utmost rapidity and without a halt. Had the retreat been
+interrupted in the hope of making a stand, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>or in the hope of repose,
+the whole army would have gone.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the night, then, with heavy losses from stragglers, and in
+one case with the surrounding and annihilation by wounds and capture
+of nearly a whole battalion (the Gordons), the retreat of the 2nd
+Corps proceeded, and, in line with it, the retreat of the 1st Corps to
+the east.</p>
+
+<p>But this 1st Corps, though set an easier task than the 2nd (which, at
+the extreme of the line, was under the perpetual menace of
+development), did not retire without losses of a serious character. It
+was marching on Guise, just as the 2nd Corps to the west of it was
+marching across the watershed to St. Quentin. The Munster Fusiliers,
+who were on its extreme right, had halted for the night on that same
+evening of the 26th; for the 1st Corps, being less hard pressed, had
+more leisure for such repose. During the night a messenger was sent to
+this body with orders for the resumption of the march next morning. He
+was taken prisoner, and never reached his goal. The Munsters were
+attacked at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>dawn by the German pursuit in greatly superior numbers,
+surrounded and destroyed, as the Gordons of the 2nd Corps had been;
+the unwounded remnant was compelled to surrender.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch58.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 58" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 58.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The whole of Thursday, the 27th, and Friday, the 28th of August, the
+British retreat continued, the 1st Corps following on at the valley of
+the Oise towards La F&egrave;re, while the 2nd Corps to the west passed St.
+Quentin, and made for Noyon, in the neighbourhood of the same river
+farther down; and on the night of that Friday the Expeditionary Force
+was at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>last in line, and in some kind of order, organized for the
+first breathing space possible after so terrible an ordeal.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch59.jpg" width="75%" alt="Sketch 59" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 59.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is clear from the accompanying sketch map that the position the
+British had now reached gave to the whole Allied force a bent contour.
+The French armies to the east lay along line AB, which, had it been
+directly prolonged, would have stretched towards C; but the British
+contingent, which, on account of its extreme position, had suffered
+most heavily, was turned right back on the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>scheme AD, and even so,
+was still in some peril of being outflanked by the German forces along
+the arrow (1) to the west of it. At this moment the French, whose
+fortunes we shall next describe, found it possible to check the fury
+of the pursuit. The drive of the German masses, which had so nearly
+annihilated the British end of the line, was blocked, and the
+remainder of the great retreat followed a more orderly fashion,
+proceeded at a much slower rate, and approached that term at which a
+counter-offensive might be attempted.</p>
+
+<p>The whole process may be compared to the flood of a very rapid tide,
+which, after the first few hours, is seen to relax its speed
+considerably, and to promise in the immediate future an ebb.</p>
+
+<p>In order to appreciate how this was, let us next consider what the
+larger French forces to the east of the British had been doing. There
+are no details available, very few published records, and it will not
+be possible until an official history of the war appears to give more
+than the most general sketch of the French movements in this retreat;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>but the largest lines are sufficient for our judgment of the result.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that what I have called "the operative corner"
+of the Allied army had stood in the angle between the Sambre and the
+Meuse. It had consisted in the British contingent upon the left, or
+west, in front of Mons; the 5th French Army, composed of three army
+corps, under Lanrezac, to the east of it, along the Sambre, past
+Charleroi; and the 4th French Army, also of three army corps, under
+Langle, along the Middle Meuse, being in general disposition what we
+have upon the accompanying sketch. It had been attacked upon Saturday,
+the 22nd August, by seventeen German army corps&mdash;that is, by forces
+double its own. On that same day Namur, at the corner, had fallen into
+complete possession of the Germans, the French retreat had begun, and
+on the following day the English force had, after the regrettable
+delay of half a day, also begun its retirement.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen that the British retirement (following the dotted lines
+upon Sketch 60) had reached, upon the Friday night, the position from
+Noyon to La <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>F&egrave;re, marked also in dots upon the sketch.</p>
+
+<p>What had happened meanwhile to their French colleagues upon the east?</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch60.jpg" width="70%" alt="Sketch 60" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 60.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The first thing to note is that the fortress of Maubeuge, with its
+garrison of reserve and second line men, had, of course, been at once
+invested by the Germans when the British and French line had fallen
+behind it and left it isolated. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>imperfection of this fortress I
+have already described, and the causes of that imperfection. Maubeuge
+commanded the great railway line leading from Belgium to Paris, which
+is the main avenue of supply for an invasion or for a retreat, running
+north-east to south-west on the Belgian frontier upon the capital.</p>
+
+<p>The 5th French Army retired parallel to the British along the belt
+marked in Sketch Map 60 by diagonal lines. At first, as its retirement
+had begun earlier, it was behind, or to the south of, the British, who
+were thus left almost unsupported. It lay, for instance, on Monday,
+the 24th, much along the position 1, at which moment the British Army
+was lying along the position 2. That was the day on which the Germans
+attempted to drive the British into Maubeuge.</p>
+
+<p>But during the succeeding two days the French 5th Army (to which the
+five corps, including the Prussian Guard, under Buelow, were opposed)
+held the enemy fairly well. They were losing, of course, heavily in
+stragglers, in abandoned wounded, and in guns; but their retreat was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>sufficiently strongly organized to keep this section of the line well
+bent up northwards, and just before the British halted for their first
+breathing space along the line La F&egrave;re and Noyon, the French 5th Army
+attempted, and succeeded in, a sharp local attack against the superior
+forces that were pursuing them. This local attack was undertaken from
+about the position marked 3 on Sketch 60, and was directed against
+Guise. It was undertaken by the 1st and 3rd French Corps, under
+General Maunoury. He, acting under Lanrezac, gave such a blow to the
+Prussian Guard that he here bent the Prussian line right in.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the 4th French Army, which had also been retiring rapidly
+parallel to the 5th French Army, lay in line with it to the east along
+that continuation of 3 which I have marked with a 4 upon the sketch.
+Farther east the French armies, linking up the operative corner with
+the Alsace-Lorraine frontier, had also been driven back from the Upper
+Meuse, and upon Friday, the 28th of August, when the British halt had
+come between La F&egrave;re and Noyon (a line largely protected by the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>Oise), the whole disposition of the Allied forces between the
+neighbourhood of Verdun and Noyon was much what is laid down in the
+accompanying sketch. At A were the British; at B the successful
+counter-offensive of the French 5th Army had checked and bent back the
+Prussian centre under von Buelow; at C, the last section of what had
+been the old operative corner, the army under Langle was thrust back
+to the position here shown, and pressed there by the Wurtembergers and
+the Saxons opposed to it. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>Meanwhile further French forces, D and E,
+had also been driven back from the Upper Meuse, and were retiring with
+Verdun as a pivot, leaving isolated the little frontier town of
+Longwy. This was not seriously fortified, had held out with only
+infantry work and small pieces, and had not been thought worthy of
+attack by a siege train. It surrendered to the Crown Prince upon
+Friday, 28th August.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch61.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 61" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 61.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch62.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 62" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 62.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>On that date, then, the two opposing lines might be compared, the one
+to a great encircling arm AA, the elbow of which was bent at Guise,
+the other to a power BB which had struck into the hollow of the elbow,
+and might expect, with further success, to bend the arm so much more
+at that point as to embarrass its general sweep.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>Those who saw the position as a whole on this Friday, the 28th of
+August, wondered whether or not the French Commander-in-chief would
+order the continuation of the successful local attack at Guise, and so
+attempt to break the whole German line. He did not give this order,
+and his reasons for retiring in the face of such an opportunity may be
+briefly stated thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>1. The French forces in line from Verdun to La F&egrave;re, and continued by
+the British contingent to the neighbourhood of Noyon, were still
+gravely inferior to the German forces opposed to them. Even,
+therefore, if the French success at Guise had been pushed farther, and
+had actually broken the German line, either half of the French line
+upon either side of the forward angle would have been heavily
+outnumbered by the two limbs of the enemy opposed to each, and that
+enemy might perfectly well have defeated, though separated, each
+portion of the force opposed to it.</p>
+
+<p>2. To the west, at the position FF on Sketch 62, were acting large
+bodies of the enemy, which had swept, almost <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>without meeting
+resistance, through Arras to Amiens. Against that advance there was
+nothing but small garrisons of French Territorials, which were brushed
+aside without difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>Now these bodies, though they were mainly of cavalry which were
+operating thus to the west, had already cut the main line of
+communications from Boulogne, upon which the British had hitherto
+depended, and were close enough to the Allied left flank to threaten
+it with envelopment, or, rather, to come up in aid of von Kluck at A,
+and make certain what he already could regard as probable&mdash;his power
+to get round the British, and turn the whole left of the Allied line.</p>
+
+<p>3. More important even than these two first conclusive considerations
+was the fact that the French Commander-in-chief, had he proposed to
+follow up this success of his subordinate at Guise, would have had to
+change the whole of his general plan, and to waste, or at best to
+delay, the action of his chief factor in that plan. This chief factor
+was the great man&oelig;uvring mass behind the French line which had not
+yet come into play, and the advent of which, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>at a chosen moment, was
+the very soul of the French strategy.</p>
+
+<p>It is so essential to the comprehension of the campaign to seize this
+last point that, at the risk of repetition, I will restate for the
+reader the main elements of that strategy.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch63.jpg" width="70%" alt="Sketch 63" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 63.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I have called it in the earlier pages of this book "the open strategic
+square," and I have shown how this theoretical arrangement was in
+practice complicated <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>and modified so that it came to mean, under the
+existing circumstances of the campaign, the deliberate thrusting forth
+of the fraction called "the operative corner," behind which larger
+masses, "the mass of man&oelig;uvre," were to come up in aid and assume
+the general counter-offensive when the operative corner should have
+drawn the enemy down to that position in which such a general
+counter-offensive would be most efficacious.</p>
+
+<p>To concentrate the great mass of man&oelig;uvre was a business of some
+days, and having ordered its concentration in one district, it would
+be impossible to change the plan at a moment's notice. The district
+into which a great part of this mass of man&oelig;uvre had been
+concentrated&mdash;or, rather, was in course of concentration at this
+moment, the 28th August&mdash;was the district behind and in the
+neighbourhood of Paris. It lay far from the scene of operation at
+Guise. It was intended to come into play only when the general retreat
+should have reached a line stretching from Verdun to the neighbourhood
+of Paris itself. To have pursued the success at Guise, therefore,
+would have been to waste <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>all this great concentration of the mass of
+man&oelig;uvre which lay some days behind the existing line, and in
+particular to waste the large body which was being gathered behind and
+in the neighbourhood of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>With these three main considerations in mind, and in particular the
+third, which was far the most important, General Joffre determined to
+give up the advantage obtained at Guise, to order the two successful
+army corps under Maunoury, who had knocked the Prussian Guard at that
+point, to retire, and to continue the general retreat until the Allied
+line should be evenly stretched from Paris to Verdun. The whole
+situation may be put in a diagram as follows: You have the Allied line
+in an angle, ABC. You have opposed to it the much larger German forces
+in a corresponding angle, DEF. Farther east you have a continuation of
+the French line, more or less immovable, on the fortified frontier of
+Alsace-Lorraine at M, opposed by a greater immovable German force at
+N. At P you have coming up as far as Amiens large German bodies
+operating in the west, and at Q a small newly-formed French body, the
+6th French <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>Army, supporting the exposed flank of the British
+contingent at A, near Noyon. Meanwhile you have directed towards S,
+behind Paris, and coming up at sundry other points, a concentration of
+the mass of man&oelig;uvre.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch64.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 64" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 64.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is evident that if the French offensive at B which has successfully
+pushed in the German elbow at E round Guise is still sent forward, and
+even succeeds in breaking the German line at E, "the elbow," the two
+limbs into which the Germans will be divided, DE and EF, are each
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>superior in number to the forces opposed to them, and that DE in
+particular, with the help of P, may very probably turn AB and its new
+small supporter at Q, roll it up, and begin a decisive victory, while
+the other large German force, EF, may press back or pierce the smaller
+opposed French force, BC.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile you would not only be risking this peril, but you would also
+be wasting your great mass of man&oelig;uvre, SS, which is still in
+process of concentration, most of it behind Paris, and which could not
+possibly come into play in useful time at E.</p>
+
+<p>It is far better to pursue the original plan to continue the retreat
+as far as the dotted line from Paris to Verdun, where you will have
+the whole German force at its farthest limit of effort and
+corresponding exhaustion, and where you will have, after the salutary
+delay of the few intervening days, your large mass of man&oelig;uvre, SS,
+close by to Paris and ready to strike.</p>
+
+<p>From such a diagram we see the wisdom of the decision that was taken
+to continue the retirement, and the fruits which that decision was to
+bear.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>The whole episode is most eminently characteristic of the French
+military temper, which has throughout the whole of French history
+played this kind of game, and invariably been successful when it has
+attained success from a concentration of energy upon purely military
+objects and a sacrificing of every domestic consideration to the
+single object of victory in foreign war.</p>
+
+<p>It is an almost invariable rule in French history that when the
+military temper of the nation is allowed free play its success is
+assured, and that only when the cross-current of a political object
+disturbs this temper do the French fail, as they failed in 1870, as
+they failed in 1812, or as they failed in the Italian expeditions of
+the Renaissance. By geographical accident, coupled with the
+conditions, economic and other, to which their aggression gives rise,
+the French are nearly always numerically inferior at the beginning of
+a campaign. They have almost invariably begun their great wars with
+defeats and retirements. They have only succeeded when a patient,
+tenacious, and consistently military policy has given them the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>requisite delay to achieve a defensive-offensive plan. It was so
+against Otto the Second a thousand years ago; it was so in the wars of
+the Revolution; it was so in this enormous campaign of 1914. There is
+in their two thousand years of constant fighting one great and
+salutary exception to the rule&mdash;their failure against C&aelig;sar; from
+which failure they date the strength of their Roman tradition&mdash;still
+vigorous.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 5%;' />
+
+<p>The minor fortified posts lying behind the French line were not
+defended. Upon 29th August the French centre fell back behind Rethel,
+the Germans crossed the Aisne, occupied Rheims and Ch&acirc;lons, while the
+British contingent on the left and the French 6th Army now protecting
+its flank continued also to fall back towards Paris. And on Sedan day,
+2nd September, we may regard the great movement as having reached its
+end.</p>
+
+<p>The German advance had nowhere hesitated, save at Guise, and the
+French retirement after their success at Guise can only have seemed to
+the German commanders a further French defeat. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>Those commanders knew
+their overwhelming numerical superiority against the total of the
+Allied forces&mdash;a superiority of some 60 per cent. They may have
+guessed that the French were keeping a considerable reserve; but in
+their imagination that reserve was thought far less than it really
+was, for they could hardly believe that under the strain of the great
+retreat the French commanders would have had the implacable fortitude
+which permitted them to spare for further effort the reinforcements of
+which the retiring army seemed in vital and even in despairing need.</p>
+
+<p>Upon this anniversary of Sedan day it cannot but have appeared to the
+Great General Staff of the enemy that the purpose of their great
+effort in the West was already achieved.</p>
+
+<p>They had reached the gates of Paris. They had, indeed, not yet
+destroyed the enemy's main army in the field, but they had swept up
+garrison after garrison; they had captured, perhaps, 150,000 wounded
+and unwounded men; their progress had been that of a whirlwind, and
+had been marked by a bewildering <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>series of incessant victories. They
+were now in such a situation that either they could proceed to the
+reduction of the forts outside Paris (to which their experience of
+their hitherto immediate reduction of every other permanent work left
+them contemptuous), or they could proceed to break at will the
+insufficient line opposed to them.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch65.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 65" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 65.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>They stood, on this anniversary of Sedan, in the general situation
+apparent on the accompanying sketch. The 6th <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>French Army was forced
+back right upon the outer works of Paris; the British contingent, to
+its right, lay now beyond the Marne; the 5th French Army, to its right
+again, close along the Seine; the 4th and 3rd continuing the great bow
+up to the neighbourhood of Verdun, three-quarters of the way round
+which fortress the Crown Prince had now encircled; and in front of
+this bent line, in numbers quite double its effectives, pressed the
+great German front over 150 miles of French ground. Upon the left or
+west of the Allies&mdash;the German right&mdash;stood the main army of von
+Kluck, the 1st, with its supporters to the north and west, that had
+already pressed through Amiens. Immediately to the east of this, von
+Buelow, with the 2nd Army, continued the line. The Saxons and the
+Wurtembergers, a 3rd Army, pressed at the lowest point of the curve in
+occupation of Vitry. To the east, again, beyond and in the Argonne,
+the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia was upon the point of reducing
+Verdun, the permanent works of which fortress had already suffered the
+first days of that bombardment from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>the new German siege train which
+had hitherto at every experiment completely destroyed the defence in a
+few hours. If we take for the terminal of this first chapter in the
+Great War the morning of 4th September, we may perceive how nearly the
+enemy had achieved his object, to which there now stood as a threat
+nothing more but the French reserves, unexpected in magnitude, though
+their presence was already discovered, which had for the most part
+been gathered in the neighbourhood of and behind the fortified zone of
+Paris.</p>
+
+<p>With this position, of what it meant in immediate alternatives to the
+enemy, I will deal a few pages on at the close of this book, when I
+will also consider in one conspectus on the map the whole of that ten
+days' sweep down from the north, and summarize its effect upon the
+Allied attitude towards the next phase of the war.</p>
+
+<p>But to understand a campaign, one must seize not only the
+topographical positions of troops, nor only their number: one must
+also gauge the temper of their commanders and of the political opinion
+at home behind them, for upon this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>moral factor everything ultimately
+depends. The men that fight are living men, and the motive power is
+the soul.</p>
+
+<p>It is, therefore, necessary for the reader to appreciate at this
+terminal date, September 2-4, the moral strength of the enemy, and to
+comprehend in what mood of confidence the Germans now lay. With this
+object we must add to the story of the advance on Paris the subsidiary
+events which had accompanied that great sweep into the West. We must
+turn to the "holding up of Russia" upon the East by the Austrian
+forces, and see how the partial failure of this effort (news of which
+was just reaching the Western armies) was quite eclipsed by the
+splendid tidings of Tannenberg. We must see with German eyes the
+secondary but brilliant victory in front of Metz; we must stand in
+their shoes to feel as they did the clearing of Alsace, and to
+comprehend with what contempt they must have watched the false picture
+of the war which the governments and the press of the Allies,
+particularly in Britain, presented to public opinion in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>their doomed
+territories; and we must, in general, grasp the now apocalyptic temper
+of the nervous, over-strained industrialized population which is the
+tissue of modern Germany.</p>
+
+<p>Not until we have a good general aspect of that mood can we understand
+either the war at this turning-point in its fortunes, or the future
+developments which will be traced in the succeeding volumes of this
+series.</p>
+
+<p>I will, therefore, now turn to the three main elements productive of
+that mood in their historical order: the Battle of Metz, the Austrian
+operations against Russia, and, lastly, the great victory of
+Tannenberg in East Prussia, before concluding this volume with a
+summary of the whole situation in those first days of September, just
+before the tide turned.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_III_1" id="PART_III_1"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">The Battle of Metz.</h4>
+
+<p>The Battle of Metz, though quite subsidiary to the general operations
+of the war, and upon a scale which later operations have dwarfed, will
+be mentioned with special emphasis in any just account <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>of the great
+war on account of its moral significance.</p>
+
+<p>It took place before the main shock of the armies; it had no decisive
+effect upon the future of the campaign; but it was of the very highest
+weight, informing the German mind, and leading it into that attitude
+of violent exaltation on which I shall later insist in these pages,
+and which largely determined all the first months of the war, with
+their enormous consequences for the future. For the action in front of
+Metz was the first pitched battle fought in Western Europe during our
+generation, and to an unexpected degree it fulfilled in its narrow
+area all the dreams upon which military Germany had been nourished for
+forty years. It thrilled the whole nation with the news, at the very
+outset of hostilities, of a sharp and glorious victory; it seemed a
+presage of far more to come. The Battle of Metz was the limited
+foundation upon which was rapidly erected that triumphant mood that
+lasted long after the tide had turned, and that matured, when bad
+blundering had lost the victory in the West, into the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>unsoldierly,
+muddled hope that could fail to win, and yet somehow not lose, a
+campaign.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen that the disposition of the French armies at the moment
+when the shock was being delivered through Belgium involved along the
+frontiers of Alsace-Lorraine the presence of considerable forces.
+These, once the operative corner had taken the shock, formed part of
+the mass of man&oelig;uvre, and were destined in large part to swing up
+in aid of the men retreating from the Sambre.</p>
+
+<p>But in the very first days of the war, before the main blow had
+fallen, and when the French General Staff were still in doubt as to
+precisely where the blow <i>would</i> fall, considerable bodies had been
+operating in Alsace and over the Lorraine frontier. The whole range of
+the Vosges was carried in the second week after the British
+declaration of war&mdash;that is, between 10th August and 15th August.
+Mulhouse was occupied; upon Monday, the 17th of August, Saarburg, the
+most important railway junction between Strassburg and Metz, was in
+French hands. Up to that date, though such <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>comparatively small forces
+were involved, the French had possessed a very decisive numerical
+superiority. It was not destined to last, for there was moving down
+from the north the now mobilized strength of Germany in this region;
+and a blow <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>struck against the French left, with no less than four
+army corps, was speedily to decide the issue upon this subsidiary
+front.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch66.jpg" width="60%" alt="Sketch 66" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 66.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This great force was based upon Metz, from which fortress the action
+will presumably take its name in history. It stretched upon the 20th
+of August from the north of Pont-&agrave;-Mousson to beyond Ch&acirc;teau Salins.
+Before this overwhelming advance the French left rapidly retired. It
+did not retire quickly enough, and one portion of the French force&mdash;it
+is believed the 15th Division (that is, the first division of the 15th
+Army Corps)&mdash;failed in its task of supporting the shock.</p>
+
+<p>Details of the action are wholly lacking. We depend even for what may
+be said at this date upon little more than rumour. The Germans claimed
+a capture of ten batteries and of the equivalent of as many
+battalions, and many colours. Upon the 21st the whole French left fell
+back, carrying with them as a necessary consequence the centre in the
+Vosges Mountains and the right upon the plains of Alsace. So rapid was
+the retreat that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>upon the 22nd of August the Bavarians were at
+Lun&eacute;ville, and marching on Nancy; the extreme right of the German line
+had come within range of the forts north of Toul; and in those same
+hours during which, on that same Saturday, the 22nd of August, the 5th
+French Army in the north fell back at the news of Namur and lost the
+Sambre, those forces on the borders of Alsace-Lorraine had lost all
+the first advantages of their thrust into the lost provinces, had
+suffered defeat in the first striking action of the war, and had put
+Nancy in peril.</p>
+
+<p>Nancy itself was saved. The French counter-offensive was organized on
+the 23rd of August, at a moment when the German line lay from St. Di&eacute;
+northwards and westwards up to positions just in front of Nancy. It
+was delivered about a week later. That counter-offensive which
+ultimately saved Nancy belongs to the next volume, for it did not
+develop its strength until after Sedan Day, and after the end of the
+great sweep on Paris.</p>
+
+<p>The situation, then, in this field (the very names of which have such
+great moral effects upon the French and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>German minds) was, by the
+2nd of September, as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The French had suffered in the first considerable action of the war a
+disaster. They had lost their foothold in the annexed provinces. They
+had put the capital of French Lorraine, Nancy, in instant peril. They
+had fallen back from the Vosges. They were beginning, with grave
+doubts of its success, a counter-offensive, to keep the enemy, if
+possible, from entering Nancy. They had lost thousands of men, many
+colours, and scores of guns, and all Germany was full of the news.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_III_2" id="PART_III_2"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">Lemberg.</h4>
+
+<p>The foundation of the Germanic plan upon the Eastern front at the
+origin of the war was, as we have said, the holding up of Russia
+during her necessarily slow mobilization, while the decisive stroke
+was delivered in the West.</p>
+
+<p>That is the largest view of the matter.</p>
+
+<p>In more detail, we know that the main part of this task was entrusted
+to the Austro-Hungarian forces. The German forces had indeed entered
+and occupied <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>the west fringe of Russian Poland, seizing the small
+industrial belt which lies immediately east of Silesia, and the two
+towns of Czestochowa and Kalish&mdash;the latter, in the very centre of the
+bend of the frontier, because it was a big railway depot, and, as it
+were, a gage of invasion; the former, both because the holding of one
+line demanded it (if Kalish and the industrial portion were held), and
+because <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>Czestochowa being the principal shrine of the Poles, some
+strange notion may have passed through the German mind that the
+presence therein of Prussian officers would cajole the Poles into an
+action against Russia. If this were part of the motive (and probably
+it was), it would be a parallel to many another irony in the present
+campaign and its preliminaries, proceeding from the incapacity of the
+enemy to gauge the subtler and more profound forces of a civilization
+to which it is a stranger.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch67.jpg" width="70%" alt="Sketch 67" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 67.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This local German move was almost entirely political. The main task,
+as I have said, was left to the Austrians farther south; and,
+proceeding to further detail, we must see the Austrians stretched in a
+line from near the middle Carpathians past the neighbourhood of
+Tomasow towards Tarnow, and this line distinctly divided into two
+armies, a northern and a southern. The two met in an angle in front of
+the great fortress of Przemysl. The northern, or first, army faced, as
+will be seen, directly towards the Russian frontier. It was the
+operative wing; upon its immediate action and on the rapidity of the
+blow it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>was to deliver depended the success of this first chapter in
+the Eastern war.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch68.jpg" width="70%" alt="Sketch 68" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 68.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The southern, or second, army, which stretched all along the Galician
+plain at the foot of the Carpathians to the town of Halicz, had for
+its mission the protection of the first army from the south. It was
+known, or expected, that the first army would advance right into
+Russian <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>Poland, with but inferior forces in front of it. It was
+feared, however, that the main Russian concentration to the south-east
+of it might turn its right flank. The business of the second army was
+to prevent this. The first army (I), being the operative body, was
+more homogeneous in race, more picked in material than the second
+(II), the latter containing many elements from the southern parts of
+the empire, including perhaps not a few disaffected contingents, such
+as certain regiments of Italian origin from the Adriatic border.</p>
+
+<p>So far as we can judge, perhaps&mdash;and it is a very rough estimate&mdash;we
+may put the whole body which Austria-Hungary was thus moving in the
+first phase of the war beyond the Carpathians at more than 750,000,
+but less than 1,000,000 men. Call the mass 800,000, and one would not
+be far wrong. Of this mass quite a quarter lay in reserve near the
+mountains behind the first army. The remaining three-quarters, or
+600,000 men, were fairly evenly divided between the two groups of the
+first and of the second army&mdash;the first, or northern, one being under
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>command of Dankl, the second under that of von Auffenberg. Each
+of these forces was based upon one group of depots of particular
+importance, the northern operative army (I) relying upon Przemysl, and
+the southern one (II) upon Lemberg.</p>
+
+<p>It was less than a week after the first German advance bodies had
+taken the outer forts of Li&eacute;ge when Dankl crossed the frontier,
+heading, with his centre, towards Krosnik and farther towards Lublin.
+His troops were in Russian territory upon the Monday evening or the
+Tuesday, 10th-11th August.</p>
+
+<p>The second army meanwhile stood fulfilling its r&ocirc;le of awaiting and
+containing any Russians that might strike in upon the south. It had
+advanced no more than watching bodies towards the frontier, such as
+the 35th Regiment of the Austrian Landwehr, which occupied Sokal, and
+smaller units cordonned out southward between that town and Brody.
+Here, at the outset of the large operations that were to follow, it is
+important for the reader to note that everything depended upon the
+resisting power of the second, or southern, army.</p>
+
+<p>Observe the problem. Two men, a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>left-hand man and a right-hand man,
+go out to engage two other men whom they hope and believe to be
+unready. The left-hand man is particularly confident of being able to
+drive back his opponent, but he knows that sooner or later upon his
+right the second enemy, a stronger man, may come in and disturb his
+action. He says therefore to his right-hand companion: "Stand firm and
+engage and contain the energy of your opponent until I have finished
+with mine. When I have done that, I shall turn round towards you, and
+between us we will finish the second man."</p>
+
+<p>Seeing the paucity of Russian communications, and the physical
+necessity under which the Russians were, on account of the position of
+their depots and centres of mobilization, of first putting the mass of
+their men on the south, the physical impossibility under which they
+lay of putting the mass of their men in the north for the moment, the
+plan was a sound one; <i>but</i> its success depended entirely upon the
+tenacity of the second Austrian army, which would have to meet large,
+and might have to meet superior, numbers.</p>
+
+<p>The first army went forward with very <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>little loss and against very
+little resistance. The Russian forces which were against it, which we
+may call the first Russian army, were inferior in number, and fell
+back, though not rapidly, towards the Bug. It relied to some extent in
+this movement upon the protection afforded by the forts of Zamosc, but
+it was never in any serious danger until, or unless, things went wrong
+in the south. The Austrians remained in contact (but no more), turned
+somewhat eastward in order to keep hold of the foe, when their advance
+was checked by the news, first of unexpected Russian strength, later
+of overwhelming Russian advances towards the south. Long before the
+third week in August, the first Austrian army was compelled to check
+its advance upon the news reaching it from the second, and its
+fortunes, in what it had intended to be a successful invasion of
+Russian Poland, had ended. For the whole meaning of the first Galician
+campaign turns after the 14th of August upon the great Russian advance
+in the south.</p>
+
+<p>It was upon that day, August 14, that the Russian force, under General
+Russky (which we will call the second army), <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>crossed the frontier.
+Its right occupied Sokal, its centre left moved in line with the right
+upon von Auffenberg's force directly before it.</p>
+
+<p>The Russian mobilization had proceeded at a greater pace than the
+enemy had allowed for. The Russian numbers expected in this field
+appeared in far greater strength than this expectation had allowed
+for, and it was soon apparent that von Auffenberg's command would have
+to resist very heavy pressure.</p>
+
+<p>But it would be an error to imagine, as was too hastily concluded in
+the press of Western Europe at the time, that this pressure upon the
+front of the second Austrian army, with its dogged day after day
+fighting and mile by mile advance, was the principal deciding factor
+in the issue. That deciding factor was, in fact, the appearance upon
+the right flank of von Auffenberg of yet another Russian army (which
+we will call the third) under Brussilov. It was the menace of this
+force, unexpected, or at least unexpected in its great strength, which
+really determined the issue, though this was again affected by the
+tardiness of the Austrian <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>retirement. Russky's direct advance upon
+the front of his enemy extended for a week. It had begun when it had
+destroyed the frontier posts upon Friday, the 14th. It was continued
+until the evening of the succeeding Thursday, regularly, slowly, but
+without intermission. It stood upon the Friday, the 21st&mdash;the day on
+which the first shots were fired at the main Franco-British forces in
+the West, and the day on which the first shell fell into Charleroi
+station&mdash;not more than one day's cavalry advance from the outer works
+of Lemberg, but it was just in that week-end that the pressure of
+Brussilov began to be felt.</p>
+
+<p>This third Russian army had come up from the south-east, supplied by
+the main Odessa railway through Tarnopol. It was manifestly
+threatening the right flank of von Auffenberg, and if a guess may be
+hazarded upon operations on which we have so little detail as yet, and
+which took place so far from our own standpoint, the error of the
+Austrian general seems to have consisted in believing that he could
+maintain himself against this flank attack. If this were the case (and
+it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>is the most probable explanation of what followed), the error
+would have been due to the same cause which affected all Austrian
+plans in these first days of the war&mdash;the mistake as to the rapidity
+with which Russia would complete her preparations.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch69.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 69" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 69.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>Sunday, 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 its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>commander 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.</p>
+
+<p>To this great series of actions, which history will probably know by
+the name of Lemberg, we will now turn.</p>
+
+<p>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 that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>it 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&mdash;that is, its necessary weakness in quality&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch70.jpg" width="65%" alt="Sketch 70" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 70.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was on Friday, the 28th of that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>month, 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 such <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>considerable personal superiority over their opponents.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The action for Lemberg itself opened, by a curious coincidence, the
+campaign <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>which 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;that is, to the east of the great town&mdash;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 than <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>once in the first phases of the war, and must, in
+the nature of things, occur over and over again before the end of it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A great <i>modern</i> town, 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 and <i>machinery</i> for 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 fall <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>behind a position of such political
+and material value, and to let it fall to his opponent.</p>
+
+<p>But, on the other hand, such a position is as bad in strategical value
+as it is good in material and political value.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>see. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch71.jpg" width="85%" alt="Sketch 71" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 71.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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
+show <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>for 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 its <i>moral</i> intact, 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 fallen <i>as
+prisoners</i> into 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.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_III_3" id="PART_III_3"></a><br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>
+<h4 class="sc">Tannenberg.</h4>
+
+<p>The province of East Prussia is of a character peculiar in the German
+Empire and in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch72.jpg" width="60%" alt="Sketch 72" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 72.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>Christendom. 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 within <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>the 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, of <i>Borussia</i>
+(whence our word Prussia is derived)&mdash;roughly from the Vistula up on
+to the Bight of Libau&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>That lake country well merits a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>particular 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"&mdash;that is, the
+frontier march&mdash;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. Its
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>country-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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 large <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span>German-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.</p>
+
+<p>It was to be expected, therefore, that two strategical consequences
+would flow from these non-strategical conditions: first, that the
+Russians would be tempted&mdash;though, no doubt, in very small force for
+such a secondary operation&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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, would <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>certainly be
+drawn to move into East Prussia in spite of the known and peculiarly
+heavy difficulties to an advance which that province presented.</p>
+
+<p>What were those difficulties?</p>
+
+<p>They were of two kinds, the second of which has been, perhaps, unduly
+emphasized at the expense of the first.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>Next to this extreme position, which was the first handicap, comes the
+region of the lakes, the nature of which was the second handicap.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The military character of such a region <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span>will be clear. It is, in the
+technical language of military art, a labyrinth of <i>defiles</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>retreat&mdash;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&mdash;the two types of soil hardly
+distinguishable.</p>
+
+<p>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 similarly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span>confined to the only possible issues;
+but let the retreat be confused, and disaster at once threatens.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The first phase of the business lasts until the 24th of August,
+beginning with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>the 7th of that month, and may be very briefly dealt
+with.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 K&ouml;nigsberg, lost
+masses of munitions and guns, and were shut up in that fortress. The
+defeat at Gumbinnen occupied four days&mdash;from the 16th to the 20th of
+August.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the Russian army which was advancing from the Narew had
+struck a single German army corps&mdash;the 20th&mdash;in the neighbourhood of
+Frankenau. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span>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 K&ouml;nigsberg, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The nature of this victory may be grasped from the accompanying sketch
+map.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span>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&mdash;one from the east, one going west to Niedenberg and the
+junction of Ortelsberg, a third coming in from the north-east and
+Eylau.</p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch73.jpg" width="70%" alt="Sketch 73" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 73.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>From Eylau, through Osterode, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span>main international line runs
+through Allenstein, and so on eastward, while a branch from this goes
+through Passenheim to the junction at Ortelsberg.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, you have a quadrilateral of railways about fifty miles in
+length. Within that quadrilateral is extremely bad country&mdash;lakes,
+marshes, and swamps&mdash;and the only good roads within it are those
+marked in single lines upon my sketch&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>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 was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>imperfect, 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 K&ouml;nigsberg, 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&mdash;heavy
+artillery, and big howitzers capable of use in the field.</p>
+
+<p>On Wednesday, 26th August, Samsonoff first discovered that he had a
+formidable force in front of him.</p>
+
+<p>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 the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span>defensive, 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 arrow <i>a</i> was to give the
+Russian line by the evening of that Wednesday, the 26th of August, the
+form of the line 1 upon Sketch 73.</p>
+
+<p>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
+superiority <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span>in 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 arrow <i>b</i>. 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 arrow <i>c</i>, which bent it
+farther and farther in.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the triangle Passenheim-Ortelsberg-Niedenberg&mdash;and his
+main avenue of escape was a defile between the lake which the railway
+at Ortelsberg uses.</p>
+
+<p>His retirement became hopelessly congested. Further pressure along the
+arrow <i>d</i>, during the 30th and 31st, broke that retirement into two
+halves, one half (as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span>at 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.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the victory of Tannenberg&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The news of that great triumph reached <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span>Berlin 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.</p>
+
+<a name="PART_III_4" id="PART_III_4"></a><br />
+<br />
+<h4 class="sc">The Spirits in Conflict.</h4>
+
+<p>At this point it is well to pause and consider an element of the
+vastest consequence to the whole conduct of these great campaigns&mdash;I
+mean the element of German confidence.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 physical <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span>self-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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>These, from what would seem every quarter of the globe, had been
+gathered to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span>oppose 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&mdash;a silence of awe
+and dread, which proclaims him master. It is the anniversary of Sedan.</p>
+
+<p>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 was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span>so
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span>United 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 see <i>things</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>Before leaving this digression, I would <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span>further 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;I mean the French people?</p>
+
+<p>Comprehend the mood of the French, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span>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&mdash;all that we call the ancient
+civilization of Europe&mdash;and the unstable, quickly growing, quickly
+dissolving outer mass which continually learns its lesson from the
+civilized man, and yet can never perfectly learn that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span>lesson; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>understand even during the course of the
+war its tendency and its probable end.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span>barrier fortresses of the
+Meuse, Li&eacute;ge 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>No such strain has yet been endured, so concentrated, so exact an
+image of doom.</p>
+
+<p>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
+of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span>the 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There was to come&mdash;it was already in the agony of birth&mdash;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. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 15%;"/>
+<br />
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> The ultimatum expired at midnight (August 4-5) by
+Greenwich time, 11 p.m. (August 4) by German, or Central European,
+time.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> AA is holding the obstacle OO against a superior number
+BB. There are six passages across OO. If BB forces No. 5 and No. 6 he
+creates the situation in the following diagram, where it is obvious
+that BB is now on the flank of AA, and that AA must retire, even if he
+still holds passages 1, 2, 3, and 4. That is what happened when Namur
+fell. The French could hold, and were holding, the Germans along the
+Sambre, above Namur; but the bridges of Namur, which were thought safe
+behind the forts, had fallen into German hands.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/sketch44.jpg" width="80%" alt="Sketch 44" /><br />
+<p class="cen" style="margin-top: .2em;">Sketch 44.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<h5>PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.</h5>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A General Sketch of the European War, by 
+Hilaire Belloc
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR ***
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,7032 @@
+Project Gutenberg's A General Sketch of the European War, by Hilaire Belloc
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A General Sketch of the European War
+       The First Phase
+
+Author: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2006 [EBook #18042]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A
+GENERAL SKETCH
+OF THE
+EUROPEAN WAR
+
+BY
+HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+THE FIRST PHASE
+
+
+THOMAS NELSON & COMPANY
+LONDON, EDINBURGH, PARIS, AND NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+_First published June 1, 1915_
+_Reprinted June 1915_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                    7
+
+
+PART I.
+
+THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.
+
+(1) THE GERMAN OBJECT                                          17
+
+(2) CONFLICT PRODUCED BY THE CONTRAST OF THIS GERMAN
+      ATTITUDE OR WILL WITH THE WILLS OF OTHER NATIONS         23
+
+(3) PRUSSIA                                                    27
+
+(4) AUSTRIA                                                    39
+
+(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR                           50
+
+(6) THE IMMEDIATE OCCASION OF THE WAR                          64
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE FORCES OPPOSED.
+
+(1) THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF THE BELLIGERENTS              80
+
+      The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of
+      the Germanic Body                                        86
+
+      The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of
+      the Allies                                              121
+
+(2) THE OPPOSING STRENGTHS                                    136
+
+      The Figures of the First Period, say to
+      October 1-31, 1914                                      145
+
+      The Figures of the Second Period, say to
+      April 15-June 1, 1915                                   151
+
+(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR                           164
+
+
+PART III.
+
+THE FIRST OPERATIONS.
+
+(1) THE BATTLE OF METZ                                        316
+
+(2) LEMBERG                                                   322
+
+(3) TANNENBERG                                                345
+
+(4) THE SPIRITS IN CONFLICT                                   365
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+It is the object of this book, and those which will succeed it in the
+same series, to put before the reader the main lines of the European
+War as it proceeds. Each such part must necessarily be completed and
+issued some little time after the events to which it relates have
+passed into history. The present first, or introductory volume, which
+is a preface to the whole, covers no more than the outbreak of
+hostilities, and is chiefly concerned with an examination of the
+historical causes which produced the conflict, an estimate of the
+comparative strength of the various combatants, and a description of
+the first few days during which these combatants took up their
+positions and suffered the first great shocks of the campaigns in East
+and West.
+
+But in order to serve as an introduction to the remainder of the
+series, it is necessary that the plan upon which these books are to
+be constructed should be clearly explained.
+
+There is no intention of giving in detail and with numerous exact maps
+the progress of the campaigns. Still less does the writer propose to
+examine disputed points of detail, or to enumerate the units employed
+over that vast field. His object is to make clear, as far as he is
+able, those great outlines of the business which too commonly escape
+the general reader.
+
+This war is the largest and the weightiest historical incident which
+Europe has known for many centuries. It will surely determine the
+future of Europe, and in particular the future of this country. Yet
+the comprehension of its movements is difficult to any one not
+acquainted with the technical language and the special study of
+military history; and the reading of the telegrams day by day, even
+though it be accompanied by the criticisms of the military experts in
+the newspapers, leaves the mass of men with a most confused conception
+of what happened and why it happened.
+
+Now, it is possible, by greatly simplifying maps, by further
+simplifying these into clear diagrams, still more by emphasizing what
+is essential and by deliberately omitting a crowd of details--by
+showing first the framework, as it were, of any principal movement,
+and then completing that framework with the necessary furniture of
+analysed record--to give any one a conception both of what happened
+and of how it happened.
+
+It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over which
+the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to the author
+of this), so to describe such ground to the reader that he will in
+some sort be able to see for himself the air and the view in which the
+things were done: thus more than through any other method will the
+things be made real to him. The aim, therefore, of these pages, and of
+those that will succeed them, is to give such a general idea of the
+campaigns as a whole as will permit whoever has grasped it a secure
+comprehension of the forces at work, and of the results of those
+forces. It is desired, for example, that the reader of these pages
+shall be able to say to himself: "The Germanic body expected to
+win--and no wonder, for it had such and such advantages in number and
+in equipment.... The first two battles before Warsaw failed, and I can
+see why. It was because the difficulties in Russian supply were met by
+a contraction of the Russian line.... The 1st German Army was
+compelled to retreat before Paris, and I can now see why that was so:
+as it turned to envelop the Allied line, a great reserve within the
+fortified zone of Paris threatened it, and forced it back."
+
+These main lines, and these only, are attempted in the present book,
+and in those that are to follow it in this series.
+
+The disadvantage of such a method is, of course, that the reader must
+look elsewhere for details, for the notices of a particular action,
+and the records of particular regiments. He must look for these to the
+large histories of the war, which will amply supply his curiosity in
+good time. But the advantage of the method consists in that it
+provides, as I hope, a foundation upon which all this bewildering
+multitude of detailed reading can repose.
+
+I set out, then, to give, as it were, the alphabet of the campaign,
+and I begin in this volume with the preliminaries to it--that is, its
+great political causes, deep rooted in the past; the particular and
+immediate causes which led to the outbreak of war; an estimate of the
+forces engaged; and the inception of hostilities.
+
+
+PLAN OF THIS BOOK.
+
+This first volume will cover three parts. In Part I. I shall write of
+The Causes of the War. In Part II. I shall Contrast the Forces
+Opposed. In Part III. (the briefest) I shall describe the First Shock.
+
+In Part I., where I deal first with the general or historical causes
+of the war, later with the particulars, I shall:--
+
+1. Define the German object which led up to it.
+
+2. Show how this object conflicted with the wills of other nations.
+
+3. Briefly sketch the rise of Prussia and of her domination over North
+Germany.
+
+4. Define the position of Austria-Hungary in the matter, and thus
+close the general clauses.
+
+5. The particular causes of the war will next be dealt with; the
+curious challenge thrown down to Great Britain by the German Fleet
+_before_ the German Empire had made secure its position on the
+Continent; the French advance upon Morocco; the coalition of the
+Balkan States against the remainder of the Turkish Empire in Europe.
+
+6. Lastly, in this First Part, I shall describe the immediate occasion
+of the war and its surroundings: the ultimatum issued by the
+Austro-Hungarian Government to the little kingdom of Servia.
+
+In Part II. I will attempt to present the forces opposed at the
+outbreak of war.
+
+First, the contrast in the geographical position of the Germanic
+Allies with their enemies, the French, the English, and the Russians.
+Secondly, the numbers of trained men prepared and the numbers of
+reserves available in at least the first year to the various numbers
+in conflict. Thirdly, the way in which the various enemies had thought
+of the coming war (which was largely a matter of theory in the lack of
+experience); in what either party has been right, and in what wrong,
+as events proved; and with what measure of foresight the various
+combatants entered the field.
+
+In Part III, I will very briefly describe the original armed
+dispositions for combat at the outbreak of war, the German aim upon
+the West, and the German orders to the Austrians upon the East; the
+overrunning of Belgium, and the German success upon the Sambre; then
+the pursuit of the Franco-British forces to the line Paris-Verdun, up
+to the eve of the successful counter-offensive undertaken by them in
+the first week of September. I will end by describing what were the
+contemporary events in the Eastern field: in its northern part the
+overrunning of East Prussia by the Russians, and the heavy blow which
+the Germans there administered to the invader; in its southern the
+Austrian opposition to the Russians on the Galician borders, and the
+breakdown of that opposition at Lemberg.
+
+My terminal date for this sketch will be the 5th of September.
+
+
+
+
+A GENERAL SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR.
+
+PART I.
+
+THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.
+
+
+War is the attempt of two human groups each to impose its will upon
+the other by force of arms. This definition holds of the most
+righteous war fought in self-defence as much as it does of the most
+iniquitous war of mere aggression. The aggressor, for instance,
+proposes to take the goods of his victim without the pretence of a
+claim. He is attempting to impose his will upon that victim. The
+victim, in resisting by force of arms, is no less attempting to impose
+his will upon the aggressor; and if he is victorious does effectually
+impose that will: for it is his will to prevent the robbery.
+
+Every war, then, arises from some conflict of wills between two human
+groups, each intent upon some political or civic purpose, conflicting
+with that of his opponent.
+
+War and all military action is but a means to a non-military end, to
+be achieved and realized in peace.
+
+Although arguable differences invariably exist as to the right or
+wrong of either party in any war, yet the conflicting wills of the two
+parties, the irreconcilable political objects which each has put
+before itself and the opposition between which has led to conflict,
+can easily be defined.
+
+They fall into two classes:--
+
+1. The general objects at which the combatants have long been aiming.
+
+2. The particular objects apparent just before, and actually
+provoking, the conflict.
+
+In the case of the present enormous series of campaigns, which occupy
+the energies of nearly all Europe, the general causes can be easily
+defined, and that without serious fear of contradiction by the
+partisans of either side.
+
+On the one hand, the Germanic peoples, especially that great majority
+of them now organized as the German Empire under the hegemony of
+Prussia, had for fully a lifetime and more been possessed of a certain
+conception of themselves which may be not unjustly put into the form
+of the following declaration. It is a declaration consonant with most
+that has been written from the German standpoint during more than a
+generation, and many of its phrases are taken directly from the
+principal exponents of the German idea.
+
+
+(I) THE GERMAN OBJECT.
+
+"We the Germans are in spirit one nation. But we are a nation the
+unity of which has been constantly forbidden for centuries by a number
+of accidents. None the less that unity has always been an ideal
+underlying our lives. Once or twice in the remote past it has been
+nearly achieved, especially under the great German emperors of the
+Middle Ages. Whenever it has thus been nearly achieved, we Germans
+have easily proved ourselves the masters of other societies around us.
+Most unfortunately our very strength has proved our ruin time and
+again by leading us into adventures, particularly adventures in
+Italy, which took the place of our national ideal for unity and
+disturbed and swamped it. The reason we have been thus supreme
+whenever we were united or even nearly united lay in the fact, which
+must be patent to every observer, that our mental, moral, and
+physical characteristics render us superior to all rivals. The German
+or Teutonic race can everywhere achieve, other things being equal,
+more than can any other race. Witness the conquest of the Roman Empire
+by German tribes; the political genius, commercial success, and final
+colonial expansion of the English, a Teutonic people; and the peculiar
+strength of the German races resident within their old homes on the
+Rhine, the Danube, the Weser, and the Elbe, whenever they were not
+fatally disunited by domestic quarrel or unwise foreign ideals. It was
+we who revivified the declining society of Roman Gaul, and made it
+into the vigorous mediaeval France that was ruled from the North. It
+was we who made and conquered the heathen Slavs threatening Europe
+from the East, and who civilized them so far as they could be
+civilized. We are, in a word, and that patently not only to ourselves
+but to all others, the superior and leading race of mankind; and you
+have but to contrast us with the unstable Celt--who has never produced
+a State--the corrupt and now hopelessly mongrel Mediterranean or
+'Latin' stock, the barbarous and disorderly Slav, to perceive at once
+the truth of all we say.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 1.]
+
+"It so happens that the various accidents which interrupted our
+strivings for unity permitted other national groups, inferior morally
+and physically to our own, to play a greater part than such an
+inferiority warranted; and the same accidents permitted men of
+Teutonic stock, not inhabiting the ancient homes of the Teutons, but
+emigrated therefrom and politically separated from the German Empire,
+to obtain advantages in which we ourselves should have had a share,
+but which we missed. Thus England, a Teutonic country, obtained her
+vast colonial empire while we had not a ship upon the sea.
+
+"France, a nation then healthier than it is now, but still of much
+baser stock than our own, played for centuries the leading part in
+Western Europe; she is even to-day 'over-capitalized,' as it were,
+possessing a far greater hold over the modern world than her real
+strength warrants. Even the savage Slavs have profited by our former
+disunion, and the Russian autocracy not only rules millions of
+German-speaking subjects, but threatens our frontiers with its great
+numbers of barbarians, and exercises over the Balkan Peninsula, and
+therefore over the all-important position of Constantinople, a power
+very dangerous to European culture as a whole, and particularly to our
+own culture--which is, of course, by far the highest culture of all.
+
+"Some fifty years ago, acting upon the impulse of a group of great
+writers and thinkers, our statesmen at last achieved that German unity
+which had been the unrealized ideal of so many centuries. In a series
+of wars we accomplished that unity, and we amply manifested our
+superiority when we were once united by defeating with the greatest
+ease and in the most fundamental fashion the French, whom the rest of
+Europe then conceived to be the chief military power.
+
+"From that moment we have incontestably stood in the sight of all as
+the strongest people in the world, and yet because other and lesser
+nations had the start of us, our actual international position, our
+foreign possessions, the security that should be due to so supreme an
+achievement, did not correspond to our real strength and abilities.
+England had vast dependencies, and had staked out the unoccupied world
+as her colonies. We had no colonies and no dependencies. France,
+though decadent, was a menace to our peace upon the West. We could
+have achieved the thorough conquest and dismemberment of France at any
+time in the last forty years, and yet during the whole of that time
+France was adding to her foreign possessions in Tunis, Madagascar, and
+Tonkin, latterly in Morocco, while we were obtaining nothing. The
+barbarous Russians were increasing constantly in numbers, and somewhat
+perfecting their insufficient military machine without any
+interference from us, grave as was the menace from them upon our
+Eastern frontier.
+
+"It was evident that such a state of things could not endure. A nation
+so united and so immensely strong could not remain in a position of
+artificial inferiority while lesser nations possessed advantages in no
+way corresponding to their real strength. The whole equilibrium of
+Europe was unstable through this contrast between what Germany might
+be and what she was, and a struggle to make her what she might be
+from what she was could not be avoided.
+
+"Germany must, in fulfilment of a duty to herself, obtain colonial
+possessions at the expense of France, obtain both colonial possessions
+and sea-power at the expense of England, and put an end, by campaigns
+perhaps defensive, but at any rate vigorous, to the menace of Slav
+barbarism upon the East. She was potentially, by her strength and her
+culture, the mistress of the modern world, the chief influence in it,
+and the rightful determinant of its destinies. She must by war pass
+from a potential position of this kind to an actual position of
+domination."
+
+Such was the German mood, such was the fatuous illusion which produced
+this war. It had at its service, as we shall see later, _numbers_,
+and, backed by this superiority of numbers, it counted on victory.
+
+
+(2) CONFLICT PRODUCED BY THE CONTRAST OF THIS GERMAN ATTITUDE OR
+WILL WITH THE WILLS OF OTHER NATIONS.
+
+When we have clearly grasped the German attitude, as it may thus be
+not unfairly expressed, we shall not find it difficult to conceive
+why a conflict between such a will and other wills around it broke
+out.
+
+We need waste no time in proving the absurdity of the German
+assumptions, the bad history they involve, and the perverse and
+twisted perspective so much vanity presupposes. War can never be
+prevented by discovering the moral errors of an opponent. It comes
+into being because that opponent does not believe them to be moral
+errors; and in the attempt to understand this war and its causes, we
+should only confuse ourselves if we lost time over argument upon
+pretensions even as crassly unreal as these.
+
+It must be enough for the purposes of this to accept the German will
+so stated, and to see how it necessarily conflicts with the English
+will, the French will, the Russian will, and sooner or later, for that
+matter, with every other national will in Europe.
+
+In the matter of sea-power England would answer: "Unless we are
+all-powerful at sea, our very existence is imperilled." In the matter
+of her colonies and dependencies England would answer: "We may be a
+Teutonic people or we may not. All that kind of thing is pleasant talk
+for the academies. But if you ask whether we will allow any part of
+our colonies to become German or any part of our great dependencies to
+fall under German rule, the answer is in the negative."
+
+The French would answer: "We do not happen to think that we are either
+decadent or corrupt, nor do we plead guilty to any other of your vague
+and very pedantic charges; but quite apart from that, on the concrete
+point of whether we propose to be subjugated by a foreign Power,
+German or other, the answer is in the negative. Our will is here in
+conflict with yours. And before you can proceed to any act of mastery
+over us, you will have to fight. Moreover, we shall not put aside the
+duty of ultimately fighting you so long as a population of two
+millions, who feel themselves to be French (though most of them are
+German-speaking) and who detest your rule, are arbitrarily kept in
+subjection by you in Alsace-Lorraine."
+
+The Russians would reply: "We cannot help being numerically stronger
+than you, and we do not propose to diminish our numbers even if we
+could. We do not think we are barbaric; and as to our leadership of
+the Slav people in the Balkans, that seems as right and natural to us,
+particularly on religious grounds, as any such bond could be. It may
+interfere with your ambitions; but if you propose that we should
+abandon so obvious an attitude of leadership among the Slavs, the
+answer is in the negative." There is here, therefore, again a conflict
+of wills.
+
+In general, what the German peoples desired, based upon what they
+believed themselves to be, was sharply at issue with what the English
+people, what the French people, what the Russian people respectively
+desired. Their desires were also based upon what _they_ believed
+themselves to be, and they thought themselves to be very different
+from what Germany thought them to be. The English did not believe that
+they had sneaked their empire; the French did not believe that they
+were moribund; the Russians did not believe that they were savages.
+
+It was impossible that the German will should impose itself without
+coming at once into conflict with these other national wills. It was
+impossible that the German ideal should seek to realize itself without
+coming into conflict with the mere desire to live, let alone the
+self-respect, of everybody else.
+
+And the consequence of such a conflict in ideals and wills translated
+into practice was this war.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the war would not have come nor would it have taken the shape that
+it did, but for two other factors in the problem which we must next
+consider. These two other factors are, first, the position and
+tradition of Prussia among the German States; secondly, the peculiar
+authority exercised by the Imperial House of Hapsburg-Lorraine at
+Vienna over its singularly heterogeneous subjects.
+
+
+(3) PRUSSIA.
+
+The Germans have always been, during their long history, a race
+inclined to perpetual division and sub-division, accompanied by war
+and lesser forms of disagreement between the various sections. Their
+friends have called this a love of freedom, their enemies political
+incompetence; but, without giving it a good or a bad name, the plain
+fact has been, century after century, that the various German tribes
+would not coalesce. Any one of them was always willing to take service
+with the Roman Empire, in the early Roman days, against any one of the
+others, and though there have been for short periods more or less
+successful attempts to form one nation of them all in imitation of the
+more civilized States to the west and south, these attempts have never
+succeeded for very long.
+
+But it so happens that about two hundred years ago, or a little more,
+there appeared one body of German-speaking men rather different from
+the rest, and capable ultimately of leading the rest, or at least a
+majority of the rest.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 2.]
+
+I use the words "German-speaking" and "rather different" because this
+particular group of men, though speaking German, were of less pure
+German blood than almost any other of the peoples that spoke that
+tongue. They were the product of a conquest undertaken late in the
+Middle Ages by German knights over a mixed Pagan population,
+Lithuanian and Slavonic, which inhabited the heaths and forests along
+the Baltic Sea. These German knights succeeded in their task, and
+compelled the subject population to accept Christianity, just as the
+Germans themselves had been compelled to accept it by their more
+powerful and civilized neighbours the French hundreds of years before.
+The two populations of this East Baltic district, the large majority
+which was Slavonic and Lithuanian, and the minority which was really
+German, mixed and produced a third thing, which we now know as the
+_Prussian_. The cradle of this Prussian race was, then, all that flat
+country of which Koenigsberg and Danzig are the capitals, but
+especially Koenigsberg--"King's Town"--where the monarchs of this
+remote people were crowned. By an historical accident, which we need
+not consider, the same dynasty was, after it had lost all claim to
+separate kingship, merged in the rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg, a
+somewhat more German but still mixed district lying also in the Baltic
+plain, but more towards the west, and the official title of the
+Prussian ruler somewhat more than two hundred years ago was the
+Elector of Brandenburg. These rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg were a
+family bearing the title of Hohenzollern, a castle in South Germany,
+by which name they are still distinguished. The palace of these
+Hohenzollerns was henceforward at Berlin.
+
+Now, much at the same time that the civil wars were being fought in
+England--that is, not quite three hundred years ago--the Reformation
+had produced in Germany also very violent quarrels. Vienna, which was
+the seat of the Imperial House, stood for the Catholic or traditional
+cause, and most Germans adhered to that cause. But certain of the
+Northern German principalities and counties took up the side of the
+Reformation. A terrible war, known as the Thirty Years' War, was
+fought between the two factions. It enormously reduced the total
+population of Germany. In the absence of exact figures we only have
+wild guesses, such as a loss of half or three-quarters. At any rate,
+both from losses from the adherence of many princes to the Protestant
+cause and from the support lent to that cause for political reasons by
+Catholic France, this great civil war in Germany left the Protestant
+part more nearly equal in numbers to the Catholic part, and, among
+other things, it began to make the Elector of Brandenburg with his
+Prussians particularly prominent as the champion of the Protestant
+cause. For, of all the warring towns, counties, principalities, and
+the rest, Prussia had in particular shown military aptitude.
+
+From that day to this the advance of Prussia as, first, the champion,
+then the leader, and at last the master of Northern Germany as a whole
+(including many Catholic parts in the centre and the south), has been
+consistent and almost uninterrupted. The "Great Elector" (as he was
+called) formed an admirable army some two hundred years ago. His
+grandson Frederick formed a still better one, and by his great
+capacities as a general, as well as by the excellence of his troops,
+gave Prussia a military reputation in the middle of the eighteenth
+century which has occasionally been eclipsed, but has never been
+extinguished.
+
+Frederick the Great did more than this. He codified and gave
+expression, as it were, to the Prussian spirit, and the manifestation
+of that spirit in international affairs is generally called the
+"Frederician Tradition."
+
+This "Frederician Tradition" must be closely noted by the reader,
+because it is the principal moral cause of the present war. It may be
+briefly and honestly put in the following terms:--
+
+"The King of Prussia shall do all that may seem to advantage the
+kingdom of Prussia among the nations, notwithstanding any European
+conventions or any traditions of Christendom, or even any of those
+wider and more general conventions which govern the international
+conduct of other Christian peoples."
+
+For instance, if a convention of international morals has arisen--as
+it did arise very strongly, and was kept until recent times--that
+hostilities should not begin without a formal declaration of war, the
+"Frederician Tradition" would go counter to this, and would say: "If
+ultimately it would be to the advantage of Prussia to attack without
+declaration of war, then this convention may be neglected."
+
+Or, again, treaties solemnly ratified between two Governments are
+generally regarded as binding. And certainly a nation that never kept
+such a treaty for more than a week would find itself in a position
+where it was impossible to make any treaties at all. Still, if upon a
+vague calculation of men's memories, the acuteness of the
+circumstance, the advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to
+the advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a
+treaty should be broken.
+
+It will be apparent that what is called the "Frederician Tradition,"
+which is the soul of Prussia in her international relations, is not an
+unprincipled thing. It has a principle, and that principle is a
+patriotic desire to strengthen Prussia, which particular appetite
+overweighs all general human morals and far outweighs all special
+Christian or European morals.
+
+This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the
+Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or in
+acts of treason and bad faith. What it means is that, wherever they
+are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do _this_, which is to the advantage
+of my country but opposed to European and common morals, or _that_,
+which is consonant with those morals but to the disadvantage of my
+country?" they choose the former and not the latter course.
+
+Prussia, endowed with this doctrine and possessed of a most excellent
+military organization and tradition, stood out as the first military
+power in Europe until the French Revolution. The wars of the French
+Revolution and of Napoleon upset this prestige, and in the battle of
+Jena (1806) seemed to have destroyed it. But it was too strong to be
+destroyed. The Prussian Government was the first of Napoleon's allies
+to betray Napoleon _after_ the Russians had broken his power (1812).
+They took part with the other Allies in finishing off Napoleon after
+the Russian campaign (1813-14); they were present with decisive effect
+upon the final field of Waterloo (1815), and remained for fifty years
+afterwards the great military power they had always been. They had
+further added to their dominions such great areas in Northern
+Germany, beyond the original areas inhabited by the true Prussian
+stock, that they were something like half of the whole Northern German
+people when, in 1864, they entered into the last phase of their
+dominion. They began by asking Austria to help them in taking from
+Denmark, a small and weak country, not only those provinces of hers
+which spoke German, but certain districts which were Danish as well.
+France and England were inclined to interfere, but they did not yet
+understand the menace Prussia might be in the future, and they
+neglected to act. Two years later Prussia suddenly turned upon
+Austria, her ally, defeated her in a very short campaign, and insisted
+upon Austria's relinquishing for the future all claims over any part
+of the German-speaking peoples, save some ten millions in the valley
+of the Middle Danube and of the Upper Elbe. Four years later again, in
+1870, Prussia having arranged, after various political experiments
+which need not be here detailed, for the support of all the German
+States except Austria, fought a war with France, in which she was
+immediately and entirely successful, and in the course of which the
+rulers of the other German States consented (1) to give the
+Hohenzollern-Prussian dynasty supreme military power for the future
+over them, under the hereditary title of German Emperors; (2) to form
+a united nation under the more or less despotic power of these
+emperors.
+
+This latter point, the national unity, though really highly
+centralized at Berlin, especially on the military side, was softened
+in its rigour by a number of very wise provisions. A great measure of
+autonomy was left to the more important of the lesser States,
+particularly Catholic Bavaria; local customs were respected; and,
+above all, local dynasties were flattered, and maintained in all the
+trappings of sovereign rank.
+
+From that date--that is, for the last forty-four years--there has been
+a complete _Northern_ Germany, one strong, centralized, and thoroughly
+co-ordinated nation, in which the original Prussian domination is not
+only numerically far the greatest element, but morally overshadows all
+the rest. The spiritual influence ruling this state issues from Berlin
+and from the Prussian soul, although a large minority consist of
+contented but respectful Catholics, who, in all national matters,
+wholly sympathize with and take their cue from the Protestant North.
+
+So far one may clearly see what kind of power it is that has initiated
+the German theory of supremacy which we have described above, is
+prepared to lead it to battle, and is quite certain of leading it to
+victory.
+
+But we note--the fatal mark in all German history--that the unity is
+not complete. The ten millions of Austrian Germans were, when Prussia
+achieved this her highest ambition, deliberately left outside the new
+German Empire. And this was done because, in Prussian eyes, a
+so-called "German unity" was but a means to an end, and that end the
+aggrandizement of the Hohenzollern dynasty. To include so many
+southern and Catholic Germans would have endangered the mastery of
+Berlin. The fact that Austria ruled a number of non-German subjects
+far larger than her Austrian population would further have endangered
+the Hohenzollern position had Austria been admitted to the new German
+Empire, and had the consolidation of all Germans into one true state
+been really and loyally attempted. Lastly, it would have been
+impossible to destroy the historic claims to leadership of the
+Imperial Hapsburgs, and that, more than anything else, was the rivalry
+the Hohenzollerns dreaded. Once more had the Germans proved themselves
+incapable of, and unwilling to submit to, the discipline of unity.
+What part, then, was Austria, thus left out, to play in the
+international activity of Prussia in the future? What part especially
+was she to play when Prussia, at the head of Northern Germany, should
+go out to impose the will of that Germany and of herself upon the rest
+of the world? That is the next question we must answer before we can
+hope to understand the causes of the present war in their entirety.
+
+
+(4) AUSTRIA.
+
+Austria, or, more strictly speaking, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
+means no more than the congeries of States governed each separately
+and all in combination by the head of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine.
+Of these various States only one is German-speaking as a whole, and
+that is the Austrian State proper, the "Eastern States" (for that is
+what the word "Austria" originally meant) which Christendom erected
+round the Roman and Christian frontier town of Vienna to withstand the
+pressure of the heathen Slavs and Mongol Magyars surging against it
+upon this frontier.
+
+The complexity of the various sections which make up the realm of the
+present Emperor Francis Joseph, the present head of the House of
+Hapsburg-Lorraine, would be only confusing if it were detailed in so
+general a description as this. We must be content with the broad lines
+of the thing, which are as follows:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 3.]
+
+From the Upper Danube and its valley--all the basin of it, one may
+say, down to a point about twenty miles below Vienna--is the original
+Austrian State; German-speaking as a whole, and the historic centre of
+the entire agglomeration. East of this is the far larger state of
+Hungary, and Hungary is the valley of the river Danube, from where the
+German-speaking boundary cuts it, just below Vienna down to the Iron
+Gates, up to the crest of the Carpathians. These two great units of
+Austria proper and of Hungary have round them certain frills or edges.
+On the north are two great bodies, Slav in origin, Bohemia and
+Galicia; on the south another Slav body, separated from the rest for
+centuries by the eruption of the Magyars from Asia in the Dark Ages,
+and these Slav bodies are represented by Croatia, by much of Dalmatia,
+and latterly by Bosnia and Herzegovina, which have been governed by
+Austria for a generation, and formally annexed by her with the consent
+of Europe seven years ago. Finally, there is a strip, or, to be more
+accurate, there are patches of Italian-speaking people, all along the
+coasts of the Adriatic, and occupying the ports governed by Austria
+along the eastern and northern coast of that sea. There is also a belt
+of Alpine territory of Italian speech--the Trentino--still in Austrian
+hands.
+
+This very general description gives, however, far too rough an idea of
+the extraordinarily complicated territories of the House of Hapsburg.
+Thus, there are considerable German-speaking colonies in Hungary, and
+these, oddly enough, are more frequent in the east than in the west
+of that State. Again, the whole western slope of the Carpathians is,
+so far as the mass of the population is concerned, Roumanian in
+tongue, custom, and race. Bohemia, though Slavonic in origin, is
+regularly enframed along its four sides by belts of German-speaking
+people, and was mainly German-speaking until a comparatively recent
+revival of its native Slavonic tongue, the Czech. Again, though the
+Magyar language is Mongolian, like the Turkish, centuries of Christian
+and European admixture have left very little trace of the original
+race. Lastly, in all the north-eastern corner of this vast and
+heterogeneous territory, something like a quarter of the population is
+Jewish.
+
+The Western student, faced with so extraordinary a puzzle of race and
+language, may well wonder what principle of unity there is lying
+behind it, and, indeed, this principle of unity is not easy to find.
+
+Some have sought it in religion, pointing out that the overwhelming
+majority of these various populations are Catholic, in communion with
+Rome; and, indeed, this Catholic tincture or colour has a great deal
+to do with the Austro-Hungarian unity; and of late years the chief
+directing policy of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine has been to pose as
+the leader of the Catholic Slavs against the Slavs belonging to the
+Greek Church.
+
+But this principle of unity is not the true one, for two reasons:
+first, that the motive leading the House of Hapsburg to the difficult
+task of so complicated a government is not a religious motive; and,
+secondly, because this religious unity is subject to profound
+modification. Hungary, though Catholic in its majority, contains, and
+is largely governed by, powerful Protestant families, who are
+supported by considerable bodies of Protestant population. The Greek
+Church is the religious profession of great numbers along the Lower
+Danube valley and to the south of the river Save. There are in Bosnia
+a considerable number of Mahomedans even, and I have already mentioned
+the numerous Jewish population of the north-east, particularly in
+Galicia.
+
+The true principle of unity in what has hitherto been the
+Austro-Hungarian Empire is twofold. It consists, first, in the
+reigning family, considerable personal attachment to which is felt in
+every section of its dominions, utterly different as these are one
+from another; and, secondly (a more important point), in the
+historical development of the State.
+
+It is this last matter which explains all, and which can make us
+understand why a realm so astonishingly ill constructed was brought
+into the present struggle as one force, and that force a force allied
+to, and in a military sense identical with, modern Prussian Germany.
+
+For the historical root of Austria-Hungary is German. Of its
+population (some fifty-one millions) you may say that only about a
+quarter are German-speaking (less than another quarter are
+Magyar-speaking, most of the rest Slavonic in speech, together with
+some proportion of Roumanian and Italian).
+
+But it is from this German _quarter_ and from the emperor at their
+head that the historical growth of the State depends, because this
+German _quarter_ was the original Christian nucleus and the civilized
+centre, which had for its mission the reduction of Slavonic and Magyar
+barbarism. The Slavs of the Bohemian quadrilateral were subjected,
+not indeed by conquest, but by a process of culture, to Vienna. The
+crown of Hungary, when it fell by marriage to the Hapsburgs, continued
+that tradition; and when the Empress Maria-Theresa, in the last
+century, participated in the abominable crime of Frederick the Great
+of Prussia, and took her share of the dismembered body of Poland (now
+called the Austrian province of Galicia), that enormous blunder was,
+in its turn, a German blunder undertaken under the example of Northern
+Germany, and as part of a movement German in spirit and origin. The
+same is true even of the very latest of the Austrian developments, the
+annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The act was that of Vienna, but
+the spirit behind it, perhaps the suggestion of it, and the support
+that made it possible came from Berlin.
+
+In a word, if you could interrogate the Genius of the Hapsburgs and
+ask it for what their dominion stood, it would tell you that for
+uninterrupted centuries they had stood for the German effort to
+repress or to overcome pressure upon the German peoples from the
+East. And that is still their role. They have come into this war, for
+instance, as the servants of Prussia, not because Prussia threatened
+or overawed them, but because they felt they had, in common with
+Prussia, the mission of withstanding the Slav, or of tolerating the
+Slav only as a subject; because, that is, they feared, and were
+determined to resist, Russia, and the smaller Slavonic States, notably
+Servia to the south, which are in the retinue of Russia.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We may sum up, then, and say that the fundamental conflict of wills in
+Europe, which has produced this general war, is a conflict between the
+German will, organized by Prussia to overthrow the ancient Christian
+tradition of Europe (to _her_ advantage directly; and indirectly, as
+she proposes, to the advantage of a supposedly necessary German
+governance of the world under Prussian organization), and the will of
+the more ancient and better founded Western and Latin tradition to
+which the sanctity of separate national units profoundly appeals, and
+a great deal more which is, in their eyes, civilization. In this
+conflict, Prussia has called upon and received the support of not only
+the German Empire, which she controls, but also the Hapsburg monarchy,
+controlling the organized forces of Austria-Hungary; while there has
+appeared against this strange Prussian claim all that values the
+Christian tradition of Europe, and in particular the doctrine of
+national freedom, with very much else--which very much else are the
+things by which we of the civilized West and South, who have hitherto
+proved the creators of the European world, live and have our being.
+Allied with us, by the accident that this same German claim threatens
+them also, is the young new world of the Slavs.
+
+It is at this final point of our examination that we may see the
+immensity of the issues upon which the war turns. The two parties are
+really fighting for their lives; that in Europe which is arrayed
+against the Germanic alliance would not care to live if it should fail
+to maintain itself against the threat of that alliance. It is for them
+life and death. On the other side, the Germans having propounded this
+theory of theirs, or rather the Prussians having propounded it for
+them, there is no rest possible until they shall either have "made
+good" to our destruction, or shall have been so crushed that a
+recurrence of the menace from them will for the future be impossible.
+
+There is here no possibility of such a "draw" or "stalemate" as was
+the result, for instance, of the reduction of Louis XIV.'s ambition,
+or of the great revolutionary effort throughout Europe which ended
+with the fall of Napoleon. Louis XIV.'s ambition cast over Europe,
+which received it favourably, the colour of French culture. The
+Revolutionary Wars were fought for a principle which, if it did not
+appeal universally to men, appealed at least to all those millions
+whose instincts were democratic in every country. But in this war
+there is no such common term. No one outside the districts led by
+Prussia desires a Prussian life, and perhaps most, certainly many, of
+those whom Prussia now leads are in different degrees unwilling to
+continue a Prussian life. The fight, in a word, is not like a fight
+with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign away some property,
+or make you acknowledge some principle to which you are already half
+inclined; it is like a fight with a man who says, "So long as I have
+life left in me, I will make it my business to kill you." And fights
+of that kind can never reach a term less absolute than the destruction
+of offensive power in one side or the other. A peace not affirming
+complete victory in this great struggle could, of its nature, be no
+more than a truce.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So much for the really important and the chief thing which we have to
+understand--the general causes of the war.
+
+Now let us turn to the particular causes. We shall find these to be,
+not like the general causes, great spiritual attitudes, but, as they
+always are, a sequence of restricted and recent _events_.
+
+
+(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR.
+
+After the great victories of Prussia a generation ago (the spoliation
+of Denmark in 1864, the supremacy established over Austria in 1866,
+the crushing defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine,
+with two millions of people in 1870-1), Europe gradually drifted into
+being an armed camp, the great forces of which were more or less in
+equilibrium. Prussia had, for the moment at least, achieved all that
+she desired. The French were for quite twenty years ardently desirous
+of recovering what they had lost; but Europe would not allow the war
+to be renewed, and Prussia, now at the head of a newly constituted
+German Empire, made an arrangement with Austria and with Italy to curb
+the French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before
+this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support
+them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking
+another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling
+gradually deadened. It did not disappear--any incident might have
+revived it--but the anxious desire for immediate war when the
+opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the
+process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all
+the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock, every one very
+heavily armed, the principal antagonists, France and Germany, armed
+to their utmost, but the European States, as a whole, unwilling to
+allow any one of them to break the peace.
+
+It was about this moment that Prussia committed what the future
+historian will regard, very probably, as the capital blunder in her
+long career of success. She began to build a great fleet. Here the
+reader should note two very important consequences of the great
+Prussian victories which had taken place a generation before. The
+first was the immense expansion of German industrialism. Germany, from
+an agricultural State, became a State largely occupied in mining,
+smelting, spinning, and shipbuilding; and there went with this
+revolution, as there always goes with modern industrialism, a large
+and unhealthy increase of population. The German Empire, after its war
+with France, was roughly equal to the population of the French; but
+the German Empire, after this successful industrial experiment, the
+result of its victories, was much more than half as large again in
+population as the French (68 to 39).
+
+Secondly, the German Empire developed a new and very large maritime
+commerce. This second thing did not follow, as some have imagined it
+does, from the first. Germany might have exported largely without
+exporting in her own ships. The creation of Germany's new mercantile
+marine was a deliberate part of the general Prussian policy of
+expansion. It was heavily subsidized, especially directed into the
+form of great international passenger lines, and carefully
+co-ordinated with the rest of the Prussian scheme throughout the
+world.
+
+At a date determined by the same general policy, and somewhat
+subsequent to the first creation of this mercantile marine, came the
+decision to build a great fleet. Now, it so happens that Great Britain
+alone among the Powers of Europe depends for her existence upon
+supremacy at sea, and particularly upon naval superiority in the
+Narrow Seas to the east and the south of the British islands.
+
+Such a necessity is, of course, a challenge to the rest of the world,
+and it would be ridiculous to expect the rest of the world to accept
+that challenge without protest. But a necessity this naval policy of
+Great Britain remains none the less. The moment some rival or group
+of rivals can overcome her fleet, her mere physical livelihood is in
+peril. She cannot be certain of getting her food. She cannot be
+certain of getting those foreign materials the making up of which
+enables her to purchase her food. Further, her dominions are scattered
+oversea, and supremacy at sea is her only guarantee of retaining the
+various provinces of her dominion.
+
+It is a case which has happened more than once before in the history
+of the world. Great commercial seafaring States have arisen; they have
+always had the same method of government by a small, wealthy class,
+the same ardent patriotism, the same scattered empire, and the same
+inexorable necessity of maintaining supremacy at sea. Only one Power
+had hitherto rendered this country anxious for the Narrow Seas: that
+Power was France, and it only controlled one-half of the two branches
+of the Narrow Seas, the North Sea and the Channel. It had been for
+generations a cardinal piece of English policy that the French Fleet
+should be watched, the English Fleet maintained overwhelmingly
+superior to it, and all opportunities for keeping France engaged with
+other rivals used to the advantage of this country. On this account
+English policy leant, on the whole, towards the German side, during
+all the generation of rivalry between France and Germany which
+followed the war of 1870.
+
+But when the Germans began to build their fleet, things changed. The
+Germans had openly given Europe to understand that they regarded
+Holland and Belgium, and particularly the port of Antwerp, as
+ultimately destined to fall under their rule or into their system.
+Their fleet was specifically designed for meeting the British Fleet;
+it corresponded to no existing considerable colonial empire, and
+though the development of German maritime commerce was an excuse for
+it, it was only an excuse. Indeed, the object of obtaining supremacy
+at sea was put forward fairly clearly by the promoters of the whole
+scheme. Great Britain was therefore constrained to transfer the weight
+of her support to Russia and to France, and to count on the whole as a
+force opposed, for the first time in hundreds of years, to North
+Germany in the international politics of Europe. Similarity of
+religion (which is a great bond) and a supposed identity (and partly
+real similarity) of race were of no effect compared with this
+sentiment of necessity.
+
+Here it is important to note that the transference of British support
+from one continental group to another neither produced aggression by
+Great Britain nor pointed to any intention of aggression. It is a
+plain matter of fact, which all future history will note, that the
+very necessity in English eyes of English supremacy at sea, and the
+knowledge that such a supremacy was inevitably a provocation to
+others, led to the greatest discretion in the use of British naval
+strength, and, in general, to a purely defensive and peaceful policy
+upon the part of the chief maritime power. It would, indeed, have been
+folly to have acted otherwise, for there was nothing to prevent the
+great nations, our rivals, if they had been directly menaced by the
+British superiority at sea, from beginning to build great fleets,
+equal or superior to our own. Germany alone pursued this policy, with
+no excuse save an obvious determination to undo the claim of the
+British Fleet.
+
+I have called this a blunder, and, from the point of view of the
+German policy, it was a blunder. For if the Prussian dynasty set out,
+as it did, to make itself the chief power in the world, its obvious
+policy was to deal with its enemies in detail. It ought not, at any
+cost, to have quarrelled with Russia until it had finally disposed of
+France. If it was incapable, through lack of subtlety, to prevent the
+Franco-Russian group from forming, it should at least have made itself
+the master of that group before gratuitously provoking the rivalry of
+Great Britain. But "passion will have all now," and the supposedly
+cold and calculating nature of Prussian effort has about it something
+very crudely emotional, as the event has shown. From about ten years
+ago Prussian Germany had managed to array against itself not only the
+old Franco-Russian group but Great Britain as well.
+
+This arrangement would not, however, have led to war. Equilibrium was
+still perfectly maintained, and the very strong feeling throughout all
+the great States of Europe that a disturbance of the peace would mean
+some terrible catastrophe, to be avoided at all costs, was as
+powerful as ever.
+
+The true origin of disturbance, the first overt act upon which you can
+put your finger and say, "Here the chain of particular causes leading
+to the great war begins," was the revolution in Turkey. This
+revolution took place in the year 1908, and put more or less
+permanently into power at Constantinople a group of men based upon
+Masonic influence, largely Western in training, largely composed of
+Jewish elements, known as the "Young Turks."
+
+The first result of this revolution, followed as it inevitably was by
+the temporary weakening in international power which accompanies all
+civil war at its outset, was the declaration by Austria that she would
+regard the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina--hitherto only
+administrated by her and nominally still Turkish--as her own
+territory.
+
+It was but a formal act, but it proved of vast consequence. It was an
+open declaration by a Germanic Power that the hopes of the Servians,
+the main population of the district and a Slav nation closely bound
+to Russia in feeling, were at an end; that Servia must content herself
+with such free territory as she had, and give up all hope of a
+completely independent State uniting all Servians within its borders.
+It was as though Austria had said, "I intend in future to be the great
+European Power in the Balkans, Slav though the Balkans are, and I
+challenge Russia to prevent me." The Russian Government, thus
+challenged, would perhaps have taken the occasion to make war had not
+the French given it to be understood that they would not imperil
+European peace for such an object. The Prussian Government of the
+German Empire had, in all this crisis, acted perhaps as the leader,
+certainly as the protector and supporter of Austria; and when France
+thus refused to fight, and Russia in turn gave way, the whole thing
+was regarded, not only in Germany but throughout the world, as
+equivalent to an armed victory. Observers whose judgment and criticism
+are of weight, even in the eyes of trained international agents,
+proclaimed what had happened to be as much a Prussian success as
+though the Prussian and Austrian armies had met in the field and had
+defeated the Russian and the French forces.
+
+The next step in this series was a challenge advanced by Germany
+against that arrangement whereby Morocco, joining as it did to French
+North Africa, should be abandoned to French influence, so far as
+England was concerned, in exchange for the French giving up certain
+rights of interference they had in the English administration of
+Egypt, and one or two other minor points. Germany, advancing from a
+victorious position acquired over the Bosnian business, affirmed (in
+the year 1911) her right to be consulted over the Moroccan settlement.
+Nor were the French permitted to occupy Morocco until they had ceded
+to Germany a portion of their African colony of the Congo. This
+transaction was confused by many side issues. German patriots did not
+regard it as a sufficient success, though French patriots certainly
+regarded it as a grave humiliation. But perhaps the chief consequence
+of the whole affair was the recrudescence in the French people as a
+whole of a temper, half forgotten, which provoked them to withstand
+the now greatly increased power of the German Empire and of its ally,
+and to determine that if such challenges were to continue unchecked
+during the coming years, the national position of France would be
+forfeited.
+
+Following upon this crisis came, in the next year--still a consequence
+of the Turkish Revolution--the sudden determination of the Balkan
+States, including Greece, to attack Turkey. It was the King of
+Montenegro (a small Slav State which had always maintained its
+independence) who fired the first shot upon the 8th of October, 1912,
+with his own hand. In the course of that autumn the Balkan Allies were
+universally successful, failed only in taking Constantinople itself,
+reduced Turkey in Europe to an insignificant strip of territory near
+the capital itself, and proceeded to settle the conquered territory
+according to an agreement made by them before the outbreak of
+hostilities.
+
+But here the Germanic Powers again intervened. The defeated Turkish
+Army had been trained by German officers upon a German system; the
+expansion of German and Austrian political military influence
+throughout the Near East was a cardinal part of the German creed and
+policy. Through Austria the Balkans were to be dominated at last, and
+Austria, at this critical moment, vetoed the rational settlement which
+the allied Balkan States had agreed to among themselves. She would not
+allow the Servians to annex those territories inhabited by men of
+their race, and to reach their natural outlet to the sea upon the
+shores of the Adriatic. She proposed the creation of a novel State of
+Albania under a German prince, to block Servia's way to the sea. She
+further proposed to Servia compensation by way of Servia's annexing
+the territory round Monastir, which had a Bulgarian population, and to
+Bulgaria the insufficient compensation of taking over, farther to the
+east, territory that was not Bulgarian at all, but mixed Greek and
+Turkish.
+
+The whole thing was characteristically German in type, ignoring and
+despising national feeling and national right, creating artificial
+boundaries, and flagrantly sinning against the European sense of
+patriotism. A furious conflict between the various members of the
+former Balkan Alliance followed; but the settlement which Austria had
+virtually imposed remained firm, and the third of the great Germanic
+steps affirming the growing Germanic scheme in Europe had been taken.
+
+But it had been taken at the expense of further and very gravely
+shaking the already unstable armed equilibrium of Europe.
+
+The German Empire foresaw the coming strain; a law was passed
+immediately increasing the numbers of men to be trained to arms within
+its boundaries, and ultimately increasing that number so largely as to
+give to Germany alone a very heavy preponderance--a preponderance of
+something like thirty per cent.--over the corresponding number trained
+in France.
+
+To this move France could not reply by increasing her armed forces,
+because she already took every available man. She did the only
+possible thing under the circumstances. She increased by fifty per
+cent. the term during which her young men must serve in the army,
+changing that term from two years to three.
+
+The heavy burden thus suddenly imposed upon the French led to very
+considerable political disputes in that country, especially as the
+parliamentary form of government there established is exceedingly
+unpopular, and the politicians who live by it generally despised.
+When, therefore, the elections of last year were at hand, it seemed as
+though this French increase of military power would be in jeopardy.
+Luckily it was maintained, in spite of the opposition of fairly honest
+but uncritical men like Jaures, and of far less reputable professional
+politicians.
+
+Whether this novel strain upon the French people could have been long
+continued we shall never know, for, in the heat of the debates
+provoked by this measure and its maintenance, came the last events
+which determined the great catastrophe.
+
+
+(6) THE IMMEDIATE OCCASION OF THE WAR.
+
+We have seen how constantly and successfully Austria had supported the
+general Prussian thesis in Europe, and, in particular, the
+predominance of the German Powers over the Slav.
+
+We have seen how, in pursuit of this policy, the sharpest friction was
+always suffered at the danger-point of _Servia_. Servia was the Slav
+State millions of whose native population were governed against their
+will by Austro-Hungarian officials. Servia was the Slav State mortally
+wounded by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And Servia was
+the Slav State which Austria had in particular mortified by forbidding
+her access to the Adriatic, and by imposing upon her an unnatural
+boundary, even after her great victories of the Balkan War.
+
+The heir to the Hapsburgs--the man who, seeing the great age of his
+uncle, might at any moment ascend the throne--was the Archduke
+Francis. He had for years pursued one consistent policy for the
+aggrandizement of his House, which policy was the pitting of the
+Catholic Slavs against the Orthodox Slavs, thereby rendering himself
+in person particularly odious to the Orthodox Serbs, so many of whose
+compatriots and co-religionists were autocratically governed against
+their will in the newly annexed provinces.
+
+To the capital of these provinces, Sarajevo, he proceeded in state in
+the latter part of last June, and there, through the emissaries of
+certain secret societies (themselves Austrian subjects, but certainly
+connected with the population of independent Servia, and, as some
+claimed, not unconnected with the Servian Government itself), he was
+assassinated upon Saturday, the 28th of June, 1914.
+
+For exactly a month, the consequences of this event--the provocation
+which it implied to Austria, the opportunity which it gave the
+Hapsburgs for a new and more formidable expression of Germanic power
+against the Slavs--were kept wholly underground. _That is the most
+remarkable of all the preliminaries to the war._ There was a month of
+silence after so enormous a moment. Why? In order to give Germany and
+Austria a start in the conflict already long designed. Military
+measures were being taken secretly, stores of ammunition overhauled,
+and all done that should be necessary for a war which was premeditated
+in Berlin, half-feared, half-desired in Vienna, and dated for the end
+of July--after the harvest.
+
+The Government of Berlin was, during the whole of this period,
+actively engaged in forcing Austria forward in a path to which she was
+not unwilling; and, at last, upon the 23rd of July, Europe was amazed
+to read a note sent by the Imperial Governor at Vienna to the Royal
+Government in the Servian capital of Belgrade, which note was of a
+kind altogether unknown hitherto in the relations between Christian
+States. This note demanded not only the suppression of patriotic, and
+therefore anti-Austrian, societies in Servia (the assassins of the
+Crown Prince had been, as I have said, not Servian but Austrian
+subjects), but the public humiliation of the Servian Government by an
+apology, and even an issue of the order of the day to the Servian
+Army, so recently victorious, abasing that army to the worst
+humiliation. The note insisted upon a specific pledge that the Servian
+Government should renounce all hope of freeing the Servian nation as a
+whole from foreign government, and in many another clause subjected
+this small nation to the most thorough degradation ever suggested by a
+powerful European people towards a lesser neighbour.
+
+So far, though an extreme hitherto unknown in European history had
+been reached, the matter was one of degree. Things of the same sort,
+less drastic, had been known in the past.
+
+But what was novel in the note, and what undoubtedly proceeded from
+the suggestion of the Prussian Government (which was in all this the
+real agent behind Austria), _was the claim of the Austrian Government
+to impose its own magistrates upon the Servian courts, and to condemn
+at will those subjects of the Servian king and those officers holding
+his commission whom Austria might select so to condemn, and that to
+penalties at the goodwill and pleasure of Austria alone_. In other
+words, Austria claimed full rights of sovereignty within the territory
+of her small neighbour and enemy, and the acceptation of the note by
+Servia meant not only the preponderance of Austria for the future over
+the Slavs of the Balkans, but her continued and direct power over that
+region in the teeth of national and religious sentiment, and in clean
+despite of Russia.
+
+So strong was the feeling still throughout Europe in favour of
+maintaining peace and of avoiding the awful crash of our whole
+international system that Russia advised Servia to give way, and the
+Germanic Powers were on the eve of yet another great success, far more
+important and enduring than anything they had yet achieved. The only
+reservation which Servia was permitted by the peaceful Powers of
+Europe, and in particular by Russia, to make was that, upon three
+points which directly concerned her sovereignty, Austria should admit
+the decision of a Court of Arbitration at the Hague. But the
+time-limit imposed--which was the extraordinarily short one of
+forty-eight hours--was maintained by Austria, and upon the advice, as
+we now know, of Berlin, no modification whatever in the demands was
+tolerated. Upon the 25th, therefore, the Austrian Minister left
+Belgrade. There followed ten days, the exact sequence of events in
+which must be carefully noted if we are to obtain a clear view of the
+origin of the war.
+
+Upon that same day, Saturday, July 25th, the English Foreign Office,
+through Sir Edward Grey, suggested a scheme whereby the approaching
+cataclysm (for Russia was apparently determined to support Servia)
+might be averted. He proposed that all operations should be suspended
+while the Ambassadors of Germany, Italy, and France consulted with him
+in London.
+
+What happened upon the next day, Sunday, is exceedingly important.
+The German Government refused to accept the idea of such a conference,
+but at the same time the German Ambassador in London, Prince
+Lichnowski, was instructed to say that the principle of such a
+conference, or at least of mediation by the four Powers, was agreeable
+to Berlin. _The meaning of this double move was that the German
+Government would do everything it could to retard the entry into the
+business of the Western Powers, but would do nothing to prevent
+Russia, Servia, and the Slav civilization as a whole from suffering
+final humiliation or war._
+
+That game was played by Germany clumsily enough for nearly a full
+week. Austria declared war upon Servia upon Monday the 27th; but we
+now know that her intention of meeting Russia halfway, when she saw
+that Russia would not retire, was stopped by the direct intervention
+of the Prussian Government. In public the German Foreign Office still
+pretended that it was seeking some way out of the crisis. In private
+it prevented Austria from giving way an inch from her extraordinary
+demands. And all the while Germany was secretly making her first
+preparations for war.
+
+It might conceivably be argued by a special pleader that war was not
+the only intention of Berlin, as most undoubtedly it had not been the
+only intention of Vienna. Such a plea would be false, but one can
+imagine its being advanced. What is not capable even of discussion is
+the fact that both the Germanic Powers, under the unquestioned
+supremacy of Prussia, _were_ determined to push Russia into the
+dilemma between an impossible humiliation and defeat in the field.
+They allowed for the possibility that she would prefer humiliation,
+because they believed it barely possible (though all was ready for the
+invasion of France at a moment already fixed) that the French would
+again fail to support their ally. But war was fixed, and its date was
+fixed, with Russia, or even with Russia and France, and the Germanic
+Powers arranged to be ready before their enemies. In order to effect
+this it was necessary to deceive the West at least into believing that
+war could after all be avoided.
+
+One last incident betrays in the clearest manner how thoroughly
+Prussia had determined on war, and on a war to break out at her own
+chosen moment. It was as follows:
+
+As late as Thursday, the 30th of July, Austria was still willing to
+continue a discussion with Russia. The Austrian Government on that day
+expressed itself as willing to reopen negotiations with Russia. The
+German Ambassador at Vienna got wind of this. He communicated it at
+once to Berlin. _Germany immediately stopped any compromise, by
+framing that very night and presenting upon the next day, Friday the
+31st, an ultimatum to Russia and to France._
+
+Now, the form of these two ultimata and the events connected with them
+are again to be carefully noted, for they further illuminate us upon
+the German plan. That to Russia, presented by the German Ambassador
+Portales, had been prepared presupposing the just possible humiliation
+and giving way of Russia; and all those who observed this man's
+attitude and manner upon discovering that Russia would indeed fight
+rather than suffer the proposed humiliation, agreed that it was the
+attitude and manner of an anxious man. The ultimatum to France had,
+upon the contrary, not the marks of coercion, but of unexpected and
+violent haste. If Russia was really going to fight, what could Prussia
+be sure of in the West? It was the second great and crude blunder of
+Prussian diplomacy that, instead of making any efforts to detach
+France from Russia, it first took the abandonment of Russia by France
+for granted, and then, with extreme precipitancy, asked within the
+least possible delay whether France would fight. That precipitancy
+alone lent to the demand a form which ensured the exact opposite of
+what Prussia desired.
+
+This double misconception of the effect of her diplomatic action
+dates, I say, from Friday, the 31st of July, and that day is the true
+opening day of the great war. Upon Sunday, the 2nd of August, the
+German army violated the neutrality of Luxembourg, seizing the railway
+passing through that State into France, and pouring into its neutral
+territory her covering troops. On the same day, the French general
+mobilization was ordered; the French military authorities having lost,
+through the double action of Germany, about five days out of, say,
+eleven--nearly half the mobilization margin--by which space of time
+German preparations were now ahead of theirs.
+
+There followed, before the action state of general European conflict,
+the third German blunder, perhaps the most momentous, and certainly
+the most extraordinary: that by which Germany secured the hitherto
+exceedingly uncertain intervention of England against herself.
+
+Of all the great Powers involved, Great Britain had most doubtfully to
+consider whether she should or should not enter the field.
+
+On the one hand, she was in moral agreement with Russia and France; on
+the other hand, she was bound to them by no direct alliance, and
+successive British Governments had, for ten years past, repeatedly
+emphasized the fact that England was free to act or not to act with
+France according as circumstances might decide her.
+
+Many have criticized the hesitation, or long weighing of circumstance,
+which astonished us all in the politicians during these few days, but
+no one, whether friendly to or critical of a policy of neutrality, can
+doubt that such a policy was not only a possible but a probable one.
+The Parliamentarians were not unanimous, the opposition to the great
+responsibility of war was weighty, numerous, and strong. The
+financiers, who are in many things the real masters of our
+politicians, were all for standing out. In the face of such a
+position, in the crisis of so tremendous an issue, Germany, instead of
+acting as best she could to secure the neutrality of Great Britain,
+simply took that neutrality for granted!
+
+Upon one specific point a specific question was asked of her
+Government. To Great Britain, as we have seen in these pages, the
+keeping from the North Sea coast of all great hostile Powers is a
+vital thing. The navigable Scheldt, Antwerp, the approaches to the
+Straits of Dover, are, and have been since the rise of British
+sea-power, either in the hands of a small State or innocuous to us
+through treaty. Today they are the possession of Belgium, an
+independent State erected by treaty after the great war, and
+neutralized by a further guarantee in 1839. This neutrality of Belgium
+had been guaranteed in a solemn treaty not only by France and England,
+but by Prussia herself; and the British Government put to the French
+and to the Germans alike the question whether (now they were at war)
+that neutrality would be respected. The French replied in the
+affirmative; the Germans, virtually, in the negative. But it must not
+be said that this violation of international law and of her own word
+by Germany automatically caused war with England.
+
+_The German Ambassador was not told that if Belgian territory was
+violated England would fight_; he was only told that if that territory
+were violated England _might_ fight.
+
+The Sunday passed without a decision. On Monday the point was, as a
+matter of form, laid before Parliament, though the House of Commons
+has no longer any real control over great national issues. In a speech
+which certainly inclined towards English participation in the war
+should Germany invade Belgium, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs
+summed up the situation before a very full House.
+
+In the debate that followed many, and even passionate, speeches were
+delivered opposing the presence of England in the field and claiming
+neutrality. Some of these speeches insisted upon the admiration felt
+by the speaker for modern Germany and Prussia; others the ill judgment
+of running the enormous risk involved in such a campaign. These
+protests will be of interest to history, but the House of Commons as a
+whole had, of course, no power in the matter, and sat only to register
+the decisions of its superiors. There was in the Cabinet resignation
+of two members, in the Ministry the resignation of a third, the
+threatened resignation of many more.
+
+Meanwhile, upon that same day, August 3rd, following with
+superstitious exactitude the very hour upon which, on the very same
+day, the French frontier had been crossed in 1870, the Germans entered
+Belgian territory.
+
+The Foreign Office's thesis underlying the declaration of its
+spokesman, Sir Edward Grey, carried the day with the politicians in
+power, and upon Tuesday, August 4th, Great Britain joined Russia and
+France, at war with the Prussian Power. There followed later the
+formal declaration of war by France as by England against Austria, and
+with the first week in August the general European struggle had
+opened.
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE FORCES OPPOSED.
+
+
+Here, then, at the beginning of August 1914, are the five great Powers
+about to engage in war.
+
+Russia, France, and Great Britain, whom we will call the Allies, are
+upon one side; the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, whom we will
+call the Germanic Powers, are upon the other.
+
+We must at the outset, if we are to understand the war at all, see how
+these two combatant groups stood in strength one against the other
+when the war broke out. And to appreciate this contrast we must know
+two things--their geographical situation, and their respective weight
+in arms. For before we can judge the chances of two opponents in war,
+we have to know how they stand physically one to the other upon the
+surface of the earth, or we cannot judge how one will attack the
+other, or how each will defend itself against the other. And we must
+further be able to judge the numbers engaged both at the beginning of
+the struggle and arriving in reinforcement as the struggle proceeds,
+because upon those numbers will mainly depend the final result.
+
+Having acquired these two fundamental pieces of information, we must
+acquire a third, which is _the theories of war_ held upon either side,
+and some summary showing which of these theories turned out in
+practice to be right, and which wrong.
+
+For, after a long peace, the fortune of the next war largely depends
+upon which of various guesses as to the many changes that have taken
+place in warfare and in weapons will be best supported by practice,
+and what way of using new weapons will prove the most effective. Until
+the test of war is applied, all this remains guess-work; but under the
+conditions of war it ceases to be guess-work, and becomes either
+corroborated by experience or exploded, as the case may be. And of two
+opponents after a long peace, that one which has had the most
+foresight and has guessed best what the effect of changes in armament
+and the rest will effect in practice is that one who has the best
+chance of victory.
+
+We are going, then, in this Second Part, of the little book, to see,
+first, the geographical position of the belligerents; secondly, their
+effective numbers; and, thirdly, what theories of war each held, and
+how far each was right or wrong.
+
+
+(1) THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF THE BELLIGERENTS.
+
+The position of the original belligerent countries (excluding Turkey)
+upon the map of Europe was that which will be seen upon the
+accompanying sketch map.
+
+Of this belligerent area, which is surrounded by a thick black line,
+the part left white represents the territory of the Allies at the
+origin of the war--Great Britain, France, Russia, and Servia. This
+reservation must, however, be made: that in the case of Russia only
+the effective part is shown, and only the European part at that;
+Arctic Russia and Siberia are omitted. The part lightly shaded with
+cross lines represents the Germanic body--to wit, the German Empire
+and Austria-Hungary.
+
+1. The first thing that strikes the eye upon such a map is the great
+size of the Germanic body.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 4.]
+
+When one reads that "Germany" was being attacked by not only France
+and England, but also Russia; when one reads further that in the Far
+East, in Asia, Japan was putting in work for the Allies; and when one
+goes on to read that Belgium added her effort of resistance to the
+"German" invasion, one gets a false impression that one single nation
+was fighting a vast coalition greatly superior to it. Most people had
+an impression of that kind, in this country at least, at the outset of
+the war. It was this impression that led to the equally false
+impression that "Germany" must necessarily be beaten, and probably
+quickly beaten.
+
+The truth was, of course, that we were fighting something very much
+bigger than "Germany." We set out to fight something more than twice
+as big as Germany in area, and very nearly twice as big as the German
+Empire in mere numbers. For what we set out to fight was not the
+German Empire, but the German Empire _plus_ the whole of the dominions
+governed by the Hapsburg dynasty at Vienna.
+
+How weighty this Germanic body was geographically is still more
+clearly seen if we remember that Russia north of St. Petersburg is
+almost deserted of inhabitants, and that the true European areas of
+population which are in conflict--that is, the fairly well populated
+areas--are more accurately represented by a modification of the map
+on page 81 in some such form as that on page 84, where the comparative
+density of population is represented by the comparative distances
+between the parallel cross-lines.
+
+2. The next thing that strikes one is the position of the neutral
+countries. Supposing Belgium to have remained neutral, or, rather, to
+have allowed German armies to pass over her soil without actively
+resisting, the Germanic body would have been free to trade with
+neutral countries, and to receive support from their commerce, and to
+get goods through them over the whole of their western front, with the
+exception of the tiny section which stands for the frontier common to
+France and Germany. On the north, supposing the Baltic to be open, the
+Germanic body had a vast open frontier of hundreds of miles, and
+though Russia closed most of the eastern side, all the Roumanian
+frontier was open, and so was the frontier of the Adriatic, right away
+from the Italian border to Cattaro. So was the Swiss frontier and the
+Italian.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 5.]
+
+Indeed, if we draw the Germanic body by itself surrounded by a
+frontier of dots, as in the accompanying sketch, and mark in a thick
+line upon that frontier those parts which touched on enemy's
+territory, and were therefore closed to supply, we shall be
+immediately arrested by the comparatively small proportion of that
+frontier which is thus closed.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 6.]
+
+It is well to carry this in mind during the remainder of our study of
+this war, because it has a great effect upon the fighting power of
+Germany and Austria after a partial--but very partial--blockade is
+established by the Allied and especially by the British naval power.
+
+3. The third thing that strikes one in such a map of the belligerent
+area is the way in which the Germanic body stands in the middle facing
+its two groups of enemies East and West.
+
+
+_The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Germanic Body_.
+
+With this last point we can begin a comparison of the advantages and
+disadvantages imposed by geographical conditions upon the two
+opponents, and first of these we will consider the geographical
+advantages and disadvantages of the Germanic body--that is, of the
+Austrian and German Empires--passing next to the corresponding
+advantages and disadvantages of the Allies.
+
+The advantages proceeding from geographical position to Germany in
+particular, and to the Germanic body as a whole, gravely outweigh the
+disadvantages. We will consider the disadvantages first.
+
+The chief disadvantage under which the Germanic body suffered in this
+connection was that, from the outset of hostilities, it had to fight,
+as the military phrase goes, upon two fronts. That is, the commanders
+of the German and Austrian armies had to consider two separate
+campaigns, to keep them distinct in their minds, and to co-ordinate
+them so that they should not, by wasting too many men on the East or
+the West, weaken themselves too much on the other side of the field.
+
+To this disadvantage some have been inclined to add that the central
+position of Austria and Germany in Europe helped the British and
+Allied blockade (I repeat, a very partial, timid, and insufficient
+blockade) of their commerce.
+
+But this view is erroneous. The possibility of blockading
+Austria-Hungary and Germany from imports across the ocean was due not
+to their central but to their continental position; to the fact that
+they were more remote from the ocean than France and Great Britain. It
+had nothing to do with their central position between the two groups
+of the Allies.
+
+Supposing, for instance, that Germany and Austria-Hungary had stood
+where Russia stands, and that Western Europe had been in alliance
+against them. Then they would have been in no way central; their
+position would have been an extreme position upon one side; and yet,
+so far as blockading goes, the blockade of them would have been
+infinitely easier.
+
+Conversely, if Germany and Austria had been in the west, where Great
+Britain and France are, their enemies lying to the east of them could
+not have blockaded them at all.
+
+As things are the blockade that has been established exists but is
+partial. As will be seen upon the following sketch map, the British
+Fleet, being sufficiently powerful, can search vessels the cargoes of
+which might reach the Germanic body directly through the Strait of
+Gibraltar (1), the Strait of Dover (2), or the North Sea between
+Scotland and Norway (3). But it is unable to prevent supplies reaching
+the Germanic body from Italy, whether by land or by sea (4), or
+through Switzerland (5), or through Holland (6), or through Denmark
+(7), or across the frontier of Roumania (8); or, so long as the German
+Fleet is strongest in the Baltic, by way of Norway and Sweden across
+the Baltic (9).
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 7.]
+
+The blockading fleet is even embarrassed as to the imports the
+Germanic body receives indirectly through neutral countries--that is,
+imports not produced in the importing countries themselves, but
+provided through the neutral countries as middlemen.
+
+It is embarrassed in three ways.
+
+(_a_) Because it does not want to offend the European neutral
+countries, which count in the general European balance of power.
+
+(_b_) Because it does not wish to offend Powers outside Europe which
+are neutral in this war, and particularly the United States. Such
+great neutral Powers are very valuable not only for their moral
+support if it can be obtained, but on account of their great financial
+resources untouched by this prolonged struggle, and, what lies behind
+these, their power of producing materials which the Allies need just
+as much as Austria and Germany do.
+
+(_c_) Because, even if you watch the supplies of contraband to
+neutrals, and propose to stop supplies obviously destined for German
+use, you cannot prevent Germany from buying the same material "made
+up" by the neutral: for example, an Italian firm can import copper ore
+quite straightforwardly, smelt it, and offer the metal in the open
+market. There is nothing to prevent a German merchant entering that
+market and purchasing, unless Italy forbids all export of copper,
+which it is perfectly free not to do.
+
+To leave this side question of blockade, and to return to the relative
+advantages and disadvantages of our enemy's central position, we may
+repeat as a summary of its disadvantages the single truth that it
+compels our enemy to fight upon two fronts.
+
+All the rest is advantage.
+
+It is an advantage that Germany and Austria-Hungary, as a corollary to
+their common central position, are in some part of similar race and
+altogether of a common historical experience. For more than a hundred
+years every part of the area dominated by the Germanic body--with the
+exception of Bosnia and Alsace-Lorraine--has had a fairly intimate
+acquaintance with the other part. The Magyars of Hungary, the Poles of
+Galicia, of Posen, of Thorn, the Croats of the Adriatic border, the
+Czechs of Bohemia, have nothing in race or language in common with
+German-speaking Vienna or German-speaking Berlin. But they have the
+experience of generations uniting them with Vienna and with Berlin.
+In administration, and to some extent in social life, a common
+atmosphere spreads over this area, nearly all of which, as I have
+said, has had something in common for a hundred years, and much of
+which has had something in common for a thousand.
+
+In a word, as compared with the Allies, the Germanic central body in
+Europe has a certain advantage of moral homogeneity, especially as the
+governing body throughout is German-speaking and German in feeling.
+
+That is the first point of advantage--a moral one.
+
+The second is more material. The Governments of the two countries,
+their means of communication and of supply, are all in touch one with
+another. Those governments are working in one field within a ring
+fence, and working for a common object. They are not only spiritually
+in touch; they are physically in touch. An administrator in Berlin can
+take the night express after dinner and breakfast with his
+collaborator in Vienna the next morning.
+
+It so happens, also, that the communications of the two Germanic
+empires are exactly suited to their central position. There is
+sufficient fast communication from north to south to serve all the
+purposes necessary to the intellectual conduct of a war; there is a
+most admirable communication from east to west for the material
+conduct of that war upon two fronts. Whenever it may be necessary to
+move troops from the French frontier to the Russian, or from the
+Russian to the French, or for Germany to borrow Hungarian cavalry for
+the Rhine, or for Austria to borrow German army corps to protect
+Galicia, all that is needed is three or four days in which to entrain
+and move these great masses of men. There is no area in Europe which
+is better suited by nature for thus fighting upon two land frontiers
+than is the area of the combined Austrian and German Empire.
+
+With these three points, then--the great area of our enemy in Europe,
+his advantage through neutral frontiers, and his advantage in
+homogeneity of position between distant and morally divided
+Allies--you have the chief marks of the geographical position he
+occupies, in so far as this is the great central position of
+continental Europe.
+
+But it so happens that the Germanic body in general, and the German
+Empire in particular, suffer from grave geographical disadvantages
+attached to their political character. And of these I will make my
+next points.
+
+The Germanic body as a whole suffers by its geographical disposition,
+coupled with its political constitution, a grave disadvantage in its
+struggle against the Allies, particularly towards the East, because
+just that part of it which is thrust out and especially assailable by
+Russia happens to be the part most likely to be disaffected to the
+whole interests of the Germanic body; and how this works I will
+proceed to explain.
+
+Here are two oblongs--A, left blank, and B, lightly shaded. Supposing
+these two oblongs combined to represent the area of two countries
+which are in alliance, and which are further so situated that B is the
+weaker Power to the alliance both (1) in his military strength, and
+(2) in his tenacity of purpose. Next grant that B is divided by the
+dotted line, CD, into two halves--B not being one homogeneous State,
+but two States, B1 and B2.
+
+Next let it be granted that while B1 is more likely to remain attached
+in its alliance to A, B2 is more separate from the alliance in moral
+tendency, and is also materially the weaker half of B. Finally, let
+the whole group, AB, be subject to the attack of enemies from the
+right and from the left (from the right along the arrows XX, and from
+the left along the arrows YY) by two groups of enemies represented by
+the areas M and N respectively.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 8.]
+
+It is obvious that in such a situation, if A is the chief object of
+attack, and is the Power which has both provoked the conflict and made
+itself the chief object of assault by M and N, A is by this
+arrangement in a position _politically_ weak.
+
+That is, the strategical position of A is gravely embarrassed by the
+way in which his ally, B, separated into the two halves, B1 and B2,
+stands with regard to himself. B2 is isolated and thrust outward. The
+enemy, M, upon the right, attacking along the lines XX, may be able to
+give B2 a very bad time before he gets into the area of B1, and long
+before he gets into the area of the stronger Power, A. It is open to M
+so to harass B2 that B2 is prepared to break with B1 and give up the
+war; or, if the bond between B2 and B1 is strong enough, to persuade
+B1 to give up the struggle at the same time that he does. And if B2 is
+thus harassed to the breaking-point, the whole alliance, A plus B,
+will lose the men and materials and wealth represented by B2, and
+_may_ lose the whole shaded area, B, leaving A to support singly for
+the future the combined attacks of M and N along the lines of attack,
+XX and YY.
+
+Now, that diagram accurately represents the political embarrassment in
+strategy of the German-Austro-Hungarian alliance. B1 is Austria and
+Bohemia; B2 is Hungary; A is the German Empire; M is the Russians; N
+is the Allies in the West. With a geographical arrangement such as
+that of the Germanic alliance, a comparatively small proportion of the
+Russian forces detached to harry the Hungarian plain can make the
+Hungarians, who have little moral attachment to the Austrians and none
+whatever to the Germans, abandon the struggle to save themselves;
+while it is possible that this outlier, being thus detached, will drag
+with it its fellow-half, the Austrian half of the dual monarchy, cause
+the Government of the dual monarchy to sue for peace, and leave the
+German Empire isolated to support the undivided attention of the
+Russians from the East and of the French from the West.
+
+It is clear that if a strong Power, A, allied with and dependent for
+large resources in men upon a weaker Power, B, is attacked from the
+left and from the right, the ideal arrangement for the strong Power,
+A, would be something in the nature of the following diagram (Sketch
+9), where the weaker Power stands protected in the territory of the
+stronger Power, and where of the two halves of the weaker Power, B2,
+the less certain half, is especially protected from attack.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 9.]
+
+Were Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Rhineland, upon the one
+hand, the Hungarian plain, Russian Poland, and East Prussia, upon the
+other hand, united in one strong, patriotic, homogeneous
+German-speaking group with the Government of Berlin and the Baltic
+plain, and were Bavaria, Switzerland, the Tyrol, Bohemia, to
+constitute the weaker and less certain ally, while the least certain
+half of that uncertain ally lay in Eastern Bohemia and in what is now
+Lower Austria, well defended from attack upon the East, the conditions
+would be exactly reversed, and the Austro-German alliance would be
+geographically and politically of the stronger sort. As it is, the
+combined accidents of geography and political circumstance make it
+peculiarly vulnerable.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 10.]
+
+Having already considered in a diagram the way in which the
+geographical disposition of Austria-Hungary weakens Germany in the
+face of the Allies, let us translate that diagram into terms of actual
+political geography. These two oblongs, with their separate parts,
+are, as a fact, as follows: Where A is the German Empire, the shaded
+portion, B, is Austria-Hungary, and this last divided into B1, the
+more certain Austrian part, and B2, the less certain exposed
+Hungarian part, the latter of which is only protected from Russian
+assault by the Carpathian range of mountains, CCC, with its passes at
+DDD. M, the enemy on the right, Russia, is attacking the alliance, AB,
+along XX; while the enemy on the left, N, France and her Allies, is
+attacking along the lines YY.
+
+Hungary, B2, is not only geographically an outlier, but politically is
+the weakest link in the chain of the Austro-Germanic alliance. The
+area of Hungary is almost denuded of men, for most of these have been
+called up to defend Germany, A, and in particular to prevent the
+invasion of Germany's territory in Silesia at S. The one defence
+Hungary has against being raided and persuaded to an already tempting
+peace is the barrier of the Carpathian mountains, CCC. When or if the
+passes shall be in Russian possession and the Russian cavalry reappear
+upon the Hungarian side of the hills, the first great political
+embarrassment of the enemy will have begun--I mean the first great
+political embarrassment to his strategy.
+
+(_a_) Shall he try to defend those passes above all? Then he must
+detach German corps, and detach them very far from the areas which are
+vital to the core of the alliance--that is, to the German Empire, A.
+
+(_b_) Shall he use only Hungarian troops to defend Hungary? Then he
+emphasizes the peculiar moral isolation of Hungary, and leaves her
+inclined, if things go ill, to make a separate peace.
+
+(_c_) Shall he abandon Hungary? And let the Russians do what they will
+with the passes over the Carpathians and raid the Hungarian plain at
+large? Then he loses a grave proportion of his next year's wheat, much
+of his dwindling horse supply, his almost strangled sources of petrol.
+He tempts Roumania to come in (for a great sweep of Eastern Hungary is
+nationally Roumanian); and he loses the control in men and financial
+resources of one-half of his Allies if the danger and the distress
+persuade Hungary to stand out. For the Hungarians have no quarrel
+except from their desire to dominate the southern Slavs; to fight
+Austria's battles means very little to them, and to fight Germany's
+battles means nothing at all.
+
+There is, of course, much more than this. If Hungary dropped out,
+could Austria remain? Would not the Government at Vienna, rather than
+lose the dual monarchy, follow Hungary's lead? In that case, the
+Germanic alliance would lose at one stroke eleven-twenty-fifths of its
+men. It would lose more than half of its reserves of men, for the
+Austrian reserve is, paradoxically enough, larger than the German
+reserve, though not such good material.
+
+Admire how in every way this geographical and political problem of
+Hungary confuses the strategical plan of the German General Staff!
+They cannot here act upon pure strategics. They _cannot_ treat the
+area of operations like a chessboard, and consider the unique object
+of inflicting a military defeat upon the Russians. Their inability to
+do so proceeds from the fact that this great awkward salient,
+Hungarian territory, is not politically subject to Berlin, is not in
+spiritual union with Berlin; may be denuded of men to save Berlin, and
+is the most exposed of all our enemy's territory to attack. Throughout
+the war it will be found that this problem perpetually presents itself
+to the Great General Staff of the Prussians: "How can we save Hungary
+without weakening our Eastern line? If we abandon Hungary, how are we
+to maintain our effectives?"
+
+Such, in detail, is the political embarrassment to German strategy
+produced by the geographical situation and the political traditions of
+Hungary itself, and of Hungary's connection with the Hapsburgs at
+Vienna. Let us now turn to the even more important embarrassment
+caused to German strategy by the corner positions of the four
+essential areas of German territory.
+
+This last political weakness attached to geographical condition
+concerns the German Empire alone.
+
+Let us suppose a Power concerned to defend itself against invasion and
+situated between two groups of enemies, from the left and from the
+right, we will again call that Power A, the enemy upon the right M,
+and the enemy upon the left N, the first attacking along the lines XX,
+and the second along the lines YY.
+
+Let us suppose that A has _political_ reasons for particularly
+desiring to save from invasion four districts, the importance of
+which I have indicated on Sketch 12 by shading, and which I have
+numbered 1, 2, 3, 4.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 11.]
+
+Let us suppose that those four districts happen to lie at the four
+exposed corners of the area which A has to defend. The Government of A
+knows it to be essential to success in the war that his territory
+should not be invaded. Or, at least, if it is invaded, it must not,
+under peril of collapse, be invaded in the shaded areas.
+
+It is apparent upon the very face of such a diagram, that with the
+all-important shaded areas situated in the corners of his
+quadrilateral, A is heavily embarrassed. He must disperse his forces
+in order to protect all four. If wastage of men compels him to
+shorten his line on the right against M, he will be immediately
+anxious as to whether he can dare sacrifice 4 to save 2, or whether he
+should run the dreadful risk of sacrificing 2 to save 4.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 12.]
+
+If wastage compels him to shorten his defensive line upon the left, he
+is in a similar quandary between 1 and 3.
+
+The whole situation is one in which he is quite certain that a
+defensive war, long before he is pushed to extremities, will compel
+him to "scrap" one of the four corners, yet each one is, for some
+political reason, especially dear to him and even perhaps necessary to
+him. Each he desires, with alternating anxieties and indecisions, to
+preserve at all costs from invasion; yet he cannot, as he is forced
+upon the defensive, preserve all four.
+
+Here, again, the ideal situation for him would be to possess against
+the invader some such arrangement as is suggested by Sketch 11. In
+this arrangement, if one were compelled unfortunately to consider four
+special districts as more important than the mass of one's territory,
+one would have the advantage of knowing that they were clearly
+distinguishable into less and more important, and the further
+advantage of knowing that the more important the territory was, the
+more central it was and the better protected against invasion.
+
+Thus, in this diagram, the government of the general oblong, A, may
+distinguish four special zones, the protection of which from invasion
+is important, but which vary in the degree of their importance. The
+least important is the outermost, 1; the more important is an inner
+one, 2; still more important is 3; and most important of all is the
+black core of the whole.
+
+Some such arrangement has been the salvation of France time and time
+again, notably in the Spanish wars, and in the wars of Louis XIV., and
+in the wars of the Revolution. To some extent you have seen the same
+thing in the present war.
+
+To save Paris was exceedingly important, next came the zone outside
+Paris, and so on up to the frontier.
+
+But with the modern German Empire it is exactly the other way, and the
+situation is that which we found in Sketch 12; the four external
+corners are the essentials which must be preserved from invasion, and
+if any one of them goes, the whole political situation is at once in
+grave peril.
+
+The strategical position of modern Germany is embarrassed because each
+of these four corners must be saved by the armies. 1 is
+Belgium--before the war indifferent to Germany, but now destined to be
+vital to her position--2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is
+Silesia, and the German commanders, as well as the German Government,
+must remain to the last moment--if once they are thrown on the
+defensive--in grave indecision as to which of the four can best be
+spared when invasion threatens; or else, as is more probable, they
+must disperse their forces in the attempt to hold all four at once. It
+is a situation which has but rarely occurred before in the history of
+war, and which has always proved disastrous.
+
+Germany then must--once she is in Belgium--hold on to Belgium, or she
+is in peril; she must hold on to East Prussia, or she is in peril; she
+must hold on to Alsace-Lorraine, or she is in peril; and she must hold
+on to Silesia, or it is all up with her. If there were some common
+strategical factor binding these four areas together, so that the
+defence of one should involve and aid the defence of all, the
+difficulties thus imposed upon German strategy would be greatly
+lessened. Though even then the mere having to defend four outlying
+corners instead of a centre would produce confusion and embarrassment
+the moment numerical inferiority had appeared upon the side of the
+defence. But, as a fact, there is no such common factor.
+Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium, East Prussia and Silesia, stand
+strategically badly separated one from the other. Even the two on the
+East and the two on the West, though apparently forming pairs upon the
+map, are not dependent on one system of communications, and are cut
+off from each other by territory difficult or hostile, while between
+the Eastern and the Western group there is a space of five hundred
+miles.
+
+Let us, before discussing the political embarrassment to strategy
+produced by these four widely distant and quite separate areas,
+translate the diagram in the terms of a sketch map.
+
+On the following sketch map, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia,
+and Silesia are shaded, as were the four corners of the diagram. No. 1
+is Belgium, 2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is Silesia. The
+area occupied by the German Empire, including its present occupation
+of Belgium, is marked by the broad outline; and the areas shaded
+represent, not the exact limits of the four territories that are so
+important, but those portions of them which are essential: the
+non-Polish portion of Silesia, the non-Polish portion of East Prussia,
+the plain of Belgium, and all Alsace-Lorraine.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 13.]
+
+Now the reason that each of these must at all costs be preserved from
+invasion is, as I have said, different in each case, and we shall do
+well to examine what those reasons are; for upon them depends the
+political hesitation they inevitably, cause to arise in the plans of
+the Great General Staff.
+
+1. _Belgium._ The military annexation of Belgium has been a result of
+the war, and, from the German point of view, an unexpected result.
+Germany both hoped and expected that her armies would pass through
+Belgium as they did, in fact, pass through Luxembourg. The resistance
+of Belgium produced the military annexation of that country; the reign
+of terror exercised therein has immobilized about 100,000 of the
+German troops who would otherwise be free for the front; the checking
+of the advance into France has turned the German general political
+objective against England, and, to put the matter in the vaguest but
+most fundamental terms, the German mind has gradually come, since
+October, to regard the retention of Belgium as something quite
+essential. And this because:--(_a_) It gives a most weighty asset in
+the bargaining for peace. (_b_) It gives a seaboard against England.
+(_c_) It provides ample munition, house-room, and transport facility,
+without which the campaign in North-eastern France could hardly be
+prolonged. (_d_) It puts Holland at the mercy of Germany, for she can,
+by retaining Belgium, strangle Dutch trade, if she chooses to divert
+her carriage of goods through Belgian ports. (_e_) It is a specific
+conquest; the Government will be able to say to the German people, "It
+is true we had to give up this or that, but Belgium is a definite new
+territory, the occupation of which and the proposed annexation of
+which is a proof of victory." (_f_) The retention of Belgium has been
+particularly laid down as the cause of quarrel between Great Britain
+and Germany; to retain Belgium is to mark that score against what is
+now the special enemy of Germany in the German mind. (_g_) Antwerp is
+the natural port for all the centre of Europe in commerce westward
+over the ocean. (_h_) With Belgium may go the Belgian colonies--that
+is, the Congo--for the possession of which Germany has worked
+ceaselessly year in and year out during the last fifteen years by a
+steady and highly subsidized propaganda against the Belgian
+administration. She has done it through conscious and unconscious
+agents; by playing upon the cupidity of French and British
+Parliamentarians, of rum shippers, upon religious differences, and
+upon every agency to her hand.
+
+We may take it, then, that the retention of Belgium is in German eyes
+now quite indispensable. "If I abandon Belgium," she says, "it is much
+more than a strategic retreat; it is a political confession of
+failure, and the moral support behind me at home will break down."
+
+If I were writing not of calculable considerations, but of other and
+stronger forces, I should add that to withdraw from Belgium, where so
+many women and children have been massacred, so many jewels of the
+past befouled or destroyed, so wanton an attack upon Christ and His
+Church delivered, would be a loss of Pagan prestige intolerably
+strong, and a triumph of all that against which Prussia set out to
+war.
+
+2. _Alsace-Lorraine._ But Alsace-Lorraine is also "indispensable." We
+have seen on an earlier page what the retention of that territory
+means. Alsace-Lorraine is the symbol of the old victory. It is the
+German-speaking land which the amazingly unreal superstitions of
+German academic pedantry discovered to be something sacredly necessary
+to the unity of an ideal Germany, though the people inhabiting it
+desired nothing better than the destruction of the Prussian name. It
+is more than that. It is the bastion beyond the Rhine which keeps the
+Rhine close covered; it is the two great historic fortresses of
+Strassburg and Metz which are the challenge Germany has thrown down
+against European tradition and the civilization of the West; it is
+something which has become knit up with the whole German soul, and to
+abandon it is like a man abandoning his title or his name, or
+surrendering his sword. Through what must not the German mind pass
+before its directors would consent to the sacrifice of such a
+fundamentally symbolic possession? There is defeat in the very
+suggestion; and the very suggestion, though it has already occurred to
+the Great General Staff, and has already, I believe, been mentioned in
+one proposal for peace, would be intolerable to the mass of the
+enemy's opinion.
+
+3. _East Prussia._ East Prussia is sacred in another, but also an
+intense fashion. It is the very kernel of the Prussian monarchy. When
+Berlin was but a market town for the Electors of Brandenburg, those
+same Electors had contrived that East Prussia, which was outside the
+empire, should be recognized as a kingdom. Frederick the Great's
+father, while of Brandenburg an Elector, was in Prussia proper a king,
+a man who had emancipated that cradle of the Prussian power. The
+province in all save its southern belt (which is Polish) is the very
+essence of Prussian society: a mass of serfs, technically free,
+economically abject, governed by those squires who own them, their
+goods, and what might be their soil. The Russians wasted East Prussia
+in their first invasion, and they did well though they paid so heavy a
+price, for to wound East Prussia was to wound the very soul of that
+which now governs the German Empire. When the landed proprietors fled
+before the Russian invasion, and when there fled with them the
+townsfolk, the serfs rose and looted the country houses. In a way
+quite different from Belgium, quite different from Alsace-Lorraine,
+East Prussia is essential. Forces will and must be sent periodically
+to defend that territory, however urgently they may be needed
+elsewhere, as the pressure upon Germany increases. The German
+commanders, if they forget East Prussia for a moment in the
+consideration of the other essential points, will, the moment their
+eyes are turned upon East Prussia again, remember with violent emotion
+all that the province means to the reigning dynasty and its
+supporters, and they will do anything rather than let that frontier
+go. The memory of the first invasion is too acute, the terror of its
+repetition too poignant, to permit its abandonment.
+
+4. _Silesia._ Silesia, for quite other reasons (and remember that
+these different reasons for defending such various points are the
+essence of the embarrassment in which German strategy will find
+itself), must be saved. It has been insisted over and over again in
+these pages what Silesia means. Its meaning is twofold. If Silesia
+goes, the safest, the most remote from the sea, the most independent
+of imports of the German industrial regions, is gone. Silesia is,
+again, the country of the great proprietors. Amuse yourselves by
+remembering the names of Pless and of Lichnowsky. There are dozens of
+others. But, most important of all, Silesia is what Belgium is not,
+what Alsace-Lorraine is not, what East Prussia is not--it is the
+strategic key. Who holds Silesia commands the twin divergent roads to
+Berlin northwards, to Vienna southwards. Who holds Silesia holds the
+Moravian Gate. Who holds Silesia turns the line of the Oder, and
+passes behind the barrier fortresses which Germany has built upon her
+Eastern front. Who holds Silesia strikes his wedge in between the
+German-speaking north and the German-speaking south, and joins hands
+with the Slavs of Bohemia. Not that we should exaggerate the Slav
+factor, for religion and centuries of varying culture disturb its
+unity. But it is something. The Russian forces are Slav; the
+resurrection of Poland has been promised; the Czechs are not
+submissive to the German claim of natural mastery, and whoever holds
+Silesia throws a bridge between Slav and Slav if his aims are an
+extension of power in that race. For a hundred reasons Silesia must be
+saved.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now put yourself in the position of the men who must make a decision
+between these four outliers--Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia,
+and Silesia--and understand the hesitation such divergent aims impose
+upon them. Hardly are they prepared to sacrifice one of the four when
+the defensive problem becomes acute, but its claims will be pressed in
+every conceivable manner--by public sentiment, by economic
+considerations, by mere strategy, by a political tradition, by the
+influence of men powerful with the Prussian monarchy, whose homes and
+wealth are threatened. "If I am to hold Belgium, I must give up
+Alsace. How dare I do that? To save Silesia I must expose East
+Prussia. How dare I? I am at bay, and the East must at all costs be
+saved. I will hold Prussia and Silesia, but to withdraw from Belgium
+and from beyond the Rhine is defeat." The whole thing is an embroglio.
+That conclusion is necessary and inexorable. It would not appear at
+all until, or if, numerical weakness imposed on the enemy a gradual
+concentration of the defensive; but once that numerical weakness has
+come, the fatal choices must be made. It may be that a strict, silent,
+and virile resolution, such as saved France this summer, a
+preparedness for particular sacrifices calculated beforehand, will
+determine first some one retirement and then another. It may
+be--though it is not in the modern Prussian temperament--that a
+defensive as prolonged as possible will be attempted even with
+inferior numbers, and that, as circumstances may dictate,
+Alsace-Lorraine or Belgium, Silesia or East Prussia will be the first
+to be deliberately sacrificed; but one must be, and, it would seem,
+another after, and in the difficulty of choice a wound to the German
+strategy will come.
+
+The four corners are differently defensible--Alsace-Lorraine and
+Belgium only by artifice, and with great numbers of men; Silesia only
+so long as Austria (and Hungary) stand firm. East Prussia has her
+natural arrangement of lakes to make invasion tedious, and to permit
+defence with small numbers.
+
+Between the two groups, Eastern and Western, is all the space of
+Germany--the space separating Aberdeen from London. Between each part
+of each pair, in spite of an excellent railway system, is the block in
+the one case of the Ardennes and the Eifel, in the other of empty,
+ill-communicated Poland. But each is strategically a separate thing;
+the political value of each a separate thing; the embarrassment
+between all four insuperable.
+
+Such is the situation imposed by the geography of the European
+continent upon our enemies, with the opportunities and the drawbacks
+which that situation affords and imposes.
+
+I repeat, upon the balance, our enemies had geographical opportunities
+far superior to our own.
+
+Our power of partial blockade (to which I will return in a moment) is
+more than counterbalanced by the separation which Nature has
+determined between the two groups of Allies. The ice of the North, the
+Narrows of the Dardanelles, establish this, as do the Narrows of the
+Scandinavian Straits.
+
+The necessity of fighting upon two fronts, to which our enemies are
+compelled, is more than compensated by that natural arrangement of the
+Danube valley and of the Baltic plain which adds to the advantage of a
+central situation the power of rapid communication between East and
+West; while the chief embarrassment of our enemies in their
+geographical arrangement, which is the outlying situation of Hungary
+coupled with the presence of four vital regions at the four external
+corners of the German Empire, is rather political than geographical in
+nature.
+
+I will now turn to the converse advantages and disadvantages afforded
+and imposed by geographical conditions upon the Allies.
+
+
+_The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Allies._
+
+It has been apparent from the above in what way the geographical
+circumstance of Germany and Austria-Hungary advantaged and
+disadvantaged those two empires in the course of a war against East
+and West.
+
+Let us next see how the Allies were advantaged and disadvantaged by
+their position.
+
+1. The first great disadvantage which the Allies most obviously suffer
+is their separation one from the other by the Germanic mass.
+
+The same central position which gives Germany and Austria-Hungary
+their power of close intercommunion, of exactly coordinating all their
+movements, of using their armies like one army, and of dealing with
+rapidity alternate blows eastward and westward, produces contrary
+effects in the case of the Allies. Even if hourly communication were
+possible by telegraph between the two main groups, French and Russian,
+that would not be at all the same thing as personal, sustained, and
+continuous contact such as is enjoyed by the group of their enemies.
+
+But, as a fact, even the very imperfect and indirect kind of contact
+which can be established by telegraphing over great distances is
+largely lacking. The French and the Russians are in touch. The
+commanders can and do pursue a combined plan. But the communication of
+results and the corresponding arrangement of new dispositions are
+necessarily slow and gravely interrupted. Indeed, it is, as we shall
+see in a moment, one of the main effects of geography upon this
+campaign that Russia must suffer during all its early stages a very
+severe isolation.
+
+In general, the Allies as a whole suffer from the necessity under
+which they find themselves of working in two fields, remote the one
+from the other by a distance of some six hundred miles, not even
+connected by sea, and geographically most unfortunately independent.
+
+2. A second geographical disadvantage of the Allies consists in the
+fact that one of them, Great Britain, is in the main a maritime Power.
+
+That this has great compensating advantages we shall also see, but for
+the moment we are taking the disadvantages separately, and, so
+counting them one by one, we must recognize that England's being an
+island (her social structure industrialized and free from
+conscription, her interests not only those of Europe but those of such
+a commercial scattered empire as is always characteristic of secure
+maritime Powers) produces, in several of its aspects, a geographical
+weakness to the Allied position, and that for several reasons, which I
+will now tabulate:--
+
+(_a_) The position of England in the past, her very security as an
+island, has led her to reject the conception of universal service. She
+could only, at the outset of hostilities, provide a small
+Expeditionary Force, the equivalent at the most of a thirtieth of the
+Allied forces.
+
+(_b_) Her reserves in men who could approach the continental field in,
+say, the first year, even under the most vigorous efforts, would never
+reach anything like the numbers that could be afforded by a conscript
+nation. The very maximum that can be or is hoped for by the most
+sanguine is the putting into the field, after at least a year of war,
+of less than three-sixteenths of the total Allied forces, although her
+population is larger than that of France, and more than a third that
+of the enemy.
+
+(_c_) She is compelled to garrison and defend, and in places to
+police, dependencies the population of which will in some cases
+furnish no addition to the forces of the Allies, and in all cases
+furnish but a small proportion.
+
+(_d_) The isolation of her territory by the sea, coupled with her
+large population and its industrial character, makes Britain
+potentially the most vulnerable point in the alliance.
+
+So long as her fleet is certainly superior to that of the enemy, and
+has only to meet oversea attack, this vulnerability is but little
+felt; but once let her position at sea be lost, or even left
+undecided, or once let the indiscriminate destruction of commercial
+marine be seriously begun, and she is at the mercy of that enemy. For
+she cannot feed herself save by supplies from without, and she cannot
+take part in the supplying of armies with men and munitions upon the
+continent.
+
+(_e_) She is open to fear aggression upon any one of her independent
+colonies oversea, and yet she is not able to draw upon them for the
+whole of their potential strength, or, indeed, for more than a very
+small proportion of it. In other words, the British Fleet guarantees
+some fifteen million of European race beyond the seas from attack by
+the enemy, but cannot draw from these fifteen million more than an
+insignificant fraction of the million of men and more which, fully
+armed, they might furnish; nor has she any control over their finance,
+so as to be able to count upon the full weight of their wealth; nor
+can she claim their resources in goods and munitions. She can only
+obtain these by paying for them.
+
+There is here a very striking contrast between her position and that
+of the Germanic Powers.
+
+(_f_) Her isolation and maritime supremacy, coupled with her
+industrial character, make her during the strain of equipment the
+workshop of the Allies. That this is a great advantage is evident; but
+the disadvantage attaching to it is that very large proportions of her
+manhood are necessarily withdrawn from the field for the purposes of
+her shipbuilding, her communications, her manufactory of arms and all
+kinds of supplies, her seafaring work, both civil and military.
+
+Of the two other main Allies, the French disadvantage may be thus
+summarized, and it is slight:--
+
+(_a_) The French political frontier, as established since the defeat
+of the French in 1871, is an open frontier. It has no natural features
+upon which the defensive can rely. In the lack of this the French
+fortified at very heavy expense that portion of their frontier which
+faced their certain enemy, and established a line from Verdun to
+Belfort calculated to check the first movement of his offensive. But
+all the two hundred miles to the north of this, the whole line between
+Verdun and the North Sea, was virtually open. There were, indeed,
+certain fortified places upon that line, but they formed no
+consecutive system, and, as their armaments grew old, they were not
+brought up to date. The truth is, that the defence of France upon this
+frontier was really left to the co-operation of Belgium. If, as was
+believed to be almost certain, Prussian morals being what they are,
+the Prussian guarantee to respect Belgian neutrality would be torn up
+at the outbreak of war, then three great fortresses--Liege, Namur, and
+Antwerp--would hold up the enemy's advance in this quarter, and
+perform the function of delay which the obsolete armament of the
+north-eastern French frontier could not perform. We shall see, when we
+come to the conflicting theories of warfare held by the various
+belligerents, what a grievous miscalculation this was, and how largely
+it accounted for the first disasters of the war. But, at any rate, let
+us remember, as our first point, the absence of any natural line of
+defence in France as against a German invasion, remembering, also,
+that the French would necessarily, at the beginning of any war, be
+upon the defensive on account of their inferior numbers. Had France,
+for instance, had along her frontiers, and just within them, such a
+line as Germany possesses in the Rhine, she would have fallen back at
+the outset upon that line. But she has no such advantage.
+
+(_b_) The second disadvantage of the French geographically is one
+immixed with political considerations. The French have for centuries
+produced, and have for two thousand years believed in, central
+government. For at least three hundred years all the life of the
+nation has centred upon Paris; all the railways and all the great
+system of roads and most of the waterways of the north similarly have
+Paris for their nucleus. Now, this central ganglion of the whole
+French organism is but 120 miles from the frontier, ten days' easy
+marching. An enemy coming in from the north-east not only finds no
+natural obstacle in his way, but has Paris as nearly within his grasp
+as, say, Cologne is within the grasp of a French invasion of North
+Germany. This feature has had the most important consequences upon the
+whole of French history. It was particularly the determining point of
+1870.
+
+To meet the handicap, the French of our generation have combined two
+policies.
+
+First, they have fortified the whole region of Paris so thoroughly
+that it has sometimes been called "a fortified province;" an area of
+nearly thirty miles across at its narrowest, and of something like
+from seven to eight hundred square miles, is comprised within this
+plan.
+
+The weakness of this in the face of modern fire will again be dealt
+with when we come to the conflicting theories upon war established
+during the long peace.
+
+Secondly, the French established a policy whereby, if Paris were
+menaced in a future campaign, the Government should abandon that
+central point, and, in spite of the grave inconvenience proceeding
+from the way in which all material communications centred upon the
+capital and all established offices were grouped there, would withdraw
+the whole central system of government to Bordeaux, and leave Paris to
+defend itself, precisely as though it were of no more importance than
+any other fortified point. They would recognize the strategic values
+of the district; they would deliberately sacrifice its political and
+sentimental value. They would never again run the risk of losing a
+campaign because one particular area of the national soil happened to
+be occupied. The plans of their armies and the instructions of their
+Staff particularly warned commanders against disturbing any defensive
+scheme by too great an anxiety to save Paris.
+
+If this were the disadvantage geographically of France, what was that
+of Russia?
+
+Russia's geographical disadvantage was twofold. First, she had no
+outlet to an open sea in Europe save through the arctic port of
+Archangel. This port was naturally closed for nearly half the year,
+and how long it might be artificially kept partially open by
+ice-breakers it remained for the war to prove. But even if it were
+kept open the whole year in this precarious fashion, it lay on the
+farther side of hundreds of miles of waste and deserted land connected
+only with the active centre of Russia by one narrow-gauge line of
+railway with very little rolling stock. The great eastern port of
+Vladivostok was nearly as heavily handicapped, and its immense
+distance from the scene of operations in the West, with which it was
+only connected by a line six thousand miles long, was another
+drawback. Russia might, indeed, by the favour of neutrals or of
+Allies, use warm water ports. If the Turks should remain neutral and
+permit supply to reach her through the Dardanelles, the Black Sea
+ports were open all the year round, and Port Arthur (nearly as far off
+as Vladivostok) was also open in the Far East. But the Baltic, in a
+war with Germany, was closed to her. Certain goods from outside could
+reach her from Scandinavia, round by land along the north of the
+Baltic, but very slowly and at great expense. It so happened also
+that, as the war proceeded, this question of supply became
+unexpectedly important, because all parties found the expenditure of
+heavy artillery high-explosive ammunition far larger than had been
+calculated for, and Russia was particularly weak therein and dependent
+upon the West. This disadvantage under which Russia lay was largely
+the cause of her embarrassment, and of the prolongation of hostilities
+in the winter that followed the declaration of war.
+
+The fact that Russia was ill supplied with railways, and hardly
+supplied at all with hard roads (in a climate where the thaw turned
+her deep soil into a mass of mud) is political rather than
+geographical, but it must be remembered in connection with this
+difficulty of supply.
+
+If these, then, were the various disadvantages which geographical
+conditions had imposed upon the Allies, what were the corresponding
+advantages?
+
+They were considerable, and may be thus tabulated:--
+
+1. The western Allies stood between their enemies and the ocean. If
+they could maintain superiority at sea through the great size and
+efficiency of the British Fleet, and through its additional power when
+combined with the French, they could at the least embarrass, and
+perhaps ultimately starve out the enemy in certain essential materials
+of war. They could not reduce the enemy to famine, for with care his
+territories, so long as they were not ravaged, would be just
+self-supporting. The nitrates for his explosives the enemy could also
+command, and, in unlimited quantity, iron and coal. But the raw
+material of textiles for his clothing, cotton for his explosives,
+copper for his shell, cartridge cases, and electrical instruments,
+antimony for the hardening of the lead necessary to his small-arm
+ammunition, to some extent petrol for his aeroplanes and his
+motor-cars, and india-rubber for his tyres and other parts of
+machinery, he must obtain from abroad. That he would be able in part
+to obtain these through the good offices of neutrals was probable; but
+the Allied fleets in the West would certainly closely watch the extent
+of neutral imports, and attempt, with however much difficulty and with
+however partial success, to prevent those neutrals acting as a mere
+highroad by which such goods could pass into Germany and Austria. They
+would hardly allow, especially in the later phases of the war, Italy
+and Switzerland, Holland and Scandinavia, to act as open avenues for
+the supply of the Germanic body. Though they would have to go warily,
+and would find it essential to remain at peace with the nations whose
+commerce they thus hampered and in some sense controlled, the Allies
+in the West could in some measure, greater or less, embarrass the
+enemy in these matters.
+
+Conversely, they could supply themselves freely with tropical and
+neutral goods, and even with munitions of war obtained from across the
+ocean, from Africa and from America.
+
+So long as North-western France and the ports of Great Britain were
+free from the enemy this partial blockade would endure, and this
+freedom of supply for France and Britain from overseas would also
+endure.
+
+2. The Allies had further the geographical advantage of marine
+transport for their troops--an important advantage to the French, who
+had a recruiting ground in North Africa, and to the British, who had a
+recruiting ground in their dominions oversea, and, above all, an
+advantage in that it permitted the constant reinforcement of the
+continental armies by increasing contingents arriving from these
+islands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of geographical advantages attaching to the position of Russia only
+one can be discovered, and it consists in the immense extent and unity
+of the Russian Empire. This permitted operations upon a western front
+from the Baltic to the Carpathians, or rather to the Roumanian border,
+which vast line could never be firmly held against them by the enemy
+when once the Russians had trained and equipped a superior number of
+men. The German forces were sufficient, as events proved, long to
+maintain a strict cordon upon the shorter front between the Swiss
+frontiers and the sea, but upon the other side of the great field,
+between the Baltic and the Carpathians, they could never hope to
+establish one continued wall of resistance.
+
+
+(2) THE OPPOSING STRENGTHS.
+
+When nations go to war their probable fortunes, other things being
+equal, are to be measured in numbers.
+
+Other things being equal, the numbers one party can bring against the
+other in men, coupled with the numbers of weapons, munitions, and
+other material, will decide the issue.
+
+But in European civilization other things are more or less equal.
+Civilian historians are fond of explaining military results in many
+other ways, particularly in terms of moral values that will flatter
+the reader. But a military history, however elementary, is compelled
+to recognize the truth that normally modern war in Europe has followed
+the course of numbers.
+
+Among the very first, therefore, of the tasks set us in examining the
+great struggle is a general appreciation of the numbers that were
+about to meet in battle, and of their respective preparation in
+material.
+
+More than the most general numbers--more than brief, round
+statements--I shall not attempt. I shall not do more than state upon
+such grounds as I can discover proportions in the terms of single
+units--as, to say that one nation stood to another in its immediate
+armed men as eight to five, or as two to twenty. Neither shall I give
+positive numbers in less than the large fractions of a million. But,
+even with such large outlines alone before one, the task is
+extraordinarily difficult.
+
+It will almost certainly be found, when full details are available
+after the war, that the most careful estimates have been grievously
+erroneous in some particular. Almost every statement of fact in this
+department can be reasonably challenged, and the evidence upon matters
+which in civilian life are amply recorded and easily ascertainable is,
+in this department, everywhere purposely confused or falsified.
+
+To the difficulty provided by the desire for concealment necessary in
+all military organization, one must add the difficulty presented by
+the cross categories peculiar to this calculation. You have to
+consider not only the distinction between active and reserve, but also
+between men and munitions, between munitions available according to
+one theory of war, and munitions available according to another. You
+have to modify statical conclusions by dynamic considerations (thus
+you have to modify the original numbers by the rate of wastage, and
+the whole calculus varies progressively with the lapse of time as the
+war proceeds).
+
+In spite of these difficulties, I believe it to be possible to put
+before the general reader a clear and simple table of the numbers a
+knowledge of which any judgment of the war involves, and to be fairly
+certain that this table will, when full details are available, be
+discovered not too inaccurate.
+
+We must begin by distinguishing between the two sets of numbers with
+which we have to deal--the numbers of men, and the amount of munitions
+which these men have to use.
+
+The third essential element, equipment, we need not separately
+consider, because, when one says "men" in talking of military affairs,
+one only means equipped, trained, and organized men, for no others can
+be usefully present in the field.
+
+Let us start, then, with some estimate of the number of men who are
+about to take part in battle; let us take for our limits the
+convenient limits of a year, and let us divide that space of time
+arbitrarily into three parts or periods.
+
+There was a first period in which the nations opposed brought into the
+field the men available in the first few weeks for immediate action.
+It is not possible to set a precise limit, and to say, "This period
+covers the first six" or "the first eight weeks;" but we can say
+roughly that, when we are speaking of this first period, we mean the
+time during which men for whom the equipment was all ready, whose
+progress and munitioning had all been organized, were being as rapidly
+as possible brought into play. Such an estimate is not equivalent to
+an estimate of the very first numbers that met in the shock of battle;
+those numbers were far smaller, and differed according to the rate of
+mobilization and the intention of the various parties. The estimate is
+only that of the total number which the various parties could, and
+therefore did, bring into play before men not hitherto trained as
+soldiers, or trained but not believed to be required in the course of
+the campaign--according as that campaign had been variously foreseen
+by various governments--came in to swell the figures.
+
+The conclusion of this first period would come, of course, gradually
+in the case of every combatant, and would come more rapidly in the
+case of some than in the case of others. But we are fairly safe if we
+take the general turning-point from the first period to the second to
+be the month of October 1914. The second period had begun for
+some--notably for Germany--with the first days of that month; it had
+already appeared for all, especially for England, before the beginning
+of November.
+
+The second period is marked for all the combatants by the bringing
+into play of such forces as, for various reasons, the Government of
+each had once hoped would not be required. The German Empire might
+have marked them as not required, in the reasonable hope that victory
+would be quickly assured. The British Government might, from a very
+different standpoint, have believed them not to be required, because
+it regarded the work of its continental Allies as sufficient to gain
+the common object, etc. But in the case of all, however various the
+motives, the particular mark of this second period is the straining to
+put into the field newly trained and equipped bodies which in the
+first period were, it was imagined, neither needed nor perhaps
+available.
+
+This second period merges very gradually into the third, or final,
+period, which is that of the last effort possible to the belligerents.
+There comes a moment before the end of the first year when, in the
+case of most of the belligerents, every man who is available at all
+has been equipped, trained, and put forward, and after which there is
+nothing left but the successive batches of yearly recruits growing up
+from boyhood to manhood.
+
+Although Britain is in a peculiar position, and Russia, through her
+tardiness in equipment, in a peculiar position of another kind, yet
+one may fairly say that the vague margin between the second period of
+growth and the third period of finality appears roughly somewhere
+round the month of June. It will fall earlier with Germany, a good
+deal earlier with France; but from the middle of May at earliest to
+the end of June at latest may be said to mark the entry of the
+numerical factor into its third and final phase.
+
+Let us take these three periods one by one.
+
+The first period is by far the most important to our judgment of the
+campaign; a misapprehension of it has warped most political statements
+made in this country, and most contemporary judgments of the war as a
+whole. It is impossible to get our view of the great European
+struggle--of its nature in the bulk--other than fantastically wrong,
+if we misapprehend the opening numbers with which it was waged.
+
+There are three ways of getting at those numbers.
+
+The first and worst way is the consulting of general statistics
+published before the war broke out. Thus we may see in almanacs the
+French army put down as a little over four million, the German at the
+same amount, the Russian at about five million, and so forth.
+
+These figures have no relation to reality, because they omit a hundred
+modifying considerations--such as the age of the reserves, the degree
+of training of the reserves, the organization prepared for the
+enrolment of untrained men, etc. The only element in them which is of
+real value is the statistics--when we can obtain them--of men actually
+present with the colours before mobilization, to which one may add,
+perhaps--or at any rate in the case of France and Germany--the numbers
+of the _active_ reserve immediately behind the conscript army in
+peace.
+
+The second method, which is better, but imperfect, is that which has
+particularly appealed to technical writers. It consists in numbering
+_units_; in noting the headquarters and the tale of army corps and of
+independent divisions.
+
+The fault of this method is twofold. First, that only actual
+experience can tell one whether units are really being maintained
+during peace at full strength; and secondly, that only actual
+experience discovers how many new units can and will be created when
+war is joined. In other words, the fault of this method (necessary
+though it is as an adjunct to all military calculations) lies in its
+divorce from the reality of numbers.
+
+At the end of the retreat from Moscow each army corps of the Grand
+Army still preserved its name, each regiment its nominal identity. And
+the roll was called by Ney, for instance, before the Beresina,
+division by division and regiment by regiment, and even in the
+regiments company by company; but in most of these last there was no
+one to answer, and there is a story of one regiment for which one
+surviving man answered with regularity until he also died. What fights
+is numbers of living men--not headings; and if five army corps are
+present, each having lost two-fifths of its men, three full army corps
+are a match for them.
+
+The third method is that of commonsense. We must deduce from the
+results obtained, from the fronts covered, from the energy remaining
+after known losses, from the reports of intelligence, from the avenues
+of communication available, what least and what largest numbers can be
+present. We must correct such conclusions by our previous knowledge of
+the way in which each service regards its strength, which most depends
+upon reserves, how each uses his depots and drafts, what machinery it
+has for training the untrained and for equipping them. This
+complicated survey taken, we can arrive at general figures.[1]
+
+Using that method, and applying it to the present campaign, I think we
+shall get something like the following.
+
+
+_The Figures of the First Period, say to October 1-31, 1914._
+
+Germany put across the Rhine in the first period (without counting a
+certain small proportion of Hungarian cavalry and Austrian artillery)
+rather more than two and a quarter million men. She put into the
+Eastern field first a quarter of a million, which rapidly grew to half
+a million, and before the end of October to nearly a million; a
+balance of rather more than another million she used for filling gaps
+and for keeping her strength at the full, and also in particular
+cases (as in her violent attempt to break out through Flanders, or
+rather the beginning of that attempt) for the immediate reinforcement
+of a fighting line. Say that Germany put into the field altogether
+five million men in the first period, and you are saying too much. Say
+that she put into the field altogether in the first period four and a
+quarter million men, and you are saying probably somewhat too little.
+
+France met the very first shock with about a million men, which
+gradually grew in the fighting line to about a million and a half.
+Here the limit of the French force immediately upon the front will
+probably be set. The numbers continued to swell long before the end of
+the first period and well on into the second, but they were kept in
+reserve. Counting the men drafted in to supply losses and the reserve,
+it is not unwise to put at about two and a half million men the
+ultimate French figure, of which one and a half million formed, before
+the end of the first period, the immediate fighting force.
+
+Austria was ordered by the Germans to put into the field, as an
+initial body to check any Russian advance and to confuse the beginning
+of Russian concentration, about a million men; which in the first
+period very rapidly grew to two million, and probably before the end
+of the first period to about two million and a half.
+
+Russia put into the field during the first weeks of the war some
+million and a quarter, which grew during the first period (that is,
+before the coming of winter had created a very serious handicap, to
+which allusion will presently be made) to perhaps two million and a
+half at the very most. I put that number as an outside limit.
+
+Servia, of men actually present and able to fight, we may set down at
+a quarter of a million; and Belgium, if we like, at one hundred
+thousand--though the Belgian service being still in a state of
+transition, and the degree of training very varied within it, that
+minor point is disputable. Indeed it is better, in taking a general
+survey, to consider only the five Great Powers concerned.
+
+Of these the fifth, Great Britain, though destined to exercise by sea
+power and by her recruiting field a very great ultimate effect upon
+the war, could only provide, in this first period upon the Continent,
+an average of one hundred thousand men. To begin with, some
+seventy-five thousand, dwindling through losses to little more than
+fifty thousand, replenished and increased to about one hundred and
+twenty-five thousand, and approaching, as the end of the first period
+was reached, one hundred and fifty thousand men actually present upon
+the front.
+
+We can now set down these figures in the shape of simple units, and
+see how the numerical chances stood at the opening of the campaign.
+
+The enemy sets out with =32= men, of whom he bids =10= men against the
+Russians, and sends =22= against the French. The Russians meet the
+=10= men with about =12=, and the French meet the =22= with about
+=10=; but as they have not the whole =22= to meet in the first shock,
+they are struck rather in the proportion of =10= to =16= or =17=,
+while the presence of the British contingent makes them rather more
+than =101/2=. But these initial figures rapidly change with the growth
+of the armies, and before the first period is over the Germans have
+=22= in the West against =15= French and =1= British, making =16=;
+while in the East the Russian =12= has grown to, say, =24=, but the
+Austro-Germans in the East, against those =24=, have grown to be quite
+=32=. And there is the numerical situation of the first period
+clearly, and I think accurately, put, _supposing the wastage to be
+equal in proportion throughout all the armies_. The importance of
+appreciating these figures is that they permit us to understand why
+the enemy was morally certain of winning, quite apart from his right
+judgment on certain disputed theories of war (to which I shall turn in
+a moment), and quite apart from his heavy secret munitioning, which
+was of such effect in the earlier part of the campaign. He was ready
+with forces which he knew would be overwhelming, and how superior he
+was thus numerically in that first period can best be appreciated, I
+think, by a glance at the diagram on the next page.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 14.]
+
+It is no wonder that he made certain of a decisive success in the
+West, and of the indefinite holding up or pushing back of the Russian
+forces in the East. It is no wonder that he confidently expected a
+complete victory before the winter, and the signing of peace before
+the end of the year. To that end all his munitioning, and even the
+details of his tactics, were directed.
+
+
+_The Figures of the Second Period, say to April 15-June 1, 1915._
+
+The second period saw in the West, and, in the enemy's case, a very
+great change proceeding by a number of minute steps, but fairly rapid
+in character.
+
+The French numbers could not grow very rapidly, because the French had
+armed every available man. They could bring in a certain number of
+volunteers; but neither was it useful to equip the most of the older
+men, nor could they be spared from those duties behind the front line
+which the much larger population of the enemy entrusted to men who,
+for the most part, had received no regular training. The French did,
+however, in this second period, gradually grow to some two and a half
+million men, behind which, ready to come in for the final period, were
+about a third of a million young recruits.
+
+Great Britain discovered a prodigious effort. She had already,
+comparatively early in the second period, put across the sea nearly
+half a million men, and drafts were perpetually arriving as the second
+period came to a close; while behind the army actually upon the
+Continent very large bodies--probably another million in
+number--hastily trained indeed, and presented with a grave problem in
+the matter of officering, but of excellent material and _moral_, were
+ready to appear, before the end of the second period or at its close,
+the moment their equipment should be furnished. Counting the British
+effort and the French together, one may say that, without regard to
+wastage, the Allies in the West grew in the second period from the
+original 16 to over 30, and might grow even before the second period
+was over to 35 or even more.
+
+On the enemy's side (neglecting wastage for the moment) there were the
+simplest elements of growth. Each Power had docketed every untrained
+man, knew his medical condition, where to find him, where and how to
+train him. The German Empire had during peace taken about one-half of
+its young men for soldiers. It had in pure theory five million
+untrained men in the reserve, excluding the sick, and those not
+physically efficient for service.
+
+In practice, however, a very large proportion of men, even of the
+efficients, must be kept behind for civilian work; and in an
+industrial country such as Germany, mainly urban in population, this
+proportion is particularly large. We are safe in saying that the
+German army would not be reinforced during the second period by more
+than two and a half million men. These were trained in batches of some
+800,000 each; the equipment had long been ready for them, and they
+appeared mainly as drafts for filling gaps, but partly as new
+formations in groups--the first going in or before November, the
+second in or before February. A third and last group was expected to
+have finished this rather elementary training somewhere about the end
+of April, so that May would complete the second period in the German
+forces.
+
+Austria-Hungary, by an easily appreciable paradox, possessed, though
+but 80 per cent. of the Germans in population, a larger available
+untrained reserve. This was because that empire trained a smaller
+proportion of its population by far than did the Germans. It is
+probable that Austria-Hungary was able to train and put forward during
+the second period some three million men.
+
+It is a great error, into which most critics have fallen, to
+underestimate or to neglect the Austro-Hungarian factor in the enemy's
+alliance. Without thus nearly doubling her numbers, Germany could not
+have fought France and Russia at all, and a very striking feature of
+all the earlier weeks of 1915 was the presence in the Carpathians of
+increasing Austro-Hungarian numbers, which checked for more than three
+months all the Russian efforts upon that front.
+
+Say that Austria-Hungary nearly doubled her effectives (apart from
+wastage) in this second period, and you will not be far wrong.
+
+Russia, which upon paper could almost indefinitely increase during the
+second period her numbers in the field, suffered with the advent of
+winter an unexpected blow. Her equipment, and in particular her
+munitioning (that is, her provision of missiles, and in especial of
+heavy shell), must in the main come from abroad. Now the German
+command of the Baltic created a complete blockade on the eastern
+frontier of Russia, save upon the short Roumanian frontier; and the
+entry of Turkey into the campaign on the side of the enemy, which
+marked the second period, completed that blockade upon the south, and
+shut upon Russia the gate of the Dardanelles. The port of Archangel in
+the north was ice-bound, or with great difficulty kept partially open
+by ice-breakers, and was in any case only connected with Russia by one
+narrow-gauge and lengthy line; while the only remaining port of
+Vladivostok was six thousand miles away, and closed also during a part
+of the winter.
+
+In this situation it was impossible for the great reserves of men
+which Russia counted on to be put into the field, and the Russians
+remained throughout the whole of this second period but little
+stronger than they had been at the end of the first. If we set them
+down at perhaps somewhat over three millions (excluding wastage)
+towards the end of this second period, we shall be near to a just
+estimate.
+
+We can now sum up and say that, _apart from wastage_, the forces
+arrayed against each other after this full development should have
+been about 120 men for the central powers of the enemy--35 (and
+perhaps ultimately 40) men against them upon the West, and, until
+sufficient Russian equipment could at least be found, only some 30 men
+against them upon the East.
+
+Luckily such figures are wholly changed by the enormous rate of the
+enemy's wastage. The Russians had lost men almost as rapidly as the
+enemy, but the Russian losses could be and were made good. The
+handicap of the blockade under which Russia suffered permitted her to
+maintain only a certain number at the front, but she could continually
+draft in support of those numbers; and though she lost in the first
+seven months of the war quite four hundred thousand in prisoners, and
+perhaps three-quarters of a million in other casualties, her strength
+of somewhat over three millions was maintained at the close of the
+first period.
+
+In the same way drafts had further maintained the British numbers. The
+French had lost not more than one-fifth of a million in prisoners, and
+perhaps a third of a million or a little more in killed and
+permanently disabled--that is, unable to return to the fighting line.
+In the case of both the French and the British sanitary conditions
+were excellent.
+
+You have, then, quite 35 for your number in the West, and quite 33 for
+your number in the East of the Allied forces at the end of the winter;
+but of your enemy forces you may safely deduct 45-50 might be a truer
+estimate; and it is remarkable that those who have watched the matter
+carefully at the front are inclined to set the total enemy losses
+higher than do the critics working at home. But call it only 45 (of
+which 5 are prisoners), and you have against the 68 Allies in East and
+West no more at the end of this second period than 75 of the enemy.
+
+The following diagram illustrates in graphic form the change that six
+months have produced.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 15.]
+
+In other words, at the end of the winter and with the beginning of the
+spring, although the enemy still has a numerical preponderance, it is
+no longer the overwhelming thing it was when the war began, and that
+change in numbers explains the whole change in the campaign.
+
+The enemy was certain of winning mainly because he was fighting more
+than equal in the East, and at first nearly two to one, later quite
+four to three, in the West. Those are the conditions of the late
+summer of 1914. 1915, before it was a third over, had seen the numbers
+nearly equalized. With the summer of 1915 we might hope to see the
+numbers at last reversed, and, after so many perilous months, a total
+(not local) numerical majority at last appearing upon the side of the
+Allies. If ever this condition shall arrive before the enemy can
+accomplish a decisive result in either field the tide will have
+turned.
+
+The third period belongs at the moment of writing to the future. All
+we can say of it is that it presents for the enemy no considerable
+field of recruitment; but while in the West it offers no increase to
+the French, it does offer another five units at least, and possibly
+another six or eight, to the British; and to the Russians, if the
+blockade can be pierced at any point, or if the change of weather,
+coupled with the broadening of the gauge of the railway to Archangel,
+permits large imports, an almost indefinite increase in
+number--certainly an increase of two millions, or twenty of the units
+we were dealing with in the figures given above.
+
+So much, then, for the numerical factor in men which dominates the
+whole campaign.
+
+When we turn from this to the second factor--that of munitions--we
+discover something which can be dealt with far more briefly, but which
+follows very much the same line.
+
+The enemy in the first period of the war had, if anything, an even
+greater superiority in munitioning than in men. This superiority was
+due to two distinct causes. In the first place, as we shall see in a
+few pages, his theory upon a number of military details was well
+founded; in the second place, _he made war at his own chosen moment,
+after three years of determined and largely secret preparation_.
+
+As to the first point:--
+
+We may take as a particular example of these theories of war the
+enemies' reliance upon heavy artillery--and in particular upon the
+power of the modern high explosive and the big howitzer--to destroy
+permanent fortification rapidly, and to have an effect in the field,
+particularly in the preparation of an assault, which the military
+theories of the Allies had wrongly underestimated. It is but one
+example out of many. It must serve for the rest, and it will be dealt
+with more fully in the next section. The Germans to some extent, and
+much more the Austrians, prepared an immensely greater provision of
+heavy ammunition than their opponents, and entered the field with
+large pieces of a calibre and in number quite beyond anything that
+their opponents had at the outset of the campaign.
+
+As to the second point:--
+
+No peaceful nations, no nations not designing a war at their own hour,
+lock up armament which may be rendered obsolete, or, in equipment more
+extensive than the reasonable chances of a campaign may demand, the
+public resources which it can use on what it regards as more useful
+things. Such nations, to use a just metaphor, "insure" against war at
+what they think a reasonable rate. But if some one Government in
+Europe is anarchic in its morals, and proposes, while professing
+peace, to declare war at an hour and a day chosen by itself, it will
+obviously have an overwhelming advantage in this respect. The energy
+and the money which it devotes to the single object of preparation
+cannot possibly be wasted; and, if its sudden aggression is not fixed
+too far ahead, will not run the risk of being sunk in obsolete
+weapons.
+
+Now it is clearly demonstrable from the coincidence of dates, from the
+exact time required for a special effort of this kind, and from the
+rate at which munitions and equipment were accumulated, that the
+Government at Berlin came to a decision in the month of July 1911 to
+force war upon Russia and upon France immediately after the harvest of
+1914; and of a score of indications which all converge upon these
+dates, not one fails to strike them exactly by more than a few weeks
+in the matter of preparation, by more than a few days in the date at
+which war was declared.
+
+Under those circumstances, Berlin with her ally at Vienna had the
+immense numerical advantage over the French and the Russians when war
+was suddenly forced upon those countries on the 31st of July last
+year.
+
+But, as in the case of men, the advantage would only be overwhelming
+during the first period. The very fact that the war had to be won
+quickly involved an immense expenditure of heavy ammunition in the
+earlier part of it, and this expenditure, if it were not successful,
+would be a waste.
+
+It takes about five months to produce a heavy piece, and the rate of
+production of heavy ammunition, though slow, is measurable. At the
+moment of writing this, towards the close of the second period, the
+balance is not yet redressed, but it is in a fair way to be redressed.
+The imperfect and too tardy blockade to which the enemy is somewhat
+timidly subjected is a factor in aid of this; and we may be fairly
+confident that, if a third period is reached before the enemy shall
+have the advantage of a decision, there will be a preponderance of
+munitioning upon the Allied side in the West and the East which will
+be, if anything, of superior importance to the approaching
+preponderance in numbers.
+
+Having thus briefly surveyed the opposing strength of either
+combatant, checked and measured as it varied with the progress of the
+war, we will turn to the _moral_ opposition of military theory
+between the one party and the other, and show how here again that,
+_save in the most important matter of all, grand strategy_, the enemy
+was on the highroad to the victory which he confidently and, for that
+matter, reasonably expected.
+
+
+(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR.
+
+The long peace which the most civilized parts of Europe had enjoyed
+for now a generation left more and more uncertain the value of
+theories upon the conduct of war, which theories had for the most part
+developed as mere hypotheses untested by experience during that
+considerable period. The South African and the Manchurian war had
+indeed proved certain theories sound and others unsound, so far as
+their experience went; but they were fought under conditions very
+different from those of an European campaign, and the progress of
+material science was so rapid in the years just preceding the great
+European conflict that the mass of debated theories still remained
+untried at its outbreak.
+
+The war in its first six months thoroughly tested these theories, and
+proved, for the greater part of them, which were sound in practice and
+which unsound. I will tabulate them here, and beg the special
+attention of the reader, because upon the accuracy of these forecasts
+the first fortunes of the war depended.
+
+I. A German theory maintained that, with the organization of and the
+particular type of discipline in the German service, attacks could be
+delivered in much closer formation than either the French or the
+English believed to be possible.
+
+The point is this: After a certain proportion of losses inflicted
+within a certain limit of time, troops break or are brought to a
+standstill. That was the universal experience of all past war. When
+the troops that are attacking break or are brought to a standstill,
+the attack fails. But what you cannot determine until you test the
+matter in actual war is what numbers of losses in what time will thus
+destroy an offensive movement. You cannot determine it, because the
+chief element in the calculation is the state of the soldier's mind,
+and that is not a measurable thing. One had only the lessons of the
+past to help one.
+
+The advantages of attacking in close formation are threefold.
+
+(_a_) You launch your attack with the least possible delay. It is
+evident that spreading troops out from the column to the line takes
+time, and that the more extended your line the more time you consume
+before you can strike.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 16.]
+
+If I have here a hundred units advancing in a column towards the place
+where they are to attack (and to advance in column is necessary,
+because a broad line cannot long keep together), then it is evident
+that if I launched them to the attack thus:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 17.]
+
+packed close together, I get them into that formation much more
+quickly than if, before attacking, I have to spread them out thus:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 18.]
+
+(_b_) The blow which I deliver has also evidently more weight upon it
+at a given point. If I am attacking a hundred yards of front with a
+hundred units of man and missile power, I shall do that front more
+harm in a given time than if I am attacking with only fifty such
+units.
+
+(_c_) In particular circumstances, where troops _have_ to advance on a
+narrow front, as in carrying a bridge or causeway or a street or any
+other kind of defile, my troops, if they can stand close formation and
+the corresponding punishment it entails, will be more likely to
+succeed than troops not used to or not able to bear such close
+formation. Now, such conditions are very numerous in war. Troops are
+often compelled, if they are to succeed, to rush narrow gaps of this
+kind, and their ability to do so is a great element in tactical
+success.
+
+I have here used the phrase "if they can stand close formation and the
+corresponding punishment it entails," and that is the whole point.
+There are circumstances--perhaps, on the whole, the most numerous of
+all the various circumstances in war--in which close formation, if it
+can be used, is obviously an advantage; but it is equally self-evident
+that the losses of troops in close formation will be heavier than
+their losses in extended order. A group is a better target than a
+number of dispersed, scattered points.
+
+Now, the Germans maintained in this connection not only, as I have
+said, that they could get their men to stand the punishment involved
+in close formation, but also that:--
+
+(_a_) The great rapidity of such attacks would make the _total_ and
+_final_ wastage less than was expected, and further:--
+
+(_b_) That the heavy wastage, such as it was, was worth while, because
+it would lead to very rapid strategical decision as well as tactical.
+In other words, because once you had got your men to stand these heavy
+_local_ losses and to suffer heavy _initial_ wastage, you would win
+your campaign in a short time, so that the high-rate wastage not being
+prolonged need not be feared.
+
+Well, in the matter of this theory, the war conclusively proved the
+following points:--
+
+(_a_) The Germans were right and the Allies were wrong with regard to
+the mere possibility of using close formations. The German temper,
+coupled with the type of discipline in the modern German service, did
+prove capable of compelling men to stand losses out of all proportion
+to what the Allies expected they could stand, and yet to continue to
+advance neither broken nor brought to a standstill. But--
+
+(_b_) The war also proved that, upon the whole, and taking the
+operations in their entirety, such formations were an error. In case
+after case, a swarm of Germans advancing against inferior numbers got
+home after a third, a half, or even more than a half of their men had
+fallen in the first few minutes of the rush. But in many, many more
+cases this tactical experiment failed. Those who can speak as
+eye-witnesses tell us that, though the occasions on which such attacks
+actually broke were much rarer than was expected before the war began,
+yet the occasions on which the attack was thrown into hopeless
+confusion, and in which the few members of it that got home had lost
+all power to do harm to the defenders, were so numerous that the
+experiment must be regarded as, upon the whole, a failure. It may be
+one that no troops but Germans could employ. It is certainly not one
+which any troops, after the experience of this war, will copy.
+
+(_c_) Further, the war proved even more conclusively that the wastage
+was not worth while. The immense expense in men only succeeded where
+there was an overwhelming superiority in number. The strategical
+result was not arrived at quickly (as the Germans had expected)
+through this tactical method, and after six months of war, the enemy
+had thrown away more than twice and nearly three times as many men as
+he need have sacrificed had he judged sanely the length of time over
+which operations might last.
+
+II. Another German theory had maintained that modern high explosives
+fired from howitzers and the accuracy of their aim controlled by
+aircraft would rapidly and promptly dominate permanent fortification.
+
+This theory requires explanation. Its partial success in practice was
+the most startling discovery and the most unpleasant one to the Allies
+of the early part of the war.
+
+In the old days, say up to ten years ago or less, permanent
+fortification mounting heavy guns was impregnable to direct assault if
+it were properly held and properly munitioned. It could hold out for
+months. Its heavy guns had a range superior to any movable guns that
+could be brought against it--indeed, so very heavily superior that
+movable guns, even if they were howitzers, would be smashed or their
+crews destroyed long before the fortress was seriously damaged by
+them.
+
+A howitzer is but a form of mortar, and all such pieces are designed
+to lob a projectile instead of throwing it. The advantage of using
+these instruments when you are besieging permanent works is that you
+can hide them behind an obstacle, such as a hill, and that the heavy
+gun in the fortress cannot get its shell on to them because that shell
+has a flatter trajectory. The disadvantage is that the howitzer has a
+very much shorter range than the gun size for size.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 19.]
+
+Here is a diagram showing how necessarily true this is. The howitzer,
+lobbing its shell with a comparatively small charge, has the advantage
+of being able to hide behind a steep bit of ground, but on such a
+trajectory the range is short. The gun in the fortress does not lob
+its shell, but throws it. The course of the gun shell is much more
+straight. It therefore can only hit the howitzer and its crew
+indirectly by exploding its shell just above them. Until recently, the
+gun was master of the howitzer for three reasons:--
+
+First, because the largest howitzers capable of movement and of being
+brought up against any fortress and shifted from one place of
+concealment to another were so small that their range was
+insignificant. Therefore the circumference on which they could be used
+was also a small one; their opportunities for hiding were consequently
+reduced; the chances of their emplacement being immediately spotted
+from the fortress were correspondingly high, and the big gun in the
+fortress was pretty certain to overwhelm the majority of them at least.
+It is evident that the circumference {~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~} offers
+far more chances of hiding than the circumference ABC, but a still more
+powerful factor in favour of the new big howitzer is the practical one
+that at very great ranges in our climate the chances of spotting a
+particular place are extremely small. Secondly, because the explosives
+used, even when they landed and during the short time that the howitzer
+remained undiscovered and unheard, were not sufficiently powerful nor,
+with the small howitzers then in existence, sufficiently large in
+amount in each shell to destroy permanent fortification. Thirdly,
+because the effect of the aim is always doubtful. You are firing at
+something well above yourself, and you could not tell very exactly
+where your howitzer shell had fallen.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 20.]
+
+What has modified all this in the last few years is--
+
+First, the successful bringing into the field of very large howitzers,
+which, though they do lob their shells, lob them over a very great
+distance. The Austrians have produced howitzers of from 11 to 12
+inches in calibre, which, huge as they are, can be moved about in the
+field and fired from any fairly steady ground; and the Germans have
+probably produced (though I cannot find actual proof that they have
+used them with effect) howitzers of more than 16 inches calibre, to be
+moved, presumably, only upon rails. But 11-inch was quite enough to
+change all the old conditions. It must be remembered that a gun varies
+as the _cube_ of its calibre. A 12-inch piece is not twice as powerful
+as a 6-inch. It is _eight times_ as powerful. The howitzer could now
+fire from an immense distance. The circumference on which it worked
+was very much larger; its opportunities for finding suitable steep
+cover far greater. Its opportunities for moving, if it was endangered
+by being spotted, were also far greater; and the chances of the gun in
+the fortress knocking it out were enormously diminished.
+
+Secondly, the high explosives of recent years, coupled with the vast
+size of this new mobile howitzer shell, is capable, when the howitzer
+shell strikes modern fortification, of doing grievous damage which,
+repeated over several days, turns the fort into a mass of ruins.
+
+Thirdly, the difficulty of accurate aiming over such distances and of
+locating your hits so that they destroy the comparative small area of
+the fort is got over by the use of aircraft, which fly above the fort,
+note the hits, and signal the results.
+
+Now, the Germans maintained that under these quite recently modified
+conditions not even the best handled and heaviest gunned permanent
+fort could hold out more than a few days. The French believed that it
+could, and they trusted in the stopping power not only of individual
+works (such as the fortress of Manonvilliers on the frontier), but
+more especially of great rings of forts, such as surround Liege,
+Namur, Verdun, etc., and enclose an area within the security of which
+large bodies of troops can be held ready, armies which no one would
+dare to leave behind them without having first reduced them to
+surrender.
+
+The very first days of the war proved that the German theory was right
+and the French wrong. The French theory, upon which such enormous
+funds had been expended, had been perfectly right until within quite
+recent years the conditions had changed. Port Arthur, for instance,
+only ten years ago, could hold out for months and months. In this war
+no individual fort has held out for more than eleven days.
+
+It might be imagined under such circumstances that the very existence
+of fortresses was doomed; yet we note that Verdun continues to make a
+big bulge in the German line four months after the first shots fell on
+its forts, and that the Germans are actively restoring the great
+Belgian rings they have captured at Liege, Antwerp, and Namur.
+
+Why is this? It is because another German theory has proved right in
+practice.
+
+III. This German theory which has proved right in practice is what may
+be called "the mobile defence of a fortress." It proposes no longer to
+defend upon expensive permanent works precisely located upon the map,
+but upon a number of improvised batteries in which heavy guns can move
+somewhat behind field-works concealed as much as possible, numerous
+and constructed rapidly under the conditions of the campaign. Such
+works dotted round the area you desire to defend are quite a different
+thing to reduce from isolated, restricted, permanent forts. In the
+first place, the enemy does not know where they are; in the second
+place, you can make new ones at short notice; in the third place, if a
+howitzer does spot your heavy gun, you can move it or its neighbours
+to a new position; in the fourth place, the circumference you are
+defending is much larger, and the corresponding area that the
+besiegers have to search with their fire more extended. Thus, in the
+old forts round Verdun, about a dozen permanent works absolutely fixed
+and ascertainable upon the map, and covering altogether but a few
+acres, constituted the defence of the town. Before September was out
+the heavy guns had been moved to trenches far advanced into the field
+to the north and east, temporary rails had been laid down to permit
+their lateral movement--that is, to let them shift from a place where
+they had perhaps been spotted to a new place, under cover of darkness,
+and the sectors thus thrown out in front of the old fortifications in
+this improvised mobile fashion were at least three times as long as
+the line made by the ring of old forts, while the area that had to be
+searched was perhaps a hundred times as large. For in the place of the
+narrowly restricted permanent fort, with, say, ten heavy guns, you had
+those same ten heavy guns dotted here and there in trenches rapidly
+established in half a dozen separate, unknown, and concealed spots,
+along perhaps a mile of wooded hill, and free to operate when moved
+over perhaps double that front.
+
+IV. _In Grand Strategy a German general theory of strategics was
+opposed to a French general theory of strategics, and upon which of
+the two should prove right depended, much more than on any of the
+previous points, the ultimate issue of the campaign._
+
+This is far the most important point for the reader's consideration.
+It may be said with justice that no one can understand this war who
+has not grasped the conflict between these two fundamental conceptions
+of armed bodies in action, and the manner in which (by the narrowest
+and most fortunate margin!) events in the first phase of the war
+justified the French as against the German school.
+
+I must therefore beg the reader's leave to go somewhat thoroughly into
+the matter, for it is the foundation of all that will follow when we
+come to the narration of events and the story of the Western battle
+which began in the retreat from the Sambre and ended in the Battle of
+the Marne.
+
+The first postulate in all military problems is that, other things
+being equal, numbers are the decisive factor in war. This does not
+mean that absolute superiority of numbers decides a campaign
+necessarily in favour of the superior power. What it means is that _in
+any particular field_, if armament and discipline are more or less
+equal on the two sides, the one that has been able to mass the greater
+number _in that field_ will have the victory. He will disperse or
+capture his enemy, or at the least he will pin him and take away his
+_initiative_--of which word "initiative" more later. Now, this field
+in which one party has the superior numbers can only be a portion of
+the whole area of operations. But if it is what is called the decisive
+portion, then he who has superior numbers _in the decisive time and
+place_ will win not only there but everywhere. His local victory
+involves consequent success along the whole of his line.
+
+For instance, supposing five men are acting against three. Five is
+more than three; and if the forces bear upon each other equally, the
+five will defeat the three. But if the five are so badly handled that
+they get arranged in groups of two, two, and one, and if the three are
+so well handled that they strike swiftly at the first isolated two and
+defeat them, thus bringing up the next isolated two, who are in their
+turn defeated, the three will, at the end of the struggle, have only
+one to deal with, and the five will have been beaten by the three
+because, although five is larger than three, yet _in the decisive time
+and place_ the three never have more than two against them. It may be
+broadly laid down that the whole art of strategics consists for the
+man with superior numbers in bringing all his numbers to bear, and for
+the man with inferior numbers in attempting by his cunning to compel
+his larger opponent to fight in separated portions, and to be defeated
+in detail.
+
+As in every art, the developments of these elementary first principles
+become, with variations of time and place, indefinitely numerous and
+various. Upon their variety depends all the interest of military
+history. And there is one method in particular whereby the lesser
+number may hope to pin and destroy the power of the greater upon which
+the French tradition relied, and the value of which modern German
+criticism refused.
+
+Before going into that, however, we must appreciate the mental
+qualities which led to the acceptance of the theory upon the one side
+and its denial upon the other.
+
+The fundamental contrast between the modern German military temper and
+the age-long traditions of the French service consists in this: That
+the German theory is based upon a presumption of superiority, moral,
+material, and numerical. The theory of the French--as their national
+temperament and their Roman tradition compel them--is based upon an
+_envisagement_ of inferiority: moral, material, and numerical.
+
+There pervades the whole of the modern German strategic school this
+feeling: "I shall win if I act and feel as though I was bound to win."
+There pervades the whole French school this sentiment: "I have a
+better chance of winning if I am always chiefly considering how I
+should act if I found myself inferior in numbers, in material, and
+even in moral at any phase in the struggle, especially at its origins,
+but even also towards its close."
+
+This contrast appears in everything, from tactical details to the
+largest strategical conception, and from things so vague and general
+as the tone of military writings, to things so particular as the
+instruction of the conscript in his barrack-room. The German soldier
+is taught--or was--that victory was inevitable, and would be as swift
+as it would be triumphant: the French soldier was taught that he had
+before him a terrible and doubtful ordeal, one that would be long, one
+in which he ran a fearful risk of defeat, and one in which he might,
+even if victorious, have to wear down his enemy by the exercise of a
+most burdensome tenacity. In the practice of the field, the contrast
+appeared in the French use of a great reserve, and the German contempt
+for such a precaution: in the elaborate thinking out of the use of a
+reserve, which is the core of French military thought; in the
+superficial treatment of the same, which is perhaps the chief defect
+of Germany.
+
+It would be of no purpose to debate here which of these two mental
+attitudes, with all their consequences, is either morally the better
+or in practice the more successful. The French and Latin tradition
+seems to the German pusillanimous, and connected with that decadence
+which he perceives in every expression of civilization from Athens to
+Paris. The modern German conception seems to the French theatrical,
+divorced from reality, and hence fundamentally weak. Either critic may
+be right or either wrong. Our interest is to follow the particular
+schemes developing from that tone of mind. We shall see how, in the
+first phases of the war, the German conception strikingly justified
+itself for more than ten days; how, after a fortnight, it was
+embarrassed by its opponent; and how at the end of a month the German
+initiative was lost under the success--only barely achieved after
+dreadful risk--of the French plan.
+
+That plan, inherited from the strategy of Napoleon, and designed in
+particular to achieve the success of a smaller against a larger
+number, may be most accurately defined as _the open strategic square_,
+and its leading principle is "the method of detached reserves."
+
+This strategic conception, which I shall now describe, and which (in a
+diagram it is put far too simply) underlies the whole of the
+complicated movements whereby the French staved off disaster in the
+first weeks of the war, is one whose whole object it is to permit the
+inferior number to bring up a _locally_ superior weight against a
+_generally_ superior enemy in the decisive time and at the decisive
+place.
+
+Let us suppose that a general commanding _twelve_ large units--say,
+twelve army corps--knows that he is in danger of being attacked by an
+enemy commanding no less than _sixteen_ similar units.
+
+Let us call the forces of the first or weaker general "White," and
+those of the second or stronger general "Black."
+
+It is manifest that if White were merely to deploy his line and await
+the advance of Black thus,
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 21.]
+
+he would be outflanked and beaten; or, in the alternative, Black might
+mass men against White's centre and pierce it, for Black is vastly
+superior to White in numbers. White, therefore, must adopt some
+special disposition in order to avoid immediate defeat.
+
+Of such special dispositions one among many is the French Open
+Strategic Square.
+
+This disposition is as follows:--
+
+White arranges his twelve units into four quarters of three each, and
+places one quarter at each corner of a square thus:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 22.]
+
+We will give them titles, and call them A, B, C, and D.
+
+If, as is most generally the case in a defensive campaign at its
+opening, White cannot be certain from which exact direction the main
+blow is coming, he may yet know that it is coming from some one
+general direction, from one sector of the compass at least, and he
+arranges his square to face towards that sector.
+
+For instance, in the above diagram, he may not know whether the blow
+is coming from the precise direction 1, or 2, or 3, but he knows that
+it is coming somewhere within the sector XY.
+
+Then he will draw up his square so that its various bodies all face
+towards the average direction from which the blow may come.
+
+The SIZE of his square--which is of great importance to the
+result--he makes as restricted as possible, _subject to two prime
+conditions_. These conditions are:--
+
+First, that there shall be room for the troops composing each corner
+to be deployed--that is, spread out for fighting. Secondly, that there
+shall be room between any two corners (A and C, for instance) for a
+third corner (D, for instance) to move in between them and spread out
+for fighting in support of them. He makes his square as close and
+restricted as possible, because his success depends--as will be seen
+in a moment--upon the rapidity with which any one corner can come up
+in support of the others. But he leaves enough room for the full
+numbers to spread out for fighting, because otherwise he loses in
+efficiency; and he leaves room enough between any two squares for a
+third one to come in, because the whole point of the formation is the
+aid each corner can bring to the others.
+
+In this posture he awaits the enemy.
+
+That enemy will necessarily come on in a lengthy line, lengthy in
+proportion to the number of his units. For it is essential to the
+general commanding _superior_ numbers to make the _whole_ of the
+superior numbers tell, and this can only be done if they march along
+parallel roads, and these roads are sufficiently wide apart for the
+various columns to have plenty of room to deploy--that is, to spread
+out into a fighting line--when the shock comes.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 23.]
+
+This extended line of Black marching thus against White strikes White
+first upon some one corner of his square. Suppose that corner to be
+corner A. Then the position when contact is established and the first
+serious fighting begins is what you will observe in the above diagram.
+A is the corner (now spread out for fighting) which gets the first
+shock.
+
+Note you (for this is the crucial point of the whole business) that
+upon the exposed corner A will fall a very dangerous task indeed. A
+will certainly be attacked by forces superior to itself. Normally
+forces more than half as large again as A will be near enough to A to
+concentrate upon him in the first shock. The odds will be at least as
+much as five to three, the Black units, 4, 5, and 6, will be right on
+A, and 3 and 7 will be near enough to come in as well in the first day
+or two of the combat, while possibly 2 may have a look in as well.
+
+A, thus tackled, has become what may be called "the _operative corner_
+of the square." It is his task "to retreat and hold the enemy" while
+B, C, and D, "the masses of manoeuvre," swing up. But under that
+simple phrase "operative corner" is hidden all the awful business of a
+fighting retreat: it means leaving your wounded behind you, marching
+night and day, with your men under the impression of defeat; leaving
+your disabled guns behind you, keeping up liaison between all your
+hurrying, retreating units, with a vast force pressing forward to your
+destruction. A's entire force is deliberately imperilled in order to
+achieve the success of the plan as a whole, and upon A's tenacity, as
+will be seen in what follows, the success of that plan entirely
+depends.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 24.]
+
+Well, while A is thus retreating--say, from his old position at A_1 on
+the foregoing diagram to such a position as A_2, with Black swarming
+up to crush him--the other corners of the square, B, C, and D, receive
+the order to "swing"--that is, to go forward inclining to the left or
+the right according to the command given.
+
+Mark clearly that, until the order is given, the general commanding
+Black cannot possibly tell whether the "swing" will be directed to
+the left or to the right. Either B will close up against A, C spread
+out farther to the left, and D come in between A and C (which is a
+"swing" to the left) as in Sketch 25, or C will close up against A, B
+will spread well out to the right, and D come up between A and B, as
+in Sketch 26 (which is a "swing" to the right).
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 25.]
+
+Until the "swing" actually begins, Black, the enemy, cannot possibly
+tell whether it is his left-hand units (1 to 8) or his right-hand
+units (9 to 16) which will be affected. One of the two ends of his
+line will have to meet White's concentrated effort; the other will be
+left out in the cold. Black cannot make dispositions on the one
+hypothesis or on the other. Whichever he chose, White would, of
+course, swing the other way and disconcert him.
+
+Black, therefore, has to keep his line even until he knows which way
+White is going to swing.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 26.]
+
+Let us suppose that White swings to the left.
+
+Mark what follows. The distances which White's units have got to go
+are comparatively small. B will be up at A's side, and so will D in a
+short time after the swing is over, and when the swing is completed,
+the position is after this fashion. Black's numbers, 1 to 9 inclusive,
+find themselves tackled by all Black's twelve. There is a superiority
+of number against Black on his right, White's left, and the remaining
+part of Black's line (10 to 16 inclusive), is out in the cold.
+
+If it were a tactical problem, and all this were taking place in a
+small field, Black's left wing, 10-16, would, of course, come up at
+once and redress the balance. But being a strategical problem, and
+involving very large numbers and very great distances, Black's left
+wing, 10-16, can do nothing of the kind. For Black's left wing, 10-16,
+_cannot possibly get up in time_. Long before it has arrived on the
+scene, White's 12 will have broken Black's 9 along Black's right wing.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 27.]
+
+There are three elements which impose this delay upon Black's left
+wing.
+
+First, to come round in aid of the right wing means the marching
+forward of one unit after another, so that each shall overlap the
+last, and so allow the whole lot to come up freely. This means that
+the last unit will have to go forward six places before turning, and
+that means several days' marching. For with very large bodies, and
+with a matter of 100 miles to come up, all in one column, it would be
+an endless business (Sketch 28).
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 28.]
+
+Next you have the delay caused by the _conversion of direction_
+through a whole right angle. That cause of delay is serious. For when
+you are dealing with very large bodies of men, such as half a dozen
+army corps, to change suddenly from the direction S (see Sketch 29)
+for which your Staff work was planned, and to break off at a moment's
+notice in direction E, while you are on the march towards S, is
+impossible. You have to think out a whole new set of dispositions,
+and to re-order all your great body of men. White was under no such
+compulsion, for though he had to swing, the swing faced the same
+general direction as his original dispositions. And the size of the
+units and the distances to be traversed--the fact that the problem is
+strategical and not tactical--is the essence of the whole thing. If,
+for instance, you have (as in Sketch 30) half a dozen, not army corps,
+but mere battalions of 1,000 men, deployed over half a dozen miles of
+ground, AB, and advancing in the direction SS, and they are suddenly
+sent for in the direction E, it is simple enough. You form your 6,000
+men into column; in a few hours' delay they go off in the direction
+E, and when they get to the place where they are wanted, the column
+can spread out quickly again on the front CD, and soon begin to take
+part in the action. But when you are dealing with half a dozen army
+corps--240,000 men--it is quite another matter. The turning of any one
+of these great bodies through a whole right angle is a lengthy
+business. You cannot put a quarter of a million men into one
+column--they would take ages to deploy--so you must, as we have seen,
+make each unit of them overlap the next before the turn can begin.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 29.]
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 30.]
+
+Nor is that all the delay involved. It would never do for these six
+separate corps to come up in driblets and get defeated in detail; 10,
+11, and 12 will have to wait until 13, 14, 15, and even 16, have got
+up abreast of them--and that is the third cause of delay.
+
+Here are three causes of delay which, between them and accumulated,
+have disastrous effect; and in general we may be certain that where
+very large bodies and very extensive stretches of territory are
+concerned, that wing of Black which has been left out in the cold can
+never come up in time to retrieve the situation created by White's
+twelve pinning Black's engaged wing of only nine.
+
+If the square has worked, and if the twelve White have pinned the
+right-hand wing of Black, 1 to 9 inclusive, there is nothing for Black
+to do but to order his right wing, 1 to 9, to retreat as fast as
+possible before superior numbers, and to order his left wing, 10 to
+16, to fall back at the same time and keep in line; and you then have
+the singular spectacle of twelve men compelling the retreat of and
+pursuing sixteen.
+
+_That is exactly what happened in the first three weeks of active
+operations in the West. The operative corner A in the annexed diagram
+was the Franco-British force upon the Sambre. The retirement of that
+operative corner and its holding of the enemy was what is called in
+this country "The Retreat from Mons." BB are the "masses of manoeuvre"
+behind A. The swinging up of these masses involving the retirement of
+the whole was the Battle of the Marne._
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 31.]
+
+Now, it is evident that in all this everything depends upon the
+tenacity and military value of the operative corner, which is exposed
+and sacrificed that the whole scheme of the Open Square may work.
+
+If that operative corner is destroyed as a force--is overwhelmed or
+dispersed or surrounded--while it is fighting its great odds, the
+whole square goes to pieces. Its centre is penetrated by the enemy,
+and the army is in a far worse plight than if recourse had never been
+had to the open strategic square at all. For if the operative corner,
+A, is out of existence before the various bodies forming the
+"manoeuvring mass" behind it have had time to "swing," then the enemy
+will be right in their midst, and destroying, in overwhelming force,
+these remaining _separated_ bodies in detail.
+
+It was here that the German strategic theory contrasted so violently
+with the French. The Germans maintained that an ordeal which Napoleon
+might have been able to live through with his veterans and after
+fifteen years of successful war, a modern conscript army, most of its
+men just taken from civilian life and all of short service, would
+never endure. They believed the operative corner would go to pieces
+and either be pounded to disintegration, or outflanked, turned, and
+caught in the first days of the shock before the rest of the square
+had time to "work." The French believed the operative corner would
+stand the shock, and, though losing heavily, would remain in being.
+They believed that the operative corner of the square would, even
+under modern short service and large quasi-civilian reserve
+conditions, remain an army. They staked their whole campaign upon that
+thesis, and they turned out to be right. But they only just barely won
+through, and by the very narrowest margin. Proving right as they did,
+however, the success of their strategical theory changed the whole
+course of the war.
+
+With this contrast of the great opposing theories considered, I come
+to the conclusion of my Second Part, which examines the forces
+opposed. I will now turn to the Third Part of my book, which concerns
+the first actual operations from the Austrian note to the Battle of
+the Marne.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Thus, after these lines were written, I had occasion in _Land and
+Water_ to estimate the garrison of Przemysl before the figures were
+known. The element wherewith to guide one's common sense was the known
+perimeter to be defended; and arguing from this, I determined that a
+minimum of not less than 100,000 men would capitulate. I further
+conceived that the total losses could hardly be less than 40,000, and
+I arrived at an original force of between three and four corps.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 32.]
+
+
+
+
+PART III.
+
+THE FIRST OPERATIONS.
+
+
+In any general view of the great war which aims both at preserving
+proportion between its parts, and at presenting especially the main
+lines in relief, the three weeks between the German sudden forcing of
+war and the seventeen or eighteen days between the English declaration
+and the main operations upon the Sambre, will have but a subsidiary
+importance. They were occupied for at least half the period in the
+mobilization of the great armies. They were occupied for the second
+half of the period in the advance across the Rhine of German numbers
+greatly superior to the Allies, and also through the plain of Northern
+Belgium. The operation, as calculated by the German General Staff, was
+delayed by but a very few days--one might almost say hours--by the
+hastily improvised resistance of Liege, and the imperfect defence of
+their country which was all the Belgian forces, largely untrained,
+could offer.
+
+We must, therefore, pass briefly enough over that preliminary period,
+though the duty may be distasteful to the reader, on account of the
+very exaggerated importance which its operations took, especially in
+British eyes.
+
+For this false perspective there were several reasons, which it is
+worth while to enumerate, as they will aid our judgment in obtaining a
+true balance between these initial movements and the great conflicts
+to which they were no more than an introduction.
+
+1. War, as a whole, had grown unfamiliar to Western Europe. War on
+such a scale as this was quite untried. There was nothing in
+experience to determine our judgment, and after so long a peace,
+during which the habits of civil life had ceased to be conventioned
+and had come to seem part of the necessary scheme of things, the first
+irruption of arms dazzled or confounded the imagination of all.
+
+2. The first shock, falling as it did upon the ring fortress of
+Liege, at once brought into prominence one of the chief questions of
+modern military debate, the value of the modern ring fortress, and
+promised to put to the test the opposing theories upon this sort of
+stronghold.
+
+3. The violation of Belgian territory, though discounted in the
+cynical atmosphere of our time, when it came to the issue was, without
+question, a stupendous moral event. It was the first time that
+anything of this sort had happened in the history of Christian Europe.
+Historians unacquainted with the spirit of the past may challenge that
+remark, but it is true. One of the inviolable conventions, or rather
+sacred laws, of our civilization was broken, which is that European
+territory not involved in hostilities by any act of its Government is
+inviolable to opposing armies. The Prussian crime of Silesia, nearly
+two centuries before, the succeeding infamies of 1864, and the forgery
+of the Ems dispatch, the whole proclaimed tradition of contempt for
+the sanctities of Christendom, proceeding from Frederick the Great,
+had indeed accustomed men to successive stages in the decline of
+international morals; but nothing of the wholly crude character which
+this violation of Belgium bore was to be discovered in the past, even
+of Prussia, and posterity will mark it as a curious term and possibly
+a turning-point in the gradual loss of our common religion, and of the
+moral chaos accompanying that loss.
+
+4. The preparations of this country by land were not complete. Those
+of the French were belated compared with those of the Germans, and the
+prospect of even a short delay in the falling of the blow was
+exaggerated in value by all the intensity of that anxiety with which
+the blow was awaited.
+
+To proceed from these preliminaries to the story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The German Army had for its ultimate object, when it should be fully
+mobilized, the passage of the greater part of its forces over the
+Belgian Plain.
+
+This Belgian Plain has for now many centuries formed the natural
+avenue for an advance upon the Gauls.
+
+It has been represented too often as a sort of meeting-place, where
+must always come the shock between what is called Latin civilization
+and the Germanic tribes. But this view is both pedantic and
+historically false. There never was here a shock or conflict between
+two national ideals. What is true is, that civilization spread far
+more easily up from the Gauls through that fertile land towards the
+forests of Germany, and that when the Roman Empire broke down, or
+rather when its central government broke down, the frontier garrisons
+could here depend upon wealthier and more numerous populations for the
+support of their local government. That body of auxiliary soldiers in
+the Roman army which was drawn from the Frankish tribes ruled here
+when Rome could no longer rule. It was from Tournai that the father of
+Clovis exercised his power; and in the resettlement of the local
+governments in the sixth century, the Belgian Plain was the avenue
+through which the effort of the civilized West was directed towards
+the Rhine. It has Roman Cologne for its outpost; later it evangelized
+the fringes of German barbarism, and later still conquered them with
+the sword. All through the succeeding centuries the ambitions of kings
+in France, or of emperors upon the Rhine, were checked or satisfied in
+that natural avenue of advance. Charlemagne's frontier palace and
+military centre facing the Pagans was rather at Aix than at Treves or
+Metz; and though the Irish missionaries, who brought letters and the
+arts and the customs of reasonable men to the Germans, worked rather
+from the south, the later forced conversion of the Saxons, which
+determined the entry of the German tribes as a whole into Christendom,
+was a stroke struck northwards from the Belgian Plain. Caesar's
+adventurous crossing of the Rhine was a northern crossing. The
+Capetian monarchy was saved on its eastern front at Bouvines, in that
+same territory. The Austro-Spanish advance came down from it, to be
+checked at St. Quentin. Louis XIV.'s main struggle for power upon the
+marches of his kingdom concentrated here. The first great check to it
+was Marlborough's campaign upon the Meuse; the last battle was within
+sound of Mons, at Malplaquet. The final decision, as it was
+hoped--the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo--again showed what this
+territory meant in the military history of the West. It was following
+upon this decision that Europe, in the great settlement, decided to
+curb the chaos of future war by solemnly neutralizing the Belgian
+Plain for ever; and to that pact a seal was set not only by the French
+and the British, but also by the Prussian Government, with what
+results we know.
+
+The entries into this plain are very clearly defined by natural
+limits. It is barred a few hours' march beyond the German frontier by
+the broad and deep river Meuse, which here runs from the rough and
+difficult Ardennes country up to the Dutch frontier. The whole passage
+is no more than twelve miles across, and at the corner of it, where
+the Meuse bends, is the fortress of Liege. West of this fortress the
+upper reaches of the river run, roughly east and west upon Namur, and
+after Namur turn south again, passing through a very deep ravine that
+extends roughly from the French town of Mezieres to Namur through the
+Ardennes country. The Belgian Plain is therefore like a bottle with a
+narrow neck, a bottle defined by the Dutch frontier and the Middle
+Meuse on either side, and a neck extending only from the Ardennes
+country to the Dutch frontier, with the fortress of Liege barring the
+way. Now the main blow was to be delivered ultimately upon the line
+Namur-Charleroi-Mons. That is, the situation was roughly that of the
+accompanying diagram: by the bottle neck at D the whole mass of troops
+must pass--or most of them--which are later to strike on the front AB.
+To reach that front was available to the invader the vast network of
+Belgian railways RRR crammed with rolling stock, and provided such
+opportunities for rapid advance as no other district in Europe could
+show. But all this system converged upon the main line which ran
+through the ring of forts round Liege, L, and so passed through
+Aix-la-Chapelle, A, and to Germany.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 33.]
+
+The German Government, therefore, could not be secure of its intention
+to pass great bodies through the Belgian Plain until Liege was
+grasped, and it was determined to grasp Liege long before the
+mobilization of the German forces was completed. For this purpose only
+a comparatively small force, rapidly gathered, was available. It was
+placed under the command of General von Emmerich, and its first bodies
+exchanged shots with the Belgian outposts early in the afternoon of
+Tuesday, August 4, 1914.
+
+The hour and date should always be remembered for the solemnity which
+attaches to the beginning of any great thing; and the full observer of
+European affairs, who understands what part religion or superstition
+plays in the story of Europe, will note this enormously significant
+detail. The first Germans to cross the violated frontier accomplished
+that act upon the same day and at the same hour as that in which
+their forerunners had crossed the French frontier forty-four years
+before.
+
+The afternoon wore on to night, with no more than a conflict between
+outposts. Just before midnight the cannonade was first heard. It also
+was the moment in which the ultimatum delivered to Germany by this
+country, by a coincidence, expired.[2]
+
+This night attack with guns was only delivered against one sector of
+the Liege forts, and only with field-pieces.
+
+As to the first of these points, it will be found repeated throughout
+the whole of the campaign wherever German forces attack a ring of
+permanent works. For the German theory in this matter (which
+experience has now amply supported) is that since modern permanent
+works _of known and restricted position_ go under to a modern siege
+train if the fire of the latter be fully concentrated and the largest
+pieces available, everything should be sacrificed to the putting into
+the narrowest area of all the projectiles available. The ring once
+broken on a sufficient single sector point is broken altogether.
+
+The second point, that only field-pieces as yet were used (which was
+due to the fact that the siege train was not yet come up), is an
+important indication of the weakness of the defence--on all of which
+the enemy were, of course, thoroughly informed.
+
+There were perhaps 20,000 men in and upon the whole periphery of
+Liege, a matter of over thirty miles, and what was most serious, no
+sufficient equipment or preparation of the forts, or, what was more
+serious still, no sufficient trained body of gunners.
+
+It is almost true to say that the resistance of Liege, such as it was,
+was effected by rifle fire.
+
+With the dawn of August 5th, and in the first four hours of daylight,
+a German infantry attack upon the same south-eastern forts which had
+been subjected to the first artillery fire in the night developed, and
+after some loss withdrew, but shortly after the first of the forts,
+that of Fleron, was silenced. The accompanying sketch map will show
+how wide a gap was left henceforward in the defences. Further, Fleron
+was the strongest of the works upon this side of the river. Seeing
+that, in any case, even if there had been a sufficient number of
+trained gunners in the forts, and a sufficient equipment and full
+preparation of the works for a siege (both of which were lacking),
+the absence of sufficient men to hold the gaps between would in any
+case have been fatal to the defence. With such a new gap as this open
+by the fall of Fleron, the defence was hopeless, even if it were only
+to be counted in hours.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 34.]
+
+It is high praise of the Belgian people and character to point out
+that, after the fall of Fleron, for forty-eight full hours such a gap
+was still contested by men, a great part of whom were little better
+than civilian in training, and who, had they been all tried regulars,
+would have been far too few for their task. General Leman, who
+commanded them, knew well in those early hours of Wednesday, the 5th,
+that the end had already come. He also knew the value of even a few
+hours' hopeless resistance, not perhaps to the material side of the
+Allied strategy, but to the support of those moral forces lacking
+which men are impotent in maintaining a challenge. Not only all that
+Wednesday, the 5th, but all the Thursday, the 6th, he maintained a
+line against the pressure of the invaders with his imperfect and
+insufficient troops.
+
+During those forty-eight hours, the big howitzer, which is the type
+of the heavy German siege train--the 225 mm.--was brought up, and it
+is possible that a couple of the still larger Austrian pieces of 280
+mm. (what we call in this country the 11-inch), which are constructed
+with flat treadles to their wheels to fire from mats laid on any
+reasonably hard surface (such as a roadway), had been brought up as
+well. At any rate, in the course of the Thursday, the fort next
+westward from Fleron, Chaudefontaine, was smashed. The gap was now
+quite untenable, and the first body of German cavalry entered the
+city. The incident has been reported as a _coup de main_, with the
+object of capturing the Belgian general. Its importance to the
+military story is simply that it proved the way to be open. In the
+afternoon and evening of the day, the Belgians were retiring into the
+heart of the city, and it is typical of the whole business that the
+great railway bridge upon which the main communications depended was
+left intact for the Germans to use.
+
+With the morning of Friday, the 7th August, the first bodies of German
+infantry entered the town. The forts on the north and two remaining
+western forts upon the south of the river were still untaken, and
+until a large breach should be made in the northern forts at least,
+the railway communication of the German advance into the Belgian plain
+was still impeded. Great masses of the enemy, and, in proportion to
+those masses, still greater masses of advance stores were brought in.
+
+In all that follows, until we reach the date of Monday, August 24th, I
+propose to consider no more than the fortunes of the troops who passed
+through Belgium to attack the French armies upon the Sambre and the
+Meuse, with the British contingent that had come to their aid. And my
+reasons for thus segregating and dealing later with contemporary
+events in the south will appear in the sequel.
+
+This reservation made--an important one in the scheme of this book--I
+return to what I have called the preliminaries, the advance through
+Belgium.
+
+We have already seen that the reduction of the northern forts of Liege
+was the prime necessity to that advance.
+
+We have also seen that meanwhile it was possible and advisable to
+accumulate stores for the advance as far forward as could be managed,
+and that it was also possible, with caution, to bring certain
+bodies--not the bulk of the army--forward through the Ardennes, to
+command the passages of the Meuse above Liege, between that fortress
+and Namur.
+
+This latter operation was effected by the 12th of August, when the
+town of Huy, with its bridge and its railway leading from the Belgian
+Ardennes right into the Belgian Plain, was seized.
+
+Meanwhile, upon the north of the river Meuse, cavalry and armed
+motor-cars were similarly preparing the way for the general advance
+when the northern forts of Liege should be dominated; and on this same
+Wednesday, August 12th, the most advanced bodies of the invader lay in
+a line roughly north and south from the neighbourhood of Diest along
+the Gethe and thence towards Huy.
+
+Of the outrages committed upon the civilian inhabitants in all these
+country-sides, the Government of which was neutral, and the territory
+of which was by the public law of Europe free not only from such
+novel crimes but from legitimate acts of war, I shall not speak, just
+as I shall not allude, save where they happen to have military
+importance, to the future increase of similar abominations which
+marked the progress of the campaign. For my only object in these pages
+is to lay before the reader a commentary which will explain the
+general strategy of the war.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 35.]
+
+While this advance line of cavalry was engaging in unimportant minor
+actions, or rather skirmishes (grossly exaggerated in the news of
+those days), the attack on the northern forts of Liege, upon which
+everything now depended, was opened. It was upon Thursday, August
+13th, that the 280 mm. howitzers opened upon Loncin. Other of the
+remaining forts were bombarded; but, as in the case of Fleron a week
+before, we need not consider the subsidiary operations, because
+everything depended upon the fort of Loncin, which, as the
+accompanying diagram shows, commanded the railway line westward from
+Liege. General Leman himself was within that work, the batteries
+against which were now operating from _within_ the ring--that is, from
+the city itself, or in what soldiers technically call "reverse"--that
+is, from the side upon which no fort is expected to stand, the side
+which is expected to defend and not to be attacked from. Whether
+Loncin held out the full forty-eight hours, or only forty, or only
+thirty-six, we do not know; but that moral factor to which I have
+already alluded, and which must be fully weighed in war, was again
+strengthened by the nature of such a resistance. For nearly all that
+garrison was dead and its commander found unconscious when the
+complete destruction of the work by the high explosive shells
+permitted the enemy to enter.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 36.]
+
+It was upon Saturday, the 15th of August, that the great bulk of the
+two main German armies set aside for passage through the Belgian Plain
+began to use the now liberated railway, and the week between that date
+and the first great shock upon the Sambre is merely a record of the
+almost uninterrupted advance, concentration, and supply of something
+not far short of half a million men coming forward in a huge tide
+over, above, and round on to, the line Namur-Charleroi-Mons, which was
+their ultimate objective, and upon which the Anglo-French
+body--perhaps half as numerous--had determined to stand.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 37.]
+
+The story of that very rapid advance is merely one of succeeding
+dates. By the 17th the front was at Tirlemont, by the 19th it was
+across the Dyle and running thence south to Wavre (the first army),
+the second army continuing south of this with a little east in it to a
+point in front of Namur. On the 20th there was enacted a scene of no
+military importance (save that it cost the invaders about a day), but
+of some moral value, because it strongly impressed the opinion in this
+country and powerfully affected the imagination of Europe as a whole:
+I mean the triumphal march through Brussels.
+
+Far more important than this display was the opening on the evening of
+the same day, Thursday, August 20th, of the first fire against the
+eastern defences of Namur. This fire was directed upon that evening
+against the two and a half miles of trench between the forts of
+Cognelee and Marchovelette, and in the morning of Friday, the 21st,
+the trenches were given up, and the German infantry was within the
+ring of forts north of the city. The point of Namur, as we shall see
+in a moment, was twofold. First, its fortifications, so long as they
+held out, commanded the crossings both of the Sambre and of the Meuse
+within the angle of which the French defensive lay; secondly, its
+fortified zone formed the support whereupon the whole French right
+reposed. It was this unexpected collapse of the Belgian defence of
+Namur which, coupled with the unexpected magnitude of the forces
+Germany had been able to bring through the Belgian plain, determined
+what was to follow.
+
+Once Namur was entered, the reduction of the forts was not of
+immediate importance, though it was immediately and successfully
+achieved. For the German business was not here, as at Liege, to grasp
+a railway within the zone of the fortifications, but to destroy the
+buttress upon which the French depended for their defensive position,
+and to prevent the French from holding the crossings over the two
+rivers Sambre and Meuse at their junction.
+
+With this entry of the Germans into Namur, their passage of the lines
+upon Friday, August 21st, their capture of the bridgeheads on
+Saturday, August 22nd, we reach the beginning of those great
+operations which threatened for a moment to decide the war in the
+West, and to establish the German Empire in that position to attain
+which it had planned and forced the war upon its appointed day.
+
+It behoves us before entering into the detail of this large affair to
+see the plan of it clearly before our eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have already described that general conception underlying the whole
+modern French school of strategy for which the best title (though one
+liable to abuse by too mechanical an interpretation) is "the open
+strategic square."
+
+I have further warned the reader that, in spite of the way in which
+the intricacy of organization inseparable from great masses and the
+manifold disposition of a modern army will mask the general nature of
+such an operation, that operation cannot be understood unless its
+simplest lines are clear. I have further insisted that in practice
+those lines remain only in the idea of the scheme of the whole, and
+are not to be discovered save in the loosest way from the actual
+positions of men upon the map.
+
+We have seen that this "open strategic square" involved essentially
+two conceptions--the fixed "operative corner" and the swinging
+"manoeuvring masses."
+
+The manoeuvring masses, at this moment when the great German blow fell
+upon the Sambre and the Meuse, and when Namur went down immediately
+before it, were (_a_) upon the frontiers of Alsace and Lorraine, (_b_)
+in the centre of the country, (_c_) near the capital and to the west
+of it, and even, some of them, upon the sea.
+
+The operative corner was this group of armies before Namur on the
+Sambre and Meuse, the 4th French Army under Langle, the 5th French
+Army under Lanrezac, the British contingent under French.
+
+We know from what has been written above in this book that it is the
+whole business of an operative corner to "take on" superior numbers,
+and to hold them as well as possible, even though compelled to
+retreat, until the manoeuvring masses can swing and come up in aid,
+and so pin the enemy.
+
+We further know from what has gone before that the whole crux of this
+manoeuvre lies in the power of the operative corner to stand the
+shock.
+
+It was the business of the French in this operative corner before
+Namur and of their British Allies there to await and, if possible, to
+withstand by a careful choice of position the first shock of enemies
+who would certainly be numerically superior. It was the whole business
+of the German commanders to make the shock overwhelming, in order that
+the operative corner should be pounded to pieces, or should be
+surrounded and annihilated before the manoeuvring masses could swing
+up in aid. Should this destruction of the operative corner take place
+before the manoeuvring masses behind it could swing, the campaign in
+the West was lost to the Allies, and the Germans pouring in between
+the still separated corners of the square were the masters for good.
+
+It behoves us, therefore, if we desire to understand the campaign, to
+grasp how this operative corner stood, upon what defences it relied,
+in what force it was, what numbers it thought were coming against it,
+and what numbers were, as a fact, coming against it.
+
+To get all this clear, it is best to begin with a diagram.
+
+Suppose two lines perpendicular one to the other, and therefore
+forming a right angle, AB and BC. Suppose at their junction, B, a
+considerable zone or segment, SSS, of a circle, as shaded in the
+following diagram. Supposing the line AB to be protected along the
+outer half of it, AK, by no natural obstacle--the state of affairs
+which I have represented by a dotted line {~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}; but suppose the second half of it,
+KB, should be protected by a natural obstacle, though not a very
+formidable one--such as I have represented by the continuous line
+{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}. Supposing the
+perpendicular line BC to be protected by a really formidable natural
+obstacle {~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}, and
+supposing the shaded segment of the circle at B to represent a
+fortified zone (1) accessible to any one within the angle KBC, as from
+the arrow M; (2) inaccessible (until it was captured or forced) to any
+one coming from outside the angle, as from the arrows NNN; (3)
+containing within itself, protected by its ring of fortifications,
+passages, PP, for traversing the two natural obstacles, {~GREEK SMALL
+LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~} and {~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}, which meet at the point {~GREEK
+SMALL LETTER BETA~}.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 38.]
+
+There you have the elements of the position in which the advance
+corner of the great French square was situated just before it took the
+shock of the main German armies. The two lines AB and BC are the French
+and British armies lying behind the Sambre, {~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}, and the Middle Meuse, {~GREEK SMALL
+LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}, respectively; but the line
+of the Sambre ceases to protect eastward along the dotted line {~GREEK
+SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~} beyond the point up to
+which the river forms a natural obstacle, while from K to B the line is
+protected by the river Sambre itself. The more formidable obstacle,
+{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}, represents the
+great trench or ravine of the Meuse which stretches south from Namur.
+The town of Namur itself is at B, the junction of the two rivers; and
+the fortified zone, SSS, is the ring of forts lying far out all round
+Namur; while the passages, PP, over the obstacles contained within that
+fortified zone, and accessible to the people _inside_ the angle from M,
+but not to the people _outside_ the angle from NNN, are the bridges
+across both the Sambre and the Meuse at Namur.
+
+All this is, of course, put merely diagrammatically, and a diagram is
+something very distant from reality. The "open strategic square" in
+practice comes to mean little more than two main elements--one the
+operative corner, the other a number of separate units disposed in all
+sorts of different places behind, and generally denominated "the
+manoeuvring mass." If you had looked down from above at all the French
+armies towards the end of August, when the first great shock came, you
+would have seen nothing remotely resembling a square.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 39.]
+
+You would have seen something like Sketch 31 where the bodies enclosed
+under the title A were the operative corner; various garrisons and
+armies in the field, enclosed under the title B, were the manoeuvring
+mass. But it is only by putting the matter quite clearly in the
+abstract diagrammatic form that its principle can be grasped.
+
+With this digression I will return and conclude with the main points
+of debate in the use of the open strategic square.
+
+We have seen that the operative corner is in this scheme deliberately
+imperilled at the outset.
+
+The following is a sketch map of the actual position, and it will be
+seen that the topographical features of this countryside are fairly
+represented by Sketch 39; while this other sketch shows how these
+troops that were about to take the shock stood to the general mass of
+the armies.
+
+But to return to the diagram (which I repeat and amplify as Sketch
+41), let us see how the Allied force in the operative corner before
+Namur stood with relation to this angle of natural obstacles, the
+two rivers Sambre and Meuse, and the fortified zone round the point
+where they met.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 40.]
+
+The situation of that force was as follows:--
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 41.]
+
+Along and behind {~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+GAMMA~} stretched the 5th Army of the French, prolonged on its left by
+the British contingent. I have marked the first in the diagram with the
+figure 5, the second with the letters Br, and the latter portion I have
+also shaded. At right angles to the French 5th Army stretched the
+French 4th Army, which I have marked with the figure 4. It depended
+upon the obstacle of the Meuse {~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL
+LETTER DELTA~} for its defence, just as the French 5th Army depended
+upon the Sambre, {~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER
+BETA~}. It must, of course, be understood that when one says these
+forces "lay along" the aforesaid lines, one does not mean that they
+merely lay behind them. One means that they held the bridges and
+prepared to dispute the crossing of them.
+
+Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves: "There
+will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ, and this
+enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He will perhaps
+be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are. But he will suffer
+under these disadvantages:--
+
+"The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act in
+co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because Y and
+Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by the
+fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect in a
+long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z, could
+only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle--that is, by
+stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the ring of
+forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the arrow X) will
+further be used up in trying to break down the resistance of SSS.
+That will take a good deal of time. If our horizontal line AB holds
+its own, naturally defended as it is, against the attack from V and W,
+while our perpendicular line BC holds its own still more firmly
+(relying on its much better natural obstacle) against YZ, we shall
+have ample time to break the first and worst shock of the enemy's
+attack, and to allow, once we have concentrated that attack upon
+ourselves, the rest of our forces, the masses of manoeuvre, or at any
+rate a sufficient portion of them, to come up and give us a majority
+in _this_ part of the field. We shall still be badly outnumbered on
+the line as a whole; but the resistance of our operative corner,
+relying on the Sambre and Meuse and the fortress of Namur, will gather
+much of the enemy unto itself. It will thus make of this part of the
+field the critical district of the whole campaign. Our masses,
+arriving while we resist, will give us a local superiority here which
+will hold up the whole German line. We may even by great good luck so
+break the shock of the attack as ourselves to begin taking the
+counter-offensive after a little while, and to roll back either Y and
+Z or V and W by the advance of our forces across the rivers when the
+enemy has exhausted himself."
+
+It will be clear that this calculation (whether of the expected and
+probable least favourable issue--a lengthy defence followed by an
+orderly and slow retreat designed to allow the rest of the armies to
+come up--or of the improbable and more favourable issue--the taking of
+the counter-offensive) depended upon two presumptions which the
+commander of the Allies had taken for granted: (1) that the German
+shock would not come in more than a certain admitted maximum, say
+thirty per cent. superiority at the most over the Allied forces at
+this particular point; (2) that the ring of forts round Namur would be
+able to hold out for at least three or four days, and thus absorb the
+efforts of part of the enemy as well as awkwardly divide his forces,
+while that enemy's attack was being delivered.
+
+Both these presumptions were erroneous. The enemy, as we shall see in
+a moment, came on in much larger numbers than had been allowed for.
+Namur, as we have already seen, fell, not in three or four days, but
+instantly--the moment it was attacked. And the result was that,
+instead of an orderly and slow retirement, sufficiently tardy to
+permit of the swinging up of the rest of the French "square"--that is,
+of the arrival of the other armies or manoeuvring masses--there came
+as a fact the necessity for very rapid retirement of the operative
+corner over more than one hundred miles and the immediate peril for
+days of total disaster to it.
+
+To appreciate how superior the enemy proved to be in number, and how
+heavy the miscalculation here was, we must first see what the numbers
+of this Allied operative corner were.
+
+I have in Sketch 42 indicated the approximate positions and relative
+sizes of the three parts of the Allied forces.
+
+Beginning from the left, we have barely two army corps actually
+present of the British contingent in the fighting line: for certain
+contingents of the outermost army corps had not yet arrived. We may
+perhaps call the numbers actually present at French's command when
+contact was taken 70,000 men, but that is probably beyond the mark.
+To the east lay the 5th French Army, three army corps amounting, say,
+to 120,000 men, and immediately south of this along the Meuse lay the
+4th French Army, another three army corps amounting to at the most
+another 120,000 men.
+
+We may then call the whole of the operative corner (if we exclude
+certain cavalry reserves far back, which never came into play) just
+over 300,000 men. That there were as many as 310,000 is improbable.
+
+The French calculation was that against these 300,000 men there would
+arrive at the very most 400,000.
+
+That, of course, meant a heavy superiority in number for the enemy;
+but, as we have seen, the scheme allowed for such an inconvenience at
+the first contact.
+
+That more than 400,000 could strike in the region of Namur no one
+believed, for no one believed that the enemy could provision and
+organize transport for more than that number.
+
+A very eminent English critic had allowed for seven army corps of
+first-line men as all that could be brought across the Belgian Plain.
+The French went so far as to allow for ten, a figure represented by
+the 400,000 men of the enemy they expected.
+
+We had then the Allied forces expecting an attack in about the
+superiority indicated upon this diagram, where the British contingent
+and the two French armies are marked in full, and the supposed enemy
+in dotted lines.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 42.]
+
+Roughly speaking, the Allies were allowing for a thirty per cent.
+superiority.
+
+Now, lying as they did behind the rivers, and with the ring of forts
+around Namur to shield their point of junction and to split the
+enemy's attack, this superiority, though heavy, was not crushing. The
+hopes of the defensive that it would stand firm, or at least retire
+slowly so as to give time for the manoeuvring masses to come up was,
+under this presumption, just. It was even thought possible that, if
+the enemy attacked too blindly and spent himself too much, the
+counter-offensive might be taken after the first two or three days.
+
+As for the remainder of the German forces, it was believed that they
+were stretched out very much in even proportion, without any thin
+places, from the Meuse to Alsace.
+
+Now, as a matter of fact, the German forces were in no such
+disposition. 1. The Germans had added to every army corps a reserve
+division. 2. They had brought through the Belgian plains a very much
+larger number than seven army corps: they had brought nine. 3. They
+had further brought against Namur yet another four army corps through
+the Ardennes, the woods of which helped to hide their progress from
+air reconnaissance. To all this mass of thirteen army corps, each
+army corps half as large again as the active or first line allowed
+for, add some imperfectly trained but certainly large bodies of
+independent cavalry. We cannot accurately say what the total numbers
+of this vast body were, but we can be perfectly certain that more than
+700,000 men were massed in this region of Namur. The enemy was coming
+on, not four against three, but certainly seven against three, and
+perhaps eight or even nine against three.
+
+The real situation was that given in the accompanying diagram (Sketch
+43).
+
+Five corps, each with its extra division, were massed under von Kluck,
+and called the 1st German Army. Four more, including the Guards, were
+present with von Buelow, and stretched up to and against the first
+defences of Namur. Now, around the corner of that fortress, two Saxon
+corps, a Wurtemberg corps, a Magdeburg corps, and a corps of reserve
+under the Duke of Wurtemberg formed the 3rd Army, the right wing of
+which opposed the forts of Namur, the rest of which stretched along
+the line of the Meuse.
+
+Even if the forts of Namur had held out, the position of so hopelessly
+inferior a body as was the Franco-British force, in face of such
+overwhelming numbers, would have been perilous in the extreme. With
+the forts of Namur abandoned almost at the first blow, the peril was
+more than a peril. It had become almost certain disaster.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 43.]
+
+With the fall of Namur, the angle between the rivers--that is, the
+crossings of the rivers at their most difficult part where they were
+broadest--was in the hands of the enemy, and the whole French body,
+the 4th and 5th Armies, was at some time on that Saturday falling
+back.
+
+The exact hour and the details of that movement we do not yet know. We
+do not know what loss the French sustained, we do not know whether any
+considerable bodies were cut off. We do not know even at what hour the
+French General Staff decided that the position was no longer tenable,
+and ordered the general retreat.
+
+All we know is that, so far from being able to hold out two or three
+days against a numerical superiority of a third and under the buttress
+of Namur, the operative corner, with Namur fallen and, not 30 per
+cent., but something more like 130 per cent. superiority against it,
+began not the slow retreat that had been envisaged, but a retirement
+of the most rapid sort.
+
+Such a retirement was essential if the cohesion of the Allied forces
+was to be maintained at all, and if the combined 4th and 5th French
+Armies and British contingent were to escape being surrounded or
+pierced.
+
+By the Saturday night at latest the French retirement was ordered; by
+Sunday morning it was in full progress, and it was proceeding
+throughout the triangle of the Thierarche all that day.
+
+But the rate of that retirement, corresponding to the pressure upon
+the French front, differed very much with varying sections of the
+line. It was heaviest, of course, in those advanced bodies which had
+lain just under Namur. It was least at the two ends of the bow, for
+the general movement was on to the line Maubeuge-Mezieres. The farther
+one went east towards Maubeuge, the slower was the necessary movement,
+and to this cause of delay must be added the fact that von Kluck,
+coming round by the extreme German line, had farthest to go, and
+arrived latest against the line of the Allies.
+
+Therefore the British contingent at the western extreme of the Allied
+line felt the shock latest of all, and all that Sunday morning the
+British were still occupied in taking up their positions. They had
+arrived but just in time for what was to follow.
+
+It was not till the early afternoon of the Sunday that contact was
+first taken seriously between Sir John French and von Kluck. At that
+moment the British commander believed, both from a general and
+erroneous judgment which the French command had tendered him and from
+his own air work, that he had in front of him one and a half or at the
+most two army corps; and though the force, as we shall see in a
+moment, was far larger, its magnitude did not appear as the afternoon
+wore on. Full contact was established perhaps between three and four,
+by which hour the pressure was beginning to be severely felt, and upon
+the extreme right of the line it had already been necessary to take up
+defensive positions a little behind those established in the morning.
+But by five o'clock, with more than two good hours of daylight before
+it, the British command, though perhaps already doubtful whether the
+advancing masses of the enemy did not stand for more men, and
+especially for more guns than had been expected, was well holding its
+own, when all its dispositions were abruptly changed by an unexpected
+piece of news.
+
+It was at this moment in the afternoon--that is, about five
+o'clock--that the French General Staff communicated to Sir John French
+information bearing two widely different characteristics: the first
+that it came late; the second that had it not come when it did, the
+whole army, French as well as British, would have been turned.
+
+The first piece of information, far too belated, was the news that
+Namur had fallen, and that the enemy had been in possession of the
+bridge-heads over the Sambre and the Meuse since the preceding day,
+Saturday. Consequent upon this, the enemy had been able to effect the
+passage of the Sambre, not only in Namur itself, but in its immediate
+neighbourhood, and, such passages once secured, it was but a question
+of time for the whole line to fall into the enemy's hands. When
+superior numbers have passed one end of an obstacle it is obvious that
+the rest of the obstacle gradually becomes useless.[3] At what hour
+the French knew that they had to retire, we have not been told. As we
+have seen, the enemy was right within Namur on the early afternoon of
+Saturday, the 22nd, and it is to be presumed that the French
+retirement was in full swing by the Sunday morning, in which case the
+British contingent, which this retirement left in peril upon the
+western extreme of the line, ought to have been warned many hours
+before five o'clock in the afternoon.
+
+To what the delay was due we are again as yet in ignorance, but
+probably to the confusion into which the unexpected fall of Namur and
+the equally unexpected strength of the enemy beyond the Sambre and the
+Meuse had thrown the French General Staff.
+
+At any rate, the news did come thus late, and its lateness was of
+serious consequence to the British contingent, and might have been
+disastrous to it.
+
+The second piece of news, on the other hand, was the saving of it; and
+that second piece of news was the information that Sir John French had
+in front of him not one German army corps, and possibly part or even
+the whole of a second, but at least three. As the matter turned out,
+the British contingent was really dealing first and last with four
+army corps, and the essential part of the news conveyed was that the
+extreme western portion of this large German force _was attempting to
+turn the flank of the whole army_.
+
+It was not only attempting to do so, it was in number sufficient to do
+so; and unless prompt measures were taken, what was now discovered to
+be the general German plan would succeed, and the campaign in the
+West would be in two days decided adversely to the Allies--the same
+space of time in which the campaign of 1815 was decided adversely to
+Napoleon in just these same country-sides.
+
+It is here necessary to describe what this German plan was.
+
+The reader has already seen, when the general principles of the open
+strategic square were described on a previous page, that everything
+depends upon the fate of the operative corner. This operative corner
+in the present campaign had turned out to be the two French armies,
+the 4th and the 5th, upon the Lower Sambre and the Meuse, and the
+British contingent lying to the left of the 5th on the Upper Sambre
+and by Mons.
+
+If the operative corner of a strategic open square is annihilated as a
+military force, or so seriously defeated that it can offer no
+effective opposition for some days, then the whole plan of a strategic
+square breaks to pieces, and the last position of the inferior forces
+which have adopted it is worse than if they had not relied upon the
+manoeuvre at all, but had simply spread out in line to await defeat
+in bulk at the hands of their superior enemy.
+
+Now there are two ways in which a military force can be disposed of by
+its opponent. There are two ways in which it can be--to use the rather
+exaggerated language of military history--"annihilated."
+
+The first is this: You can break up its cohesion by a smashing blow
+delivered somewhere along its line, and preferably near its centre.
+But if you do that, the results will never be quite complete, and may
+be incomplete in any degree according to the violence and success of
+your blow.
+
+The second way is to get round the enemy with your superior numbers,
+to get past his flank, to the back of him, and so envelop him. If that
+manoeuvre is carried out successfully, you bag his forces entire. It
+is to this second manoeuvre that modern Prussian strategy and tactics
+are particularly attached. It is obvious that its fruits are far more
+complete than those of the first manoeuvre, when, or if, it is wholly
+successful. For to get round your enemy and bag him whole is a larger
+result than merely to break him up and leave _some_ of him able to
+re-form and perhaps fight again. Two things needful to such success
+are (_a_) superior numbers, save in case of gross error upon the part
+of the opponents; (_b_) great rapidity of action on the part of the
+outflanking body, coupled, if possible, with surprise. That rapidity
+of action is necessary is obvious; for the party on the flank has got
+to go much farther than the rest of the army. It has to go all the
+length of the arrow (1), and an element of surprise is usually
+necessary. For if the army AA which BB was trying to outflank learned
+of the manoeuvre in time he only has to retreat upon his left by the
+shorter arrow (2) to escape from the threatened clutch.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 45.]
+
+Now, von Kluck with his five army corps, four of which were in
+operation against Sir John French, was well able to count on all
+these elements. He had highly superior numbers, his superiority had
+not been discovered until it was almost too late, and for rapidity of
+action he had excellent railways and a vast equipment of petrol
+vehicles.
+
+What he proposed to do was, while engaging the British contingent of
+less than two army corps with three full army corps of his own, to
+swing his extreme western army corps right round, west through
+Tournai, and so turn the British line. If he succeeded in doing that,
+he had at the same time succeeded in turning the whole of the
+Franco-British forces on the Sambre and Meuse. In other words, he was
+in a fair way to accomplishing the destruction of the operative corner
+of the great square, and consequently, as a last result, the
+destruction of the whole Allied force in the West.
+
+The thing may be represented on a sketch map in this form.
+
+Of von Kluck's five corps, 1 is operating against the junction of the
+English and French lines beyond Binche, 2, 3, and 4 are massing
+against the rather more than one and a half of Sir John French at AA,
+and 5, after the capture of Tournai, is going to take a big sweep
+round in the direction of the arrow towards Cambrai, and so to turn
+the whole line. Meanwhile, the cavalry, still farther west, acting
+independently, is to sweep the country right out to Arras and beyond.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 46.]
+
+The particular titles of corps are of no great value in following the
+leading main lines of a military movement; but it may be worth
+remembering that this "number 5," to which von Kluck had allotted the
+turning movement, was the _Second_ German Corps. With its cavalry it
+numbered alone (and apart from all the other forces of von Kluck which
+were engaging the British line directly) quite three-quarters as many
+men as all that British line for the moment mustered.
+
+It was not possible, from local circumstances which the full history
+of the war, when it is written, will explain, for the British
+contingent to fall back in the remaining hours of daylight upon that
+Sunday.
+
+Belated by at the most twelve hours, as the news of the French
+retirement had been, the British retirement followed it fully twenty
+hours after. It was not until daylight of Monday, the 24th, that all
+the organizations for this retirement were completed, the plans drawn
+up, and the first retrograde movements made.
+
+To permit a retirement before such a great superiority of the enemy to
+be made without disaster, it was necessary to counter-attack not only
+at this inception of the movement, but throughout all the terrible
+strain of the ensuing eight days.
+
+Here it may be necessary to explain why, in any retirement, continual
+counter-attacks on the pursuing enemy are necessary.
+
+It is obvious that, under equal conditions, the pursuing enemy can
+advance as fast as can your own troops which are retreating before
+him. If, therefore, a retreat, once contact has been established,
+consisted in merely walking away from the enemy, that enemy would be
+able to maintain a ceaseless activity against one portion of your
+united force--its rear--which activity would be exercised against
+bodies on the march, and incapable of defence. To take but one example
+out of a hundred: his guns would be always unlimbering, shooting at
+you, then limbering up again to continue the pursuit; unlimbering
+again, shooting again--and so forth; while your guns would never
+reply, being occupied in an unbroken retirement, and therefore
+continually limbered up and useless behind their teams.
+
+A retiring force, therefore, of whatever size--from a company to an
+army--can only safely effect its retirement by detaching one fraction
+from its total which shall hold up the pursuit for a time while the
+main body gets away.
+
+When this detached fraction is wearied or imperilled, another fraction
+relieves it, taking up the same task in its turn; the first fraction,
+which had hitherto been checking the pursuit, falls back rapidly on to
+the main body, under cover of the new rearguard's fire as it turns to
+face the enemy. And the process is kept up, first one, then another
+portion of the whole force being devoted to it, until the retirement
+of the whole body has been successfully effected, and it is well ahead
+of its pursuers and secure.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 47.]
+
+For example: two White army corps, I., II., as in the annexed diagram,
+each of two divisions, 1, 2, and 3, 4, have to retire before a greatly
+superior Black force, _abcde_. They succeed in retiring by the action
+expressed in the following diagram. White corps No. I. first
+undertakes to hold up the enemy while No. II. makes off. No. I.
+detaches one division for the work (Division 2), and for a short time
+it checks the movement of _a_, _b_, and _c_, at least, of the enemy.
+Now _d_ and _e_ press on. But they cannot press on at any pace they
+choose, for an army must keep together, and the check to _a_, _b_, and
+_c_ somewhat retards _d_ and _e_. They advance, say, to the positions
+{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 48.]
+
+Next, White corps No. II. stops, puts out one of its divisions (say 4)
+to check _d_ and _e_, while its other division either helps or falls
+back, according to the severity of the pressure, and White corps No.
+I. makes off as fast as it can. _a_, _b_, _c_, no longer checked by a
+White rearguard, are nevertheless retarded from two causes--first,
+the delay already inflicted on them; secondly, that they must not, if
+the army is to keep together, get too far ahead of their colleagues,
+_d_ and _e_, which White corps II. is holding up.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 49.]
+
+Thus, on the second or third day the retreat of White is being secured
+by an increasing gap between pursued and pursuers. The process is
+continued. Every succeeding day--if that process is successful--should
+further widen the gap until White can feel free from immediate
+pressure.
+
+Such is the principle--modified indefinitely in practice by variations
+of ground and numbers--under which a retirement must be conducted if
+it is to have any hope of ultimate success in saving the pursued.
+
+But it is clear that the process must always be a perilous one. Unless
+the most careful co-ordination is maintained between the moving parts
+of the retreat; unless the rearguard in each action falls back only
+_just upon_ and not a _little while after_ the precise moment when it
+can last safely do so; unless the new rearguard comes into play in
+time, etc., etc.--the pursuers may get right in among the pursued and
+break their cohesion; or they may get round them, cut them off, and
+compel them to surrender. In either case the retreating force ceases
+to exist as an army.
+
+In proportion as the pursuers are numerous (mobility being equal)
+compared with the pursued, in that proportion is the peril. And with
+the best luck in the world some units are sure to be cut off, many
+guns lost, all stragglers and nearly all wounded abandoned in the
+course of a pressed retreat, and, above all, there will be the
+increasing discouragement and bewilderment of the men as the strain,
+the losses, and the ceaseless giving way before the enemy continue day
+after day with cumulative effect.
+
+The accomplishment of such a task, the maintenance of the "operative
+corner" in being during its ordeal of retreat before vastly superior
+numbers, and in particular the exceedingly perilous retirement of the
+British contingent at what was, during the first part of the strain,
+the extreme of the line, are what we are now about to follow.
+
+The initial counter-attack, then, on this Monday, the first day of the
+retreat, was undertaken by the 2nd British Division from the region of
+Harmignies, which advanced as though with the object of retaking
+Binche. The demonstration was supported by all the artillery of the
+1st Army Corps, while the 1st Division, lying near Peissant, supported
+this action of the 2nd. While that demonstration was in full activity,
+the 2nd Corps to the west or left (not all of it was yet in the field)
+retired on to the line Dour-Frameries, passing through Quaregnon. It
+suffered some loss in this operation from the masses of the enemy,
+which were pressing forward from Mons. When the 2nd Corps had thus
+halted on the line Dour-Frameries, the 1st Corps, which had been
+making the demonstration, took the opportunity to retire in its turn,
+and fell back before the evening to a line stretching from Bavai to
+Maubeuge.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 50.]
+
+The 2nd Corps had entrenched itself, while the 1st Corps was thus
+falling back upon its right; and when it came to the turn of the 2nd
+Corps to play the part of rearguard in these alternate movements, the
+effort proved to be one of grave peril.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 51.]
+
+Since the whole movement of the enemy was an outflanking movement,
+the pressure upon this left and extreme end of the line was
+particularly severe. The German advance in such highly superior
+numbers overlapped the two British corps to _their_ left or west,
+which was at this moment the extreme end of the Allied Franco-British
+line. They overlapped them as these pursuing Black units overlap the
+lesser retiring White units. It is evident that in such a case the
+last unit in the line at A will be suffering the chief burden of the
+attack. An attempt was made to relieve that burden by sending the and
+Cavalry Brigade in this direction to ride round the enemy's outlying
+body; but the move failed, with considerable loss to the 9th Lancers
+and the 18th Hussars, which came upon wire entanglements five hundred
+yards from the enemy's position. There did arrive in aid of the
+imperilled end of the line reinforcement in the shape of a new body.
+One infantry brigade, the 19th, which had hitherto been upon the line
+of communications, reached the army on this its central left near
+Quarouble and a little behind that village before the morning was
+spent. It was in line before evening. This reinforcement lent some
+strength to the sorely tried 2nd Corps, but it had against it still
+double its own strength in front, and half as much again upon its
+exposed left or western flank, and it suffered heavily.
+
+By the night of that Monday, the 24th of August, however, the whole of
+the British Army was again in line, and stretched from Maubeuge, which
+protected its right, through Bavai, on to the fields between the
+villages of Jenlain and Bry, where the fresh 19th Infantry Brigade had
+newly arrived before the evening, while beyond this extreme left again
+was the cavalry.
+
+The whole operation, then, of that perilous Monday, the first day of
+the retreat, may be planned in general as in Sketch 52. At the
+beginning, at daybreak, you have the three German army corps lying as
+the shaded bodies are given opposite to the unshaded, which represent
+the British contingent of not quite two full army corps. By nightfall
+the British contingent, including now the 19th Brigade of infantry,
+lay in the positions from Maubeuge westward, with the 1st Corps next
+to Maubeuge, the 2nd Corps beyond Bavai, the 1st being commanded by
+Sir Douglas Haig, the 2nd by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien; while the
+Germans lay more or less as the dotted shaded markings are.
+
+The fortress of Maubeuge was, under these circumstances, clearly a
+lure. An army in the field in danger of envelopment will always be
+tempted to make for the nearest fortified zone in order to save
+itself. The British commander was well advised in his judgment to
+avoid this opportunity, and that for two reasons. First, that the
+locking up of any considerable portion of the Anglo-French force in
+its retirement would have jeopardized the chance of that
+counter-offensive which the French hoped sooner or later to initiate;
+secondly, that, as will be seen later, the works of Maubeuge were
+quite insufficient to resist for more than a few days a modern siege
+train.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 52.]
+
+This point of Maubeuge and of its fall must be discussed later; for
+the moment all we need note is that the fortress afforded for a few
+hours--that is, during the night of Monday to Tuesday, the 24th-25th
+August--support to the British line during its first halt upon the
+rapid and perilous retirement from Mons.
+
+Meanwhile the whole of the French 5th Army had been falling back with
+equal rapidity, and upon its right the 4th Army had followed soon; and
+as this French retirement had preceded the retirement of the British,
+its general line lay farther south.
+
+On the other hand, from the nature of the topography in this section
+of the Franco-Belgian border, the units of the French command had to
+fall back farther and more rapidly in proportion as they stretched
+eastward. The attack of the enemy in forces of rather more than two to
+one had come, as we have seen, not only from across the line of the
+Sambre, but, once Namur had fallen, from across the line of the Meuse
+at right angles to the line of the Sambre. Therefore the 5th and the
+4th Armies, contained within the triangle bounded by the Sambre and
+Meuse, retiring from blows struck from the direction of the arrows 1-5
+over all that hilly and wooded country known as the Thierache, were,
+as to the extreme salient of them at A, compelled to a very rapid
+retirement indeed; and on this Sunday night the French line was
+deflected southward, not without heavy losses, until either on that
+night or on the Monday morning it joined up with the forces which
+stretched northward through and from Mezieres. An attempt to
+counter-attack through the precipitous ravines and deep woods on to
+the valley of the Semois had failed, and the line as a whole ran, upon
+this night between the Sunday and the Monday, much as is indicated
+upon the accompanying sketch.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 53.]
+
+From this it will be seen that the British contingent away upon the
+extreme left was in very grave peril, not only because the turning
+movement was wholly directed round their exposed flank, but also
+because, their retirement having come late, they stood too far forward
+in the general scheme at this moment, and therefore more exposed to
+the enemy's blow than the rest of the line. With this it must be
+remembered Tournai had already fallen. It was very imperfectly held by
+a French Territorial brigade, accompanied by one battery of English
+guns; and the entering German force, in a superiority of anything you
+like--two, three, or four to one--easily swept away the resistance
+proffered in this quarter.
+
+These German forces from Tournai had not yet, by the nightfall of
+Monday, come up eastward against the British, but they were on the
+way, and they might appear at any moment. The corps next to them, the
+4th of von Kluck's five, was already operating upon that flank, and
+the next day, Wednesday, 26th of August, was to be the chief day of
+trial for this exposed British wing of the army.
+
+So far the operations of the British Army had not differed greatly
+from the expected or at least one of the expected developments of the
+campaign.
+
+The operative corner, if it should not have the luck, through losses
+or blunders on the part of the enemy, to take the counter-offensive
+after receiving the third shock, is intended to retire, and to draw
+upon itself a maximum of the enemy's efforts.
+
+But between what had been intended as the most probable, and in any
+case perilous, task of this body (which comprised, it will be
+remembered, six French and ultimately two British army corps) turned
+out, within twenty-four hours of the retreat, and within forty-eight
+of the fall of Namur, to be an operation of a difficulty so extreme as
+to imperil the whole campaign, and in this operation it was the
+British force upon the outer left edge of the line--the unsupported
+extremity round which the enemy made every effort to get--which was
+bound to receive the severest treatment. This peculiar burden laid
+upon the Expeditionary Force from this country was, of course, gravely
+increased by the delay in beginning its retreat, which we have seen to
+be due to the delay in the communication to it by the French of the
+news of the fall of Namur. On account of this delay not only was the
+extreme of the line which the British held immediately threatened with
+outflanking, but it still lay somewhat forward of the rest of the
+force. It was in danger of being turned round its exposed edge C, not
+only because it lay on the extreme of the line, but also because,
+instead of occupying its normal position, AB, which it would have
+occupied had the retreat begun with all the rest, it actually occupied
+the position CD, which made it far more likely to be surrounded than
+if it had been a day's march farther back, as it would have been if
+the French Staff work had suffered no delays.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 54.]
+
+There lay in the gap formed by this untoward tardiness in the British
+retirement, at the point M, the fortress of Maubeuge. It was
+garrisoned by French reserves, or Territorial troops, not of the same
+quality as the active army, and its defensive power was, even if the
+old ring of fortress theory had proved sound, of very doubtful order.
+
+The French 5th Army being no longer present to support the British
+right, but having fallen back behind the alignment of that right,
+General Sir John French had no support for what should have been his
+secure flank save this fortress of Maubeuge, and it will be evident
+from the above diagram that the enemy, should he succeed in
+outflanking the British line, would compel it to fall back within the
+ring of forts surrounding Maubeuge. To avoid destruction it would have
+no alternative but to do that. For, counting the forces in front of it
+and the forces trying to get round its back, it was fighting odds of
+two to one.
+
+Maubeuge was a stronghold that had played a great part in the
+revolutionary war. Its resistance in the month of October 1793 had
+made possible the French victory of Wattigines, just outside its
+walls, and had, perhaps, done more than any other feat of arms in that
+year to save the French Revolution from the allied governments of
+Europe. It was, indeed, full of historic memories, from the moment
+when Caesar had defeated the Nervii upon the Sambre just to the west of
+the town (his camp can still be traced in an open field above the
+river bank) to the invasion of 1815.
+
+But this role which it had played throughout French history had not
+led to any illusion with regard to the role it might play in any
+modern war; and at the best Maubeuge, in common with the other
+ill-fortified points of the Belgian frontier, suffered from the only
+error--and that a grave one--which their thorough unnational political
+system had imposed upon the military plan of the French. This error
+was the capital error of indecision. No consistent plan had been
+adopted with regard to the fortification of the Belgian frontier.
+
+The French had begun, after the recuperation following upon the war of
+1870, an elaborate and very perfect system of fortification along
+their German frontier--that is, along the new frontier which divided
+the annexed territory of Alsace-Lorraine from the rest of the country.
+They had taken it for granted that the next German attempt would be
+made somewhere between Longwy and Belfort. And they had spent in this
+scheme of fortification, first and last, the cost of a great campaign.
+They had spent some three hundred million pounds; and it will be
+possible for the reader to gauge the magnitude of this effort if he
+will consider that it was a military operation more costly than was
+the whole of the South African War to Great Britain, or of the
+Manchurian War to Russia. The French were wise to have undertaken this
+expense, because it had hitherto been an unheard-of offence against
+European morals that one nation in Christendom should violate the
+declared neutrality of another. And the attack upon Belgium as a means
+of invading France by Germany had not then crossed the mind of any but
+a few theorists who had, so to speak, "marched ahead" of the rapid
+decline in our common religion which had marked now three
+generations.
+
+But when the French had completed this scheme of fortification, Europe
+heard it proposed by certain authorities in Prussia that, as the cost
+of invading France through the now fortified zone would be
+considerable, the German forces should not hesitate to originate yet
+another step in the breakdown of European morality, and to sacrifice
+in their attack upon France the neutrality of Belgium, of which
+Prussia was herself a guarantor.
+
+Men have often talked during this war, especially in England, as
+though the crime accompanying Prussian activities in the field were
+normal to warfare; and this error is probably due to the fact that war
+upon a large scale has never come home to the imagination of the
+country, and that it is without experience of invasion.
+
+Yet it is of the very first importance to appreciate the truth that
+Prussia in this campaign has postulated in one point after another new
+doctrines which repudiate everything her neighbours have held sacred
+from the time when a common Christianity first began to influence the
+states of Europe. The violation of the Belgian territory is on a par
+with the murder of civilians in cold blood, and after admission of
+their innocence, with the massacre of priests, and the sinking without
+warning of unarmed ships with their passengers and crews. To regard
+these things as something normal to warfare in the past is as
+monstrous an historical error as it would be to regard the reign of
+terror during the French Revolution as normal to civil disputes within
+the State. And to appreciate such a truth is, I repeat, of especial
+moment to the understanding of the mere military character of the
+campaign. For if the violation of Belgium in particular had not been
+the unheard of thing it was, the fortification of the Franco-Belgian
+frontier with which we are here concerned would have had a very
+different fortune.
+
+As it was, the French could never quite make up their minds--or rather
+the French parliamentarians could never make up their minds--upon the
+amount of money that might wisely be expended in the defence of this
+neutral border. There were moments when the opinion that Prussia
+would be restrained by no fear of Europe prevailed among the
+professional politicians of Paris. The fortification of the Belgian
+frontier was undertaken in such moments; a full plan of it was drawn
+up. But again doubt would succeed, the very large sums involved would
+appal some new ministry, and the effort would be interrupted. To such
+uncertainty of aim characteristic of parliamentary government in a
+military nation was added, unfortunately, the consideration of the
+line of the Meuse. Liege and Namur were fortresses of peculiar
+strength, Antwerp was thought the strongest thing in Europe; and that
+triangle was conceived, even by many who believed that the violation
+of Belgian territory would take place, as affording a sufficient
+barrier against the immediate invasion of France from the north-east.
+Those who made this calculation did not forget that fortresses are
+nothing without their full complement of men, guns, and stores; but
+they could neither control, nor had they the elements properly to
+appreciate, the deficiency of organization in a foreign and not
+military country.
+
+For all these causes Maubeuge, in common with other points along the
+Belgian frontier less important than itself, was left imperfect. Even
+if the ring fortress had remained after 1905 what it had been before
+that date, and even if modern howitzer fire and modern high explosives
+had not rendered its tenure one of days rather than months, Maubeuge
+was not a first-class fortress. As it was, with fortifications
+unrenewed, and with the ring fortress in any case doomed, Maubeuge was
+a death-trap.
+
+The role assigned to the fortress in the original French plan was no
+more than the support of the retiring operative corner, as it
+"retreated, manoeuvred, and held the enemy." Maubeuge was considered
+as part of a line beyond which the operative corner would not have to
+fall before the rest of the square, the "manoeuvring mass," had swung
+up. Hence it was that the French General Staff and its Chief had put
+within the ring of its insufficient forts nothing more than a garrison
+of Territorials--that is, of the older classes of the reserve.
+
+Had the British General accepted the lure of Maubeuge as Bazaine did
+the lure of Metz in 1870, the Expeditionary Force would have been
+destroyed. But it would have been destroyed, not after a long delay,
+as was the army at Metz, but immediately; for Maubeuge was not Metz,
+and the fortress power of resistance of to-day is not that of a
+generation ago. Maubeuge, as a fact, fell within a fortnight of the
+date when this temptation was offered to the sorely pressed British
+army, and had that temptation been yielded to, the whole force would
+have been, in a military sense, annihilated before the middle of
+September.
+
+What preserved it was the immediate decision undertaken upon that
+Monday night to proceed, in spite of the fatigues that were already
+felt after the first day's retreat, with a retirement upon the
+south-west, and to proceed with it as vigorously as possible.
+
+It was not yet daylight upon the morning of Tuesday, August 25th, when
+the move began. The Field-Marshal counted justly upon some exhaustion
+in his immensely superior enemy, especially in those troops of his
+upon the west (the 2nd German Corps) which had to perform the heavy
+marching task of getting round the end of the British line. This
+element, combined with the considerable distance which the British
+marched that morning, saved the army; though not until another week of
+almost intolerable suffering had passed, and not until very heavy
+losses indeed had been sustained. The great Maubeuge-Bavai road, which
+is prolonged to Eth, and which was, roughly, the British front of that
+night, was cleared shortly after sunrise. A couple of brigades of
+cavalry and the divisional cavalry of the 2nd Corps covered the
+operation on the centre of the right, in front of the main body of the
+2nd Corps, while the rest of the cavalry similarly covered the exposed
+western edge and corner of the line.
+
+Delays, with the criticism of which this short summary has no concern,
+had forbidden the whole force which should have been present with the
+British Army in Flanders at the outset of the campaign to arrive in
+time, and the contingents that had already come up had taken the
+shock, as we have already described, in the absence of the 4th
+Division. This 4th Division had only begun to detrain from the
+junction at Le Cateau at the same hour that General Sir John French
+was reading that Sunday message which prompted his immediate
+retirement from before Mons. When the full official history of the war
+comes to be written, few things will prove of more credit to the
+Expeditionary Force and its command than the way in which this belated
+division--belated through no fault of the soldiers--was incorporated
+with the already existing organization, in the very midst of its
+retreat, and helped to support the army. There are few parallels in
+history to the successful accomplishment of so delicate and perilous
+an operation.
+
+At any rate, in less than forty-eight hours after its arrival, the 4th
+Division--eleven battalions and a brigade of artillery--were
+incorporated with the British line just as the whole force was falling
+back upon this Tuesday morning, the 25th; and the newly arrived
+division of fresh men did singular service in the further covering of
+the retirement. General Snow, who was in command of this division,
+was deployed upon a line running from just south of Solesmes, on the
+right, to a point just south of La Chatrie, upon the road from Cambrai
+to Le Cateau, upon his left; and, as will be seen by the accompanying
+sketch map, such a line effectually protected the falling back of the
+rest of the force. Behind it the 1st and the 2nd British Corps fell
+back upon the line Cambrai to Landrecies. The small inset map shows
+how the various points in this two days' retreat stood to one another.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 55.]
+
+This line from Landrecies towards Cambrai had already been in part
+prepared in the course of that day--Tuesday--and entrenched, and it
+may be imagined what inclination affected commanders and men towards
+a halt upon that position. The pressure had been continuous and heavy,
+the work of detraining and setting in line the newly arrived division
+had added to the anxieties of the day, and an occupation of the
+prepared line seemed to impose itself. Luckily, the unwisdom of such a
+stand in the retirement was perceived in time, and the British
+Commander decided not to give his forces rest until some considerable
+natural object superior to imperfect and hurriedly constructed
+trenches could be depended upon to check the enemy's advance. The
+threat of being outflanked was still very grave, and the few hours'
+halt which would have been involved in the alternative decision might,
+or rather would, have been fatal.
+
+The consequences, however, to the men of this decision in favour of
+continual retirement were severe. The 1st Corps did not reach
+Landrecies till ten o'clock at night. They had been upon the move for
+eighteen hours; but even so, the enemy, in that avalanche of advance
+(which was possible to him, as we now know, by the organization of
+mechanical transport), was well in touch. The Guards in Landrecies
+itself (the 4th Brigade) were attacked by the advance body of the 9th
+German Army Corps, which came on in overwhelming numbers right into
+the buildings of the town, debouching from the wood to the north under
+cover of the darkness. Their effort was unsuccessful. They did not
+succeed in piercing or even in decisively confusing the British line
+at this point; and, packed in the rather narrow street of Landrecies,
+the enemy suffered losses equivalent to a battalion in that desperate
+night fighting. But though the enemy here failed to achieve his
+purpose, his action compelled the continued retreat of men who were
+almost at the limit of exhaustion, and who had now been marching and
+fighting for the better part of twenty-four hours.
+
+In that same darkness the 1st Division, under Sir Douglas Haig, was
+heavily engaged south-east of Maroilles. They obtained ultimately the
+aid of two French reserve divisions which lay upon the right of the
+British line, and extricated themselves from the peril they were in
+before dawn. By daylight this 1st Corps was still continuing its
+retirement in the direction of Wassigny, with Guise as its objective.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 56.]
+
+Meanwhile the 2nd Corps, which had not been so heavily attacked, and
+which lay to the west--that is, still upon the extreme of the
+line--had come, before the sunset of that Tuesday, the 25th, into a
+line stretching from Le Cateau to near Caudry, and thence prolonged by
+the 4th Division towards Seranvillers.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 57.]
+
+It will be seen that this line was bent--its left refused. This
+disposition was, of course, designed to meet the ceaseless German
+attempt to outflank on the west; and with the dawn of Wednesday, the
+26th, it was already apparent how serious would be the task before
+this 2nd Corps, which covered all the rest of the army, and, in a
+sense, the whole of the Anglo-French retirement. General Sir Horace
+Smith-Dorrien, who was here in command, was threatened with a disaster
+that might carry in its train disaster to the whole British
+contingent, and ultimately, perhaps, to the whole Franco-British line.
+
+Although the German bodies which were attempting the outflanking had
+not yet all come up, the field artillery of no less than four German
+corps was already at work against this one body, and a general action
+was developing upon which might very well depend the fate of the
+campaign. Indeed, the reader will do well to fix his attention upon
+this day, Wednesday, the 26th August, as the key to all that followed.
+There are always to be found, in the history of war, places and times
+which are of this character--nuclei, as it were, round which the
+business of all that comes before and after seems to congregate. Of
+such, for instance, was the Friday before Waterloo, when Erlon's
+counter-orders ultimately decided the fate of Napoleon; and of such
+was Carnot's night march on October 15, 1793, which largely decided
+the fate of the revolutionary army.
+
+The obvious action to take in such a position as that in which the 2nd
+Corps found themselves was to break contact with the enemy, to call
+for support from the 1st Corps, and to maintain the retreat as
+indefatigably as it had already been maintained in the preceding
+twenty-four hours.
+
+But men have limits to their physical powers, which limits commonly
+appear sharply, not gradually, at the end of a great movement. The 1st
+Corps had been marching and fighting a day and a night, and that after
+a preceding whole day of retirement from before Mons. It was unable to
+execute a further effort. Further, the general in command of the 2nd
+Corps reported that the German pressure had advanced too far to permit
+of breaking contact in the face of such an attack.
+
+It would have been of the utmost use if at this moment a large body of
+French cavalry--no less than three divisions--under General Sordet,
+could have intervened upon that critical moment, the morning of
+Wednesday, the 26th, to have covered the retirement of the 1st Corps.
+They were in the neighbourhood; the British commander had seen their
+commander in the course of the 25th, and had represented his need.
+Through some error or misfortune in the previous movement of this
+corps--such that its horses were incapable of further action through
+fatigue--it failed to appear upon the field in this all-important
+juncture, and General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien was left facing
+overwhelming odds, which in artillery--the arm that was doing all the
+heavy work of that morning--were not less than four to one.
+
+The fact that the retirement was at last made possible was due more
+than anything else to the handling of the British guns upon this day,
+and to the devotion with which the batteries sacrificed themselves to
+the covering of that movement; while the cavalry, as in the preceding
+two days, co-operated in forming a screen for the retreat.
+
+It was about half-past three in the afternoon when the general in
+command of this exposed left flank judged it possible to break
+contact, and to give the order for falling back. The experiment--for
+it seems to have been no more secure than such a word suggests--was
+perilous in the extreme. It was not known whether the consequences of
+this fierce artillery duel against an enemy of four-fold superiority
+had been sufficient to forbid that enemy to make good the pursuit.
+Luckily, as the operation developed, it was apparent that the check
+inflicted upon such enormous odds by the British guns was sufficient
+for its purpose. The enemy had received losses that forbade him to
+move with the rapidity necessary to him if he was to decide the
+matter. He failed to press the retiring 2nd British Corps in any
+conclusive fashion: this 2nd Corps, the left wing, was saved; and with
+it the whole army, and perhaps the whole line.
+
+The retreat of this body, which had thus covered all its comrades,
+continued under terrible conditions of strain (and after so heavy an
+action) right through the afternoon, and on hour after hour through
+the darkness; but though such an effort meant the loss of stragglers
+and of wounded, of guns whose teams had been destroyed, of material,
+and of all that accompanies a perilous retreat, one may justly say
+that well before midnight of that Wednesday, the 26th, the operation
+had proved successful and its purpose was accomplished.
+
+Two more days of almost equal strain were, as we shall see, to be
+suffered by the whole army before it had reached a natural obstacle
+behind which it could draw breath (the river Oise), and might fairly
+be regarded as no longer in peril of destruction; but the breaking
+point that had come on that Wednesday, the 26th, had been successfully
+passed without disaster, and had been so passed, in the main, by
+virtue of the guns.
+
+This critical day, upon which depended the fortunes certainly of the
+British contingent, and in some degree of all the "operative corner"
+of the French plan, turned in favour of the Allies, not only through
+the military excellence of the action which was broken off by Sir
+Horace Smith-Dorrien during the afternoon, but also through the vigour
+and tenacity of the retreat.
+
+I must here beg the reader's leave for a short digression in
+connection with those two phrases--"in favour of," and "vigour."
+History in general treats a retirement, particularly a rapid
+retirement accompanied by heavy losses, as a disaster; and the
+conception that such a movement may seem to the military historian a
+success, and that the energy of its conduct is just as important as
+the energy of an assault, is unfamiliar to most students of civilian
+record. But I am writing here, though an elementary, yet a military
+history; and to the military historian a retreat may be just as much a
+factor in victory as an advance; while the energy and tenacity
+required for its carriage are, if anything, more important than the
+corresponding qualities required for an advance. And in the case of
+this critical day and a half, the Wednesday, August 26th, and the
+Wednesday and Thursday night, August 26th-27th, the preservation of
+the British forces, and to some extent of all that lay east of them,
+was made possible by the very fact that the retirement was prosecuted
+with the utmost rapidity and without a halt. Had the retreat been
+interrupted in the hope of making a stand, or in the hope of repose,
+the whole army would have gone.
+
+Throughout the night, then, with heavy losses from stragglers, and in
+one case with the surrounding and annihilation by wounds and capture
+of nearly a whole battalion (the Gordons), the retreat of the 2nd
+Corps proceeded, and, in line with it, the retreat of the 1st Corps to
+the east.
+
+But this 1st Corps, though set an easier task than the 2nd (which, at
+the extreme of the line, was under the perpetual menace of
+development), did not retire without losses of a serious character. It
+was marching on Guise, just as the 2nd Corps to the west of it was
+marching across the watershed to St. Quentin. The Munster Fusiliers,
+who were on its extreme right, had halted for the night on that same
+evening of the 26th; for the 1st Corps, being less hard pressed, had
+more leisure for such repose. During the night a messenger was sent to
+this body with orders for the resumption of the march next morning. He
+was taken prisoner, and never reached his goal. The Munsters were
+attacked at dawn by the German pursuit in greatly superior numbers,
+surrounded and destroyed, as the Gordons of the 2nd Corps had been;
+the unwounded remnant was compelled to surrender.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 58.]
+
+The whole of Thursday, the 27th, and Friday, the 28th of August, the
+British retreat continued, the 1st Corps following on at the valley of
+the Oise towards La Fere, while the 2nd Corps to the west passed St.
+Quentin, and made for Noyon, in the neighbourhood of the same river
+farther down; and on the night of that Friday the Expeditionary Force
+was at last in line, and in some kind of order, organized for the
+first breathing space possible after so terrible an ordeal.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 59.]
+
+It is clear from the accompanying sketch map that the position the
+British had now reached gave to the whole Allied force a bent contour.
+The French armies to the east lay along line AB, which, had it been
+directly prolonged, would have stretched towards C; but the British
+contingent, which, on account of its extreme position, had suffered
+most heavily, was turned right back on the scheme AD, and even so,
+was still in some peril of being outflanked by the German forces along
+the arrow (1) to the west of it. At this moment the French, whose
+fortunes we shall next describe, found it possible to check the fury
+of the pursuit. The drive of the German masses, which had so nearly
+annihilated the British end of the line, was blocked, and the
+remainder of the great retreat followed a more orderly fashion,
+proceeded at a much slower rate, and approached that term at which a
+counter-offensive might be attempted.
+
+The whole process may be compared to the flood of a very rapid tide,
+which, after the first few hours, is seen to relax its speed
+considerably, and to promise in the immediate future an ebb.
+
+In order to appreciate how this was, let us next consider what the
+larger French forces to the east of the British had been doing. There
+are no details available, very few published records, and it will not
+be possible until an official history of the war appears to give more
+than the most general sketch of the French movements in this retreat;
+but the largest lines are sufficient for our judgment of the result.
+
+It will be remembered that what I have called "the operative corner"
+of the Allied army had stood in the angle between the Sambre and the
+Meuse. It had consisted in the British contingent upon the left, or
+west, in front of Mons; the 5th French Army, composed of three army
+corps, under Lanrezac, to the east of it, along the Sambre, past
+Charleroi; and the 4th French Army, also of three army corps, under
+Langle, along the Middle Meuse, being in general disposition what we
+have upon the accompanying sketch. It had been attacked upon Saturday,
+the 22nd August, by seventeen German army corps--that is, by forces
+double its own. On that same day Namur, at the corner, had fallen into
+complete possession of the Germans, the French retreat had begun, and
+on the following day the English force had, after the regrettable
+delay of half a day, also begun its retirement.
+
+We have seen that the British retirement (following the dotted lines
+upon Sketch 60) had reached, upon the Friday night, the position from
+Noyon to La Fere, marked also in dots upon the sketch.
+
+What had happened meanwhile to their French colleagues upon the east?
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 60.]
+
+The first thing to note is that the fortress of Maubeuge, with its
+garrison of reserve and second line men, had, of course, been at once
+invested by the Germans when the British and French line had fallen
+behind it and left it isolated. The imperfection of this fortress I
+have already described, and the causes of that imperfection. Maubeuge
+commanded the great railway line leading from Belgium to Paris, which
+is the main avenue of supply for an invasion or for a retreat, running
+north-east to south-west on the Belgian frontier upon the capital.
+
+The 5th French Army retired parallel to the British along the belt
+marked in Sketch Map 60 by diagonal lines. At first, as its retirement
+had begun earlier, it was behind, or to the south of, the British, who
+were thus left almost unsupported. It lay, for instance, on Monday,
+the 24th, much along the position 1, at which moment the British Army
+was lying along the position 2. That was the day on which the Germans
+attempted to drive the British into Maubeuge.
+
+But during the succeeding two days the French 5th Army (to which the
+five corps, including the Prussian Guard, under Buelow, were opposed)
+held the enemy fairly well. They were losing, of course, heavily in
+stragglers, in abandoned wounded, and in guns; but their retreat was
+sufficiently strongly organized to keep this section of the line well
+bent up northwards, and just before the British halted for their first
+breathing space along the line La Fere and Noyon, the French 5th Army
+attempted, and succeeded in, a sharp local attack against the superior
+forces that were pursuing them. This local attack was undertaken from
+about the position marked 3 on Sketch 60, and was directed against
+Guise. It was undertaken by the 1st and 3rd French Corps, under
+General Maunoury. He, acting under Lanrezac, gave such a blow to the
+Prussian Guard that he here bent the Prussian line right in.
+
+Meanwhile the 4th French Army, which had also been retiring rapidly
+parallel to the 5th French Army, lay in line with it to the east along
+that continuation of 3 which I have marked with a 4 upon the sketch.
+Farther east the French armies, linking up the operative corner with
+the Alsace-Lorraine frontier, had also been driven back from the Upper
+Meuse, and upon Friday, the 28th of August, when the British halt had
+come between La Fere and Noyon (a line largely protected by the
+Oise), the whole disposition of the Allied forces between the
+neighbourhood of Verdun and Noyon was much what is laid down in the
+accompanying sketch. At A were the British; at B the successful
+counter-offensive of the French 5th Army had checked and bent back the
+Prussian centre under von Buelow; at C, the last section of what had
+been the old operative corner, the army under Langle was thrust back
+to the position here shown, and pressed there by the Wurtembergers and
+the Saxons opposed to it. Meanwhile further French forces, D and E,
+had also been driven back from the Upper Meuse, and were retiring with
+Verdun as a pivot, leaving isolated the little frontier town of
+Longwy. This was not seriously fortified, had held out with only
+infantry work and small pieces, and had not been thought worthy of
+attack by a siege train. It surrendered to the Crown Prince upon
+Friday, 28th August.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 61.]
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 62.]
+
+On that date, then, the two opposing lines might be compared, the one
+to a great encircling arm AA, the elbow of which was bent at Guise,
+the other to a power BB which had struck into the hollow of the elbow,
+and might expect, with further success, to bend the arm so much more
+at that point as to embarrass its general sweep.
+
+Those who saw the position as a whole on this Friday, the 28th of
+August, wondered whether or not the French Commander-in-chief would
+order the continuation of the successful local attack at Guise, and so
+attempt to break the whole German line. He did not give this order,
+and his reasons for retiring in the face of such an opportunity may be
+briefly stated thus:--
+
+1. The French forces in line from Verdun to La Fere, and continued by
+the British contingent to the neighbourhood of Noyon, were still
+gravely inferior to the German forces opposed to them. Even,
+therefore, if the French success at Guise had been pushed farther, and
+had actually broken the German line, either half of the French line
+upon either side of the forward angle would have been heavily
+outnumbered by the two limbs of the enemy opposed to each, and that
+enemy might perfectly well have defeated, though separated, each
+portion of the force opposed to it.
+
+2. To the west, at the position FF on Sketch 62, were acting large
+bodies of the enemy, which had swept, almost without meeting
+resistance, through Arras to Amiens. Against that advance there was
+nothing but small garrisons of French Territorials, which were brushed
+aside without difficulty.
+
+Now these bodies, though they were mainly of cavalry which were
+operating thus to the west, had already cut the main line of
+communications from Boulogne, upon which the British had hitherto
+depended, and were close enough to the Allied left flank to threaten
+it with envelopment, or, rather, to come up in aid of von Kluck at A,
+and make certain what he already could regard as probable--his power
+to get round the British, and turn the whole left of the Allied line.
+
+3. More important even than these two first conclusive considerations
+was the fact that the French Commander-in-chief, had he proposed to
+follow up this success of his subordinate at Guise, would have had to
+change the whole of his general plan, and to waste, or at best to
+delay, the action of his chief factor in that plan. This chief factor
+was the great manoeuvring mass behind the French line which had not
+yet come into play, and the advent of which, at a chosen moment, was
+the very soul of the French strategy.
+
+It is so essential to the comprehension of the campaign to seize this
+last point that, at the risk of repetition, I will restate for the
+reader the main elements of that strategy.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 63.]
+
+I have called it in the earlier pages of this book "the open strategic
+square," and I have shown how this theoretical arrangement was in
+practice complicated and modified so that it came to mean, under the
+existing circumstances of the campaign, the deliberate thrusting forth
+of the fraction called "the operative corner," behind which larger
+masses, "the mass of manoeuvre," were to come up in aid and assume the
+general counter-offensive when the operative corner should have drawn
+the enemy down to that position in which such a general
+counter-offensive would be most efficacious.
+
+To concentrate the great mass of manoeuvre was a business of some
+days, and having ordered its concentration in one district, it would
+be impossible to change the plan at a moment's notice. The district
+into which a great part of this mass of manoeuvre had been
+concentrated--or, rather, was in course of concentration at this
+moment, the 28th August--was the district behind and in the
+neighbourhood of Paris. It lay far from the scene of operation at
+Guise. It was intended to come into play only when the general retreat
+should have reached a line stretching from Verdun to the neighbourhood
+of Paris itself. To have pursued the success at Guise, therefore,
+would have been to waste all this great concentration of the mass of
+manoeuvre which lay some days behind the existing line, and in
+particular to waste the large body which was being gathered behind and
+in the neighbourhood of Paris.
+
+With these three main considerations in mind, and in particular the
+third, which was far the most important, General Joffre determined to
+give up the advantage obtained at Guise, to order the two successful
+army corps under Maunoury, who had knocked the Prussian Guard at that
+point, to retire, and to continue the general retreat until the Allied
+line should be evenly stretched from Paris to Verdun. The whole
+situation may be put in a diagram as follows: You have the Allied line
+in an angle, ABC. You have opposed to it the much larger German forces
+in a corresponding angle, DEF. Farther east you have a continuation of
+the French line, more or less immovable, on the fortified frontier of
+Alsace-Lorraine at M, opposed by a greater immovable German force at
+N. At P you have coming up as far as Amiens large German bodies
+operating in the west, and at Q a small newly-formed French body, the
+6th French Army, supporting the exposed flank of the British
+contingent at A, near Noyon. Meanwhile you have directed towards S,
+behind Paris, and coming up at sundry other points, a concentration of
+the mass of manoeuvre.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 64.]
+
+It is evident that if the French offensive at B which has successfully
+pushed in the German elbow at E round Guise is still sent forward, and
+even succeeds in breaking the German line at E, "the elbow," the two
+limbs into which the Germans will be divided, DE and EF, are each
+superior in number to the forces opposed to them, and that DE in
+particular, with the help of P, may very probably turn AB and its new
+small supporter at Q, roll it up, and begin a decisive victory, while
+the other large German force, EF, may press back or pierce the smaller
+opposed French force, BC.
+
+Meanwhile you would not only be risking this peril, but you would also
+be wasting your great mass of manoeuvre, SS, which is still in process
+of concentration, most of it behind Paris, and which could not
+possibly come into play in useful time at E.
+
+It is far better to pursue the original plan to continue the retreat
+as far as the dotted line from Paris to Verdun, where you will have
+the whole German force at its farthest limit of effort and
+corresponding exhaustion, and where you will have, after the salutary
+delay of the few intervening days, your large mass of manoeuvre, SS,
+close by to Paris and ready to strike.
+
+From such a diagram we see the wisdom of the decision that was taken
+to continue the retirement, and the fruits which that decision was to
+bear.
+
+The whole episode is most eminently characteristic of the French
+military temper, which has throughout the whole of French history
+played this kind of game, and invariably been successful when it has
+attained success from a concentration of energy upon purely military
+objects and a sacrificing of every domestic consideration to the
+single object of victory in foreign war.
+
+It is an almost invariable rule in French history that when the
+military temper of the nation is allowed free play its success is
+assured, and that only when the cross-current of a political object
+disturbs this temper do the French fail, as they failed in 1870, as
+they failed in 1812, or as they failed in the Italian expeditions of
+the Renaissance. By geographical accident, coupled with the
+conditions, economic and other, to which their aggression gives rise,
+the French are nearly always numerically inferior at the beginning of
+a campaign. They have almost invariably begun their great wars with
+defeats and retirements. They have only succeeded when a patient,
+tenacious, and consistently military policy has given them the
+requisite delay to achieve a defensive-offensive plan. It was so
+against Otto the Second a thousand years ago; it was so in the wars of
+the Revolution; it was so in this enormous campaign of 1914. There is
+in their two thousand years of constant fighting one great and
+salutary exception to the rule--their failure against Caesar; from
+which failure they date the strength of their Roman tradition--still
+vigorous.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The minor fortified posts lying behind the French line were not
+defended. Upon 29th August the French centre fell back behind Rethel,
+the Germans crossed the Aisne, occupied Rheims and Chalons, while the
+British contingent on the left and the French 6th Army now protecting
+its flank continued also to fall back towards Paris. And on Sedan day,
+2nd September, we may regard the great movement as having reached its
+end.
+
+The German advance had nowhere hesitated, save at Guise, and the
+French retirement after their success at Guise can only have seemed to
+the German commanders a further French defeat. Those commanders knew
+their overwhelming numerical superiority against the total of the
+Allied forces--a superiority of some 60 per cent. They may have
+guessed that the French were keeping a considerable reserve; but in
+their imagination that reserve was thought far less than it really
+was, for they could hardly believe that under the strain of the great
+retreat the French commanders would have had the implacable fortitude
+which permitted them to spare for further effort the reinforcements of
+which the retiring army seemed in vital and even in despairing need.
+
+Upon this anniversary of Sedan day it cannot but have appeared to the
+Great General Staff of the enemy that the purpose of their great
+effort in the West was already achieved.
+
+They had reached the gates of Paris. They had, indeed, not yet
+destroyed the enemy's main army in the field, but they had swept up
+garrison after garrison; they had captured, perhaps, 150,000 wounded
+and unwounded men; their progress had been that of a whirlwind, and
+had been marked by a bewildering series of incessant victories. They
+were now in such a situation that either they could proceed to the
+reduction of the forts outside Paris (to which their experience of
+their hitherto immediate reduction of every other permanent work left
+them contemptuous), or they could proceed to break at will the
+insufficient line opposed to them.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 65.]
+
+They stood, on this anniversary of Sedan, in the general situation
+apparent on the accompanying sketch. The 6th French Army was forced
+back right upon the outer works of Paris; the British contingent, to
+its right, lay now beyond the Marne; the 5th French Army, to its right
+again, close along the Seine; the 4th and 3rd continuing the great bow
+up to the neighbourhood of Verdun, three-quarters of the way round
+which fortress the Crown Prince had now encircled; and in front of
+this bent line, in numbers quite double its effectives, pressed the
+great German front over 150 miles of French ground. Upon the left or
+west of the Allies--the German right--stood the main army of von
+Kluck, the 1st, with its supporters to the north and west, that had
+already pressed through Amiens. Immediately to the east of this, von
+Buelow, with the 2nd Army, continued the line. The Saxons and the
+Wurtembergers, a 3rd Army, pressed at the lowest point of the curve in
+occupation of Vitry. To the east, again, beyond and in the Argonne,
+the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia was upon the point of reducing
+Verdun, the permanent works of which fortress had already suffered the
+first days of that bombardment from the new German siege train which
+had hitherto at every experiment completely destroyed the defence in a
+few hours. If we take for the terminal of this first chapter in the
+Great War the morning of 4th September, we may perceive how nearly the
+enemy had achieved his object, to which there now stood as a threat
+nothing more but the French reserves, unexpected in magnitude, though
+their presence was already discovered, which had for the most part
+been gathered in the neighbourhood of and behind the fortified zone of
+Paris.
+
+With this position, of what it meant in immediate alternatives to the
+enemy, I will deal a few pages on at the close of this book, when I
+will also consider in one conspectus on the map the whole of that ten
+days' sweep down from the north, and summarize its effect upon the
+Allied attitude towards the next phase of the war.
+
+But to understand a campaign, one must seize not only the
+topographical positions of troops, nor only their number: one must
+also gauge the temper of their commanders and of the political opinion
+at home behind them, for upon this moral factor everything ultimately
+depends. The men that fight are living men, and the motive power is
+the soul.
+
+It is, therefore, necessary for the reader to appreciate at this
+terminal date, September 2-4, the moral strength of the enemy, and to
+comprehend in what mood of confidence the Germans now lay. With this
+object we must add to the story of the advance on Paris the subsidiary
+events which had accompanied that great sweep into the West. We must
+turn to the "holding up of Russia" upon the East by the Austrian
+forces, and see how the partial failure of this effort (news of which
+was just reaching the Western armies) was quite eclipsed by the
+splendid tidings of Tannenberg. We must see with German eyes the
+secondary but brilliant victory in front of Metz; we must stand in
+their shoes to feel as they did the clearing of Alsace, and to
+comprehend with what contempt they must have watched the false picture
+of the war which the governments and the press of the Allies,
+particularly in Britain, presented to public opinion in their doomed
+territories; and we must, in general, grasp the now apocalyptic temper
+of the nervous, over-strained industrialized population which is the
+tissue of modern Germany.
+
+Not until we have a good general aspect of that mood can we understand
+either the war at this turning-point in its fortunes, or the future
+developments which will be traced in the succeeding volumes of this
+series.
+
+I will, therefore, now turn to the three main elements productive of
+that mood in their historical order: the Battle of Metz, the Austrian
+operations against Russia, and, lastly, the great victory of
+Tannenberg in East Prussia, before concluding this volume with a
+summary of the whole situation in those first days of September, just
+before the tide turned.
+
+
+THE BATTLE OF METZ.
+
+The Battle of Metz, though quite subsidiary to the general operations
+of the war, and upon a scale which later operations have dwarfed, will
+be mentioned with special emphasis in any just account of the great
+war on account of its moral significance.
+
+It took place before the main shock of the armies; it had no decisive
+effect upon the future of the campaign; but it was of the very highest
+weight, informing the German mind, and leading it into that attitude
+of violent exaltation on which I shall later insist in these pages,
+and which largely determined all the first months of the war, with
+their enormous consequences for the future. For the action in front of
+Metz was the first pitched battle fought in Western Europe during our
+generation, and to an unexpected degree it fulfilled in its narrow
+area all the dreams upon which military Germany had been nourished for
+forty years. It thrilled the whole nation with the news, at the very
+outset of hostilities, of a sharp and glorious victory; it seemed a
+presage of far more to come. The Battle of Metz was the limited
+foundation upon which was rapidly erected that triumphant mood that
+lasted long after the tide had turned, and that matured, when bad
+blundering had lost the victory in the West, into the unsoldierly,
+muddled hope that could fail to win, and yet somehow not lose, a
+campaign.
+
+We have seen that the disposition of the French armies at the moment
+when the shock was being delivered through Belgium involved along the
+frontiers of Alsace-Lorraine the presence of considerable forces.
+These, once the operative corner had taken the shock, formed part of
+the mass of manoeuvre, and were destined in large part to swing up in
+aid of the men retreating from the Sambre.
+
+But in the very first days of the war, before the main blow had
+fallen, and when the French General Staff were still in doubt as to
+precisely where the blow _would_ fall, considerable bodies had been
+operating in Alsace and over the Lorraine frontier. The whole range of
+the Vosges was carried in the second week after the British
+declaration of war--that is, between 10th August and 15th August.
+Mulhouse was occupied; upon Monday, the 17th of August, Saarburg, the
+most important railway junction between Strassburg and Metz, was in
+French hands. Up to that date, though such comparatively small forces
+were involved, the French had possessed a very decisive numerical
+superiority. It was not destined to last, for there was moving down
+from the north the now mobilized strength of Germany in this region;
+and a blow struck against the French left, with no less than four
+army corps, was speedily to decide the issue upon this subsidiary
+front.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 66.]
+
+This great force was based upon Metz, from which fortress the action
+will presumably take its name in history. It stretched upon the 20th
+of August from the north of Pont-a-Mousson to beyond Chateau Salins.
+Before this overwhelming advance the French left rapidly retired. It
+did not retire quickly enough, and one portion of the French force--it
+is believed the 15th Division (that is, the first division of the 15th
+Army Corps)--failed in its task of supporting the shock.
+
+Details of the action are wholly lacking. We depend even for what may
+be said at this date upon little more than rumour. The Germans claimed
+a capture of ten batteries and of the equivalent of as many
+battalions, and many colours. Upon the 21st the whole French left fell
+back, carrying with them as a necessary consequence the centre in the
+Vosges Mountains and the right upon the plains of Alsace. So rapid was
+the retreat that upon the 22nd of August the Bavarians were at
+Luneville, and marching on Nancy; the extreme right of the German line
+had come within range of the forts north of Toul; and in those same
+hours during which, on that same Saturday, the 22nd of August, the 5th
+French Army in the north fell back at the news of Namur and lost the
+Sambre, those forces on the borders of Alsace-Lorraine had lost all
+the first advantages of their thrust into the lost provinces, had
+suffered defeat in the first striking action of the war, and had put
+Nancy in peril.
+
+Nancy itself was saved. The French counter-offensive was organized on
+the 23rd of August, at a moment when the German line lay from St. Die
+northwards and westwards up to positions just in front of Nancy. It
+was delivered about a week later. That counter-offensive which
+ultimately saved Nancy belongs to the next volume, for it did not
+develop its strength until after Sedan Day, and after the end of the
+great sweep on Paris.
+
+The situation, then, in this field (the very names of which have such
+great moral effects upon the French and the German minds) was, by the
+2nd of September, as follows:--
+
+The French had suffered in the first considerable action of the war a
+disaster. They had lost their foothold in the annexed provinces. They
+had put the capital of French Lorraine, Nancy, in instant peril. They
+had fallen back from the Vosges. They were beginning, with grave
+doubts of its success, a counter-offensive, to keep the enemy, if
+possible, from entering Nancy. They had lost thousands of men, many
+colours, and scores of guns, and all Germany was full of the news.
+
+
+LEMBERG.
+
+The foundation of the Germanic plan upon the Eastern front at the
+origin of the war was, as we have said, the holding up of Russia
+during her necessarily slow mobilization, while the decisive stroke
+was delivered in the West.
+
+That is the largest view of the matter.
+
+In more detail, we know that the main part of this task was entrusted
+to the Austro-Hungarian forces. The German forces had indeed entered
+and occupied the west fringe of Russian Poland, seizing the small
+industrial belt which lies immediately east of Silesia, and the two
+towns of Czestochowa and Kalish--the latter, in the very centre of the
+bend of the frontier, because it was a big railway depot, and, as it
+were, a gage of invasion; the former, both because the holding of one
+line demanded it (if Kalish and the industrial portion were held), and
+because Czestochowa being the principal shrine of the Poles, some
+strange notion may have passed through the German mind that the
+presence therein of Prussian officers would cajole the Poles into an
+action against Russia. If this were part of the motive (and probably
+it was), it would be a parallel to many another irony in the present
+campaign and its preliminaries, proceeding from the incapacity of the
+enemy to gauge the subtler and more profound forces of a civilization
+to which it is a stranger.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 67.]
+
+This local German move was almost entirely political. The main task,
+as I have said, was left to the Austrians farther south; and,
+proceeding to further detail, we must see the Austrians stretched in a
+line from near the middle Carpathians past the neighbourhood of
+Tomasow towards Tarnow, and this line distinctly divided into two
+armies, a northern and a southern. The two met in an angle in front of
+the great fortress of Przemysl. The northern, or first, army faced, as
+will be seen, directly towards the Russian frontier. It was the
+operative wing; upon its immediate action and on the rapidity of the
+blow it was to deliver depended the success of this first chapter in
+the Eastern war.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 68.]
+
+The southern, or second, army, which stretched all along the Galician
+plain at the foot of the Carpathians to the town of Halicz, had for
+its mission the protection of the first army from the south. It was
+known, or expected, that the first army would advance right into
+Russian Poland, with but inferior forces in front of it. It was
+feared, however, that the main Russian concentration to the south-east
+of it might turn its right flank. The business of the second army was
+to prevent this. The first army (I), being the operative body, was
+more homogeneous in race, more picked in material than the second
+(II), the latter containing many elements from the southern parts of
+the empire, including perhaps not a few disaffected contingents, such
+as certain regiments of Italian origin from the Adriatic border.
+
+So far as we can judge, perhaps--and it is a very rough estimate--we
+may put the whole body which Austria-Hungary was thus moving in the
+first phase of the war beyond the Carpathians at more than 750,000,
+but less than 1,000,000 men. Call the mass 800,000, and one would not
+be far wrong. Of this mass quite a quarter lay in reserve near the
+mountains behind the first army. The remaining three-quarters, or
+600,000 men, were fairly evenly divided between the two groups of the
+first and of the second army--the first, or northern, one being under
+the command of Dankl, the second under that of von Auffenberg. Each
+of these forces was based upon one group of depots of particular
+importance, the northern operative army (I) relying upon Przemysl, and
+the southern one (II) upon Lemberg.
+
+It was less than a week after the first German advance bodies had
+taken the outer forts of Liege when Dankl crossed the frontier,
+heading, with his centre, towards Krosnik and farther towards Lublin.
+His troops were in Russian territory upon the Monday evening or the
+Tuesday, 10th-11th August.
+
+The second army meanwhile stood fulfilling its role of awaiting and
+containing any Russians that might strike in upon the south. It had
+advanced no more than watching bodies towards the frontier, such as
+the 35th Regiment of the Austrian Landwehr, which occupied Sokal, and
+smaller units cordonned out southward between that town and Brody.
+Here, at the outset of the large operations that were to follow, it is
+important for the reader to note that everything depended upon the
+resisting power of the second, or southern, army.
+
+Observe the problem. Two men, a left-hand man and a right-hand man,
+go out to engage two other men whom they hope and believe to be
+unready. The left-hand man is particularly confident of being able to
+drive back his opponent, but he knows that sooner or later upon his
+right the second enemy, a stronger man, may come in and disturb his
+action. He says therefore to his right-hand companion: "Stand firm and
+engage and contain the energy of your opponent until I have finished
+with mine. When I have done that, I shall turn round towards you, and
+between us we will finish the second man."
+
+Seeing the paucity of Russian communications, and the physical
+necessity under which the Russians were, on account of the position of
+their depots and centres of mobilization, of first putting the mass of
+their men on the south, the physical impossibility under which they
+lay of putting the mass of their men in the north for the moment, the
+plan was a sound one; _but_ its success depended entirely upon the
+tenacity of the second Austrian army, which would have to meet large,
+and might have to meet superior, numbers.
+
+The first army went forward with very little loss and against very
+little resistance. The Russian forces which were against it, which we
+may call the first Russian army, were inferior in number, and fell
+back, though not rapidly, towards the Bug. It relied to some extent in
+this movement upon the protection afforded by the forts of Zamosc, but
+it was never in any serious danger until, or unless, things went wrong
+in the south. The Austrians remained in contact (but no more), turned
+somewhat eastward in order to keep hold of the foe, when their advance
+was checked by the news, first of unexpected Russian strength, later
+of overwhelming Russian advances towards the south. Long before the
+third week in August, the first Austrian army was compelled to check
+its advance upon the news reaching it from the second, and its
+fortunes, in what it had intended to be a successful invasion of
+Russian Poland, had ended. For the whole meaning of the first Galician
+campaign turns after the 14th of August upon the great Russian advance
+in the south.
+
+It was upon that day, August 14, that the Russian force, under General
+Russky (which we will call the second army), crossed the frontier.
+Its right occupied Sokal, its centre left moved in line with the right
+upon von Auffenberg's force directly before it.
+
+The Russian mobilization had proceeded at a greater pace than the
+enemy had allowed for. The Russian numbers expected in this field
+appeared in far greater strength than this expectation had allowed
+for, and it was soon apparent that von Auffenberg's command would have
+to resist very heavy pressure.
+
+But it would be an error to imagine, as was too hastily concluded in
+the press of Western Europe at the time, that this pressure upon the
+front of the second Austrian army, with its dogged day after day
+fighting and mile by mile advance, was the principal deciding factor
+in the issue. That deciding factor was, in fact, the appearance upon
+the right flank of von Auffenberg of yet another Russian army (which
+we will call the third) under Brussilov. It was the menace of this
+force, unexpected, or at least unexpected in its great strength, which
+really determined the issue, though this was again affected by the
+tardiness of the Austrian retirement. Russky's direct advance upon
+the front of his enemy extended for a week. It had begun when it had
+destroyed the frontier posts upon Friday, the 14th. It was continued
+until the evening of the succeeding Thursday, regularly, slowly, but
+without intermission. It stood upon the Friday, the 21st--the day on
+which the first shots were fired at the main Franco-British forces in
+the West, and the day on which the first shell fell into Charleroi
+station--not more than one day's cavalry advance from the outer works
+of Lemberg, but it was just in that week-end that the pressure of
+Brussilov began to be felt.
+
+This third Russian army had come up from the south-east, supplied by
+the main Odessa railway through Tarnopol. It was manifestly
+threatening the right flank of von Auffenberg, and if a guess may be
+hazarded upon operations on which we have so little detail as yet, and
+which took place so far from our own standpoint, the error of the
+Austrian general seems to have consisted in believing that he could
+maintain himself against this flank attack. If this were the case (and
+it is the most probable explanation of what followed), the error
+would have been due to the same cause which affected all Austrian
+plans in these first days of the war--the mistake as to the rapidity
+with which Russia would complete her preparations.
+
+[Illustration: 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 the Sunday, 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 its commander 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 that it 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.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 70.]
+
+It was on Friday, the 28th of that month, 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 such considerable 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
+campaign which 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 than once 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 great _modern_ town, 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 and _machinery_ for 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 fall behind 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 not see. 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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
+show for 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 its _moral_ intact, 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 fallen _as
+prisoners_ into 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.
+
+
+TANNENBERG.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: 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 of Christendom. 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 within the 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, of _Borussia_
+(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 a particular 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. Its
+country-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 large German-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, would certainly 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 region will be clear. It is, in the
+technical language of military art, a labyrinth of _defiles_. 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 of
+retreat--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 similarly confined 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 with the 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 Koenigsberg, 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 Koenigsberg, 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.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 73.]
+
+From Eylau, through Osterode, the main 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 was imperfect, 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 Koenigsberg, 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 the
+defensive, 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 arrow _a_ was 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
+superiority in 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 arrow _b_. 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 arrow _c_, 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
+arrow _d_, during the 30th and 31st, broke that retirement into two
+halves, one half (as at 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 reached Berlin 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.
+
+
+THE SPIRITS IN CONFLICT.
+
+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 physical self-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 to oppose 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 was so
+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 the United 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 see _things_, 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 would further 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 that lesson; 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 to understand 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. The barrier fortresses of the
+Meuse, Liege 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
+of the 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.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] The ultimatum expired at midnight (August 4-5) by Greenwich time,
+11 p.m. (August 4) by German, or Central European, time.
+
+[3] AA is holding the obstacle OO against a superior number BB. There
+are six passages across OO. If BB forces No. 5 and No. 6 he creates
+the situation in the following diagram, where it is obvious that BB is
+now on the flank of AA, and that AA must retire, even if he still
+holds passages 1, 2, 3, and 4. That is what happened when Namur fell.
+The French could hold, and were holding, the Germans along the Sambre,
+above Namur; but the bridges of Namur, which were thought safe behind
+the forts, had fallen into German hands.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch 44.]
+
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.
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+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A General Sketch of the European War, by
+Hilaire Belloc
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