by John Buchan
H. Belloc: The Cruise of the Nona.
PART II
CHAPTER I. CONTACT
I
War in older days had been a gladiatorial show in which, in a circumscribed area, a selected manhood fought on a narrow issue. Now it was to cover the whole earth, and the combatants pitted against each other the sum total of their physical endurance, national resources, and moral vigour. The scale was so large that it passed beyond the scope of any single directing mind or group of minds. Therefore its story cannot follow the neat model of earlier campaigns, but must be a tale of sound and fury, signifying much indeed, but without pattern or logic, for millions of men blundered blindly towards a decision.
Three things must be noted at the start. The problem before the world prior to 1914 was how to use its new mastery of nature to maximise human life. Needing peace for constructive work more than any preceding age, it was swept suddenly into a barbarous struggle for mere existence. The General Staffs might have their plans, but the peoples were in confusion. Again, the State in recent years had become a more potent thing, and the dogmas of a dozen schools of political thought had exalted its authority; men looked to it to provide a new way of life, and, having acknowledged this sovereignty, they submitted when they were offered a new way of death. It was a war of nations, and of docile nations. Lastly, it was a struggle which enlisted the enthusiasm of a youth long puzzled and uneasy. The legend that young men were sacrificed by bellicose dotards is childishly false. The elderly laboured for peace and faced the inevitable with heavy hearts. But in every belligerent capital youth clamoured for war.
Mr. Asquith, when on August 6th he moved the Vote of Credit, laid down the purpose of Britain as the fulfilment of a solemn international obligation and the vindication of law against lawless force. For this task, which the nation accepted with few dissidents, what assets could we furnish? Our Army was meagre as compared with those of our allies and opponents. Britain had deliberately chosen to limit herself to a small highly trained force, trusting to the protection of her Navy to allow her to improvise an adequate Army in the event of a great war: she had followed Raleigh’s precept—”There is a certain proportion both by sea and land beyond which excess brings nothing but disorder and amazement.” She had reserved her strength for a long sustenance of effort; as Germany hoped for immediate victory, so Britain thought of the ultimate battle. Her resources, provided the issue were not decided in the early months, would steadily grow, for, unlike her neighbours, she had but skimmed the cream of her man-power for the first trial and had not depleted her wealth by extravagant armaments.
But for immediate use she had only her Expeditionary Force, which numbered 160,000 troops of all arms. Small as this striking force was, it was not to be compared with any continental army of the same size. The British regulars were beyond question the most professional in the world. A large proportion of both men and officers had had actual experience of war, and a man who has already led or followed successfully under fire has learned something that no textbook or staff college or manoeuvres can teach. In Carnot’s famous words: “It is not pirouetting up and down a barrack-yard, but active service that makes an old soldier.” Behind it lay the Territorial Force, not yet brought up to strength and still imperfectly trained, and behind that the civilian manhood of the country, now flocking to every recruiting station.
Britain was not, like certain continental states, a nation in arms, but she had exceptional facilities for becoming a nation at war. She had in her industrial machine an almost unlimited means of producing war material, she had great wealth, and she had a world-wide network of commerce. The use of these advantages and the feeding of her people depended on keeping her naval predominance unimpaired. She had never been stronger afloat than when at 8.30 on the morning of August 4th her Grand Fleet put to sea. Her naval strength was far greater than that of Germany and Austria combined; she had been a pioneer in every modern invention, and in every class of craft she had a superiority both in numbers and quality. In two respects only was the Navy at a disadvantage as compared with the Army. Modern warfare for it was still an untested thing. Scarcely an admiral had had any experience of actual sea-fighting. We had to prove in practice a new technique under conditions which we could forecast but which we did not know. Again, on our Navy depended utterly our hope not of victory alone but of national survival. Expeditionary force after expeditionary force might be beaten and disappear, but they could be replaced; but a decisive defeat at sea would mean the end of Britain and the downfall of her allies. In Mr. Churchill’s words, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Grand Fleet was the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon.
So with a small expert Army, capable of indefinite expansion, and a Navy omnipotent by all reasonable presumptions, we entered upon a war of a type wholly novel in our history. Hitherto in the great European struggles we had subsidised continental allies, had controlled the seas, and, using our sea power, had flung in small armies at vital points. Now we had to take our place in the forefront of the main theatre. There was no commander anywhere who had been trained to war on the grand scale; the continental staffs had worked out grandiose schemes, but their solutions were only academic; it was realised that most of the problems would be different from those of the past.
But all the world failed in exact prevision, and in the necessary guessing guessed wrong. It was universally assumed, for example, that the coming war would be one of movement and manoeuvre. It was believed, too, that modern numbers and weapons would make the struggle most desperate but also short, since flesh and blood would soon be brought to the breaking point. No belligerent recognised the immense increase of strength given by modern weapons to the defence over the attack, and the consequent impregnability of field entrenchments. Again, none foresaw the vital problem of the superior direction of the whole Allied strength, the need of finding some controlling mind which was capable of disregarding all but the simple essentials and taking the broad synoptic view. Men looked for too little from the new factors in war, and they looked for too much. In many ways the world was blind to the meaning of its own progress, but in other respects it was too ready to assume that the former things, the eternal truths of strategy, had passed away.
That such problems did not trouble the mind of statesmen more acutely at the start was due to the fact that the contest was regarded as likely to be brief. The thing would be like the clashing of two great forces of nature, and the human mind must be content in large measure to wait upon fortune. No man foresaw that presently the whole strength of every belligerent would be involved, that scarcely a corner of the globe would be free from turmoil, and that the supreme need on each side would be some central direction, political, moral and military, such as in the Seven Years’ War the elder Pitt gave to his country.
Britain was fortunate in having at the outset one great combatant figure on which the popular mind could lean. Lord Kitchener was stopped at Dover as he was leaving for Egypt, and on August 6th became Secretary of State for War. It was a wise appointment, for the public had created an image of him to suit its fancy, and that image, false as it was in many points, was well calculated to win confidence. He was no politician, and Britain was surfeited with politics. He had that air of mystery and taciturnity which the ordinary man loves to associate with a great soldier. His splendid presence, his iron face, his glittering record, raised him out of the ranks of mere notabilities to the elect circle of those who even in their lifetime become heroes of romance. As it happened, the popular judgment, though right in spirit, was wrong on most of the facts. Lord Kitchener had little gift for detail and he was a poor administrator. He was fond of summary methods, and the result was often confusion. He was not a comfortable member of a team. So far from being a man of iron and granite, he was often lonely and conscious of it, often undecided, too loyal sometimes to be wise, and too tender-hearted to be just. His underrating of the Territorials was to be a grave hindrance to the British effort. But he had t
he invaluable gifts of foresight and imagination, though to his long-sighted eyes the foreground might sometimes be dim. He did not foresee trench warfare and was perplexed when it began, but his instinct told him that the war would be lengthy and he made his preparations accordingly. In Mr. Lloyd George’s apt image, he illuminated by flashes and not by a steady glow, “like one of those revolving lighthouses which radiate momentary gleams of revealing light far into the surrounding gloom, and then suddenly relapse into complete darkness.”
The one war plan which mattered at the start was Germany’s, as laid down by Schlieffen. This was to hold Russia with small forces, and direct the main weight of her strength to a surprise encirclement of France on the north. If France attempted an attack on her weak left wing by way of Lorraine, so much the better, for the thing, as Captain Liddell Hart has put it, would be like a revolving door — if a man pressed heavily on one side the other side would swing round and hit him in the back. France, under the influence of the mysticism of the offensive à outrance, underestimated the strength of the German right wing and the width of its sweep, and her ill-fated Plan XVII aimed at meeting it by a counter-attack on the enemy centre and left. The French intelligence system was faulty, and the campaign opened with the British Expeditionary Force — in spite of the doubts of Kitchener and French and Haig — stuck on as an appendix to the French left in what was to prove the most perilous part of the battle-field. Germany not without reason hoped for an early and crushing victory, a “battle without a morrow” before the leaves fell. France, with less reason, put blind trust in her historic prowess in war and in the proven valour of her sons. Britain launched her little army into the void with the anxiety with which men and nations face something which is new in their experience but on which hang mighty issues.
Far other is this battle in the west, Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth And brake the petty kings.
II
In this place we are not concerned with a detailed history of the War, but only with its main tidal movements, as seen from the viewpoint which is given by the lapse of two decades.
Germany in the first stage had the odds on her side. She was superior to any combination of her enemies in the number of trained men she could put straightway into the field; she had a smooth and powerful military machine, built up patiently during a generation; she had a centralised command and a colleague subject in all matters to her will. She was aware that her opponents had greater potential strength, but it would take time to become actual, and long before that day dawned she hoped for victory. She came near succeeding. The Belgian defence scarcely delayed her time-table. France’s counter-move in the south failed bloodily, and her dislocated armies, ill-placed along a wide frontier, were faced with the ruin of all their elaborate plans and a deadly menace from the north. The French left just escaped in time from the net, and the British army, in a predicament still more hazardous, was compelled like its neighbour to a retreat which was not strategic but enforced and blind.
Nevertheless two delaying actions, at Le Cateau by the British and at Guise by the French, upset in turn Germany’s calculations. Her right, instead of encircling and taking Paris, wheeled inward to attempt a second Sedan, Schlieffen’s plan was abandoned, and while the speed of the advance slackened from fatigue and failure of supplies, a new envelopment was attempted on her left and left centre by way of Nancy and Verdun. Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, divined this fumbling in the German High Command, reshuffled his forces, and revised his earlier plans. In the first days of September a flank attack, of which Gallièni, the Governor of Paris, was the inspirer, so embarrassed the German right that a thirty-mile gap was created between the armies of Kluck and Bülow. Verdun and Nancy stood firm against the assault on the other flank; the British force, turning at long last, marched into the gap on Bülow’s right; on September 9th Bülow began to fall back, and by the 11th the whole German army was in retreat.
Such were the elements of the First Battle of the Marne, which to the British people, disheartened by the débâcle in the north and straining their eyes anxiously into the mist, came as a miracle and a mystery. The Allies had snatched a strategic victory from the enemy’s blunders. The central guidance on Germany’s side had gone to pieces, and Moltke in consequence disappeared. Germany failed, as Marmont failed at Salamanca, because she allowed a perilous crack to open in her front, a crack due to the defects in her whole strategy of envelopment. That strategy demanded the impossible, and placed a burden of co-ordination and control upon her High Command which it could not sustain. The First Marne was a relic of the old regime of war, a battle of movement, surprise, improvisation — which is to say that it was won less by the machine than by the human quality of the soldier. Joffre, surmounting his earlier delusions, managed tardily to seize the strategic initiative, aided by the inspired audacity of Gallièni and the stubborn defence of Foch and Sarrail and Castelnau. It was the most significant battle of the War — decisive, inasmuch as it shattered the first German plan of campaign. The “battle without a morrow” had gone beyond hope, for the battle had been fought and the morrow had come.
But in another sense it was not decisive; it did not, like Jena, destroy one of the combatant forces, or make peace inevitable, like Sadowa and Solferino. Germany kept her armies in being, and made a skilful retreat in the face of an unskilful pursuit. By September 13th she had re-knit her front on the north bank of the Aisne, and established the first battlements of that fortress which she was to hold for four years. But she was not yet on the defensive. The plan of Falkenhayn, who had succeeded Moltke, was to envelop the Allied left flank, and secure those Channel ports which might have fallen to Germany as easy fruit during the Allied retreat in August — a peril which would have crippled the British effort and to which only Mr. Churchill seemed awake. The Allies retorted with attempts to turn their enemy’s right flank, and the campaign took the form of a race to the sea.
Germany’s first business was to get rid of the Belgian Army, based on the fortified camp of Antwerp. Her powerful artillery blasted a hole in the defence, the Belgian field force withdrew to the Flanders coast covered by the newly arrived British 7th Division, and, though the garrison was strengthened on Mr. Churchill’s initiative by three British brigades of marines and naval volunteers, the city was forced to surrender on October 10th. Its resistance had not been in vain, for it had delayed the main German outflanking movement long enough to enable the Allies to fill the seaward gap. For a fortnight the latter believed that they were engaged in a promising offensive, and optimism reigned in the minds of both French and British commanders, who speculated pleasantly on what date they were likely to cross the enemy frontier. But by October 20th they began to realise that their task would be a desperate effort to hold their ground, for Falkenhayn, bringing troops from his left and centre and using his new formations, was staking everything on a break through to the west and an outflanking which he believed might be decisive.
So began the First Battle of Ypres, on the rim of upland east of the old Flemish city. In the north the Belgian Army held its ground in the mud of the Yser, having opened the sluices and flooded the plain; on the south the Messines ridge was lost after heavy fighting; but in the centre, in the half-moon of the Ypres salient, the troops of Britain and France for a fortnight beat off the attack in a string of confused and costly actions. There was no general plan and no central leading. Foch and French rarely understood what was happening and contributed little beyond an ill-founded optimism; the brunt fell upon Haig, his divisional and brigade commanders, and above all on the regimental officers. There were moments, as on October 29th, 30th and 31st, and November 11th, when only a miracle seemed to save our thin front from destruction. It was, like Albuera, a soldiers’ battle, won by the dogged fighting quality of the rank-and-file, rather than by any tactical brilliance; there was no room and no time for ingenious tactics. Much of it was a wild mellay in which units became hopelessly mixed and strange things happen
ed. A subaltern often found himself in command of a battalion; a brigadier commanded one or two companies, or a division, as the fates ordained. The price paid was high. On the British side whole units virtually disappeared. One divisional general, ten brigadiers, nearly a dozen staff officers fell, and eighteen regiments and battalions lost their colonels. Scarcely a house famous in our stormy history but mourned a son. Wellesley, Wyndham, Dawnay, Fitz-Clarence, Cadogan, Cavendish, Bruce, Gordon-Lennox, Fraser, Kinnaird, Hay, Hamilton — it was like the death-roll after Agincourt or Flodden. But it was a victory, for it achieved its purpose. The Allied line stood firm from the Oise to the sea, and the enemy’s short-lived initiative was over.
On the Eastern Front the great spaces and the slower concentration of armies made the first stage of the campaign more tentative and diffused. Russia at once invaded East Prussia, which eased the situation in the west by drawing two German corps from the Marne. But when Hindenburg and Ludendorff succeeded the incompetent Prittwitz, the invasion came to a disastrous end in the annihilation of Samsonov at Tannenberg and the flight of Rennenkampff across the border. Meantime Austria had got herself into difficulties. Her invasion of Poland had been checked by the end of August, her right wing in Galicia was threatened, and by the close of September she was in general retreat. With the help of Germany a fresh attempt was made to advance to Warsaw, but it was checked by the movement of a group of Russian armies against Silesia. Hindenburg used his smaller forces to brilliant purpose, and retired, destroying the scanty Polish communications. Intercepting the enemy’s uncoded wireless messages, he drove a wedge into the Russian front, forced one half back on Warsaw, and at Lodz decisively defeated the other. The end of the year saw the Russian armies stubbornly on the defensive on the river line west of the Polish capital.
