by John Buchan
There was small opposition in the country, and the attitude of organised Labour was one of the most characteristically British performances in the campaign. A Labour congress in January 1916, by a majority of a million card-votes, instructed the Labour Party in Parliament to oppose the measure. At the annual conference three weeks later the members approved of the War by a majority of nearly a million, rejected conscription by large majorities, by a small majority decided not to agitate for repeal should the measure become law, and by a very large majority agreed that the three Labour members should retain their posts in the Government. The result was a typical product of our national temperament, and only the thoughtless would label it inconsistent. The Labour delegates were honest men in a quandary. They were loath to give up a cherished creed even under the stress of a dire necessity. But they were practical men and Englishmen, and they recognised compelling facts. If they could not formally repudiate their dogmas, they could neglect them.
In the bewilderment of the year there was one incident which keyed the national temper to that point where resolution acquires the impetus of a passion. An Englishwoman, Miss Edith Cavell, the head of a nursing institute in Brussels, had been active in assisting the escape of wounded Allied soldiers. She was arrested, tried, and condemned, and on October 11th suffered death, in spite of the efforts of the American and Spanish Embassies to save her. Her execution was legal, since on the letter of the German military law she was liable to the extreme penalty, but in the case of a woman and a nurse, who had ministered to German sick and wounded, the pedantry which exacted that penalty was an outrage on human decency. In France and Britain, in Holland and America, her execution woke a profound horror, for it seemed to reveal as by a flashlight the psychology of that German “culture” which sought to regenerate the world. So noble a death should not be tarnished by facile praise. She was not the least of that sisterhood of great-hearted women who have taught the bravest men a lesson in courage. M. Clemenceau spoke the tribute of the people of France: “Since the day of Joan of Arc, to whose memory I know that our Allies will one day seek to erect a statue, England has owed us this return. She has nobly given it.”
The King since his accession had enjoyed remarkably good health; indeed, save for his attack of typhoid fever in 1898, he had never had a serious illness. But on his visit to the front in October 1915 he met with an accident, carefully concealed from the public, which might have had the gravest consequences. He landed at Boulogne and inspected the base hospitals. Thence he travelled to Rouen and Havre, and saw much of both the British and the French work behind the lines. These visits were strenuous affairs, for, apart from busy days filled with long journeys, the King worked every morning assiduously at the papers forwarded from London. At Aire he found Sir Douglas Haig and reviewed troops, and at Doullens he met President Poincaré, who was splendidly attired in a blue yachting cap, a blue cape coat, and yellow leggings. The next halt was Amiens, where he was joined by General Joffre, and there was a parade of four corps of the Armée Coloniale. At Cassel he reviewed the British Second Army under General Plumer, and afterwards at Bailleul the Canadian Corps.
On Thursday, October 28th, came the accident. At Labuissière the King was received by Sir Douglas Haig, and reviewed the 4th Corps of Sir Henry Rawlinson and the 1st Corps of Sir Hubert Gough. He was proceeding to inspect a squadron of the Royal Flying Corps, when an unexpected outbreak of cheering made his horse rear and fall back on him, slipping on the muddy ground. For a moment the King lay very still, and the onlookers feared the worst. But he struggled to his feet, and was carried to his car and taken back to Aire. So serious his accident seemed that the Prince of Wales left at once to report to the Queen. For two days the King remained in bed, but on November 1st he decided to return home. He was carried on a stretcher aboard the train and a hospital ship, and, after a rough crossing, reached Buckingham Palace in a motor ambulance at 8 p.m. He was well again in a day or two, but it was only by a narrow margin that Britain escaped what would have been the crowning mischance of a melancholy year.
III
When the year 1916 opened, the main front had been irrevocably fixed in the West. The vast material and mechanical power involved in the new type of war made it impossible to alter readily the type of campaign which had once been set, or to use the whole world-front to strategic purpose. The unimaginative methods of frontal attack and attrition, as practised in 1915, were the only ones of which the High Command could conceive, since they seemed to follow naturally from the cumbrous mechanism behind them. The fact that they were costly was obscured by the hope that they were still more costly to the enemy. There was perhaps some reason in the view that the German will to conquer could only be broken by a holocaust of suffering, and not by some ingenious strategical triumph which might have given the Allies a victory on points, for we were fighting not only the pride of a monarch and an army but the megalomania of a great people.
The War had been thus stereotyped on a pattern, and the chief criticism must be that the pattern was not used to the best purpose. There was no unity of direction among the Allies in Western Europe, and a dreadful barrenness in tactical resource. As to the second, it may be said that the nature of the campaign was such as to atrophy tactical ingenuity; as to the first, that no Allied Government at that stage could have proposed a unity of command, which would place its armies under a foreigner, without falling from power. Nor can much of the blame for the deadlock be laid on the British commanders. They had been compelled to conform to a mode of war which was not of their planning, and from which they could not now escape. The most that can be said is that, out of a kind of professional loyalty, they had been too ready to defend the indefensible. What could Haig have achieved had he protested against the whole system? A radical change of military policy in the throes of a campaign would be like the uprooting of mandrakes.
Failing the appointment of a Generalissimo for the whole front who had an eye for realities, the only hope of escape lay in the civilian Government of Britain, for that of France was bound to the chariot-wheels of her General Staff. Only British statesmen could break the bondage of a leaden and ineffective machine. If any charge is to be brought against them, it is not that they interfered unduly with the soldiers, but that they did not interfere enough, and in the right way. In a war of nations it is the civilian who must direct the general strategy, for, as Sir William Robertson has pointed out, in the total effort of a people in war only twenty-five per cent. is purely military. The French politician was right who said that war had become too grave a business to be left to the soldier. But the distinction between what is technical and professional, and therefore the soldier’s special province, and what has a wider significance, is always hard to draw; and at this stage there was no British statesman or British soldier who could see our work in the field in its true relation to the central purpose of the war.
The Chantilly Conference of December 1915 laid down the Allied plans for the coming year. There was to be a co-ordinated offensive on the Eastern, Western and Italian Fronts, and the minimum of effort elsewhere. Germany, aware of this scheme, resolved to forestall it. Falkenhayn regarded Russia as half paralysed and Italy as unimportant. The soul of the enemy attack was Britain, and she could only be reached through her ally France. Though outnumbered in the West by three to two, he would attack France at a point which she was bound to defend and at which her defence would bleed her to death. On February 20th 1916 his guns opened against Verdun, that border fortress whose fall in 1792 had drawn from Danton his famous “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.”
The defence of Verdun was France’s greatest feat of arms in the campaign. She had much leeway to make up from past carelessness, but the peril steeled the spirit and steadied the nerve of the nation. First Pétain and then Nivelle, who in this task made his name, held the ground with a noble obstinacy. There were moments when all seemed over, but always there came some miraculous revival. For five despera
te months the battle continued, and the recapture by the French of Thiaumont on the last day of June and the failure of the German attack at Souville on July 11th may be taken as the end of the main battle. Germany, believing like all the world in France’s élan in attack, had misjudged her power of maintaining a long and desperate defence. As the weeks passed Verdun became for France a watch-word, a mystic symbol of her resolution. Mankind must have its shrines, and that thing for which much blood had been spilled becomes holy in its eyes. Over Verdun, as over Ypres, there will brood in history a strange aura, the effluence of the sacrifice and fortitude of the tens of thousands who fell before her gates. Her little hills are for ever consecrated by her dead.
The summer advances of Russia and Italy did something to relieve the pressure on Verdun, but the real distraction came on July 1st, when the main battle moved from the shattered Meuse uplands to the sluggish Somme and the green downs of Picardy. As the weary French infantry scrambled over the débris of Thiaumont, a hundred miles to the north-west on a broad front the infantry of Britain and France were waiting to cross their parapets. This had been fixed at Chantilly as the main effort of the year, but Verdun had seriously limited the French divisions available. Haig would have preferred an attack in Flanders, and indeed it is hard to see why Joffre chose the Somme area, for the German position there was immensely strong, and success offered no strategic advantage.
The first day brought only slender results. There was no chance of surprise, the lengthy bombardment, owing to the poor quality of the ammunition, completely failed of its purpose, and the front of assault was too wide and the pressure too uniform. We were attacking a fortress without concentrating on the weak spots. The battle, which continued till it was stopped by the November rains, degenerated into a colossal effort of attrition. The later phases showed more tactical ingenuity than the earlier, and they were made notable by the use — the premature use — of a new weapon, the credit of which belonged wholly to Britain. This was the Tank, which, after more than a year of controversy and delay, was first tried on September 15th. Its success did something to convince the wiser minds in the British Command that here had been found the method of overcoming the defence of machine-guns, trenches and wire entanglements which had hitherto paralysed the attack.
The Somme was the first great effort of the new armies of Britain, and in it they won much glory and a grave. The “tawny ground of Picardy,” which Shakespeare’s Henry V discoloured with blood, was to become memorable for the English people, since few households in the land had not contributed to it a son. It was the final witness of the entry of the manhood of Britain into war. Most of the troops engaged had twenty months before been employed in peaceful civilian trades. In their ranks were every class and condition — miners from the north, factory hands from the industrial centres, clerks and shop-boys, ploughmen and shepherds, Saxon and Celt, college graduates and dock labourers, men who in the wild places of the earth had often faced danger, and men whose chief adventure had been a Sunday bicycle ride. This fighting stuff, which Germany had decried, proved a match for her Guards and Brandenburgers.
It is not easy to judge fairly a battle of which the guiding plan was so wasteful and uninspired. Yet its results were vital, and the gains were on the whole to the Allies. The losses on each side were approximately half a million — the Germans a little less, the Allies a little more. The British armies were given experience and were not discouraged: the Germans lost notably in confidence, and their whole military machine was put out of gear. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who had now replaced Falkenhayn, found a very real decline in moral in the West. “The German army,” the latter wrote, “had been fought to a standstill and was utterly worn out; if the war lasted, our defeat seemed inevitable.” Britain had lost in officers three times as much as her opponents, but she had great resources to draw upon, and the losses of Germany in this class could not be replaced. The spirit both of her men in the field and of the nation at large was gravely depressed. The Somme became a name of terror, that “blood-bath” to which many journeyed and from which few returned. Of what avail her easy conquests on the Danube when this deadly cancer in the West was eating into her vitals? On the Somme attrition became at last a menace to Germany, for it was acute attrition: not like the slow erosion of cliffs by the sea, but like the steady crumbling of a mountain to which hydraulic engineers have applied a mighty head of water.
From July 1st Britain took over the major share of the fighting on the Western Front. France in the year had won great fame, but she had lost a million men and she was very weary. The fighting quality of her sons had been proved beyond dispute, but so unhappily had the weakness of her High Command. Her staff work, which the world had been taught to admire, was faulty both in theory and practice, and the pre-war doubts of Germany were amply justified. The realism, which had been its boast, was a blend of sentimentality and prejudice, and its superficial logic could no longer conceal its futility. Those few of France’s soldiers, who were longer sighted and had the courage of their opinions, were soon discarded. Before the War ended she was to produce great leaders, but they were not in high command at the start. Most dangerous of all was her General-in-Chief. Joffre was the typical French bourgeois, a soldier expert in the orthodox parts of his profession, a character stalwart and imperturbable, but suspicious of subordinates and jealous of colleagues, a mind inelastic and infertile. At the start his optimism and rock-like placidity had been valuable to his country, but the value had gone. His intellectual mediocrity had become too glaring, and his supersession was inevitable.
There were no decisive events elsewhere on the long battle-fronts. In the East Brussilov’s great summer offensive won much ground and expedited the break-up of Austria; but he could not develop his success, and his losses of over a million still further lowered the spirit of his own command. It led, however, to the dismissal of Falkenhayn, to the failure of Austria’s offensive against Italy, and to the entry into war of Rumania on the Allied side. Rumania made nothing of her tardy resolution. She was presently overrun by Mackensen and put out of action, but her conquest did little to improve Germany’s military position, since it lengthened the Eastern Front for her by 250 miles. For the rest the Allies were virtually immobilised at Salonika, and Townshend’s army was forced to surrender at Kut in April. The Mesopotamian enterprise ended in disaster, but, considering the nature of the country and our inferiority in numbers and supplies, it had been no disgrace to British arms. The events of the year were a lesson in what could be done under difficulties, if war were conducted not by a loose partnership but by a single and concentrated control. They had brought into supreme power Germany’s natural leaders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the massive character and the orderly brain. One consequence was that all her resources of production were combined under an iron dictatorship.
On the naval side there befell one event which might have changed the destiny of the world. The British blockade, in spite of difficulties with the United States, had been steadily growing tighter, and the answering German submarine campaign more active. The Grand Fleet in Scottish waters gave little sign of life, nor that hidden behind the bulwark of Heligoland. But the British Navy was winning without striking a blow. Besides the army in France, it and our merchant service were providing for four distant campaigns, and at the same time keeping Britain herself fed and supplied. With the advent of Scheer to high command Germany changed her waiting tactics, and sought to isolate and destroy some portion of the British Grand Fleet. On May 30th it was clear that part of the German Fleet had come out of port, and Beatty with his battle-cruisers was ordered to sweep the eastern part of the North Sea, and then join Jellicoe, who with the Grand Fleet was moving in the north. A casual Danish merchantman drew out ships from both Hipper’s and Beatty’s battle-cruiser squadrons to inspect it, and so contact between the adversaries was brought about on the afternoon of May 31st.
So began the Battle of Jutland. Beatty, heavily punished by Hipper, turn
ed north and drew him towards Jellicoe. He had escaped from the trap, and now it was the turn of Hipper and Scheer to enter it. The details of what followed will no doubt be debated for centuries; here we need say only that the two adversaries made contact, that Scheer and Hipper narrowly escaped, and that in a night of gloom the Germans slipped round the British and returned to port with smaller losses than their opponents. Jellicoe had fought the battle which he always intended to fight, taking no undue risks, since he believed that so long as the British Grand Fleet was unbeaten it was victorious. Jutland, the uncompromising details of which were at once published by the British Admiralty, did us no good, but it also did us little harm. In a fog of uncertainty Jellicoe handled the affair ably, and, if he was also cautious, such was not only the nature of the man but the essence of his policy. He could not have destroyed Scheer without taking risks which might have destroyed himself, and with him would have gone down the Allied cause. It was a war of peoples, and even the most resounding triumph at sea would not have ended the contest, while a defeat would have struck from the Allied hands the weapon on which all others depended. If it be argued that such considerations belong to statesmanship rather than to naval tactics, it may be replied that the commander of the British Grand Fleet must be statesman as well as seaman.
