Unknown - "The World English Bible (WEB): Ephesians"

C. S. C. - "Verses and Translations"

Benjamin Franklin - "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin"

Thomas H. Huxley - "The Conditions of Existence"

A Short History of the Great War

A >> A.F. Pollard >> A Short History of the Great War



A SHORT HISTORY OF
THE GREAT WAR

BY

A. F. POLLARD
M.A., Litt.D.

FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

WITH NINETEEN MAPS

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1920


CONTENTS

CHAP.
I. THE BREACH OF THE PEACE
II. THE GERMAN INVASION
III. RUSSIA MOVES
IV. THE WAR ON AND BEYOND THE SEAS
V. ESTABLISHING THE WESTERN FRONT
VI. THE FIRST WINTER OF THE WAR
VII. THE FAILURE OF THE ALLIED OFFENSIVE
VIII. THE DEFEAT OF RUSSIA
IX. THE CLIMAX OF GERMAN SUCCESS
X. THE SECOND WINTER OF THE WAR
XI. THE SECOND GERMAN OFFENSIVE IN THE WEST
XII. THE ALLIED COUNTER-OFFENSIVE
XIII. THE BALKANS AND POLITICAL REACTIONS
XIV. THE TURN OF THE TIDE
XV. HOPE DEFERRED
XVI. THE BALANCE OF POWER
XVII. THE EVE OF THE FINAL STRUGGLE
XVIII. THE LAST GERMAN OFFENSIVE
XIX. THE VICTORY OF THE ENTENTE
XX. THE FOUNDATIONS OF PEACE
INDEX


LIST OF MAPS

1. THE GERMAN INVASION OF FRANCE
2. THE BATTLES OF THE AISNE
3. THE CAMPAIGNS IN ARTOIS
4. THE DARDANELLES
5. THE RUSSIAN FRONT
6. THE BALKANS
7. MESOPOTAMIA
8. THE CAUCASUS
9. THE ATTACK ON VERDUN
10. THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
11. THE RUMANIAN CAMPAIGN
12. THE CONQUEST OF EAST AFRICA
13. THE BALTIC CAMPAIGNS
14. THE BATTLES IN FLANDERS
15. THE ITALIAN FRONT
16. THE BATTLES OF ARRAS AND CAMBRAI
17. THE LAST GERMAN OFFENSIVE
18. THE CONQUEST OF SYRIA
19. FOCH'S CAMPAIGN

NOTE

The manuscript of this book, except the last chapter, was finished on
21 May 1919, and the revision of the last chapter was completed in
October. It may be some relief to a public, distracted by the
apologetic deluge which has followed on the peace, to find how little
the broad and familiar outlines of the war have thereby been affected.

A. F. P.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE
GREAT WAR

CHAPTER I

THE BREACH OF THE PEACE

On 28 June 1914 the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir-presumptive to
the Hapsburg throne, was shot in the streets of Serajevo, the capital
of the Austrian province of Bosnia. Redeemed by the Russo-Turkish war
of 1876-7 from Ottoman rule, Bosnia had by the Congress of Berlin in
1878 been entrusted to Austrian administration; but in 1908, fearing
lest a Turkey rejuvenated by the Young Turk revolution should seek to
revive its claims on Bosnia, the Austrian Government annexed on its
own authority a province confided to its care by a European mandate.
This arbitrary act was only challenged on paper at the time; but the
striking success of Serbia in the Balkan wars of 1912-13 brought out
the dangers and defects of Austrian policy. For the Serbs were kin to
the great majority of the Bosnian people and to millions of other
South Slavs who were subject to the Austrian crown and discontented
with its repressive government; and the growing prestige of Serbia
bred hopes and feelings of Slav nationality on both sides of the
Hapsburg frontier. The would-be and the real assassins of the
Archduke, while technically Austrian subjects, were Slavs by birth,
and the murder brought to a head the antagonism between a race
becoming conscious of its possibilities and a government determined to
repress them. The crime gave a moral advantage to the oppressor, but
the guilt has yet to be apportioned, and instigation may have come
from secret sources within the Hapsburg empire; for the Archduke was
hated by dominant cliques on account of his alleged pro-Slav
sympathies and his suspected intention of admitting his future Slav
subjects to a share in political power.

For some weeks after the murder it bade fair to pass without a
European crisis, for the public was unaware of what happened at a
secret conclave held at Potsdam on 5 July. It was there decided that
Germany should support to the uttermost whatever claims Austria might
think fit to make on Serbia for redress, and she was encouraged to put
them so high as either to ensure the domination of the Balkans by the
Central Empires through Serbian submission, or to provoke a war by
which alone the German militarists thought that German aims could be
achieved. That was the purport of the demands presented to Serbia on
23 July: acceptance would have reduced her to a dependence less formal
but little less real than that of Bosnia, while the delay in
presenting the demands was used to complete the preparations for war
which rejection would provoke. It was not, however, against Serbia
that the German moves were planned. She could be left to Austria,
while Germany dealt with the Powers which would certainly be involved
by the attack on Serbian independence.

The great Power immediately concerned was Russia, which had long
aspired to an outlet into European waters not blocked by winter ice or
controlled by Baltic States. For that and for the less interested
reasons of religion and racial sympathy she had fought scores of
campaigns against the Turks which culminated in the liberation of most
of the Balkans in 1878; and she could not stand idle while the fruits
of her age-long efforts were gathered by the Central Empires and she
herself was cut off from the Mediterranean by an obstacle more fatal
than Turkish dominion in the form of a Teutonic corridor from Berlin
to Baghdad. Serbia, too, Orthodox in religion and Slav in race, was
more closely bound to Russia than was any other Balkan State; and an
attack on Serbia was a deadly affront to the Russian Empire. It was
not intended as anything else. Russia was slowly recovering from her
defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 and from the revolutionary
outbreaks which had followed; and there was little doubt that sooner
or later she would seek compensation for the rebuffs she had suffered
from the mailed fist during her impotence. Conscience made Germany
sensitive to the Slav peril, and her militarist philosophy taught her
that the best defence was to get her blow in first. Her diplomacy in
July was directed towards combining this advantage with the
appearance, needed to bemuse her people and the world at large, of
acting in self-defence.

But Russia was the object of Germany's diplomatic activity rather than
of her military preparations. It was thought that Russia could not
mobilize in less than six weeks or strike effectively in less than two
or three months, and that that interval would suffice for the crushing
of France, who was bound by treaty to intervene if Russia were
attacked. The German mobilization was therefore directed first against
France, defence against Russia being left to second-line German troops
and to an Austrian offensive. The defeat of France was not, however,
regarded by Germans as a mere incident in a war against Russia; for it
was a cardinal point in the programme of the militarists, whose mind
was indiscreetly revealed by Bernhardi, that France must be so
completely crushed that she could never again cross Germany's path. To
Frenchmen the war appeared to be mainly a continuation of the national
duel which had been waged since the sixteenth century. To Great
Britain it appeared, on the other hand, as the forcible culmination of
a new rivalry for colonial empire and the dominion of the seas. But
these were in truth but local aspects of a comprehensive German
ambition expressed in the antithesis Weltmacht oder Niedergang.
Bismarck had made the German Empire and raised it to the first place
as a European Power. Europe, it was discovered, was a small portion of
the globe; and Bismarck's successful methods were now to be used on a
wider scale to raise Germany to a similar predominance in the world.
The Serbian plot was merely the lever to set the whole machinery
working, and German activities all the world over from Belgrade and
Petrograd to Constantinople, Ulster, and Mexico were parts in a
comprehensive piece.

But while the German sword was pointed everywhere, its hilt was in
Berlin. Prussia supplied the mind which conceived the policy and
controlled its execution; and in the circumstances of the Prussian
Government must be sought the mainspring of the war. The cause of the
war was not the Serbian imbroglio nor even German rivalry with Russia,
France, or Britain. These were the occasions of its outbreak and
extension; but national rivalries always exist and occasions for war
are never wanting. They only result in war when one of the parties to
the dispute wants to break the peace; and the Prussian will-to-war was
due to the domestic situation of a Prussian government which had been
made by the sword and had realized before 1914 that it could not be
maintained without a further use of the sword. That government was the
work of Bismarck, who had been called to power in 1863 to save the
Hohenzollerns from subjection to Parliament and had found in the
Danish and Austrian wars of 1864 and 1866 the means of solving the
constitutional issue at Berlin. The cannon of Königgratz proved more
convincing than Liberal arguments; and the methods of blood and iron,
by which Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon conquered Denmark, Austria, and
France and annexed to Prussia the greater part of German soil,
impressed upon Germany a constitution in which the rule of the sword
was merely concealed behind a skilfully emasculated parliamentary
system. The Reichstag with its universal suffrage was the scabbard of
the Prussian sword, and it was because the sword could not do the work
required of it while it lay in the scabbard that it was drawn in 1914.

Since 1871 the object of every Prussian Government had been to
reconcile the German people to the veiled rule of the sword by
exhibiting results which, it was contended, could not otherwise have
been secured. Historians dwelt on the failure of the German Parliament
at Frankfurt to promote a national unity which was left for Prussian
arms to achieve, and philosophers deduced from that example a
comprehensive creed of might. More material arguments were provided
for the man in business and in the street by the skilful activities of
the Government in promoting trade, industry, and social welfare; and
the wealth, which would in any case have accrued from the removal of
the tariff-walls and other barriers between the thirty-nine
independent States of Germany, was credited to the particular method
of war by which the unification had been accomplished. No State had
hitherto made such economic progress as did the German Empire in the
generation after Metz and Sedan, and the success of their rulers led
most of the German people to place implicit reliance on the testimony
those rulers bore to the virtue of their means. The means did not,
however, commend themselves to the rest of the world with equal
conviction; and an increasing aversion to the mailed fist on the part
of other countries led to what Germans called the hostile encirclement
of their Fatherland. Gradually it became clearer that Prussian
autocracy could not reproduce in the sphere of world-ambitions the
success which had attended it in Germany unless it could reduce the
world to the same submission by the use of similar arguments.

But still the Prussian Government was driven towards imperialistic
expansion by the ever-increasing force of public opinion and popular
discontent. It could only purchase renewed leases of autocratic power
at home, with its perquisites for those who wielded and supported
autocracy, by feeding the minds of the people with diplomatic triumphs
and their bodies with new markets for commercial and industrial
expansion; and the incidents of military domination grew ever more
irksome to the populace. The middle classes were fairly content, and
the parties which represented them in the Reichstag offered no real
opposition to Prussian ideas of government. But the Social Democrats
were more radical in their principles and were regarded by Prussian
statesmen as open enemies of the Prussian State. Rather than submit to
social democracy Prussians avowed their intention of making war, and
war abroad would serve their turn a great deal better than civil
strife. The hour was rapidly advancing two years before the war broke
out. The German rebuff over Agadir in 1911 was followed by a general
election in 1912 at which the Social Democrats polled nearly a third
of the votes and secured by far the largest representation of any
party in the Reichstag. In 1913, after a particularly violent
expression of militarism called "the Zabern incident," the Reichstag
summoned up courage for the first time in its history to pass a vote
of censure on the Government. The ground was slipping from under the
feet of Prussian militarism; it must either fortify its position by
fresh victories or take the risk of revolution. It preferred the
chances of European war, and found in the Serbian incident a means of
provoking a war the blame for which could be laid at others' doors.

The German Kaiser played but a secondary part in these transactions.
It is true that the German constitution placed in his hands the
command of the German Army and Navy and the control of foreign policy;
but no paper or parchment could give him the intellect to direct the
course of human affairs. He had indeed dismissed Bismarck in 1890, but
dropping the pilot did not qualify him to guide the ship of state, and
he was himself in 1906 compelled to submit to the guidance of his
ministers. The shallow waters of his mind spread over too vast a
sphere of activity to attain any depth, and he had the foibles of
Frederick the Great without his courage or his capacity. His barbaric
love of pomp betrayed the poverty of his spirit and exhibited a
monarchy reduced from power to a pageant. He was not without his
generous impulses or exalted sentiments, and there was no section of
the British public, from Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to Mr. Rudyard Kipling
and the "Daily Mail," to which one or other of his guises had not
commended itself; it pleased him to pose as the guardian of the peace
of Europe, the champion of civilization against the Boxers, and of
society against red revolution. But vanity lay at the root of all
these manifestations, and he took himself not less seriously as an
arbiter of letters, art, and religion than as a divinely appointed
ruler of the State. The many parts he played were signs of versatile
emotion rather than of power; and his significance in history is that
he was the crest of a wave, its superficial froth and foam without its
massive strength. A little man in a great position, he was powerless
to ride the whirlwind or direct the storm, and he figured largely in
the public eye because he vented through an imperial megaphone the
fleeting catchwords of the vulgar mind.

After Agadir he had often been called a coward behind his back, and it
was whispered that his throne would be in danger if that surrender
were repeated. He had merited these reproaches because no one had done
more than he to inflate the arrogance of his people, and his eldest
son took the lead in exasperating public opinion behind the scenes.
The militarists, with considerable backing from financial and
commercial groups, were bent on war, and war appeals to the men in the
streets of all but the weakest countries. The mass of the people had
not made up their mind for a war that was not defensive; but modern
governments have ample means for tuning public opinion, and with a
people so accustomed as the Germans to accept the truth from above,
their rulers would have little difficulty, when once they had agreed
upon war, in representing it as one of defence. It is, however,
impossible to say when, if ever, the rulers of Germany agreed to
attack; and to the last the Imperial Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg,
struggled to delay if not to avert the breach. But he gradually lost
his grip on the Kaiser. The decisive factor in the Emperor's mind may
have been the rout in 1912-13 of the Turks, on whom Germany had staked
her credit in return for control of the Berlin-Baghdad route; for the
free Balkan confederation, which loomed on the horizon, would bar for
ever German expansion towards the East. The Balkan States themselves
provided the German opportunity; the Treaty of Bukarest in 1913
entrenched discord in their hearts and reopened a path for German
ambition and intrigue. Austria, not without the usual instigation,
proposed to Italy a joint attack upon Serbia; the offer was not
accepted, but by the winter of 1913-14 the Kaiser had gone over to the
party which had resolved upon war and was seeking an occasion to
palliate the cause.

The immeasurable distance between the cause and the occasion was shown
by the fact that Belgium was the first to suffer in an Austro-Serbian
dispute; and the universal character of the issue was foreshadowed by
the breach of its neutrality. Germany would not have planned for two
years past an offensive through that inoffensive, unconcerned, and
distant country, had the cause of the war been a murder at Serajevo.
The cause was a comprehensive determination on the German part to
settle international issues by the sword, and it involved the
destinies of civilization. The blow was aimed directly or indirectly
at the whole world, and Germany's only prospect of success lay in the
chance that most of the world would fail to perceive its implications
or delay too long its effective intervention. It was the defect of her
self-idolatry and concentration that she could not develop an
international mind or fathom the mentality of other peoples. She could
not conceive how England would act on a "scrap of paper," and never
dreamt of American participation. But she saw that Russia and France
would inevitably and immediately be involved in war by the attempt at
armed dictation in the Balkans, and that the issue would decide the
fate of Europe. The war would therefore be European and could only be
won by the defeat of France and Russia. Serbia would be merely the
scene of local and unimportant operations, and, Russia being the
slower to move, the bulk of the German forces were concentrated on the
Rhine for the purpose of overwhelming France.

The condition of French politics was one of the temptations which led
the Prussian militarists to embark upon the hazard. France had had her
troubles with militarism, and its excesses over the Dreyfus case had
produced a reaction from which both the army command and its political
ally the Church had suffered. A wave of national secularism carried a
law against ecclesiastical associations which drove religious orders
from France, and international Socialism found vent in a pacifist
agitation against the terms of military service. A rapid succession of
unstable ministries, which the group system in French parliamentary
politics encouraged, militated against sound and continuous
administration; and in April 1914 a series of revelations in the
Senate had thrown an unpleasant light upon the efficiency of the army
organization. On military grounds alone there was much to be said for
the German calculation that in six weeks the French armies could be
crushed and Paris reached. But the Germans paid the French the
compliment of believing that this success could not be achieved before
Russia made her weight felt, unless the Germans broke the
international guarantees on which the French relied, and sought in
Belgium an easier and less protected line of advance than through the
Vosges.

For that crime public opinion was not prepared either in France or
England, but it had for two years at least been the settled policy of
the German military staff, and it had even been foretold in England a
year before that the German attack would proceed by way of Liège and
Namur. There had also been military "conversations" between Belgian
and British officers with regard to possible British assistance in the
event of Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality. But the Belgian
Ministry was naturally reluctant to proceed far on that assumption,
which might have been treated as an insult by an honest or dishonest
German Government; and it was impossible for England to press its
assistance upon a neutralized State which could not even discuss it
without casting a slur upon the honour of its most powerful neighbour.
Nor was England bound by treaty to defend the neutrality of Belgium.
She had been so bound by a treaty concluded during the Franco-Prussian
War; but that treaty expired in the following year, and the treaty of
1839, which regulated the international situation of Belgium, merely
bound the five great signatory Powers not to violate Belgian
neutrality without obliging them individually or collectively to
resist its violation. It was not in fact regarded in 1839 as
conceivable that any of the Great Powers would ever violate so solemn
a pledge, and there was some complacent satisfaction that by thus
neutralizing a land which had for centuries been the cockpit of
Europe, the Powers had laid the foundations of permanent peace. But
the bond of international morality was loosened during the next
half-century, and in the eighties even English newspapers argued in
favour of a German right-of-way through Belgium for the purposes of
war with France. It does not appear that the treaty was ever regarded
as a serious obstacle by the German military staff; for neither
treaties nor morality belong to the curricula of military science
which had concluded that encirclement was the only way to defeat a
modern army, and that through Belgium alone could the French defence
be encircled. The Chancellor admitted that technically Germany was
wrong, and promised full reparation after the war. But he was never
forgiven the admission, even by German jurists, who argued that
treaties were only binding rebus sic stantibus, while the conditions
in which they were signed remained substantially the same; and Germans
had long cast covetous eyes on the Congo State, the possession of
which, they contended, was inconsistent with Belgium's legal immunity
from attack in Europe.

The opposition of Bethmann-Hollweg and the German foreign office was
accordingly brushed aside, and the army made all preparations for an
invasion of France through Belgium. The diplomatists would have made a
stouter resistance had they anticipated the attitude England was to
adopt. But the German ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowsky, failed
to convince his Government that there was anything to fear from the
British Empire. Mr. Lloyd George has claimed it as one of the
advantages we derive from the British press that it misleads public
opinion abroad, and a study of "The Times," the only British newspaper
that carries much weight in foreign countries, may well have persuaded
the German Government in 1914 that eight years of Liberal
administration were not likely to have provided England with the
means, or left it the spirit, to challenge the might of Germany. She
was known to have entered into no binding alliance with France or
Russia; the peace had never in all their history been broken between
the two great Protestant Powers; and, while there had been serious
naval and colonial rivalry and some diplomatic friction, relations in
1913-14 seemed to have entered calmer waters. Germany had been well
satisfied with the efforts and sacrifices England had made to prevent
the Balkan crisis from developing into a European war; and Lichnowsky
was successfully negotiating treaties which gave Germany unexpected
advantages with regard to the Baghdad railway and African
colonization. On the eve of war the English were hailed as cousins in
Berlin, and the earliest draft of the German official apology,
intended for American consumption, spoke of Great Britain and Germany
labouring shoulder to shoulder to preserve the peace against Russian
aggression. The anger of the Kaiser, the agitation of the Chancellor,
and the fury of the populace when England declared war showed that
Germany had no present intention of adding the British Empire to her
list of enemies and little fear that it would intervene unless it were
attacked. Any anxiety she may have felt was soothed by the studied
assumption that England's desire, if any, to intervene would be
effectively checked by her domestic situation. Agents from Ulster were
buying munitions to fight Home Rule with official connivance in
Germany, and it was confidently expected that war would shake a
ramshackle British Empire to its foundations; there would be
rebellions in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and the self-governing
Dominions would at least refuse to participate in Great Britain's
European adventures. In such circumstances "the flannelled fool at the
wicket and the muddied oaf at the goal" might be trusted to hug his
island security and stick to his idle sports; and the most windy and
patriotic of popular British weeklies was at the end of July
placarding the streets of London with the imprecation "To hell with
Servia."

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.