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A Short History of the Great War

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




The object of German diplomacy was to avoid offence to British
susceptibilities, and the first requisite was to keep behind the
scenes. The Kaiser went off on a yachting cruise to Norway, where,
however, he was kept in constant touch with affairs, while Austria on
23 July presented her ultimatum to the Serbian Government. The terms
amounted to a demand for the virtual surrender of Serbian
independence, and were in fact intended to be rejected. Serbia,
however, acting on Russian and other advice, accepted them all except
two, which she asked should be referred to the Hague Tribunal. Austria
refused on the ground that the dispute was not of a justiciable
nature; and the meagre five days' grace having expired on the 28th,
Austrian troops crossed the Save and occupied Belgrade, the Serbians
withdrawing without resistance. Meanwhile feverish activity agitated
the chancelleries of Europe. The terms of the ultimatum had been
discussed by the British Cabinet on Friday the 24th, and the British
Fleet, which had been reviewed at Spithead on the previous Saturday,
was, instead of dispersing at Portland, kept together, and then, on
the 29th, dispatched to its war stations in the North Sea.
Simultaneously the German High Seas Fleet withdrew on the 26th to Kiel
and Wilhelmshaven. Russia replied to the Austrian invasion of Serbia
by mobilizing her southern command and extending the mobilization, as
the hand of Germany became more apparent, to her northern armies. Sir
Edward Grey made unceasing efforts to avert the clash of arms by
peaceable negotiation, and proposed a conference of the four Great
Powers not immediately concerned in the dispute--Germany, France,
Italy, and Great Britain. Germany, knowing that she would stand alone
in the conference, declined. The dispute, she pretended, was merely a
local affair between Austria and Serbia, in which no other Power had
the right to intervene. But she refused to localize the dispute to the
extent of regarding it as a Balkan conflict between the interests of
Austria and Russia. Austria was less unyielding when it became evident
that Russia would draw the sword rather than acquiesce in Serbia's
subjection, and on the 30th it seemed that the way had been opened for
a settlement by direct negotiation between Vienna and Petrograd. At
that moment Germany threw off the diplomatic disguise of being a
pacific second to her Austrian friend, and cut the web of argument by
an ultimatum to Russia on the 31st. Fear lest the diplomatists should
baulk them of their war had already led the German militarists to
publish in their press the unauthorized news of a complete German
mobilization, and on 1-2 August German armies crossed the frontiers.
It was not till some days later that war was declared between Austria
and any of the Allies; the war from first to last was made in Germany.

Throughout that week-end the British Cabinet remained in anxious
conclave. The Unionist leaders early assured it of their support in
any measures they might think fit to take to vindicate Great Britain's
honour and obligations; but they could not relieve it of its own
responsibility, and the question did not seem as easy to answer as it
has done since the conduct of Germany and the nature of her ambitions
have been revealed. A purely Balkan conflict did not appear to be an
issue on which to stake the fortunes of the British Empire. We were
not even bound to intervene in a trial of strength between the Central
Empires and Russia and France, for on 1 August Italy decided that the
action of the Central Empires was aggressive and that therefore she
was not required by the Triple Alliance to participate. There had in
the past been a tendency on the part of France to use both the Russian
alliance and English friendship for purposes in Morocco and elsewhere
which had not been quite relished in England; and intervention in
continental wars between two balanced alliances would have found few
friends but for recent German chauvinism. It might well seem that in
the absence of definite obligations and after having exhausted all
means of averting war, Great Britain was entitled to maintain an
attitude of benevolent neutrality, reserving her efforts for a later
period when better prepared she might intervene with greater effect
between the exhausted belligerents.

Such arguments, if they were used, were swept aside by indignation at
Germany's conduct. Doubts might exist of the purely defensive
intentions of France and Russia; each State had its ultra-patriots who
had done their best to give away their country's case; and if Russia
was suspect of Panslavist ambition, France was accused of building up
a colonial empire in North Africa in order to throw millions of
coloured troops into the scale for the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine.
But no such charge could be brought against Belgium. She had no
interest and no intention but to live in peace with her neighbours,
and that peace had been guaranteed her by international contract. If
such a title to peace was insecure there could be no security for the
world and nothing but subservience for little nations. The public
sense which for a century had been accustomed to welcome national
independence wherever it raised its head--in Greece, the Balkans,
Italy, Hungary, Poland, the South American Republics--revolted at its
denial to Belgium in the interest of German military aggression; and
censure of the breach of international contract was converted to
passion by the wrong wantonly done to a weak and peaceful by a mighty
and ambitious Power. Great Britain was not literally bound to
intervene; but if ever there was a moral obligation on a country, it
lay upon her now, and the instant meeting of that obligation implied
an instinctive recognition of the character of the war that was to be
fought. Mixed and confused though the national issues might be in
various quarters, the war, so far as concerned the two Powers who were
to be mainly instrumental in its winning, was a civil war of mankind
to determine the principle upon which international relations should
repose.

That issue was not for every one to see, and there were many to whom
the struggle was merely national rivalry in which the interests of
England happened to coincide with those of France and in which we
should have intervened just the same without any question of Belgium's
neutrality. Whether it might have been so can never be determined. But
it is certain that no such struggle would have enlisted the united
sympathies and whole-hearted devotion of the British realms, still
less those of the United States, and in it we might well have been
defeated. From that division and possible defeat we and the world were
saved by Germany's decision that military advantage outweighed moral
considerations. The invasion of Belgium and Luxemburg united the
British Empire on the question of intervention. Three ministers alone
out of more than forty--Lord Morley, Mr. John Burns, and Mr. C. P.
Trevelyan--dissented from the Cabinet's decision, and the minority in
the nation was of still more slender proportions. Parliament supported
the Ministry without a division when on 4 August England declared war.

Had we counted the cost? the German Chancellor asked our ambassador in
Berlin on the eve of the declaration. The cost would not have affected
our decision, but it was certainly not anticipated, and the Entente
was ill-prepared to cope with the strength displayed by Germany. The
British Navy was, indeed, as ready as the German Army, and the command
of the sea passed automatically into our hands when the German Fleet
withdrew from the North Sea on 26 July. But for that circumstance not
a single division could have been sent across the sea, and the war
would have been over in a few months. Nor was the British Army
unprepared for the task that had been allotted to it in anticipation.
It was the judgment not only of our own but of Allied Staffs that an
expeditionary force of six divisions would suffice to balance German
superiority in the West; and that force, consisting of better material
better trained than any other army in the field, was in its place in
the line of battle hundreds of miles from its base within three weeks
of the declaration of war. The real miscalculation was of the
respective strength of France and Germany, and no one had foreseen
that it would ultimately require three times the force that France
could put in the field to liberate French soil from the German
invader. The National Service League would have provided us with a
large army; but even its proposals were vitiated by their assumption
that these forces were needed to do the navy's work of home-defence,
and by the absence of provision for munitions, without which sending
masses of men into battle was sending them to useless slaughter. Time
was needed to remedy these miscalculations, but time was provided by
our command of the sea, about which there had been no misjudgment and
no lack of pre-vision. We made our mistakes before, and during the
war, but neither Mr. Asquith's Governments nor that of his successor
need fear comparison with those of our Allies or our enemies on that
account; and it is merely a modest foible of the people, which has
hardly lost a war for nearly four hundred years, to ascribe its escape
to fortune, and to envy the prescience and the science which have
lightened the path of its enemies to destruction.


CHAPTER II

THE GERMAN INVASION

Germany began the war on the Western front before it was declared, and
on 1-2 August German cavalry crossed the French frontier between
Luxemburg and Switzerland at three points in the direction of Longwy,
Lunéville, and Belfort. But these were only feints designed to prolong
the delusion that Germany would attack on the only front legitimately
open to warfare and to delay the reconstruction of the French defence
required to meet the real offensive. The reasons for German strategy
were conclusive to the General Staff, and they were frankly explained
by Bethmann-Hollweg to the British ambassador. There was no time to
lose if France was to be defeated before an effective Russian move,
and time would be lost by a frontal attack. The best railways and
roads from Berlin to Paris ran through Belgium; the Vosges protected
more than half of the French frontier south of Luxemburg, Belfort
defended the narrow gap between them and Switzerland, and even the
wider thirty miles' gap between the northern slopes of the Vosges and
Luxemburg was too narrow for the deployment of Germany's strength; the
way was also barred by the elaborate fortifications of Verdun, Toul,
and Nancy. Strategy pointed conclusively to the Belgian route, and its
advantages were clinched by the fact that France was relying on the
illusory scrap of paper. Her dispositions assumed an attack in
Lorraine, and her northern fortifications round Lille, Maubeuge, and
Hirson were feeble compared with those of Belfort, Toul, and Verdun.
Given a rapid and easy march through Belgium, the German armies would
turn the left flank of the French defence and cut it off from the
capital. Hence the resistance of Belgium had a great military
importance apart from its moral value. To its lasting honour the
Belgian Government had scorned the German proposal for connivance even
in the attractive form which would have limited the German use of
Belgian territory to the eastern bank of the Meuse.

Haste and contempt for the Belgian Army, whose imperfect organization
was due to a natural reliance on the neutrality which Germany had
guaranteed, accounted for the first derangement of German plans. The
invasion began towards Visé, near the Dutch frontier where the direct
road from Aix to Brussels crosses the Meuse, but the main
advance-guard followed the trunk railway from Berlin to Paris via
Venders and Liège. It was, however, inadequately mobilized and
equipped, and was only intended to clear away an opposition which was
not expected to be serious. The Belgians fought more stubbornly than
was anticipated; and aided by Brialmont's fortification of Liège,
although his plans for defence were not properly executed, they held
up the Germans for two days in front of the city. It was entered on 7
August, but its fall did not give the Germans the free passage they
wanted; for the forts on the heights to the north commanded the
railway, and the Germans contented themselves with bringing up their
transport and 11 2 in. howitzers. Brialmont had not foreseen the
explosive force of modern shells, and two days' bombardment on the
13th-15th reduced the remaining forts, in spite of their construction
underground, to a mass of shell-holes with a handful of wounded or
unconscious survivors. The last to be reduced was Fort Loncin, whose
gallant commander, General Leman, was found poisoned and half-dead
from suffocation. He had succeeded in delaying the German advance for
a momentous week.

No more could be done with the forces at his disposal, and the German
masses of infantry were pouring across the Meuse at Visé, towards
Liège by Verviers, up the right bank of the Meuse towards Namur, and
farther south through the Ardennes. The German cavalry which spread
over the country east and north-east of Brussels and was sometimes
repulsed by the Belgians, was merely a screen, which defective
air-work failed to penetrate, and the frequent engagements were merely
the brushes of outposts. Within a week from the fall of Fort Loncin
half of Belgium was overrun and the real menace revealed. Belgium was
powerless before the avalanche, and its only hope lay in France. But
the French Army was still mobilizing on its northern front, and its
incursions into Alsace and Lorraine did nothing to relieve the
pressure. The Belgians had to fall back towards Antwerp, uncovering
Brussels, which was occupied by the Germans on the 20th and mulcted in
a preliminary levy of eight million pounds, and leaving to the
fortifications of Namur the task of barring the German advance to the
northern frontiers of France. Namur proved a broken reed. The troops
which paraded through Brussels with impressive pomp and regularity
were only a detail of the extreme right wing of the invading force;
the mass was advancing along the north bank of the Meuse and
overrunning the whole of Belgium south and east of the river. On the
15th an attempt to seize Dinant and the river crossing above Namur was
repulsed by French artillery; but there was apparently no cavalry to
follow up this success, and the Germans were allowed to bring up their
heavy howitzers for the bombardment of Namur without disturbance. It
began on the 20th, and, unsupported by the Allied assistance for which
they looked, the Belgians were panic-stricken; on the 23rd the city
and most of the forts were in German hands though two resisted until
the 26th. The Germans had not, as at Liège, wasted their infantry in
premature attacks, and with little loss to them, a fortress reputed
impregnable had been captured, the greater part of the southern
Belgian Army destroyed, and the provisional plan of French defence
frustrated. The fall of Namur was the first resounding success of the
Germans in the war.

Its loss was not redeemed by the French offensive in Alsace and
Lorraine. On 7 August a weak French force advanced through the Belfort
gap and, finding still weaker forces to oppose it, proceeded to occupy
Altkirch and Mulhouse, while a proclamation by General Joffre
announced the approaching liberation of the provinces torn from France
in 1870. It was a feeble and ill-conceived effort to snatch a
political advantage out of a forbidding military situation. German
reinforcements swept up from Colmar and Neu Breisach, and on the both
the French were back within a few miles of the frontier, leaving their
sympathizers to the vengeance of their enemies. More legitimate though
not more successful was the French thrust in Lorraine. It had other
motives than the political: it would, if pushed home, menace the left
of the German armies in Belgium and disturb their communications; and
a smaller success would avert the danger of a German advance in
Lorraine which would threaten the right of the French on the Meuse.
Accordingly, Generals Pau and de Castelnau, commanding the armies of
Alsace and Lorraine respectively, ordered a general advance on the
10th. At first it met with success: the chief passes of the Vosges
from Mt. Donon on the north to the Belfort gap were seized;
counter-thrusts by the Germans towards Spincourt and Blamont in the
plain of Lorraine were parried; Thann was captured, Mulhouse was
re-occupied, and the Germans looked like losing Alsace as far north as
Colmar. German Lorraine seemed equally insecure, for on the 18th
Castelnau's troops were in Saarburg cutting the rail and roads between
Strassburg and Metz. The Germans, however, were not unprepared: their
Fifth Army, under the Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, came down
from Metz and fell upon the exposed French left, which was routed with
great losses in guns and prisoners on the 21st. Not only did the
invasion collapse, but the Bavarians pushed across the French frontier
nearly as far as Toul and occupied Lunéville, compelling also a French
retreat from the passes of the Vosges. General Pau had soon to follow
suit and retire again from Mulhouse and all but the south-west corner
of Alsace.

The operations in Alsace and Lorraine had dismally failed to discount
the advance of the Germans through Belgium or even to impede the march
of their centre through Luxemburg and the Ardennes. At the end of
three weeks France was still in the throes of mobilization: the
original scheme of defence along the Franco-German frontier had been
upset by the German attack through Belgium; and second thoughts had
fared little better at Namur. The shortest line of defence after the
Germans had broken through at Liège was one running from Antwerp to
Namur, and the shortest line is imperative for the weaker combatant.
But the Germans were well across it when they entered Brussels, and
with the fall of Namur the hinge upon which depended the defence of
the northern frontier of France was broken. It was to an almost
forlorn hope that the British Army was committed when it took its
place on the left of the French northern armies at Mons to encounter
for the first time since Waterloo the shock of a first-rate European
force. But for its valour and the distraction caused by the Russian
invasion of East Prussia, Paris and possibly the French armies might
not have been saved.

It was a meagre force for so great a responsibility, but far from the
"contemptible little army" it was falsely believed to have been called
by the Kaiser. The men were all volunteers who had enlisted for seven
years' service with the colours as against the three years' service of
the Germans and the French; and on an average they had seen far more
actual fighting than the Germans, who contemptuously dismissed this
experience as colonial warfare. If in the science of tactics and
strategy the British was inferior to the German Army, its marksmanship
and individual steadiness were unequalled; and under anything like
equal conditions British troops proved themselves the better men. But
the conditions were never equal during the first two years of the war
owing to the German superiority in numbers and in artillery; and there
was a third cause of inequality due to the different military systems
of the two countries. Universal service enabled Germany to select the
ablest men--at least from the middle and upper classes--to officer and
command her armies. In England before the war only an infinitesimal
fraction of her youthful ability found its way into the army.
Independent means and social position rather than brains were the
common qualifications for a commission; and what there was to be said
for such a system so long as fighting was mainly a matter of physical
courage and individual leadership lost its validity when war became a
matter of science and mechanical ingenuity. The fact that four of the
six British army-commanders (Plumer, Byng, Rawlinson, Cavan) in the
West at the end of the war were old Etonians, testifies to more things
than their military skill; and it was a characteristic irony that from
first to last the British armies should have been commanded by cavalry
officers in a war in which cavalry played hardly any part.

The commander-in-chief was Sir John French, who had made his
reputation as a cavalry leader in the Boer War and had been chief of
the imperial staff since 1911. As inspector-general of the forces from
1907 to 1911 he had a good deal to do with Lord Haldane's
reorganization of the British Army, and as chief of the staff he was
largely responsible for the equipment of the Expeditionary Force and
the agreement with the French Government with regard to its dimensions
and the way in which it should be used. He was the obvious general to
command it when it came to the test. With similar unanimity the
popular voice approved of the appointment of Lord Kitchener as
Secretary of State for War on 5 August. The Expeditionary Force
consisted of three army corps, each comprising two divisions, and a
cavalry division under Allenby. The First Army Corps was commanded by
Sir Douglas Haig, the youngest lieutenant-general in the army, and the
second by Sir James Grierson, its most accomplished student. Unhappily
Grierson died suddenly soon after the landing, and he was succeeded by
Sir H. Smith-Dorrien, who, like French, had made his name in South
Africa. The Third Corps, under Sir W. Pulteney, came later into the
field. The embarkation began on 7 August, less than three days after
war had been declared, and the Government showed a sound confidence in
our little-understood command of the sea when it risked the whole of
our effective fighting force by sending it across the Channel to
assist the French and thus abandoning the defence of British shores to
the British Navy. By the 16th the transportation had been accomplished
without a hitch or loss of any kind. It was an achievement which even
domestic faction failed to belittle until time itself had effaced it
from popular recollection.

From Boulogne and from other ports the troops were sent up to the
wavering line of battle along the Franco-Belgian frontier. They came
not to win a victory but to save an army from disaster. The mass of
French reserves were in Lorraine or far away to the south, and the
safety of the French line on the northern front had depended upon the
assumed impregnability of Namur and an equally fallacious
underestimate of the number of German troops in Belgium. Three French
armies, the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth, were strung along the
frontier from Montmédy across the Meuse and the Sambre to a point
north-west of Charleroi, where the British took up their position
stretching through Binche, Mons, and along the canal from Mons to
Condé. Far away to the south-west was a French Territorial corps in
front of Arras, and at Maubeuge behind the British centre was a French
cavalry corps under General Sordet. The French staff anticipated a
defeat of the German attack on these lines and then a successful
offensive, and military critics in England even wrote of the hopeless
position of the Germans under Von Buelow and Von Kluck thrust far
forward into a cul-de-sac in Belgium with the French on their left at
Charleroi, the British on their right front at Mons, and the Belgians
on their right rear before Antwerp. The German calculation was that
the Belgians had been effectively masked by a corps detached
north-westwards from Brussels, that the Duke of Württemberg and Von
Hausen had troops enough to force the Meuse, drive in the French
right, and threaten the centre at Charleroi, and that Von Buelow could
cross the Sambre and Von Kluck encircle the British flank. The
strength which the Germans developed in Belgium and the extension of
their right wing are said to have been an afterthought due to the
intervention of the British Expeditionary Force; but the original
German plan required some such modification when the presence of
British troops lengthened the line of French defence.

The first two army corps, under Haig to the right and Smith-Dorrien to
the left, were in position on Saturday the 22nd hard at work throwing
up entrenchments and clearing the ground of obstacles to their fire.
That day was more eventful for the French, and it is not quite clear
why they were not assisted by a British offensive on their left. On
the right, the Third and Fourth French armies under Ruffey and Langle
de Cary had advanced from the Meuse to attack the Germans across the
Semois. They were severely checked and withdrew behind the Meuse,
while an unsuspected army of Saxons under Von Hausen attacked the
right flank of the Fifth French army under Lanrezac which lay along
the Sambre with its right flank resting on the Meuse. The fall of
Namur in the angle of the two rivers made Von Hausen's task
comparatively easy, and the Fifth army, which was also attacked by Von
Buelow in front, fell back in some confusion. A breach was thus made
in the French line, and Von Hausen turned left to roll up the Fourth
and Third armies of Langle de Cary and Ruffey; they, too, in their
turn retreated in some haste, and the Germans were free to concentrate
on the British. They had cleared their left and centre of danger, and
Von Kluck was able on the 23rd not only to face our troops with
superior forces in front, but to outflank them towards the west and
bring Von Buelow down upon them from Charleroi on the east. He had at
least four army corps with which to crush the British two, and our
75,000 men were spread out on a line of twenty-five miles thinner far
than the French line just broken at Charleroi. Finally, owing to
defective staff-work and the confusion of the French retreat, they
were left in utter ignorance of what had happened, and faced the
German attack as if they were part of one unbroken front instead of
being a fragment round which the tide of battle surged, and under the
impression conveyed to them on their arrival at the scene of action
that their opponents numbered little more than one or at most two army
corps.

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