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A Short History of the Great War

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




The Carpathians were therefore the key to the future of the war and
history of south-eastern Europe. The Russians had in the autumn
established a solid control of the Galician outlets from the mountain
passes, but had made no serious attempt to achieve the far more
difficult task of securing command of the foothills south of the
range, which alone would enable them to conquer the plains of Hungary.
For a mountain pass is like a river bridge-head; one may often possess
it without being able to debouch. The Austrians experienced that
difficulty in their winter offensive against the Russian flank in
Galicia. They made little progress against Brussilov at the Dukla and
Lupkow passes, but farther east they seized most of the mountain
routes, and Alexeiev was pressed back in Bukovina. Their centre under
Linsingen was, however, held up by the Russians at Hill 992 near
Kosziowa, and all efforts to dislodge the defenders failed. This
defence saved Galicia for the time and prevented the relief of
Przemysl, which otherwise would have been certain. For the Austrian
right succeeded late in February in recovering Czernowitz, Kolomea,
and on 3 March, Stanislau. Reinforcements, however, now reached the
Russians; Stanislau was recaptured, the Austrians lost much of what
they had gained, and on the 22nd Przemysl weakly surrendered. Its fame
as a fortress had been enhanced by its five months' siege since
October, but it did not redound to the credit of its defenders. They
were superior in numbers to the besiegers, were amply provisioned, and
well supplied with heavy artillery and all the munitions of war. Every
sort of blunder seems to have been committed by the commander, who
apparently regarded the siege as a relief from more arduous work in
the field, and capitulated because the repulse of the rescuing
expedition foreboded an increase of inconvenience.

The surrender liberated the besieging force for operations elsewhere,
and the Russians began a serious effort to surmount the Carpathian
rampart. They got well to the south of the Dukla, made substantial
progress in the centre through the Rostoki pass, and by the middle of
April held the crests for a continuous seventy miles; cavalry
penetrated much farther down the slopes, and the Austrians prepared to
evacuate the Ungvar valley. Reciprocal raids occurred elsewhere on the
Eastern front: the Russians seized and burnt Memel, and the Germans
retaliated by the bombardment of Libau. Despite warnings like that of
"The Times" Petrograd correspondent on 13 April to the effect that the
Germans had not only sent enormous reinforcements to the Carpathians,
but had taken charge of the operations, there was general confidence
in the West in a coming triumphant Russian offensive. Dmitrieff
himself had no suspicion of what was in store until a few days before
the storm broke; and a Panslav society in Petrograd passed and
published abroad a resolution that in view of the victorious progress
of the Russian armies across the Carpathians, the contemplated
intervention of Italy in the war was belated and undesirable.

The Russian Government cannot have been ignorant of the weakness of
Russian armies, not in man-power, still less in skill or courage, but
in artillery and equipment; but it had no conception of the material
and mechanical force which Germany was prepared to bring to the urgent
task of relieving the pressure on her ally. Nor was it for nothing
that Turkey had been cajoled and bribed into making war. Turkish
generalship and organization were negligible quantities, but Germany
could supply those defects, and Turkish bravery and man-power could be
used as a valuable means of distracting Russia's attention and
diverting forces from the Polish and Galician fronts. This had been
the main purpose of the campaign in the Caucasus which Turkey waged in
the winter. They began by seizing Tabriz in the province of
Azerbaijan, which though nominally Persian had been for some time
occupied partly by Russian and partly by Turkish troops; but the
Russians were first across the Russo-Turkish frontier and captured
Bayazid, Khorasan, and Kuprikeui. These advance-guards were, however,
pushed back by the Turks, whose leader and evil genius, the
half-Polish and German-educated adventurer, Enver, had conceived an
ambitious design of encircling the Russian armies between Sarikamysh
and Ardahan. In December the Turks succeeded in making their arduous
way across the snow-clad mountains, and on 1 January they were in
Ardahan. But the task would have tried the German Army itself in
summer, and Enver had attempted more than he could achieve. His army
corps were successively isolated and defeated in a series of
engagements collectively known as the battle of Sarikamysh, and driven
back across the frontier with heavy losses. Tabriz was reoccupied by
the Russians, though they were not able to follow up their victory by
the capture of Erzerum (see Map, p. 182).

The other diversion, which the Turks were used to create against the
Entente, was in Egypt. British rule, in spite of the vast benefits it
conferred, was not universally acceptable to the Egyptian people and
still less to Egyptian officials; and chief among those who resented
their restriction to the straight and narrow path of honest
administration was the Khedive Abbas II. He threw in his lot with the
Turks, and was deposed in his absence, while the shadowy Turkish
suzerainty over Egypt was converted into a substantial British
protectorate. Cyprus, which had been in British occupation since 1878,
was annexed at the same time to the British Crown. The Turks had been
deluded by the Germans with hopes of recovering their ancient control
of Egypt, and they at once began their feeble efforts to realize their
ambitions. In November an expedition started from Palestine to cut the
Suez Canal, a main artery of the British Empire, and stir the embers
of Moslem fanaticism in Egypt. It disappeared in the sands of the
intervening desert. Another, better prepared with German assistance,
reached the east bank of the Canal at various points on 2 February,
but miserably failed to effect a crossing; its only success was its
escape, which was partly explained by a sandstorm, and Egypt had rest
until the winter brought the campaigning season round again (see Map,
p. 352).

The British retort to Egypt and the Caucasus lay in the Persian Gulf
and the Dardanelles. The Persian Gulf had long been a scene of British
trade and political enterprise to which the inertia of its rulers
rendered Persia susceptible; and its position as a possible Russian
outlet to the sea on the flank of our communications with India had
produced some rivalry for Persian favours. The advent of a third comer
in the shape of the Germans, with their plans for a Germanized Turkish
Empire controlling the Berlin-Baghdad route, changed the rivalry into
co-operation; and an attack on the Turks at the head of the Persian
Gulf was an obvious reply to the Turkish campaign in the Caucasus. It
afforded an easy means of employing the native Indian army in the
common cause without the long sea journey to France or the risks
inflicted by northern winters upon sub-tropical races. During the
first half of November detachments of the Indian army sailed up the
Shat-el-Arab, the joint estuary of the Tigris and the Euphrates,
defeated the Turks at Sahil on the 17th, occupied Basra on the 22nd,
and cut off Kurna, which surrendered on 9 December. The local Turks
were weak in numbers and equipment, and distance removed them from the
stimulus of Enver's energy and German organization. It was not until
April 1915 that an effective reaction to the British advance was
attempted. Then the Turks and Arabs concerted a movement against the
whole line stretching round from Ahwaz within the Persian frontier to
Shaiba south-west of Basra. The real attack was on Shaiba, and the
battle lasted from 12 to 15 April. The Turks were completely defeated,
with some 6000 casualties; but the most important effect was to
convert the Arabs into our allies. The advantage was pressed in June,
and on the 3rd Amara was captured seventy-five miles to the north of
Kurna. The way was open for an advance on Baghdad as soon as autumn
made exertion possible in that torrid zone (see Map, p. 177).

Sir John Nixon's success in the Mesopotamian delta was, however, but a
pin-prick in a distant part compared with the blow that was aimed at
the heart of the Turkish Empire in the Dardanelles; and the merits of
that famous but ill-starred enterprise, and of the strategy which
inspired it, have been one of the most debated questions of the war.
Soldiers and civilians, writers and talkers, and even thinkers were
divided into two camps, Westerners and Easterners, those who believed
that the war could only be won by frontal attack in the West, and
those who discerned a way round to victory in the Near or the Farther
East. Volumes might be, and no doubt will be, written on this
controversy, and its implications have infinite variety. It involved
questions of policy as well as strategy, and therefore raised the
delicate problem of the relations between civil and military
authority. The soldier only deals with armies, and in the field his
voice is properly supreme; but policy may be as far above strategy as
strategy is above tactics; and policy may dictate a strategy which
would not commend itself on military principles. The soldier has
nothing to do with the policy, but policy and diplomacy may or may not
bring fresh allies into the war and fresh armies into the field; and a
strategy which may be unsound on purely military grounds may be
completely justified by political reasons. The diversion of a force
from the main field of operations where it is needed to a more distant
objective, seems suicidal to the general in command; but if, without
provoking disaster on the field it has left, it has the effect of
turning the enemy's flank, detaching his actual or deterring his
potential allies, and inducing neutrals to intervene, it may win a war
although it postpones or risks the success of a campaign.

On the other hand, it was urged that the fundamental principle of
strategy is to concentrate all available forces where the enemy has
concentrated his, beat him there, and thus win a victory which will
carry with it the desired results in all the subsidiary spheres.
Germany once beaten in the West, it was argued, there would be no need
to trouble about the Balkans or the amateur strategy which looked to
Laibach or Aleppo as the vital spot in the situation. This principle
was erected into a dogma, and dogma is a dangerous impediment to the
art of war. War is an art, and therefore consists in the adaptation of
varying means to conditions which are not constant. Strategy is not,
apart from its mechanical adjuncts, a science in which properties are
fixed, axioms can be assumed, and the results of experiments foretold;
the combination of two armies and a commander-in-chief does not
produce the same uniform result as the combination of two parts of
hydrogen and one of oxygen; and formulae are as irrational in war as
in any other human art. Dogmas deduced from the experience of some
wars are inapplicable to others; and the science of wars between
France and Germany becomes mere imposture when it seeks to dictate
dogma to wars in which the British Empire is involved. The particular
dogma about concentration had three defects: it left the initiative to
the enemy, thus surrendering the advantage, secured by the command of
the sea, of being able to strike in other directions; it assumed that
the enemy could be beaten on that front without disturbance on his
flanks or in his rear; and it abandoned the Near and the Farther East
to any schemes on which the Germans might choose to employ their own
or their allies' subsidiary forces.

No one, on the other hand, imagined that the Western front could be
denuded of the armies required to maintain it. The question was really
how to use the considerable margin of force between what was essential
for defence and what was needed for a successful offensive. Should it
be employed for frontal attack in the West, or flank attack in the
East? Caution counselled one course, adventure suggested the other.
Surplus force intended for an offensive on the West would be
available, if need arose, for defence; it would not, if it were a
thousand miles away, and our needs in the spring of 1918 seemed to
supply an effective answer to arguments drawn from our later successes
in the Balkans and in Syria. The antithesis is, however, largely a
false one, due to the exigencies of popular debate and the habit of
treating war as an abstract science independent of changing but actual
conditions. No one denies that a diversion of our main effort from
France to Laibach in the winter of 1917 would have been fatal to us in
the spring of 1918, but it is not clear that the thousands of troops
we lost at Loos and the French in Champagne in the autumn of 1915
might not better have been employed in saving Serbia or forcing the
Dardanelles.

The Dardanelles

There was much to be said for the policy, and even the strategy, which
led to the Dardanelles expedition. Flanks had disappeared on the
Western front; the lines extended from the Alps to the sea, and it was
natural that, commanding the sea, we should seek to turn them farther
afield. We had asked Russia to relieve the pressure on our Western
front by using her military force in Prussia and Galicia; and it was
reasonable enough for Russia to ask us to reciprocate and relieve the
Turkish pressure on her flank in the Caucasus by a naval attack on
Turkey. The German Fleet lay snug in port beyond the reach of naval
power: could not our supremacy on the sea find an offensive function
somewhere else? There was, moreover, our own position in Egypt to be
defended; no one proposed evacuation, and the best defence of Egypt
was a blow at the Dardanelles in the direction of Turkey's capital. It
was, in fact, no more a dissipation of forces to send troops to force
the Dardanelles than to send them to hold the Suez Canal, and from the
point of view of policy, which was even more important, the effect of
the expedition might be a concentration of power or Powers against the
Central Empires. Serbia had successfully held the gate of the Balkans
against Austria: Rumania's intervention would extend the lines of
possible attack, Greece inclined in the same direction, and the
forcing of the Dardanelles would assuredly have deterred Bulgaria from
hostile intervention, and almost certainly have decided her to join a
common Balkan move against the Teutons and the Turks. To the war on
the Eastern and Western fronts, which was already a German nightmare,
would be added one on an almost undefended Southern frontier. Austria
could not long resist if Italy also intervened, and the collapse of
the Hapsburg Empire would open up an advance against Germany from the
south which would circumvent the Rhine and the Oder and turn the
gigantic bastion she had constructed in France and Belgium into a
house of cards. Well might the Dardanelles expedition be hailed in the
press as a stroke of strategical genius and associated with Mr.
Churchill's imagination. Easy also is it to understand the
concentrated fear and force which the Germans put into Mackensen's
coming drive in Galicia.

There is, indeed, less material for censure in the policy of the
Dardanelles expedition than in the Allies' decision to couple with it
a military offensive on the Western front and to divorce the naval and
military efforts in the Aegean. Divided counsels produced divided
efforts. Mr. Churchill, backed up, we are led to infer, by Mr. Lloyd
George, secured his naval expedition; but he failed, until it was too
late, to secure its military complement because the troops were
earmarked for costly and premature attacks on the German lines in
France. Deprived of this assistance, the naval expedition seems to
have relied on the hope of Greek co-operation to the extent of two
army corps, which Venizelos was only prevented from dispatching by the
vigour of the Prussian Queen of Greece and by the veto of the King.
Possibly there was precipitation, for the naval attack did not await
the arrival of the military forces, which were before long on the way,
extorted, it would seem, by impetuous pressure from a reluctant and
unconvinced authority.

For this purely naval attack on the defences of the Dardanelles there
is little to be said; for no argument of advantage from success can
justify an attempt which is fore-doomed to failure, and history
demonstrated beyond a doubt the strength of modern forts against the
modern battleship. Nor was it in the Dardanelles a test between an
ordinary sea attack and a normal land defence. The strength of the
position attacked was trebled by the forts on both sides of the
channel and by its twist at the Narrows, which enabled the land
batteries to concentrate fire on the attacking fleet from in front as
well as on both flanks. There was no room to manoeuvre in a channel
less than a mile in width, and even when the mine-fields had been
swept, the Turks could send fresh mines down the constant stream, and
discharge torpedoes from hidden tubes along both shores. Against such
formidable defences even the guns of the Queen Elizabeth were an
inadequate attack, and forts that were said to be silenced repeatedly
renewed their bombardment.

The first stage of the attack began on 19 February; it consisted in
demolishing by concentric fire the outpost fortifications at Kum Kale
and Cape Helles. This proved comparatively simple, and after a week of
bad weather the mine-sweepers were able to clear the channel for four
miles. It was a different matter when the real defences in the Narrows
were attacked early in March. The chief bombardment was from outside
in the Gulf of Saros, where it was hoped that the guns of the Queen
Elizabeth and her consorts would by indirect fire dispose of Chanak
and the other forts. None of them were, however, silenced with the
possible exception of Dardanos, and Turkish howitzers, cunningly
concealed in the scrub along the shore, provided an unpleasant surrise
by hitting the Queen Elizabeth. Nevertheless, it was thought that
enough had been effected to justify an attempt to force the Narrows on
the 18th. Three successive squadrons of British and French ships were
sent up the Straits, but the Turks had only waited till the channel
was full of vessels to release their floating mines and land-
torpedoes. First the French Bouvet, then the Irresistible, and thirdly
the Ocean were struck by mines and sunk, the Bouvet with most of her
crew. Three battleships and 2000 men had been lost in an attack which
did not even reach the entrance to the Narrows; and for six weeks
occasional bombardments hardly concealed the fact that the frustrated
naval attack was awaiting the co-operation of the army to give it some
chance of success.

More progress was happily made during the winter in still more distant
spheres, although the conquest of German colonies was regarded by the
pure strategist as belonging to the illegitimate and divergent rather
than to the legitimate and subsidiary type of military operation.
Policy may, however, outweigh strategy, and the circumstance that the
victor only retains as the price of peace his conquests, or part of
them, made in war, extenuates if it does not justify divergent
operations. They were divergent enterprises which gave us India,
Canada, and the Cape of Good Hope; and assuredly the defeat of Germany
on the Western front would not alone have brought German colonies
under the sceptre of a League of Nations. Even from the point of view
of a strategy limited to Central Europe these operations had their
value; for they enlisted against the common foe forces which would
certainly not have been employed had we merely stood on the defensive
in the overseas Dominions, and when their work was done in distant
parts these forces gravitated towards the centre with a weight which
would have grown more crushing had resistance been prolonged. Only
surrender by the enemy stayed Allenby's and Marshall's Oriental hosts
in Asia and anticipated the arrival on the Western front of further
aid from Africa. A blow at the heart may be the normal strategy, but
it is not the only nor always the best means of dealing with an
antagonist clad in a breastplate of steel.

The scene of the least successful of these colonial wars was still
East Africa. The reverse of Tanga in November was followed by another
at Jassin on 19 January, and at the end of the winter the Germans
could claim that their territory was clear of our troops while several
German detachments were in ours; but we had seized the island of Mafia
off the mouth of the Rufigi and declared a blockade of the German East
African coast. On the other side of the continent we made steady
progress in reducing the vast territory of the Cameroons; but the
success of the season was Botha's conquest of German South-West
Africa. The last remnants of the rebellion under Maritz and Kemp were
stamped out at Upington on 3 February, and on 14 January Swakopmund
was captured from the sea. Botha selected that as his base, while
Smuts directed three columns farther south. The first advanced on the
capital Windhoek from Luderitz Bay, the second from Warmbad near the
Orange River, and the third from Kimberley. The second, under Van
Deventer, had the heaviest work, but the fighting was not as a rule
severe. The campaign was a triumph of forethought, strategy, and
organization which left the Germans no choice but a series of
retirements, culminating in the surrender of Windhoek on 12 May, and
the capitulation of the entire remaining German forces at Grootfontein
on 9 July.

On the sea the Germans had abandoned hope of victory. The balance of
power in our favour, which had been insufficient to relieve Jellicoe
of considerable anxiety, began to increase rapidly with the completion
of the Queen Elizabeth class in April; and Germany turned her
anticipatory gaze towards her submarines. Just as Napoleon's efforts
by means of the Berlin and Milan decrees to ruin us by war on commerce
came after the final collapse of his naval ambitions at Trafalgar, so
Germany's submarine campaign followed upon her recognition of the
hopelessness of her naval situation. On 18 February she proclaimed the
waters round the British Isles a war zone in which enemy merchantmen
would, and neutrals might, be sunk by submarines irrespective of the
risks to non-combatants and neutrals. This was a flagrant violation of
the rules of international law which safeguarded the shipping of
neutrals, and only sanctioned the condemnation of contraband goods in
prize courts, and the destruction of enemy vessels when they could not
be taken into port and provision had been made for the safety of their
crews and passengers. The German submarines were not in a position to
guarantee any of these conditions; and trading on the legal maximum
that no one can be required to do what is impossible, the Germans
claimed immunity from these obligations.

To this the British Government replied on 1 March with a blockade
which was more humane and more effective, but none the less involved
an autocratic extension of belligerent rights. All oversea trade with
Germany was to be as far as possible intercepted; goods, whether
contraband or not, were at least to be detained; and the right of
search was to be rendered more secure by being exercised in British
ports, to which neutral ships were brought, instead of on the high
seas amid the danger of submarine attack. These measures inflicted no
loss of life and no loss of property that was not contraband. But they
made havoc with the ideas that neutrals were entitled to trade with
both belligerents, and that neither belligerent could intercept
commerce which did not directly serve for military purposes. It was
not, for instance, a breach of neutrality to sell munitions to a
belligerent, though belligerents were entitled to seize them if they
could; and we ourselves bought vast quantities from the United States.
America was, however, deeply attached to that "freedom of the seas"
which enabled neutrals to sell, without interference, goods which were
not contraband, to either belligerent; and our extension of contraband
to cover food supplies gave deep offence. The difficulty arose not
only from the inevitable tendency of law to disappear amid the clash
of arms, but from the modern absorption of all energies, civilian as
well as military, in the warlike operations of the State. The food of
civilians making munitions became a vital element in the conduct of
war, and the distinction between civil and military purposes was lost
in the fusion of all activities for a common end.

Disquieting as was the course of military operations during the
spring, the diplomatic situation caused even more anxiety; and public
opinion was as impervious to the one as to the other. American
protests against our action on the seas were received with
ill-concealed resentment, popular newspapers adjured the Government to
"stand no nonsense from the United States," President Wilson's name
was hissed by British audiences, and the man in the street seemed bent
on estranging the neutral on whose assistance we were in the end to
rely for victory in the war. It needed all the resources of an
unpopular wisdom and diplomacy to steer between the Scylla of
alienating friends by our blockade and the Charybdis of being, in Mr.
Asquith's words, "strangled in a network of juridical niceties." The
Germans came to our aid with a colossal crime. On 7 May the
passenger-ship Lusitania was torpedoed off the south coast of Ireland
with the loss of 1100 souls, many of them women and children, and some
of them Americans; and the news was hailed in Germany with transports
of delight from ministers of religion and all but an insignificant
section of the people; medals were officially struck to commemorate
the deed. British lives had been lost through Russian action off the
Dogger Bank in 1904 without provoking war, and the sinking of the
Lusitania did not precipitate war between Germany and the United
States. But it eased the friction over our blockade, and gave for the
first time some general American support to the pro-Entente sentiment
which had from the beginning been strong in the New England States. A
moral force was created in reserve which would in time redress the
military disasters which the Entente had yet to encounter.

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