Chapter IV: Part IV: Diplomatic Papers Relating to the Origin of the War, (3)

German diplomacy and staff work had not in all of the war gained a more important technical advantage for less cost in time, money, and troops, than it had in the fall of 1915 in the Balkans when they made the Bulgars to serve as they had the Turks, to secure their ends. At last the British withdrew from Gallipoli with such small losses that the evacuation of this position on an exposed coast is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant pieces of military maneuvering of its kind in all history. No credit is ever given for retreats. But this was a good deal more than a retreat. It was withdrawing from a beach in face of a well-armed enemy. The story of it--as yet unwritten--will some day bring a tribute to British military skill from professional soldiers, if not from the lay public.

The Bulgarians decided not to invade Greece; the Greeks made no attack. Those who looked forward to the war being settled in the Balkans, and to Saloniki becoming another Port Arthur, had missed their calculations. But every gun and every man that the Allies had to maintain at Saloniki might be a gun and a man kept idle, when they might be needed elsewhere.

The Germans having disposed of Serbia, had at the same time forced the further dissipation of English and French troops. That they could once more turn to the main theatre of the war and try to push back the siege wall in another direction. Meantime, Turkey had been doing their bidding in another quarter. The natural response of the British to any threat to their Indian Empire was to take the offensive, for this was one certain way to impress the Oriental mind. Having annexed Egypt and Cyprus and occupied the German colonies throughout the world, Britain now proceeded to the extension of her Asiatic domain. The threat of Mohammedan insurrection was met by an invasion of Mohammedan regions.

Her expedition toward Bagdad, had it not been in the midst of the greatest war in all history, would perhaps have been the most spectacular and interesting of all the small campaigns in remote regions which have gradually extended British influence. It marched through Mesopotamia and the Garden of Eden. The Turks under German direction replied with an offensive which in turn put General Townshend's army in siege, requiring that it should have relief.

The self-interest of each one of the parties to the war is evident, with the exception of Turkey. Why she ever entered in on the side of Germany, or on either side, is a puzzle. She was the one to lose in any event. German success meant German domination. German failure must mean that Russia would realize her ambition to take Constantinople, and the British must further strengthen their empire at her expense.

For many decades the British and Russian empires have glowered at each other across the dividing belts of Thibet, Afghanistan, and Persia. The fear of a Russian invasion of India haunted British statesmen until the German power became so threatening that England struck hands with France and Russia. Now while the British were advancing northward, the Russians made a southerly move to her assistance. The grand duke, who had been sent to the Caucasus in February, 1916, took the offensive and captured the fortress of Erzerum, an action which was bound to relieve pressure on the British. Thus, the Turk who had been led to believe that he was to regain Egypt and recover some of his lost territory, was simply losing more. Indeed, after Saloniki, despite the talk to that effect, the far-seeing Germans neither carried out their threatened attempt to invade Egypt, nor, as many expected, were they drawn from the main theatre of war by dispatching troops by rail to Turkey. In dissipating the allied troops by their threats, they had taken care not to dissipate their own.

Thus Germany would supply Turkey with officers, and all her munitions, but she would not risk an army on the other side of Bulgaria with a long line of communications threatened by the Allies from Saloniki and Dedeagatch.

The approach of the spring of 1916 found them facing much the same problem as in the spring of 1915. Despite the territory they had gained, to ask for peace was to imply that their economic situation was weaker and their casualties heavier than they were willing to admit. Even if their economic situation was strong and the reserves plentiful, any suggestion that they were ready for negotiations must convince the Allies that they were reaching the end of their resources. There could be no doubt of Russia's immense reserves of men. It was only a question with her as to whether or not she could make them into an efficient army properly equipped and supplied, and whether or not she would be able to maintain her organization and railway facilities and sufficient forces at the actual fighting front to strike a successful blow against her enemies.

On the western front there had been an enormous accession of munitions during the winter, while the British new army with two million men yet to go under fire was gradually getting its rifles and guns. Victory comes in war either when you are exhausted or when you have taken from the enemy his capital or something of such vital importance to him that he must yield in order to recover it. Neither France nor Russia was by any means in that pass. Belgium had merely become a dead land, a shop within a garden, cut off from all trade, when it had been a nation of manufacturers and traders.

Germany, unless she were exhausted in men and supplies, could not consider any peace which did not accord her the results of her gains, while she was still in possession of much of the enemy's territory, and she still maintained the power of the offensive. The purpose of the Allies was to contain her, to strengthen "the ring of steel." Her own purpose must be to strike some vital blow which would win a separate peace either from Russia or France. The moment she gave up her offensive and settled down to the defensive, which was naturally against the policy of her staff and the vigorous nature of her people, she was acknowledging that she had reached the limit of her prowess. Then the Allies, with the sea at their command, would bid her await their pleasure--unless she had so far exhausted them that they considered a decided victory over her hopeless, and they made a compromise.

Saloniki now being an incident of her military past, the next plan of her staff was an effort on Verdun, the great fortress which occupied a salient in the French siege line. Here, as elsewhere when she attacked, she concentrated both her own and the Austrian heavy artillery, and following the system of intense artillery preparation, threw in her waves of infantry. This blow was struck at the most inclement season of the year, in February snow and slush and rain, as if to anticipate the allied attack which was generally thought bound to come later in the spring when sufficient munitions had been accumulated on the western front and the weather was favorable.

By this time experts who had thought the war would be decided in the Balkans had again realized that it never pays to desert the simple military principle that the decision comes between the main bodies of armies and not in remote regions from any clash of subsidiary forces.

Paris or Petrograd in the hands of the Germans might mean such a decision. Certainly, should the western front be broken by either side, it would be the most telling blow of the war in both the moral and the military sense. But after all, was the line of least resistance for Germany the line of the western front? Would she really strike her great blow of 1916--if she still had the power to strike one--against the western rather than the eastern front? Hitherto, attacks had succeeded against Russia.

It was in Russia that she had had her success. German officers had always stated their confidence that with their superior gun fire and tactics they could always force the Russians back. Could they press back the French and the British?

When would the war end? seemed as unanswerable to the lay observer in the spring of 1916 as in the spring of 1915. How long was the fearful attrition to go on? Could either side ever strike a decisive blow, or would the eventual result be a bloody stalemate, with England still in command of the sea?

The significant generic lesson of the war is not in the power of artillery, but the power of all material organization, when nations set out to gain their ends by force: its military lesson was that both sides had pretty well followed sound policy considering the situation, despite armchair critics who knew nothing of inside facts.

Europe was spending $100,000,000 or more a day in the business of destruction--of life and of property. A broad belt of ruins spread across France and Belgium for 450 miles; a broader one of 1,000 miles across Galicia and Russia. No nation engaged could be said to be victorious except the Japanese. Japan had gained Kiao-chau; strengthened her influence in China enormously, and was making immense profits by working her arsenals and every plant at full speed making munitions for Russia.

The United States at peace, preparing to make munitions as fast as she could, and able to produce only 3,000 rifles a week for the Allies on the 1st of December, 1915, and 5,000 a week March 1, 1916, was enjoying an era of "boom" prosperity, thanks to the eager market of nations whose own production was arrested while their workers were at war. From the gloom of London and Paris, where men and women had given up all luxuries, the transatlantic voyage brought you to New York, which was the only gay capital in the world, enjoying all the privileges of extravagance when money is plentiful.

WAR BY MACHINERY

This has been a war of machinery; but the old rule has been true that development in any weapon of offense has been countered by further development of means of defense. Nor is the theoretical power of weapons ever equaled by their actual power when the test of war comes. With self-preservation remaining the first law of nature, man is in nothing so skillful as in avoiding the enemy's blows.

When one watches a 15-inch gun fired and hears its 2,000-pound shell go screaming through the air, his concept of its destructive action is exaggerated by imagination, and further confirmed if he sees that shell burst inside a house, reducing its interior to wreckage. But the shell may not hit the house; it may fall in an open field and merely make a crater in the earth. Besides, someone must be in the house when it is hit if there are to be any casualties; and it is quite possible that a single person present might be dug out of the debris unharmed. Vulnerable as man's flesh is, he remains a pretty small object on the landscape. If he knows that his house is in danger of being struck he then either goes into the cellar at the first alarm, after having covered his floor with sandbags, or he may take to a dugout in his yard.

When one has seen ten 15-inch shells strike a town of 25,000 inhabitants in a busy hour of the day and only half a dozen persons killed and injured, he may learn a contempt for shell fire which, however, is promptly turned into a tragic respect when one of the same sort of shells strikes in a stone-paved courtyard where a hundred soldiers are at their evening meal, and two-thirds of them are killed and wounded.

The bursting of a shrapnel shell and its spray of low-velocity bullets is also theoretically most destructive, but a roof of 6-inch boards will furnish perfect protection from the bullets. Mother Earth remains the best protection there is from fire. No rifle bullet can penetrate through a 3-foot thickness of sandbags. A 6 or 8-inch high-explosive shell, which is the largest caliber practicable for trench warfare, may burst near a double layer of bags of stone rubble without hurting anyone in a cellar 30 feet underneath. The rain of shrapnel bullets which mows the barbed wire in front of a trench, as hail mows ripening grain, will not reach a single man in the trench to the rear, if he keeps his head down.

At first thought it seems utterly inconsistent when bullets carry effectively a mile and a half, and guns carry twenty miles, that infantry should be fighting so close that they can throw bombs at each other from distances of 15 and 20 yards. The very destructiveness of modern weapons has contributed toward this result.

There has never been anything like so many guns used in battle, and never have they been capable of such rapid fire. The field gun can fire consistently eight or ten shots a minute, thanks to its modern recoil cylinder and to the steadiness of aim, and literally establish a "curtain of fire" with its torrent of bullets shot down from the air and the cataracts of earth shot up by the bursting of high-explosive shells in the ground, which no infantry can pass.

A machine gun behind a shield firing 500 shots a minute is practically safe from rifle fire, and soldiers intrenched on either side of it add to its volume their own more accurate fire from their rifles. Infantry in the open, though they were not subjected to the fearful concentration of artillery fire, could not survive through a mile of machine-gun and rifle-swept space. Successful advances against anything but very inferior numbers badly armed become impossible in any frontal attack in the open. Thus all modern infantry operations must have more or less a siege character, as the only practicable means of approach is by digging your way forward. The spade has become almost as important a weapon as the rifle.

Impatience with digging, which was characteristic of the early days of the American Civil War, and which has been generally resented by all armies in the past, has now become second nature to every soldier, because its value is brought home to him by the most telling kind of lesson in experience--death. He puts earth between himself and the enemy's fire as instinctively as one holds up his hand to ward off a blow.

In trench fighting all that is exposed of a man firing is his head and shoulders, which accounts for the high percentage of dead to wounded in this war. In other wars it has been as one to five; while in this war, on the western front, it has varied from as one to two and three. If the trenches are brought extremely close together then either side is safe from the other's artillery fire, because there is as much danger of hitting your own trench as the enemy's with your shells. A distance of 20 or 30 yards meant that at any time either side could start in throwing bombs or grenades by hand across that one definitely neutral country--the zone of death between the trenches. Beyond that range up to the average range, trench mortars which "lobbed" a charge of high explosive from trench to trench could be used. Thus the war of machinery became a war of explosives. Anything that could be dropped into the trench and burst might kill or wound some of the enemy, which meant debit on their side of the ledger in a war of attrition and exhaustion. The higher the angle of flight the more likely the charge actually to fall into the narrow ditch in the earth, instead of breaking its force against the wall, which accounts for the superiority of the howitzer with its high angle of flight and shorter range to the gun with its lower trajectory and longer range.

Thus there can be no limitation to the amount of artillery and the quantities of explosives serviceable in this kind of warfare. No one of the armies has ever had anything like enough shells. None ever can. Five hundred guns of all ranges set back of one another from 3,000 to 20,000 yards' range to a mile could be placed, or 225,000 for the western front, and they could readily use five million shells a day in this contest of munitions and manufacturing resources.

All armies had to conserve their ammunition, and in parts of the line, which were known as "quiet corners," for tactical reasons the stalemate was almost peaceful, either side holding its fire unless the other became restless. But between the trenches which had remained in the same position for many months, no living thing was visible day after day except a rabbit or a field mouse where the ground birds made their nests, and there the piping of birds joined with the song of the bullets. Except for occasional snipers' shots at the sight of anything moving on the enemy's parapet, the day wore monotonously on--when to expose the head for half a minute meant death.

Naturally the trenches do not run straight. They bend in and out at sharp angles in order to localize the explosions of shells; they are so narrow in most places that two men can pass with difficulty. A few soldiers are on guard, the rest may be lying about their dugouts or probably engaged in building new traverses or in putting up new layers of sandbags or deepening their dugouts. They become beavers rather than warriors, day laborers with spade and shovel rather than knights. There is no marching and countermarching; they have no use for the skirmish drill or the maneuver ground. Sharpshooters with clamped rifles watch for a target patiently as fishermen for a bite.

Back from the first line trench runs a winding communication trench, a foot or more deeper than the average man's height and the turns in its walls stop any bullets which otherwise might sweep its length in enfilade. In the reserve trenches are other men in burrows who have not even the excitement of sniping. They do nothing but wait and dig, repairing damages wrought by occasional shells on dull days.

At any hour the enemy may suddenly decide to attack and they may find their houses pounded down about their heads and perhaps half of a company wiped out in a quarter of an hour. Then other communication trenches lead back until finally you are in the open country out of the range of bullets, but not outside the range of shells. Here the munition caissons and the transport wagons come up by night bringing the food for men and guns which is taken up to the hungry mouths under the cover of darkness; and here, on an average day, one will occasionally observe the passing of an ambulance with its green roof and sides which melts it into the road and the landscape--and processions of ambulances when there is battle. All the detail of army existence is as precise as that of the best organized industrial plant.

As you walk along you will spy at intervals a hidden battery, perhaps in a house, perhaps in a hedge, perhaps in a group of trees, perhaps beautifully roofed over with sod, so that it is invisible from the air. You rarely look up without seeing an aeroplane flying overhead. When there is action, you will see many. A faint pur comes out of the heavens and two planes are seen circling as they exchange bullets from their machine guns. Another plane is turning to the right and left and ducking to avoid the thistle blows of smoke which burst from the shrapnel shells fired by the antiaircraft guns.

Follow the course of the long procession of motor trucks which feed the army and you arrive at one of the great supply depots which every day send out the precise quota of supplies that are needed, with every motor truck having its schedule and keeping that schedule with the accuracy of a first-class passenger train. Follow the ambulances back from station to station, where the wounded men are examined to see if they are suffering from a hemorrhage and whether they are able to stand the farther journey and do not need an immediate operation, and you are brought to the immense base hospitals in a closely guarded and well ordered camp where every sanitary tradition known to modern life is absolutely enforced. One of these hospitals had twelve thousand beds and in the offensive of September 25, 1915, it discharged seven thousand patients in a day.

Soldiers are restricted to the neighborhood of their billets and officers themselves must have passes if they travel outside the region occupied by their battalions. Everyone is a policeman under an intricate system guarding every detail of army secrets from any spy and from those gallant aviators who risk antiaircraft gunfire in the hope of bringing home some information to their side.

Never has the Intelligence Service of an army had so many secrets to guard; never has it required such complicated measures of protection against espionage. In Napoleonic times, it was enough to know that your adversary was marching a hundred thousand men along parallel roads. This your cavalry scouts might discover; or a spy who had crossed the frontier in an unfrequented place might be watching the enemy's army and counting his numbers as they passed. Now the frontier is an intact line of trenches.

The spies of Richelieu's day have been surpassed in this, our day--with their stories yet to be told. Many a man who spoke the enemy's language well has put on the enemy's uniform, joined one of his scouting parties between the trenches in the darkness, entered the enemy's trenches, heard all the talk and slipped back to his own lines safely. If apprehended, his fate was certain--death.

The most efficient spy, of course, is the one with military training He knows the value of what he sees. Usually he is an officer of good family who has been cashiered for gambling or debt and takes a desperate chance out of patriotism and the hope of atonement. Naturally, the easiest route for spies was through Holland and Switzerland which became the gateway of passing spies and the playground of espionage and counterespionage. Gradually the restrictions tightened for all neutral travelers from capital to capital, while none were permitted to go into the zones of the armies, some twenty or thirty miles from the trenches.

The problem of the Intelligence Corps is much like that of putting the parts of a picture puzzle together. A line from a newspaper in one part of the world, a line from a newspaper in another taken in connection with a photograph, an excerpt from a letter found on a prisoner or a fact got from a prisoner by skillful catechism, might develop a valuable contributory item. The amount of information procured by either side about the other was only less amazing to the outsider than how it was obtained. Again, events revealed amazing ignorance. Most baffling and most secret of all branches is this, whose work is both gaining and conserving information, and just as professional, just as carefully prepared before the war as any other.

A single instance illustrates how small a fact may be of value to the enemy. A certain well known "military expert" went out to British headquarters as a guest of a general. From a tower in the square of a small town, he watched a certain action. When he wrote his account of it, it was submitted to the general who was his friend; and the general carelessly passed one little statement which no Chief of Intelligence of any army would ever have passed and probably no correspondent of experience would have had the temerity to submit to the censor unless he wanted to be responsible for the death of men who were his hosts and his friends. For the writer stated that he saw the battle from this tower.

Now the London papers reach Holland at four o'clock in the afternoon where they are seized promptly by the tentacles of the German Intelligence Service, which did not need to undertake any "picture puzzle work" on this occasion. It was plain as day that this tower must be used as an artillery observation post by the enemy. From there he could see the fall of shells from his batteries and know whether they were "on" or not. Out of the blue sky the next morning, came a German artillery concentration which brought the tower down like a house of cards, and many British soldiers billeted in the neighborhood were killed or wounded.

In order to deepen the shroud of mystery over his side which baffles the enemy, many military men would undoubtedly make the press merely the herald of official bulletins. The British Admiralty carried out this system to the letter, as a navy may better than an army, in the resistance of the German submarine campaign. Thus the "Untersee-boots" came out from Kiel or Zeebrugge and disappeared in the mists of the North Sea with no message of how they had been destroyed when they never returned.

The Intelligence Service in common with army transport and the sanitary service and every other expert branch has for its object the conserving of the lives of your own soldiers and the taking of those of the enemy, best expressed by an infantry attack on the enemy's trenches, whether to gain a few hundred yards or a belt of eight to ten miles as in the case of the French attack in Champagne in September, 1915, and the German attack on Verdun in February, 1916. The first step is the concentration of batteries for artillery preparation. Gradually, these guns all try out their range with the aeroplanes spotting the fall of their shells. Then, at the scheduled minute they loose their blasts upon the front line trenches which are to be taken. In front of the trenches, of course, are the elaborate barbed-wire entanglements. These are often twenty, thirty or even forty feet deep. There may be more than one series of entanglements and some may be screened in some fashion or other from the effects of artillery fire. Aside from these, _trous de loup_, pits with sharpened sticks to impale the invader, and all the other devices of former times are used--in short, every obstacle from the time of Moses to the modern machine gun. No invader can possibly reach the enemy's trench to contest it with him until these impedimenta are removed. Thousands of short-cut plans and inventions have been offered for cleaning away the barbed wire before an attack, but not one has succeeded because it requires that whoever is to carry out the suggestion or remove the obstruction, must be submitted to murderous grilling machine-gun and rifle fire. Shrapnel shells with their sprays of bullets bursting at a height of a foot above ground remain the approved method of cutting barbed wire. If the barbed wire is not destroyed, the men in the charge are "hung up" in it, as the saying is. Then if a machine gun is still in position in the enemy's trench, they are riddled with bullets where they lie. No form of death could be more pitiless or helpless for the soldier than this. He becomes a target on a spit, as it were.

Granted that the barbed wire is swept away perfectly, no charge can succeed if many machine guns or rifles from the trenches are playing upon it. Then men simply rush into a spray of bullets. Therefore, all the teeth must be drawn from the trench itself. This is done by the concentration of high-explosive shells from guns of larger caliber, mostly howitzers, which burst in the earth, tossing up great fountains of dust, burying and smashing the machine guns and driving all the operators into their dugouts, where they are sometimes buried alive.

Back of the trench, the guns of smaller caliber which destroy the barbed wire place a "curtain of fire," as it is called, which does not permit the enemy to escape from a trench, or any reserves to come to his assistance. This process is kept up for such a length of time as is deemed sufficient. At a given moment, the invader charges, often protected by a screen of smoke which is sent out from his own trenches.

As the burrowers in the earth crawl from the parapets and take to their legs, they know that their fate is almost altogether dependent upon the preparation by the guns rather than any effort of their own. Ahead of them is this wall of smoke and dust from the explosions, in which they are lost to the observer. Keeping units together and protecting them is as difficult as maneuvering ships in a fog. The delicate problem of the gunner is to protect the invader just as far forward as possible, without putting shells into his own men. A few from defective fuses must fall short. This is expected and is a part of the cost of a charge; but none with correct fuses and dependable powder should. The gunners time their part to that of the invader, by lifting their fire from the first to the second line trench, as their own men are entering the first.

Granted that the barbed wire is cleared and the men enter the enemy's trench, they may find themselves struggling over heaps of dust mixed with the rags of sandbags, splintered timbers and the flesh and uniforms of their enemy--at first see not a single adversary. They will be instantly due for heavy shell fire; and also for heavy machine gun and rifle fire from the second line enemy trench. They begin to dig at once in order to establish protection. Out of this wreckage they have to reverse the enemy's trench, so that it shall face toward him. This becomes a matter of desperate effort and usually it is in the course of this that the severest casualties are suffered. But should the artillery destruction of the trench be imperfect, upon entering it they may still take the enemy by surprise in his dugouts. In that case, bombs in hand, at the doorways of these cellars they demand surrender. In case it is not given, they throw the bombs into the dugout; for, to enter, means that they will be shot down.

Or, upon entering the trench, they may meet the enemy's soldiers running out of their dugouts for hand-to-hand battle. The traverses are so narrow that the length of the rifle makes it a clumsy weapon, and the adversaries in modern war, whose guns carry twenty miles, engage hand to hand, using knives, bombs and even their fists. With discarded rifles and bombs lying about a trench, it is difficult to give quarter. For a prisoner who is down may pick up a rifle or a bomb and turn on his captor. It is not human savagery so much as conditions that has made the fighting so grim. Having established themselves in a certain section or sections of the trench, naturally the new occupants have the enemy on their right and left. That is, on one side of one of the winding traverses will be a German, and say on the other side a Frenchman. Neither sees the other's head, for both are hidden behind these walls of earth. If one starts around the corner, it means a bayonet or a bullet for him.

To gain ground in a trench requires a superior supply of bombs. Any small package that will contain a high explosive would serve the purpose. Early in the war, bombs were made out of jam tins and bottles or any other receptacle which could be filled with an explosive and set off by a fuse. Later on, different varieties of manufactured bombs in great quantities appeared. There have been instances of five thousand being used in a single day over two hundred yards of trench. After throwing a bomb from the traverse, the offensive follows up the explosion by rushing along the traverse and catching the defender with a bayonet while he is _hors de combat_ from the effect of the explosion. While this orgy--characteristic of cave dwellers battling on a precipice in its ferocity--is proceeding, all is precision at the rear. As the caissons bring up the supplies of ammunition, the green-curtained motor ambulances speed on to the hospital with the wounded and the military police direct the congested traffic and keep watch for spies.

VITAL LESSONS

War is force, violence, killing. Whoever tries to disguise its character is a poor soldier and a poorer citizen. If you would avoid it, and if you would prepare for it, you must look at it as a fact, squarely in the face. Never has war been so savage as it is in this most progressive age in history. We had popular education, aseptic surgery, the wireless, and antitoxin, but war came nevertheless, and in the wake of Hague conferences and much preaching of internationalism. It came when the nations were supposed on account of the press and the telegraph to have been farther removed from parochialism than ever before, when more people in every nation in Europe knew the language of their neighbors than ever in history.

In the cave dweller's time, combatants used a stone hatchet which was the best weapon that science could produce. To-day by land and sea they have used all the powers of destruction known to modern man; all the scientific brains of Europe have been at the disposal of commanders. Yet no single revolutionary invention has appeared in the course of the war. The idea of the gas was old. Man already had learned to fly. Guns have been larger and shells more powerful, but the principle is the same. Weapons have been further developed, but the types have not changed.

All the essential lessons which the Germans applied they learned in the Russo-Japanese War. The line of trenches throughout the winter of 1904-05 before Mukden were much the same type as those along the Aisne. There were trenches in the Civil War and in the Crimea, and in the American Revolution and in many wars before that. So far as one can learn, there has not been a single invention by a civilian which would have been of any use to the British navy in fighting submarines. All have been devised and applied by naval experts who knew conditions. No profession is more expert than soldiering and none is older, because it began when Cain killed Abel.

War being the ultimate resort of force, then the poet, the dreamer, the scholar, the doctor and the organizer of the arts of peace may succumb to the bully with the square jaw, the low brow and flesh-tearing incisors, unless the civilized man uses his resources and talents to make weapons which are stronger than the bully's fist. This is precisely what civilization does in order to protect itself.

The two forces which were really prepared for this war were the British navy and the German army. The British navy has kept command of the seas and the German army has planted its trenches on foreign soil. For any nation which is separated from other nations by the sea, the military lesson of this war is that the sea is the first line of defense. You will escape bloody trenches at home if you never allow an enemy to land. He cannot land until he has driven your navy off the seas.

The other lesson is that a nation should know its method of defense and have it as complete, practicable and ready as the German army and British navies were. For three or four years, the Belgians saw the Germans constructing railroad sidings at Aix and making their preparations for the blow they struck. Yet the Belgians did not modernize their forts, or adequately strengthen their army for defense. If to the staffs of England and France war seemed inevitable, their governments refused to be convinced.

Any nation which is considering preparedness for national defense must have a national policy. It must know what it is going to defend and how it is going to defend it. The British navy was built for the specific problem of either defeating the German navy in battle or keeping it fast in its lair. The German army was organized for the purpose of the invasion of France and then of Russia; the French army for defense from Germany.

Their efficiency was not the result of the expenditure of money, for money will not buy defense. It requires training, organization, and patriotism, and courage, which are not for sale in the market places of mankind.

Until this war the opinion among English-speaking peoples was universal that the volunteer system was the best method of recruiting. This on the principle that the man who offers himself to fight, fights better than the one who is called to arms by government order. Thus England raised 3,000,000 men. But to a man who has lived much with armies, it seems an immoral method; it means hiring men to fight for you. One man's life is just as valuable to him as another's. It is the final sacrifice which he makes for the defense of his country or his home. He should make it himself and not ask others to make it for him. Those who should be the first into battle are the men of wealth, of position, the favored ones. They owe their country more than the others, because their country has done more for them.

The courage which every Continental army has exhibited has forever destroyed the idea that universal service weakens the valor of an army. Millionaire and peasant, nobleman and workman fighting side by side in the ranks, and doing all the drudgery of the trenches in common, develop a democracy which means that a man appreciates his fellow man for his own sake.

The old idea that wars must be frequent in order to keep up a nation's virility has also been disproved. Universal service both in France and Germany through forty years of peace, had been an important influence in the better physical development of the race, which led to the fortitude, precision, and courage exhibited. At the same time, a realization of the seriousness of war on the part of all men, because they knew before this war began the punishing effect of rifle or machine-gun and artillery fire, is a powerful deterrent to making war in any spasm of emotion.

There is no more glory, there is no more sport to war. It has become scientific, businesslike, and commonplace. Never has an unprepared nation been so helpless against the prepared as to-day. The American Revolution could never have been won by untrained levies to-day against the British regulars if they possessed modern weapons. Our forefathers had their fowling pieces, taken from the walls in the days when the cannon fired a solid shot for a few hundred yards, and there were few cannon; and so far as weapons were concerned, they were almost on a level with their enemy, the enemy's only superiority being that of their drill and organization. Now the enemy would have guns and rifles which it takes many months to make, even if you have the plants.

In an era of sanitation and bodily cleanliness and popular education, it has been shown that far from men having lost their virility, they fought far better than the so-called "strong" and primitive man, and those soldiers of former ages who "drank hard six days a week and fought like the devil on Sunday" and would look down upon this age as effeminate. Physically, mentally, and morally, the soldiers who sprang to arms in the beginning of this war were superior unquestionably to any soldiers who have ever gone into any war in Europe. They had more skill, more courage, more determination. Their pride was greater, and that alone made them more gallant. Those who wanted to know what war was like, to have the experience of their first baptism of fire, soon had it in the swift processes of mobilization and attack. Then, in their stubbornness, they settled down to the long, grim business of seeing through a task that was begun. The trenches were the last places where you would hear the advocacy of war as war. There the sentiment was simply of duty that must go on until a decision was reached.

Never has war been more savagely fought, possibly because the modern mind reasons that war being force and violence and killing, this principle should be applied to the limit. Yet never have the wounded been so tenderly cared for, never has the hospital organization been so complete. Never probably in the history of European warfare have prisoners, once they were taken, been so well treated. In other wars 100,000 survivors or so returned home when the struggle was over. Here millions will go. Every home will either have its dead hero or its living veteran. These are the men who will rule Europe in the future. Behind the lines, among the civilian population, the war has acted as a scourge. It has submerged self into the whole. Fatty degeneration of the heart of the body politic has been cut away to the muscle.

THE THEATRES OF THE WAR'S CAMPAIGNS

By F. H. SIMONDS

MAIN MILITARY FEATURES

The purpose of this review is to summarize briefly the main military phases of the first year and a half of the Great War. To do this it is perhaps simplest to accept the unity supplied by the three major campaigns of the Central Powers, that of Germany against France, that of Austria and Germany against Russia, and that of Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria against Serbia.

There is no intention of discussing here any ethical or political considerations. Certain historical details are, however, of real interest and value. Thus it is worth while to recall that the present conflict differs little, if at all, from the earlier coalition wars of Europe, in which one nation, numerically weaker, has sought to impose its will upon a group of nations collectively larger, richer, and potentially capable of employing greater numbers of men. In a word, the present war is a pretty accurate repetition of the wars of Louis XIV and Napoleon I, with Germany playing the French rôle.

Now in such struggles it had always been true, and German writers, notably Bernhardi, insisted it would be true of any future war, that the single chance for a decisive victory for the smaller nation lay in crushing the several foes before they were able to get their collective strength in the field, while the superior preparedness, training, general military efficiency of the smaller nation still enabled it to put the superior numbers at the decisive point at the crucial moment.

This whole conception is made perfectly clear by a glance at the familiar and classic parallel of the Napoleonic wars. In 1805 Napoleon, facing a European coalition, which included Russia, Great Britain, and Austria, and was bound to enlist Prussia ultimately, quite as the present anti-German group enlisted Italy, had to solve the same military problem.

Consider what he did. Breaking his camp at Boulogne, which he left in September, 1805, he sent his Grand Army into southern Germany and against Ulm. On October 20 he captured Mack's army at Ulm. On December 2 he routed the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz, and on December 26 there was signed the Treaty of Pressburg, which eliminated Austria from the war. Prussia now intervening, he destroyed the Prussian armies at Jena and Auerstädt on October 14, 1806. In June, 1807, he completed his task by defeating the Russians at Friedland. The Peace of Tilsit, which followed immediately, removed Russia and Prussia from the fighting line, as Austria had already been removed. Between the capitulation of Ulm and the victory of Friedland there intervened nineteen months. More than eighteen have now passed since the fall of Liege in the present war.

The Peace of Tilsit made Napoleon the master of Europe with only Great Britain left in the field against him. The subsequent military and political history which led to Napoleon's downfall has no pertinence in the present discussion. What it is essential to recognize is that the German high command in August, 1914, approached a Napoleonic problem in the Napoleonic fashion.

In German quarters there had been before the war, and there has been since, a debate as to the comparative advantage of making the first campaign against France or against Russia. The fact that the attack on France failed has doubtless contributed to strengthen the case of those who held the view of the elder Moltke and advocated an eastern offensive. But this is merely an academic discussion. What is of interest to us now is to recognize that Germany did decide to attack France, that she did direct against the republic the first and necessarily the greatest blow she could deliver. It was not until April, 1915, that she actually undertook an attack upon Russia, and then the prospect of a decisive victory, on the Napoleonic order, had practically disappeared.

THE ATTACK UPON FRANCE

Turning now to the first campaign, the attack upon France, it is to be recognized at the outset that the German purpose was to dispose of France in the military sense for the period of the war by a campaign that should repeat the success of 1870. It was essential that this victory should be achieved before France could profit by Russian activity in the east and before Great Britain could render material military assistance to her French ally. It was equally essential that the blow should be so swift and heavy that it would crush the French before they could equip and organize their great reserves, for whom, thanks to legislative folly and pacifist agitation, there was lacking equipment and arms.

For the accomplishment of this great task, Germany counted upon her superior numbers, the greater speed of her mobilization, and the excess of her population over France to give her a decisive advantage. She counted also upon her advantage in heavy artillery and machine guns, on her organization of motor transport, which was to establish new records in invasion. Only in field artillery, in the now famous "seventy-fives," could France claim any advantage.

In 1870 Sedan had come four weeks after the first German troops had entered France. For the new campaign the Germans allowed six weeks. For this time German high command reckoned that Russia could be mobilized in the east, and that any incidental Russian success in East Prussia or Silesia would be counterbalanced by the tremendous victories to be won in northern France. Paris itself would be a sufficient counterprize for Posen, Breslau, or Cracow.

The time limit, however, imposed certain other conditions. The Franco-German frontier from Luxemburg to Switzerland had been transformed into one long barrier, garnished with detached forts and resting upon the first-class fortresses of Verdun, Toul, Epinal, and Belfort. To pierce such a barrier was not impossible but to break through in three weeks, with the whole French army before the forts and the shortness of the front offering the Germans no opportunity to take advantage of their superior numbers, was recognized as next to impossible.

There was left the roads through Belgium and Luxemburg. To come this way Germany had for more than a decade been constructing strategic railways leading from the Rhine and Moselle valleys to the Belgian frontier, double-track roads that served in a desolate country, but were provided with all the necessary machinery for detraining thousands of soldiers.

Belgium might not consent to suffer this invasion of her territory but the Belgian army was negligible, and the German heavy artillery was known to be adequate to dispose of the antiquated forts of Namur and Liege with brief delay. Once the Germans had passed the Meuse and deployed upon the Belgian plain, they could turn south and pass the Franco-Belgian frontier, which was destitute of real defenses, the few fortresses being obsolete, and thence the road ran down to Paris clear and open.

Conceivably Great Britain might make the Belgian invasion a cause for joining France. But, again, the British army was small, there was the gravest doubt as to whether it would be sent to the Continent at all, and even if it came, it would not redress the balance between the French and German armies. Such being the case, as German high command saw it, Belgium was summoned, and refusing, was attacked, the German armies passing the Belgian frontier in the direction of Liege on August 4, 1914, the day on which Germany declared war upon France, and the forty-fourth anniversary of the invasion of France in the Franco-Prussian War.

FROM THE MEUSE TO THE MARNE

To grasp the main circumstances of the opening campaign it is simplest to think of the whole German invading forces as comprising one army. The right of this army under Kluck and Bülow came west through Belgium by Brussels and Namur, swinging south after the Belgians were disposed of, and leaving a guard to curtain the Belgian army which had retreated on Antwerp. The center moved southwest through the Belgian Ardennes and Luxemburg, entering France between Longwy and Givet on the Meuse. The left moved from Metz and Strassburg, attempting to force the French barrier line between Toul and Epinal. The center was commanded by the German Crown Prince, Albert of Württemberg, and Hausen, the left by the Crown Prince of Bavaria and Heeringen. Smaller forces operating in Upper Alsace played little real part in the operations.

Taking up first the German right: It did not begin its real advance until August 12, 1914. Liege had been captured on August 7, the last fort fell on August 15. Meantime the Germans pushed a heavy screen of cavalry forward, and there was steady skirmishing between Liege and Brussels, which was magnified into battles and German defeats. In point of fact, the Belgian army was rapidly pushed back, and once the main German advance began, it fled to Antwerp.

Kluck took Brussels on August 18, 1914, and turned south, meeting the first serious resistance at Mons. Bülow, moving across the Meuse at Huy, took Namur on August 23, 1914, and his troops fought at Charleroi, while those of Hausen forced a passage of the Meuse south of Namur. The French were beaten at Charleroi, and the British while the battle of Mons was still undecided, were forced to retreat, because Bülow's success in taking Namur had imperiled the whole allied left flank.

Because he delayed his retreat too long, Sir John French was immediately threatened with destruction, Kluck having succeeded in getting on his flank, while sending superior numbers against his front. For a week there was grave danger that the Germans would be able to destroy the British and intervene between the French left and the city of Paris. At Cambrai on the 25th, British destruction seemed imminent, but the British just managed to win clear, and French troops coming up on their exposed flank by September 1, they were safe.

The French center had essayed an offensive into the Ardennes at the moment the battle of Charleroi was beginning. In this they did not succeed, and the Fourth Army under Langle de Cary fell back in perfect order from the Belgian-Luxemberg frontier across the Meuse near Sedan, where they held their line until the general retreat began. Henceforth the French armies from left to right were not seriously threatened until the final struggle at the Marne.

But the right under De Castelnau had been obliged to retreat. It had opened the campaign by a series of victories which had carried the main force into German Lorraine as far as Saarburg on the railroad from Metz to Strassburg. To the south Mülhausen had been taken, lost, and recaptured. But in the third week of August the main army encountered strong forces in the region of Morhange and fell back on Nancy, the frontier town of Lunéville being momentarily occupied by the Germans. At Nancy it stood. But its stand was one of the important battles of the western war and a contributory cause to the subsequent victory at the Marne. By this victory the eastern barrier was held and the German effort to isolate Verdun and Toul blocked. Some of the most terrible fighting of the war took place here, and the Germans, fighting under the eye of the kaiser suffered colossal losses.