A General Sketch of the European War Part 5

The strategical position of modern Germany is embarra.s.sed because each of these four corners must be saved by the armies. 1 is Belgium--before the war indifferent to Germany, but now destined to be vital to her position--2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is Silesia, and the German commanders, as well as the German Government, must remain to the last moment--if once they are thrown on the defensive--in grave indecision as to which of the four can best be spared when invasion threatens; or else, as is more probable, they must disperse their forces in the attempt to hold all four at once. It is a situation which has but rarely occurred before in the history of war, and which has always proved disastrous.

Germany then must--once she is in Belgium--hold on to Belgium, or she is in peril; she must hold on to East Prussia, or she is in peril; she must hold on to Alsace-Lorraine, or she is in peril; and she must hold on to Silesia, or it is all up with her. If there were some common strategical factor binding these four areas together, so that the defence of one should involve and aid the defence of all, the difficulties thus imposed upon German strategy would be greatly lessened. Though even then the mere having to defend four outlying corners instead of a centre would produce confusion and embarra.s.sment the moment numerical inferiority had appeared upon the side of the defence. But, as a fact, there is no such common factor.

Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium, East Prussia and Silesia, stand strategically badly separated one from the other. Even the two on the East and the two on the West, though apparently forming pairs upon the map, are not dependent on one system of communications, and are cut off from each other by territory difficult or hostile, while between the Eastern and the Western group there is a s.p.a.ce of five hundred miles.

Let us, before discussing the political embarra.s.sment to strategy produced by these four widely distant and quite separate areas, translate the diagram in the terms of a sketch map.

On the following sketch map, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia, and Silesia are shaded, as were the four corners of the diagram. No. 1 is Belgium, 2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is Silesia. The area occupied by the German Empire, including its present occupation of Belgium, is marked by the broad outline; and the areas shaded represent, not the exact limits of the four territories that are so important, but those portions of them which are essential: the non-Polish portion of Silesia, the non-Polish portion of East Prussia, the plain of Belgium, and all Alsace-Lorraine.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch 13.]

Now the reason that each of these must at all costs be preserved from invasion is, as I have said, different in each case, and we shall do well to examine what those reasons are; for upon them depends the political hesitation they inevitably, cause to arise in the plans of the Great General Staff.

1. _Belgium._ The military annexation of Belgium has been a result of the war, and, from the German point of view, an unexpected result.

Germany both hoped and expected that her armies would pa.s.s through Belgium as they did, in fact, pa.s.s through Luxembourg. The resistance of Belgium produced the military annexation of that country; the reign of terror exercised therein has immobilized about 100,000 of the German troops who would otherwise be free for the front; the checking of the advance into France has turned the German general political objective against England, and, to put the matter in the vaguest but most fundamental terms, the German mind has gradually come, since October, to regard the retention of Belgium as something quite essential. And this because:--(_a_) It gives a most weighty a.s.set in the bargaining for peace. (_b_) It gives a seaboard against England.

(_c_) It provides ample munition, house-room, and transport facility, without which the campaign in North-eastern France could hardly be prolonged. (_d_) It puts Holland at the mercy of Germany, for she can, by retaining Belgium, strangle Dutch trade, if she chooses to divert her carriage of goods through Belgian ports. (_e_) It is a specific conquest; the Government will be able to say to the German people, "It is true we had to give up this or that, but Belgium is a definite new territory, the occupation of which and the proposed annexation of which is a proof of victory." (_f_) The retention of Belgium has been particularly laid down as the cause of quarrel between Great Britain and Germany; to retain Belgium is to mark that score against what is now the special enemy of Germany in the German mind. (_g_) Antwerp is the natural port for all the centre of Europe in commerce westward over the ocean. (_h_) With Belgium may go the Belgian colonies--that is, the Congo--for the possession of which Germany has worked ceaselessly year in and year out during the last fifteen years by a steady and highly subsidized propaganda against the Belgian administration. She has done it through conscious and unconscious agents; by playing upon the cupidity of French and British Parliamentarians, of rum shippers, upon religious differences, and upon every agency to her hand.

We may take it, then, that the retention of Belgium is in German eyes now quite indispensable. "If I abandon Belgium," she says, "it is much more than a strategic retreat; it is a political confession of failure, and the moral support behind me at home will break down."

If I were writing not of calculable considerations, but of other and stronger forces, I should add that to withdraw from Belgium, where so many women and children have been ma.s.sacred, so many jewels of the past befouled or destroyed, so wanton an attack upon Christ and His Church delivered, would be a loss of Pagan prestige intolerably strong, and a triumph of all that against which Prussia set out to war.

2. _Alsace-Lorraine._ But Alsace-Lorraine is also "indispensable." We have seen on an earlier page what the retention of that territory means. Alsace-Lorraine is the symbol of the old victory. It is the German-speaking land which the amazingly unreal superst.i.tions of German academic pedantry discovered to be something sacredly necessary to the unity of an ideal Germany, though the people inhabiting it desired nothing better than the destruction of the Prussian name. It is more than that. It is the bastion beyond the Rhine which keeps the Rhine close covered; it is the two great historic fortresses of Stra.s.sburg and Metz which are the challenge Germany has thrown down against European tradition and the civilization of the West; it is something which has become knit up with the whole German soul, and to abandon it is like a man abandoning his t.i.tle or his name, or surrendering his sword. Through what must not the German mind pa.s.s before its directors would consent to the sacrifice of such a fundamentally symbolic possession? There is defeat in the very suggestion; and the very suggestion, though it has already occurred to the Great General Staff, and has already, I believe, been mentioned in one proposal for peace, would be intolerable to the ma.s.s of the enemy's opinion.

3. _East Prussia._ East Prussia is sacred in another, but also an intense fashion. It is the very kernel of the Prussian monarchy. When Berlin was but a market town for the Electors of Brandenburg, those same Electors had contrived that East Prussia, which was outside the empire, should be recognized as a kingdom. Frederick the Great's father, while of Brandenburg an Elector, was in Prussia proper a king, a man who had emanc.i.p.ated that cradle of the Prussian power. The province in all save its southern belt (which is Polish) is the very essence of Prussian society: a ma.s.s of serfs, technically free, economically abject, governed by those squires who own them, their goods, and what might be their soil. The Russians wasted East Prussia in their first invasion, and they did well though they paid so heavy a price, for to wound East Prussia was to wound the very soul of that which now governs the German Empire. When the landed proprietors fled before the Russian invasion, and when there fled with them the townsfolk, the serfs rose and looted the country houses. In a way quite different from Belgium, quite different from Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia is essential. Forces will and must be sent periodically to defend that territory, however urgently they may be needed elsewhere, as the pressure upon Germany increases. The German commanders, if they forget East Prussia for a moment in the consideration of the other essential points, will, the moment their eyes are turned upon East Prussia again, remember with violent emotion all that the province means to the reigning dynasty and its supporters, and they will do anything rather than let that frontier go. The memory of the first invasion is too acute, the terror of its repet.i.tion too poignant, to permit its abandonment.

4. _Silesia._ Silesia, for quite other reasons (and remember that these different reasons for defending such various points are the essence of the embarra.s.sment in which German strategy will find itself), must be saved. It has been insisted over and over again in these pages what Silesia means. Its meaning is twofold. If Silesia goes, the safest, the most remote from the sea, the most independent of imports of the German industrial regions, is gone. Silesia is, again, the country of the great proprietors. Amuse yourselves by remembering the names of Pless and of Lichnowsky. There are dozens of others. But, most important of all, Silesia is what Belgium is not, what Alsace-Lorraine is not, what East Prussia is not--it is the strategic key. Who holds Silesia commands the twin divergent roads to Berlin northwards, to Vienna southwards. Who holds Silesia holds the Moravian Gate. Who holds Silesia turns the line of the Oder, and pa.s.ses behind the barrier fortresses which Germany has built upon her Eastern front. Who holds Silesia strikes his wedge in between the German-speaking north and the German-speaking south, and joins hands with the Slavs of Bohemia. Not that we should exaggerate the Slav factor, for religion and centuries of varying culture disturb its unity. But it is something. The Russian forces are Slav; the resurrection of Poland has been promised; the Czechs are not submissive to the German claim of natural mastery, and whoever holds Silesia throws a bridge between Slav and Slav if his aims are an extension of power in that race. For a hundred reasons Silesia must be saved.

Now put yourself in the position of the men who must make a decision between these four outliers--Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia, and Silesia--and understand the hesitation such divergent aims impose upon them. Hardly are they prepared to sacrifice one of the four when the defensive problem becomes acute, but its claims will be pressed in every conceivable manner--by public sentiment, by economic considerations, by mere strategy, by a political tradition, by the influence of men powerful with the Prussian monarchy, whose homes and wealth are threatened. "If I am to hold Belgium, I must give up Alsace. How dare I do that? To save Silesia I must expose East Prussia. How dare I? I am at bay, and the East must at all costs be saved. I will hold Prussia and Silesia, but to withdraw from Belgium and from beyond the Rhine is defeat." The whole thing is an embroglio.

That conclusion is necessary and inexorable. It would not appear at all until, or if, numerical weakness imposed on the enemy a gradual concentration of the defensive; but once that numerical weakness has come, the fatal choices must be made. It may be that a strict, silent, and virile resolution, such as saved France this summer, a preparedness for particular sacrifices calculated beforehand, will determine first some one retirement and then another. It may be--though it is not in the modern Prussian temperament--that a defensive as prolonged as possible will be attempted even with inferior numbers, and that, as circ.u.mstances may dictate, Alsace-Lorraine or Belgium, Silesia or East Prussia will be the first to be deliberately sacrificed; but one must be, and, it would seem, another after, and in the difficulty of choice a wound to the German strategy will come.

The four corners are differently defensible--Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium only by artifice, and with great numbers of men; Silesia only so long as Austria (and Hungary) stand firm. East Prussia has her natural arrangement of lakes to make invasion tedious, and to permit defence with small numbers.

Between the two groups, Eastern and Western, is all the s.p.a.ce of Germany--the s.p.a.ce separating Aberdeen from London. Between each part of each pair, in spite of an excellent railway system, is the block in the one case of the Ardennes and the Eifel, in the other of empty, ill-communicated Poland. But each is strategically a separate thing; the political value of each a separate thing; the embarra.s.sment between all four insuperable.

Such is the situation imposed by the geography of the European continent upon our enemies, with the opportunities and the drawbacks which that situation affords and imposes.

I repeat, upon the balance, our enemies had geographical opportunities far superior to our own.

Our power of partial blockade (to which I will return in a moment) is more than counterbalanced by the separation which Nature has determined between the two groups of Allies. The ice of the North, the Narrows of the Dardanelles, establish this, as do the Narrows of the Scandinavian Straits.

The necessity of fighting upon two fronts, to which our enemies are compelled, is more than compensated by that natural arrangement of the Danube valley and of the Baltic plain which adds to the advantage of a central situation the power of rapid communication between East and West; while the chief embarra.s.sment of our enemies in their geographical arrangement, which is the outlying situation of Hungary coupled with the presence of four vital regions at the four external corners of the German Empire, is rather political than geographical in nature.

I will now turn to the converse advantages and disadvantages afforded and imposed by geographical conditions upon the Allies.

_The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Allies._

It has been apparent from the above in what way the geographical circ.u.mstance of Germany and Austria-Hungary advantaged and disadvantaged those two empires in the course of a war against East and West.

Let us next see how the Allies were advantaged and disadvantaged by their position.

1. The first great disadvantage which the Allies most obviously suffer is their separation one from the other by the Germanic ma.s.s.

The same central position which gives Germany and Austria-Hungary their power of close intercommunion, of exactly coordinating all their movements, of using their armies like one army, and of dealing with rapidity alternate blows eastward and westward, produces contrary effects in the case of the Allies. Even if hourly communication were possible by telegraph between the two main groups, French and Russian, that would not be at all the same thing as personal, sustained, and continuous contact such as is enjoyed by the group of their enemies.

But, as a fact, even the very imperfect and indirect kind of contact which can be established by telegraphing over great distances is largely lacking. The French and the Russians are in touch. The commanders can and do pursue a combined plan. But the communication of results and the corresponding arrangement of new dispositions are necessarily slow and gravely interrupted. Indeed, it is, as we shall see in a moment, one of the main effects of geography upon this campaign that Russia must suffer during all its early stages a very severe isolation.

In general, the Allies as a whole suffer from the necessity under which they find themselves of working in two fields, remote the one from the other by a distance of some six hundred miles, not even connected by sea, and geographically most unfortunately independent.

2. A second geographical disadvantage of the Allies consists in the fact that one of them, Great Britain, is in the main a maritime Power.

That this has great compensating advantages we shall also see, but for the moment we are taking the disadvantages separately, and, so counting them one by one, we must recognize that England's being an island (her social structure industrialized and free from conscription, her interests not only those of Europe but those of such a commercial scattered empire as is always characteristic of secure maritime Powers) produces, in several of its aspects, a geographical weakness to the Allied position, and that for several reasons, which I will now tabulate:--

(_a_) The position of England in the past, her very security as an island, has led her to reject the conception of universal service. She could only, at the outset of hostilities, provide a small Expeditionary Force, the equivalent at the most of a thirtieth of the Allied forces.

(_b_) Her reserves in men who could approach the continental field in, say, the first year, even under the most vigorous efforts, would never reach anything like the numbers that could be afforded by a conscript nation. The very maximum that can be or is hoped for by the most sanguine is the putting into the field, after at least a year of war, of less than three-sixteenths of the total Allied forces, although her population is larger than that of France, and more than a third that of the enemy.

(_c_) She is compelled to garrison and defend, and in places to police, dependencies the population of which will in some cases furnish no addition to the forces of the Allies, and in all cases furnish but a small proportion.

(_d_) The isolation of her territory by the sea, coupled with her large population and its industrial character, makes Britain potentially the most vulnerable point in the alliance.

So long as her fleet is certainly superior to that of the enemy, and has only to meet oversea attack, this vulnerability is but little felt; but once let her position at sea be lost, or even left undecided, or once let the indiscriminate destruction of commercial marine be seriously begun, and she is at the mercy of that enemy. For she cannot feed herself save by supplies from without, and she cannot take part in the supplying of armies with men and munitions upon the continent.

(_e_) She is open to fear aggression upon any one of her independent colonies oversea, and yet she is not able to draw upon them for the whole of their potential strength, or, indeed, for more than a very small proportion of it. In other words, the British Fleet guarantees some fifteen million of European race beyond the seas from attack by the enemy, but cannot draw from these fifteen million more than an insignificant fraction of the million of men and more which, fully armed, they might furnish; nor has she any control over their finance, so as to be able to count upon the full weight of their wealth; nor can she claim their resources in goods and munitions. She can only obtain these by paying for them.

There is here a very striking contrast between her position and that of the Germanic Powers.

(_f_) Her isolation and maritime supremacy, coupled with her industrial character, make her during the strain of equipment the workshop of the Allies. That this is a great advantage is evident; but the disadvantage attaching to it is that very large proportions of her manhood are necessarily withdrawn from the field for the purposes of her shipbuilding, her communications, her manufactory of arms and all kinds of supplies, her seafaring work, both civil and military.

Of the two other main Allies, the French disadvantage may be thus summarized, and it is slight:--

(_a_) The French political frontier, as established since the defeat of the French in 1871, is an open frontier. It has no natural features upon which the defensive can rely. In the lack of this the French fortified at very heavy expense that portion of their frontier which faced their certain enemy, and established a line from Verdun to Belfort calculated to check the first movement of his offensive. But all the two hundred miles to the north of this, the whole line between Verdun and the North Sea, was virtually open. There were, indeed, certain fortified places upon that line, but they formed no consecutive system, and, as their armaments grew old, they were not brought up to date. The truth is, that the defence of France upon this frontier was really left to the co-operation of Belgium. If, as was believed to be almost certain, Prussian morals being what they are, the Prussian guarantee to respect Belgian neutrality would be torn up at the outbreak of war, then three great fortresses--Liege, Namur, and Antwerp--would hold up the enemy's advance in this quarter, and perform the function of delay which the obsolete armament of the north-eastern French frontier could not perform. We shall see, when we come to the conflicting theories of warfare held by the various belligerents, what a grievous miscalculation this was, and how largely it accounted for the first disasters of the war. But, at any rate, let us remember, as our first point, the absence of any natural line of defence in France as against a German invasion, remembering, also, that the French would necessarily, at the beginning of any war, be upon the defensive on account of their inferior numbers. Had France, for instance, had along her frontiers, and just within them, such a line as Germany possesses in the Rhine, she would have fallen back at the outset upon that line. But she has no such advantage.

(_b_) The second disadvantage of the French geographically is one immixed with political considerations. The French have for centuries produced, and have for two thousand years believed in, central government. For at least three hundred years all the life of the nation has centred upon Paris; all the railways and all the great system of roads and most of the waterways of the north similarly have Paris for their nucleus. Now, this central ganglion of the whole French organism is but 120 miles from the frontier, ten days' easy marching. An enemy coming in from the north-east not only finds no natural obstacle in his way, but has Paris as nearly within his grasp as, say, Cologne is within the grasp of a French invasion of North Germany. This feature has had the most important consequences upon the whole of French history. It was particularly the determining point of 1870.

To meet the handicap, the French of our generation have combined two policies.

First, they have fortified the whole region of Paris so thoroughly that it has sometimes been called "a fortified province;" an area of nearly thirty miles across at its narrowest, and of something like from seven to eight hundred square miles, is comprised within this plan.

The weakness of this in the face of modern fire will again be dealt with when we come to the conflicting theories upon war established during the long peace.

Secondly, the French established a policy whereby, if Paris were menaced in a future campaign, the Government should abandon that central point, and, in spite of the grave inconvenience proceeding from the way in which all material communications centred upon the capital and all established offices were grouped there, would withdraw the whole central system of government to Bordeaux, and leave Paris to defend itself, precisely as though it were of no more importance than any other fortified point. They would recognize the strategic values of the district; they would deliberately sacrifice its political and sentimental value. They would never again run the risk of losing a campaign because one particular area of the national soil happened to be occupied. The plans of their armies and the instructions of their Staff particularly warned commanders against disturbing any defensive scheme by too great an anxiety to save Paris.

If this were the disadvantage geographically of France, what was that of Russia?

Russia's geographical disadvantage was twofold. First, she had no outlet to an open sea in Europe save through the arctic port of Archangel. This port was naturally closed for nearly half the year, and how long it might be artificially kept partially open by ice-breakers it remained for the war to prove. But even if it were kept open the whole year in this precarious fashion, it lay on the farther side of hundreds of miles of waste and deserted land connected only with the active centre of Russia by one narrow-gauge line of railway with very little rolling stock. The great eastern port of Vladivostok was nearly as heavily handicapped, and its immense distance from the scene of operations in the West, with which it was only connected by a line six thousand miles long, was another drawback. Russia might, indeed, by the favour of neutrals or of Allies, use warm water ports. If the Turks should remain neutral and permit supply to reach her through the Dardanelles, the Black Sea ports were open all the year round, and Port Arthur (nearly as far off as Vladivostok) was also open in the Far East. But the Baltic, in a war with Germany, was closed to her. Certain goods from outside could reach her from Scandinavia, round by land along the north of the Baltic, but very slowly and at great expense. It so happened also that, as the war proceeded, this question of supply became unexpectedly important, because all parties found the expenditure of heavy artillery high-explosive ammunition far larger than had been calculated for, and Russia was particularly weak therein and dependent upon the West. This disadvantage under which Russia lay was largely the cause of her embarra.s.sment, and of the prolongation of hostilities in the winter that followed the declaration of war.

The fact that Russia was ill supplied with railways, and hardly supplied at all with hard roads (in a climate where the thaw turned her deep soil into a ma.s.s of mud) is political rather than geographical, but it must be remembered in connection with this difficulty of supply.