A Short History of the Great War Part 7

The work of our armies in Egypt was less sensational, but it was making solid progress and laying firm foundations during the autumn of 1916. The Grand Sherif of Mecca was proclaimed king of the Hedjaz, and he was a thorn in the side of the Turks. Their defeat at Romani had been followed by the steady construction of a railway eastward across the desert from Kantara, and on 20 December El Arish was captured, while on the 23rd the Turks who had fled south-east to Magdhaba were there surrounded and forced to surrender. The success was repeated at Rafa on the Palestine frontier a fortnight later, and presently the whole Sinai peninsula was cleared of the enemy forces (see Map, p. 352). Early in February a final blow was struck on the western frontiers of Egypt at the Senussi, and Egypt was converted from an enemy objective into a fruitful basis of operations against the Turkish Empire. Whatever might be said for frontal attacks in the west of Europe, ways round were proved to be the shortest in the East, and the failure of the direct blow at Turkey's heart in the Dardanelles was redeemed by success along the circuitous routes through Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Among the other forgotten achievements of the first two and a half years of the war was the completion, chiefly by British arms, of the establishment in the African continent of Entente and mainly British supremacy. For even before the Turks had been driven from the frontiers of Egypt the Germans had been expelled from all the important parts of East Africa. The progress had been slow and not very creditable to our earlier efforts, which failed through an underestimate of the German strength, and particularly of the skill and resource of the German commander Von Lettow-Vorbeck. But it was sound as well as inevitable strategy to make sure of what we had by suppressing rebellion in the South African Union and then securing its frontiers by the conquest of its German neighbour before proceeding to concentrate forces for an offensive against an isolated German stronghold which could not threaten any essential interest nor affect the main struggle for victory in the war. The case against divergent operations was strongest of all against the East African campaign; and it would have been criminal folly for the sake of amour propre or imperial expansion to diminish our safeguards against a German victory in the West, or weaken the defence of our threatened communications with Egypt and India. Von Lettow-Vorbeck had forces enough to hold his own, but he never even attempted the conquest of British East Africa or the Belgian Congo, and the most nervous antic.i.p.ation could not picture him as a serious danger to other dominions.

The Conquest Of East Africa

He was therefore left very much to himself until the South African Union, having set its own house in order and secured its frontiers by expelling German rule from the southern part of the continent, was able to lend its military power and its generalship to the task of reducing the Germans in East Africa. It was formidable enough, not so much from the opposition of man as because of the obstacles nature placed in the way. A tropical climate, torrential rains which played havoc with transport, the tzetze-fly which slew beasts of burden in hundreds of thousands, impenetrable forests, impa.s.sable swamps, immense mountain ma.s.ses, and an area almost as large as Central Europe, provided a problem as vast as that of the great Boer War, and more difficult of solution but for the fact that Von Lettow-Vorbeck's forces could not be compared with those of our past antagonists and present allies. Still they were far more dangerous than any we had encountered in our normal wars against native races; for they had been trained by German officers, experts with machine guns and the other scientific equipment of civilized conflict; and three ships at least had eluded the blockade and relieved Von Lettow-Vorbeck's most pressing need of munitions; and he had selected his coloured troops from the hardiest and most bellicose of the native tribes. With their help he had kept the German colony intact until 1916, and even held at Taveta an angle of British East Africa.

Smith-Dorrien had been selected for the command in the autumn of 1915, but ill-health prevented him from taking it up, and in February 1916 General s.m.u.ts arrived at Mombasa to conduct the campaign. Experience had made us shy of enforced landings from the sea; and rejecting the idea of seizing as bases Tanga or Dar-es-Salaam, which would have given him shorter lines of communication with the Cape, s.m.u.ts adopted the more circuitous route by the railway from Mombasa, with the design of forcing the gap below Kilimanjaro and driving the Germans southwards, while British and Belgian subsidiary forces impinged upon the enemy's flank from the Lakes, the Congo State, and Nyasa in the west. His advance began on 5 March and Taveta was occupied on the 10th. A frontal attack on the pa.s.s between Kilimanjaro and the Pare mountains savoured rather of British than Boer methods, and s.m.u.ts preferred to send Van Deventer round the north of Kilimanjaro to turn the German position from Longido and cut off their escape. Van Deventer was successful, and at Moschi blocked the Germans' retreat westwards; they managed, however, to slip away south-eastwards by Lake Jipe, but the Kilimanjaro ma.s.sif had been cleared, and s.m.u.ts established his headquarters at Moschi. His force was now arranged in three divisions, the first under Hoskins, the second under Van Deventer, and the third under Brits; the first consisted of British and Indian troops, the two others of South African. The plan was to strike with the second division from Moschi towards Kondoa Irangi and thence at the German central railway, while the first and third cleared the Pare and Usambara mountains and the coast, and then marched on Handeni and threatened the central railway on a parallel line to Van Deventer's attack. Van Deventer's second division marched with almost incredible speed. He started from Aruscha on 1 April, and by the 19th had driven the Germans from Kondoa Irangi, more than a hundred miles away. In May and June the other divisions cleared the Pave and Usambara mountains, reached Handeni and Kangata, and with naval a.s.sistance occupied Tanga, Pangani, Sadani Bay, and Bagamoyo in July and August almost without opposition. Von Lettow-Vorbeck had transferred the bulk of his troops south and then westwards up the central railway to bar Van Deventer's progress; and in the process he had been forced to abandon the north-eastern quarter of the colony. No small part of the north-western province of Ruanda had been lost as well: the Belgians had occupied Kigali and the British had driven the Germans from their sh.o.r.e of Lake Victoria Nyanza.

The rapidity and divergence of these attacks, which were admirably timed, distracted Von Lettow-Vorbeck's strategy, and in spite of his interior lines he was unable to offer successful resistance. No sooner did he send troops to bar s.m.u.ts' advance from Kangata into the Nguru hills than Van Deventer struck west, south, and south-east from Kondoa Irangi. To the west he took Singida, thus getting behind the Germans on Lake Tanganyika; to the south and south-east he got astride the central railway by 14 July and pushed down it eastwards to Kilossa, which he reached on 22 August. He was now almost due south the Nguru hills, whence s.m.u.ts, attacking from the north, had driven the Germans before the middle of August. This converging advance made Mrogoro the only line of retreat, and s.m.u.ts planned a complicated outflanking movement to intercept it. They escaped by a track unknown to our forces on the 26th, and prepared to stand south of the central railway in the Ulunguru hills. s.m.u.ts was too quick for them, but they repelled a badly-timed attack at Kissaki on 6 September. Their retreat had, however, made the coast untenable: on 3 September the capital Dar-es-Salaam surrendered, and all the remaining ports before the end of the month. Van Deventer, too, had pressed south to the Ruaha on the 10th, the Belgians occupied Tabora on the 19th, and General Northey, advancing from Nyasa in the south-west, had reached Iringa before the end of August, while some Portuguese troops crossed the Rovuma river, the frontier between German East Africa and Mozambique, and made a pretence of marching north. By the end of September the great German colony had been conquered save for the unhealthy south-eastern corner, where only the Mahenge plateau provided a decent habitation for white troops.

The campaign had, however, tried the health and endurance of our forces, and three months' respite was now taken for recuperation and reinforcement before the final task of eradicating the Germans from the remnants of their territory. The great difficulty was that, apart from the Mahenge plateau, they were not rooted to any spot, and their elusiveness was ill.u.s.trated by the fact that the Tabora garrison evaded the encircling forces and joined Von Lettow-Vorbeck at Mahenge. The campaign reopened on 1 January 1917, and consisted of a converging attack on Mahenge by Hoskins from Kilwa on the coast, by Northey from Lupembe, by Van Deventer from Iringa, and by Beves and subsidiary forces from north of the Rufigi. s.m.u.ts was summoned on the 29th to England to take part in the imperial conference, and Hoskins succeeded to the chief command. Unprecedented rains impeded our operations; progress became slow, and remained so after Van Deventer replaced Hoskins at the end of May. Not till October was Mahenge occupied by the Belgians. On 26 November half of the German forces under Von Lettow-Vorbeck's lieutenant Tafel were forced to surrender between Mahenge and the Rovuma; but Von Lettow himself escaped across the frontier with sufficient troops to terrorize the Portuguese and maintain himself in their territory until the end of the war.

The victor in the East African campaign came in 1917 to a Europe where victory seemed also on the way, for the early spring saw the only German retreat of moment until the war was near its end. The battles of the previous September had convinced the Germans that their line upon the Somme was barely tenable, and they had employed the winter pause to perfect the shorter and better line upon which they had begun to work at Michaelmas. Possibly it was to frustrate these preparations that Haig reopened his campaign so early as he did. On 11 January, the day on which the Allies answered President Wilson's note, British troops began to nibble at the point of the salient on the Ancre which had been created by the battle of the Somme. It was a modest sort of offensive; for it was no part of the Allies' combined plan of operations, which had been settled in conference during November, to launch a first-cla.s.s attack across the devastated battlefield of the Somme. That wasted area was as effective a barrier as a chain of Alps to military pressure, and the Germans were thus left free to withdraw from their salient without much risk of disaster. They did not contemplate any serious stand, and until the Allies were ready to strike at the flanks of their position the Germans could afford to retreat at a pace which was not seriously hustled by our advance. They showed as much prompt.i.tude, foresight, and skill in retirement as they had done in their advance; they suffered few casualties and had no appreciable loss in guns or prisoners.

The details of the movement were therefore of little moment, and owed the attention they attracted to the habit of measuring progress in war by miles marked on a map. It was the end of January before the preliminary operation of clearing the Beaumont-Hamel spur was completed, and the apparently substantial advance began with the fall of Grandcourt on 7 February. A more ambitious attack on Miraumont from the south of the Ancre was somewhat disconcerted on the 17th by a German bombardment of our troops as they a.s.sembled, although the night was dark and misty; for even in France the Germans found spies to work for them, and a number of executions for treachery failed to prevent knowledge of our plans from occasionally reaching the enemy. A week later the German retreat extended, and Warlencourt, Pys, Miraumont, and Serre were evacuated. Again the Germans stopped for a time to breathe, and it was not till 10 March that Irles, a bare mile from Miraumont, was abandoned. By that time the Germans had only rearguards and patrols left either north or south of the Somme, and when on the 17th a general Allied advance was ordered it encountered little resistance. The area of the German withdrawal had spread over a front of a hundred miles from Arras in the north to Soissons in the south. On that day British troops occupied Bapaume, while the French, whose line we had taken over as far as the river Avre, proceeded to liberate scores of villages between it and the Aisne. On that day, too, by one of the apparent illogicalities of French politics, M. Briand's Cabinet, which had held office for the unusual period of eighteen months, resigned.

The German tide rolled sullenly and slowly back for another fortnight. Peronne, Nesle, and Chaulnes fell on the 18th, Chauny and Ham on the 19th, and on the 20th French cavalry were within five miles of St. Quentin. By the end of March the British line ran from a mile in front of Arras to the Havrincourt wood, some seven miles from Cambrai, and thence southwards to Savy, less than two miles from St. Quentin. Thence the French line ran to Moy on the Sambre ca.n.a.l, behind La Fere, which the Germans had flooded, and through the lower forest of St. Gobain to the plateau north-east of Soissons. The German resistance had gradually stiffened, and there was a good deal of local fighting in the first week of April while the Allies were testing the strength of the positions behind which the Germans had taken shelter. We called them the Hindenburg lines, and believed that the Germans had so named them to give them a nominal invincibility which they did not possess in fact. In Germany they were known as the Siegfried lines, a name which properly only applied to the sector between Cambrai and La Fere which was also protected by the St. Quentin ca.n.a.l. That was the front of the new German position; its flanks rested on the Vimy Ridge to the north, and on the St. Gobain forest and the Chemin des Dames to the south. It was a better and shorter line than that which the battles of 1914 had left to the combatants without much choice on either side, and the Germans were right enough in claiming that the Hindenburg lines were selected by themselves. Their retreat thereto was not, however, a matter of choice except in so far as they preferred it to the disaster which would otherwise have overtaken them in their more exposed positions. As a retreat the movement could hardly have been more successfully carried out; but the military distinction was marred by moral disgrace. For destruction was pushed to the venomous length of maiming for years the orchards of the peasantry in the abandoned territory. The crime may have been no more than a characteristic expression of militarist malevolence and stupidity; but it may also have been calculated to bar the path to peace by agreement and to force on the German people the choice, as a Junker expressed it later, between victory and h.e.l.l.

The success of the German withdrawal discounted our spring offensive, not because any attack was designed on the Somme, but because the Hindenburg lines and the desert before them gave that part of the German front a security which enabled the German higher command to divert reserves from its defence to that of the threatened wings. Here preparations had been begun by both the French and the British before the German retreat, and it had barely reached its limit when on Easter Monday, 9 April, Haig attacked along the Vimy Ridge and in front of Arras. Since 21 March a steady bombardment had been destroying the German wire defences and hara.s.sing their back areas, and in the first days of April it rose to the pitch which portended an attack in force. Since the battle of Loos in September 1915 our front had sagged a little, and points like the Double Cra.s.sier had been recovered by the Germans. So, too, the French capture of the Vimy heights, which had been announced in May that year, proved something of a fairy tale, and in April 1917 our line ran barely east of Souchez, Neuville, and the Labyrinth. It was held by Allenby's Third Army, which joined Gough's Fifth just south of Arras, and by Horne's First, which extended Allenby's left from Lens northwards to La Ba.s.see. The Germans had three lines of defences for their advanced positions, and then behind them the famous switch line which hinged upon the Siegfried line at Queant and ran northwards to Drocourt, whence quarries and slag-heaps linked it on to Lens (see Maps, pp. 79, 302). This line had not been finished at the beginning of April, and hopes were no doubt entertained that complete success in the battle of Arras, reinforced by Nivelle's contemplated offensive on the Chemin des Dames, would break these incomplete defences and thus turn the whole of the Hindenburg lines.

At dawn on Easter Monday the British guns broke out with a bombardment which marked another stage in the growing intensity of artillery fire, and obliterated the first and then the second German line of trenches along a front of some twelve miles. To the north the Canadians under Sir Julian Byng carried the crest of the Vimy Ridge, and by nine o'clock had mastered it all except at a couple of points. Farther south troops that were mainly Scottish captured Le Folie farm, Blangy, and Tilloy-lez-Mofflaines, while a fortress known as the Harp, and more formidable than any on the Somme, was seized by a number of Tanks. The greatest advance of the day was made due east of Arras, where the second and third German lines were taken and Feuchy, Athies, and Fampoux were captured. On the morrow the Canadians completed their hold on the Vimy Ridge, and Farbus was taken just below it. On the 11th the important position of Monchy, which outflanked the end of the Siegfried line, was carried after a fierce struggle; and on the 12th and the following days the salient we had created was widened north and south of Monchy. The capture of Wancourt and Heninel broke off another fragment of the Siegfried line, while to the north our advance spread up to the gates of Lens; the villages of Bailleul, Willerval, Vimy, Givenchy-en-Goh.e.l.le, Angres, and Lievin, with the Double Cra.s.sier and several of the suburbs of Lens, fell into our hands. The Germans appeared to have nothing left but the unfinished Drocourt-Queant switch line between them and a real disaster.

The battle of Arras was the most successful the British had fought on the Western front since the Germans had stabilized their defences. Our bombardment was heavier than the enemy's, and was far more effective against his wire entanglements and trenches than it had ever been before; and the new method of locating hostile batteries by tests of sound enabled our gunners to put many of them out of action. Nor throughout the war was there a finer achievement than the Canadian capture of the Vimy Ridge or the British five-mile advance in a few hours to Fampoux. The German losses in men and guns also exceeded any that the British had yet inflicted in a similar period; in the first three days of the battle some 12,000 prisoners and 150 guns were taken. The battle did not succeed in converting the war from one of positions into one of movement; but if the Vimy position could be so completely demolished in two or three days, there seemed little prospect of permanence for any German stronghold in France, and a few repet.i.tions of the battle of Arras bade fair to make an end of the Hindenburg lines and of the German occupation of French territory. April along the Western front in 1917 wore a fair promise of spring.

Nor was it without its hopes in other spheres. Maude's conquest of Baghdad produced other fruits in the East, including a welcome change in the situation in Persia. The fall of Kut in the April before had enabled the Turks to turn against the Russians and drive Baratov's adventurous force back from Khanikin into the mountains and even east of Hamadan; but Maude's advance cut the Turks off from their base at Baghdad and threatened their line of retreat to Mosul. The Turks were in a trap: Baratov resumed his advance from the north-east, while Maude pushed up from the south-west: Khanikin was the trap-door, and Halil, the Turkish commander, made skilful efforts to keep it open. A strong screen of rearguards held up the Russians at the Piatak pa.s.s, while other troops reinforced from Mosul barred Maude's advance at Deli Abbas and on the Jebel Hamrin range. By the end of March the bulk of Halil's forces were through, and Maude had to content himself with linking up with the Russians at Kizil Robat and driving the Turks from the Diala after their troops in Persia had escaped. Their junction with those from Mosul enabled Halil to resume the offensive, but his counter-attack was repulsed on 11-12 April, and Maude proceeded to extend his defences far to the north and west of Baghdad. Feluja on the Euphrates had already been occupied in March, and the Turks driven up the river to Ramadie; and on 23 April Maude completed his advance up the Tigris by the capture of Samara, where the section of the railway running north from Baghdad came to an end. Hundreds of miles separated it from the other railhead at Nisibin, and with his front pushed out on the rivers to eighty miles from Baghdad, and with the Russians in touch with his right and holding the route into Persia, Maude might well rest for the summer content with the security of his conquests. He had done single-handed what had been planned for a joint Anglo-Russian campaign, with Russia taking the lion's share (see Map, p. 177*).

In the spring of that year it looked, indeed, as though the British Empire alone was making any headway against the enemy Powers. Even on the cosmopolitan Salonika front offensive action was left to British troops, and at no time during the war did any but troops of the British Empire partake in the defence of its dominions and protectorates. These were all safe enough by the middle of April 1917, and those that were within reach of the enemy were being used as bases for attack upon his forces. Maude, with his army based upon India had now blocked the southern route into Persia, and Sir Archibald Murray was advancing into Palestine. The capture of Rafa on the frontier was followed on 28 February by that of Khan Yunus, five miles within the Turkish border, and the Turks under their German general Kressenstein withdrew to Gaza. There, on 26 March, they were attacked by Sir Charles Dobell, of Cameroon fame, with three infantry and two mounted divisions, including a number of Anzacs. The design was to surround and capture the Turkish forces in Gaza, and the only chance of success lay in the suddenness of the blow and its surprise. For Dobell's base was distant, his men had to drink water brought from Egypt, and in spite of the railway he had not at the front stores, equipment, or troops for a lengthy struggle, while the Turks could bring up superior reinforcements. A sea fog robbed him of two hours' precious time; and although the Wady Ghuzze and other defences of Gaza were taken and a force of Anzacs actually got behind Gaza and were fighting in its northern outskirts at sunset, night fell with the task unfinished and the British divisions out of touch on their various fronts. A retirement was accordingly ordered, and on the morrow Kressenstein counter-attacked. He was driven back with considerable losses, and although Dobell had failed to take Gaza he had reached the Wady Ghuzze and secured the means of bringing his railhead right up to the front of battle. With a few weeks' respite for reinforcement and reorganization, April might yet see the British well on the way to Jerusalem; for Arras was not intended to stand alone, and in every sphere of war the Allies had planned a simultaneous offensive (*see Map, p. 352*).

But if hope was bright in the East, it was pallid compared with the certainty of ultimate triumph which blazed from the West across the Atlantic; for on the 5th of that April of promise the great Republic, with a man-power, wealth, and potential force far exceeding those of any other of Germany's foes, entered the war against her and made her defeat unavoidable save by the suicide of her European antagonists. It was not a sudden decision, for a people with such varied spiritual homes as the American, spread over so vast a territory, and looking some eastward across the Atlantic and others westward across the Pacific, but all far removed from European politics and cherishing an inherited aloofness from the Old World and a rooted antipathy to imperialisms of every sort, could not easily see with one eye or achieve unanimity in favour of a vast adventure to break with their past and unite their fortunes with those of the Old World they had left behind. We were accustomed to fighting in Europe against overweening power; the United States had taken their stand on a splendid isolation. Their first president had warned them against entangling alliances, and their fifth had erected into the Monroe Doctrine the principle of abstention from European quarrels. For a century that principle had been the pole-star of American foreign policy; no other people had such a wrench to make from their moorings before they could enter the war, and no other people can understand what it cost the Americans to cut themselves adrift from their haven of democratic pacifism in order to fight for the freedom of another world.

But Fate was too strong for schismatic tradition, and the two worlds had merged into one. The shrinking of s.p.a.ce and expansion of mind was abolishing East and West, and the two hemispheres had become one exchange and mart of commodities and ideas. They could not continue to revolve on diverse political axes, and neither was safe without the other's concurrence. To the German cry of weltmacht must sooner or later respond the American cry of weltrecht; for the war was a civil war of mankind, and upon its issue would hang the future of human government. Intervention was inevitable, not so much because the Kaiser had said he would stand no nonsense from America as because, if America was to stand no nonsense from him after victory, she would have to turn the New World into an armed camp like the Old and run the same race to ruin. The old peace and isolation were in any case gone, and the choice was between war for the time, with the prospect of permanent peace on the one hand, and peace for the time, with the permanent prospect of war on the other. There was no other way, and Germany forced the American people to realize their dilemma.

President Wilson had seen it earlier than the majority of his fellow-countrymen; but for a statesman a vision of the truth is an insufficient ground for acting upon it. He is bound, indeed, not to act upon it until he can carry with him the State he governs; otherwise he ceases to be a statesman and sinks or rises into the missionary. The zealot is ever ready to break his weapon upon the obstacle he wishes to remove, but the statesman who destroys national unity in his zeal for war does not help to win it; and American intervention was both useless and impossible until the President could act with his people behind him. Nor, as official head of the State, could he play the irresponsible part of an advocate; if he believed war to be inevitable in his country's interests, it was for him to convince the people not by argument, but by his conduct of American affairs. Idealism entered more largely into his policy than that of most statesmen, but it was bound to American mentality and national interests; for ideals which do not affect national interests do not appeal to the majority in any nation, and the lawlessness which trampled on Belgian neutrality made less impression across the Atlantic than that which destroyed American lives and property.

A subsidiary cause of delay in American intervention was the absorption of the United States in the presidential contest of 1916, but President Wilson's re-election in November gave him a freer hand than was possessed by any other democratic statesman. No American president is ever elected for a third term of office, and Mr. Wilson had no need to keep his eye on his prospects for 1920. He must, indeed, secure the a.s.sent of Congress before war could be declared, but in both Houses his party had secured a majority in November. The decisive step was not, however, taken by President Wilson, but by the German Government, and America was as much forced into war in 1917 as we were in 1914; and in both cases it was their view of military necessity which drove the Germans into political suicide. They could not, they thought in 1914, cope with Russia until they had first beaten France, and they could not beat France in time unless they trampled a way through Belgium. So in the early days of 1917, not foreseeing the fortune which the Russian revolution was to bring them, they saw no prospect of victory save through the ruin of England by means of their submarines. The Eastern and Western fronts were too strong for a successful offensive against either, the military situation was growing desperate, and their offers of peace had been scorned; the war went on in their despite, and their real offensive for 1917 was the submarine campaign. It was adopted because there was no opening on land and no hope of success in a naval battle; and its adoption justified those who held that the remedy was worse than the disease and that unrestricted submarine warfare would bring the United States into the war before it drove Great Britain out.

As late as 22 January, President Wilson, while depicting the sort of peace which would commend itself to the American people, disavowed any intention of helping to secure it by force of arms. But on the 31st Germany revoked her promise given on 4 May 1916 that vessels other than warships would not be sunk without warning, and announced her resolve forthwith to wage submarine war without any restriction. Later on Herr Bethmann-Hollweg stated that the promise had only been given because Germany's preparations were incomplete, and was revoked as soon as they were ready. The President's answer was prompt: on 3 February the German amba.s.sador was given his pa.s.sports and Mr. Gerard was recalled from Berlin. But the invitation to other neutrals to follow the President's lead was declined on this side of the Atlantic. Switzerland, without any seaboard, was not concerned with submarine warfare, and other neutrals were too much under the influence of German blandishments or terror to risk war in defence of their rights; they preferred to abandon their sailings to British ports.

At first the President contemplated no more than an armed neutrality, and proposed to equip all American mercantile vessels for self-defence. But the sinking of American ships and loss of American lives began to rouse popular anger; sailings stopped at the ports, the railways became congested with goods seeking outlet, and the remotest inland districts felt the effects of the German campaign. In March, too, the Russian revolution removed a stumbling-block to co-operation with the Entente, for American public opinion had always been sensitive to the iniquity of the old regime in Russia. At length the President summoned a special session of Congress, and on 2 April recommended a declaration of war. It was adopted in the Senate on the 4th by 82 votes to 6, and by the House of Representatives on the 5th by 373 to 50. Of the ultimate issue of the war there could now be no doubt. Time would be needed for the United States to mobilize its resources and train its armies, and the extent to which they might be required would depend upon the course of events in Europe. But the Americans were not a people to turn back having put their hand to the plough, and with their forces fully deployed they would alone be more than a match for the German Empire. Victory might be delayed, but its advent was a.s.sured, and the first fortnight of April saw the hopes of the Allies rise higher than since the war began.

CHAPTER XV

HOPE DEFERRED

Among the events which gave so brilliant a promise to the spring of 1917, not the least was the revolution in Russia. From the first, indeed, there was anxiety about the effect which so great a change in the midst of war would have upon the military efficiency of our ally. But that had suffered under the old regime, and the failure to capture Lemberg in the summer of 1916, distracted as the Central Empires were by the Somme and Italian campaigns, followed by the more discreditable failure to protect Rumania in the autumn, raised serious doubts of the competence of the imperial bureaucracy. Its honesty also fell under grave suspicion. Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, had been dismissed in August, and Stuermer became Prime Minister. A fierce indictment of his conduct by Miliukov in the Duma led to his retirement in November, and an honest Conservative, Trepov, succeeded. But Stuermer retained his power at Court as Imperial Chamberlain, and a renegade from the Liberal party, Protopopov, was introduced into the Ministry and exercised therein a growing and sinister influence. Winter saw the Russian Government turning its back on its Liberal professions, proroguing the Duma, prohibiting the meetings of town councils and Zemstvos, provoking a revolution in order to suppress it and re-establish the old despotism on its ruins, and apparently casting wistful glances back at its old alliance with the German champions of autocracy. The Tsar himself was a firm friend of the Entente, but the same could not be said of the Tsaritsa nor of the reactionary and disreputable influences to which she extended her patronage. If therefore there were risks to the Entente cause in a Russian revolution, there were also perils in its postponement; and it might well be thought that a Liberal Russia would be bound more closely and logically to the Western Powers than autocracy ever could be. A revolution would at least clarify the issue between the combatants and give a more solid basis of political principle to the Entente.

The overture was a strange and squalid tragedy. Noxious weeds grew in the shadow of the Oriental despotism of the Russian Court, and for years the Government had been at the mercy of a religious impostor and libertine called Rasputin. The trouble, remarked a Russian General, was not that Rasputin was a wizard, but that the Court laboured under the superst.i.tions of a Russian peasant; and Rasputin, who had some mesmeric power, used it to gratify his avarice, immorality, and taste for intrigue at the expense of Russian politics and society. At last, on 29 December, he was doomed by a conclave of Grand Dukes, Princes, and politicians who informed the police of what had been done. The deed was enthusiastically celebrated next evening by the audience at the Imperial Theatre singing the national anthem; but the body was buried at Tsarkoe Selo in a silver coffin, while the Metropolitan said ma.s.s, the Tsar and Protopopov acted as pall-bearers, and the Tsaritsa as one of the chief mourners. The last days of the old regime in France, with their Cagliostro and the Diamond Necklace, produced nothing so redolent of corruption or so suggestive of impending dissolution.

Rasputin was a symptom, not a cause, and the dark forces in Russia were not eradicated by his removal. Rather they were roused to further action, and on 8 January Trepov gave place to Prince Golitzin, a mere agent of obstruction, while Protopopov proceeded with his measures to provoke disorder. The Duma was prorogued and machine guns made in England were diverted from the front to dominate the capital. The Russian revolution was, in fact, as much forced upon the Russian people as war was forced upon ourselves and America. Le peuple, wrote Sully three centuries ago, ne se souleve jamais par envie d'attaquer, mais par impatience de souffrir; and in Russia even hunger and Protopopov barely provoked the people to action. The revolution occurred not so much because they rose, as because the bureaucracy fell, and it was not so much a change from one government to another as a general cessation of all government through comprehensive inaction. The Petrograd mob did not storm a Bastille like that of Paris in 1789; it merely paraded the streets and declined to disperse or work, and the act of revolution was simply the refusal of the soldiers to fire. It was not the new wine of liberty, but the opium of lethargy that possessed the popular mind, and relaxation loosened all the fibres of the Russian State. Action came later with the Bolshevik reconstruction, but for the time dissolution was the order of the day-a dissolution that was due less to the activity of destroyers than to the decay of the body politic; and the over-government of Russia by bureaucracy and police precipitated a violent reaction towards no government at all.

The Russian revolution was not therefore planned, and its origin and progress can hardly be seen in acts. The Rasputin affair was a vendetta of society which revealed its moral disintegration, but more than two months pa.s.sed before the Government collapsed. The first disorder took the form of the looting of bakers' shops on 8 March by disappointed food-queues, but a more ominous and comprehensive symptom was the abstention from work. Characteristically it was not an organized strike; the idle throng seemed to have no definite objects, and the question was not whether it would achieve them, but whether the soldiers would obey orders and fire upon the mob. On the 9th the chief newspapers ceased to appear; on the 10th the trams stopped running; on the 11th a company of the Pavlovsk regiment mutinied when told to fire, and the President of the Duma, Rodzianko, telegraphed to the Tsar that anarchy reigned in the capital, the Government was paralysed, and the transport, food, and fuel supplies were utterly disorganized. Golitzin thereupon again prorogued the Duma; but, like the French National a.s.sembly in 1789, it refused to disperse, and declared itself the sole repository of const.i.tutional authority. On the 12th Household troops improved upon the example of the Pavlovsk regiment, and shot their more unpopular officers when ordered to fire on the people. Other regiments sent to suppress the mutiny joined it and seized the a.r.s.enal. Then the fortress of SS. Peter and Paul surrendered, and the police were hunted down. The Duma now appointed an executive committee of its members to act as a provisional government, while, outside, an unauthorized committee of soldiers and workmen was created, for the original Duma had been purged by imperial rescript and represented chiefly the upper and middle cla.s.ses. On the 13th news came that Moscow had accepted the revolution, and it was clear that the Army would offer no resistance, although the Tsar had appointed Ivanov commander-in-chief in order to suppress the insurrection. Ruszky and Brussilov signified their adhesion to the popular cause, and Ivanov failed to reach the capital. The Tsar followed him, but was stopped at Pskov on the 14th. There on the 15th-the modern Ides of March-the modern Russian Tsar or Caesar was constrained to abdicate.

On that day the Duma Coalition Ministry was announced; the Premier was Prince Lvov, Miliukov took charge of Foreign Affairs, Gutchkov of War and the Marine, and Kerensky, a Socialist, of Justice. Ministers were in favour of a regency, but the Soviet-a Russian word which originally meant no more than Council-of Soldiers' and Workmen's Delegates demanded a republic. Kerensky, however, persuaded it to support the Provisional Government by an enormous majority and the revolution appeared to have produced a government. But even in orderly countries enormous majorities secured in moments of emotion are apt to be evanescent, and the Provisional Government had an uneasy lease of life for just two months. The Duma had not made the revolution, and the middle cla.s.ses for which it stood were weak in numbers and prestige. The vast ma.s.s of the Russian people consisted of peasants who were illiterate and unorganized, and cared for little but the land. The urban proletariat, not having been educated by the Government, had partially educated itself in the abstract socialism of Karl Marx, Lavrov, and Tolstoy. The Extremists followed Marx and were called Social Democrats; but they had themselves split into two sections, the Bolsheviks or Maximalists and the Mensheviks or Minimalists; the former wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat, a complete inversion of the Tsardom consisting in the subst.i.tution of the tyranny of the bottom for the tyranny of the top, while the Mensheviks were willing to recognize the claims of other cla.s.ses than the proletariat. More moderate, though still socialists, were the followers of Lavrov, who called themselves Social Revolutionaries and found a leader in Kerensky. The middle cla.s.ses and intelligentsia formed the bulk of the Cadet party led by Miliukov and were predominant in the Duma and the Provisional Government. In the Soviet power gradually pa.s.sed farther and farther to the left, from Social Revolutionaries to Mensheviks and from Mensheviks to Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin, whose return from exile in Switzerland was facilitated for its own purposes by the German Government.

All parties in the Soviet were, however, agreed in their anxiety for peace, the destruction of imperialism and bureaucracy, and the reconstruction of Russia on a socialistic basis; and they concurred with the peasants in their demand for the extirpation of landlordism. The emanc.i.p.ation of the serfs by Alexander II in 1861 had done little more than subst.i.tute economic for legal slavery; for the emanc.i.p.ated peasants were only given as proprietors the refuse of the land they had tilled as serfs, and for it they had to pay tribute calculated upon the value of their labour when applied to the richer soil of their lords. Freedom therefore meant unavoidable penury, but the demand of the peasants was not so much to evade their dues to the State as to secure the richer land which would enable them to meet their obligations. It was here that they sought their indemnities and their annexations, not in the acquisition of foreign territory hundreds of miles beyond their ken. Of Belgium and Serbia they knew nothing, and all they knew of the war was that it meant ghastly losses, fighting with pitchforks against poison gas and machine guns for them, and for their masters the fruits of victory. What domestic progress Russia had made in the past had been the outcome of her defeats; success in war had always been followed by reaction. Constantinople-Tsargrad as it was called by the Russians-had no charms for the proletariat. They wanted peace, some of them because national wars divided the forces of international Socialism and postponed the war of cla.s.ses, but most in order that they might consolidate their revolution and garner its ripe and refreshing fruit. They did not, however, desire a separate peace with the enemy, and Austria's offer of 15 April was declined, because a separate peace would be disadvantageous to them. What they wanted was a general peace which would give each nation what it possessed before and each proletariat a good deal more; and the design took form in the Congress of Stockholm in June.

Meanwhile discipline disappeared in Russia, and even in her armies the Soviet insisted that there should be no death-penalty, and that military orders, except on the field of battle, should proceed from a democratic committee. They knew that Russian autocracy had rested on bayonets and only fell with the failure of that support: whosoever controlled the Army would be master of Russia, and with a correct instinct the Bolsheviks set to work to convert the soldiers and seamen. It was easy work preaching peace, plenty, and indolence to the peasants at the front; and the relaxation which reduced the production of Russian industries by 40 per cent diminished still more the efficiency of the Russian Army. The Provisional Government struggled in vain against the disintegration, but its efforts were frustrated by the Congress of Soviets which began to sit in April, fell more and more under Lenin's influence, and resisted on principle all measures to retain or re-establish authority. On 13 May, Gutchkov, the Minister for War, resigned, and Miliukov followed. On the 16th the Provisional Government was succeeded by another Coalition more socialist in its complexion. Lvov remained its nominal head, but Tchernov, a social revolutionary, and two Mensheviks became Ministers, and Kerensky took Gutchkov's place at the Ministry of War. He did his best by his fervour and eloquence to reanimate the army, for he believed that only the success of Russian arms could guarantee the orderly progress of the revolution. But Alexeiev retired in June, the Congress of Soviets resolved that the Duma should be disbanded, and the view was sedulously propagated that it was wrong to fight fellow Socialists in the German Army and that the approaching Stockholm Conference would compel the bourgeois and imperialist governments to make peace without any further bloodshed.

Still Kerensky achieved some success with his impa.s.sioned appeals, and Brussilov, who had become commander-in-chief, reported that the army was recovering its moral. The Government determined to gamble on the chance of a successful offensive. It had, indeed, no other means of checking the growth of disorder, and an attack on the front was not entirely hopeless. Both the Germans and Austrians had depleted their Eastern forces to provide against dangers elsewhere, and there were still sound elements like the Cossacks in the Russian Army. It was skimmed for the purpose of all the cream of its regiments, and the scene of action was laid where Brussilov's advance had pressed farthest forward in 1916. Lemberg was to be outflanked on the south by a movement from a line reaching from Zborow across the Dniester to the foothills of the Carpathians. Three armies were employed, Erdelli's Eleventh to the north, then Tcheremisov's Seventh reaching to the Dniester, and south of it Kornilov's Eighth. Kerensky orated in khaki, and Gutchkov served as an officer in the field. The artillery preparation began on 29 June, and on 1 July the troops advanced from their trenches. For a time they carried all before them, and revolutionary Russia bade fair to repeat the success of Brussilov's offensive in 1916. Tcheremisov's Seventh Army took Koniuchy on the 1st and Potutory on the 2nd, and captured 18,000 prisoners. Erdelli's Eleventh was more successful in attracting the bulk of the enemy reserves than in making progress; but the diversion gave Kornilov's Eighth a chance of which it made brilliant use. It attacked on the 8th and took half a dozen villages south of the Dniester, driving the Austrians back across its tributaries, the Lukwa and the Lomnica. On the 10th Halicz fell before a combined advance of Tcheremisov north and Kornilov south of the Dniester, and on the morrow Kalusz was captured well on the way to Lemberg's vital connexions at Stryj. Then the weather broke and the strength of the Russian armies turned into water. There were no reserves with the spirit of those who fell in this rapid advance, and Erdelli had failed to inspire the Eleventh Army with Kornilov's dash. On the 16th Lenin brought off his Bolshevik insurrection at Petrograd, but more fatal was the infection which spread through Erdelli's troops. It was on them that the weight of the German counter-attack fell on the 19th, and they simply wilted before it. There was no great force in the German blow, which was merely designed to relieve the pressure of Kornilov's advance; but Russian troops refused to fight, and ran away trampling underfoot and killing officers who strove to stem the rout. By the 20th German patrols were in Tarnopol, which the Russians had held since August 1914, and in a fortnight they were across the Russian frontier as far south as the borders of Bukovina (see Map, p. 146). The Seventh and Eighth Armies had to conform to this retreat, but they offered some stubborn resistance and were brought off in good order. Czernowitz fell on 3 August, and the only solid obstacle to the enemy advance in the East was the little Rumanian Army which had looked to this summer for its revenge on the invader and the recovery of its capital and Wallachia.

The Rumanian Army had during the winter been refitted and equipped with a considerable store of munitions, and its offensive was planned to follow closely on the heels of the Russian in Galicia, But the Russians were out of Tarnopol before, in the last week of July, Averescu began his advance from south of the Oitoz Pa.s.s towards Kezdi Vasarhely; and the Russian Fourth Army under Scherbachev, which was to co-operate on Averescu's right, was deeply infected with revolutionary disorder. Nevertheless Averescu broke the enemy front, took 2000 prisoners on the first day, and on 28 July was ten miles ahead of his original line. Then Mackensen counter-attacked farther south at Focsani, while Scherbachev's regiments began to desert and the Russians in the Bukovina were being steadily driven back. On 6 and 7 August Mackensen forced the Russo-Rumanian line back from the Putna to the Susitza, taking over 3000 prisoners in three days and also pushing on towards Okna and Marasesti. In three days more the number of prisoners increased to 7000, the key to the defence of the Moldavian mountains was threatened at Adjudul, and the Court prepared to leave Ja.s.sy and take refuge in Russian territory. On the 14th Rumanian troops replaced the Russians in front of Okna in the Trotus valley and counterattacked with vigour. But the decisive battle was fought farther south, where Mackensen, advancing from Focsani, was seeking to cross the Sereth in the direction of Marasesti and Tecuciu. It was the most heroic of Rumania's struggles. Deprived of all but a fragment of her territory and her manhood, and abandoned by the only ally within reach, she had to face perhaps the ablest of German generals and over a dozen fresh divisions thrown into the battle; and almost hourly during the three days' fighting a fresh detachment of Russians deserted. Yet Rumania triumphed at the battle of Marasesti, and by the 19th the crisis had pa.s.sed. The attack then shifted to Okna, where the Second Rumanian Army emulated the achievements of the First at Marasesti. Sporadic fighting went on into September, but Rumania had defended herself and saved South Russia for the time. On the 18th the Germans even withdrew from Husiatyn, an Austrian town on the Galician frontier: they had already abandoned the south for a safer adventure against the unaided Russians at Riga (see Map, p. 229).

The Baltic Campaigns

This northern campaign resembled autumn manoeuvres, and was mainly intended to test the value of the new tactics which Germany proposed to use next spring against a more serious foe. It was more realistic to experiment upon Russians than among themselves, and Von Hutier was selected to make the demonstration. The advance began in the last days of August, and on 1 September Von Hutier forced the pa.s.sage of the Dvina at Uexkull, eighteen miles above Riga, which the Russians abandoned on the following day. Friedrichstadt fell next, and the Russians retired from Jacobstadt on the 21st. The Germans were now across the Dvina on a front of seventy miles, and pushed on towards Wenden, meeting with occasional resistance. But their next experiment was at the expense of the Russian Navy, which was even more demoralized than the Army, and had murdered its officers wholesale. On 12 October the Germans landed a force on the island of Oesel, and within a week had overrun that and the other islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Riga. On the 21st they crossed to the mainland, disembarking a force at Verder opposite Moen Island. There was little to hinder a march on Petrograd, had there been any sufficient inducement. But Petrograd in the hands of the Bolsheviks was worth more to the Germans than in their own; for a German occupation of the capital would have sterilized its miasmic influence over the rest of Russia, and the Germans had only advanced so far in order to get into touch with Finland and establish pro-German governments among the little nationalities of the Baltic littoral. They had, moreover, to economize their shrinking manpower, and their reserves were being called off from all the Eastern fronts to more urgent tasks elsewhere, leaving Russia to stew in its own disintegration.

Disaster had done nothing to check the distraction of Russian domestic politics. The Cadets had most of them resigned in July owing to the Government's complaisance towards the Ukrainian demand for independence; and Kerensky succeeded Lvov as Premier on the 22nd, while Kornilov took Brussilov's place as commander-in-chief on 1 August. But while Kerensky shed his right wing, he gained no support from the left. The Bolsheviks would not forgive him his offensive in July, nor the success with which he had suppressed the Leninite rising; and a great conference at Moscow on 25 August representing every shade of Russian disorganization produced some agreement on formulas but none on action. Early in September Kerensky came to the conclusion that a dictatorship was the only cure, and gave Kornilov the impression that the latter should fill the part. Another Bolshevik insurrection was brewing in Petrograd, and on the 7th Kornilov prepared to crush it, sending Krymov forward to Gatchina within twenty miles of the capital. Kerensky now took fright at the bugbear of a military restoration, denounced Kornilov as a traitor, and threw himself on the support of the Soviets. The cry that the revolution was in danger ruined Kornilov's chances; his surrender was arranged by Alexeiev's mediation, while Krymov committed suicide.

Such were Russian politics during the week in which the Germans overran the Dvina. A republic was proclaimed on the 15th, and the government entrusted to a council of five with Kerensky at its head. It lived no longer than its numerous predecessors in the revolution. Kerensky was rash enough to renew his breach with the Bolsheviks who had helped him to ruin Kornilov, and in November they rent the man of words. Trotzky organized the blow. There was little that was Russian about this Jew, whose real name was Leo Braunstein, although he was born in Odessa; but he possessed some practical capacity. Having secured election as president of the Petrograd Soviet, he had created a military revolutionary committee and a body of Red Guards, and on 5 November summoned the Petrograd garrison to place itself under its direction. Kerensky sought to defend his Government, but most of his forces went over to the Bolsheviks, and on the 7th he fled from the city. He attempted to return at the head of some dubious troops, but they were scattered by the Red Guards at Tsarskoe Selo on the 13th and Kerensky disappeared. What there was left of government in Russia pa.s.sed into the hands of a self-const.i.tuted council of People's Commissioners with Lenin as its president and Trotzky its Foreign Minister; and on the 21st the council found a commander-in-chief in one Ensign Krilenko. His business was to offer an armistice to the Germans as a preliminary to suing for peace.

Russia had gone out of the war much faster than America came in. Early in May a flotilla of destroyers joined the British Fleet, and on 26 June the first division landed in France. But it needed six months' training, and a year would pa.s.s before the weight of American reinforcements would make much material difference to the Western front. That year was bound to try the Western Allies to the utmost, and the interval between the disappearance of Russia and the arrival of the United States as an effective combatant, gave the Germans the chance of reversing the decision which they felt had gone against them before the end of 1916. They regarded the Russian revolution as a miracle wrought in their favour; but it was only by degrees that they realized the extent of their apparent good fortune and proceeded both to use and to abuse it. From the first, however, the revolution changed for the worse the situation on every front, and enemy troops, released from fear of Russia, began to appear in the West, on the Isonzo, in Mesopotamia, in Palestine, and in the Balkans. The middle of treacherous April saw the tide checked that had been flowing so strongly since the year began.

The disappointment was not, however, entirely due to the gradual elimination of Russia, for that misfortune did not fall with much weight on the Western front until many months had pa.s.sed, and depression there had its causes nearer home. Commenting on the British success at the battle of Arras, an Italian journal optimistically asked its readers what would be the plight of the Central Empires when real military Powers got to work, since so much had been achieved by the semi-civilians of the British Empire. Hopes also ran high in France. Nivelle, the new commander-in-chief, had conceived an ambitious plan of crushing the Germans on a front of fifty miles between the plateau north-east of Soissons and the river Suippe in Champagne; and this offensive, coupled with the British pressure in front of Arras, was to clear the Germans out of the greater part of occupied France. Nivelle proposed to repeat on a vastly extended scale his triumphs of the previous autumn at Verdun, and he made no secret to his Government of his confidence that Laon would fall as a result of the first day's fighting. Neither Haig nor Petain had much faith in the possibility of the plan, but Nivelle had persuaded Ribot's Ministry, which had succeeded Briand's in March, and French expectations were raised to a giddy height. There were three main objectives: to clear the Chemin des Dames, to master the Moronvillers ma.s.sif and other heights north and east of Reims, and to thrust between these two great bastions along the road to Laon. Each was an objective greater than that achieved in the battle of Arras, and all were attempted at once (*see Map, p. 67*).

The artillery preparation began on 6 April and the infantry attack on Monday the 16th, a week after that on the Vimy Ridge. The battle was not easy to follow, because the French were very reserved about their reverses, and the maps gave an erroneous impression of the line from which the attack started and that on which it ended. The French were commonly thought to be holding both banks of the Aisne all the way from Soissons to Berry-au-Bac, whereas in reality they had never recovered from their retreat in January 1915 to the south bank between Missy and Chavotine. Nor, except at Troyon, were they near the Chemin des Dames; and not only had the river to be crossed, but the formidable slopes, which the Germans had beeen meticulously fortifying for two and a half years, to be surmounted. The results of the first day's onslaught fell lamentably short of the extravagant antic.i.p.ations. The banks of the Aisne were cleared, some progress was made up the slopes, and from Troyon, where the original line was nearly on the ridge, an advance was made along it. But on the whole the Germans maintained their grip on the Chemin des Dames. Nor was fortune much kinder in the gap between it and the heights east of Reims. The French Tanks, here first employed, were disappointing, and Loivre was the only gain. The 17th was spent in beating off counter-attacks west of Reims, while the French offensive spread east to Moronvillers. Here the same tale had to be told; gallantry carried various points of importance, but a month's fighting failed to give the French complete control of their first day's objectives. West of Reims on the 18th and following days Nanteuil, Vailly, Laffaux, Aizy, Jouy, Ostel, and Bray were captured by Mangin, but they were all below the Chemin des Dames, and April came to an end with the road to Laon as impa.s.sable as ever. Fresh attempts were made in May; Craonne was taken on the 4th, and the California plateau to the north of it and Chevreux in the plain to the east were seized on the 6th and held against counter-attacks, while east of Reims Auberive had fallen, and by the 20th the whole summit of the Moronvillers ma.s.sif was said to have been secured.

The impression that the Chemin des Dames had been conquered was not removed until it really was gained by Petain five months later; but there was contrast enough between the promises and the achievement to produce the deepest depression in France. On 28 April Petain was appointed chief of staff and on 15 May commander-in-chief in succession to Nivelle, while Foch became chief of staff. Little was wisely revealed abroad of French despondency or the effect of the disappointment on the moral of the army. But French journals began to clamour for unity of command of all the forces in France under a French generalissimo, pour epargner du sang Francais, as one of them expressed it; and prudence constrained the higher command to revert to those limited objectives which Nivelle had abandoned. Joffre was sent to the United States to place the situation before the sister-republic; and but for American intervention France would have been nearer a peace of compromise in May 1917 than at any previous date in the war. The second battle of the Aisne gave rise to that miasma of defaitisme, a.s.sociated with the names of Bolo and Caillaux, which enfeebled the spirit and effort of France until they were revived by Clemenceau's vigorous stimulants.

Haig was also laid under an obligation to relieve the pressure and gloom by prolonging his Arras offensive and seeking to extract more from his victory than it would yield; and the second phase of that battle was fought under a shadow and under constraint. But if it resulted in serious losses, it brought some additions to our gains of ground. On 23 April Gavrelle and Guemappe were captured after desperate fighting; and on the 28th an advance was made at Arleux and Oppy. On 3 May the Canadians took Fresnoy, and the Australians trenches at Bullecourt, but the Germans kept up a series of stubborn counter-attacks, especially at Fresnoy, Roeulx, and Bullecourt, and Fresnoy was lost on the 8th. On the 14th we completed our capture of Roeulx, and on the 17th that of Bullecourt. The fighting died down, towards the end of May, and the scene was shifted farther north in June to the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge. During the month of the battle of Arras we had taken over 20,000 prisoners, and the French claimed more on the Aisne. We had also bitten into the Hindenburg "line." But that line had not been broken, mainly because it was not a line, having instead of none a breadth of several miles; and, apart from the important Vimy Ridge, the German position had not been greatly shaken. The warfare was one of attrition, and the true test was that of wastage, which can only be used when the losses on both sides are exactly known. There was evidence that the Germans were feeling the strain, but so was the Entente, and the influx of troops from the Eastern front, which began in April and was felt in the Arras battle, would more than compensate for the excess (if any) in German losses. It was also clear by this time that the Germans had gained another great advantage. They might lose the war, but they would lose it in France, and the Fatherland would not suffer the destruction and desolation which it had inflicted on all its foes except the British Empire and the United States. The Germans were wisely bent on fighting to a finish where Hindenburg had fixed his lines; they were beaten there, but s.n.a.t.c.hed immunity from ruin for German soil out of their defeat. Nivelle's failure in April 1917 combined with the Russian collapse to preclude an Entente repet.i.tion of the German invasion of August 1914; and Lord Curzon's mental vision of Gurkhas encamping in Berlin was destined to remain a dream.

The breakdown of Russia and of the French campaign paralysed other offensives than those on the Western front, and a sympathetic inertia spread to the Balkans. At the end of February Sarrail had told his commanders that he intended attacking all along the line at Salonika in the first week of April as his