Like every German general Hindenburg believed in the offensive being the best form of defence, and like all Germans in the advantage of waging war in the enemy's country. His plan of attack was a concentric advance on Warsaw along the three railway lines leading from Thorn, Kalisch, and Czenstochowa, combined with an effort to cross the Vistula at Josefow while the Austrians kept step in Galicia, relieved Przemysl, and recovered Lemberg. There was even a movement southwards from East Prussia which captured Mlawa, but it was only a raid which did not hamper the Grand Duke's contemplated counter-offensive. Warsaw had obvious attractions; Josefow was selected because it was far from Russia's railway lines but near to Ostrowiec, the terminus of a line which led from the German frontier; and the object of crossing the Vistula was to take in the rear the great fortress of Ivangorod lower down, and then to get behind Warsaw. The Grand Duke had divined these intentions, while he concealed his own by misleading the Germans into a belief that he proposed abandoning the Polish salient and retiring on Brest. His real plan was to stand on the east bank of the Vistula save for the defence of Warsaw which lies upon the west, and to counter-attack round the north of the German left wing under the guns of the great fortress of Novo Georgievsk. Rennenkampf was brought down to command this movement, while Ruszky took charge of the defence at Josefow.

On 10 October Hindenburg's centre moved out from Lodz and on the 15th the battle was joined all along the Vistula. Warsaw was vigorously defended by Siberian and Caucasian troops, aided by Japanese guns. The battle raged from the 16th to the 19th, when the planned surprise from Novo Georgievsk forced back the German left and threatened the centre before Warsaw. Ruszky was still more successful with his stratagem at Josefow. The Germans were suffered to construct their pontoons, cross the river, and make for the railway between Warsaw and Lublin. Then on the 21st the Russians came down upon them with a bayonet charge, and not a man is said to have escaped across the river. Next day the Russians also crossed at Novo Alexandria lower down, and a general attack drove the Germans back to Radom on the 25th and thence from Kielce on 3 November. Threatened by Rennenkampf on the north and Ruszky on the south, the German centre had to abandon Skierniewce, Lowicz, and then Lodz, destroying every vestige of communication as they withdrew and lavishly sacrificing men in rearguard actions to protect their stores and their equipment.

Ironically enough the chief success of Hindenburg's offensive was achieved by the Austrian subordinates he had come to help. Ivanoff was a bad substitute for Ruszky, and Dankl temporarily retrieved the reputation he had lost the previous month. Jaroslav was recovered, Przemysl was relieved and abundantly revictualled for a second and a longer siege, and an attack on Sambor bade fair to put the Austrians once more in Lemberg. But the German defeat in Poland compelled an Austrian retreat in Galicia. Przemysl was reinvested and the Russians resumed their march with quickened pace on Cracow. This time they threatened it first from the north of the Vistula, and on 9 November their cavalry, pursuing the Germans, was at Miechow, only twenty miles from Cracow. Moving more slowly through Galicia while Brussilov occupied the Carpathian passes, Dmitrieff pushed his cavalry into Wielitza south-east of the city on 6 December, and on the 8th he fought a successful action in its outskirts. Farther north the Cossacks had occupied Nieszawa, a few miles from Thorn, on 9 November, and on the following day a Russian raid across the Silesian frontier cut the German railway from Posen to Cracow. It was high time that the Germans turned the weight of their offensive from the Flanders front and the Channel ports to parrying the Russian menace on their East.

Austria was in no happier case. Her invasion of Serbia which had opened the flood-gates of war had been almost submerged in the torrent, and the punitive expedition she had planned had brought punishment mainly upon herself, and that not merely at the hands of Serbia's powerful patron, but at those of the little people who were to be chastised. The early fighting was of a desultory character, and Austria's two first-line corps having been withdrawn to meet the Russians, the Serbs and Montenegrins made a combined effort on 12 August to invade Bosnia and capture Serajevo. No great progress was made, and on the 16th the Austrians retaliated with the capture of Shabatz in the north-west corner of Serbia. But next day the Serbs routed a large Austrian force in the neighbourhood, and the Crown Prince Alexander followed up this victory by another on the 18th against the Austrians on the Jadar, who were seeking, in co-operation with those at Shabatz, to cut the Serbs off from their base. The result was that by the 24th the Austrians were practically cleared out of the country, and Vienna announced that the punitive expedition, which had cost 40,000 casualties and fifty guns, had accomplished its object.

A second attempt to achieve it was, however, provoked by the invasion of Bosnia with which the Serbs had supplemented their victory, and by their capture of Semlin in order to stop the Austrian bombardment of Belgrade. On 8 September the Austrians launched an attack across the Drina which forms the boundary between Serbia and Bosnia, and the battle raged till the 17th. Again the Serbs were victorious, though they made no impression on Serajevo and the Austrians retained a foothold on the eastern bank of the Drina; and for six weeks Serbia was left in comparative peace. But at the end of October the entrance of Turkey into the war and the relief afforded to Austria's troops farther north by the increasing activity of Germany in Poland and Galicia encouraged another effort; and under General Potiorek the Austrians began a more ambitious campaign. The Serbian frontier constituted a sharp salient which was indefensible against a superior force, and the Austrians exploited this advantage by extending their front of attack from Semendria on the Danube right round to Ushitza beyond the Drina. Their object was to envelop the Serbs and seize, firstly, Valievo, their advanced base, secondly, Kraguievatz the Serbian arsenal, and, finally, Nish, to which the Serbian Court and Government had withdrawn.

The only chance the Serbs had of success was to shorten their line by withdrawing to the semicircular mountain ridge which lies south and south-east of Valievo, and even so their prospects were gloomy. Two wars had already depleted Serbia's manhood and her munitions, and her numbers were sadly inferior to the Austrians. But individually her troops were far better fighters than their opponents, and the Crown Prince, Marshal Putnik, and General Mshitch, the commander of the 1st Serbian Army, quite outclassed Potiorek in tactics, strategy, and knowledge of the terrain. By 10 November the Austrians were in Valievo, and Potiorek was inclined to rest on his laurels. For a fatal fortnight he did nothing, and even detached three of his corps to serve in the Carpathians against the Russians who were there doing Serbia the service they had done in East Prussia to the Allies on the Marne. In that interval Greek and other munitions were conveyed in spite of Bulgar and Turkish intervention to the hard-pressed Serbians; King Peter, old, blind, and deaf, came from Nish to make a stirring appeal to his troops; and when on 1-3 December Potiorek once more advanced to the ridges of Rudnik and Maljen, he encountered a re-munitioned army, skilfully posted in strong positions and pledged to death or victory. Victory was its guerdon all along the line; the Austrian left centre and centre were broken on the 5th; at night their right was shattered near Ushitza; and on the morrow the whole army was in retreat, which soon became a rout. There were 80,000 casualties before, on the 15th, the fugitives were back in their own land across the Drina, the Danube, and the Save, leaving Belgrade once more in the hands of the heroic Serbs.

Austria had, however, acquired a strange new friend in the Turk, who had thrice besieged Vienna, and with whom she had waged an intermittent warfare of the Crescent and the Cross for some four centuries; and the blood-stained hand of Turkey was stretched out to save its "natural allies"—to quote Bernhardi—at Buda-Pesth and Potsdam. There was, indeed, a bond of sympathy, for in each of the enemy capitals a ruling caste oppressed one or more subject nationalities. Prussia stood for the Junker domination of the German tribes; Austria, for Teutonic government of Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles; Hungary, for Magyar dictation to Jugo-Slavs and Rumanes; and Turkey, for the exploitation or extermination of Armenians, Greeks, and Arabs. The Young Turk, who had dispossessed Abdul Hamid in 1908, only differed from the Old in being more efficient and less of a gentleman, and in seeking his inspiration from Krupp's guns and Treitschke's philosophy instead of from the Koran. He was a Turk without the Turk's excuse, and the adventurer Enver, who inaugurated the rule of the Committee of Union and Progress by assassinating his rivals, was willing to give Germany control of the Berlin-Baghdad route in return for a free hand with the subject nationalities of the Ottoman Empire. Russia was the common obstacle to both ambitions; but, Russia finally crippled, the Balkan States would become Turco-Teutonic provinces, and the Near East a German avenue into Asia, while Egypt might be recovered for the Sultan and made a base for German penetration of Africa.

Millions of German money had already been invested in this scheme, and the Kaiser's versatile piety had assumed a Mohammedan hue in the East. He had proclaimed himself the friend of every Mohammedan under the sun, and had carefully refrained from wounding the feelings of the authors of the Armenian massacres. The defeat of his Turkish friends in the Balkan Wars had been almost as great a blow to him as to them, and he had seen in the subsequent discord of the victors a chance of crushing them all. Rumania, he thought, was tied to his chariot-wheels by its Hohenzollern king, and Greece by its Hohenzollern queen; and Bulgaria could be won through its hatred of the successful Serbs. Serbia conquered, the corridor would be complete; but Serbia could not be permanently crushed while Russia remained intact, and Turkey would be a useful ally in the Russian campaign. There were millions of Mohammedans under Russian rule, and a Turkish invasion of the Caucasus, even if it did not stimulate insurrection in Russia, would keep hundreds of thousands of Russian troops from East Prussia, Poland, or Galicia.

Apart from the vulgar bribes which affected the Young Turk politicians there were other motives to move the populace. A Jehad against the Christian might stir the honest fanatic; well-to-do Turks had invested some of their savings in two Turkish Dreadnoughts under construction in England which the British Government had commandeered; and two German warships, the Goeben and the Breslau, had arrived at the Golden Horn to impress or to encourage the Ottoman mind. Such were some of the straws which finally broke the back of sober resistance to the warlike gamble of Enver and Talaat; but the substantial argument was the chance which was offered for Turkey to get back some of what her inveterate Russian enemy had seized in the course of a century and her inveterate British friend had pocketed as the price of her protection. On 29 October a horde of Bedouins invaded the Sinai Peninsula while Turkish torpedo boats raided Odessa, and on 1 November the British ambassador departed from Constantinople. The two Central Empires had enlisted their first ally, and the war had taken another stride towards Armageddon.

CHAPTER IV

THE WAR ON AND BEYOND THE SEAS The declaration of war by Great Britain on 4 August converted the conflict into one unlike any other that had been waged since Napoleon was sent to St. Helena in 1815; and sea-power was once more revealed to a somewhat purblind world. There had, indeed, been wars in which navies had been engaged, and Japan in 1904 had exhibited the latest model of a naval battle. But Japan only commanded the sea in Far Eastern waters; and the wars in which Great Britain herself was engaged since 1815 had displayed her command in limited spheres and at the expense of enemies who had no pretensions to be her naval rivals. But in 1914 the second navy in the world seemed by the conduct of Germany to challenge the first, and for nearly four and a half years there were hopes and fears of a titanic contest for the command of the sea. But in fact the challenge was not forthcoming, and from first to last the command remained in our hands through Germany's default. There was no Trafalgar because no one came forth to fight, and in the end the German Navy surrendered without a struggle.

But while our command of the sea was not disputed in deed by the Germans, it was disputed in word by domestic critics and denied by loquacious generals; and the exploits of German submarines, airships, and aeroplanes lent some colour to the denial and to the assertion that England had ceased to be an island. Both contentions were the outcome of inadequate knowledge and worse confusion of thought. Islands are made by the sea and not by the air; even if the Germans had secured command of the air, which they did not, that command would not have given them the advantages which accrue from the command of the sea. It might please pessimists to believe that England would be cowed into submission by air-raids, but the most inveterate scaremongers hesitated to assert that armies with their indispensable artillery and equipment could be dropped on British soil from the skies. Belgium and France were far more troubled than we by aircraft; but it was not aircraft that carried German armies to Brussels and near to the gates of Paris, and London was saved from the fate of Louvain by British command of the sea. Nor was that command abolished or even threatened by submarines, and the fear lest it was came of the mentality which denies the existence of a power on the ground that it is not perfect. Command of the sea never has been and never can be absolute. French privateers had never been more active nor British losses at sea more acute than after Trafalgar, when no French Navy ventured out of port; and the destruction of every German Dreadnought would not have affected by one iota the success of German submarines.

The command of the sea does not mean immunity from the risks of naval warfare or from loss by the capture or sinking of merchant vessels. It does not imply absolute security for British coasts, for British coasts have been raided in every great war that Britain has waged. It does not even involve the defeat or destruction of the enemy's naval forces, or it would be a simple task for any naval Power to deprive us of the command of the sea by locking its fleets in harbour, and on that theory the forts of the Dardanelles would have enabled Turkey to deny the command of the sea to the combined fleets of the world. The meaning is familiar enough to intelligent students of history. Bacon sketched it three hundred years ago when he wrote, "He that commands the sea is at great liberty and may take as much and as little of the war as he will ... and the wealth of both Indies seems in great part but an accessory to the command of the seas." "Both Indies" have grown to-day to include the resources of nearly the whole extra-European world which the command of the sea placed at the disposal of the Entente and denied to the Central Empires; and the last great war, like those against Napoleon, Louis XIV, and Philip II, was decided by the same indispensable factor in world-power. Others might control for a time a continent; only those who command the sea can dispose of the destinies of the world.

But while an essential factor in world-power, the command of the sea is not its sum; and the war throughout its course illustrated the weakness of attack by sea against a well-defended coast. No attempt was made to land an army on German territory, and complete command of the gean did not avail for the capture of Gallipoli. It could not turn sea into land nor enable a navy to do an army's work, and command of the sea while a more extensive is a less intensive kind of power than command of the land. The nature of the command varies, indeed, with the solidity of the element in which it is exercised: land is more solid than water, and water than air; the command of the land is therefore more complete than command of the sea, and command of the sea than command of the air; and endless confusion arose from the use of the same word to describe three different degrees of control. Victory can be achieved on sea, conquest only on land; and nothing like victory, let alone conquest, in war has yet been won in the air. Conquest, however, while it cannot be effected, can be prevented on sea, as it was at Salamis in 1588, at Trafalgar, and Navarino; for sea-power, while conclusive for defence, is merely conducive to offence, and that is why it has ever been a means of liberty rather than of despotism. Armies are the weapons of autocracy, navies those of freedom; for peoples do not live upon water, and only armies command their homes. Command of the sea is a sufficient protection for an island-empire; to conquer others it needs a superior army, and the absence of such an army proved the defensive aims of the British Empire before the war. World domination could only be secured by the combination of a dominant army with a dominant navy, and hence the significance of the German naval programme designed at least to prevent the counteraction of one by the other.

But while a supreme navy suffices to protect an island empire, it does not suffice to defend continental states; and the importance of British sea-power was that it gave us and other oversea peoples the liberty to take as much or as little part as we chose in a war to defend states that were threatened on land. The existence of that facility did not determine the extent to which it might be used by ourselves or by allies. That would depend upon the size of the armies we raised and the labour we spent upon their equipment; and we might have restricted our expeditionary forces to the numbers we sent under Marlborough against Louis XIV or under Wellington against Napoleon. But we could not have sent any without the command of the sea; and the essence of that command is that, firstly, it prevented the enemy from using his armies to invade our shores, and, secondly, it enabled us to send whatever forces we liked to whatever sphere of operations was not commanded by the enemy's armies. Philip II had demonstrated once for all the emptiness of the invasion scare when he sent a superb military expedition, the Spanish Armada, across a sea which he did not command; and the efforts of German submarines failed to affect the transport of our own and our Allies' troops or seriously to impede their communications.

The command of the sea was, in fact, abandoned by the Germans when on 26 July 1914 their fleet was recalled from the Norwegian fiords; and the cruisers which the outbreak of war found beyond reach of German territorial waters were in turn and in time destroyed. One Dreadnought, the Goeben, and a light cruiser, the Breslau, escaped to play a chequered part in the war. Caught by its outbreak in the Mediterranean, they attempted to make the Straits, were headed off by the British, and gained Messina on 5 August. Evading the British Fleet under circumstances which were held to cast no reflection on the British commander, and with assistance which it was deemed impolitic to make public, they pursued their flight eastward, gallantly assaulted by the smaller and slower Gloucester off Cape Matapan, until they reached the Dardanelles and took the Turkish Government under their charge. Out in the Atlantic the swift Karlsruhe caused some anxiety till she was wrecked in the West Indies, and the Geier was interned at Honolulu by the United States. A few converted merchantmen also pursued a brief career as raiders: the Cap Trafalgar was disposed of in a spirited action by the converted Cunarder Carmania on 14 September off Brazil; the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was sunk by the Highflyer off Cape Verde Islands on 27 August; and the Spreewald was captured in the North Atlantic by the Berwick on 12 September. For the rest, the German mercantile marine was interned in neutral ports or restricted to Baltic waters, and apart from Von Spee and the submarines the German flag disappeared from the seas.

The Germans had realized from the start a vital difference between war on sea and war on land. The land affords some protection to the weaker combatant especially on the defensive; the sea gives none. There are no trenches in the sea, but only graves. It is merciless to the vanquished, and the casualties in a beaten fleet are total losses; instead of prisoners, fugitives, and wounded, there is one vast list of drowned. Ships that are sunk do not return to the battle-line, and their loss takes long to repair. Years are required to build a Dreadnought, and years to make a seaman. Armies are easier to create and more difficult to destroy than fleets, and the sailor's fight is ever one to a finish, with little chance of escape from the dread alternative. It is a case of all or nothing; there are no water-tight compartments in sea-power, no fluctuating spheres of power, no divided areas in some of which one and in some the other combatant may be supreme. Apart from land-locked waters the sea is one and indivisible, and he who has the command, commands it everywhere. The battle at sea is a battle without a morrow for those who lose; and from the day when the Germans wisely withdrew into Kiel and Wilhelmshaven there was little chance that they would come out to fight to a finish except as a counsel of despair or until they could by mine or submarine or skilful raid reduce the disparity of force. That was the purpose of their early naval strategy; it proved ineffective owing to British skill and caution, and it became hopeless when it appeared that we could build ships much faster than the Germans could sink them or build ships themselves; and the Germans then turned from the task of destroying the British Navy to that of destroying the commerce on which we depended for subsistence, from the hope of securing the command of the sea for themselves to that of turning it into a "no man's land," a desert which no allied or neutral ship could cross.

The mine-sowing began the moment war was declared, and on 5 August the Konigin Luise was sunk in the nefarious act of sowing loose mines in the North Sea. Fixed mines for coast and harbour defence or minefields at sea are legitimate means of war, provided that warning is given of the dangerous area; loose mines are prohibited by international law, because they can make no distinction in their destruction between neutrals and belligerents, merchantmen and men-of-war. But the German flag having practically disappeared from the seas, the Germans paid little heed to the risks of other people. On 6 August a light cruiser, the Amphion, struck one of these mines and was sunk, and on 3 September a gunboat, the Speedy, met with a similar fate. A more serious loss, though only one man was killed, was that of the super-Dreadnought Audacious, which struck a mine to the north of Ireland on 27 October and sank as she was being towed into harbour; and a mine caused the loss of the Hampshire, with Lord Kitchener on board, in June 1916.

The submarine proved, however, the greater danger, and there was nothing illegal in the sinking of men-of-war or transports. On 5 September the Pathfinder, a light cruiser, was torpedoed and sunk, and on the 13th the British retaliated by sinking the German light cruiser Hela near Heligoland. The warning, however, had not been taken to heart, and on 22 September the German submarine commander, Otto Weddigen, successively sank the Aboukir, the Hogue, and the Cressy, three old but substantial cruisers on patrol duty off the Dutch coast. The Hogue and the Cressy were lost because they came up to the rescue and were protected by no screen of destroyers, and 680 officers and men were drowned. A fourth cruiser, the Hawke, was torpedoed off Aberdeen on 15 October, and on 1 January 1915 the Formidable, of 15,000 tons, was sunk off Start Point on her way to the Dardanelles, with a loss of 600 of her crew. The Germans were not, however, immune in their submarine campaign. H.M.S. Birmingham rammed and sank a German submarine on 6 August, the Badger did the like on 25 October, and U18 was sunk on 23 November; Weddigen himself was rammed, with the loss of his submarine and all on board, later on by the Dreadnought.

The British losses by mine and submarine created some discontent on the ground that our naval strategy was defensive rather than offensive; and military critics, whose notions of naval warfare were derived from the study of German text-books on the principles of war on land, continually pressed for a more active policy, and asked why our superior navy did not treat the German Fleet as the German Army treated its enemies in France and Belgium. It was forgotten that he who possesses all must always be on the defensive; there must be something tangible to attack before there can be an offensive, and there could have been no Trafalgar had Napoleon kept his fleet in harbour. The abandonment of the high seas by the German Navy precluded a naval battle, and the defensive strength of harbour defences which kept Nelson outside Toulon had so increased as to make it vastly harder for Jellicoe to penetrate Wilhelmshaven or Kiel. Naval power, which the war proved to be more than ever effective on sea, was shown to be more than ever powerless on shore. The mine and the submarine made the sustained bombardment of land fortifications a dangerous practice, and moving batteries on shore were more than a match for ships, because they could not be sunk and could be more easily repaired or replaced. There were wild dreams of British forces landing on German coasts, and still wilder alarms about German armies descending on British shores; but the only landing effected on hostile territory during the war was at Gallipoli, and it did not encourage a similar attempt against the better defended lands held by the Germans. We had to content ourselves with the practical realization in war of our continual claim in peace that sea-power is an instrument for the defence of island states rather than one for offence against continental peoples. Only when and where those peoples wished to be defended and opened their ports to their allies, was it found possible to land a relieving force. The British armies which liberated Brussels had to travel via Boulogne and not Ostend; and the German ships which sheltered in port had to be routed out by the pressure of Allied arms on land.

The naval actions of the war were therefore of the nature of outpost raids and skirmishes rather than of battles. The first that developed any serious fighting took place in the Bight of Heligoland on 28 August. Apparently with the design of inducing the Germans to come out, a flotilla of submarines under Commodore Keyes was sent close in to Heligoland, with some destroyers and two light cruisers, the Arethusa and Fearless, behind them, and more substantial vessels out of sight in the offing. Presently there appeared a German force of destroyers and two cruisers, the Ariadne and the Strassburg; they were driven off mainly by the gallant fighting of the Arethusa; but thinking there was no further support the Germans then sent out three heavier cruisers, the Mainz, the Koln, and apparently the Yorck. The Arethusa and Fearless held their own for two or three hours until Beatty's battle-cruisers, led by the Lion, came safely through the German mine-fields and submarines to their assistance. The Lion's 13.5-inch guns soon settled the issue: the Mainz and the Kln were sunk, while no British unit was lost, and the casualties were 32 killed and 52 wounded against 300 German prisoners and double that number of other casualties. The overwhelming effect of heavier gunfire had been clearly demonstrated, and it was further illustrated on 17 October by the destruction of four German destroyers off the Dutch coast by the light cruiser Undaunted accompanied by four British destroyers; but the next exhibition of naval gun-power was to be at our expense.

Among the incidental advantages which the adhesion of Great Britain brought to the Entente was the intervention of Japan, which, apart from its alliance with us, had never forgiven Germany the part she took in depriving Japan of the fruits of her victory over China in 1894, and regarded as a standing offence the naval base which Germany had established at Tsingtau and the hold she had acquired on North Pacific islands. On 15 August Japan demanded within eight days the surrender of the lease of Tsingtau and the evacuation of Far Eastern waters by German warships. No answer was, of course, returned, but the German squadron under Von Spee wisely left Tsingtau in anticipation of its investment by the Japanese. It began on the 27th, and troops were landed on 2 September: on the 23rd a British contingent arrived from Wei-hai-wei to co-operate, and gradually the lines of investment and the heavy artillery were drawn closer. The final assault was fixed for 7 November, but the Germans forestalled it by surrender; there were 3000 prisoners out of an original garrison of 5000, and Germany's last overseas base, on which she had spent 20,000,000, passed into the enemy's hands. Australian troops had already occupied without serious opposition German New Guinea, the Bismarck archipelago, and the Gilbert and Caroline Islands, while Samoa surrendered to a New Zealand force, and the Marshall Islands to the Japanese.

Von Spee's squadron was thus left without a German naval base; but one of its vessels was to show that there was still a career for a raider, and the others were to demonstrate the paradox that neutral ports might be more useful than bases of their own, inasmuch as they could not be treated like Tsingtau. On fleeing from the Japanese menace Von Spee had steamed eastwards across the Pacific, but two of his cruisers, the Knigsberg and the Emden, were detached to help the Germans in East Africa and to raid British commerce in the Indian Ocean. On 20 September the Knigsberg sank H.M.S. Pegasus at Zanzibar, but failed to give much assistance in the projected attack on Mombasa, and was presently bottled up in the Rufigi River. The Emden under Captain Mller had better success. Throughout September and October she haunted the coasts of India and harried British trade, setting fire to an oil-tank at Madras, torpedoing a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer in the roadstead of Penang, and capturing in all some seventeen British merchantmen. She had, however, lost her own attendant colliers about 25 October, and a raid on the Cocos or Keeling islands on 9 November was interrupted by the arrival of H.M.S. Sydney, which had been warned by wireless, on her way from Australia. In less than two hours the Sydney's 6-in. guns had battered the Emden to pieces, and with only 18 casualties had killed or wounded 230 of the enemy. Mller became an honourable prisoner of war; he had proved himself the most skilful of German captains and the best of German gentlemen.

Meanwhile Von Spee had gained the South American coast and made himself at home in its friendly ports and islands. He had with him two sister cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, each of 11,400 tons and an armament of eight 8.2-inch guns, and three smaller cruisers, the Dresden, Leipzig, and Nrnberg, each about the size of the Emden, from 3200 to 3540 tons, and carrying ten 4.1-inch guns; none of them had a speed of less than 22 knots. To protect the South Pacific trade the British Government had in August sent Admiral Cradock with a somewhat miscellaneous squadron, consisting of the Canopus, a pre-Dreadnought battleship of nearly 13,000 tons, with 6-inch armour, four 12-inch guns, and a speed of 19 knots; the Good Hope, a cruiser of 14,000 tons, with two 9.2-inch and sixteen 6-inch guns, and a speed of 22 knots; the Monmouth of 9800 tons, fourteen 6-inch guns, and the same speed as the Good Hope; the Glasgow of 4800 tons, with two 6-inch and ten 4-inch guns, and a speed of 25 knots; and the Otranto, an armed liner. Reinforcements were expected from home, and possibly from Japan; but the squadrons were not unequally matched in weight of metal, though the British were handicapped by the diversity and antiquity of their armament. The balance was, however, destroyed before the battle, because, as Cradock in the third week of October made his way north along the Pacific coast, the Canopus developed defects which necessitated her being left behind for repairs.

The squadrons fell in with one another north-west of Coronel late in the afternoon of 1 November. Cradock had turned south, presumably to join the Canopus, but Von Spee secured the inestimable advantage of the in-shore course, and as the sun set it silhouetted the British ships against the sky while the gathering gloom obscured the Germans. The fight was really between the two leading cruisers on each side, the Good Hope and the Monmouth against the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau. The Germans got the range first, and the Good Hope's two 9.2-inch guns were soon put out of action in spite of their superior weight. At 7:50 she blew up, and the Monmouth was a wreck. The lightly-armoured Glasgow had no option but to use her superior speed and escape to warn the Canopus. This she did, and the two got safely round Cape Horn to the Falkland Isles, leaving for the time the Germans in command of the South Pacific coast. Sixteen hundred and fifty officers, midshipmen, and men lost their lives with Cradock, and none were rescued by the Germans. There was hardly a parallel in British naval history for such a defeat.

Prompt measures were taken to retrieve it. Lord Fisher had succeeded Prince Louis of Battenberg at the Admiralty on 30 October, and one of his first acts was to dispatch on 5 November a squadron under Admiral Sturdee, comprising the Invincible and Inflexible, and four lighter cruisers, the Carnarvon, Kent, Cornwall, and Bristol; the Glasgow was picked up in the South Atlantic, while the Canopus was at Port Stanley in the Falklands. The Invincible and Inflexible were the two first battle-cruisers built; each had a tonnage of 17,250, a speed of 27-28 knots, and eight 12-inch guns which could be fired as a broadside to right or left; and there would be little chance for Von Spee if he encountered such a weight of metal. Sturdee reached Port Stanley on 7 December. Von Spee, who had been refitting at Juan Fernandez, left it on 15 November, possibly fearing the Japanese approach, and made for Cape Horn and the Atlantic. His plan was to snap up the Canopus and the Glasgow, get what he could out of the Falklands, and then proceed to support the rebellion in South Africa. Early on 8 December he unsuspectingly approached Port Stanley, not discovering the presence of Sturdee's squadron until it was too late. He then made off north-eastwards with the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, while his lighter cruisers turned south-eastwards. The former were sunk in the afternoon by the two British battle-cruisers and the Carnarvon, while the latter succumbed in the evening to the Kent, Glasgow, and Cornwall; only the Dresden escaped, to be sunk in five minutes on 14 March 1915 at Juan Fernandez by the Kent and the Glasgow. The Invincible had no casualties, the Inflexible one man killed; the Kent had four killed and twelve wounded, and the Glasgow nine and four. About two hundred Germans were saved from drowning, but they did not include Von Spee.

Such were the effects upon human life of a disparity of weight of metal in naval action. No skill could avoid the brutal precision of mechanical and material superiority. Von Spee had it at Coronel, Sturdee at the Falklands, and there is no reason to suppose that if the persons had been exchanged, the result would have been any different. It is the romance of the past which attributes naval success mainly to superior seamanship or courage; the "little" Revenge was the super-Dreadnought of her time, and the victories of the Elizabethan sea-dogs were as surely won by superior weight of metal as those of Nelson or to-day. Von Spee and his men fought as bravely and as skilfully as Cradock and his; and the war for command of the sea went against the Germans because while the Germans were building pre-Dreadnoughts and casting 8-inch guns, we were building Dreadnoughts and casting 10 or 12-inch guns; and while they were constructing their Dreadnoughts, we were building super-Dreadnoughts with 13.5 and 15-inch guns. Success in naval warfare goes not so much to the brave as to those who think ahead in terms of mechanical force.

The last German cruisers outside harbour were now destroyed, and barely a raider remained at large, while the British went on gathering the fruits of their command of the sea by mustering in Europe the forces of the Empire and acquiring abroad the disjointed German colonies. Naval strategy was reduced to the dull but arduous task of blocking the exits from the North Sea and guarding against the furtive German raids. The battle-fleet was stationed in Scapa Flow, the cruisers off Rosyth, while little more than a patrol—backed by a squadron of pre-Dreadnoughts in the Channel—was left to watch the Straits of Dover and supplement the mine-fields. Both combatants drew advantage from the narrow front of Germany's outlook towards the sea; the exits were easier for us to close than Nelson had found the lengthy coast of France, and no German Fleet slipped across the Atlantic as Villeneuve did in 1805. On the other hand, the narrow front was easier to fortify, protect with mine-fields, and defend against attack. If there was to be a conclusive naval battle, the field would be in the North Sea, and the only hope of success for the Germans lay in the dispersion of our battle-fleet.

This was the object of the German raids on Yarmouth on 3 November, and on Scarborough, Whitby, and the Hartlepools on 16 December. The former effected nothing except sowing of some floating mines which subsequently sank British submarine and two fishing-smacks, while one of the participating cruisers, the Yorck, struck a German mine and sank on entering Wilhelmshaven. The December raid was more successful in its murderous intention of extending the schrecklichkeit practised in Belgium to civilians on British shores. British delegates had insisted at The Hague in 1907 on large rights of naval bombardment, and the Germans expanded the plea that the presence of civilians does not exempt a fortified town from bombardment into the argument that the presence of a soldier or even of war-material justifies the shelling of a crowd of civilians or a watering-place. There was a cavalry station at Scarborough, a coastguard at Whitby, and some infantry and a battery at Hartlepool; Scarborough also had a wireless installation, and Hartlepool its docks, and both were undoubtedly used for purposes of war. The truth is that war tends to pervade and absorb the whole energies of the community, and the only legitimate criticism of German methods is that they pushed to extremes of barbarity premisses which were commonly admitted and could logically lead in no other direction. The old restriction of war to a few actual combatants disappeared as manhood took to universal service, womanhood to munition-making, and whole nations to war-work, and as the reach of artillery and aircraft extended the sphere of operations hundreds of miles behind the battle-lines. Eighteen were killed at Scarborough, mostly women and children, and 70 were wounded; Whitby had 3 killed and 2 wounded, but the damage at Hartlepool was serious. Six hundred houses were damaged or destroyed, 119 persons were killed, over 300 were wounded, and the mines the Germans scattered sank three steamers with considerable loss of life. The raiders escaped by the skin of their teeth in a fog which closed down just as two British battle-cruisers appeared on the scene of their retreat. That the raid had been effected at all evoked some protest from a public unaware that such incidents have always been an inevitable accompaniment of all our naval wars; and critics declared that we had lost the command of the sea in the first great war in our history in which not an enemy landed on English soil except as a prisoner. It was the German plan to provoke such comment, a feeling of insecurity, and a demand for the scattering of our Grand Fleet along the coasts for defence in order that it might be dealt with in detail; but the design was happily defeated by the restraint of the people and the sense of better judges.

The Germans, however, were encouraged by their success to repeat the attempt once too often, and on 24 January 1915 a more ambitious effort was made by Admiral Hipper to emulate these raids, or perhaps rather to lure the British on to mine-fields north of Heligoland which he extended before he set out. He had with him three of the best German battle-cruisers, the Derfflinger, Seydlitz, and Moltke, with speeds ranging from 27 to 25 knots, tonnage from 26,000 to 22,000, and 12 or 11-inch guns; the Blcher of 15,550 tons, 24 knots, and 8.2-inch guns; six light cruisers and a torpedo flotilla. The Germans rarely if ever came out without information of their intended movement preceding them, and Beatty put to sea within an hour of their start. His flagship was the Lion, 26,350 tons, 29 knots, and eight 13.5-inch guns, and he had five other battle-cruisers, the Tiger, 28,000 tons, 28 knots, and the same armament as the Lion; the Princess Royal, a sister ship of the Lion; the New Zealand, 18,800 tons, 25 knots, and eight 12-inch guns; and the Indomitable, sister to Sturdee's Invincible and Inflexible. There were also four cruisers of the "town" class, three light cruisers, and torpedo flotillas. The fight was, however, mainly between the battle-crusiers. As soon as Hipper heard of Beatty's approach he turned south-east. Gradually he was overhauled, each of the leading British cruisers, Lion, Tiger, and Princess Royal firing salvos into the slower Blcher as they passed on to tackle the Moltke, Seydlitz, and Derfflinger. The Blcher was finally reduced to a wreck by the New Zealand and Indomitable, and then torpedoed by the Meteor; bombs from German aircraft prevented our boats from rescuing more than 120 survivors from the sinking ship. Meanwhile the Lion was damaged by a shell and had to fall behind, and an hour and twenty minutes passed before Beatty could return to the scene of action; he found that his second in command had broken off the fight out of respect for the German mine-field, which seems, however, to have been still thirty or forty miles away. The German battle-cruisers, which might apparently have been destroyed, thus got home with a severe battering which incapacitated them for action for some months. No British ship was lost, and our casualties were about a score of men.

The result was disappointing in the escape of the German cruisers, but it left no doubt about the command of the sea. It was, indeed, being daily demonstrated by the security of the Channel passage, the muster of forces from oversea, and the conquest of German colonies. These were mainly in Africa, and consisted of Togoland, the German Cameroons, German South-West Africa, and East Africa. The tide of conquest flowed in this order round Africa from north-west to south-east, and Togoland, which was also the smallest, was the first to be subdued. It was about the size of Ireland, and was hemmed in on all sides, by British sea-power on the south, Nigeria on the west, and French colonies on the north and east; and converging attacks forced the handful of German troops to unconditional surrender on 27 August, The Cameroons were larger than the German Empire in Europe, and the first attacks, being made with inadequate preparation, were repulsed in the latter days of August. On 27 September, however, by co- operation between French troops and two British warships, Duala the capital was captured and the whole coast-line was seized.

The conquest of German South-West Africa was a more serious matter, not only because the Germans were there more numerous and better organized, but because the task was complicated by the politics of the Union. It was not a Crown colony subject to the orders of the Imperial Government; troops could only move at the instance of a responsible local administration, and the back-veld Boers, led by Hertzog and De Wet, were strenuously opposed to participation in the war on the British side. Fortunately, perhaps, the Germans began hostilities by raiding the frontiers of Cape Colony, and on 18 September the British retaliated by seizing Luderitz Bay, which, like their other port, Swakopmund, the Germans had abandoned to concentrate at their inland capital, Windhoek. On the 26th there was a small British reverse at Sandfontein, which was followed by the more serious news of Maritz' rebellion in the Cape. Maritz had fought against the British in the Boer War and for the Germans against the revolted Hereros; he now held the ambiguous position of rank in the German Army and command of British forces, but came down on the German side of the fence. Botha ordered his arrest, and Maritz, with German assistance in arms and ammunition, attempted to overrun the north-west of Cape Colony. A fortnight's campaign in October ended with the dispersal of his commandos by Colonel Van Deventer.

Maritz was the stormy petrel of a far more serious disturbance. While the grant of self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony in 1908 had placated the great majority and the better-educated Boers, tradition and prejudice kept their hold upon the more conservative minority; and some like Beyers, who had once been received by the Kaiser, looked to a war with Germany to restore their ancient independence. On 24 October De Wet seized Heilbronn in the Orange State, and Beyers Rustenburg in the Transvaal. Botha's appeal to the loyal Boers met, however, with an effective response, and soon he had 30,000 men at his disposal. He acted with remarkable swiftness: on the 27th he dispersed the commandos of Beyers and Kemp, and on 7 November General Smuts announced that there were but a few scattered bands of rebels in the Transvaal. De Wet made a longer run by his elusive heels, but found the motor-transport of his enemies an insuperable bar to the repetition of his exploits of 1900-2. He had a slight success at Doornberg on 7 November, when his force amounted to 2000 men; but Botha now came south into the Orange State and completely defeated De Wet on the 11th to the east of Winburg. De Wet himself escaped and attempted a junction with Beyers who had fled south from the Transvaal. But he was gradually driven westward into the Kalahari desert and overtaken by Colonel Jordaan's motors a hundred miles west of Mafeking on 1 December, while Beyers was drowned in trying to cross the Vaal on the 8th. De Wet was once more given his life, and the other rebels were treated with a lenience which nothing but its wisdom could excuse.

The rising put off to another year the conquest of German South-West Africa. The conquest of East Africa (see Map, p. 249) was postponed for a longer period by the inherent difficulties of the task and the imported defects in its management. German East Africa was actually and potentially by far the most valuable of German oversea possessions. Twice the size of Germany, it had a population of eight million natives and five thousand Europeans. Although tropical in its climate, high ground, and especially the slopes of Kilimanjaro, provided inhabitable land for white men, and its wealth in forests, gold and other minerals, pastoral and agricultural facilities was considerable. There were four excellent ports, and from two of them, Tanga and the capital, Dar-es-Salaam, railways ran far into the interior. On the north it was bounded by British East Africa and Uganda, on the west by the Belgian Congo State, and on the south-west by British Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, while on the south Portuguese Mozambique provided some means of supply and an ultimate refuge in defeat. The German forces were greatly superior to those of the British in East Africa, and the Uganda railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria Nyanza running parallel with the frontier was a tempting object of attack. The Germans took the offensive against the British north and south-west, without achieving any great success. But only the arrival of reinforcements from India on 3 September and the failure of the Konigsberg to co-operate prevented the fall of Mombasa, and only the inadequacy of the British maps, on which the Germans had for once to rely, frustrated their attack on the Uganda railway. Karungu was also besieged on Lake Victoria Nyanza, but relieved by a couple of British vessels; the invaders of Northern Rhodesia were beaten back; and a naval force bombarded Dar-es-Salaam and destroyed the wireless installation. The arrival of a second expeditionary force from India on 1 November was the prelude to a greater reverse. Landing at Tanga on the 4th, it was met by a German force, superior in the art of bush fighting if not in numbers which hurried down from Moschi, and was compelled to re-embark with a loss of 800 casualties. During the brief span of their colonial experience the Germans had learnt as much about colonial warfare as we could teach them after centuries; for traditions are not an unmixed blessing in the art of war.

CHAPTER V

ESTABLISHING THE WESTERN FRONT The Battles Of The Aisne

Throughout the war there was an undercurrent of criticism against the dispersion of British forces and dissipation of British energy, and the briefest history of it cannot avoid a certain amount of discursiveness. The reason, if not the justification, is the same in both cases; for happily or unhappily the British Empire is scattered all over the globe, and unless colonies were to be abandoned to enemy attacks and the natural forces of native discontents, they had to be defended in part at least by British troops. Fortunately the task required but a fraction of the military strength which Germany needed to hold Alsace-Lorraine in time of peace, and long before the end Great Britain received from her dominions fourfold the help in Europe that she had to lend them overseas. The rally to the British flag was to us one of the most inspiring, and to the Germans one of the most dispiriting, portents in the war; but it took time to bear its fruits, and meanwhile the cause of civilization had to rely upon the gallantry of French armies and the numerically weak British forces fighting on the Marne and on the Aisne.

The human eye is ever longing to pierce the veil of the future, but it was perhaps as well that men could not foresee, as the Allies drove the Germans across the lower reaches of the Aisne, how long that river would be reddened with the blood of the contending forces. They thought that the tide of invasion would recede as fast as it had advanced, and it was only as the days of German resistance lengthened into weeks, and the weeks into months of the longest battle in history, that staffs and armies and peoples began to grasp the awful potentialities of scientific progress in the art of modern war. The battle without a morrow had long been the ideal consummation for victorious strategy, but no one had yet foreseen the battle without an end and armies without flanks. That sooner or later one or other combatant would be outflanked had been the universal assumption of the strategist; but in the autumn of 1914 the combatant forces gradually extended their fronts in the effort until they rested upon the frontier of Switzerland and the sea, and the deadlock of a deadly embrace began which was not effectively broken until the wrestling of four years wore down the strength of the wrestlers and left the final decision in the hands of new-comers to the European field of battle.

The deadlock was no part of the original German plan, but German forethought during the advance to the Marne had provided entrenchments in the rear for the event of a retreat, and the natural strength of the forest of St. Gobain, the Chemin des Dames, and the Argonne as well as a study of the campaign of 1814 had suggested an obvious line of defence. It was not, however, expected by the Entente higher command which proceeded with its frontal attack on the assumption that the Germans were merely fighting rearguard actions to secure their further retirement; and it was only when the German front refused to budge that pressure spread out to the Allied left wing in an attempt to turn the German right flank, which would have stood more chance of success had it come a fortnight earlier as a first instead of a second thought. An even better alternative might have been to revert to Joffre's original plan, which had failed in August on the Saar, to thrust forward against the Crown Prince and threaten the left of the Germans and the communications of their forces in Belgium and northern France. But it is easier on paper after the event than it was in action at the time to convert an improvised defensive into a considered offensive strategy; and the Germans themselves had occasion during the autumn and the rest of the war to regret that their second thoughts had not come first.

The battle of the Aisne began, like that of the Marne, on Sunday, 13 September. The Germans' retreat had taken them north of the river except at a few bridgeheads, but the river was deep and its crossings were all commanded by fire from German batteries concealed on the slopes rising up from the northern bank. Maunoury's 6th Army attacked on the left from Compigne and the Fort de l'Aigle to Soissons, and several divisions were got across. From Soissons eastward for fifteen miles to Pont-Arcy the line of attack was held by the British Army; the whole of the 4th Division got across near Venizel, and most of the 5th and 3rd Divisions farther east, but the Germans succeeded in holding the bridge at Cond. The 2nd Division was also only partially successful in the region of Chavonne, but the whole of the 1st got across at Pont-Arcy and Bourg. On Monday, Maunoury pressed forward up the heights, capturing Autrches and Nouvron, but, like the British on his right between Vregny and Vailly, he found the German positions impregnable on the plateau. Haig's First Corps was more successful farther east; Vendresse and Troyon were captured and the Chemin des Dames was almost reached. But D'Esperey's 5th French army could make little impression on the Craonne plateau; Foch's 9th was unable to force the Suippe to the east of Reims, and Langle's 4th, while it occupied Souain, was similarly held up in Champagne.

On the 15th the Germans counter-attacked. Maunoury was driven out of Nouvron and Autrches, the British were forced back from Vregny almost to the river, and the Moroccan troops withdrew on Haig's right flank. There was a lull on the 16th, and on the 17th Maunoury recovered the quarries of Autrches; but east of Reims the 9th Army had fallen back from the Suippe, and the Prussian Guard had captured Nogent l'Abbesse and was threatening Foch's connexion with Langle in Champagne. The 18th saw little progress on either side, except along the Oise, where Maunoury had as early as the 15th begun to outflank the German right. This success, coupled with the stalemate along the rest of the front, suggested to Joffre a change of strategy. Numerically the opposing forces were not unequal, but the Germans had all the advantages of position. To attack up carefully protected slopes with a river in the rear and its crossings commanded by the enemy's fire, promised little hope of success, and threatened disaster in case of failure and retreat. Accordingly, Joffre, taking some risks by weakening his centre, began on the 16th to lengthen and strengthen his left by forming two new armies. Castlenau gave up his command of the 2nd to Dubail in Lorraine and took over the new 7th, and a 10th was entrusted to Maud'huy, another of the professors of military history to whom the French and the Russian armies owed so much of their generalship. By the 20th Maunoury had swung his left round until it stretched at a right angle from Compigne north to the west of Lassigny. Castelnau's 7th continued the line north through Roye to the Albert plateau; and on the 30th Maud'huy's 10th took up the tale through Arras to Lens.

But if the impact of equal forces on the Aisne flattened them out towards the west, it had the same effect in the other direction, though here it was the Germans who took the offensive in trying to penetrate Sarrail's flank on the Meuse and thus get behind the whole front of the Allies. Verdun was the nut to be cracked, but Sarrail had been extending its defences so as to put the city beyond the reach of the German howitzers and surrounding it with miles of trenches and wire-entanglements; and the Germans preferred to attempt another method than frontal attack. About the 20th four new corps, chiefly of Wrttemburgers, appeared in Lorraine, bringing their forces up to seven against Sarrail's three; and an attack was made on Fort Troyon on the Meuse which reduced it to a dust-heap but failed to carry the Germans across the river. A more serious onslaught was made on the 23rd against St. Mihiel, which was captured while the neighbouring forts of Paroches and the Camp des Romains were destroyed. But again the Germans were prevented from pushing their advantage, and were left with no more than a wonderful salient which looked on the map like Germany putting out its tongue at France and resisted all efforts to repress this insolence until the closing months of the war.

Having achieved but a sterile success to the south of Verdun, the Crown Prince encountered a greater failure to the west. On 3 October he attacked Sarrail's centre in the forest of the Argonne, seeking to recapture St. Menehould, the headquarters he had abandoned on 14 September. His troops were caught in La Grurie wood and so badly mauled that they temporarily lost Varennes and the main road through the Argonne to Verdun. Foiled in both these directions, the Germans revenged themselves by bombarding Reims in the centre and ruining its cathedral; "the commonest, ugliest stone," wrote a German general, "placed to mark the burial-place of a German grenadier is a more glorious and perfect monument than all the cathedrals in Europe put together." The bombardment did not help them much; Neuvillette, which they had seized two miles north of Reims, was lost again on 28 September, and the French also recovered Prunay, the German occupation of which had driven a wedge between Foch's and Langle's armies. On the other hand, Berry-au-Bac, where the great road crossed the Aisne and the French often reported progress, remained in German hands for four years longer. Both sides were now firmly entrenched, and their armies were learning that new art of trench warfare which was to tax their ingenuity, test their endurance, and drain their strength, until years later this war of positions once more gave place to a war of movement. The lines had become stabilized, and between Reims and the Alps they did not alter by half a dozen miles at any point from September 1914 until September 1918. The question of October was whether and where they would be fixed between the Aisne and the sea.

Joffre's outflanking move was promptly countered, if not indeed anticipated, by the German higher command, and in the first days of October there was a general drift of German forces towards their right and the Channel ports. Most and the best of the new levies were sent into Belgium, and the stoutest troops in the fighting line were shifted from East to West. Alsace was almost denuded; the Bavarians were moved from Lorraine towards Lille and Arras, and the Duke of Wrttemberg into Belgian Flanders. Von Bulow was sent to face Castelnau and Maud'huy between the Oise and the Somme, and only Von Kluck and the Crown Prince with a new general, Von Heeringen, from Alsace were left to hold the line of the Aisne. Von Moltke was superseded by Falkenhayn, and a new phase came over German strategy. The knock-out blow against France had failed, and the little British Army threatened to grow. France had been the only foe the Germans had counted in the West, but a new enemy was developing strength, and the German front was turned to meet the novel danger.

The British Army made a movement which was sympathetic with this change and symptomatic of the future course of the war. It was clearly out of place along the Aisne in trenches which could be held by French territorials and where its long communications crossed those of three French armies. It was needed in Flanders close to its bases and to the Channel ports which the Germans had now resolved to seize in the hope of cutting or straining the Anglo-French liaison and furthering their new campaign on land and sea against their gathering British foes. The idea had occurred to Sir John French before the end of September, and on the 29th he propounded it to Joffre; Joffre concurred, called up an 8th Army under D'Urbal to support and prolong the extension of the line into Flanders, and placed Foch in general charge of the operations north of Noyon. The transport began on 3 October and was admirably carried out, though some of the ultra-patriotic English newspapers did their best to help the enemy by their enterprise in evading the Censor and giving news of the movement to the public; for if business was business to the profiteer, news was news to its vendors.

For a fortnight the British were on the road and out of the fight, which was left for the most part to Castelnau's 7th and Maud'huy's 10th Armies; and strenuous fighting it was for all-important objects. There was little profit in a British out-march round the German flank in Flanders unless the links between it and the Oise could be maintained, and the Germans were as speedily reinforcing and extending their right as we were preparing to turn it. At first Castelnau seemed to be making rapid and substantial progress; he captured Noyon on 21 September, was pushing on by Lassigny to Roye, and optimistic maps in the English press depicted the German right being bent back to St. Quentin and the French outflanking it as far north-east as Le Catelet. These were not intelligent anticipations. Von Kluck had been reinforced, and a desperate battle ensued from the 25th to the 28th, in which Castelnau was driven back from Noyon and Lassigny. This counter-attack was repulsed with great losses at Quesnoy and Lihons a little farther north, but Maud'huy was not less heavily engaged north of the Somme in a several days' struggle for the Albert plateau. The line established was supposed to run through Combles and Bapaume, and it was not till long afterwards that the public realized how far it had sagged to the westwards, or what that sagging meant when the British had to fight their way up to Bapaume.

North of that watershed the fronts were fluid, if the scattered bodies of French Territorials and German cavalry could be said to constitute a front at all; and there was a strenuous race and struggle to turn the respective flanks. Neither side, it was soon apparent, would succeed in that object, and the practical question was at what point the outflanking contest would reach the coast. The German ambition was to push their right as far south as the mouth of the Seine, while the Allies hoped to thrust their left to the north until it joined the Belgian Army at Antwerp. Maud'huy had entered Arras on 30 September, and some of his Territorials pushed forward to Lille and Douai. During the first three days of October he was fighting hard on the eastern slopes of Vimy Ridge but was compelled to fall back on Arras, while the Germans occupied Lille and Douai and their cavalry penetrated as far as Bailleul, Hazebrouck, and Cassel. But the British from the Aisne were moving up towards their positions on Maud'huy's left, the Aire-La Basse Canal being fixed as the point of their junction, and the 7th Division, with a division of cavalry, had landed at Ostend and Zeebrugge while the Naval Division was sent to assist in the defence of Antwerp. The Allied dream of a front along the Scheldt to Antwerp, barring German access to the sea, seemed on the verge of realization; but dramatic as the moment was, the tension would have been far more acute had men grasped what a difference possession of the Belgian coast was to make in the course of the war.

Success was missed by the Allies because it had been a more urgent task to break the German offensive on the Marne than to save the remnants of Belgian soil and assist the detached Belgian Army; and the whole of our available force had been sent to the vital spot. Isolation is always dubious strategy, but there were sound as well as natural motives behind the decision which led the Belgian Army after the German occupation of Brussels on 20 August to fall back north-westwards on Antwerp instead of southwards to join the Allies at Mons and Charleroi. The isolation did not involve ineffectiveness, and so far away as the Marne the Allies experienced the benefit of Belgian fighting at Antwerp. Three successive sorties alarmed the Germans for the safety of their far-flung right and its communications, and diverted reserves from their front in France to their rear in Belgium (see Map, p. 34). The first began on 24 August and drove the Germans from Malines, while 2000 British marines landed at Ostend. Then the Belgian right stretched out a hand towards the British and captured Alost, while the left struck at Cortenburg on the line between Brussels and Louvain. The communications of the capital were thus threatened on three sides, and the Germans had to recall at least three of their corps from France. It was this interference with their vital plans in France, coupled with the panic produced by the Belgian advance, which provoked the Germans into their barbarities at Louvain, Malines, and Termonde. Schrecklichkeit was to deter the contemptible Belgian Army from spoiling a mighty German success. That was the view of the German staff, and a soldiery prone as ever to pillage and rapine, needed little encouragement to extend to civilians, women, and children the violence which their leaders organized against cathedrals and cities.

Panic produces plots in all countries—in the minds of the panic-stricken, and Germans no doubt believed in the tales of civilian conspiracies which they used to justify their military crimes. Major Von Manteuffel ordered the systematic destruction of Louvain, with its ancient university and magnificent library. The Cathedral and Palais de Justice at Malines were ruined by bombardment after the Belgian troops had left it; and Termonde was burnt because a fine was not paid in time. Massacre, looting, and outrage attained a licence which only the Germans themselves had equalled during the Thirty Years' War. It and other orgies were a natural expression of German militarism; for excessive restraint in one direction provokes relaxation in others, and the tighter the bond of martial law, the less the respect for civil codes. The proverbial licence of soldiery is the reaction against their military discipline.

The second, called "the great sortie" from Antwerp, nearly coincided with the battle of the Marne. It began on 9 September: Termonde was reoccupied, but the main effort was towards Aerschot and Louvain. Aerschot was recaptured on the 9th, though the fiercest struggle took place at Weerde between Malines and Brussels. Kessel, just outside Louvain, was taken on the 10th, but German reinforcements began to arrive on the 11th, and two days later the Belgians were back in their positions on the Nethe, their retirement being marked, as before, by a fresh series of German atrocities. A third sortie induced by representations of the French higher command and by the impression that the German forces before Antwerp had been reduced, was planned for 26-27 September, and some fighting occurred at Alost and Moll. But by this time the new Germany strategy was at work, and the "side-shows" of the first phase of the war became the main objectives of the second. The French Army was fairly secure in its trenches and the way to Paris was barred. But the approach to the Channel ports was not yet closed, and Antwerp was on the way to the Belgian coast. It was a fine city to ransom; its loss might convince the Belgians that there was no hope for their independence; and historical Germans bethought themselves of Napoleon's description of Antwerp as a pistol pointed at England's heart. Its fall would be some consolation for the lack of a second Sedan, and on 28 September the siege began.

The Antwerp defences had been, like those of Lige and Namur, designed by Brialmont, and were begun in 1861. But the rapid growth of the city and the increasing range of guns made Brialmont's ring of forts, which was drawn little more than two miles from the walls, useless as a protection against bombardment, and twenty years later a wider circle of forts, which was barely completed when war broke out, was begun ten miles farther out, beyond the Rupel and the Nethe, and extending almost to Malines. One of the objects of the Belgian sorties had been to keep this ring intact and prevent the German howitzers from being brought up within range of the city. But there are only two means by which forts can be made effective defences; either their artillery must be equal in range and power to that of the attacking force, or the attacking force must be prevented by defending troops from bringing its howitzers within range. Neither of these two conditions was fulfilled. The Belgian trenches, so far as any had been dug, were close under this outer ring of forts, and the German 28-cm. howitzers had an effective range of at least a mile and a half longer than that of any guns the Belgians could mount. These howitzers had already disposed of the fortifications of Lige, Namur, and Maubeuge, and it was only a question of days and hours when they would make a breach in the outer defences of Antwerp.

Their fire was concentrated on Forts Waelhem and Wavre, south and east of Antwerp. Both had been destroyed by 1 October, and the reservoir near the former, which supplied the city with water, was broken down, flooding the Belgian trenches north of the Nethe, beyond which they had now taken refuge. Farther to the left Termonde was seized by German infantry and the Belgians driven across the Scheldt. On the 2nd the Government resolved to leave Antwerp, but its departure and the flight of the civilians were postponed by the arrival of Mr. Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, and first a brigade of Royal Marines and then two naval brigades of splendid but raw and ill-armed recruits. They were at once sent out to help the Belgians to defend their trenches along the north bank of the Nethe against the German numbers and their more effective shells. On the 5th and following night both the left and centre of the defence were pierced, the Germans crossed the Nethe, and began to concentrate their howitzers on the inner line of ramparts. On the 7th the exodus from the city began by land and water, and amid heartrending scenes a quarter of a million people strove to reach the Dutch frontier or safety on the sea. The Belgian and British troops did their best to hold off the Germans while the flight proceeded and the city was subject to bombardment. It was doubtful whether any would get away, for the Germans had at last begun serious fighting up the Scheldt in order to cut off the retreat towards Zeebrugge and Ostend. In the narrow gap between the intruding Germans and the Dutch frontier some were forced across the latter and interned; others fell into the enemy's hands; and less than a third of the first Naval Brigade escaped to England. On the 9th the bombardment ceased, and on the 10th the Germans made their formal entry into a well-nigh deserted city. They had got their pistol pointed at the heart of England, but like Napoleon they learnt that it was a pistol which could only be fired by sea-power.

Most of the Belgian Army with the remnants of the British forces got away to the coast through the gap beyond the Scheldt which Von Beseler had failed to close in time; and it is impossible to say whether the gallant efforts of the Royal Marines and naval brigades did more to facilitate this escape than the postponement of the retreat, caused by their arrival, did to frustrate it. As an end in itself the expedition for the relief of Antwerp was a failure; but it was designed to subserve a larger operation, the scope of which has not yet been revealed. At the time of its dispatch there may still have been hopes for the success of Joffre's larger strategical scheme of bending back the German flank in Flanders behind the Scheldt; and obviously, if the failure of the Germans at the Marne and a successful defence of Antwerp by the Entente should induce the Dutch to intervene, the German position in the West would be completely turned. In either case "other and more powerful considerations," as the Admiralty expressed it on 17 October, prevented the "large operation" of which the expedition of the Naval Division had been merely a part, from being carried out; and the "powerful consideration" may have been the forces which Germany was massing at Aix and in Belgium to defeat the Entente strategy in Flanders.

The Campaigns In Artois

The fall of Antwerp was as fatal to our scheme of controlling the Scheldt as Castlenau's and Maud'huy's successful defence between the Oise and Arras had been to the German project of reaching the mouth of the Seine; and it still remained to be seen at what point the expanding pressure upon the opposing flanks would impinge upon the coast. Neither side had yet reconciled itself to or perhaps conceived of such a stalemate to their strategy. Rawlinson's 7th Division of infantry and 3rd of cavalry had not been landed at Zeebrugge and Ostend on 6 October to defend those ports or even the Yser, and the fresh German armies advancing through Belgium were not intended to waste their strength on the ridges in front of Ypres or floods around Dixmude. The Germans hoped, if not to turn the Entente flank, at least to seize Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne; and Joffre and French were planning to make La Basse, Lille, and Menin the pivot of a turning movement which should liberate Brussels, isolate Von Beseler in Antwerp, and threaten the rear of the German position along the Aisne. To render these plans feasible it was necessary that La Basse and Lille should be held and that the indefinite German flank in Flanders should be outreached; and thus the country from Arras northwards to the coast became the ground on which the autumn campaign in the West was doomed to be decided.

Antwerp fell amid a fluid front. On 9 October Maud'huy's 10th Army was holding up in front of Arras; but his Territorials were falling back on Lille and its environment as the Belgians retreated to join Rawlinson at Ostend. French's three corps were on their way to prolong and establish Maud'huy's left, and an 8th French army under D'Urbal was designed to fling the line yet farther north. But the Germans were bent on a similar object, and their masses of cavalry, released from the front on the Aisne by its settlement into trenches, were keeping open the country and the issue. The rival armies were like two doors swinging towards one another on the same hinge; but they were not wooden or rigid, and the banging together began at the hinge near La Basse and extended northwards to the coast in a concussion spread over several days. On 11 October Smith-Dorrien's 2nd Corps reached the La Basse Canal between Aire and Bthune, while Gough's cavalry was clearing the German patrols out of the forest of Nieppe. On the 12th he attempted a frontal attack on La Basse, but found the German position too strong, and determined to try to wheel round it on the north. This movement had some success; the 3rd Division drove the Germans from village to village until on the 17th Aubers and Herlies, north to north-east of La Basse, were taken by assault. But the Germans were simultaneously and in the same way driving in the French Territorials; on the 13th they occupied Lille, and on the 19th an Irish brigade which had advanced beyond Herlies to Le Pilly was cut off and captured. So far as the 2nd Corps was concerned the doors had banged together.

Pulteney's 3rd was moving towards collision on the left. It detrained from St. Omer on the 11th, drove the Germans out of Meteren on the 13th, occupied Bailleul and Armentires and then crossed the Lys, gaining a line from Le Gheir, north of Armentires, to Bois Grenier by the 17th. An attempt to clear the right bank farther north failed against the opposition of the German front from Radinghen to Frelinghien and thence along the river. Here, too, the way was barred, but north of the Lys there was as yet no stable control. There were some French and British cavalry and some weak detachments of infantry; but Haig's 1st Corps had not yet completed its transport from the Aisne, Rawlinson's 7th Division was being expanded into a 4th Corps, and the Belgian Army was painfully making its retreat from Antwerp. On the 13th Von Beseler was in Ghent, on the 14th in Bruges, and on the 16th in Ostend. The outflanking here was being done by the Germans with uncomfortable rapidity. On the day that the Germans entered Ostend, the Belgians were driven out of the forest of Houthulst and took refuge far behind the Yser. Four French cavalry divisions recovered the forest on the 17th, but the 7th British Division which had occupied Roulers on the 13th was driven back to a line south-east of Ypres running through Zandvoorde, Gheluvelt, and Zonnebeke (see Map, p. 288).

D'Urbal's 8th French army now, however, came up to support the exhausted Belgians and assist in holding the Yser from Dixmude to the sea, where British warships were assembled to harass the German flank along the dunes; and Sir John French thought the moment had come for an offensive wheel round Menin towards the Scheldt. Haig's 1st Corps was expected shortly to fill the gap between Rawlinson's 4th and D'Urbal, and Rawlinson was instructed to advance on the 18th, seize Menin, and then await Haig, who was to move through Ypres on to Thourout, Bruges, and Ghent. In England it was confidently expected that the Germans, who had arrived at Ostend on a Friday, would enjoy but a week-end visit to the seaside resort, and the newspapers were not more sadly optimistic or ill-informed than headquarters in France. The orders given on the 18th and 19th could only have been the outcome of complete ignorance of the strength of the German Army, which was as much underestimated by the Intelligence Department on the spot as it was later exaggerated by writers on the campaign. In reality four new German Corps were already at Brussels or Courtrai mainly from Wrttemberg and Bavaria, and although the presence in them of men with grey beards and boys with none gave rise to some ill-timed satisfaction in the British press, these Landsturm troops were not to be despised. Rawlinson moved on Menin on the 19th, but was stopped three miles away by the German masses coming from Courtrai, and had to entrench on a line running east of Gheluvelt. On the same day the 1st Corps detrained at St. Omer and marched towards Ypres. Instead of advancing on Thourout and beyond, it had to dig itself in on a line of defence from Rawlinson's left at Zonnebeke to Bixschoote, where the French began their own and the Belgian front along the Yser to Nieuport.

The impact of the opposing forces had flattened them out until they extended to the coast, and the point at which they reached it remained fixed for four years to a day. Instead of a brilliant strategical run round the enemy's flanks to a distant goal in his rear, there was fated to be a strenuous scrimmage all along the line. It was a democratic sort of war, depending for its decision upon the stoutness of the pack rather than on the genius of the individual. The pressure was differently distributed at different periods during those endless years; now it was Ypres, now Verdun, then the Somme and the Chemin des Dames that was selected for the special push; and in time as their man-power began to fail the Germans laid greater stress on the concrete of their lines. But the line was never really broken, and no flank was ever fully turned. It wavered at places and times now in favour of one side and now in that of the other; but the end only came when the whole was pushed back by superior weight of numbers, advancing at an average rate of less than a mile a day.

The first great trial of strength is associated in British minds with the first battle of Ypres. The French dwell rather on the equally strenuous struggle farther south round Arras under Foch. For the line of battle stretched north from the Albert plateau for a hundred miles, and we can hardly claim that the boys and the middle-aged men, at whom some were inclined to scoff, in Flanders were the pick of the German troops sent into the fray. The glory of the defence consisted rather in the resistance of better troops to superior numbers backed by a vast preponderance of artillery. The estimates of the German forces are still little more than conjectures; and the figures of a million and a half Germans to half a million French, British, and Belgians, or of fifty corps to twelve and a half, will probably be corrected when the German statistics are known. If it is further true that at the actual points of fighting the disproportion was five to one, we need no further illustration of the ills which inadequate co-ordination imposes on an Alliance, and inadequate staff-work and intelligence on any fighting force. The Allied tactics were probably not so clumsy nor the German troops so feeble as these thoughtless estimates imply.

It was not a struggle in which there was much scope for strategy on either side, because there had been no fixed data on which to base it. Each combatant had been bent on out-flanking the other before the sea was reached and success denied; but neither knew from day to day or hour to hour where his own or the enemy's line would be. It was idle to plan at headquarters the investment of places which might at the moment be well behind the lines, or the defence of others which the enemy might already have passed; and the alleged inexplicable nature of the German strategy seems to be largely due to an antedating of the establishment of a line of battle. They might have done better to concentrate on Arras with a view to breaking the Anglo-French liaison on the La Basse Canal and isolating the British Army, than to distribute their onslaughts over a front of a hundred miles. But the problem was to outflank a wing which was still in the air, and not to break a line which was not yet formed; and even if it were in existence, subsequent experience would have justified the conviction that success was to be obtained by pressure along an extended front rather than by concentration on limited sectors like Verdun, or even the 18-mile front of the battle of the Somme. The struggle which closed the autumn campaign in the West was not, in fact, a new battle fought on a preconceived plan, but the final clash of armies seeking to outmarch each other's flanks in a battle begun on the Marne; and the popular German advertisement of a new campaign against the Channel ports and a different enemy than the French was merely a fresh coat of paint designed to cover a structure that had gone to pieces.