The delusion served, however, to shake Mr. Asquith's Government to its foundations. Lord Kitchener himself, the popular idol for whom the press had clamoured at the beginning of the war, was deposed from his shrine in ultra-patriotic hearts because he had devoted himself to the raising of armies more than to the making of munitions. But the first offensive in the press, as often happened in the field, fell short of its objective: Lord Kitchener received the Garter amid the plaudits of "Punch," and the curious spectacle was exhibited of the most excitable journal in the realm being publicly burnt on the Stock Exchange by the nation's most excitable body of citizens. Another incident supervened upon the munitions outcry; Lord Fisher resigned from the Admiralty on 15 May. He had had notorious differences with Mr. Churchill over the Dardanelles and other questions; and unable to do without either at the Admiralty, Mr. Asquith dispensed with both, and covered up the deficiency by a Coalition. The principal Unionists joined the Cabinet, and the chief Liberal Jonah was Lord Haldane, who knew a great deal about Germany and was therefore accused of being pro-German. He also knew something of science, and might conceivably have been more alive to the need of munitions than Lord Kitchener. But the nation would not have tolerated his presence at the War Office, and even resented it on the Woolsack. He left his seat to successors who did not fill his place.

Apart from this concession to popular prejudice, the Coalition was an advantage from the national though not from the Premier's personal or party point of view. He would have been wiser in his own interests to have resigned and left the responsibility to men whose supporters believed that with a little more energy and foresight the war could be won in a few months or at most a year. Few had as yet realized that the struggle was one between mighty nations which only the perseverance of peoples, and not the merits of Ministers, could decide; and the inevitable deferment of foolish hopes would sooner or later have produced a reaction in favour of the retiring Premier and his party. But it would have been accompanied by a revival of party warfare which would have undoubtedly weakened national unity and impaired the prospects of success; and all parties to the Coalition—Liberal, Unionist, and Labour—were patriotically inspired when they agreed to share a burden which the wiser among their leaders foresaw would tax their united strength.

There was need enough for unity during the summer of 1915 when the Allied offensive in the West had broken down, little progress was being made in the Dardanelles, and the Germans were driving the Russians like chaff before them. The one gleam of light was the intervention of Italy, which might distract Austrian forces from the Galician front and in any case meant some accession of strength to the Allied cause. Italy had already rendered inestimable services to the Entente by proclaiming that Germany's action was offensive in character, and therefore dispensed Italy from an obligation to support her partners in the Triple Alliance; and her neutrality during August and intervention in May disproved the gibe of the French diplomatist that she would rush to the rescue of the conqueror. The question throughout the winter was whether she would complete her breach of the Triple Alliance by attacking her former Allies. The grievance upon which diplomacy fixed was the reciprocal compensation which Austria and Italy had promised each other in case either were forced to disturb the status quo in the Balkans. Austria pleaded that her invasion of Serbia involved no permanent disturbance, because no permanent annexation was intended; to which Baron Sonnino retorted that Austria had declared, during the Turkish-Italian war, that an Italian bombardment of the Dardanelles or even the use of searchlights against the Turkish coast would constitute a breach of the agreement. In March Baron Burian accepted the principle that compensation was due to Italy, and discussion arose as to its nature and extent. The Italian Government pressed its advantage, and demanded not only the whole of Italia irredenta, that unredeemed territory peopled by Italians in the Trentino and across the Adriatic, which had been left under Hapsburg dominion after the wars of Italian liberation, but practically the whole north-eastern coasts of the Adriatic which were inhabited by a predominantly Slav population.

Austria, under German pressure, travelled far on the path of concession, but no conclusion could be reached that way. For concessions at the expense of the Jugo-Slavs would not be recognized by the Entente if it won the war; and if the Central Empires were successful, they were not likely to regard these promises extracted from them in their hour of need as more binding than other scraps of paper. The negotiations were, indeed, no more than a diplomatic method of forcing the issue and setting a standard for the concessions to be demanded from the Entente as the price of Italy's intervention. We could not afford, it was thought, to offer less than Austria, and we probably underestimated Italy's fears and difficulties. She was really bound to intervene, because if she stood out, she would lose whichever side won. There was a triangular duel for the control of the Adriatic; if the Central Empires were victorious the Adriatic would become a Teutonic lake; if the Entente succeeded, its north-eastern shores would become Jugo-Slav. Italy could only avoid that dilemma by intervention in favour of the winning side, and thus establishing a claim to share in the fruits of victory. Her ambitions were considerable: not only did she insist that control of the eastern shores of the Adriatic was essential to the safety of her own exposed and harbourless coasts, but she regarded herself as the heir of Venice, which "once did hold the gorgeous East in fee"; and she hoped to retain the Greek islands of the Dodecanese which she had seized during the Turkish War, and to acquire a foothold in Asia Minor and on the Illyrian coast along the Straits of Otranto. It would not be easy to harmonize her claims with those of Serbia who was already our ally, nor those of Greece whose adhesion was expected. But Italy's sword seemed worth the risk and the price in the spring of 1915, and the Treaty of London was concluded on 26 April which promised her most of what she desired, and produced some of the hardest tasks for the ultimate Congress of Peace.

The compact was from the first more honoured in the breach than the observance. Italy undertook to wage war by all means at her disposal in union with France, Great Britain, and Russia against the Powers at war with them. But for another year she remained at peace with Germany. War was, indeed, declared upon Austria on 22 May, but the union with the Allies was limited almost exclusively to the prosecution of Italy's territorial ambitions, and the forces employed hardly produced effects to correspond with the facts that the population of Italy was almost equal to that of France and that the bulk of the Austrian armies were involved in the struggle with Russia. Italy had, indeed, peculiar disadvantages; she was more divided in mind about the war than any of the great protagonists, and the splendid qualities of her Bersaglieri and Alpini were not shared by all her troops. Her war strength was put at a million men, and she still had to cope with Turkish forces in Tripoli which only surrendered at the end of the war as a condition of the armistice concluded between Great Britain and Turkey. She was further hampered by lack of coal and inadequate industrial equipment, and her northern frontier had been so drawn in the Alps as to give Austria every advantage of the passes both for offence and defence. To these drawbacks were added a defective strategy dictated by political idiosyncrasies. The capture of Trieste rather than the defeat of the enemy was made the great objective of the campaign. It had the advantage that it might not involve German troops in its defence, and the defect that it was a divergent operation which even if successful would have no material influence on the general course of the war. Soon, too, it became evident that Trieste was not likely to fall until Austria was defeated on other fields or fell into impotence through domestic disruption (see Map, p. 298).

The campaign began with scattered Italian offensives all along the northern frontier, designed to wrest from the Austrians their control of the Alpine heights and passes, and to secure the flank of the main attack across the Isonzo towards Trieste. Slight successes were gained at various points, and the enemy was pressed back almost to the head of Lake Garda. But no serious impression was made on his positions except along the lower reaches of the Isonzo. Here the west bank from Tolmino down to Monfalcone and the sea fell into Italian hands. Gradisca was captured on 10 June and the river was crossed at different points. On the 20th the Italians announced their firm establishment on the slopes of Monte Nero above Tolmino and Caporetto, and on 26 July a similar success on Monte San Michele and Monte dei Sei Busi farther south near Gorizia. On 4 August they were even said to be making progress on the Carso to the south-east. But all these gains were illusory. Gorizia itself remained in Austrian hands for another year, the heights east of it were not mastered until 1917, and neither Tolmino nor the Carso fell to the Italians until the war had been lost and won. There was nothing here to disturb the Austrian concentration of effort against their Russian foes or to call for German assistance to their Austrian allies. Italy did, however, on 20 August declare war upon Turkey, with which she had not yet made a definitive peace since the outbreak of hostilities in 1911; and it was even announced that she would send an expedition to the Eastern Mediterranean. This was taken to mean a descent upon Adalia in Asia Minor, where Italy desired to stake out her claims in the expectation of an early dissolution of the Turkish Empire. But the Turks showed unexpected signs of animation under German stimulants, and the "eastern Mediterranean" expedition was reduced to the nearer and more practical exploit of seizing Avlona which there were not even Turkish troops to defend. Italy was not alone to blame, for the first use the Serbs made of Italy's committal to the Entente cause was to dash across to the Adriatic coast where their rival claims conflicted.

The Gallipoli campaign therefore dragged its weary length along throughout the torrid heat of summer without an Italian diversion, serving mainly as a demonstration of practical though ineffective sympathy with our Russian allies. Another attack on Krithia, launched on 28 June, gave us control of the Saghir Dere and led to considerable Turkish losses in the counter-attacks which Enver, defying Liman's wiser advice, had ordered; and the French under Gouraud made a corresponding advance on the eastern shore of the peninsula. Gouraud received a wound which required the amputation of his leg and his retirement to France, where he later rendered more brilliant and far more effective service. On 12 July yet another effort was made to capture Krithia without substantial success; and the much-tried armies on that forbidding and barren field then sat down to await the reinforcements demanded and the new plan which was maturing for the solution of the problem.

Stagnation also set in along the Western front, and the summer campaign was marked by as little movement as the winter. An attack was made in the Argonne on 20 June more in the interests of the Crown Prince's reputation than in those of strategy; and the advance which attained the depth of a mile was reduced by counter-attacks on 14 July to 400 yards. Another at Hooge in front of Ypres on 30 July was marked by the first employment in battle of one of our new divisions recruited since the war began, and on the German side by the use of liquid fire. It was successful in making an awkward dent in our line, but again a counterattack on 9 August restored the situation. That, however, was one which suited the Germans, for they were simply out to hold their lines in the West, while behind those lines they commandeered French and Belgian labour and worked French and Belgian mines to eke out their own munitions of war and supply the needs of their campaign on the other side of Europe. Towards stopping that our checks to their local attacks in the West and offensive operations of our own did nothing. Important and sweeping French successes continued to be announced from time to time in the press, and occasionally positions were captured and retained, as at Buval near Souchez, Hbuterne, and Quennevires. The Germans, too, failed in their attacks on Les parges, while the French succeeded in capturing Metzeral in Alsace. But the great offensive in Artois had subsided into stubborn hand-to-hand fighting in the Labyrinth, which was as costly as a first-class battle without producing its results.

So spring passed into summer and the days began to wane, with the Germans reaping the fruits of their foresight and preparations in the East, while we pinned our faith to the silver lining of the clouds and looked day by day for that offensive which was to relieve our hard-pressed Allies but did not come. The truth was hidden from the public eye, and possibly with prudence; for there are times in which without illusions the weight of gloom would be intolerable. The difficulty is that illusion also dims the sense of danger and of duty; our belated provision for war was still retarded by strikes, profiteering, and perversity, and the King's example of total abstinence failed to prevent the nation from spending more on drink in war than in peace. An imperfectly educated people is slow to grasp a novel situation; and it was only by stealth and caution that it could be led along the path of preparation for the part we had to play by national service, national thrift, and national control.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DEFEAT OF RUSSIA THE winter, spring, and summer which had passed with so little change on the other fronts, owed their lack of decisive movement not to the comforting delusion of the French official communiqu that Germany's offensive had been broken and her defensive could be broken whenever it was thought desirable, but to the fact that she had reversed her strategy, and reached the conclusion that Russia could be defeated more easily than France. Russia, indeed, had almost limitless man-power, but the war had already shown the importance of munitions, and Germany quickly learnt the lesson. Russia was ill-equipped with munitions and the industrial facilities for their manufacture; nor could the want be supplied by her allies, since, apart from their own needs, their communications with Russia were circuitous, uncertain, and inadequate. The Murmansk railway was not complete, the route to Archangel was icebound from November to May, and the single rail across Siberia was further hampered by indolence and corruption on the part of the railway workers and their staff. Russia was the most isolated of the Allies, and the attempt to open a shorter connexion by a naval attack on the Dardanelles had been frustrated. Without assistance from the West, Russia would be beaten, and without it she could not recover. There were good reasons for the policy which led Germany, during the winter and behind an unpenetrated veil of secrecy, to concentrate her energies upon the production of guns and munitions for the Eastern front.

The strategical position of Russia was no more sound than the state of her armaments. She occupied a vast salient, the southern flank of which was the Carpathians. They formed a substantial protection, since the passes afforded poor facilities for transporting the mass of artillery on which Germany relied for success in her attack. But the safety of the flank depended upon the integrity of the front, and a successful German drive in Galicia would expose the entire position of the Russian armies in Poland. The two reasons subsequently given for the dismissal of the Grand Duke Nicholas from the supreme command were, firstly, that he had in the autumn advanced too precipitately into Silesia, and secondly, that in the spring he exhausted his strength in trying to pierce the Carpathians and thus left his front on the Dunajec too weak to resist Mackensen's furious onslaught. But it is doubtful whether any strategic correctitude could have saved the Russian armies from the effects of German superior armaments. The Germans were playing for high stakes, nothing less than the destruction of Russia's offensive capacity; but they were justified in their game by the cards they held in their hand.

The attack began on 28 April with a forward move on Dmitrieff's left at Gorlice. The pressure compelled him to weaken his centre along the Biala in front of Ciezkowice. Then on 1 May Mackensen's vast volume of fire burst forth; over 700,000 shells are said to have fallen upon the Russian position, and their defences were blown out of existence. Under cover of this fire, to which the Russians could make little reply, the Biala was crossed, Ciezkowice and Gorlice were captured, and Dmitrieff's line was broken; on the 2nd his army was in full retreat to the Wisloka, twenty miles back in his rear, where no trenches had been dug, and there was little hope of checking the Germans. Nevertheless a heroic stand was here made for five days by Caucasian and other reinforcements. On the 7th Mackensen forced a crossing at Jaslo, and next day he pursued his advantage by seizing two bridgeheads across the Wistok farther on, one at Fryslak to the north and the other at Rymanow to the south. Brussilov's army along the Carpathian foothills at Dukla had to beat a precipitate retreat and lost heavily; it was nearly severed from Dmitrieff's centre. But a counterattack from Sanok in the south and a stand by the Russians at Dembica towards the north procured a slight respite, and by the 14th the bulk of the Russian armies were across the San with their right at Jaroslav, their left at Kosziowa, their centre at Przemysl, and their forces in Poland conforming to the retirement.

The latter part of the retreat had been of a more orderly character and began to follow a plan, but the plan involved a great deal more than the surrender of Galicia between the San and the Dunajec. Mackensen's force was overpowering, and the German design was not to lengthen the line by compelling a Russian retreat to the San; it only fell short of complete success because the Russian armies had not so far been isolated and destroyed, but there was still the likelihood of their being driven back until the whole of Galicia was recovered and Poland lost. For the rest of the month Mackensen's huge machine of destruction was moving forward to the second stage of its journey on the San. Its progress was delayed by Russian counter-attacks on the Austrians under Von Woyrsch in Poland and on Mackensen's other wing which was advancing from the Carpathians on to the Dniester. But by the 18th Kosziowa had fallen and the Germans had seized the line of the San from Sieniawa to Jaroslav. Przemysl had not been further fortified by the Russians since its capture; it would clearly meet the same fate as Antwerp from the German howitzers unless the Russian armies in the field could keep the German artillery at a distance. They could only delay matters until the stores and material were removed from the fortress. It was now a salient threatened with encirclement on the north and south. Russian counter-attacks at Sieniawa and Mosciska relieved the pressure for some days, but before the end of May Mackensen's howitzers were at work, and Przemysl was evacuated by the Russians on 1 June.

On the same day Stryj fell to Von Linsingen and on 7 June he forced the Dniester at Zurawno. But he had advanced too far ahead of his communications and reserves, and on the 8th Brussilov drove him back over the Dniester with severe losses. The Dniester was indeed the scene of stubborn fighting for many days, and on the 18th the Russian Government announced that the enemy had lost between 120,000 and 150,000 men in their efforts to cross it on a front of forty miles. But the Russian stand on the Dniester only left it to Mackensen's centre and left to turn the Grodek position and ensure the fall of Lemberg. By 20 June the Russian communications north of the Galician capital were severed by a battle at Rawa Ruska, and on the 22nd, after nine months' Russian occupation, it once more fell into Austrian hands. The Russians had not done much to commend their cause to the inhabitants during their stay; the opportunity was seized for proselytizing in the interests of the Orthodox Church, and Sczeptycki the Archbishop of Lemberg, a member of the Uniate Church which had made terms with Roman Catholicism, was treated with a harshness compared with which the indignities inflicted by the Germans upon Cardinal Mercier of Malines were trivial; he was interned in a Russian monastery and deprived of all religious rites save those which were to him heretical.

The fall of Lemberg was followed by the loss of the Dniester line as far as Halicz, and all beyond it including the Bukovina, and the Russians fell back behind the Gnilia Lipa, where Ivanov prolonged a stubborn resistance. But the aims of the Germans in Galicia had been achieved with the capture of Lemberg except in so far as the remnants of the Russian armies remained intact. The city formed a formidable bastion for defence because of its ample lines of communication with the south and west, and inadequate lines to the north and east. A farther German advance across the Russian frontier in that direction would be an eccentric movement, and the front of attack was accordingly swung round from east to north, where the Russian position in Poland had been outflanked. The reconquest of Galicia produced fruits enough in the restoration of Austrian and Hungarian confidence and the repression of pro-Entente tendencies in the Balkans. But it was only a part of the most ambitious and successful campaign the Germans fought in the war. May and June were but the prelude to greater successes in July, August, and September.

The heaviest blows were to be struck in the Polish centre, but diversions had already been made on the extreme German left in the north. Libau had fallen on 9 May, and during that and the following month the German armies under Von Buelow overran the duchy of Courland as far as Windau on the coast and Shavli half-way to Riga. This movement was regarded with comparative indifference as being a divergent operation calculated at worst to do no more than distract Russian forces from more critical points. But it was in keeping with a German design considered grandiose until it nearly succeeded. The bulk of Russia's forces were concentrated in the Polish triangle of which the apex was at Warsaw, the base ran from Kovno by Brest-Litovsk to the Galician frontier, the north-western side in front of the railway from Kovno to Warsaw, and the southern in front of that from Warsaw to Lublin, Cholm, Kovel, Rovno, and Kiev. The German plan was not merely to squeeze the Russians out of the triangle by pressure on the sides and intercept as much of their forces as possible, but also to outflank the whole position by striking behind the base from the north at Vilna; and a naval attack on Riga was part of the projected operations.

The Galician drive had furnished the territorial means for the attack on the southern side of the Polish triangle; and although Ivanov was farther pushed back from the Gnilia Lipa to the Strypa and thence almost to the Sereth, this Eastern advance became irrelevant to the main strategic design, and German reinforcements were collecting mostly under Gallwitz, Scholtz, and Von Eichhorn along the Narew and the Niemen for an onslaught on the north-western side of the triangle. The Austrian Prince Leopold's forces which fronted Warsaw on the Bzura at the apex were comparatively weak, and were only intended to gather the fruits of the real fighting done by the Germans on the flanks. The Germans rode roughshod enough over Austrian susceptibilities when efficiency required it; but they atoned for the brusqueness by conceding a large share in the spectacular aspects of triumph; and just as the Austrians entered Lemberg first and not its real conqueror Mackensen, so Prince Leopold was cast for the part of the victor of Warsaw. But first of all the Galician armies had to face north to take their allotted share in the scheme by driving the Russians back across the railway between Lublin and Kovel.

Within a few days of the fall of Lemberg they had crossed the Russian frontier, turning the Vistula and advancing in two columns, one under the Archduke Joseph towards Krasnik on the road to Lublin, and the other farther east under Mackensen towards Krasnostav on the way to Cholm. The Russian army in Poland west of the Vistula had gradually to conform to the retreating line and fall back in a north-easterly direction towards the river. By 2 July the Archduke was in Krasnik, but here he was checked by the Russian position defending the railway line; on the 5th the Russians, who had been reinforced, counter-attacked, and in a battle lasting till the 9th drove the Austrians back. Similarly Mackensen found himself held up between Zamosc and Krasnostav, and for a week the struggle for the Lublin- Cholm railway resolved itself into an artillery duel. The attack was resumed on the 16th simultaneously with Von Gallwitz's movement against the other side of the triangle. The Archduke failed after ten assaults to carry the Russian position in front of him at Wilkolaz, but Mackensen was more successful at Krasnostav. He enveloped the Russian right, drove it beyond Krasnostav, and was soon within striking distance of the railway.

Meanwhile, to the north Gallwitz had forced the Russians from Prasnysz towards the Narew on the 14th, and crossed it himself on the 23rd between Pultusk and Rozhan as well as between Ostrolenka and Lomza; and by the 25th he was on the banks of the Bug, within twenty miles of the railway connecting Warsaw with Petrograd. The great line of fortresses along the Narew were now exposed to bombardment by German howitzers; the Russians in front of Warsaw withdrew from their winter defences along the Rawka and Bzura to the inner lines of Blonie; and south of Warsaw they retired from Opatow, then from Radom, and then to the great fortress of Ivangorod on the Vistula. Even that was now threatened by Mackensen's advance to the Lublin line in its rear. It was broken on the 29th, and on the 30th the Germans were in Lublin and Cholm. Warsaw was doomed, and, indeed, the Grand Duke Nicholas had as early as the 15th decided upon its evacuation. The fighting along the Lublin-Cholm line, and the strenuous resistance the Russians offered on the 26th to Gallwitz's renewed attacks on the Narew, were intended not to save Warsaw, but the armies defending and the stores within it. On 4 August the troops abandoned the Blonie lines and marched through the city, blowing up the bridges across the Vistula. Next day Prince Leopold made his triumphal entry, and the first year of the war closed on the Eastern front with an event of greater significance even than that which the Kaiser attached to it. To him the capture of Warsaw was a resounding tribute to the success of German arms: to future generations the import of the Russian departure will doubtless be the term it set to Russian rule in Poland, and it may be deemed one of the ironies of history that Hohenzollern autocracy should have been made the instrument to wreck the Russian domination. In spite of themselves the Germans assisted to achieve the common purposes of the great war of liberation.

Russian autocracy was indeed stricken to death by its own inherent maladies nearer home than Poland. Shallow democrats in the West were deploring the lack of prevision and provision exhibited by their democratic Governments, but no democracy endured a tithe of the sufferings inflicted upon Russian soldiers by the blindness, incompetence, and corruption of the bureaucratic Tsardom. Confident in the successes which the heroism of its troops had won over the discordant forces of the Hapsburg Empire and those which Germany could spare from the Western front, it had neglected to perform any of the promises it had made to conciliate the inhabitants of Poland and Galicia, and had even failed to take the commonest military precautions to safeguard its victories. Nothing had been done in Galicia to put the captured Przemysl into a state of defence, and even the bridge across the San had not been repaired to provide a direct line of supply to the front on the Dunajec. Offers of skilled labour from other countries to improve the inefficient service of Russian railways and the inept direction of industries and munition factories were ignored. The business organization of Russia had been managed mainly by Germans before the war; too much of it was left in their hands after war began, with the result that the Putilov munition works, for instance, were reduced to half-time by German control; and there was no one to take the place of those who departed. Russian generals were among the most skilful of strategists, and men like Ruszky, Alexeiev, Brussilov, and others would have been invincible had Russia's man-power been competently equipped. As it was, every sort of provision was neglected; the artillery of one army was limited to two shells a day; a whole division had on one occasion to face an attack without a rifle among them, and troops were put into trenches relying for weapons on those which fell from the hands of their dead or wounded comrades. These were the organized atrocities of autocratic bureaucracy, and it was little wonder that in time they bred in the breasts of Russian soldiers a fiercer resentment against their rulers who betrayed them than against the enemy whom they fought.

The retreat which followed the fall of Warsaw was sympathetically represented as a masterly operation, and the failure of the Germans to envelop and isolate the Russian armies as proof of the breakdown of their strategy. But all retreats in the war, with the exception of the Turks' before Allenby, were similarly described in the appropriate quarters. It was the common characteristic of the victors that they could not win decisive battles in the sense of earlier wars, and of the vanquished that they evaded the expected Sedans and Waterloos. Even the Germans with all their initial advantages of preparation and surprise could not break the Allied armies in their first offensive on the West, and the same inability dogged their still more rapid footsteps in the East. It is a consequence of the reliance of modern armies on the mechanical force of artillery to which the Germans were especially addicted; for while 16-inch howitzers could pulverise any position, they could not pursue with the speed required to encircle and capture armies in the field. Hence salients, which when viewed in the light of older conditions seemed traps which could not be eluded, were in practice evaded because, with Allenby's one exception, cavalry failed to atone for the slower movement of the more powerful arm of artillery. There was nothing therefore miraculous in the Russian escape, and the strategy of the Grand Duke was hardly so brilliant as it was represented. At the beginning of the war Alexeiev, then Ivanov's chief of staff, is said to have counselled a Russian retreat like those which lured Charles XII and Napoleon to their doom; but the temptations of Austrian weakness and German concentration on the West and the plight of France and Belgium led to the adoption of other advice and the premature invasion of Prussia, Galicia, and Hungary; and in August 1915 it was too late for a voluntary and innocuous retreat. The safety of the majority had to be bought at a heavy price in casualties, in loss of guns and material, in suffering for the troops and civilians, and in national dejection. What might have been cheerfully done by choice was despondently done by compulsion.

The evacuation of Warsaw was the first step in the withdrawal from the apex of the Polish triangle which it was hoped the resistance of the sides would enable the Russians to complete without disaster; and a large garrison with adequate guns and ammunition was left at Novo Georgievsk to impede the German advance and hamper communications with their front. The greatest menace was on the north-west along the Narew and beyond in Courland where Von Buelow was preparing to strike behind the base of the triangle. On 10 August Von Scholtz breached the line of fortresses by storming Lomza, but Kovno was a much more critical point. It was the angle of the base, and its fall would not only threaten the base running south to Brest-Litovsk and all the Russian armies west of that line, but would greatly facilitate Von Buelow's sweep round beyond it and Vilna. The bombardment began on the day that Warsaw fell. Kovno was expected to hold out at least to the end of the month, but it fell on the 17th, and the general in command was subsequently sentenced to fifteen years' hard labour for his inadequate defence and absence from his post of duty. On the following day Von Gallwitz cut the line between Kovno and Brest at Bielsk, and on the 19th Novo Georgievsk fell to the howitzers of Von Beseler, the expert of Antwerp. Ossowiec, which had stood so well against the earlier German invasions, followed on the 23rd, and Von Beseler was brought up to give the coup de grce to Brest. Its loss was perhaps inevitable after the fall of Kovno, but it completed the destruction of the base of the triangle and involved the withdrawal of the whole Russian line beyond the Pripet marshes which would break its continuity; and there was cold comfort in the fact that Ewarts got away with most of his troops and stores and that a Russian mine, exploded two days after their departure, destroyed a thousand Germans and set a precedent for similar machinations on their part when they retreated in the West.

Fortresses now toppled down like ninepins. On the 26th Augustowo was evacuated and Bialystok captured. On the 27th Olita was abandoned and on 2 September Grodno. The Germans thus gained the whole line from Kovno to Brest, and things were going no better in the south. The fall of Lemberg had given the German right a position far to the east of their left, and Mackensen advancing from Lublin and Cholm had driven the Russians across the Bug at Wlodawa before Brest-Litovsk was taken. The marshes of Pripet were at their driest in August, and Mackensen encountered few obstacles as he pressed on from Brest to Kobrin and thence to Pinsk along the rail to Moscow. In Galicia Ivanov was pushed back to the Strypa and then the Sereth, and on the upper reaches of those rivers Brody was captured and two of the Volhynian fortresses, Dubno and Lutsk. Rovno itself was threatened, and with it the southern stretch of that lateral railway from Riga to Lemberg on which the Germans had set their hearts.

But the most ominous German advance was far to the north, where Von Buelow was profiting by the fall of Kovno, marching on Mitau and Riga, and threatening both to cut the railway between Vilna and Petrograd and confine the Russian retreat to congested and narrow lines of communication along which they could not escape. This northern advance was accompanied by a naval offensive in the Baltic, designed to seize Riga and turn the line of the Dvina on which the Russians hoped to stand in the last resort. Fortunately this part of the campaign broke down before matters had reached their worst on land. It looked like a naval operation planned, or at least attempted, by soldiers professionally incapable of grasping the elementary principles of naval or amphibious warfare. After an unsuccessful attack on the southern inlet to the Gulf of Riga on 10 August, the Germans during a thick fog on the 17th sought to land troops at Pernau in large flat-bottomed barges without having secured command of the sea; and the entire landing-force was captured or destroyed. Simultaneously the Russian Fleet engaged the Germans, who had eight destroyers and two cruisers sunk or put out of action; the only Russian vessel lost was an old gunboat. The Dvina lines were not to be turned by strategy like this, and Russia was henceforth free from naval interference until her sailors played her false.

Von Buelow was still, however, to be reckoned with, and he was the substantial danger. On 28 August he began his movement against the Dvina, which would, if successful, cut off all the Russian armies from direct communication with Petrograd. The blow was struck at Friedrichstadt, where the river is crossed by the only practicable road between Riga and Jacobstadt, but the design was to turn the whole front as far as Dvinsk; and Von Buelow held out to his troops the alluring prospect of winter quarters in Riga and a march on Petrograd in the spring. On 3 September the left bank was cleared for some miles, but all attempts to cross were frustrated. The out-march on the extreme German left had failed, and the critical point moved south towards Vilna. The danger here was serious enough, for the depletion of the Russian forces and length of their line had left a gap between Dvinsk and Vilna, and into this gap the Germans thrust a huge cavalry force which more nearly turned the Russian line than any other movement in the campaign.

The way was prepared by the great ten-days' battle of Meiszagola. The unexpectedly rapid fall of Kovno and Grodno had enabled the Germans to threaten the envelopment of Ewarts' army both on the south and the north, on the Niemen towards Mosty and Lida and farther north towards Vilna. The struggle for Vilna was decided at Meiszagola, a village about fifteen miles north-west of the old Lithuanian capital. It was captured on 12 September, and masses of German cavalry swept round from Vilkomir towards Sventsiany and crossed the Petrograd railway to outflank the retreating Russian troops. The evacuation of Vilna began on the 13th, and two days later the menace from the German cavalry became more apparent. Fresh divisions were apparently brought up from Courland with 140 guns; on the 16th they were at Vidzy and on the 17th at Vileika, nearly seventy miles due east of Vilna and in the rear of the Russians escaping thence. They were thus also close to Molodetchno on the railway along which Ewarts was falling back from Skidel, Mosty, and Lida; and control of that junction would have put two Russian armies at their mercy.

Just in time Ruszky was restored to the command of the northern group of Russian armies, and the victor of Rawa Ruska and Prasnysz was not doomed now to break his uniform record of success. The situation was not unlike that at Prasnysz, and it was relieved in a similar way by a Russian counter-offensive from Dvinsk against the flank of the German cavalry. Vidzy was recaptured on the 20th, and farther south the pressure slackened along the Vilna-Vileika railway; Smorgon was retaken by a brilliant bayonet charge on the 21st. The door had been kept from closing on Russian armies seeking to escape from the salient between Lida and Molodetchno, while the Germans were squeezed out of that which they had made to the north. They were driven out of Vileika, and gradually the lines were straightened and stabilized so as to run almost due south from Dvinsk by Postavy, Lake Narotch, and Smorgon. Other factors than Ruszky's brilliant strategy contributed to this dramatic defeat of the final German effort of the campaign to annihilate the Russian forces. The Germans had lost in men and impetus during their long advance. Superb though their organization was, lengthening lines of communication across a country ill-supplied with roads and railways, and the necessity of guarding against a hostile population told upon their armies in the fighting-line. The heaviest blow will spend itself in time against an elusive foe, and the longest arm will find the limit of its reach. The Germans had not planned a march on Moscow, but they had hoped to overrun the Russian armies and occupy the winter quarters of their choice. These were denied them on the Dvina, and they had not secured the coveted Riga-Rovno line.

They were indeed left farther from it in the south than in the north. Their defeat east of Vilna enabled Ewarts to escape from the encirclement threatened by the advance from Kovno and Grodno; and although he had to leave Lida and was subsequently pushed behind the junction of Baranowitchi, thus surrendering to the Germans the control of the railway from Vilna to that point, it remained in Russian hands to Rovno. Mackensen was unable to advance from Pinsk, which he occupied on 16 September, to the railway at Luninetz, while Ivanov reacted successfully against the German attacks along the Kovel-Sarny line and recovered a good deal of the ground lost in the Volhynian triangle and eastern extremity of Galicia. Mackensen's army may have been weakened by calls from the north and from the south for a campaign which was already planned but not yet suspected; at any rate it was too weak to achieve its objectives, the capture of Sarny, Rovno, and Tarnopol, which would have completed the hold of the Germans on the Vilna-Kovno line and given them a base for a farther advance in the spring on Odessa and for the isolation of Rumania. On 7 September, as Mackensen's forces were moving on Rovno and the Sereth at Tarnopol and Trembowla, Ivanov counter-attacked from Rovno and Brussilov and Lechitzky on the Sereth. By the 9th the two latter had captured 17,000 prisoners and a considerable number of guns; and Ivanov followed up this success by retaking Lutsk and Dubno by the 23rd. Kovel was even threatened, but the pressure was not maintained. Sarny, Rovno, and Tarnopol were saved, but Lutsk and Dubno reverted to the Germans, and the line in the east was stabilized with the Volhynian triangle and the railway from Vilna to Rovno divided between the antagonists.

The success of Ruszky in the north and of Ivanov in the south in setting a term to the terrifying sweep of the German advance produced a temporary optimism in Russia comparable with that which followed the victory on the Marne; and in neither case did the Allies realize the extent of the advantage gained by the Germans or foresee the years that would pass before the loss could be recovered. The Grand Duke Nicholas was relieved of his command and sent to take over that in the Caucasus. He was succeeded by the Tsar himself, who was unlikely to interfere with the military measures of Alexeiev, his chief of staff; and the Duma seconded the Tsar's attempt to express the determination of the Russian peoples to withstand the Germans until victory was secured. Nevertheless, the profound effects of the Russian defeat could not be removed by any laudable efforts at keeping up appearances. It was a resounding disaster which condemned Europe to three more years of war, and Russia to a convulsion which would permanently alter the whole course of her history and position in the world. Miliukov raised in the Duma the question of responsible government, and if the debacle of 1915 was slower than Sedan in producing the downfall of the system to which it was due, it was not because the disaster was less, but because Russia was a less organized country than France, and her illiterate population reacted more slowly than the French.

The Russian Front

At the moment the best face was put on affairs; and although one correspondent was allowed to report that the heart of the Russian people had grown cold to the Allies who had watched their misfortunes without raising a finger in the shape of a serious offensive to help, public opinion was fed on the comfort in which a facile optimism is so fertile. German casualties were multiplied at will, despondent diaries of individual German officers killed or captured were given unlimited publicity, and roseate pictures were painted of the colossal drain of man-power involved in winter trench-warfare in Russia and in holding vast tracts of hostile country. It was assumed that the Germans would suffer more than the Russians, although again and again whole Russian battalions in those trenches were wiped out by German artillery and machine guns to which the Russians had not the wherewithal to reply except with fresh masses of human flesh; and little was said of the millions of Russian prisoners and civilians who were put to far more effective use in making munitions and producing food for their enemies than they ever had been for Russia or themselves, and without whose labour Germany's man-power would have been exhausted one or two years before the end of the war. It was considered a triumph that the Germans had not reached Petrograd or Moscow, but it might have been well if they had. They had, however, no such ambitions. Just as the reconquest of Galicia had been mainly designed as providing the base for a flank attack upon Russia, so the conquest of Poland was to be used as providing protection for Germany against Russian interference with her plans in the Balkans. Sofia and Constantinople opened up more alluring prospects and a path that led farther than Moscow or Petrograd; and while public opinion in England and France was dreaming of a repetition of 1812, public opinion in Germany was feasting on visions of Cairo, Baghdad, and Teheran, and the possibility of evading the British blockade through outlets to the Indian Ocean.

All eyes that could see were turned to the Dardanelles. There British troops were making the one serious counter-offensive to the German attack on Russia, and success would redeem the Russian failure and foil the hopes the Germans were building upon their victory. The immediate future of the Balkans, the Black Sea, and Asia Minor, and it might be the more distant future of Egypt and the East, hung upon the issue at Gallipoli. During July the reinforcements for which Sir Ian Hamilton had asked were gathering in Egypt and in Gallipoli; and on 6 August the new plan of attack was begun. There were to be four distinct items; a feint was to be made of landing north of Bulair, the attack on Krithia was to be renewed in order to hold the Turkish troops there and draw others in that direction, and a similar advance was planned for the Anzacs with a similar motive, but also to co-operate with the real and fresh offensive. This took the form of a landing at Suvla Bay, the extreme north-westerly point of the peninsula between Anzac and Bulair. The diversions were reasonably successful, as successful, indeed, as previous attacks had been in those localities when they were the principal efforts. The chief of them was a threefold advance north-east, east, and south-east from Anzac Cove on Sari Bair with its highest point at Koja-Chemen. Conspicuous gallantry was shown in the three days' fighting; and while, as earlier at Krithia, the summits defied the greatest valour, enough progress was made in these subsidiary attacks to justify the hope of general success if the principal effort at Suvla Bay went well (see Map, p. 107).

It began without any great mishap, and General Stopford's 9th Corps was successfully landed on the shores of Suvla Bay during the night of 6-7 August and deployed next morning in the plain without serious resistance. The surprise had been effected, but it would be useless unless the attack was pressed with energy and without delay. Yet torpor crept over the enterprise during that torrid afternoon; many of the troops were in action for the first time in their lives, and, understanding that water was obtainable from the lake close by, they had drained their water-bottles by eight o'clock in the morning. A thunderstorm mended matters a little, and Chocolate Hill was carried on the right. But all next day an inferior Turkish force, assisted by a planned or accidental conflagration of the scrub, managed by skilful use of a screen of sharpshooters to hold up our advance all along the line. Sir Ian Hamilton himself arrived that night and strove by persuasion to infuse some energy into the attack. But by the 9th it was already too late, for the Turks had had time to bring up reinforcements, and an attack on the Anafarta ridge on the 10th was repulsed. Five days later General Stopford relinquished the command of the 9th Corps, to which he had been somewhat reluctantly appointed by Lord Kitchener, and the 29th Division was brought up from Cape Helles to renew the attack on 21 August. It might have succeeded had it been originally employed in place of the inexperienced troops; but by this time there could be nothing but a frontal attack on a watchful foe, and it ended like the similar efforts in May and June. Some ground was gained, contact was established with the Anzacs, and a continuous line of six miles was secured from the north of Suvla Bay to the south of Anzac Cove. But before the Turks could be expelled from the peninsula and a passage cleared through the Dardanelles there would be a long and weary struggle, in which progress would be as slow and beset by as many obstacles as it was on the Western front. Russia was to obtain no relief that way; as a counter-offensive to the German campaign of 1915, the attack on the Dardanelles had failed; and the failure produced a deeper impression upon the Balkans than if the attempt had never been made. The way was clear for the next move of German diplomacy and war.

CHAPTER IX

THE CLIMAX OF GERMAN SUCCESS No one's eyes had been more keenly trained on the Dardanelles operations during the spring and summer than those of Ferdinand, King and Tsar of Bulgaria. Descended from Orleanist Bourbons on the mother's side and from the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha on the father's, he was purely Prussian in his realpolitik, and observed no principle in his conduct save that of aggrandizement for his adopted country and himself. The treaty of Bukarest in 1913 had given them both a common and a legitimate grievance, and the great war was welcomed in Bulgaria as an opportunity for revenge. The means would be the assistance Bulgaria might render to the victor, and who that might be was a matter of indifference if he possessed the essential qualifications of victory and insensibility to the feelings of Bulgaria's neighbours and to the sanctity of scraps of paper. This was a defect in the Entente from Ferdinand's point of view. Bulgaria could with difficulty be satisfied except by Serbian sacrifices which the Entente was loath to make. The Central Empires had no scruples on that point; but Bulgaria also wanted something from Rumania, Turkey, and Greece, and Turkey was an ally, Rumania a neutral whom it was not wise to offend, and Greece had as its queen a sister of the Kaiser who was distinctly her husband's better half.

The Balkans

Serbia alone, however, had received by the Treaty of Bukarest enough territory claimed by Bulgaria to provide a sufficient inducement for Bulgaria's intervention in the war, once she was persuaded that a victory of the Central Empires would place it at their disposal. Efforts were made by the Entente during the summer to counteract this attraction by inducing Serbia to reconsider her annexations in Macedonia. But her successes in the autumn of 1914 had stiffened her attitude, and in any case she could not be expected to make that comprehensive surrender of Macedonia which the Central Empires were quite prepared to promise Bulgaria. The decisive factor in the diplomatic situation was, however, the progress of German arms and prospects of German victory; for it was only the victor who would have any favours to bestow, and the course of the war in the summer convinced the Bulgarian Government that Germany was the horse on which prudent people should put their money. On 17 July a secret treaty was concluded guaranteeing Bulgaria in return for intervention the whole of Macedonia possessed by Serbia as well as an extension of Bulgaria's frontiers at Serbia's expense farther north. Bulgaria was also allowed to extort a separate price from Turkey in the shape of a strip of land along the Maritza controlling that river and Adrianople. An even more sinister concession to Bulgarian exorbitance was that of Epirus, a district assigned to Albania in 1913 but populated by Greeks who had revolted and claimed incorporation in Greece. This Prussian complaisance was doubtless due to the fact that Venizelos, who had resigned owing to Constantine's opposition to his policy, had at the Greek general election in June secured nearly a two to one majority in the Greek Chamber. Greece could not be allowed the benefit of a Prussian queen when it chose Venizelos as Prime Minister.

The bond had been signed between the Central Empires and their Bulgarian taskmaster; but the doctrine of rebus sic stantibus was as well understood in Bulgaria as in Prussia, and the treaty would have remained a scrap of paper had Russia expelled the German invaders or Britain broken the barrier at the Dardanlles. As it was, nothing occurred in August or September to weaken Bulgaria's fidelity to the secret compact. The failure of the attack at Suvla Bay was followed by the futile routine of trench warfare; an equally barren result threatened the long-prepared attacks in Artois and Champagne; and, Russia having more than enough to do in reorganizing her shaken armies, the Central Empires were free to turn their attention southwards. Success in the Balkans was not this time to be staked on Austrian control, and Mackensen, whose armies in Galicia were nearest to the scene, was naturally selected to repeat in Serbia the triumphs of his Galician drive. The task would be all the easier because Serbia was a country small compared with Russia, and would, moreover, be distracted by the coming Bulgarian stab in the back. Her Government, conscious of this danger, had, indeed, wished to anticipate it by a frontal attack on Bulgaria; but her offensive was vetoed by the Entente. Possibly it was a case in which moral scruples unduly weighted the scales against military advantage. There was no real doubt about Bulgaria's intentions, and she would have had no grounds for complaint had Serbia attacked before Mackensen was prepared for his part in the joint assassination. The real doubt concerned the attitude of Greece. She was bound by treaty to assist Serbia in that case, and Venizelos would assuredly do his best to fulfil the bond. But the obligation would not arise if Serbia were the aggressor, and Venizelos would be powerless. The fault of the Entente, if it was a fault, lay in the failure to act on the presumption that Constantine would prove as false to international obligation as his imperial brother-in-law when he invaded Belgium, and in the assumption that the difference between Serbian aggression and defence would involve the difference between Greece being an ally and a neutral.

The diplomatic crisis grew to a climax as Mackensen's forces reached the northern bank of the Danube, for the arrest of the German offensive in Russia was not entirely due to German difficulties or Russian valour and strategy, and by the middle of August German divisions were already being diverted from the Russian front. In the middle of September Bulgaria concluded her compact with Turkey, and on the 19th Mackensen's batteries opened their bombardment of Belgrade. On the 21st Venizelos asked the Western Allies for 150,000 troops, which were promised on the 24th, and on the 23rd Bulgaria ordered a general mobilization and Greece retorted in kind. Bulgaria proclaimed her intention to observe neutrality, and when on the 27th Serbia requested the consent of the Allies to an offensive, it was refused. Entente diplomatists at Sofia were still under the impression that Bulgarian intervention could be avoided, and a vigorous protest by the leaders of all the Opposition parties in the Sobranje against the Government's policy gave some colour to their views. But by 10 October it became known that many German officers were busy in consultation with the Bulgarian Staff; on the 3rd Russia required Bulgaria to break with the Teutonic Powers, and on the 5th herself broke off diplomatic relations. A week later the Bulgarian Army invaded Serbia and the Bulgarian Government declared war. Mackensen had crossed the Danube on the 7th and taken Belgrade on the 9th. On the 19th an imperial manifesto was issued from Petrograd denouncing Bulgaria's treason to the Slav cause and leaving the fate of the traitor to the "just punishment of God." It was assuredly not to be inflicted by the Government whose designs on Constantinople had been the principal obstacle to the success of Entente diplomacy in the Balkans. Bulgaria did, indeed, betray the Slav to the Teuton, but no Balkan State could view with equanimity the prospect of being ground to powder between the upper and nether millstone of Russia on the Danube and on the Dardanelles.

Nor was Bulgaria the only traitor responsible for the Serbian tragedy. On 5 October Venizelos announced to the Greek Chamber in no uncertain terms the intention of his ministry to draw the sword on Serbia's side if Bulgaria attacked. The following day he was summoned to the palace and told that Constantine disapproved; he resigned in the afternoon, and the Chamber compromised its future and its country's by supporting an alternative ministry under Zaimis, which proclaimed its neutrality and refused on 11 October the assistance for which Serbia asked under the terms of their alliance. Russia was willing but unable to help, and large threats and insignificant demonstrations against the Bulgarian coast were all she could contribute to the protection of the little State in whose interests she had entered the war. The burden fell on the Western Powers who had never contemplated it, and they were divided in mind. British ships wrought effective destruction upon the Bulgarian depots and communications along the Aegean coast; but bombardment there was of little use to Serbia, and the British General Staff pronounced against an expedition to Salonika. Sir Edward Carson resigned as a protest against this inaction, while Delcass resigned in France because Briand was more adventurous. Briand carried his point, succeeded Viviani as Premier, and committed both Powers to the Salonika policy. Italy stood aloof; her antagonism to Serbia and Greece made her ever averse from an offensive against Bulgaria.

The Salonika expedition, which consisted at first of troops transferred from Gallipoli, came too late and was too weak to effect more than a part of its purpose. It would have been more effective had the Allies consented to the Serbian proposal for an attack on Bulgaria; for in that case the Serbian armies would have been aligned along the Bulgarian frontier with their right within reach from Salonika. As it was, they faced north towards Mackensen, and the Bulgarian offensive towards Uskub took the Serbians in the rear, cut their communications with Salonika down the Vardar, and eventually forced a retreat into the Albanian mountains. Serbia would in any case have been overrun, and Mackensen's conquest of its northern half would have been more rapid than it was. But the Serbian armies might have remained intact and given a good account of themselves against both their enemies in the mountain fastnesses of the south with their retreat secured to Salonika, instead of being split into two and most of them driven, to escape as best they could with frightful mortality along impossible tracks towards the Adriatic.

War and disease had reduced the Serbian armies before the campaign began to some 200,000 men, and their enemies brought at least double that number against them. The Serbians were, moreover, constrained by the counsels of the Allies to preserve what they could of their forces as a nucleus for future resistance, and thus to stand only so long as retreat remained open. Threatened on three sides by superior numbers, they were in an untenable position and had a well-nigh impossible task; and only skill, endurance, and courage brought the remnants out of the death-trap laid by collusion between the Central Empires and Bulgaria. The campaign was for the Serbians simply a series of rearguard actions encouraged at first by the delusive hope that the Allies might yet be in time. They might have been, had they been numerous enough. The French from Cape Helles came first, landed at Salonika on 5-7 October, and by the 27th had occupied the valley of the Vardar as far north as Krivolak. They also seized the commanding heights of Kara Hodjali north-east of the river, and repulsed the Bulgarian attempts to drive them off in the first week of November; while to the west they stretched out a hand towards the Serbians defending the Babuna Pass. With adequate forces they could have pushed beyond Veles to Uskub, broken the wedge which the Bulgarians had driven in between them and the Serbians, restored the line of the Vardar, and secured the Serbian retreat.

It was this Bulgarian stab in the back which made havoc of the Serbian defence. Mackensen made slow progress at first, partly because he had no wish to drive the Serbians south until the Bulgars had cut off their retreat down the Vardar. Belgrade did not fall until three weeks after the bombardment had opened; but with the intervention of the Bulgarian armies all along the bare Serbian flank, events moved with tragic rapidity. On 17 October the Salonika line was pierced at Vrania, Veles fell on the 20th, and Uskub on the 21st. By the 26th Mackensen and the Bulgarians had effected a junction in the north and cleared the Danube route into the Balkans. Nish fell on 5 November after three days' fierce fighting, and the Constantinople railway thus passed into enemy hands. In the north-west the Austrians were pressing on from Ushitza down by the Montenegrin frontier towards Mitrovitza, threatening to crush the Serbians on the Kossovo plateau between them and the Bulgars. To save the main Serbian force and keep open a retreat through Albania, a stand had to be made at Katchanik against the Bulgars advancing north from Uskub. It was successful to that extent, and when at one moment the Serbs temporarily broke the Bulgarian front, a junction seemed possible with the French advance from Veles. But both Allies were too weak for the solid Bulgarian wedge. The Serbs had to fall back from Kossovo and the French to their entrenched camp at Kavadar. A still narrower chance intervened between the French and the Serbs who were fighting at the Babuna Pass to bar the way to Prilep and Monastir, and at one time the French flung out their left to within ten miles of the Serbian position. But their own communications were threatened all down the narrow line of the Vardar, and they were hopelessly outnumbered by the Bulgarian forces. Retreat was the common misfortune and necessity. Prilep fell on 16 November; and farther north, as the Serbians retreated into Montenegro and Albania, the Austrians occupied Novi Bazar on 20 November, and Mitrovitza and Prishtina on the 23rd. On the 28th the Germans announced that "with the flight of the scanty remnants of the Serbian army into the Albanian mountains our main operations are closed."

There was something still for the Bulgars to do. Pursuing the Serbians in retreat from the Babuna Pass they reached the Greek frontier and cut the railway between Salonika and Monastir at Kenali on 29 November, and on 5 December occupied Monastir itself. The Greek frontier was a feeble protection, and the French at Kavadar were threatened with encirclement on their left. Kavadar had to be evacuated and a retreat secured by hard fighting at Demir Kapu. Simultaneously the British holding the front towards Lake Doiran were severely attacked, and on 6-7 December had 1300 casualties and lost 8 guns. But the enemy failed to cut off the retreat, and by the 12th both the French and British forces were on Greek territory fortifying a magnificent position which stretched from the mouth of the Vardar round to the Gulf of Orphano and enclosed the Chalchidice peninsula. Strong measures had to be taken to ensure the safety of Salonika with its cosmopolitan population, and the enemy hoped for its fall in January. But there was great reluctance to attack lines which were daily growing more formidable and were held by troops that were being gradually reinforced. Bulgarian ambition was also restrained by German counsels, for even Constantine and his new and pusillanimous premier, Skouloudis, might resent the occupation of Salonika by their hereditary rivals, and the Kaiser trusted more to family and diplomatic influence at Athens than to Bulgarian valour. The Germans themselves were more intent on consolidating the Berlin-Constantinople corridor and their hold upon the Turks than on Salonika, which fell within the Austrian sphere of influence, and might thus, if taken, become an apple of discord between its captors.

Austria had to content herself with dominion along the eastern shores of the Adriatic. The conquest of Serbia had left Montenegro an unprotected oasis surrounded by enemy territory; and Italy, which alone might have defended the Black Mountain, was unable or disinclined to make the effort. Lovtchen fell on 10 January, and the Austrians occupied Cettinje three days later. The Germans announced the unconditional surrender of the country, and some sort of capitulation was made by some sort of Montenegrins. But King Nicholas escaped to Italy and thence to France, while the greater part of his army made their way south to Scutari to join the Serbians who had retreated to the Adriatic coast. An Italian force marched up from Avlona to Durazzo to protect them, and Essad Pasha, a pro-Entente Albanian who had established a principality of his own on the fall of the Prince of Wied, rendered useful assistance. Eventually about 130,000 Serbian troops were transported to safety across the Adriatic, while the Serbian Government was provided with a home at Corfu in spite of the protests of the Greek administration. Save for neutral Greece and Rumania, the Italian foothold at Avlona and ours at Gallipoli, the whole of the Balkans had passed into the enemy's hands; for Essad's rule was as brief as it was circumscribed, and the Italians withdrew from Durazzo as the Austrians advanced to the southern frontier of Albania, and menaced Greek territory far beyond the reach of protection from Salonika.

While Greece and Rumania seemed to depend for their existence upon the forbearance of the Central Empires, our foothold in Gallipoli was even more precarious, and the first use the Germans made of their corridor to Constantinople was to furnish the Turks with howitzers designed to blow our forces off the peninsula. In October Sir Charles Monro had been sent out to take over the command from Sir lan Hamilton and report on the situation. His report, which, owing to the singular relations then existing between someone in the Government and the press, was known to selected journalists within a few hours of its reception in London, was in favour of evacuation. The Cabinet was not prepared to accept that decision without further advice, and dispatched Lord Kitchener to make a survey of the political and military situation in the gean on the spot. He confirmed Monro's opinion; and in spite of the damage to our reputation and the losses which it was thought such an operation would inevitably involve, orders were given for a complete withdrawal from the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Some of the forces had already been transferred to Salonika, and the evacuation was to be completed in two stages, the first at Suvla Bay and Anzac and the last at Cape Helles. Success depended upon weather suitable for embarkation and skill in organizing transport and concealing our intentions from the enemy. No one dared to hope for so complete a co-operation of these factors as that which characterized the enterprise on 18-19 December. The weather was ideal in spite of the season, an attack from Cape Helles diverted the attention of the Turks, and the whole force at Suvla Bay and Anzac was embarked during two successive nights with only a single casualty. Marvellous as this success appeared, its repetition at Cape Helles on 7-8 January was even more extraordinary, although a Turkish attack on the 7th threatened to develop into that rearguard action which had been considered almost inevitable. But it was a mere incident in trench warfare, and they were as blind to our real intentions at Cape Helles as they had been three weeks before at Suvla Bay and Anzac—unless, indeed, with true Oriental passivity, they were content to see us leave their land in peace and had no mind to seek a triumph of destruction which would inure to the benefit of their uncongenial allies.

The brilliant success of the withdrawal from the Dardanelles provided some solace for the failure of the campaign, but did nothing to relieve from responsibility those who had designed its inception and directed its earlier course; and a Commission, which was appointed in the following summer, produced on 8th March 1917 an interim report which threw a vivid but partial and biased light not only on the Dardanelles campaign, but on the governmental organization which was responsible for the failures as well as the successes of the British Empire during the greater part of the war. Both were largely the outcome of that autocracy in war with which popular sentiment and the popular press had invested Lord Kitchener. It swallowed up everything else: the Cabinet left the war to the War Council and the War Council to a triumvirate consisting of Mr. Asquith, Lord Kitchener, and Mr. Churchill; but of these the greatest was Lord Kitchener. "All-powerful, imperturbable, and reserved," said Mr. Churchill, "he dominated absolutely our counsels at this time.... He was the sole mouthpiece of War Office opinion in the War Council.... When he gave a decision it was invariably accepted as final." He occupied, in the words of the Report, "a position such as has probably never been held by any previous Secretary of State for War," though it cannot compare with the elder Pitt's in 1757-61. Oriental experience had not improved his qualifications for the post; secretiveness, testified the Secretary of the War Council, made him reluctant to communicate military information even to his colleagues on the Council; the General Staff sank into insignificance, and the regulations prescribing the duties of its Chief were treated as non-existent. Mr. Churchill was debarred from a similar dictatorship at the Admiralty mainly because he was not a seaman and had Lord Fisher as his professional mentor; while Mr. Asquith busied himself with keeping the peace between his two obtrusive colleagues, neither of whom expressed the considered views of the Services they represented.

Thus the Dardanelles campaign was less an active expression of policy or strategy than the passive result of conflicting influences and opinions. As early as November 1914 Mr. Churchill had suggested an attack there or elsewhere on the Turkish coast as a means of protecting Egypt, but the idea was not seriously considered until on 2 January 1915 an urgent request was received from Russia for some diversion to relieve the Turkish pressure in the Caucasus. There was a corresponding need to deter Bulgaria from casting in her lot with the Central Empires, and on 13 January the War Council resolved upon the "preparation" of a naval attack on the Dardanelles. Its members were in some doubt as to what was meant by their resolution. Lord Fisher was averse from the scheme because he preferred another sphere of action, possibly the Baltic or Zeebrugge, with which Jellicoe's mind was also occupied; and he hoped that preparation did not involve execution. Lord Kitchener warmly supported the idea of a naval attack, but most of his colleagues assumed that the operation would automatically become amphibious and involve the army as well; at any rate this impression was clearly stamped on their' minds after the purely naval attack had failed. Lord Kitchener, however, was strongly opposed to military cooperation; a great advantage of a purely naval attack was, he thought, that it could be abandoned at any moment, and he maintained that he had no troops to spare. Meanwhile Russia enthusiastically welcomed the notion, France concurred, and Mr. Churchill had secured an uncertain amount of naval backing for an expedition, the nature of which was not defined. But Lord Fisher grew more pronounced in his opposition, and when on 28 January the War Council proceeded from preparation to execution, he accepted the decision with a reluctance that nearly drove him to resign.

No sooner, however, had the War Council decided on a purely naval expedition than it found itself involved in an amphibious enterprise. "We drifted," said the Director of Military Operations, "into the big military attack"; and on 16 February it was resolved to send out the 29th Division and to reinforce it with troops from Egypt. The naval bombardment did not begin till three days later, and therefore it was no naval failure that produced this resolution; it was rather an unconscious reversion to the Council's original idea which had been dropped out of deference to Lord Kitchener. The same influence delayed the execution of the plan of 16 February: the 29th Division was to have started on the 22nd, but on the 20th it was countermanded by Lord Kitchener. Animated discussions ensued at the War Council on the 24th and 26th, but Lord Kitchener could not overcome his anxieties on the score of home defence and the Western front, and the Council yielded to his pressure. It was not till 10 March that the ill-success of the naval attack, advices from officers on the spot, and reassurances about the situation nearer home overcame the reluctance to dispatch the 29th division and other forces under Sir Ian Hamilton. Lord Kitchener now desired haste, and complained that 14 April, the date suggested by Hamilton, would be too late for the military attack. It was not found practicable until the 25th, and according to Enver Pasha the delay enabled the Turks thoroughly to fortify the Peninsula and to equip it with over 200 Austrian Skoda guns. Enver's further statement that the navy could have got through unaided, although it agreed with Mr. Churchill's opinion, is more doubtful. Out of the sixteen vessels employed to force the Dardanelles by 23 March, seven had been sunk or otherwise put out of action.

The same hesitation that characterized the inception of the military attack marked its prosecution, and forces which might have been adequate at an earlier stage were insufficient to break down the defences which delay enabled the Turks to organize. Nevertheless the enterprise might have succeeded but for errors of judgment in its execution, notably at Suvla Bay; and success would have buried in oblivion the mistakes of the campaign and its initiation just as it has done similar miscalculations in scores of precedents in history. There were, moreover, vital causes of failure which could not be canvassed at the time or even alleged in mitigation by the Commission of Inquiry; and the publication of its report on 8 March 1917, without the evidence on which it was based or reference to these other causes, was a masterpiece of political strategy designed to concentrate the odium of failure on those who were only responsible in part and to preclude their return to political power. Of these hidden causes there were two in particular: one the possibly justifiable refusal of Greece to lend her army to the scheme when a comparatively small military force might have been sufficient, and the other the far more culpable failure of Russia to co-operate with the 100,000 troops which were to have been landed at Midia and would have either found the northern approaches to Constantinople almost undefended or have diverted enough Turkish forces from the Dardanelles to give the southern attack a reasonable prospect of success. As it was, the British Empire had to content itself with the idea that 120,000 military casualties, apart from the French and the naval losses—which might have bought the downfall of Turkey shortened the war by a year at least, and saved a greater number of lives—had the minor effect of immobilizing 300,000 Turks and facilitating the defence of Egypt and the conquest of Mesopotamia and Syria.

The failure of the larger hope was a blow to the "Easterners" who discerned in the Dardanelles the strategic key to victory in the war and expected to turn the argument against divergent operations by pointing to a converging advance from the Balkans upon the Central Empires. But the "Westerners," who maintained that the war could be won and could only be won in France and Belgium, were not much happier at the end of 1915. The British and French commands alike had subordinated the Dardanelles and Salonika expeditions to the needs of an autumn offensive on the West; and the argument between the two schools of thought is narrowed down, so far as the autumn of 1915 is concerned, to the question whether the troops we lost in September and October at Loos and in Champagne might not have been more effectively employed at the Dardanelles or Salonika. That they were not needed for defence in the West is obvious, since the line was held in spite of their loss. They were, in fact, mortgaged to an offensive which produced less strategical effect than the casualties in the East; for without the Salonika expedition, at least, Greece would have fallen completely under German dominion, and our control of the gean and our communications with Egypt would have been seriously imperilled. The controversy was an idle one so far as it was conducted on abstract principles, because war is an art in which success depends upon changing conditions which dictate one sort of strategy at one time and another at another. There were times when neglect of the West would have been fatal; there were others at which neglect of the East was almost as disastrous, and the autumn of 1915 belonged to the latter rather than to the former category. Neglect of the East would, indeed, have been not merely excusable but an imperative duty, had the situation in the West been what it was in the autumn of 1914 or spring of 1918. But there was no such necessity in September 1915: troops were not then withheld from the East to defend our lines in the West against a German offensive, but to take the offensive ourselves; and illusory hopes of success were based upon the known inferiority of German numbers in France due to their concentration in Russia.

The Entente advantage in bayonets on the Western front was between three and four to two, and it also had the ampler reserves. Sir John French commanded nearly a million men and General Joffre more than double that number, while our advantage in guns and munitions was not less marked; an almost unlimited supply of shells had been accumulated during the summer, and the new Creusot howitzers outdid the monsters from Essen and Skoda. Thirty fresh miles of French front had been taken over by the British, but it was not continuous. Plumer's Second and Haig's First armies still held the line from Ypres to south of La Basse, but D'Urbal's Tenth French army intervened between Haig and the new Third British army which stretched from Arras to the Somme. It was not, however, along the British front but in Champagne that the main attack was planned. The objective was Vouziers, and the design was to break the German communications from east to west along the Aisne and thus compel an extensive retreat from the angle of the German front on the Oise and the Somme. If the subsidiary attack on the British front also succeeded, the Germans would suffer disaster and be compelled to evacuate much of the ground they held in France (see Map, p. 67).

A desultory bombardment of the whole front had begun early in the month, and on the 23rd a more intense fire, designed to obliterate the first line of German defences, opened from La Basse to Arras and in Champagne. On the 25th the infantry attacked in high hopes and high spirits: for months, declared Joffre in his order of the day, we had been increasing our strength and our resources while the enemy had been consuming his, and the hour had come for victory. The striking force was Langle de Cary's Fourth Army, and the front of attack ran for fifteen miles from Auberive to Massiges. The bombardment had been effective and the lan of French, and particularly Marchand's colonial troops, carried most of the German first and parts of their second line of defence, and thousands of prisoners and scores of guns fell into their hands. But victory was not in this Western warfare of the twentieth century won in a day, and the morrow of a successful attack, which used to be fatal to the defeated, was now more trying to the victors. Instead of their well-protected lines they had to lie in the open or in the blasted trenches of the enemy, and from thence to attack a second and a third line of defences not less strong than the first, but less battered by bombardment. The second French effort, made on the 29th, was less successful than the first; some more prisoners and guns were taken, and a breach was made in the second line, but it was too narrow for the cavalry to penetrate. A third French attack on 6 October secured the village and Butte de Tahure which commanded the Bazancourt-Challerange railway, the first of the lateral lines of communication which it had been the object of the campaign to break; and later in the month the French made some local progress in other parts of the front. But on 30 October German counter-attacks, which had failed elsewhere, succeeded in recapturing the Butte de Tahure and recovering the use of the railway; and while the French had advanced on a front of fifteen miles to a depth of two and a half in places, the net result of the great attack was to leave them without appreciable advantage save in the disputable respect of greater German losses and the withdrawal of some divisions from the Russian front.

The subsidiary attacks between Ypres to Arras produced the same general kind of result. They extended almost continuously all along the line, but except to the north and south of Lens do not appear to have been designed to do more than prevent the opposing troops from being sent to reinforce the defence against the main offensive. For this purpose they were perhaps needlessly aggressive, for each resulted in the capture of ground which could not be held, and the forces engaged in these local enterprises were badly needed to clinch the nearly successful major operation. Later on in the war it was found that enemy troops could be contained along the line without such numerous and expensive precautionary attacks, and possibly these were really intended not so much to contain the enemy as to test his line with the idea of finding some weak spot which might be pierced. None of them succeeded to that extent, though Bellewarde was temporarily taken in front of Ypres, Le Bridoux redoubt in front of Bois Grenier, the slopes of the Aubers ridge, and some trenches near La Basse. The last operation, if more force had been put into it, might have secured La Basse and done more to convert the battle of Loos into a substantial victory than could ever have been achieved by a series of local successes farther north.

That battle was the principal British effort, and it only fell short of a real victory because the reserves were not on the spot to follow up the initial success which might almost seem to have surprised the higher command. The front extended from the La Basse Canal to the outskirts of Lens, and as in Champagne the attack on 25 September was preceded by an intense bombardment which destroyed the first German trenches and wire-entanglements. Nearly everywhere the advance was at first successful. The Hohenzollern redoubt was captured, the Lens-La Basse road was crossed, and even Haisnes and Hulluch reached. But the greatest success was farthest south, where the village of Loos was rushed by the 15th Division and then Hill 70. Even there the Highlanders would not stop, but went on impetuously as far as the Cit St. Auguste, well outflanking Lens and past the hindmost of the German lines. This was all by 9.30 a.m., within four hours of the first attack. But there were no reserves at hand to consolidate the victory and hold up the German counter-attacks. There were plenty miles away in the rear, retained by Sir John French because along the extended line of attack from Ypres to Lens it was not known where they would most be needed; and even when the need was clear, interrupted telephones and defective staff-work caused confusion and delay. Eventually the 11th Corps fresh from England and to fighting was marched eight miles and put into the battle line without sufficient food or water. Gradually our troops were pushed back from Hill 70, across the Lens-La Basse road, and out of the Hohenzollern redoubt. The line was restored to some extent by the Guards on the 27th, and Loos remained firmly in our hands; but a great opportunity had been lost, and the great stroke of the 15th Division had not been turned into a great advance. Lens had been almost in our grasp, and with it a lever to loosen the German hold on Lille (see Map, p. 79).

The fault was partly due to the fact that D'Urbal's simultaneous offensive south of Lens had fallen short of the Vimy Ridge and left our right flank almost in the air in front of Grenay where the two lines joined. D'Urbal's army was, like our own, greatly superior in numbers to the Germans opposite, seventeen to nine Divisions, and the French artillery preparation for the attack on 25 September was equally elaborate. Unhappily the French offensive did not begin till one o'clock, three hours after the Highlanders had swarmed over Hill 70 and into Cit St. Auguste; and when it did begin, its left, where it joined the British right, was held up in front of Souchez till the following day, and the Germans used the interval to recover from the staggering blow they had received at Loos. On the 26th the French were more successful. Souchez, most of the Givenchy Wood, La Folie farm, and Thelus were captured, and on the 28th they made some progress up the Vimy slopes. The impression of success exceeded the reality, and a historian writing some months afterwards declared that by the 29th "the Vimy Heights had been won": it required a considerable Canadian victory a year and a half later to give much substance to this claim, and most of the ground secured in September 1915, including the Givenchy Wood, La Folie, and Thelus, was found to be in German hands when the line from Lens to Arras was taken over by British troops.

Attacks and counter-attacks, particularly round the Hohenzollern redoubt, during October led to little but slaughter, and the line in the West relapsed into winter stability and stagnation where they had been a year before with changes which only a large-scale map revealed. There had been at least 120,000 French casualties and more than 50,000 British; each side claimed that the enemy's losses far exceeded its own, and there was probably little to choose. A fortnight's battle in the West cost the Allies as much as nine months in the Dardanelles, though in the former it was the French and in the latter the British who bore the brunt. The optimism of the civilians with regard to the Dardanelles was capped by the optimism of the soldiers on the Western front; and neither was in a position to throw stones at the strategy of the other. Mr. Churchill disappeared from the Admiralty in May and from the Cabinet in October, and Sir John French lost his command of the British forces in December. His ostensible cheerfulness had been useful in the early days of shock and stress; but the part had been somewhat overdone in public and underdone in private, and it was becoming clearer, though not yet sufficiently clear, that brilliant cavalry generalship was not the quality most required to control the gigantic machinery of a modern army. Nevertheless, the criticisms that were levelled against the ineptitude and mental inelasticity of the generals and the staff of the old army overshot the mark. No one ventured to bring such a charge against the staff-work of the French, and yet the French had been no more successful in Champagne than we had been in Artois. The truth was that no generalship could have given the Entente victory over the Germans in 1915. The war was constantly and correctly described as a soldiers' war or a war of nations, but the meaning of the description was not fully realized. The Entente had to deal with a mighty people, splendidly organized and equipped for war, and against that colossal force mere generalship was like a sort of legerdemain pitted against an avalanche. The only power that could cope with the Germans was that of people similarly determined and equally trained and organized, and the only way in which they could be defeated was by exhaustion. Individual skill in modern politics and war tells mainly in matters of personal rivalry; it is our aristocratic quality which breaks its head in vain against the stolid mass of democratic forces. The single people in the long run beats the single man, and the community of nations overcomes the rebel State.

So far the rebel had succeeded because he took the world by storm and by surprise. The Germans in 1915 had played a skilful game and won. They had calculated that their line in the West could be held by inferior forces against any attacks the Entente could launch against it, while they broke the strength of Russia and overran the Balkans; and their calculations proved correct. It is conceivable that they might have done better to concentrate in 1915 as in 1914 against the Western Powers, but it is more probable that here, too, they were wise in their military conceit. The offensive that had failed in 1914 when British forces were a hundred thousand without munitions to correspond, would hardly have succeeded when they had grown to a million; and neglect of the East might well have meant invasion by Russia, the collapse of Austria, Czecho-Slovak and Jugo-Slav revolts, the defeat of Turkey, and the intervention of Rumania and Bulgaria on the Entente side. More could hardly have been achieved by Germany with the resources at her disposal; but she had not won the war. She had won a respite from defeat, as she was to do again in 1916 and in 1917, and her successes enabled her to postpone the reckoning from 1916 to 1918. But it was a fatal reprieve which she only used to weave her winding-sheet; and her efforts to snatch a German peace out of the transient balance of power, which her victories had set up, involved her in that fight to a finish with civilization which made her an outcast in disgrace as well as in defeat.

CHAPTER X

THE SECOND WINTER OF THE WAR The failure of the Entente offensives in the Dardanelles and in France had at last convinced the public of the truth of Lord Kitchener's prophecy, that the war would be long if it was to result in a German defeat. Obstinate optimists had in 1914 believed in a victory before the first Christmas, while more reasonable critics hoped for one by the end of the following year. When the second Christmas came round the date of triumph had been postponed for another year or two, and few expected that it would arrive much before the end of the three years' term Lord Kitchener had suggested, or come at all unless greater efforts were made than had hitherto been the case. The magnificent response to the call for voluntary enlistment in 1914 had confirmed the traditional English view in favour of volunteers; between two and three million men had been raised by this method, either as members of the new army or as Territorials who freely surrendered their privilege of being called upon to serve for home defence alone; and it was but slowly that the nation was constrained to abandon the voluntary principle for that system of conscription which savoured so strongly of the militarism we were out to fight. But the Russian disasters and the failure of our offensives in the spring warned the Government of the advisability of at least preparing for other measures, and an Act had been passed for a national registration on 15 August of all males between the ages of 15 and 65. The autumn confirmed the foreboding of spring, and on 5 October Lord Derby undertook on behalf of the Government a recruiting campaign by which those who had not enlisted were induced to do so on the condition that they would not be compelled to serve before those who had feebler claims to exemption.