Complete fictional works.., p.989
Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated), page 989
Austria had a luckless autumn. She failed to clear Galicia, and relieve the beleaguered Przemysl, and the most she could do was to hold the enemy on the line of the Donajetz, and to block the Carpathian passes and the way to the Hungarian cornlands. She was no more fortunate in Serbia. Her first attack had been beaten off, and a later and more elaborate invasion was shattered in a great battle in the first week of December, when her army lost most of its guns and was reduced to a mob of fugitives. Midwinter, which on the Eastern Front meant a certain lull in the fighting, found Austria, with a record of misfortune behind her, on the defensive less than forty miles from Cracow, and Russia, after checks, defeats and confusions, in a like attitude about the same distance from Warsaw. The honours were with Germany.
At sea there had been no surprises. Till the defences of Scapa Flow were ready the Grand Fleet led a dangerous nomadic life among Scottish inlets. But from the first day of war the British Navy had its stranglehold upon Germany, to whom only the Baltic was left of the waters of the globe. Opportunities were missed, as when the German cruisers Goeben and Breslau were suffered to escape, and thereby Turkey’s hostility was assured, and at the start there was some fumbling on minor points which led to losses, but in all the greater matters its competence was supreme. The Expeditionary Force crossed to France unhindered. On August 29th our battle-cruisers and destroyer flotillas successfully raided the Bight of Heligoland. German warships on foreign duty were hunted down, and Von Spee’s success at Coronel was avenged by his destruction on December 8th at the Falkland Islands. Our sea-power enabled us to gather in the German colonies, and to dispose of German merchantmen on the high seas.
Sir John Jellicoe, realising that the British Navy was the main buttress of the Allied armies, was ready for battle, but was resolved not to imperil the future by unwisely seeking it, since without a battle he was able to reap most of the fruits of victory. The cautious Fabian in the north had now his corrective and complement at the Admiralty, for at the close of October Lord Fisher became again First Sea Lord. Explosive, erratic, a dangerous enemy, a difficult friend, this “proud and rebellious creature of God” had the breadth of imagination and the sudden lightning flashes of insight which deserve the name of genius. Behind a smoke screen of rhodomontade, his powerful mind worked on the data of a vast experience. His policy in war might be too bold or too whimsical, but it would never be timorous or supine.
III
Had some celestial intelligence, such as Mr. Hardy has presented in The Dynasts, kept an eye on the campaign — an intelligence with a vision unhindered by time or by space — he would have had certain comments to make at the close of the year 1914. He would have observed the War quickly extending its area. Its periphery was still in flux, but in the centre, which was the Western Front, the dynamic was fast hardening into the static. Britain, he might have commented, was being drawn into a mode of war which was a new thing in her history, and which was alien to all her former principles. Her alliance with France had bound her for the moment to a military creed which was not her own, and which was based on the mysticism of Clausewitz and a popular misinterpretation of Napoleon. In the past she had for the most part fought with a wary business eye, and her mind had not been bemused with notions of an “absolute” war, which her great captains like Cromwell and Marlborough would have rejected with scorn. She had never believed in battles for their own sake, but had endeavoured to fight only when she could fight at a profit. She had used her command of the sea, her industrial power, her wealth and her geographical position to wise strategic purpose. But now she was in danger of nullifying her traditional assets by letting herself be interlocked in a land struggle of brute force, engaging the enemy at his strongest instead of at his weakest point, and without far-sighted purpose. She, the freest of all the belligerents, was drifting into bondage to a false theory and an out-moded machine. Would she liberate herself before it was too late?
The commentator would have admitted that Germany’s torrential invasion of France made it necessary for a British force at once to cross the Channel, but, remembering the effect on the enemy mind of a single brigade of marines at Ostend, and of the resistance of Antwerp, he would have reflected that the view of French and Haig was perhaps right, and that its proper place was on the Belgian coast on the flank of the invader. He would have had only praise for the conduct of the retreat from Mons, when the British force was left in the dark by its allies and pitchforked headlong into a novel and intricate campaign. But he would have been critical of many details of its turn at the Marne, since a more resolute advance should have brought it to the river by the night of September 8th; of the too leisurely assault on the Aisne position, which might well have been pierced on the 13th; above all, of the failure to send across the Channel some of our Territorial divisions and mounted brigades, which before and during the race to the sea might have worked havoc with the German communications. There was no controlling mind on the British side which was capable of the larger strategical purpose, a misfortune perhaps inevitable in the first stages of a new and unfamiliar mode of war.
The commentator would have had much to say of the fundamental errors of France and Germany — the folly of the former’s initial plan: the departure of the latter from Schlieffen’s careful provisions, a departure which nullified the advantage of her ruthlessness and made her sin to no purpose against international ethics. He would have found many points to criticise in Moltke’s leadership, such as his withdrawal of two corps to the Eastern Front during the crisis of the Marne, and the lack of all proper control by Great Headquarters. He would have noted Falkenhayn’s failure during First Ypres to follow Gröner’s advice and transfer six corps to his right wing, a failure which cost him the battle; and, while admitting the moral effect of the Allies’ stand there, might have hinted that, if Haig had followed his first idea and withdrawn to the line of the canal, many thousands of British lives would have been saved in the coming years, and many futile offensives been prevented.
But all wars are a tissue of blunders, and that side wins which makes the fewest and the least material, and the commentator might have concluded that the ominous fact was not mistakes but the absence of positive artistry. It looked as if the minds of the combatants were sinking into a dull acceptance of the obvious, as if they were content to continue in the rut into which accidents of position and munitionment had led them. So far there had only been two gleams of the higher intelligence — Gallièni’s flank movement on Kluck, and the much-abused British expedition to Antwerp. The result was something very like a deadlock on both land and sea.
IV
The first mood of the British people was enthusiasm and an uninformed confidence. This was presently succeeded by acute anxiety, as news came of the retreat from Mons, of the tumbling down of French and Belgian fortresses, of our little army astray in some unknown corner of France. The Marne gave us hope again, a hope scarcely impaired by rumours of the weakness of Russia, and the heavy death-roll of First Ypres was made endurable by a sense that our manhood had been gloriously tested. There was a rising tide of anger in the popular mind, as reports reached them of German barbarities and the hosts of Belgian fugitives gave the evidence of eyewitnesses. Ugly mob passions were awakened; a mania for spy-hunting began; the maker of the new British Army, Lord Haldane, fell into disrepute because of his former friendliness to Germany, and a great sailor, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was compelled to resign his post. But among plain folk there burned a very pure and simple fire of patriotism. The nation was wonderfully united. The Government had not to face the kind of attacks which Pitt suffered at the hands of Fox and his allies, and which in a lesser degree appeared in the South African War.
An opposition quickly formed, but it was small in numbers and intellectually inconsiderable. It contained the men who, whether from generosity or perversity of spirit, must always side with the minority. It was sufficient for such that Germany should be widely unpopular; instantly they discovered merits in the German case. Others were so rooted in a stubborn British confidence that they could not conceive of any danger to their liberties, and, distrusting after the British fashion all politicians, convinced themselves that their country’s interests were being sacrificed to some shoddy political game. Some out of a gross spiritual pride conceived that the ethical principle which brought the nation into war must needs be wrong, since it was so generally accepted. There were the few genuine pacifists to whom war on any ground was abhorrent; there were various practitioners of minor arts and exponents of minor causes who resented anything which distracted attention from them and their works. But whether the cause was moral arrogance, or temperamental obstinacy, or vanity, or mere mental confusion, the anti-war party was negligible. The nation had never been so wholly at one.
But it was not yet completely awake. The ordinary Briton was indignant with Germany because of her doings in Belgium, because she seemed to him to be the author of the war, and because her creed violated all the doctrines in which he had been taught to believe. He was determined to beat her and to draw her fangs. But he had as yet no realisation of the hideous actualities of modern battles, or of the solemnity of the crisis for civilisation, for his country, and for himself. It was still to him a professional rather than a national war. The human mind is slow to visualise the unknown, and the smoke of a burning homestead is a more potent aid to vision than the most graphic efforts of the war correspondent or the orator. We were unfortunate, too, in our handling of the press. Britain, with her free traditions, made a bad censor, and in official secrecy she went far beyond what was demanded by military requirements. The people knew little of the doings of their army, and regiments were rarely mentioned. A civilian First Lord at the Admiralty and a civilian Home Secretary dealing with many military questions, involved as their logical corollary a large measure of free public criticism. To withdraw this right by withdrawing reasonable information was to make of our constitution a bureaucracy without a bureaucracy’s efficiency.
In spite of these hindrances the system of voluntary recruiting did not break down; indeed it justified itself beyond the hopes of its warmest advocates. Britain could not call upon her youth to enlist, as France could, for the defence of home and kin; she could only ask it to fight for her honour and interests — great matters, no doubt, but appealing to a more limited class than a call to resist direct invasion. Yet in the mellow autumn weather every training-camp was crowded, and the English roads echoed to the tramp of hundreds of thousands of stalwart lads, singing ribald songs to hymn tunes. The wind was blowing “which scatters young men through the world.” First came the Territorials, honest fellows who in apathetic years with small encouragement had prepared themselves for their country’s defence. After them followed the natural adventurers, those whom we call born soldiers, and the scallywags who sought nothing better. Next came the sober conscientious men, like Cromwell’s New Model, who had a cause to fight for. And then the wind blew louder, and thousands were gathered in who had never dreamed at the start that the call was for them, but who were moved by those queer unrealised impulses which are deeper than thought. By Christmas fully two millions of the inhabitants of the British Isles were under arms, either for home defence or foreign service.
The British recruitment was aided by the superb response of the British Empire. Germany had always despised this loose friendly aggregation, believing that the first whiff of grape-shot would shatter it, for to Germany Empire meant a machine, where each part was under the exact control of a central power. But the British conception was the reverse of mechanical. She had created a spiritual bond —
Which softness’ self, is yet the stuff To hold fast where a steel chain snaps.
By her gift of liberty she had made the conquered her allies, and the very men she had fought became in her extremity her passionate defenders.
The muster of the Empire was a landmark in British history, greater perhaps than the War which was its cause. No man can read without emotion the tale of those early days in August when from every corner of the globe poured in appeals for the right to share in our struggle. Would that we had had a Homer to write a new Catalogue of the Ships! The free Dominions offered all their resources. In South Africa, Louis Botha, the ablest of our recent opponents in the field, became a British general. No unit, however small or remote, was backward in this noble emulation. India, whose alleged disloyalty had been a prime factor in German calculations, rose in every quarter and class to the supreme heights of sacrifice.
Small wonder that the news stimulated recruiting in Britain, for there was a sense of a vast new comradeship which stirred the least emotional. This rally of the Empire brought under one banner the trapper of Athabasca, the stockman from Victoria, the Dutch farmer from the back-veld, the tribesman of the Khyber, the gillie from the Scottish hills, and the youth from the London back streets. Racially it united Mongol and Aryan, Teuton and Celt; politically it drew to the side of the Canadian democrat the Indian feudatory whose land was still mediæval; spiritually it joined Christianity in all its forms with the creeds of Islam, Buddha, Brahma, and a thousand little unknown gods. The British commonwealth had revealed itself as that wonderful thing for which its makers had striven — a union based not upon statute and officialdom, but upon the eternal simplicities of the human spirit. In 1909 Lord Morley had taken as a reductio ad absurdum of the dream of Empire the notion that Australia would ever consent to pay for a war undertaken on behalf of Belgian neutrality. Yet now Australian troops were on the sea to give their lives in that cause.
V
To the King, as to his subjects, the outbreak of war meant the quieting of old feuds and an end to the threatened constitutional impasse. But, as to his subjects, only in a higher degree, it brought new and crushing anxieties. He saw men closely akin to him by blood the subject of popular odium and in the forefront of the nation’s enemies. The people in the crisis had turned instinctively to him, and their deep and universal trust increased the burden of his responsibilities. Unlike his Ministers in council and his soldiers in the field, he had no plain task which could absorb his energies. His duty was only to wait and watch, while the old fabric of Europe was crumbling. The words which he had spoken the month before his Coronation must have often recurred to his mind. The “treasures of the past” were in jeopardy, and dark indeed was “the path of the future.”
On the last day of November he paid his first visit to the Front. He saw Sir John French at St. Omer, and the headquarters of every corps and division; he inspected the base and field hospitals, and from the little hill of Scharpenberg looked over the battle-ground of Ypres. President Poincaré, M. Viviani and General Joffre joined him at St. Omer, and at Furnes he met the King of the Belgians. It was the first time that a King of England had visited a French battle-front where his troops fought in company with their ancient foe. A dramatic proof of the new alliance was that descendants of Napoleon’s marshals, Ney and Murat, were attached to the British Staff.
That visit in the bleak December weather had a special significance, for at Ypres an older world had vanished. A fortnight earlier, within hearing of the enemy guns sounding their last challenge, had passed our most famous soldier. Lord Roberts had come to visit his beloved Indian troops, had fallen ill of pleurisy, and had died on the night of November 14th. It was fitting that the master-gunner should die within hearing of his guns, and that the most adored of British leaders should breathe his last amid the troops he had loved so well. With him went the army which he had commanded and done much to create. First Ypres saw the apotheosis of the British regulars, but also their end. A large part of the old “Contemptibles” was dead, and what was left was soon to be distributed among a thousand new battalions.
But the memory of the type remains — perhaps the most wonderful fighting man that the world has seen. Officers and men were curiously alike. Behind all the differences of birth and education there was a common temperament; a kind of humorous realism about life, a dislike of tall talk, a belief in inherited tradition and historic ritual, a rough-and-ready justice, a deep cheerfulness which was not inconsistent with a surface pessimism. They generally took a dark view of the immediate prospect; therefore they were never seriously depressed. They had an unshakable confidence in the ultimate issue; therefore they never thought it worth mentioning. They were always slightly puzzled; therefore they could never be completely at a loss; for the man who insists on having the next steps neatly outlined before he starts will be unnerved if he cannot see his way; whereas others will drive on cheerfully into the mist, because they have been there before, and know that on the further side there is clear sky.
It was the end of an old army, and an older and freer mode of war. For now a huge, cumbrous mechanism had cast a blight of paralysis on human endeavour. The fronts had been stricken by their vastness into stagnation. Already a man could walk by a chain of outposts from Switzerland to the Vosges, and in a ditch from the Vosges to the North Sea.
CHAPTER II. THE FORTRESS
I
At the beginning of 1915 the sky for the Allies was overcast, but the clouds were not yet threatening. Japan had joined them, but her effort must be confined to the Far East; Italy was moving to their side; Turkey had declared for Germany, while Bulgaria, Greece and Rumania were uneasy neutrals. Politically there was no cause for disquiet; but on the battle-field there was an ugly jam. In the East the steam-roller of Russia seemed inclined, if anything, to roll backwards, and in the West the Allies found themselves set down before a bristling fortress. The front there could not be turned, since there were no flanks; the only methods that appeared possible were investment and direct assault, and the first was slow and the second costly.
