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Since the failure of the advance in the Lake Narotch region in April quiet had reigned on the long front between the Gulf of Riga and the Rumanian border. May brought the Austrian irruption into Italy, but Alexeiev made no sign of movement. At a time when Cadorna was sorely tried, and it looked as if the Archduke Karl would reach the Venetian plains, the Power which had not yet failed an ally at need remained inactive. Russia had her own plan, and it took time to mature. She was making ready for the great combined Allied offensive which was due so soon as Germany should have spent her strength at Verdun and the new British troops and guns were ready for action. It had taken her a long winter to make her preparations, to drill her reserves, to improve her communications, and to collect munitionment. Ivanov’s Christmas attack on Czernovitz and Ewarts’s spring offensive towards Vilna had been only local assaults with a local purpose; the coming advance was conceived on a far greater scale, and with a far wider strategic purpose. At a given signal, in conjunction with all her allies, she would sweep forward, and that device of Germany’s which had hitherto checked her—the power of moving troops at will by good internal lines—would be defeated. For if the Teutonic League were attacked everywhere at once there would be no troops to move.

But no great plan can be followed to the letter, and the man who sticks too rigidly to a programme is not a soldier but a pedant. During May it was becoming clear that Italy might be so hard pressed that she would have to use in defence all the resources which she had allotted to her share in the joint offensive. The date for the main movement was not put forward. But it was resolved to use the new might of Russia in a preliminary attack to ease the pressure on Italy, and to make a reconnaissance on a wide front of the enemy strength in the East. At the same time all was put in readiness to follow up any successes that might be gained, and to merge, should it seem desirable, the preliminary attack in the main operation.

On the first day of June the Austro-GermanJune 1. armies south of Pinsk lay on the following lines. From the small salient east of that city their front ran nearly due south, following at first the left bank of the Styr, but crossing to the right bank below Rafalovka. East of Tchartorysk it left that river, and ran south till it cut the Lemberg-Rovno railway just east of Dubno. It crossed the Galician frontier north of Tarnopol, which town was in Russian hands, and followed the Strypa a few miles to the east of the stream. It reached the Dniester west of Uscieszko, where the Russians held the river crossing, and then turned east, along the northern shore, curving round to the Rumanian frontier on the Pruth a dozen miles from Czernovitz. This sector was under the command of the Archduke Frederick, and was held by five armies. From the Pripet to Kolki on the Styr lay the 1st Austrian Army, under Puhallo. From Dubno to Kolki lay the 4th Austrian Army, under the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand; and from Dubno to Zalostse, just inside the Galician border, the 2nd Austrian Army, under Boehm-Ermolli. Thence Bothmer’s mixed Austro-German force carried the front to the town of Buczacz, while south of it lay the 6th Austrian Army, under Pflanzer-Baltin, down to the Rumanian frontier. It was the old line which, with new dints at Uscieszko and east of Czernovitz, they had held throughout the winter. Originally the five armies had numbered forty-four divisions of infantry and eleven of cavalry; but two of the German divisions, including the 3rd Guard, had gone to France, and three of the Austrian to the Trentino: so at the beginning of June the total enemy strength from the Pripet southwards was under a million of men, with probably some 600,000 rifles in line.

The Russian front on June 1 south of the Pripet Marshes, and the Army Commands on both sides.

Opposite this force lay the Russian Southern Army Group, which till April was in the hands of Ivanov. Recalled to staff duties at the Imperial Headquarters, he was succeeded by Brussilov, who had commanded the 8th Army through the storm and shine of the Carpathian struggle of 1914-15. Brussilov was the most warworn of all the Russian commanders, for he had been continually in action since the first day of the campaign. But he was born, if ever man was, with a “faculty for storm and turbulence,” and twenty-two months of conflict had left no mark on his eager spirit. He was recognized by all as an incomparable leader of troops, but doubts had been expressed as to whether he had the capacity for controlling large and complex operations; whether his talents were not more suited for a cavalry dash or a stone-wall retreat than for the methodical stages of scientific warfare. He had four armies in his charge: on his right his old 8th Army—now under General Kaledin, who, like his forerunner, was a cavalryman—which had its headquarters at Rovno; the 11th, under Sakharov—once Kuropatkin’s Chief of Staff in Manchuria—astride the Galician frontier; the 7th, under Scherbachev, extending south to Uscieszko, on the Dniester; and the 9th, under Lechitsky, to the Rumanian border.

Certain misconceptions were prevalent at this time in the West with regard to the nature of the Austro-German front in Volhynia, Galicia, and the Bukovina. It was assumed to be a fluid and makeshift affair in contrast with the serried fortifications of the West. This much is true, that in large tracts where the line extended through the woods and swamps of Poliesia there was no continuous front, any more than there was a continuous front in the marshes of the Somme. That was inevitable from the nature of the country. Nor was there anything like that consistent and intricate strength which two years of labour had produced in France and Flanders, since at the most this Eastern line had been established for eight months. But it would be an error to regard the Austrian sector as mere improvised field shelters. The trench lines were numerous and good, the dug-outs deep and commodious, the wire entanglements on a colossal scale. There were well-constructed, if not always well-sited, reserve positions. The communications were admirable—far better than anything behind the Russian front. New roads and a great number of light railways connected the firing trenches with the trunk lines of Galicia. In mechanical industry the Austrians showed themselves apt pupils of their German masters. Nothing was left undone to ensure the comfort of the officers. Commodious subterranean dwellings and elegant cabins embowered in the woods amazed the oncoming Russians with evidences of a luxury which was unknown in their hardy lives. Like the Germans on the Somme, the Austrians behaved as if their front had grown stable and could not be broken, and they were resolved to make it a pleasant habitation.

The fault of Austria did not lie in negligent fatigue work, but in an underestimate of the enemy before her. She did not believe that Russia could move yet awhile, and she had depleted her long front of both men and guns. The strongest fortifications on earth cannot be held against a resolute foe unless there is also a superior artillery behind them, and infantry adequate in quality and numbers to man them. There were no strategic reserves left to meet an attack, and too many batteries had gone west to the Trentino. Above all, the Austrian infantrymen had not the fighting value of the Russian. There were good troops on the Galician front—some of the best Magyar and Viennese regiments—but the average was not equal to that of their opponents. There was not the same national impetus behind them. Armies bundled about like pawns at the bidding of an alien staff could not be expected to have the dash or the tenacity of men who fought for a cause they understood, under the command of leaders whom they loved and trusted.

We must conceive of Brussilov’s plan as in the first instance strictly a reconnaissance—a reconnaissance made on an immense scale and with desperate resolution, but still a reconnaissance rather than a blow at a selected objective. His strategy was not yet determined. Behind the enemy’s front lay vital points like Kovel and Lemberg and Stanislau; but the way to each was long, and might be hopeless. His business was to test the strength of the enemy lines on a front of nearly 300 miles between the Pripet and Rumania. When he knew its strength he would know his own purpose. No doubt he had a dozen alternative schemes as to the future, but till he had reconnoitred the ground he could not choose his path. He was like a man beating at a wall to discover which parts are solid stone and which are lath and plaster. But each blow was to be delivered with all his might, for this was a test of life and death.

May had been a month of heavy rains, and the wet lowlands south of the Pripet and around the Lower Styr made a bad campaigning ground. It was better southward among the sandy fields and the oak woods of Volhynia, and on the Galician plateau summer conditions reigned. On Saturday, 3rd June, a steady, methodical bombardment opened along the whole of Brussilov’s front. It appeared to be directed chiefly on the wire entanglements and not on the trenches, and at first the hinterland was scarcely touched. The “preparation” was intense and incessant, but it bore no relation to the overwhelming destruction which had preluded Neuve Chapelle and the Donajetz, Loos and Verdun. It seemed rather like the local bombardments which preceded the trench raids of the winter—only it fell everywhere; and when, late on the Saturday, the Austrian High Command realized this, they grew puzzled, and cast about for an explanation.

They were not left long in doubt. The work of the Russian guns was short—twelve hours only in some places, and nowhere more than twenty hours. The Austrian trenches had been little damaged, but alleys had been ploughed in the wire before them. On the morning of Sunday, 4th June,June 4. between the Pripet and the Pruth, punctually to the hour, the waves of Russian infantry crossed their parapets.

It will be convenient, in considering a series of actions of the first order in magnitude and complexity, to take the different sections of the battleground in sequence, and carry the narrative of the events in each to the close of the first stage of the forward movement. The sections were five in number—that from Kolki northwards to the Pripet, where Kaledin’s right was engaged with the army of Puhallo; that between Kolki and Dubno, the Volhynian Triangle, where Kaledin’s left and Sakharov’s right faced the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand; that between Dubno and Zalostse, where Sakharov’s left was in conflict with Boehm-Ermolli; that between Zalostse and the Dniester, where, in front of Tarnopol, Scherbachev engaged Bothmer; and the corridor between the Dniester and the Pruth, where Lechitsky faced Pflanzer-Baltin. It was in the second and fifth of these sections that the first fortnight of June showed the chief results.

North of Kolki, where the brimming swamps still made progress difficult, little impression was made on Puhallo’s front. It was different in the area of the Volhynian Triangle. Between Lutsk and Rovno lies a district some thirty miles long from north to south, which is defined on these sides by the river Ikva, a confluent of the Styr, and the river Putilovka, a tributary of the Goryn. Here the armies of Kaledin and Sakharov made their great effort. About the centre lies the village of Olyka, in the midst of a rolling, treeless country. For the attack the Russians had the good Rovno-Lutsk and Rovno-Brody railways, besides the main Rovno-Lutsk highroad. From Olyka they pressed due west, and farther south they advanced down the Ikva valley along the Dubno-Lutsk road. By noon of the first day the Austrian front was completely gone. The bayonets of the Russians swept over the parapets, while the barrage cut off all communication with the rear. The result was that the fine Austrian trenches and deep dug-outs proved the veriest trap. Troops were packed and huddled in them without any means of escape, and were captured in thousands by the triumphant Russian infantry. The Cossacks went through and rounded up those who had escaped the barrage. That day in Lutsk the birthday of the Archduke Frederick was being celebrated, when news came that the 2nd and 10th Divisions had been driven in, and that the enemy was sweeping towards the Styr. The 13th Division was hurried forward to the gap, but shared the fate of the others. Confidence was placed for a moment in the great strength of the Lutsk defences; but there comes a stage in demoralization when no fortifications seem adequate. On Tuesday,June 6. 6th June, Kaledin was at its gates, and in the afternoon the Austrian army commander, the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, sought safety in flight. At twenty-five minutes past eight in the evening the Russian vanguard entered the town, and found an amazing booty. Batteries of heavy guns and vast stores of shells and material fell to the conqueror, and since there had been no time to evacuate the hospitals, many thousands of Austrian wounded were added to the total of prisoners.

The Lutsk Salient (showing the Russian front, June 4, 1916, and the ground gained up to June 16).

Lutsk was taken and the Styr and Ikva crossed, but it was necessary to broaden the wedge if an acute salient was not to be the result of the victory. Accordingly the next few days were spent in advancing north and south of Lutsk, and especially in winning the points where the Rovno-Lutsk and the Rovno-Brody railways crossed respectively theJune 8. Styr and the Ikva. On 8th June these two points, Rojitche and Dubno, were the scene of heavy fighting. Next day both fell,June 9. thus giving Russia the third and last of the Volhynian fortresses. The Ikva was also crossed at Mlynov, and the advance pushed west and south-west till by the 13th Kozin, a village half-way between Dubno and Brody, had been taken, as well as Demidovka to the north-west, and all the forest land between. West of Lutsk the Cossacks were ranging the country far and wide, and by the 13th had reached Zaturtsy, half-way to Vladimir Volynsk, while farther north they were on the upper streams of the Stokhod. Kaledin and Sakharov had cut a semicircle out of the enemy front, of which the radius was nearly forty miles. Farther north Kaledin’s right wing was now making some progress. Kolki itself fell on 13th June, and since the line of the UpperJune 13. Styr was gone, and the enemy driven back behind the Stokhod, Svidniki, on the latter stream, was taken after a violent battle, and in the crossing of the river a complete German battalion was captured by Siberian troops. South of the main battleground the Russian front was pushed down to the Galician border near Radzivilov and Alexinietz.

By 16th June, after twelve days of fighting,June 16. Kaledin, with the assistance of Sakharov’s right wing, had advanced some fifty miles from his original line. He had captured Lutsk and Dubno, he had reached the Galician frontier, and was at one point within twenty-five miles of Kovel. He had taken prisoner over 1,300 officers and 70,000 men, and had captured fifty-three guns and colossal amounts of every type of war material. After the long months of trench contests this sudden and dazzling sweep restored to the world its old notions of war.

It was time to call a halt and await the counterstroke. When the torrent first fell on the Austrian front, von Hindenburg sent from the north such reserves as he was able to spare. Certain Landwehr and Landsturm regiments came from Prince Leopold’s army in the marshes, and several German divisions from the Dvina front. Von Ludendorff was dispatched post-haste to straighten out the tangle, and the Volhynian part of the Archduke Frederick’s command was taken from him and given to von Linsingen.^[1] But after 16th June more formidable reinforcements began to appear. Austrian troops were coming from Tirol and the Balkans, and four German divisions—the 19th and 20th of the 10th Corps, the 11th Bavarians, and the 43rd Reserve—were hurried from France. How great was the urgency may be judged from the fact that a German corps moved from Verdun to Kovel in six days. These reserves were not fresh troops, and some of them had been severely ground in the Verdun mill, but they were the best that the emergency could produce. Kovel was the danger-point, for if Kovel fell the main lateral communications would be cut between Lemberg and Brest Litovsk, between the Army of the Centre and the Army of the South. For the defence of Kovel, accordingly, every available man was brought into line, the new German troops taking to themselves the area of the Styr and Stokhod, and the Austrians the sections from Vladimir Volynsk to the Bug.

Von Linsingen’s counter-attack opened on 16th June, and was pressed with gradually ebbing vigour till the end of the month. He did not fight with the reinforcements he had expected, forJune 13. on 13th June Ewarts, on the Russian centre, had attacked north of Baranovitchi; and though he failed to break the German front, his thrust detained there divisions which would otherwise have been marching south.

We may conveniently summarize here the various actions on the northern and central sections of the Russian front which were fought during the great Southern offensive. Baranovitchi stands on the plateau close to the watershed between the river Servech, which joins the Niemen, and the Shchara, which flows to the Pripet. It is an important railway junction, where the Vilna-Rovno line meets the railway from Smolensk to Brest Litovsk. The possession of the place by the Germans should have cut the lateral communication of the Russian armies, but a switch line had been constructed behind their front to link up the broken part. Baranovitchi, therefore, did not mean a great deal to Russia, but it represented an immense amount to Germany, for it was a nodal point of the whole railway system between Vilna and Brest Litovsk. Hence any attack on the place was sure to be strongly resisted, and to draw in all adjacent reserves. Moreover, in the event of success, any gain in this region would pave the way for a converging attack by Ewarts and Brussilov on Brest Litovsk.

In the beginning of June the 4th Russian Army, under General Rogoza, was facing the 9th German Army, under von Woyrsch. Rogoza’s attack was most elaborately prepared by sapping up to within close distance of the enemy. On the morning of 13th June the bombardment opened, and at four in the afternoon the Russian infantry attacked on the front along the Upper Shchara. Presently the battle-line extended farther south towards the Oginski Canal, and north to the upper streams of the Servech. In the early days of July, when Lesch and Kaledin were preparing their second offensive, Rogoza renewed his efforts. OnJuly 2. 2nd July the German trenches received a baptism of fire which had scarcely been paralleled in the campaign. To the Russians it was their revenge for the Donajetz. “All the bitterness,” wrote one officer, “the sufferings, with which was strewn the long path of our retreat, were poured out in this fire.” But von Woyrsch’s men, mostly Prussians and Silesians and the Austrian 12th Corps, resisted stubbornly. By 4th July Rogoza hadJuly 4. penetrated the enemy’s lines to a depth of two miles on a front of twelve, and had taken 78 officers and 3,040 other ranks. But by 9th July it was clear that the advance had reached its limit. On 14th July von WoyrschJuly 14. attempted a counterstroke without success, and thereafter the battle died away. It had fulfilled its purpose, for at a critical moment in Brussilov’s movements it had disorganized the enemy’s plan and divided his forces of resistance.

Von Linsingen’s aim east of Kovel was to check the enemy and wrest from him the initiative—to fight a holding battle which would give a breathing space to the rest of the shattered front. In this object he partially succeeded, for during the fortnight Kaledin’s triumphant course was stayed. The counterstroke was delivered by three enemy groups—in the south of the salient, on the line Lokatchy-Gorokhov; in the centre, between the Vladimir Volynsk-Lutsk road and Svidniki on the Stokhod; and from the north, against the Rojitche-Kolki sector of the Styr line.

The immediate result was that Kaledin had to retire from Svidniki and the western banks of the Stokhod. The action was now joined on the west bank of the Styr, on a line dipping south-west to Kisielin, at the Stokhod source. At Gadomitchi, on the Styr, just west of Kolki, the fighting was especially furious, and the place changed hands several times in the course of one day. At the other end of the line the village of Vorontchin, north-east of Kisielin, was the chief centre of the struggle. South of the Vladimir Volynsk road, below Lokatchy and Gorokhov, the Austrians made their main effort, attacking in massed formations and winning some successes. Kaledin withdrew his front on his left centre a matter of some five miles to the line Zaturtsy-Bludov-Lipa. On his right centre, apart from the retreat from Svidniki, he held more or less the ground he had gained.

The Lutsk Salient.—Von Linsingen’s Counter-attacks, June 16 to the end of the month.

The counter-attack died down about 20th June,June 20. to revive with redoubled violence in the last days of the month. But the second effort was less successful than the first. It kept the Kovel road blocked for Kaledin, but it was not that crushing counterstroke which von Hindenburg had hoped would take the edge off the Russian temper and cripple the impetus of Brussilov’s attack. Germany was aware that the offensive was only beginning in the East, and that presently the fires would blaze on the Western front. She strove to scotch the menace in one vital sector while yet there was time, but only succeeded in postponing it for a fortnight.

Going south from Lutsk, we reach the sector Dubno-Zalostse, where Sakharov faced Boehm-Ermolli. There, with a low watershed between them, run the Ikva and the Sereth, in a country of insignificant hills patched with oak woods and wide marshy valleys. Sakharov’s right wing, as we have seen, had pushed far on the road to Brody along the railway from Dubno, and had almost reached the frontier station of Radzivilov. For the moment its rôle was secondary. It supported the army to the north of it, but did not press on towards Brody, its main objective, since Scherbachev in the south had found his advance seriously checked.

Scherbachev’s Attacks on Bothmer’s Front, June 1916.

South of the Tarnopol-Lemberg railway the ground rises from the low downs of Volhynia in the great lift of the Podolian tableland, where the rivers flow south to the Dniester in deep-cut wooded cañons. There the Austrian front followed for a little the course of the Sereth, and then struck westward to the glen of the Strypa, on the eastern bank of which it ran till it reached the Dniester. It was a countryside made by nature for defence against an enemy coming from the east. The approaches were open and unsheltered, and the positions themselves offered endless chances for concealing guns and perfecting redoubts.

Scherbachev made his attack at three main points. The first was between the Tarnopol-Lemberg line and Zalostse, the second at the lift of the plateau around Burkanov, and the third along the Buczacz-Stanislau railway. In the first he was firmly held by Bothmer, who had rightly argued that any attack would follow the Tarnopol railway. The result was proclaimed as a triumph for German troops, and was contrasted with the Austrian débâcle elsewhere; but as a matter of fact there were few German regiments present, and the work of defence fell chiefly on battalions composed of Poles from Western Galicia, who, not for the first time in the campaign, showed their prowess in the field. At Burkanov things went better, and the enemy were driven in many places across the Strypa. The left wing of the 7th Russian Army at Buczacz had a success comparable with the great events in Volhynia. On 8th June Buczacz was carried,June 8. the Strypa was crossed, and the advance pushed well to the west of the stream. But it was clear that on no grounds of strategy could an army move too far forward in this section with Bothmer’s centre unbroken to the north of it. In front of it lay the Dniester and the strong bridgehead of Halicz; on its left lay the rugged Dniester defile with an unconquered country on the other bank. An advance ran the risk of being driven southward and pinned against a dangerous river line. Scherbachev accordingly was compelled to stay his hand and wait upon developments in the Bukovina.

The corridor between the Dniester and the Pruth, which is the main entrance from the east into the Bukovina, afforded no easy access to an invader, as Ivanov had found to his cost in his offensive of Christmas 1915. For it is a corridor blocked by a range of hills, the Berdo Horodyshche, which only in the north break down into the little plain between Dobronovstse and the Dniester—a plain, moreover, which is itself blocked from the Bessarabian side by subsidiary foothills. At Christmas Lechitsky had attempted to force the hills by a frontal assault, and had failed. On the north the Dniester formed a strong barrier, and of the three main bridgeheads, the two most important, Zaleshchyki and Ustsie Biskupie, were in Austrian hands. The third, Uscieszko, was Russia’s, but the surrounding country did not permit of its serving as a base for a crossing in force. The Bukovina seemed triply armoured against attacks from east and north.

The Attack from the Russian Left—Lechitsky’s March on Czernovitz.

Lechitsky’s plan was to concentrate on the dubious gap between Dobronovstse and Okna, for if this were once forced the line of the Dniester at Zaleshchyki and the range of the Berdo Horodyshche would both be turned. He had the advantage of surprise, for the result of the Christmas battle seems to have convinced Pflanzer-Baltin that his position was impregnable. The Russian general aimed at attacking the Okna-Dobronovstse line simultaneously from the east through the corridor, and from the north across the Dniester, where the Russian position on the left bank commanded the lower southern shore. OnJune 2. 2nd June the bombardment began, and on theJune 4. evening of 4th June—the same “loud Sabbath” which saw Kaledin, sweeping upon Lutsk—the Russian infantry crossed the river towards Okna, and the foothills towards Dobronovstse. It was now clear to Pflanzer-Baltin that a desperate crisis had come upon him. He had under his command many of the picked troops of Hungary, and they were flung wildly into the breach. But they were blasted out of their positions by the Russian guns, and forced back in grim hand-to-hand struggles by the terrible Russian bayonets. By 9th June the DobronovstseJune 9. line had gone, and Lechitsky had taken 347 officers, including one general, 18,000 other ranks, and ten guns.

Pflanzer-Baltin fell back along the little branch lines which lead to Czernovitz and Kolomea, with the enemy close at his heels. Zaleshchyki was now turned, and the Russians on 12th JuneJune 12. had the bridgehead, and had pushed west to Horodenka, a great road junction which lies some twenty miles north-west of Czernovitz. With the enemy pouring across the Dniester and through the corridor, Pflanzer-Baltin’s position was hopeless. His force began to break up. Most of it retreated south across the Pruth, but detachments went west along the road to Kolomea. On 13th June June 13. Lechitsky was in Sniatyn, and was descending on Czernovitz from the north, whence Austrian officials and German professors were fleeing like the household of Lot from the Cities of the Plain. The Austrians had evacuated Sadagora, on the Czernovitz-Zaleshchyki road, and were now across the Pruth, attempting to hold the low ridge of hills on the southern bank. In nine days Lechitsky had taken 757 officers, 37,832 other ranks, and forty-nine guns.

The Russian Pursuit in the Bukovina, after the Capture of Czernovitz.

On 16th June the Russians crossed the Pruth,June 16. and that night the military evacuation of Czernovitz began. Next day, at fourJune 17. in the afternoon, the conquerors entered the city. Pflanzer-Baltin was now in full flight through South Bukovina towards the Carpathians, leaving behind him masterless detachments at Stanislau, Kolomea, and along the Dniester. He seems to have hoped to make a stand on the Sereth, the Bukovina river of that name which flows into the Danube. But Lechitsky gave him no time to halt. The day after Czernovitz fellJune 18. he had taken the town of Kutchurmare, and was across the Sereth, and on the 21st was thirty miles south of the capital. Columns were meanwhile moving westward, and were presently in Kuty and Pistyn, on the outskirts of Kolomea. Radautz fell, and on 23rd June Kimpolung,June 23. the most southerly town of the province, was taken, together with sixty officers and 2,000 men. The “country of the beech woods” was once again in Russian hands.

On this date, 23rd June, closed the first stage of what had been one of the most rapid and spectacular advances in the history of the war. In three weeks a whole province had been reconquered; Lutsk and Dubno had been retaken; the advance was within twenty-five miles of Kovel, and within ten of Brody; the prisoners captured numbered 4,031 officers and 194,041 of other ranks; 219 guns and 644 machine guns had been taken, besides vast quantities of all war material. Strategically, the first stages had been won in the attack upon the three vital places behind the enemy front—Kovel, Lemberg, and Stanislau. The Austrian line had been pierced and shattered over wide stretches, and the campaign in these areas translated from the rigidity of trench warfare to something like the freedom of manœuvre battles. For the first time since the beginning of the war the Russians were, as regards artillery and munitions, on terms of something like equality with their foe, and the decision lay with their incomparable foot and cavalry. In another matter they were on level terms—in Volhynia and at Buczacz they had railways to support their advance equal to those of their opponents. Brussilov had made brilliant use of his newly acquired advantages, and had conducted his vast operations with the skill of a master. Only the first step had been taken; the movement was still far from having won a strategic decision; but loss, vast and irreparable, had already been caused to the waning man-power of Austria.

As our narrative approaches the end of the second year of war, and reaches the second anniversary of those murders at Serajevo which opened the flood gates, it is desirable to halt and review the position. Only in this way can a campaign whose terrain was three continents and every sea, and whose battle-fronts were reckoned in thousands of miles, be seen in its full purpose and its right perspective.

At the end of June 1915 Germany’s arms to aJune 1915. superficial observer seemed to be everywhere crowned with success. It was true that her original scheme had failed, and that she had been compelled to revise her ideas, and adopt a plan for which she had small liking. But with admirable patience she had performed the revision, and the new policy had won conspicuous triumphs. She held the Allies tightly in the West, held them with the minimum of men by virtue of an artillery machine to which they could not show an equal, and fortifications of a strength hitherto unknown to the world. Using her main forces in the East, she had driven Russia from post to pillar, had won back Galicia, had penetrated far into Poland, and had already in her grip the great fortresses whose cession meant for Russia not only a crushing loss in guns, but an indefinite further retreat. She held vast tracts of enemy soil in Poland, Belgium, and France, and so far these gains had not diminished, but were daily growing. The Central Powers had a completely unified command, and all their strength could be applied with little delay and friction to the purpose of the German General Staff.

Nor was the full tale of the Allied misfortunes yet told. Bulgaria, though the fact was still secret, had entered the Teutonic League, and that must presently mean the annihilation of Serbia, and German dominion in the Balkans. Turkey had so far held the Allied advance in Gallipoli, and was soon to bring it to a melancholy standstill. There were tragedies waiting to be enacted in Mesopotamia. What had the Allies to show as against such spectacular triumphs? The conquest of one or two outlandish German colonies, a few miles gained on the Isonzo and in the Italian hills, the occupation of the butt-end of a Turkish peninsula, an advance up the Tigris, where the difficulties loomed greater with every league, a defensive action in Egypt, and one or two costly failures on the Western front. To the German observer it seemed a mirage as contrasted with the solid earth.

Nor was the prospect less pleasing when viewed with another eye than the strategist’s. In the struggle of military bureaucracies against democracies, it would seem that the bureaucracies must win. Fifty years before Abraham Lincoln had said, “It has long been a grave question whether any Government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies.” That question seemed to have been answered against the democracies. Germany and her allies looked abroad, and saw Britain still perplexed with old catchwords, still disinclined to turn a single mind to the realities of war. The air was full of captious criticism. Her people had willed the end, no doubt, but they were not wholly inclined to will the means. Again, while the Teutonic command was unified, the Allies were still fumbling and wasting their strength on divergent enterprises. There seemed to be no true General Staff work done for the Alliance as a whole. Each unit fought its own campaign, and was assisted by its colleagues only when disaster had overtaken it. Their assets, potentially very great, could not be made actual. They had far more men, but those men could not be made soldiers in time. They had a great industrial machine, but that machine would not adapt itself quickly enough to military needs. They commanded the sea, but their fleets could not destroy Germany’s unless Germany was willing to fight. Their blockade, while it might annoy, could not seriously cripple the energies of Central Europe, which in the greater matters was economically self-sufficing. As for moral, had not a bureaucracy shown that it could elicit as splendid a resolution and as whole-hearted an enthusiasm as those Powers which worshipped the fetish called popular liberty?

Nevertheless an impartial critic, looking around him in June 1915, might have noted chinks in the Teutonic panoply. So far the Allied blockade had had no very serious effects; but might it not be tightened? Germany had occupied much land; but could she hold it? She was spending herself lavishly and brandishing her sword far afield in the hope of intimidating her enemies; but what if those enemies declined to be intimidated? Unless Germany achieved her end quickly, it was possible that the Allies might set their house in order. They were fighting for their national existence, and they saw no salvation save in a complete and unquestionable victory. Was it not possible that, as the urgency of the need sank into their souls, there might come such a speeding up and tightening of energies that Germany’s offensive would be changed to a defensive? For the one hope of Germany lay in a successful offensive which would break up the Alliance by putting one or other of its constituent armies out of action. If this was not done speedily, could it be done at all?

The intelligent German would probably have assented to the premises, but denied the possibility of failure. The German offensive was on the eve of decisive success. The Kaiser had told his people that they were drawing very near to a victorious peace.

Let us suppose that a man, wounded at the close of June 1915, had been shut off from the world for the space of a year. As he became convalescent heJune 1916. asked for news of the war. Was the Russian army still in being? and if so, in what ultimate waste, far east of Petrograd and Moscow, did it lie? for in the absence of Russian equipment the German advance could not have been stayed short of those famous cities? To his amazement he was told that von Hindenburg’s thrust had first weakened, and then died away, and that the winter in the East had been stagnant. More, Russia had had her breathing space, and was now advancing. All the Bukovina had been recovered, and the Volhynian Triangle, and Brussilov was well on the road to Lemberg, with three-quarters of a million Austrians out of action. In the Balkans, Serbia and Montenegro had been overrun, and Bulgaria had joined the enemy; but an Allied army—French, British, Serbians, Russians, and Italians—was holding the Salonika front, and waiting for the signal to advance. The Gallipoli adventure had failed, but the force had been extricated, and was now in France and Egypt and Mesopotamia. Egypt had laughed at the threat of invasion, and had easily subdued the minor ferments on her borders. On the Tigris one British fort had fallen, and a weak division had been made prisoner; but it had detained large Turkish forces, and allowed the Grand Duke Nicholas in Transcaucasia to take Erzerum, Trebizond, and Erzinghian, and to threaten the central Anatolian plain. Italy had flung back the invader from the Trentino, and was now beginning her revanche. In the West there had been one great effort to pierce the German front, and after its failure the Allies had sat down to perfect their equipment and increase their armies. The convalescent heard with amazement of the tornado that had swept on Verdun, and of the unequalled stand of the thin French lines. He was told of the desperate assault then being delivered against Fleury and Thiaumont, but he was told also of the great Allied armies mustered on the Somme for the counterstroke. Above all, he heard of the miraculous work of Britain, of ample munitions, of seventy divisions in the field and great reserves behind them. He heard, too, of a unified strategical and economic purpose among the Allies, of attacks conceived and directed with a single aim. As the manifold of these facts slowly shaped itself in his consciousness, he realized that he had awakened to a new world.

What is the test of military success? The question has often been asked, and the popular replies are innumerable; but the soldier knows only one answer. The test is the destruction of the enemy’s power of resistance, and that power depends upon his possession of an adequate field army. Success is not the occupation of territory, or of successive enemy lines, or of famous enemy fortresses. These things may be means, but they are not in themselves the end. And if these things are won without the end being neared, the winner of them has not only not advanced; he has gone backward, since he has expended great forces for an idle purpose, and is thereby crippled for future efforts. Early in 1916, when the German Press was exulting in the study of the map of Europe, von Hindenburg is said to have described Germany’s military position as “brilliant, but without a future.” If the veteran field-marshal was correctly reported, he showed in the remark an acumen which observers would not necessarily have gathered from his exploits in the field.

Strategically, as we have seen in previous volumes, Germany had long ago failed. Her original strategic purpose was sound—to destroy one by one the Allied field armies. Her urgent need was a speedy and final victory. The Marne and First Ypres deprived her of this hope, and she never regained it. The Allies took the strategical offensive, and, by pinning her to her lines and drawing round her the net of their blockade, compelled her to a defensive war. In the largest sense the Allied offensive dated from the beginning of 1915. But it was an offensive which did not include the tactical initiative. So long as the Allies were deficient in equipment Germany was able to take the tactical offensive. Instances were the Second Battle of Ypres and the great German advance in the East. “A weakening Power,” in the words of General Foch, “must be always attacking,” and these various movements were undertaken in the hope that tactical success might gradually restore the strategic balance. This hope was doomed to disappointment. Victories, indeed, were won, brilliant victories, but they led nowhere. By-and-by came the last attempts, the onslaughts on Verdun and the Trentino; and the failure of these prepared the way for the Allies themselves to take the tactical initiative. Germany was now tactically as well as strategically on her defence.

The essence of German tactics was their reliance upon guns. For them artillery was the primary and infantry the secondary arm. They looked to win battles at long range, confident in an elaborate machine to which their opponents could provide no equivalent. Their whole strategical plan was based upon this tactical calculation. It miscarried; but at the beginning of the war there was some ground for their confidence. To improvise an equivalent machine might reasonably have been considered beyond the power of France and Russia. But three things combined to frustrate the hope—the stubborn fight against odds of all the Allies, their command of the sea which allowed them to import munitions till their own producing power had developed, and the industrial capacity of Britain which enabled her to manufacture for the whole Alliance. Faced with an artillery equipment of anything like equal strength, the German tactics were ineffective, and when the day came that the Allies had a stronger munitionment than their enemy, they were both futile and perilous. That is the danger of fighting behind the shelter of a machine. Men accustomed to a long-range contest will be helpless when the battle comes to close quarters. How can infantry trained as a secondary arm stand against infantry which has been taught that on it primarily rests the decision? The quality can never be the same. At first the defect may be met by greater quantity, but as effectives decline quality will come by its own.

The Battle of Verdun may be taken as the final proof of the fallacy of German tactics. They were intrinsically wrong, and could only have succeeded if the whirlwind fury of the first German assault had immediately achieved its object. So soon as Germany was reduced to a strategical defensive they became a signal danger. For sooner or later her artillery was bound to be met by an equal or greater equipment, and then she could only retrieve the tactical inferiority of her infantry by the use of superior numbers. When numbers failed her it would appear that, sooner or later, she must accept defeat.

It was the fashion among the Allies towards midsummer 1916 to blame von Falkenhayn for serious blunders. But the blame really attached to Germany’s pre-war preparations, and to the whole theory of war which the patient industry of her General Staff had elaborated for so many years. They had placed their money on a horse of surprising pace but of indifferent staying power over a long course. It is a little difficult to see what other road von Falkenhayn could have taken. He had to speed up the conflict and attack somewhere. To him the centre of gravity lay in the West, and it is not easy to say that he was wrong. If he could put France out of action, it would be impossible for Britain alone to conduct the war on that front, and the Alliance must crumble. Von Hindenburg, it was understood, while agreeing on the necessity of an offensive somewhere, preferred the Eastern theatre. He would have had Germany remain strictly on the defensive in the West, while he endeavoured to obtain a real decision against Russia. It may fairly be said that both schemes were impossible, and it is idle to determine degrees of impossibility. An assault on Russia in the spring and summer of 1916 would undoubtedly have failed, as the march through Poland had failed the year before. Since von Falkenhayn’s plan miscarried, the exponent of the untried plan increased his reputation, but there is no reason to believe that one was wiser than the other. The time had gone by for a decisive German offensive, and her tactical misconceptions were exacting their penalty. A new offensive indeed she must undertake, but its chance of forcing a decision had gone.

The special blunder of Germany at this stage did not lie only with the General Staff, but with the whole German authorities, civil, naval, and military, and with the German people. Since she was clearly on the defence, it would have been well to take the measures proper to a defensive campaign. She was holding far-flung lines with too few men, and the path of wisdom was obviously to shorten them. There is some evidence that after the failure at Verdun the wiser brains in her General Staff favoured this view. But in the then state of German opinion it was impracticable. When the people had been buoyed with hope of a triumphant peace and a vast increase of territory, when the fanatics of Pan-Germanism were publishing details of how they intended to use the conquered areas, when the Imperial Chancellor was lyrically apostrophizing the map, a shortening of the lines in East and West would have tumbled down the whole edifice of German confidence. She could not do it; her political commitments were too deep; her earlier vainglory sat like an Old Man of the Sea on her shoulders.

Yet beyond doubt it was her best chance. Had she, before the Allied offensive began, drawn in her front to the Vistula and the Meuse, she would have had an immensely strong line, and adequate numbers wherewith to hold it. She would have offered the Allies the prospect of an interminable war, under conditions which they had fondly hoped they had made impossible. Her one chance was to weaken the Alliance internally, to weary this or that Power, to lengthen out the contest to a point where the cost in money and lives would induce a general nervelessness and satiety. Moreover, by shortening her lines her food problem would have become far less urgent, and the deadliness of the blockade would have been lessened. But she let the moment for the heroic course slip by, and when the first guns opened in the combined Allied advance that course had become for ever impossible.

The position at sea in midsummer 1916 had not in substance changed from that of the preceding year. The waterways of the world were still denied by the Allies to the enemy, and used by them for their own military purposes. There had been several bursts of submarine violence, already chronicled in these pages, but it is fair to say that the submarine as a serious weapon had during the year decreased in importance. Its brutality was enhanced, but its efficiency had declined. Its moral effect in the way of shaking the nerves of British merchant seamen was nil. The result of the year’s experience had been to induce a high degree of popular confidence in the measures taken to meet the under-water danger—a confidence not wholly justified, and, as we shall see, soon to be rudely shaken. One great incident had broken the monotony of our maritime vigil. The German High Sea Fleet had been brought to action, and in the battle of 31st May off the Jutland coast hadMay 31. been conclusively beaten and driven back to harbour. But that great sea-fight did not change the situation; it only confirmed it. “Before Jutland, as after it,” in Mr. Balfour’s words, “the German fleet was imprisoned; the battle was an attempt to break the bars and burst the confining gates; it failed, and with its failure the High Sea Fleet sank again into impotence.”^[2]

The British navy, viewing the position while they swept the North Sea and the bells rang in Berlin and Hamburg to celebrate von Scheer’s return, were convinced that they would see the enemy again. They had reason for their view. The Battle of Jutland was fought because politics demanded that the German fleet should do something to justify its existence in the eyes of the German people. That demand must be repeated. As the skies darkened over Germany it was certain that von Scheer would make further efforts, and the nearer came the day of final defeat the more desperate those efforts would be. For the navy of a Power is like a politician who changes sides: it counts two on a division. If the Power is conquered, its fleet will be the spoil of the conqueror. Far better that the German battleships should go to the bottom, with a number of British ships to keep them company, than that they should be doled out ignobly to increase the strength of the Allied victors.

While Germany’s military and naval situation had a certain clearness, it was far otherwise with her domestic affairs. If differences of opinion were rumoured within her General Staff, there were open and flagrant antagonisms among her civilian statesmen. Two main strains of opinion had long been apparent. One was that held by the Kaiser, possibly by von Falkenhayn, by the Imperial Chancellor, and by the bulk of the civilian ministers. They believed—with occasional lapses into optimism—that the contest must end in a stalemate, and they were willing to abate their first arrogance and play for safety. Above all, they were anxious to avoid any conflict with the more powerful neutrals, for they knew that only by neutral help could Germany set her shattered house in order. They still talked boldly about victory, but these utterances were partly a concession to popular taste, and partly a desire to put their case high in order to enhance the value of future concessions. These people were the politiques, and they were not agreed on the details of their policy, some looking towards a rapprochement with France or Britain, others seeing in Russia a prospective ally. But they differed from their opponents in being willing to bargain and concede, and in allowing prudential considerations to temper the old German pride.

Arrayed against them were the fanatics of Pan-Germanism of the Reventlow-Tirpitz school, who still clung to the belief in a complete victory, and were prepared to defy the whole round earth. To this school Prince Bülow by a curious metamorphosis seemed to have become attached. Neck or nothing was their maxim. They were advocates of every extreme of barbarism in method, and refused to contemplate any result of the war except one in which Germany should dictate to beaten foes. They had a considerable following, and they used the name of von Hindenburg as their rallying-cry, not because that eminent person was an adherent of their views—for he had in all probability not troubled his mind with questions outside his profession—but because he loomed big in the popular imagination as the strong, implacable soldier.

We can trace the strife of these two schools through German speeches and writings till the late spring of 1916. And then something happened which convinced both that their forecasts were wrong—which took from the politiques their hope of bargaining, and from the fanatics their certainty of triumph. Suddenly, with one of those queer illuminations which happen now and then to the most self-satisfied, the masters of Germany realized that their case was getting desperate. They saw that the Allied command was now unified, and that the Allied efforts were about to be quadrupled. They saw that the Allies would accept no terms but unconditional surrender. And they saw, moreover, that the contest could not end with the war, for their enemies were preparing a conjoint economic policy which would insure that their gains in battle should not be lost in peace. They saw at the same time that their military position was losing its brilliance, and had even less future than when von Hindenburg coined his epigram. The alternative now was not between a complete victory and an honourable draw, but between victory and annihilation—Weltmacht oder Niedergang.

This sudden realization induced a new temper. The people had been deluded, but there must some day be a stern awakening. Let that awakening come from the enemy, was the decision of the German High Command. The people must learn that their foes would not stop short of their utter destruction, the ruin not only of Germany’s imperial dream, but of that laborious industrial and economical system which brought grist to the humblest mill. The boldest course was the safest. Concessions to humanity brought no reward, so let barbarism rule unchecked. It was only on the grim resolution of the whole nation that they could count for the life-and-death struggle before them, and the nation must be brought to this desperate temper by the proof that their leaders possessed it. Germany proceeded accordingly to burn her boats.

The first evidence of this calculated insanity was the murder of Captain Fryatt. Early in June the Great Eastern steamer, Brussels, plying between Harwich and Holland, was captured in the North Sea by a German torpedo boat and taken to Zeebrugge. Captain Fryatt was imprisoned at Bruges, and brought to trial as a franc-tireur, on the ground that in an encounter with a German submarine on March 28, 1915, he had defended himself by trying to ram his enemy, and had compelled her to dive. He was condemned to death on Thursday,July 27. 27th July, and shot that evening. The German Press, instructed for the purpose, promptly broke into a chorus of approval. “The necessity,” wrote the Cologne Gazette, “of protecting honourable and chivalrous combatants against perfidious and murderous attacks compels the military command to visit all illegal attacks with the strongest punishment. The captain who beneath a harmless mask flashes a dagger on an unsuspecting person is a bandit.” The incident roused in the people of Britain a cold fury similar to that which followed the murder of Miss Cavell. The Prime Minister in the House of Commons gave further warning that it would be the first business of the Allies, when the proper season arrived, to punish such crimes; that the criminals would be brought to justice, whatever their station; and that the man who authorized the system which permitted such deeds might well be held the most guilty of all. About the same time the German military authorities in north-eastern France organized a general shifting of sections of the population. In the neighbourhoods of Lille, Roubaix, and Tourcoing, women, young and old, were moved wholesale to other districts, where they were compelled to work at the dictation of their tyrants. The transference and the coercion which followed were attended with much revolting inhumanity.

Germany in both cases put forth in defence of her conduct a number of feverish contradictory pleas. Captain Fryatt had not been defending himself, she said; he had been attacking. In any case resistance on the part of a civilian was a violation of the laws of war. The French deportations were justified on the ground of the force majeure of necessity. They were a deliberate breach of Germany’s own undertakings at the Hague, but she argued that she must do the best for herself in a life-and-death struggle.

It is idle to enter into the legal arguments on the first case; there were none on the second. It is an old rule of war among civilized peoples that a merchant vessel may lawfully defend herself against an enemy attempt at her capture or destruction. This rule became more reasonable than ever when German submarines were scouting the seas with instructions to torpedo British merchantmen at sight. It had been laid down by Lord Stowell and Chief Justice Marshall; it had been embodied in the naval codes of most countries; it had been approved by the chief German jurists; it had even appeared in the German Naval Prize Regulations, which were in effect at the time when Captain Fryatt was alleged to have tried to ram the submarine. Germany, it is true, had shown herself restless under that doctrine before the war, and had made various attempts to have it set aside. Since August 1914 she had simply disregarded it, as she had disregarded all other bonds which checked her freedom. She treated any participation in warfare, direct or indirect, by other than regular combatants as a crime worthy of the ultimate punishment. The captain of a trawler who tried to ram a submarine which was endeavouring to sink him, the householder who fired a rifle at a Zeppelin which was engaged in destroying his township, the peasant who carried a pistol to protect his family from the last outrages, were all alike, under this curious creed, bandits and murderers.

It is idle to discuss the question on legal grounds, for Germany had none which serious men could consider. But, if we neglect the sphere of legality, there would still seem to remain certain fetters to unbridled licence imposed by elementary human decency. Even these Germany now spurned, as she had spurned them before in the horrors of her first invasion of France and Belgium. Had the affair not been so tragic, there would have been something comic, in the unplumbed childishness of a Power which still worshipped the leaden idols, the creation of her own vanity, when the earth was cracking beneath her feet. But if there is truth in the hypothesis we have put forward, and German statesmen did seek to burn their boats and impress upon the nation the implacableness of their foes, then they assuredly succeeded. In France and Britain the desire to wage the war à outrance was blown to a white heat of resolution. It found expression in the words of the Allied statesmen, and it was soon to find a more deadly expression in the deeds of the Allied armies.

At the end of June the economic situation of the Central Powers was becoming serious. The immediate food stringency was the least part of it. That stringency was very great, and till the harvest could be reaped in August it would continue to increase. A Director of Food Supplies was appointed in the person of Herr von Batocki; but no rationing and no ingenious manipulation of stocks could add to an aggregate which was too small for the comfort of the people. The British blockade had been greatly tightened, and every day sawJune 14-17. its effectiveness growing. In June the unfortunate Declaration of London had been totally and finally abandoned. However good the German harvest, it could not make up all the deficit, and its results would cease early in 1917; nor could it supply the animal fats, the lubricating oils, and the many foreign necessaries which the British navy had forbidden. As for finance, further loans might be raised on the security of the Jutland “victory,” though such loans were at the mercy of some sudden popular understanding of the true position. But the darkest part of the picture was the situation which must face Germany after war, assuming that a crushing victory was beyond her. Her great commercial expansion had been largely due to the system of favourable treaties which under Caprivi and Bülow she had negotiated with foreign countries. Even before the war it was clear that the signatory nations would seek to recover their freedom, and a tariff struggle was in prospect when at the end of 1916 all the treaties were liable to denunciation. Now not only was there no hope of their renewal on good terms, but there was the certainty that all the Allies after the war would unite in boycotting Germany and developing commercial relations between themselves. At a Conference held in Paris in the middle of June it was agreed that in the reconstruction period the enemy Powers should be denied “most-favoured-nation” treatment, that enemy subjects should be prevented from engaging in vital industries in Allied countries, and that provision should be made for the conservation and exchange of the Allied natural resources. It was further resolved to render the Allied countries independent of the enemy countries in raw materials and essential manufactured articles.^[3] Unless Germany won the power to dictate treaties to her foes, as she had dictated to France in 1871, it looked as if the self-sufficiency of which she had boasted would be all that was left to her.

How nervous was Germany’s temper on this subject was shown by the extravagant popular joy which greeted the voyage of a German submarine to America, and its safe return. On 9th JulyJuly 9. the U-boat Deutschland arrived at Baltimore from Bremen with 280 tons of cargo, mostly dye-stuffs, and an autograph letter of the Kaiser. She had sailed under a commercial flag, and, being held by the American authorities to be technically a merchantman, was allowed to leave, and returned safely to Germany. It was what is known as a sporting performance, and nobody grudged the crew and captain their meed of honour; but the voyage involved no naval difficulty, its commercial results were infinitesimal, and the popular joy in Germany was based upon the erroneous idea that a means had been found of meeting the British blockade. She hoped that she had re-established trading relations with the chief neutral Power. It was a vain whimsy; there was nothing which the British navy more desired than that a hundred Deutschlands would attempt to repeat the enterprise. A submarine or two in the vast expanse of the Atlantic might escape detection, but a submarine service would be gently and steadily drawn into their net.

The one hope for Germany—and it was slender at the best—was that dissension would creep into the Allied councils. She could not look to draw any one of her foes to her side, but she might weaken their affection for each other, and so lessen their united striking power. She used her Press and her connections in neutral countries to play the part of the sower of tares in the Allies’ vineyard. France was praised for her gallant exploits, and was advised not to count on the alliance of perfidious Britain. It was hinted that the Channel ports would never be restored to her; that Normandy had once been joined to England, and that history might repeat itself. What, it was asked, had become of the British during the long Verdun struggle? The overgrown improvised armies of Britain were simply mobs, too untrained to influence the war. “The value of the English infantry,” wrote the Vossische Zeitung, “is not exactly to be considered as diminished, for we must think of the old English army as a perfect thing apart; the present infantry has never had any value.” The legend of Britain’s commercial ambitions was zealously preached. Russia was warned that after the war she would soon pray to be delivered from her friends. Happily this game was destined to fail for two good reasons. It was most blunderingly played, for German diplomacy was a clumsy thing, and, her backstairs efforts were betrayed by the tramping of her heavy feet. Again she underrated the depth and gravity of the Allied purpose, which was faced with far too desperate an issue to have time for pettishness and vanity. There was rivalry, indeed, between the Allies, but it was a noble emulation in gallantry and sacrifice.

When we turn to the position of Germany’s opponents, we find by midsummer 1916 that in every respect the year had shown a change for the better. Britain had enormously increased her levies, and had provided the machinery for utilizing her total man-power. France, though she had suffered a terrible drain at Verdun, had all her armies in being, and, with the assistance of Britain, who had taken over a large part of the front, would be able to supply the necessary drafts for many a day. Russia had trained huge numbers of her new recruits, and was stronger in men than before her great retreat began. In munitionment the change was amazing. France was amply provided for, Russia had at least four times greater a supply than she had ever known, and Britain, though still far from the high-water mark of her effort, had performed the miraculous. In a speech in the House of Commons, Mr. Montagu, who had succeeded Mr. Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions, drew a contrast between the situation in June 1915 and June 1916. The report of the work of the department read like a fairy tale. In shells the output which in 1914-15 it took twelve months to produce could now be supplied from home sources in the following times: Field gun ammunition, 3 weeks; field howitzer ammunition, 2 weeks; medium shells, 11 days; heavy shells, 4 days. Britain was now manufacturing and issuing to the Western front weekly as much as the whole pre-war stock of land-service ammunition in the country. In heavy guns the output in the year had increased sixfold, and would soon be doubled. The weekly production of machine guns had increased fourteen fold, and of rifles three fold—wholly from home sources. In small-arm ammunition the output was three times as great, and large reserve stocks were being accumulated. The production of high explosives was 66 times what it had been in the beginning of 1915, and the supply of bombs for trench warfare had been multiplied by 33. These figures were for British use alone, but we were also making colossal contributions to the common stock. One-third of the total British manufacture of shell steel went to France, and 20 per cent. of our production of machine tools we sent to our Allies. Such a record was a triumph for the British workman, who in his long hours in dingy factories was doing as vital service to his country as his brothers in the trenches of France and Salonika, on the hot sands of Mesopotamia and Egypt, or on the restless waters of the North Sea.

The economic linch-pin of the Alliance was Britain, and on her financial stability depended its powers of endurance till victory. We have seen in earlier chapters how complex was her problem. All the Allies had to make vast purchases abroad, and these had to be supported by British credit. The foreign exporter had to be paid for his goods in the currency which he would accept, and hence, while Germany’s only problem was internal payments which could be met by an indefinite issue of paper, Britain had to find large quantities of gold or marketable securities for her daily purchases. So far as internal finance was concerned, her position was sound. In a speech in the HouseAug. 10. of Commons on 10th August, the Chancellor of the Exchequer calculated that by March 31, 1917, if the war lasted so long, our total indebtedness would just about equal the national income, “a burden by no means intolerable to contemplate,” and that our national indebtedness would be less than one-sixth of the total national wealth. But the question of foreign payments—something between one and two millions a day—remained an anxious one, and was yet far from a settlement. In some respects the situation had improved. Owing to the policy of restriction of imports, and owing also to a remarkable increase in British exports—11½ millions higher for July 1916 than for the same month in the previous year—our adverse trade balance was being reduced. In July 1916, for example, it was 22½ millions as against 31½ millions for July 1915. But ahead of our statesmen loomed this difficulty: we were paying for American imports for ourselves and our Allies mainly out of “dollar securities”—those American bonds which British owners had lent or sold to the Treasury. At the present rate we should have exhausted this form of currency before midsummer 1917, and we might then be faced with a real crisis. It was urged with great reason that it would be well to adopt at once some drastic method of reducing unnecessary imports, and so lessening foreign payments, if we did not wish to find our military effort crippled at the moment when it should have been gathering power for the coup de grâce.

Economy in this respect could only be effected by the Allies jointly, since British credit had to cover all purchases; and it was now made possible by the unification which we have seen effected in the Allied Staff work. The pooling of resources was in theory complete. Frequent conferences, economic, political, and strategic, gave assurance that every atom of strength would be directed to a single end. The whole Allied force now held one great battle front—from Riga to the Bukovina; then, after a gap, from the Gulf of Orfano to west of the Vardar; then from the Isonzo to the Stelvio Pass; and, lastly, from Belfort to the North Sea. The Russians were the right wing, the Salonika army the right centre, the Italians the centre, the French the left centre, and the British the left wing. Staff work had been recognized at its proper value by all the Allies, since the appointment of Sir Archibald Murray and the revival of the British General Staff in October 1915. The military Conference in Paris in May 1916 had for the first time prepared for the whole front one common strategic plan. The Central Powers, who had won what they had won by their superior unity, were now confronted with an Alliance no longer loose and divergent, but disciplined and directed. At last the machinery was adequate to the impulse to strive and the resolution to conquer.

This sense of energy well directed induced in all the Allied peoples a new confidence and peace of mind. France, keyed to a high pitch by her marvellous deeds at Verdun, was in no mind to criticize her colleagues, and still less to find fault with her leaders. In Britain the mist of suspicion grew thinner between the Government and the people. Critics forsook their quest for a man of destiny, and were content to help fallible statesmen to make the best of things. In Russia the popular temper, always staunch and cheerful, was fired to enthusiasm by the great sweep of Brussilov and his armies. It would be wrong to pretend that there were no differences within the Allied unity. In Russia especially the first sun of success seemed to be about to warm into activity some of those parasites which had aforetime preyed on her, and which had been driven to hibernate during the chill winter of the long retreat. But as the months passed it grew clear to each of the Allies that the domestic affairs of their colleagues were for these colleagues themselves, and that the Alliance had no concern with internal politics save in so far as they affected the conduct of the war. It was realized that if the Alliance was to endure, each unit must have complete domestic freedom, and that unity in the great issues did not preclude the widest difference in lesser matters. Provided the weapon was keen and bright, the rest of the accoutrement was the business of the individual soldier. In the wise words of a distinguished Russian publicist, M. Egorov, “We wish to stand on our own feet, even if they be ill-shod.”

The position of neutrals had in certain respects changed materially during the past year. Bulgaria had entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. The British blockade had revolutionized the oversea commerce of those Powers which still stood aloof from the contest. No neutral save Portugal had joined the Alliance; but, so far as could be judged, no other neutral was likely to join the enemy. Rumania was still waiting with a single eye to her own territorial interests, but every mile that Brussilov advanced in the north increased the chances of her intervention on the Allied side. Greece had attempted to play the same game, but in each move had shown a singular folly. Bulgaria’s invasion of her territory had roused a national feeling which the Court and Army chiefs, blinded by the spell of Germany, could neither understand nor in the long run control. M. Venizelos, the leader of Greek nationalism, bided his time, and watched, with shame and melancholy, as did all well-wishers of Hellas, the huckstering and blundering policy of the Athens Government. The Græculus esuriens was not dead. Still, as of old, he tended to be too clever by half, and, from his absorption in petty cunning, to wreck the greater matters of his own self-interest. Spain remained aloof from the struggle, her hierarchy and the bulk of her upper classes leaning in sympathy towards Germany, and the mass of her people favouring the Allies. Holland and the Scandinavian States preserved a strict neutrality, and, as the German star grew dimmer, Sweden found less to admire in her trans-Baltic neighbour. On these states, who were in close proximity to Germany, the restrictions of the British blockade bore very hard. On the whole they faced the difficulties with good temper and good sense, and their collaboration in the “rationing” system was of inestimable advantage to the Allies. Switzerland had, perhaps, the hardest fate of all. The war had greatly impoverished her, and the two widely different strains in her population kept her sympathies divided between the belligerents. To her eternal honour she played a diligent and kindly part in facilitating the exchange of prisoners on both sides, and in giving hospitality in her mountain health resorts to the badly wounded. The country which had originated the Red Cross service was faithful to her high tradition in the works of mercy.

The position of the United States had not altered since we last reviewed it in these pages. Her triumph over Germany on the submarine question—real in principle but trivial in results—gave to President Wilson’s Government a stock of credit in foreign policy which carried them through the summer. America’s interest was presently absorbed by her coming Presidential election, when Mr. Wilson was to be opposed from the Republican side by Mr. Hughes, assisted by Mr. Roosevelt and the Progressives. This meant that foreign affairs would be considered mainly from the electioneering standpoint. Neither side wished to alienate the German electors, both sides wished to appear as the champions of American interests, and at the same time Mr. Wilson, whose trump card was that he had kept America out of the war, was unwilling to embroil himself with either the Central Powers or the Allies. The British blockade had made some kind of “Black List” necessary, in order to penalize neutral firms that were found trading with the enemy. This step naturally roused great discontentment in America; much strong language was used, and the President was given drastic powers of retaliation.^[4] But, till the elections were over, relations with the United States had a certain unreality. Her statesmen were bound to speak and act with one eye on the facts and the other on the hustings.

One final aspect of the world situation demands a word. Germany, it is probable, had set more store by her gains in the Near East than by any occupation in Poland or in the West. To the devotees of Pan-Germanism and to her high finance the road to the East was the main necessity for Germany’s future. In that direction alone could the Central Powers keep clear the highway to the outer world. She had hoped, as we have seen, to produce an anti-British crusade throughout the Moslem lands. In that she signally failed. The revolt of the Sherif of Mecca in June^[5] drove a wedge between the essential tradition of Islam and Constantinople. Henceforth the conservatives of that most conservative faith were strongly on the Allied side. Germany could win her end now solely by territorial conquests—by her mastery of the Balkans, and, through Turkey, of Persia and Mesopotamia. She could hope for nothing from the vast, vague forces of sentiment and religion, and must rely only on the sword.

The year had not brought to light any new great figure in politics or war. In Germany this barrenness was conspicuous. “This is a war of small men,” Herr Zimmermann had observed early in the struggle, and the phrase was singularly true of his own land. On the whole von Mackensen was probably the best fighting general in the highest command that Germany possessed, and in von Falkenhayn and von Ludendorff she had two conspicuously able staff officers. Von Hindenburg was now pretty generally recognized as one of those favourites of fortune who acquire popular repute beyond their deserts. Since Tannenberg he had shown no special military genius, and he had made many failures. He was a grim and impressive figure, and he was good enough at hammer-blows, but in professional skill he ranked considerably below several of the Allied generals. The German system did not allow of the rise of new men. A proof is that by the summer of 1916 the High Commands in both East and West were more and more falling into the hands of royal personages. Such were, on the Austrian front, the Archdukes Karl and Eugene, and on the German fronts, Prince Leopold, the Imperial Crown Prince, the Crown Prince of Bavaria, and the Duke of Wurtemberg.^[6] It was as if Germany, having given up in despair the quest for supreme talent, had fallen back upon the glamour which in her eyes still surrounded her inconsiderable princes.

On the Allied side one great reputation had been made. Alexeiev, the Russian Chief of Staff, had revealed in the retreat a military genius which it is hard to overpraise. No less remarkable was his judgment during the long winter stagnation, and his power to seize the psychological moment when the hour for the offensive struck. Of the other Russian generals, Yudenitch in Transcaucasia and Brussilov in Galicia had greatly increased their fame. In the West de Castelnau had proved himself another Alexeiev, and a new fighting man had arisen in Pétain, whose discretion was as great as his resolution and fiery energy. The British armies had had little chance during the year to throw up new men, but in Sir Douglas Haig and Sir William Robertson they had soldiers who possessed the complete confidence of their troops and their Allies, and there were many army, corps, and divisional commanders who waited only for a great movement to prove their quality. At sea Sir John Jellicoe and Sir David Beatty had revealed beyond doubt the gifts of great sailors; and Admiral Kannin had handled the Russian Baltic Fleet with remarkable judgment and skill.

In civil statesmanship the French Premier, M. Briand, had shown qualities which made him an admirable leader of his nation in such a crisis. His assiduity and passion, his power of conciliation, his personal magnetism, and his great gift of speech enabled him to interpret France to the world and to herself. In Britain the death of Lord Kitchener had removed the supreme popular figure of the war—the man who played for the British Empire the part of General Joffre among the French people. He was succeeded by Mr. Lloyd George, the only British statesman who possessed anything like the same power of impressing the popular imagination. The year had brought one notable discovery. Lord Robert Cecil, the Minister of Blockade, had perhaps the most difficult department in the Government, and in it he revealed much of the patience and coolness, the soundness of judgment, and the capacity for the larger view which had characterized his distinguished father. He now ranked among the foremost of those ministers whose reputation was not measured by parliamentary dialectic or adroitness in party management, but by administrative efficiency and the essentials of statesmanship.

But it should not be forgotten that in looking only at prominent figures we are apt to misread the picture. This was a war of peoples, and the peoples were everywhere greater than their leaders. The battles were largely soldiers’ battles, and the civilian effort depended mainly upon the individual work of ordinary folk whose names were unknown to the Press. Everywhere in Britain, France, Russia, and Italy there was a vast amount of honest efficiency, and on this hung the fortunes of the Allies. Many of the ablest business and professional men were now enlisted in the service of the State. It was the work of the middle-class German in production and administration, far more than that of von Falkenhayn or von Helfferich or von Batocki, that kept Germany going, and it was the labour of the same classes among the Allies that enabled them in time to excel the German machine.

By the end of June 1916 the German outlook had appreciably darkened. The great Allied offensive had begun, and its end could not be foreseen. Germany was strategically and tactically on the defensive, and the wiser heads among her people were compelled to envisage a war of sheer endurance. In such a war there must be some sacrifice of previous gains, and the admission of unpalatable facts. It is probable that from this time dates the inclination to limit, if possible, her commitments—a policy to which the succeeding months were to add a special urgency. Von Falkenhayn ceased to be Chief of the General Staff. He was succeeded by von Hindenburg, and von Hindenburg’s Chief of Staff, von Ludendorff, became First Quartermaster-General.^[7] Many reasons were given for this change. It was alleged that von Falkenhayn suffered the penalty of his failure at Verdun, and this, which was true in part, was the view taken by the German people. It was alleged, on the other hand, that the whole thing was a plot between von Falkenhayn and the Kaiser to discredit von Hindenburg, whose popularity had become dangerous; that the old field-marshal was to be given his head, in the certainty that he would run it against a wall. But the probable explanation was simpler. When a ministry is compelled to follow an unpopular course, it entrusts the work to that man among its members who has the greatest popular prestige, in the hope that he may gild the pill. The victor of Tannenberg had become a demigod for the German people. If losses had to be met, if territory had to be relinquished, if the truth had at last to be told, he alone could perform the task and carry the nation with him.

There were signs, too, at this time that in certain quarters in Germany some were beginning to look forward not merely to a defensive war of endurance, but to an ultimate débâcle. No hint of it appeared in the Press, and men scarcely dared admit it to each other, but the suspicion was there. It was a prospect too dark for human fortitude. If a nation makes war for a noble cause and is defeated, there is ample consolation. If a nation makes war for self-interest and loses, but has conducted itself with a certain decency, it may rise in time from its failure. But if a nation forces on a war for the grossest self-interest, behaves in advance as if the world lay at its feet, and throughout violates every canon of law and honour and humanity, then there are no rags to be found in the wide earth to cover its nakedness. Compared with such shame the bitterness of death is sweet.

June had been a month of signal successes, but these successes were incomplete. Brussilov had pushed out two great wedges in Volhynia and the Bukovina, but he could not rest on his laurels. A wedge is liable to the counterstroke unless its flanks are guarded by natural obstacles, and this was not the case in Volhynia, where the Stokhod line had not yet been won, and in the south there was a perpetual menace from the direction of Brody and Lemberg. In the Bukovina the Carpathians gave security to Lechitsky’s left when the time came that he had gained the foothills; but Bothmer’s army held the crossings of the Middle Dniester, and till it was forced to retreat it prevented any advance from Buczacz towards Halicz. The position of Bothmer was, indeed, the crux of the whole matter. The Russians had found, during their great retreat in the summer of 1915, that in Eastern Galicia they might be hopelessly outflanked to south and north, and yet be able to retire at their leisure. The parallel river cañons running to the Dniester provided an ideal set of alternative positions, and now Bothmer had the advantage of them.

Brussilov’s immediate duty was, therefore, before moving towards his ultimate objective, to straighten his front. He must carry the line of the Stokhod and rest his right flank on the marshes of the Lower Styr and the Pripet. Similarly, he must take Brody, and advance his left wing in Volhynia. Above all, Bothmer must be forced back from the Strypa to the same longitude as the advance south of the Dniester. It was in such a purpose, rather than in a violent struggle for Lemberg or Kovel, that we must look for the motive which dominated Brussilov’s strategy of the second stage.

The first task was to carry forward the right flank to a position of safety. So soon as the German counter-attack on the Stokhod in the second half of June had begun to ebb, preparations were made for broadening the Volhynian wedge. The left wing of Ewarts’s central group was the 3rd Army, under Lesch, the general who had taken over the command from Radko Dmitrieff in the beginning of the Great Retreat, and had distinguished himself by his resolute holding battles on the south flank of the Warsaw salient. This army was brought south from the Pripet marshes and put under Brussilov’s charge. Kaledin drew in his right, and the new force lay along the Styr astride of the Kovel-Sarny railway, facing Puhallo’s 1st Austrian Army.

On 2nd July, in the Baranovitchi area, Ewarts’sJuly 2. right wing, as we have seen, struck a second time against the 9th German Army of von Woyrsch. It was an attack in force, supported with a good weight of artillery, and on a broad front the enemy’s first line was carried and some thousands of prisoners taken. But Hindenburg was not to be caught napping, and presently the advance was checked with heavy Russian losses, and Ewarts’s impetus died away. This thrust on the Russian right centre was in itself a substantive operation, designed to test the enemy’s strength in a vital theatre. It failed to break his front, but it had one beneficent effect on the operations south of the marshes—it prevented any further reinforcement of von Linsingen in front of Kovel at the critical moment when Lesch was about to strike.

That moment came at dawn on 4th July. FromJuly 4. Kolki to north of Rafalovka stretches a wide, wooded plain between the Styr and the Stokhod. In the south near Kashovka there are low ridges, but all to the northwards is as flat as the Libyan desert. Coarse grasses and poppies cover the dunes, and between them there are stretches of swamp and great areas of melancholy pinewoods. North of Rafalovka the marshy region of the Pripet begins, where there could be no continuous front, but only isolated forts on the knuckles of dry ground, connected by precarious trenches among the lagoons. On this marshy region Lesch had no designs. It was the protection he desired for his flank. His aim was the sandy plain beyond which, thirty miles to the west, crawled the sluggish Stokhod. The brilliant weather of June had dried up most of the swamps, and given him the one chance which might occur in the twelvemonth.

The Russian Front at the beginning of the Offensive (June 4), and the ground gained up to the end of June.

The action began with such an artillery preparation as had not yet been seen on the Russian side. The guns opened on a front of more than thirty miles, pounding the Austrian positions east of the Styr between Kolki and Rafalovka. Soon the air was clouded with dust as the sand of the entrenchments was scattered by shell. The two main attacks were at Kolki and just north of Rafalovka, the salient formed by the Tchartorysk position being cut in upon on its two flanks. By the night of 4th JulyJuly 5. Lesch was over the Styr north of Rafalovka, and at Kolodye had driven in General Puchalski’s Polish Legion, and pushed his right as far as Vulka Galuzyiskaya, some twelve miles from the river line. Next day the latter position, defended by three lines of barbed wire entanglements fitted with land mines, was carried, the stubborn resistance of the Bavarians at Kolki was broken down, and the river bridged. TheJuly 6. following day, 6th July, Kostiukhnovka, west of Kolodye, was won, and Raznitse, north of Kolki. That marked the end of the Tchartorysk salient. The apex fell back in disorder, and by the evening of 7th July the Russian cavalryJuly 7. were in Manievitche station, on the Kovel-Sarny railway, about half-way between the Styr and the Stokhod, and the two wings of Lesch’s advance had joined hands and were on the line Gorodok-Manievitche-Okonsk-Zagarovka. Moreover, on his extreme right, on the very fringe of the marshes, he had pushed forward from Yeziertsky and had reached the Stokhod at Novo Tcherevisgehe. The highroad from the latter place to Kolki by way of Manievitche was now wholly in his hands. On 8th July, inJuly 8. conjunction with Kaledin’s right, he crossed the Upper Stokhod at Ugly and Arsenovitche, where the river makes a sharp bend to the east. The Russians were now upon the Stokhod line between the Kovel-Rovno and the Kovel-Sarny railways.

After the first stern grapple the enemy’s retreat had become a flight. Through the dry bent of the dunes and the shattered pinewoods the Russian infantry swept forward like men possessed. Nothing stayed their remorseless progress. The enemy fired the villages as he retreated, and in that blazing midsummer weather Lesch advanced through a land cloudy by day and flaming skyward by night. And always in the van went the gray Cossack cavalry, clinging to the rear and flanks of Puhallo’s broken infantry. In four days Lesch had advanced twenty-five miles on a front of forty. He had taken 300 officers, including two regimental commanders, over 12,000 unwounded men, forty-five guns, including some heavy batteries, and large quantities of machine guns, ammunition, and military stores. Above all, he had won his immediate strategic purpose. The right flank of the Volhynian wedge was now secured against any counterstrokes.

Lesch’s Advance, July 1916.

But now that the Stokhod was reached, the problem became harder. Kovel, that vital centre, was only some twenty odd miles distant, and on it converged the two railways which had been the Russian lines of supply. It was clear that von Linsingen would fight desperately to cover his citadel. The Stokhod was a marshy stream with wide beds of reeds on either side, and on the western bank the ground rose slightly, so as to give the defence better observation. An alternative position had been prepared there during the previous autumn, and every nerve was now strained to make it impregnable. Moreover, many new batteries had been brought up, and it was estimated that 100 heavy guns and 100 of a lighter type had been massed for the defence. Though the river had been crossed at various points, yet the river line was far from being won, and about the middle of July the Russian advance had begun to stagnate into ordinary trench warfare.

It was about this time that the Russian High Command saw fit to announce to the world their intention. “On the issue of these battles,” so ran the communiqué, “undoubtedly depends not only the fate of Kovel and its strongly fortified zone, but also to a great degree all the present operations on our front. In the event of the fall of Kovel, new and important perspectives will open out for us, for the road to Brest Litovsk, and in some degree the roads to Warsaw, will be uncovered.” This was not the usual language of the Russian Staff, nor was it the language of a prudent general who did not desire to share his secrets with the enemy. It is difficult to regard the announcement as other than a ruse. Brussilov wished von Hindenburg to believe that he intended to break his teeth on Kovel as the Crown Prince had broken his on Verdun, and thereby to delude him as to the direction of the next effort. For, after his fashion, the Russian commander was making plans elsewhere.

So far the 11th Russian Army, under Kuropatkin’sJuly 18. old Chief of Staff, had played a lesser rôle than those of Kaledin and Lechitsky. Its right wing had, indeed, crossed the Ikva and collaborated with Kaledin in the thrust south of Lutsk to the Galician border. But now it was cast for a major part, for against the south side of the Lutsk salient von Linsingen proposed to institute a great offensive, which should do more than counterbalance the Russian gain on the Stokhod. The Austrian line, held by Boehm-Ermolli’s left wing, ran—after the Russian withdrawal of the second half of June—from the village of Shklin by Ugrinov and Mikhailovka to the Styr, and then south across the little Plashevka through wooded hills to the frontier town of Radzivilov. It was served by the many roads leading from Lemberg, by the Lemberg-Brody railway, and, so far as concerned its left wing, by the Lemberg-Stoyanov line. There, in the second week of July, twenty divisions were in process of concentration, some brought from as far afield as the Dvina, Verdun, and the Trentino. An attack in force would, it was hoped, drive back Kaledin behind Lutsk and Dubno, force Lesch to retreat from the Stokhod, and wipe out Brussilov’s Volhynian gains. The date of the great effort was fixed for 18th July.

Somehow or other Brussilov got wind of the plan and of the exact timing—probably by means of his admirable service of spies among the local population. He resolved to strike hard and quick before the dangerous scheme had time to mature. Sakharov began to move during the nightJuly 15. of 15th July. During the next two days he forced Boehm-Ermolli’s centre back upon the Upper Styr. At the same time he struck against the line Bludov-Zlotchevka, farther north. On 16th July, pivoting on Bludov, heJuly 16. turned the Austrian flank, and shepherded them southward for seven miles, cutting up the 48th and 61st Austrian divisions and the 22nd German division, newly arrived from the Dvina. At Mikhailovka on that day he took three huge ammunition dumps which von Linsingen had prepared for his army’s offensive. The enemy in this sector was back at Gorokhov, where he endeavoured in vain to regain ground by counter-attacks. On that same day, 16th July, Sakharov took 317 officers, 12,637 men, and thirty guns.

Sakharov’s Operations, July and August 1916.

Then the dry weather broke, and torrential rains fell, as at the same date they fell on the Somme. But in spite of the difficult country Sakharov did not halt. He was advancing in a half-moon, forcing the enemy from the north against the Lipa, and from the east against the Styr. On 20thJuly 20. July he attacked and carried Berestechko, where, in the seventeenth century, John Casimir, King of Poland, had routed the invading Tartars; and next day he crossed the Styr, having in this action taken 300 officers and 12,000 men. He had driven a wedge between the 4th Austrian Army and Bothmer by his defeat of Boehm-Ermolli, and was now in effect swinging south to operate against the left wing of Bothmer’s army on the Sereth and the Strypa.

By 22nd July the Austrians began to evacuateJuly 22. Brody, remembering the fate of Lutsk. It was a place which might have been stoutly defended, for Boehm-Ermolli had his left on the Styr, and in front of his centre had the curve of the river Slonovka, a broad marsh, and more than a hundred square miles of forest. On his right he had the wooded hills at the source of the Ikva. Sakharov began his attack early on the morning of 25th July. The RussianJuly 25. infantry, creeping through the dark before the summer dawn, crossed the swamp of the Slonovka and forded the stream. In the centre they fought their way yard by yard through the dense forest west of Radzivilov, and after six attempts took the village of Opariptse. On the morning ofJuly 27. 27th July the centre and right came into line, and by the evening had carried the Klekotov position five miles from Brody. Meantime the Russian left wing, which had met with less opposition, emerged from the forests south-east of the town. The fate of the place was now sealed, and at 6.30 on the morning of 28th JulyJuly 28. Sakharov entered Brody, which had been Boehm-Ermolli’s headquarters. The battle, one of the bloodiest and sternest fought in the campaign, had been planned out in every detail beforehand by the Russian commander, and Brody fell within twenty-four hours of the scheduled time. In the three days’ fight the 11th Army took 210 officers and 13,569 men, bringing the total of its captures since 16th July to 940 officers and 39,152 of other ranks. Forty-nine guns were part of the immense miscellaneous booty.

Even then Sakharov did not rest. The railway running southward from Brody to Lemberg joins at the town of Krasne the great trunk line which runs south-east through Tarnopol to Odessa. The new Russian front between Brody and Zalostse ran roughly parallel with that line, which was Bothmer’s main avenue of communication—some twenty miles distant at Brody, and only ten at Zalostse. But to reach it a tangled region of forest and mere had to be crossed, where the Styr, the Bug, the Sereth, and the Strypa had their sources. All these valleys with their enclosing ridges ran at right angles to any Russian advance, and would give the enemy an endless series of strong alternative positions. Only one road crossed the wilderness, that from Brody to Zloczov; another farther east stopped short half-way at Pienaki.

The Austrians seem to have expected that Sakharov would move towards Krasne on the way to Lemberg. Instead he advanced due south, crossing the ridges east of the most difficult country, to the Pienaki-Podkamien line. This brought his front parallel to Bothmer’s main communications. OnAug. 4. 4th August he attacked the line Nushche-Zagozhe, while Scherbachev’s right from Zalostse attacked also towards the Sereth. By the next evening Sakharov had won all the villages around the Upper Sereth, and the following day, 6th August, was as far south asAug. 6. Reniov, not eight miles from the Tarnopol line. In three days he had taken 166 officers and 8,415 men. On 10th August he was in Nesterovtse,Aug. 10. less than five miles from the railway. Bothmer’s flank had been completely turned.

Meantime—to complete the tale of this stage in the northern fighting—Lesch and Kaledin had struck again in Poliesia. On 28th July,July 28. just after midday, they attacked along the Upper Stokhod from Gulevitche to Trysten. In the first hours of the fighting they broke through the enemy position, and took thirty-eight guns and 4,000 prisoners, mostly German. The river was crossed at many points, the cavalry went through, and two days later at one place the Russians were more than five miles west of the Stokhod. Von Linsingen was forced to relinquish the bend of the river at Kashovka, and fell back to a fresh set of prepared positions. But he was now on the alert, and the defence, laboriously constructed since the opening of the offensive on 4th June, proved too strong to be carried at the first assault. On 2nd August theAug. 2. Russians were on the line Sitovitche-Yanovka, and next day made a desperate attackAug. 3. on the German position at the village of Rudka Mirynska. They carried the place, but it formed so acute a salient that, under pressure of counter-attacks, they were compelled to relinquish it. In the month’s battle they had won practically the whole line of the Stokhod between Stobychva and Kisielin, and on a forty-mile front were, on an average, some twenty-five miles from Kovel, with no natural obstacles intervening.

The control of the Bukovina, which Lechitsky had won by June, had little direct effect upon the campaign in Galicia. The province was strategically self-contained, or rather its importance lay in relation to Rumania, since it possessed all the gates into Moldavia. Its road and railway system was in no way vital to the Galician armies, as was proved in the previous year, when Russia held nearly all Galicia and most of the Carpathian passes without control of the Bukovina. But any advance from the east pushed to the west of Kolomea must bring Lechitsky into contact with Bothmer’s most indispensable communications. Above Halicz the Dniester flows through wide belts of marsh, and below Nizhniov it enters a rugged cañon; the good crossings—two railways and three roads—are all between these two towns. The southern Galician trunk line runs from Stry to Stanislau and Buczacz, and was the main feeder of Bothmer’s right wing. Moreover, one of the principal connections with Hungary was the line running from Stanislau by Delatyn to Marmaros Sziget, crossing the Jablonitza Pass. If Lechitsky took Kolomea, he would cut one of the loops of the Hungarian line, which runs from Delatyn by Kolomea to Stanislau; if he reached Delatyn, he could cut the line altogether; if he took Stanislau, he would cut the Stry-Buczacz railway; and if he forced the Dniester crossings between Halicz and Nizhniov, he would turn Bothmer’s southern flank, and make his position on the Strypa wholly untenable.

Part of the debris of Pflanzer-Baltin’s army retreated, as we have seen, in the direction of Stanislau, and passed under Bothmer’s command, so that Bothmer’s right wing was now holding the Dniester crossings from Halicz to Nizhniov. Lechitsky’s first business was to take Kolomea. OnJune 28. 28th June he attacked the Austrians east of that town on the line Niezviska-Pistyn, stretching from the Dniester to the Carpathians. Partly owing to a brilliant flanking movement in the north by the Russian cavalry, the Austrian position collapsed like sand, and that evening 221 officers and 10,285 men were added to the total of prisoners. The following day, 29th June, the RussiansJune 29. entered Kolomea, to find that the enemy had retreated in such haste that the six railways and six highroads which converge there were scarcely damaged.

Lechitsky’s Offensive South of the Dniester, June 28-August 10, 1916.

The next stroke must be against the Marmaros Sziget-Stanislau railway; but it proved impossible to march up the Pruth valley straight on Delatyn. Accordingly Lechitsky’s left wing moved southward over the wooded hills around Berezov, while his right wing, in conjunction with Scherbachev’s troops north of the Dniester, advanced against Tlumatch. On the last day of June theJune 30. latter place was carried, principally by a brigade of Circassian cavalry, who charged the trench lines without any previous artillery preparation. This success compelled Bothmer on the north bank to fall back several miles to conform to the Austrian withdrawal. The Russians were now within ten miles of the vital Dniester crossings, and the enemy made a desperate effort to stay their progress. OnJuly 2. 2nd July, Bothmer, having received German reinforcements, counter-attacked, and compelled Lechitsky to give a little ground and relinquish Tlumatch. The advance of his right wing was for the moment stayed.

Meantime his left flank and centre were carrying all before them. On 30th June the leftJune 30-July 3. wing was in Pistyn and Berezov; on 3rd July it was only six miles from the Marmaros Sziget-Stanislau railway, and next day it cut the line. The centre pressed on against Delatyn itself, and on 8th July the placeJuly 8. was captured. The first vital strategic objective of Lechitsky’s advance had now been attained. During the fighting between 23rd June and 7th July he had taken prisoner 674 officers and 30,875 men, and had captured eighteen guns.

The July rains were now beginning. The Dniester and the Pruth were in roaring flood, and all the country south of Stanislau was under water. In such conditions a halt had to be called in the most ardent advance, and only the left wing of the Russians, now among the Carpathian heights, could find dry ground to operate on. For nearly a month the lull continued, and then on 7thAug. 7. August Lechitsky struck again. This time it was on his right wing, towards Stanislau and the Dniester crossings. That day he recapturedAug. 8. Tlumatch, and reached the Dniester close to Nizhniov. Next day Scherbachev, north of the river, crossed the Koropiets and came into line. On 9th August Khryplin, the railwayAug. 9. junction south of Stanislau, was taken, and the Austrians evacuated the latter town. On 10th August Lechitsky entered Stanislau.Aug. 10. Next day, too, Scherbachev was over the Zlota Lipa north of Nizhniov.

Bothmer’s position was now desperate. Sakharov, in the north, was close to the Lemberg-Tarnopol railway, which fed his left wing; Lechitsky had cut the Marmaros Sziget line, and by his capture of Stanislau had cut also the Stry-Buczacz line, which fed his right wing. Moreover, Scherbachev was actually round his flank north of Nizhniov. There was nothing for it but retreat. The stout army, of whose impregnable position the German Press had boasted, must bend its neck at last. Bothmer’s right fell back from the Strypa upon the Zlota Lipa, his centre to Brhezany, and his left to behind Zborov, on the Lemberg-Tarnopol railway. With this retirement the second phase of Brussilov’s offensive ended. It left the enemy in an awkward position, with both Kovel and Lemberg menaced by unbroken armies, and with Lechitsky south of the Dniester, well on Bothmer’s right rear.

The significance of the ten marvellous weeks which had elapsed since Brussilov launched his thunderbolt is not to be computed in mere gain of ground. Alexeiev played for the great stake, and had no care for petty reconquests. It was not the regaining of the Volhynian fortresses or the Bukovina that mattered, but the fact that the enemy in his retreat had been compelled to lengthen his front by at least one hundred miles, and was left with fewer men to hold it. A retreat in most cases shortens a line; in the East the German-Austrian front was straight to begin with, and retirement made it sag and dip so that its total length was greatly increased. Well over 300,000 prisoners had been taken, and the dead and badly wounded amounted to twice as many again. It seems certain that the enemy south of the Pripet lost in those ten weeks the equivalent of his original strength.

How desperate was the crisis may be judged by the steps which von Hindenburg took to meet it. During June, while the front on the West was quiet, Germany transferred thence four complete divisions and a number of odd battalions, making a total of some seventy-three battalions. When the Somme battle began, her power of reinforcement was seriously crippled; but the necessity was urgent, and she continued to send divisions—exhausted divisions, whose fighting value was gravely reduced. In July, for example, she transferred from West to East three divisions and some odd battalions, making a total of thirty-seven battalions. The process continued during August and September. To anticipate—if we take the period between 4th June and the middle of September—we find that Germany sent in the way of reinforcements to the line north of the Pripet an infantry division from the West, and to the line south of the Pripet sixteen infantry divisions and three cavalry divisions from north of the Pripet, fifteen divisions from the West, and one division from the Balkans. Austria brought to the area south of the Pripet seven divisions from the Italian front—divisions ill to spare, since Cadorna was busy with his counter-offensive. Finally, two Turkish divisions, the 19th and 20th, were brought west and given to Bothmer. There can be no difference of opinion as to the vigour and resource which the German Staff, with their ally almost out of action, showed in meeting the danger. But the rushing of broken troops across the breadth of Europe was an expedient such as no sane commander would contemplate except in the last necessity.

Austria’s disasters led, as we have seen, to a complete revision of the Eastern commands. The Archduke Frederick and Conrad von Hoetzendorff, his Chief of Staff, disappeared from their posts. On 2nd August it was announced that von Hindenburg had taken the sole command of the Eastern front, but presently, as a solace to Austrian sentiment, the heir-apparent, the Archduke Karl, a young gentleman of twenty-nine, who had commanded in the Trentino offensive, was given charge of the three southern armies. The Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, commanding the 4th Austrian Army, and Pflanzer-Baltin, commanding the 6th Army, vanished into obscurity; indeed, in the latter case the army seems to have vanished with its commander. Von Tersztyansky took the Archduke Joseph’s place, and in lieu of the 6th Army appeared the 7th Army, under General von Kirchbach. A new army, the 3rd, was formed in Transylvania, under von Koevess, of Balkan fame, and took up ground north of the 7th Army, facing towards Kolomea. Finally, Puhallo’s 1st Army was brought a step south and placed between the 4th and 2nd Armies, facing Brody. A new German Army of the Bug, under von Linsingen (who was also the group commander), defended Kovel.

The major commands, as we have seen, were in the hands of von Hindenburg and the Archduke Karl, with Linsingen commanding a subordinate group, formed of the Army of the Bug and the 4th, 1st, and 2nd Austrian armies. But when von Hindenburg became Commander-in-Chief of the German forces on all fronts this arrangement was changed, and his place taken by Prince Leopold of Bavaria. The Eastern front was thus apportioned between crabbed age and youth. The Austro-German dispositions were now, from north to south, as follows: von Eichhorn’s group, comprising in order the German 8th Army (Fritz von Below), the detachment under von Scholtz, the German 12th Army (von Fabeck), the German 10th Army (von Eichhorn), and the German 9th Army (von Woyrsch); von Linsingen’s group, comprising the Army of the Bug (von Linsingen), the Austrian 4th Army (von Tersztyansky), the Austrian 1st Army (Puhallo), and the Austrian 2nd Army (Boehm-Ermolli). Both these groups were under Prince Leopold of Bavaria. The Archduke Karl’s command contained in the same order Bothmer’s Army, the Austrian 3rd Army (von Koevess), and the Austrian 7th Army (von Kirchbach).

As against these kaleidoscopic changes the Russian battle front remained the same as on 4th June. Ten weeks of constant fighting had welded it into a superb weapon. The Russian soldier had proved his wonderful fighting quality—though that was never in doubt. The new thing, the tremendous fact which emerged from the battle, was that Russia had shown that she could adapt herself to modern warfare, and could create a machine to put her manhood on even terms with the enemy. The staff work, too, had been admirable, and the patient sagacity of the leadership beyond all praise. Alexeiev, Brussilov, and each of the four army commanders had revealed the highest military qualities. The battles were generals’ battles as much as soldiers’ battles—they were won in the brain of the High Command before they were won in the field.

The Austrian threat in the Trentino had, accordingJune 3. to General Cadorna, exhausted itself by the 3rd day of June. But this exhaustion did not involve an immediate relinquishment of the struggle for the road to the Venetian plains. The Italian position lay from the Coni Zugna, in the Val Lagarina, to the massif of Pasubio, where they held the crests; then south of the Posina to a point south-east of Arsiero; and thence along the southern and eastern rims of the Asiago plateau to the Val Sugana. For a fortnight the enemy fought hard against the Italian centre and right, in the first theatre to break through the Posina heights and reach Schio, and in the second to turn the Italian flank on the Brenta. The splendid defence of Cadorna’s left in the Pasubio and Buole region, where the Alpini fought half buried in snow, slept in snow, and had two hundred cases of frostbite daily, had defeated the dangerous turning movement from the Vallarsa, and the only chances left to the enemy were in the centre and on the east.

The actual Italian counter-offensive may be saidJune 16. to have begun on Friday, 16th June, when, on the extreme right, two columns of Alpini drove two Austrian regiments from Monte Magari, a peak of 5,000 feet above the Val Sugana, which forms the northern buttress of the Sette Communi plateau. Cadorna had begun to reascend the staircase down which the enemy had moved half-way. In spite of a stubborn defence, the Italian right began to close in on Asiago. OnJune 20. the 20th the centre advanced on the heights south of the Posina, and on Monte Cengio. Meantime Brussilov’s presence in Volhynia was beginning to make itself felt, and by the 25th the Italians had begun to forceJune 25. the pace of withdrawal. Their artillery pounded the enemy positions, and between the Brenta and the Adige they won ground everywhere, in some places only half a mile, in others as much as four miles. On the 25th Monte Cengio was stormed, and Monte Cimone, north of Arsiero, was carried. Next day squadrons of SicilianJune 26-27. horse rode into Asiago, and on the 27th Arsiero was recovered. On the Italian left ground was won north of Coni Zugna, and the whole centre advanced across the Posina. The deep bulge between the Adige and the Brenta was being pressed in, and the enemy fell back only just in time. He had no reserves remaining, for his last division had been flung in to cover the difficult retirement of his left. In two days the Austrians had lost more than half the ground they had gained in their six weeks’ offensive.

Map showing the Ground regained by the Italian Counter-attack and the Austrian Front at the end of June.

Presently the enemy’s front was behind the Posina and the Assa, and there for the time being he remained. He held a strong position in the centre on the mountain ridges of Maggio, Toraro, Campomolon, and Spitz Tonnezza, and even on his flanks he had advanced from his old line, for he held Borgo in the east and Zugna Torta in the west. He had certain definite territorial gains to show for an enormous expenditure of shells, and losses which were not less than 130,000. Moreover, his retreat was skilful, for he lost few prisoners and few heavy guns. As he retired he contracted his front, and so could atone for the absence of the divisions which had gone eastwards against Brussilov. But when all this had been said, the Trentino offensive was, from Austria’s point of view, a grave failure. It had not reached its main objective—the Venetian plains and the railway communication of the Isonzo front. It had weakened Austria’s strength, and lowered her power of resistance to Brussilov’s attacks. It had inspired her with the false notion that she had crippled Cadorna and prevented any Italian offensive that year. Finally, it had taught the Italians their business. It had forced them to improve their communications, and to grapple with transport difficulties of the first magnitude. Italy’s matériel was immensely increased, and her successful resistance not only gave her confidence and enthusiasm, but a certain suppleness in movement and a new technical aptitude. If Cadorna could bring reinforcements swiftly and secretly from the Isonzo to the Trentino, he might carry them back again with the same speed and silence. The penalty for Austria’s failure was not Italy’s counterstroke of June in the Trentino, but her August assault on Gorizia.

As we have seen in earlier chapters, the fifty-mile front on the Isonzo was one of the most difficult and complex of all the European battlegrounds. In July the Italian position was as follows: At Tolmino their left flank was east of the river, and established on the hills north of the town, while they held strongly the heights on the western bank. The town remained in Austrian hands, and the area offered no very good opportunities for an advance, since the railway from Gorizia to Villach by the Wochein tunnel was already cut, and a flank march on Gorizia from Tolmino was an almost impracticable undertaking. Fifteen miles south the Italian left centre held the bridgehead of Plava, which offered a possible route for an attack upon Monte Santo, the defence of Gorizia on the north. The enemy, however, held the heights east of the river in great strength, and such a plan, since the asset of surprise was lost, would have involved a cost wholly disproportionate to any conceivable gain. It had been tried on July 2, 1915, and had failed.

Italian Front on the Isonzo Line, July 1916.

The Italian centre lay in front of Gorizia itself. The city lies in a pocket of plain defended on all sides by ramparts of hill. West of the Isonzo the Austrians held the line of lower heights, Sabotino, Oslavia, and Podgora, on the first and last of which the Italians had formerly effected a lodgment. North ran the Ternovanerwald, with its main positions of Monte Santo, Monte San Gabriele, and Monte Santa Caterina. South lay the northern edge of the Carso plateau. Finally, the Italian right wing lay along the western rim of the Carso itself—that bleak, stony upland, without soil or vegetation, where every acre is a virtual fortress. The map will show that it projects well to the west into the great loop of the Isonzo. The chord of the arc so formed is the dry valley called the Vallone, which runs almost from the plain of Gorizia to the Adriatic. It was that part of the Carso west of the Vallone which formed the key of the southern defences of Gorizia. The valley itself was like a vast lateral communication trench, providing a sheltered road for the movement of troops behind the front line. The Italians held the greater part of this butt-end of the Carso, and in the centre reached almost to the Vallone; but in the north Monte San Michele, and in the south the line of heights between Sei Busi and Cosich had defied their efforts. The vital point was San Michele, for it dominated the Gorizian plain.

In any assault upon Gorizia there were two alternatives before the Italian commander. Merely to master the heights on the western bank would not give him the city. He must win them, and also carry in support either the northern defences at Santo or the southern at San Michele. The reason was that with the enemy on San Michele or Santo, the Podgora line, even if won, could not have been used as a position from which to assault the actual river crossing. Cadorna chose the latter of the two alternatives—to carry the western bank, and at the same time take the defence on its southern flank by winning San Michele.

During the winter Italy had made a great effort in the preparation of munitions and heavy guns, and her General Staff had worked out in every detail the plans for the Isonzo attack. The Trentino business upset the time-table, but it did not change the essentials of the scheme. Cadorna spent May and June with one eye on the Archduke Karl and the other on Gorizia and the Carso, where Boroevitch von Bojna sat in fancied security. Even in the heat of the last defensive effort in the Trentino there was a steady winning of minor positions in the Gorizian area. For example, on the evening ofJune 14. 14th June a Neapolitan brigade captured by a surprise attack the enemy trenches east of Monfalcone, taking seven machine guns and nearly five hundred prisoners. Towards the end of June certain movements had already begun for transferring troops and guns from the Trentino to the Isonzo. The Italian Staff divided its operations under this head into three stages. From 29th June to July 27th the work was only preliminary, consisting of the transport of reserve units and of drafts for the existing Isonzo forces, as well as a certain amount of material. From 27th July to the eve of the grand assault the great guns and trench mortars were moved, and the principal new units, who received their orders while on the journey. After the attack began there was a rapid movement of reserves, which the railways, reorganized under the strain of the Trentino defence, handled with conspicuous speed and precision.

The Feint from Monfalcone (Aug. 4), and the Capture of Monte San Michele (Aug. 6-8).

Cadorna desired to take the enemy unawares. He intended to feint hard with his right against the Monfalcone end of the Carso position, and so induce the Austrians, under fear of being outflanked, to mass their local reserves there. At the same time, they would assume that it was merely a local effort, and would not hurry such strategic reserves as they might possess to that point from the most distant parts of their line. Then, when the main enemy strength was massed opposite Monfalcone, he intended to strike with his chief forces against Gorizia itself on the front from Sabotino to San Michele. His strategy was assisted by the false confidence into which Boroevitch von Bojna had been lulled. That commander believed that the Trentino offensive had, even in its failure, crippled Italy for months. Once again, as in Volhynia in June, Austria had underrated the recuperative power of her opponents.

From the 1st day of August the Italian artillery bombarded the whole Isonzo front from Sabotino to the Adriatic. The “preparation” was so uniform that the defence could not forecast an infantry attack in any one section from the special violence of the shelling. On Friday, 4th August, came the MonfalconeAug. 4. feint. The Bersaglieri, who had long made this their fighting ground, carried Hills 85 and 121 to the east of the Rocca, in their assault upon the strong Austrian flank positions on Monte Cosich. The Austrians left numbers of asphyxiating bombs in their abandoned trenches, which did terrible havoc to the attack. Presently a counterstroke drove back the Bersaglieri to their original line. But Cadorna’s purpose had been secured, for Boroevitch von Bojna promptly reinforced the Monfalcone section.

On Sunday, 6th August, the Italian bombardmentAug. 6. was resumed, this time with redoubled fury along the front from Sabotino to San Michele. Presently it was reported that the Austrian first position had been destroyed, and at four in the afternoon the infantry of the Third Army, under the Duke of Aosta, crossed their parapets.

The great battle of that day and the following which determined the fate of Gorizia falls naturally into two parts—the northern, where the Italian left aimed at mastering the heights between Sabotino and Podgora; and the southern, where the Italian centre struggled for San Michele. Sabotino and San Michele may be regarded as the two lateral buttresses of the Gorizian bridgehead, the fall of which must involve its conquest. On the extreme left troops of the 45th Division, led by Colonel Badoglio of the General Staff, were directed on Sabotino. The mountain had been tunnelled to within ninety feet of the Austrian trenches, and in that tunnel the first wave of the assault assembled. At the signal they swept up the broken hillside among the blazing scrub with such splendid gallantry that they were through the enemy first position before he had begun his barrage. In twenty minutes the first three trench lines were carried, and within an hour the Italians had the redoubt on the summit, fifteen hundred feet above the river, had captured the whole garrison, and were swarming down the farther side. Before the dark fell the 45th Division held the line San Valentino-San Mauro, within half a mile of the river. Just south of Sabotino a brigade of the 43rd Division assaulted the hill marked in the map 188, and carried it. On their right the Abruzzi Brigade of the 24th Division stormed at dusk the strong line of Oslavia. South, again, a brigade of the 11th Division advanced against Podgora. This key-position, so long contested, was not taken without desperate fighting. The crest was won in patches, and the Italians advanced down the farther slope; but for two days small garrisons of brave men resisted on the summit. An Austrian major with forty men made such a gallant stand that when he was finally overpowered the Italian commander ordered his men to present arms to the prisoners. Austria’s fighting record in the campaign was so consistently belittled by her German allies that it is worth while remembering that both against Italy and Russia certain of her troops showed a fighting quality which was never excelled and not often equalled in the German ranks. Finally, to complete the tale of the Italian left wing, the 12th Division carried Monte Calvaria, and had advanced by nightfall against the enemy’s final position between the southern end of Podgora and the river.

Italian Advance on the Carso after the Fall of Gorizia, showing the Front on August 15, 1916.

Not less were the achievements of the Italian centre against San Michele. Had it been possible for the Bersaglieri on the 4th to have carried the Sei Busi-Cosich position, the Italian right might have swung northwards against the southern flank of the mountain. As it was, the place had to be taken by direct assault. The four peaks, three of which had once been in Italian hands, seemed to offer a task too hard for mortal valour. Nevertheless it was done, but not without heavy loss. The enemy fought from cavern to cavern and from redoubt to redoubt; but he could not be reinforced, and step by step during the 6th and 7th the Italians won their way to the rim overlooking Gorizia and forced the defence northwards.

By midday on Tuesday, 8th August, the wholeAug. 8. of the heights on the western bank of the river had fallen to Cadorna, and the key-point of San Michele on the eastern shore. The moment had now come for the assault upon Gorizia itself. Trench line after trench line had to be carried in the riverside flats, but before the darkness came no Austrians remained on the western bank. The bridges had been damaged, and must be repaired before the army could cross, and for this task it was necessary to get an advance guard over to hold a covering line. At dusk troops of the Casale and Pavia Brigades forded the stream, and entrenched themselves on the farther side, while detachments of cavalry and Bersaglieri cyclists pursued and kept touch with the retreating enemy. That day, too, the Italian centre won more ground on San Michele, occupying Boschini on its extreme northern edge. By the morning of the 9th theAug. 9. bridges were ready, and the main army crossed the stream. Before noon they entered Gorizia, no longer the pleasant city among orchards which had once made it the Austrian Nice, but a dusty, shell-scarred memorial of a year of war. Meantime the Italian cavalry was pressing eastwards to the line of the little river Vertiobizza, and the hills which on the east bound the Gorizian plain. Already over 12,000 prisoners were in Cadorna’s hands, and the casualties of the defence were little less than 80,000.

With the fall of Gorizia Cadorna’s offensive entered on its second phase. Trieste was now the direct objective, and as a first step the enemy must be driven beyond the Vallone depression, since as long as he held any part of the western side he menaced Gorizia, and barred progress on the Carso itself. On Thursday, 10th August, began the advanceAug. 10. on the Vallone. That day the whole Doberdo plateau was cleared, the Sei Busi-Cosich knot of hills was taken, and the enemy was flung eastward across the valley. At one point in the south, at Debeli, near Monfalcone, the Austrians held their ground for two days longer, but on Saturday, the 12th, their resistanceAug. 12. was broken, and the whole of the western butt-end of the Carso was in Cadorna’s hands. He pressed on east of the Vallone, took the village of Oppacchiasella, the hill called Nad Logem, and positions on the west side of Monte Pecinka. North-east of Gorizia he won Tivoli, on the slopes of Monte Santa Caterina. But it was necessary to rearrange his front after the fortnight’s fighting, and about 15th August the advance slowedAug. 15. down. It had made invaluable gains. Gorizia and the Gorizian plain were won, and the most vital part of the Carso, the line now lying several miles east of the Vallone. The Austrians, as in Galicia, had been compelled by their repulse not to shorten but to lengthen a front already inadequately held. The whole Isonzo defence system had disappeared, and between Cadorna and Trieste lay a country, difficult indeed, but lacking such elaborately prepared fortifications as those which had made the Isonzo line so stubborn a problem. Between 4th and 15th August he had taken 18,758 prisoners, 393 of them officers, 30 heavy guns, 62 pieces of trench artillery, 92 machine guns, and huge quantities of every kind of war matériel.

Small wonder that the August battles roused in Italy a storm of joy and pride. Only those who have seen the steep wooded hills west of Gorizia, and viewed the intractable landscape of the Carso, can realize how great was the Italian achievement. The Carso in especial might be claimed with truth as the most terrible battlefield in Europe. Waterless and dusty, scorching by day and icy by night, it was one giant natural redoubt. There was nothing to soften the shattering percussion of projectiles among the acres of rock and boulders, and wounds which elsewhere might have been slight became deadly injuries. Further, Austria had used all the laborious talent of certain classes of her people to turn the natural strength of the place to the best advantage. Lord Northcliffe, who visited the battlefield during the action, has described the method:—

The fall of Gorizia was for Italy like the extra chemical whose addition to a compound dissolves certain intractable elements. The new enthusiasm for the war brought her into exact line with her Allies. On May 23, 1915, she had broken with Austria-Hungary, and the Triple Alliance was at an end; on 20th August of the same year, she had declared war on Turkey, and on 19th October on Bulgaria; but with Germany she still remained formally at peace. Her reasons for this anomalous situation were mainly domestic, and no Ally questioned their validity, the more especially as against one member of the Teutonic League she was waging a whole-hearted struggle. But the financial and ecclesiastical difficulties which stood in the way of a final break with Germany gradually disappeared during the first year of war. Germany was the supreme fount of offence, and a contest with any one of her allies must bring a nation face to face with that Prussian creed which civilized Europe had vowed to destroy. Nor was she herself slow to give Italy specific grounds for hostility. She surrendered to Austria Italian prisoners of war who escaped to German soil; she directed her banks to regard Italian subjects as alien enemies, and to postpone all payments owing to them; she suspended the payment of pensions due to Italian workmen. By the summer of 1916 the nominal peace was the merest comedy. It was Germany who supplied Austria, Italy’s direct opponent, with her chief munitions of war; it was German officers and German soldiers and sailors who largely directed every operation against Italy; it was only by Germany’s assistance that the Archduke Karl had been able to concentrate for the Trentino offensive. The contrast between the situations de facto and de jure had become too glaring to continue.

Cadorna’s success cleared the air. The newAug. 27-28. national spirit demanded that truth should be spoken and facts recognized. Accordingly, on 27th August the Government declared in the King’s name that Italy considered herself as from 28th August in a state of war with Germany, and begged Switzerland to convey the intimation to Berlin. So completely farcical had been the previous peace that the declaration involved no single change in the conduct of the campaign.

During the summer the Near East had lost the position which it had held for a little as the centre of gravity in the world-war. While the tides of battle were flowing strongly in Poland and Galicia, in the Trentino and on the Somme, the Transcaucasian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian theatres tended to be forgotten. But if they lacked the strategic importance which they held a year before, they were none the less the scene of much desperate and intricate fighting. For Turkey remained the incalculable and unknown quantity in the strife of the two Alliances. Her position dominated alike the Balkan and South Russian battlegrounds, and in her direction Germany looked mainly for those rewards which she was determined at all costs to extract from the struggle.

Constantinople during the summer again changed its character. Its people seemed to have lost heart in their manifold sufferings, and whereas in the spring it would have been dangerous for German troops to parade in its streets, by July only German and Austrian soldiers were visible, since the Turkish infantry had gone East and West to the firing line. The Christian troops of the Ottoman Empire, whom the authorities distrusted, were busy fortifying the European side of the Bosphorus, and erecting defences at Angora and Koniah. The city was congested with thousands of starving refugees. Business was everywhere at a standstill, and the steps taken by the Turkish Government for regulating commerce were probably the most perverse and whimsical economic measures ever adopted by a modern state. Towards the end of July the strain was slightly eased by the arrival of the new harvest from Central Anatolia, as well as by the receipt of food supplies from Rumania. But in the provinces things were no better. In Syria especially starvation stalked at large through the land. Germany filled the place with her engineers and surveyors, and strained every nerve to complete the gaps in the Bagdad line; she made some slight efforts, in her own interest, to fight the cholera which was appearing among the Turkish troops; but for the rest she plundered the country wholesale, and had no eye for anything but her military purpose. The plump Teuton, well fed and well doctored, made his camp everywhere from the Marmora to Jerusalem, and worked at his railways and reservoirs; while the wretched countryfolk, dully resentful of an invasion which they did not comprehend, were dying in thousands at his gates.

The fall of Trebizond on the 18th of April leftApril 18. the way open for the advance of the Grand Duke Nicholas through the last ramparts of that mountain land which defended the cornlands of Siwas. The position of Yudenitch was precarious. His wings were thrown out well ahead of his centre. His right was beyond Trebizond; his left, having occupied Mush and Bitlis, was moving on Diarbekr; while his centre was still fighting its way through the narrow hill glens towards Baiburt and Erzinghian. At this moment the new strength of the Turks had not yet been tried on their opponents. Trebizond had fallen to the efforts of an isolated wing, and it was certain that the troops brought from Gallipoli and those released by the British failure at Kut would make a desperate effort to hold up the Russian advance along the central highroads which led to the Anatolian granary.

By the end of May the Russian front was closeMay 31. on Baiburt, on the Trebizond road, and had occupied Mamakhatun, half-way between Erzerum and Erzinghian. On the last day of the month a strong Turkish offensive developed in the Baiburt region and on the Erzinghian road, with the result that in the latter area the Russians were forced to evacuate Mamakhatun after destroying the bridge. For a month there was a lull in the fighting, and then on 12thJuly 12. July Yudenitch’s centre again advanced, and recaptured Mamakhatun, taking nearly two thousand prisoners. Three days later his rightJuly 15. centre took the important town of Baiburt, and his left wing drove the enemy from his position south-west of Mush. Yudenitch pressed on, and by the morning of the 25th wasJuly 25. within ten miles of Erzinghian itself. That evening the Russian cavalry occupied the fortress—the most important gain in this theatre since the fall of Trebizond. The ancient Armenian town was the headquarters of the 4th Turkish Corps, and had been the advanced base of the enemy in the campaign since the loss of Erzerum. It was on the edge of the hill country, and was, therefore, the last outpost of the Turkish defence in front of the central Anatolian valleys.

The Turkish Counter-attack in Armenia, August 1916.

The enemy replied promptly with a vigorous diversion against the Russian left wing—a diversion which seems to have been directed by the young German general Gresmann. It began in the early days of August, a fortnight after the fall of Erzinghian, at a time when Yudenitch’s main forces were on his centre, and his left wing from Lake Van to Mush and Bitlis was lightly held. From his base at Diarbekr Gresmann thrust northward against Mush and Bitlis, took the towns, and forced the Russians some thirty miles back to a point not quite fifty miles from Erzerum itself. The danger of the attack was that Erzinghian was a hundred miles distant, separated by wild mountains with few communications, and there was a risk that, before reserves could be brought up to the threatened flank, the enemy might win his way to the east of Erzerum, cut the Russian front in two, and drive the halves apart towards the Black Sea and Lake Van. At the same time the extreme Turkish right, comprising the 4th Division, supported by troops from Mush, struck east of Lake Van in the direction of Rayat.

The Russian reply began on 18th August, beingAug. 18. directed from south of Lake Urmiah against Rayat, and from west of Lake Van against Mush and Bitlis. It reached its head on theAug. 25. 25th, when, near Rayat, the 4th Turkish Division was utterly dispersed, two complete regiments being captured—a total of 2,300 men. Bitlis had already been taken, and that same evening Mush was recaptured. The danger to Erzerum had now departed, the Russian front was reconstituted, and Yudenitch resumed his slow movement westward between the Black Sea and the Tigris watershed.

Meantime in Western Persia a singular campaign had been going on during the summer months. It will be remembered that in December 1915 a Russian force under General Baratov had entered the country from the north, and had driven the mixed levies of Turks, gendarmerie, and Persian insurgents west through the passes which bordered Mesopotamia. During the early months of 1916 this force, scarcely more than an infantry division in strength, supported by cavalry, had a series of considerable successes. Hamadan was theirs in January, and when Turkish supports arrived from Bagdad and concentrated in the Kermanshah region, Baratov smote them heavily, and drove them back through the mountain passes. For three months the bold enterprise prospered well. The Persian loyalists raised their heads, and the rebels lost adherents daily. Sir Percy Sykes arrived at Bundar Abbas in March, and proceeded to organize a military police for Southern Persia, to rid the country of German and Turkish bands and the rebel gendarmerie. On 12th March BaratovMarch 12. occupied Karind, fifty miles west of Kermanshah, and some sixty-four miles from the Turkish frontier at Khanikin. By 6th May heMay 6. was thirty miles nearer Khanikin. By 15th May he reached the frontier, and was less thanMay 15. 120 miles from Bagdad; while 160 miles farther north another force, which may be regarded as an extension of Yudenitch’s left wing, captured Revanduz, some eighty miles east of Mosul. Unfortunately, this speed could not be maintained. Baratov’s southern force had long and precarious communications behind it, and was out of touch with the main army of the Grand Duke Nicholas. Even at Kermanshah it was a full 250 miles from its base at Kasvin. Its bold sally towards the Tigris valley came too late to turn the tide at Kut, and it all but led to its own undoing. For early in June Turkey sent reinforcements to the Persian border, and Baratov was steadily driven back. His retreat was as gallant and skilful as his advance. He fell back from Khanikin, and then from Kermanshah, then across the passes, and finally from Hamadan itself. The fires of revolt once more flamed up throughout Persia, wavering tribesmen went over to the rebel side, and the position of the Shah and his ministers and the various British officers grew daily more difficult. Russia had flown, after her generous fashion, to the relief of her ally, and was paying the price of her devotion to the common cause.

Scene of Baratov’s Operations in Persia.

But before the dark days fell we have to chronicle an episode which brings a breath of romance into a sober tale. A sotnia of Baratov’s Cossacks succeeded in joining hands with the British on the Tigris. The incident had little military significance, but it was an exploit requiring supreme audacity and skill. On the night of 8th May the squadron, consistingMay 8. of five officers and 110 troopers, left Mahidasht, twenty miles west by south of Kermanshah. They rode south through the wild Pushtikuh hills, crossing passes some of them 8,000 feet high, where the snow still lay deep. They started with three days’ rations, and when these were finished depended on local supplies. So swift was their ride that they met with no opposition except stray shots at long range. The distance to be covered was 180 miles, and they travelled at the rate of twenty-four miles a day, halting for two and a half days at the court of the Wali of Pushtikuh. After nightfall on 18th May they reachedMay 18. the British camp at Ali Gharbi, on the Tigris, and were warmly welcomed by our men. The tough horsemen, though their last stage had been thirty miles long, spent the evening with song and dance, and declined to go to bed till the small hours.

The day after the arrival of the Cossacks General Gorringe’s force made an important advance. On 19th May the Turks evacuated theirMay 19. position at Beit Eissa, on the right bank of the river, a little in rear of the Sanna-i-yat line, on the left bank. Following up the enemy, Gorringe carried the Dujailar redoubt, the key of the Es Sinn position, which Aylmer had assailed in vain on 8th March. Next day the whole of theMay 20. southern bank of the Tigris was cleared as far as the Shatt-el-hai, and from the south we were facing Kut, though the other bank was still held by the Turks as far as Sanna-i-yat. The advance, had it been possible a month before, would have led to Townshend’s relief, but now it had no fruitful consequences. Our troops were weary, and suffered severely from a temperature which was never less than 100 degrees in the shade. Moreover, the floods were out, and would continue well into July. The summer campaign in Mesopotamia resolved itself into a dull and arduous watching of the enemy. But if military operations in the strict sense were thus suspended, a vast deal of work was done by Sir Percy Lake in preparing for the next cold-weather campaign. Two new railways were under construction, the shallows of the river were dredged, and at Basra wharves were completed where ocean-going steamers could unload. Embankments were built to protect the main camping-grounds at the advanced base against flood. Huts were erected on a large scale, and hospital accommodation was enormously increased. In January 1916 there had been only 4,700 beds, in May there were over 9,000, and in July nearly 16,000. In August Sir Percy Lake relinquished the chief command in Mesopotamia to Lieutenant-General F. S. Maude.

The beaver-like activity of German engineers on the Bagdad and Syrian railways, and the accumulation of stores at various points from Alexandretta to Beersheba, presaged still another effort against Egypt and the Suez Canal. The Committee, and still more its German masters, had never lost the hope of striking at Britain in that vital part, and their ardour grew as the chances of success diminished. The stagnation in Mesopotamia and at Salonika in the early summer enabled certain reserves to be freed for the enterprise, and Germany supervised the preparation of material. For the crossing of the canal and for water transport reliance was no longer to be placed on floats of kerosene tins. Great tanks and pontoons were brought from Germany up the Bagdad railway, and carted over the gap in the line through the Amanus mountains. The British command in Egypt was fully alive to this activity and its meaning, and waited with confidence on the issue. The period of waiting was beguiled by a brilliant exploit of our airplanes against the big Turkish aerodrome five miles south of El Arish. On 19thJune 19. June eleven machines crossed the hundred miles of desert, and bombed the ten hangars. Two were set on fire and wholly destroyed, four others were hit repeatedly, and at least five airplanes were put out of action. Besides the aerodrome, enemy camps and troops were attacked with bombs and machine-gun fire. Three of our machines were lost—one falling into the sea, one being forced to land ten miles north of the aerodrome, and the third descending eight miles west of El Arish. In the last case the pilot was picked up by one of our escorting machines, and carried back to Kantara.

Meantime an unlooked-for event had occurred of profound significance for the future of the Moslem world. Arabia had never been truly conquered by the Turks. It had remained the stronghold of the aristocracy of the faith, and had at the best only tolerated the Turkish guardianship of the Holy Places, since Turkey was the chief Mahommedan state, and had still the prestige of the conquering days of Islam. But repeatedly movements, inspired by a desire to return to the old ways, had risen like dust storms amid the sands of the desert. More than a century ago the Wahabis had driven the Turks from the Holy Places, from all Arabia, and even from Kerbela, the Mesopotamian city which holds the tomb of Hussain, and is the object of pilgrimage to pious Shiahs. In 1872 the Turks attempted the conquest of Yemen, but failed, and in these parts the writ of the Sultan never ran. Since 1907 the province of Asir, under Said Idrissi, had been in revolt. In 1913 the great Wahabi chieftain, Ibu Saud, drove the Turks out of El Hasa, the province of Eastern Arabia which borders on the Persian Gulf. The Arab had never wholly bowed to the Osmanli, and once the Osmanli fell under the spell of the unbeliever it was certain that the conservative theologians of the Peninsula would assert themselves. They could not endure to see the shrines of their creed in the hands of men who daily by word and deed flouted the mysteries of Islam.

On the outbreak of war the Aga Khan issued a message to Indian Moslems in which he pointed out that, since Turkey had shown herself to be no more than a tool in German hands, she had lost her position as trustee of Islam. “The Kaiser’s Resident will be the real ruler of Turkey, and will control the Holy Cities.” The wiser brains in Constantinople had long before the war contemplated trouble with Arabia, and Abdul Hamid, who was no fool, had built the Hedjaz railway that he might be able to pour troops southward to meet the first threatenings of revolt. But the new masters were less alert. They contented themselves with vapouring about a jehad, with christening the Kaiser Hadji Mohammed Guilliamo, and proclaiming the descent of the Hohenzollerns from the Prophet, while they continued to outrage every Islamic sanctity, and in Syria and Arabia grossly mistreated the Arab population. As against such a crew the grim chiefs of Southern Arabia looked with friendly eyes upon the Allies. If there could be degrees of merit among unbelievers, the latter were clearly the better friends of the faithful. Both Britain and France ruled over millions of contented Moslems, and safeguarded them in the practice of their religion. In November 1914 the Government of India had announced that “the Holy Places of Arabia, including the Holy Shrines of Mesopotamia and the port of Jeddah, will be immune from attack or molestation from the British naval and military forces so long as there is no interference with pilgrims from India to the holy places and shrines in question. At the request of his Majesty’s Government, the Governments of France and Russia have given similar assurances.”

The Revolt in Arabia.

The Grand Sherif of Mecca was the most powerful prince of Western and Central Arabia. He was the real ruler of Mecca, and, along with his able sons, exercised a unique authority due to his temporal possessions and his religious prestige as sprung from the blood of the Koreish. On 9thJune 9. June, supported by the Arab tribes of the neighbourhood, he proclaimed Arab independence of Turkey, and took prompt steps to make good his challenge. He occupied Mecca and the port of Jeddah, as well as the town of Taif to the south-east; captured the Turkish garrisons, taking in Jeddah alone 45 officers, 1,400 men, and six guns; and laid siege to Medina. He cut and destroyed parts of the Hedjaz railway, to prevent reinforcements coming from the north. The revolt spread like wildfire. The Emir Nuri Shalan, who had already refused to support Djemal, joined the Grand Sherif, and presently the Said Idrissi of Asir took up arms, and captured the Red Sea port of Kunfidah, 150 miles south of Mecca. The policy of the Arab leaders was to refrain from shedding Moslem blood, and to invest the Turkish garrisons till they surrendered. On 27th July Yambo, the port of Medina, fell; and in Medina itself the Turkish troops were closely besieged, while the fires of revolt spread northward among the Arabs all the way to Damascus. The Turks in the Medina and Mecca forts had the imprudence to fire on the Holy Places, which did not improve their reputation among the orthodox. “From Fort Jyad,” in the words of the Grand Sherif, “they shelled it, and the first shell struck a yard and a half above the Black Stone, and the second fell three yards short, so that the flame caught the Holy Carpet. When the people saw this, thousands raised a lamentable cry, and then, shouting in fierce anger, rushed to save it. They had to burst the door and mount the roof before they could quench the flames. Yet a third shot fell on the Stand of Abraham, and other shells fell in the precincts, of which they made a target for their guns, killing daily three or four who were praying within the Mosque, till they prevented the people from approaching for worship. This will show how they despised God’s house, and denied it the honour due to it from believers.”

Constantinople could not sit still under a blow which threatened the little religious prestige that remained to her. Troops were hurried south, and part of the forces destined for the invasion of Egypt were diverted to the new theatre of war. The Grand Sherif had no easy task before him, for he had to fight a modern army with levies whose equipment and discipline belonged to another age. But his action had pricked for all time the bubble of Pan-Islamism which Germany had sought to use for her own ends. In August he issued a striking Proclamation to the Moslem world to explain his action. He and the princes of his race, he said, had acknowledged the Turkish Government because they desired to strengthen the House of Islam and preserve the rule of the House of Osman. But the Committee of Union and Progress had ground down the true believer, had forgotten the precepts of the Koran, had insulted the Khalifate, and had despised the Corner-stone of the Faith. It was open to all men to see that the rulers of Turkey were Enver Pasha, Djemal Pasha, and Talaat Bey, who were doing whatsoever they pleased. In such a state of things he could not leave the life and religion of his own Arab people to be the plaything of the godless.

“God has shown us the way to victory, and has cut off the hand of the oppressors, and cast out their garrison from our midst. We have attained independence from the rest of the Ottoman Empire, which is still groaning under the tyranny of the enemy. Our independence is complete and absolute, and will not be affected by any foreign influence or aggression. Our aim is the preservation of Islam and the uplifting of its standard in the world. We fortify ourselves on our noble religion, which is our only guide. In the principles of the administration of justice we are ready to accept all things in harmony with the Faith, and all that leads to the Mountain of Islam, and particularly to uplift, so far as we have the strength, the mind and spirit of all classes of the people. This we have done according to the dictation of our creed, and we trust that our brethren in all parts of the world will each do the duty that is incumbent upon them, that the brotherhood of Islam may be confirmed.”

The Hedjaz revolt delayed but did not prevent the attack upon Egypt. This came in the first week of August, and was promptly scattered to the winds. Sir Archibald Murray had all his preparations made, and, as was expected, the enemy advanced and followed the old northern route which had been taken before the Katia engagement in April. He knew that we had thinned our forces in Egypt, and had sent several divisions to the West, and he hoped to find the desert front weakly held. He was mistaken, for since April the Katia front had been strongly entrenched, admirable communications had been established, and we had advanced our flanking posts in every adjacent oasis. The Turkish force, which included many German officers, was under the command of the German general von Kressenstein, and numbered some 18,000 men. It was elaborately equipped with matériel, including many light mountain batteries, and a great supply of water tanks carried on camels. It hoped, apparently, by timing its attack for the hottest season of the Egyptian summer, to get the benefit of surprise.

On the evening of Thursday, 3rd August, theAug. 3. British force—the 52nd Division of Territorials from the Scottish Lowlands, under Major-General the Hon. H. A. Lawrence—was drawn up on a line some seven miles long from Romani, twenty-three miles east of the Canal, to the Mediterranean. Their left flank was protected by British monitors in the Bay of Tinah, and on the right lay General Chauval’s Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division, including the Australian Light Horse and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles. About midnight on the 3rd the Turks delivered their attack, and the fighting lasted through the whole of the 4th. The LowlandAug. 4. infantry stood firm, while the cavalry on the right slowly withdrew, entangling the enemy in a maze of sand-dunes. By the afternoon reinforcements had come up—the Warwickshire and Gloucester Yeomanry, and a brigade of Lancashire Territorials from the 42nd Division. About five o’clock our whole front advanced to the counter-attack, and before the dusk fell the enemy line was hopelessly broken.

Scene of the Desert Battle, August 4, 1916.

The defeat was soon changed to a rout. FromAug. 5. daylight on the 5th our cavalry were harassing the Turkish retreat, and sweeping up prisoners and guns. On a wide front, with mounted troops on their flanks, our infantry pressed on through weather that in the daytime was 100° in the shade. By Thursday, the 7th, theAug. 7. fleeing enemy was nineteen miles east of the battlefield. On the 9th he attempted a stand,Aug. 9. but was driven on by our cavalry. Then, and not till then, we called a halt, and counted our spoils. We had taken some 4,000 prisoners, including 50 officers, and the wounded and dead we estimated at at least 5,000, so that half the total force of the invaders had been accounted for. We captured also a mountain battery of four guns, nine machine guns, large quantities of rifles and ammunition, 500 camels, 100 horses and mules, and every variety of military stores. The whole action was one of the most successful and conclusive in the campaign. The fighting quality of the Anzac troopers and the British Territorials was worthy of their great Gallipoli record, and there can be no higher praise.

In the modern world the state, like the individual, cannot live to itself alone. Nationalism in any robust sense implies internationalism, and a hermit people, pursuing with complete absorption a domestic purpose, is an anachronism destined to a speedy disappearance. With the greater and more solidly founded nations this interconnection of interests may lead to a richer civic life, since only in co-operation and international fraternity is to be found security for legitimate national development. But the smaller states may find in it their undoing. Unable to rank as honourable rivals, they are apt to attach themselves as suitors to some nation or group of nations, and to play in inter-state policy the part rather of courtiers than of statesmen. The position is inevitable, and it leads to a certain pettiness of international outlook. They do not hope to sway the councils of the world by wealth or armed strength, so they seek their advantage by adroitness and diplomacy. Absorbed in their local ambitions, they cannot take the wider view of the future of a continent, and, being compelled to play by petty methods, they become petty also in their conception even of their own interests. The trees are always before their eyes, but the wood escapes their vision.

Greece shared to the full in this drawback of all little peoples, and she had other disadvantages due to her past history and her racial character. That she was in a true sense a nation no man could doubt. Her long bondage to Constantinople, her heroic struggle for freedom, her laborious rectification of her borders, her victories in the Balkan Wars, had given her nationhood.^[8] But it was a nationhood somewhat narrow and unintelligent in its outlook on affairs beyond its frontiers. Greece had no very clear ambitions. Turkey was the secular enemy, Bulgaria an ancient rival. The Balkan Wars had given her territorial enlargement towards the north somewhat beyond her deserts, and in Europe her only unrealized aim concerned the boundaries of Epirus and the chameleon-like fortunes of Albania. She aspired to rule all the islands of the Ægean, and her wiser citizens, remembering ancient Hellas, looked forward to a great domination of the Anatolian coast which should revive the glories of classic Ionia. But nowhere was there any clearly defined objective, such as Bulgaria and Serbia possessed, and in default of a clear aim Greece was doomed to a policy of waiting, in the hope of snatching some casual advantage from the European conflagration.

To an impartial observer it must have seemed that there were two established facts which must dominate the Greek outlook. One was Turkey, who was the eternal foe. At Turkey’s expense alone could Greece enlarge her boundaries in the one direction where enlargement was possible. The second was that Greece was a maritime nation, trading throughout the whole eastern Mediterranean, and her obvious alliance was, therefore, with the great Sea Powers. It would be suicidal if she ever joined a national group which included Turkey, and arrayed herself against the British Navy. Moreover, the German dream of Eastern empire was in direct conflict not only with her legitimate aspirations, but with her continued national independence.^[9] These truths were perceived by the abler minds among Greek statesmen; they were perceived most clearly by M. Venizelos; but they were scarcely present to the nation at large, owing partly to an imperfect education in foreign politics, and partly to the fact that they were negative things, and had not the appeal of a direct territorial objective.

Hence there was no widespread popular conviction to counteract the fatal tendency to trim and hesitate which was the Greek tradition in foreign affairs, and had become a second nature to the common politician. The Court at Athens had strong German affinities; the Greek army, like most other armies, was under the spell of Prussian methods; and its highly competent Chief of Staff, General Dousmanis, was avowedly dubious as to the Allies’ chances of victory. Let it be said that the Allies had given Greece small reason for confidence in their military wisdom. The attack on Gallipoli had been undertaken in the face of the representations of the Greek General Staff, and that Staff had been amply justified. Mesopotamia had not increased their reputation, and their efforts in the Balkans had failed to avert Serbia’s destruction. Not unnaturally, with the fate of Belgium, Serbia, and Montenegro before her eyes, Greece hesitated to league herself in the field with Powers who had so far proved themselves broken reeds for the little nations to lean on.

In such circumstances the inclination—supported by the whole tradition of past policy—was to wait till the success of one side in the struggle was beyond question. The attitude was not heroic, but it is hard to condemn it as unreasonable. Moreover, it must be remembered that to a considerable section of the Greek people the larger ideals for which the Allies fought had small attraction. The country was an incomplete democracy. The Court had more sympathy with the Prussian doctrine than with the liberalism of France and Britain. Russia in occupation of Constantinople was a bugbear even to many Greeks who otherwise would have been ranged on the Allied side. The Western Powers were apt to assume that their own views of the European situation must appeal overwhelmingly to any land that possessed some kind of popular government. They forgot the difference that local atmosphere may make in the colouring of facts. Germany was not slow to take advantage of the uncertain elements in the Greek polity. Her agents worked unceasingly to present the Allied case as the effort of Powers, militarily inferior, to cloak a self-seeking purpose with dishonest rhetoric.

The charge against the Government of Greece was not that it followed a prudential course and waited, for the world is not entitled to demand quixotry from any people. It was that, when Greece’s own territorial rights were infringed, it still wavered, and that it blanketed popular opinion and violated the free constitution of the country. An appeal to the people in the summer of 1915 had restored Venizelos to power. Early in October his proposal to carry out Greece’s obligations to Serbia under her treaty of alliance was vetoed by the King, and he was compelled to retire from office. Thereafter constitutional government disappeared from the peninsula. Faked elections were held, from which the Venizelists abstained,^[10] and for eight months the land was governed by a camarilla who had no popular sanction, and were grossly unrepresentative of the majority of the Hellenic people. Greek policy was, therefore, during this period the policy not of the nation, but of a bureaucracy who were legally usurpers. Worse still, the King and his advisers were prepared to sacrifice a portion of Greek soil if they were only left in peace. The Bulgarian occupation of Fort Rupel on May 26,May 26. 1916, was not the result of superior armed forces, but of connivance on the part of the Athens Government. Orders, the authenticity of which there is small reason to doubt, signed by M. Skouloudis and by General Jannakitsus, the Minister of War, had instructed the garrison to permit the occupation of the fort by Germans and Bulgarians, but not by the Allies. Timidity had in this case brought statesmen into naked treason. There was no parallel between such an occupation and the permission to Sarrail’s army to hold the Salonika zone. The latter had the assent of the Greek people through their constitutional mouthpiece, and it was accorded to the Powers who had won and guaranteed Greece’s freedom.^[11] The former was a gift of territory to an avowed enemy, who had always claimed the land, and would not willingly depart from what she had once occupied.

For this new aberration of Greek policy the King was mainly responsible. King Constantine had deserved well of his country, and had hitherto enjoyed considerable popular prestige. But he was too slight a character for the rough times in which his lot was cast. Well-meaning and amiable, he had a mind incapable of grasping a new and complex situation, but tenacious of the small dogmatic stock-in-trade with which the lesser type of monarch is provided. He hankered after the absolutist air of Prussia, salubrious to minor royalties, and he dreaded the vast and incalculable forces which he saw around him. He believed firmly—it was about the sum of his convictions—that Germany would win. Fear was at the root of his attitude, fear of the unknown, fear of the known in the shape of Germany, fear of a false step which might cost him his throne, fear of everything and everybody. And like many another weak soul before him, he was as obstinate as he was timid. His policy became a kind of fanatical impassivity.

The surrender of the forts roused in Greece a storm of popular protest. The Venizelist journals appeared with black borders, and among the Greeks of Salonika there were impassioned demonstrations. It was announced that the Athens Government had protested formally to Berlin and Sofia, but the Allied Powers were not misled by this device. They deemed it necessary to take strong precautionary measures, for their position at Salonika was impossible with a treacherous Government in their rear, and on their flank mobilized Greek forces who might any hour receive orders hostile to the Allied plan. On 8th June the British Foreign Office announced that from 7 a.m. on 6th June certainJune 6. restrictive orders had been put in force regarding export of coal to Greece and Greek shipping in British ports with the object of preventing supplies reaching the enemy. The result was virtually a pacific blockade,^[12] similar to that which had been proclaimed during the Salonika dispute in the previous November.

The Allies’ action gave Athens food for reflection. Greece was at the mercy of the Powers which held the sea, and the British and French warships off the Piræus were cogent arguments. On 9thJune 9. June M. Skouloudis announced in the Chamber a partial demobilization of the army. Twelve classes would be disbanded, and the rest given leave, the object being to prove to the Allies that the Greek Government were without aggressive designs. But there were elements in the bureaucracy which had no thought of concessions. On Monday, 12th June, the secret policeJune 12. organized a military fête in Athens, after which bands of hooligans paraded the streets and insulted the Allied Embassies with complete impunity. Thereupon the Allied Governments presented their ultimatum. Greece in regard to them was not in the position of an ordinary neutral. France, Britain, and Russia were the Protecting Powers of the State, according to the Treaties of 1863 on which Hellenic liberties were founded, and had the right to insist as trustees that these liberties were not infringed, and that their ward was not plotting mischief. They were in the strictest sense the guarantors of the Hellenic commonweal; and the King, though they had chosen to make the throne hereditary, was their agent, put there to “give effect to the wishes of the Greek nation.” If he chose to neglect his task, it was the duty as well as the right of the Trustee Powers to call him sharply to order. The following is the text of the Allied Note:—

“By order of their respective Governments the undersigned Ministers of France, Great Britain, and Russia, representing the Protecting Powers of Greece, have the honour to make to the Hellenic Government the following declaration, which they are likewise instructed to communicate to the Greek people:—

“As they have already solemnly declared verbally and in writing, the three Protecting Powers of Greece do not ask her to emerge from her neutrality. Of this fact they furnish a striking proof by placing foremost among their demands the complete demobilization of the Greek Army in order to ensure to the Greek people tranquillity and peace. But they have numerous and legitimate grounds for suspicion against the Greek Government, whose attitude towards them has not been in conformity with repeated engagements nor even with the principles of a loyal neutrality.

“Thus the Greek Government has all too often favoured the activities of certain foreigners who have openly striven to lead astray Greek public opinion, to distort the national feeling of Greece, and to create in Hellenic territory hostile organizations which are contrary to the neutrality of the country and tend to compromise the security of the military and naval forces of the Allies.

The Salonika Front.

“The entrance of Bulgarian forces into Greece and the occupation of Fort Rupel and other strategic points with the connivance of the Hellenic Government constitute for the Allied troops a new threat which imposes upon the three Powers the obligation of demanding guarantees and immediate measures.

“Furthermore the Greek Constitution has been disregarded, the free exercise of universal suffrage has been impeded, the Chamber has been dissolved a second time within a period of less than a year against the clearly expressed will of the people, and the electorate has been summoned to the polls during a period of mobilization, with the result that the present Chamber only represents an insignificant portion of the Electoral College, and that the whole country has been subjected to a system of oppression and of political tyranny, and has been kept in leading strings without regard for the legitimate representations of the Powers.

“These Powers have not only the right but also the imperative duty of protesting against such violations of the liberties of which they are the guardians in the eyes of the Greek people.

“The hostile attitude of the Hellenic Government towards the Powers who have emancipated Greece from an alien yoke and have secured her independence, and the evident collusion of the present Cabinet with the enemies of these Powers, constitute for them still stronger reasons for acting with firmness, in reliance upon the rights which they derived from Treaties and which have been vindicated for the preservation of the Greek people upon every occasion upon which it has been menaced in the exercise of its rights or in the enjoyment of its liberties.

“The Protecting Powers of Greece accordingly see themselves compelled to exact immediate application of the following measures:—

“1. Real and complete demobilization of the Greek Army, which shall revert as speedily as possible to a peace footing.

“2. Immediate substitution for the existing Ministry of a business Cabinet devoid of any political prejudice and presenting all the necessary guarantees for the application of that benevolent neutrality which Greece is pledged to observe towards the Allied Powers and for the honesty of a fresh appeal to the electors.

“3. Immediate dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies followed by fresh elections within the time limits provided by the Constitution, and as soon as general demobilization will have restored the electoral body to its normal condition.

“4. Dismissal, in agreement with the Allied Powers, of certain police officials whose attitude, influenced by foreign guidance, has facilitated the perpetration of notorious assaults upon peaceable citizens and the insults which have been levelled at the Allied Legations and their members.

“The Protecting Powers, who continue to be inspired with the utmost friendliness and benevolence towards Greece, but who are, at the same time, determined to secure without discussion or delay the application of these indispensable measures, can but leave to the Hellenic Government entire responsibility for the events which might supervene if their just demands were not immediately accepted.”

On 21st June it was announced that the Premier,June 21. M. Skouloudis, would retire, and that his place would be filled by M. Zaimis, a friend of the Allies, who had succeeded M. Venizelos on October 4, 1915. That day, on behalf of the King, the new Prime Minister accepted the Allied demands, and set about forming that “business Cabinet devoid of any political prejudice” for which the Note had stipulated. So far the situation seemed easier, but it was a false peace. Baron Schenk and the other German agents were as busy as ever, and among the disbanded soldiers the Royalists formed Reservists’ Leagues, which were openly anti-popular and anti-Ally. The one hope lay in the promised appeal to the people, for it was certain that fresh elections after demobilization would restore M. Venizelos to power. But events were soon to happen which made an appeal to the electorate impossible.

The military situation at Salonika during June and the first half of July showed little change from that of the early summer. The Bulgarian raid of May had given them the forts of Rupel and Dragotin, the keys of the Struma valley. During May the Austro-German troops were for the most part withdrawn from the Salonika front, being urgently needed elsewhere. The central army was, indeed, still known as the 11th German Army under General von Winckler, but it contained at the most a German brigade. The right wing was held by the 1st Bulgarian Army under Gueshov, and the left wing by the 2nd Bulgarian Army under Teodorov. These three parts of the enemy force corresponded to the three natural divisions of the front. The zone west of the Vardar, whence lay the road to Monastir, was mainly mountainous; that between the Vardar and the Struma, a plain criss-crossed by low hills till the Belashitza range was reached north of Lake Doiran; the eastern zone was mountainous in the north, and guarded from the sea by coastal ranges. The Allied battle front was held on the right by the main British contingent, under General Milne; the centre by the French and the British left wing; and the western zone, the hundred miles between the Vardar and Albania, by the Serbian army, which had now taken its position in the line. The dispositions were wise, for they gave Monastir as the objective to the men of the Crown Prince Alexander, who at the end of July assumed the command, and so brought them at once within view of the frontiers of their native land. On the extreme left an Italian force, based on Avlona, was preparing to strike through Albania as a covering detachment on the flank, and an Italian contingent was also present with the Serbians. The whole composite Allied army was probably numerically smaller than the Bulgarian forces opposed to them, and the latter had every advantage of position.

Sketch Map, showing the Situation on the Salonika Front and the Bulgarian and German Offensive, August 1916.

The Allied offensive was due to begin in the second week of August. As we have shown in an earlier chapter, to advance from Salonika was no easy task. A certain gain of ground could be achieved at once, and as a matter of fact was achieved during the summer, when the Allied centre pushed north to a line a little south of Doiran station. The enemy had not drawn in close to the Salonika defences, but had kept his front in a wide semicircle commanding the entrance to the difficult part of the Vardar valley. The Vardar and Struma routes were alike almost impracticable as avenues to the heart of Bulgaria. Only on the west was there any reasonable objective, and Monastir could not be taken without hard and difficult campaigning. Its importance lay not in its strategic so much as its political value. It lay in an isolated pocket among mountains, and gave no ready access to the central Serbian terrain. But its possession had been one of Bulgaria’s chief objects in entering the war, and its loss would undoubtedly so exasperate the Bulgarian people that they might well prove refractory to Germany’s orders. The true meaning, however, of General Sarrail’s activity was to be found in connection with the Rumanian situation. As we shall see in the next chapter, the Government of Bucharest was already committed in secret to the Allied cause. But in order to protect Rumania’s mobilization against Austria, it was necessary to make certain that Bulgaria did not strike first upon her flank. Sarrail’s object was, therefore, to hold as large a Bulgarian force as possible on the line between Ostrovo and the Gulf of Orfano. His principal purpose would be achieved if he detained the bulk of the Bulgarian army, even though his advance were inconsiderable.

Early in August Sarrail was put in command of the whole Allied forces in the Balkans, which now contained a Russian contingent, General Cordonnier taking over the French divisions.^[13] In these days there was some enemy activity on the left wing, a raid on a bridge on the Monastir railway just inside the Greek border being repulsed by Serbian guards. On the morning of 10th August theAug. 10. French heavy guns began a bombardment of the town of Doiran, thirty-five miles west-north-west of Salonika, close to the junction of the Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian frontiers. Next dayAug. 11. the French troops occupied Doiran station, on the Salonika-Seres railway, and a height south of the town. Doldjeli, south-west of Doiran, was presently carried. And then, on 17thAug. 17. August, the situation was completely and ludicrously changed. For the enemy himself took the offensive in force along the whole front.

Bulgaria’s motive was not difficult to see. The Allies had made their purpose obvious, and she wished to get in the first blow. It is probable that under German instruction she had been preparing her offensive for some weeks, for it would have been everything to Germany if Britain could be compelled to divert to the Balkans some of those divisions which were threatening on the Somme. In all likelihood no thought of Rumania entered into the inception of the plan. Sofia at the moment was in dire perplexity, and Bulgarian ministers were making overtures to Bucharest which, if successful, might have changed the whole history of the war. The Salonika offensive began because it had been long arranged and could not be cancelled, but Bulgaria at the moment had no inclination for a campaign on a new front.

On 17th August the Bulgarians struck in three sectors, and their main effort was very properly on their flanks. They did not contemplate a frontal attack on Salonika, but they believed that they could count on an easy advance in the two flanking wedges of Greek territory, defended nominally by Greek troops, the more especially as the occupation of Fort Rupel had given them the key of the Lower Struma and Kavalla. On the east Teodorov flung patrols across the Nestos east of Kavalla, and pushed south and west towards the left bank of the Struma. In the centre von Winckler attacked the French and British at Doldjeli, but failed to advance. In the west Gueshov occupied Florina, a little town in Greek territory seventeen miles south of Monastir which was occupied by Serbian outposts, and advanced upon Banitza, west of the Ostrovo lake. During the next few days the centre stood fast around Doiran, and the Serbians in the west, retiring slowly towards Ostrovo, held the enemy in check, and inflicted heavy losses. But east of the Struma Teodorov moved swiftly towards Kavalla, and on theAug. 19. 19th was within seven miles of the town. French and British detachments were east of the Struma as far as the railway south of Demir Hissar, but the Kavalla area was held only by Greek troops, who were without instructions. Bulgaria saw her way to an easy triumph, much needed for domestic comfort, at the expense of her southern neighbour and with the connivance of that neighbour’s King.

Presently Teodorov was on a line two miles east of the Struma, between Lakes Tahinos and Butkova, while the Allies held the main bridges. In the centre the French made progress up the ridges of the Belashitza range, and in the west the Serbians did something more than hold their own. Banitza was now in Bulgarian hands, but the line west of Lake Ostrovo was stoutly maintained, and farther north in the Moglena mountains the Crown Prince Alexander made good progress towards the Cerna valley. Meanwhile, on the east, Teodorov was advancing on Seres, which was held by the Greek Colonel Christodoulos, and was at the gates of Kavalla. OnAug. 25. the 25th the Bulgarians occupied the forts of the latter town, and were promptly shelled by British warships. Kavalla, a great centre of the tobacco trade, had been the occasion of a fight between Greeks and Bulgarians in the Second Balkan War, and the place had long been the object of the jealousy of Sofia. Its occupation was a breach of a direct promise given to Greece by Germany at the opening of hostilities.

These events complicated beyond hope the already sufficiently complex position in Greek politics. Eastern Macedonia was largely in Bulgaria’s hands, and the question of the fate of the Greek troops there—more than two divisions—was fraught with extraordinary difficulty. The Greek people were beginning to stir. A fort or two might be overlooked, but now they had lost a province, and lost it without striking a blow. The Athens Government in their perplexity hastened to conciliate the Allies. Dousmanis, the Chief of Staff, was dismissed, and his place taken by General Moschopoulos, the commander of the 3rd Corps at Salonika, and a friend of France and Britain. But the problem could not be solved by the sacrifice of a Staff officer. The general election, on which alone a true settlement depended, could not take place when a large district was occupied by the enemy, and the position of the Greek troops in the occupied territory must lead to a split in the army itself. It looked as if the Greek situation was approaching the point when relief could only be won by some form of revolution.

At this moment, when the whole Balkan front was astir, and the Greek Government were fixed on the horns of a crazy dilemma, Rumania entered the war on the Allied side.

During two years of war Rumania, underAug. 4, 1914. great difficulties and amid manifold temptations, had steered a course of strict neutrality. The resolution come to at the Crown Council of August 4, 1914, had been scrupulously adhered to. The first Russian successes in Galicia had appeared to sway her towards the Allies; but the Russian retreat in the summer of 1915 corrected her balance. Italy’s entrance into the war shook her, and the adherence of Bulgaria to Germany, and the Serbian débâcle for a moment seemed about to force her to draw the sword, whether she willed it or not. War is a maelstrom into which the most resolute neutral may be drawn, and during the early summer of 1916 it became apparent to the world that both external and internal pressure would soon force the court of Bucharest to cast in its lot with one or other of the belligerent sides. Brussilov’s resounding successes in the north brought the moment of decision very nigh. The time has arrived to make a fuller examination in these pages of Rumania’s position and her special problem. She was only indirectly a Balkan state, and her situation, half Latin half Slav, as an outpost of the West at the gateway of the East, gave the little country at this crisis of the war a profound significance.

The territory inhabited by the Rumanian people, if constituted into a national state, would form a square block based upon the Lower Danube, and embracing the present Rumania, the Austrian district of Bukovina, the Hungarian province of Transylvania, and the Russian province of Bessarabia. It was the ancient Dacia, conquered by Trajan, and lost to Rome early in the Barbarian invasions. But so strong had been the impress of that mighty Power that the tradition of Rome continued; the Rumanians have in their veins, along with a large Slav admixture, the blood of the old Roman colonists, and their speech is still in its essentials a Romance tongue. Rumania, as we know it, consists of two provinces widely different in character, into which projects from the west the wedge of Transylvania. The eastern, Moldavia, watered by the streams of the Pruth and Sereth, is a region of black steppe earth, highly fertile, which makes it one of the granaries of Europe. The western, Wallachia, lies between the southern Carpathians and the Danube; the northern part being a broad terrain sloping from the hills, and the southern the alluvial plain of the river. Both provinces are rich in agricultural, pastoral, and mineral wealth.

The mediæval history of Wallachia and Moldavia is the tale of border states between the Turk, the Hungarian, and the Slav—a tangled tale of savage and incessant war. In 1241 the principate1241. of Wallachia was founded by the first feudal army which crossed the Carpathians. Then came the Turkish conquest, and the land became part of the Turkish Empire; but the province was ruled, after the Turkish fashion, with a measure of autonomy by local chiefs. Now and then patriots arose, such as Stephen the Great and Michael the Brave, who raised fleeting standards of independence, and were on the verge of founding a Rumanian nation. In a country so situated it was inevitable that the system should be aristocratic. The government was in the hands of the great landowners, the boyars, who were partly of native and partly of Phanariot—that is, Byzantine Greek—origin, and the peasants tilled the soil as serfs. These boyars elected the princes, who ruled the provinces as feudatories of Turkey, and held their office on a seven years’ tenure. Till 1821 the hospodars, or princes, were mainly Phanariots, but after that date came a succession of native rulers and a new consciousness of nationality.

The modern history of Rumania begins with the1828-9. war of 1828-9 and the Treaty of Adrianople, when the provinces passed under the suzerainty of Russia, and the hospodars, being now elected for life, began to change from the chiefs of a nationality to something of the status of kings. The country shared in the European democratic movement of 1848, when a revolution1848. broke out under C. A. Rosetti and the two Bratianus—a revolution which was quickly suppressed, and led to the re-establishment of the power of the boyars. During the Crimean War Russia occupied Rumania, but evacuated it after the successful resistance of the Turks on the Danube, and it was held by Austria under an agreement with France and Britain. The Treaty of Paris in 18561856. re-established the Turkish suzerainty, but granted a kind of autonomy to the two provinces under elected princes chosen for life. A strong movement began for national union, and in 1859 Colonel Cuza was elected prince of both Moldavia and Wallachia—the first ruler of a united Rumania. Turkey accepted the situation, on condition that Prince Cuza had a separate ministry and administration for each province. In 1861 he established1862. a common ministry and an assembly of representatives at Bucharest, and in the following year the union of the principalities was sanctioned by the Sultan, and modern Rumania came into being.

Prince Cuza was a vigorous but tactless ruler. He introduced democratic reforms by the methods of despotism, and declined to trouble himself with the machinery of politics and party government. The people at large were on his side, but the ruling classes, who formed the Liberal and Conservative parties, would have none of him. The Conservatives objected to his new land law, which abolished serfdom, and to his introduction of universal suffrage; and the Liberals, whatever they thought of his measures, disapproved of the means by which he enforced them. The national finances1866. fell into confusion, and a revolution, supported by the army, drove him to abdicate in 1866.

The Rumanians, looking round for a successor, applied first to Count Philip of Flanders, the brother of Leopold, King of the Belgians. On his refusal, the principality was offered, mainly on the advice of Napoleon III., to a prince of the Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns, Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, whose sister was the wife of Philip of Flanders and the mother of King Albert of Belgium. Charles accepted, and was installed at Bucharest on May 22, 1866, recognized by Turkey, and adopted by a specially summoned Constitutional Assembly. The same Assembly drew up a constitution which, with a few emendations introduced later, is that of Rumania to-day.

Prince Carol—to adopt the Rumanian version of his name—proved a wise and efficient ruler. He introduced order into the finances, developed the railway system and the Danube ports, and started his country, hitherto very backward, on a new era of prosperity. Not unnaturally, he leaned heavily on Germany, and it was German capital and German advisers that he used in his reforms, while he took Bismarck as his mentor in external politics. Following the advice of that far-seeing statesman, he kept on good terms with Russia, since through Russia alone could come the realization of his dream of true independence. Meantime he set to work to give the country a modern army. The old provinces had never had more than a rude kind of militia, and Prince Carol found the existing forces badly armed and disciplined. Himself an ex-officer of the Prussian Guard, he introduced the Prussian system of organization, increased the numbers, and drew upon Krupp for a new artillery. With an efficient army at his back he waited on his chance to use it.

The chance came with the Russo-Turkish War of1877. 1877. On 24th April of that year he signed a military convention with Russia, granting, with the connivance of Austria, free passage to the Russian army through Rumania, which thus became the advanced base for the invasion of Turkey. A month later, on 22nd May, he declared his independence of the Porte. After the first Russian failure at Plevna, he crossed the Danube with 30,000 men, and greatly distinguished himself on the northern front. In the grand assault on Plevna, on 11th September, the Rumanians carried No. 1 Grivitsa Redoubt, the only one of the Turkish works which was stormed and permanently held. For such service Rumania looked for an adequate reward, but the results were below her expectations and her desserts. The Congress of Berlin did, indeed, recognize her complete independence, but with territorial changes which deprived the gift of most of its charm. That part of Bessarabia which Russia had ceded to Moldavia under the Treaty of Paris was restored to the Russian Empire, though it had a large Rumanian population. As compensation, Rumania received the bulk of the Turkish province of the Dobrudja, whose treeless steppes and riverine swamps seemed a poor exchange for the rich Bessarabian plains.

The result was an abiding grudge against Russia,1881. her old ally in the field. In 1881 Prince Carol was proclaimed King, and, in spite of the secular grievance of Transylvania, the country began to tend towards a rapprochement with Austria-Hungary. The common people were vehemently anti-Hungarian, and among the politicians the extreme Right was Russophil and the extreme Left Francophil; but the bulk of the aristocracy and the middle classes were in favour of the policy of the King. In 1883 the Prime Minister1883. met Bismarck and the Austrian Count Kalnoky, and a secret agreement was concluded, under which the Rumanian army in certain contingencies was to be at Austria’s disposal. Rumania had become a real, if publicly unacknowledged, member of the Triple Alliance.

Under the ægis of the King, the Austro-German influence spread and ramified during the succeeding thirty years. To understand Rumania’s position on the outbreak of the European War, it is necessary to consider briefly her territorial ambitions, her economic interests, and the state of her internal politics. These three elements conditioned the problem which faced her statesmen and the diplomatists of Europe from August 1914 to the beginning of August 1916.

Sketch Map showing extent of the lands (shaded) in Transylvania and the Bukovina claimed as predominantly Rumanian in population.

The difficulty of all the small countries of South-eastern Europe, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, was that their territorial did not correspond to their racial boundaries. The Turkish wars had dislocated the natural frontiers of races, and each state saw numbers of her own “nationals” under an alien and generally oppressive rule. The Alsace-Lorraine of Rumania was Transylvania. Bessarabia was in the same position; but there the racial trouble was not so great, though the population of the province was nearly two-thirds Rumanian, and the grievance on that score arose rather from the feeling of deserts insufficiently rewarded. But under the Dual Monarchy, in the Bukovina, in the Banat of Temesvar, and above all in Transylvania, lived some four millions of Rumanian blood and of Orthodox faith. Transylvania had been handed over to Hungary by Francis Joseph in 1867, and though the Government of Budapest the following year bound themselves to respect the rights, language, and religion of their Rumanian subjects, Hungarian nationalism speedily made the pact a dead letter. The Rumanian schools were Magyarized, the language proscribed, the Orthodox Church put under disabilities, and the elections shamelessly gerrymandered. On a basis of population the Rumanians should have had sixty-nine representatives in the Hungarian Parliament; they never had more than fourteen, and in 1910 were reduced to five.

The Rumanians of Transylvania, penalized and discontented, appealed for help to their kinsfolk across the mountains. That appeal did not fall on heedless ears. A new state is sensitively conscious of its racial affiliations, and the case of the Rumanians in Transylvania and the Vlachs in Macedonia profoundly affected popular opinion. Kings and Cabinets may follow a course of enlightened opportunism and make alliances with ancient foes, but the common people think in simpler terms and have longer memories. Leagues were established in the Rumanian capital to watch over the interests of their “nationals” beyond the frontier, and though this popular feeling might remain long quiescent, there was always the chance that at a moment of crisis it might break into flame and destroy the work of a passionless diplomacy.

Rumania had, therefore, personal causes of grievance against both Russia and Austria-Hungary, but especially against the latter. She had, too, a natural ambition to enlarge her territories to make them correspond to racial distribution. Finally, as the years passed, she began to realize the strategic value of her geographical position. As the far-reaching policy of the Central Powers slowly took shape it was obvious that Rumania, on the flank of the Drang nach Osten, acquired a peculiar significance. Her alliance would safeguard on the north that route to Constantinople which was the pilgrims’ way of German dreams. If Russia, again, was ever to secure her desires and control the exits from the Euxine to the Ægean, Rumanian friendliness would be an invaluable aid. Finally, whatever course Balkan politics might take, whether in the direction of union or of continued rivalry, the land north of the Danube must play a vital part. At the same time, Rumania well understood that her strategic assets were also strategic disadvantages. In a quarrel with her powerful neighbours she offered too many avenues for assault. It behoved her, therefore, to go warily, and take no step without due thought, for only by circumspection could she hope to win her national ambitions and avoid—what was never outside the sphere of the possible—national dissolution.

These considerations affected Rumanian action in the first great crisis that faced her since the war of 1877, the First and Second Balkan Wars. She1912-13. refused to join the Balkan League, having no particular grievance against Turkey; while on Macedonian questions she had never seen eye to eye with Greece and Bulgaria. She contented herself with warning the belligerents that she could not permit any one of them to become predominant in the Balkans, and mobilized her army to watch events. When Bulgaria’s sudden attack on her former allies precipitated the Second Balkan War, Rumania was forced to act. The event had been foreseen, and a provisional arrangement had been made with Serbia and Greece. To the world at large it looked as if King Carol’s conduct was based merely on the desire to fish in troubled waters, but in reality there were sound reasons of policy behind it. Bulgaria had upset all hopes of a Balkan equilibrium as a result of the First War, and her success would give her a Balkan hegemony most dangerous to Rumanian interests. It was Russia who took the severest view of Bulgarian wrongdoing, and King Carol consulted and secured the assent of Petrograd before he intervened. He crossed the Danube at two points, occupied Silistria, threatened Sofia, and received as his reward a larger slice of the Dobrudja. This meant a rift in the now thirty-years-old entente with Austria—a rift widened by Hungarian intransigence over Transylvania, which was now deeply concerning the Rumanian people. It meant, too, increasingly friendly relations with Russia, and there was talk of a marriage between the Crown Prince’s eldest son and a daughter of the Tsar. But King Carol did not allow the estrangement from Austria to affect his friendship with Austria’s senior partner. Telegrams were exchanged between him and the Kaiser in which the latter was thanked as the only begetter of peace.

Rumanian Territorial Changes on the Lower Danube, 1878-1913.

The situation, therefore, on the eve of the European War was that politically Rumania had long leaned to the Central Powers, and had been a virtual member of the Triple Alliance; but that during 1913 and the early months of 1914, though her friendliness to Germany continued, relations with Austria were becoming strained, while Bucharest and Petrograd were once again feeling their way towards co-operation and understanding.

The real centre of Teutonic influence in Rumania was to be found less in statecraft and diplomacy than in the sphere of finance and commerce. King Carol, in calling upon Germany for aid in developing his land, had, like the housewife in the fairy tale, invoked a sprite which could not easily be laid. From the early eighties Germany had set herself resolutely to capture Rumanian trade. She and Austria soon secured the lion’s share of imports. Her agents were in every town; she controlled the chief industries; by long credit and goods exactly suited to the market she ousted both native and foreign competitors; and she made use of the large German-Jew section of the commercial community to further her ends. The Deutsche Bank and the Disconto-Gesellschaft established themselves, and financed all new undertakings, as well as floating Government loans. Presently Rumania’s public debt was largely in German hands. Germany built the railways and improved the ports; she ousted British and American financiers from the control of the great oilfields; all the electrical industries were in her charge, and the rich forests were largely in her power. These successes were won by genuine enterprise and the most painstaking assiduity. She had consuls to watch her interests in every centre, and if a foreign merchant wished a reliable report on some Rumanian question, he was compelled to go for it to German sources. A distinguished Rumanian, Professor Basilesco, thus summarized the situation on the eve of war:—

“The Germans have lent to the Rumanian state nearly £80,000,000. They have, besides, invested in Rumanian banks, trade, and industry more than £40,000,000. Rumania borrowed money from Germany at usurious rates. In 1889, after the agricultural crisis, she contracted with the Disconto-Gesellschaft a loan of £480,000 at a nominal interest of 5 per cent., which the price of issue made in reality 7 per cent. Besides, the Disconto-Gesellschaft took as security the revenues of the monopoly of cigarette paper, and secured a share of its profits. By these means the German bank won a profit of £1,880,000 in return for £480,000 lent. . . . Ninety per cent. of Rumanian manufactured goods were of Austro-German origin; Rumanian trade was almost exclusively in Austro-German hands; and the whole economic life of Rumania was under Austro-German control.”

Such a condition of things could not have existed had there not been reasons for it in the economics of Rumania’s position. She was a non-industrial country, whose exports must always be mainly raw materials, mineral and agricultural. She therefore needed a highly industrialized country as her chief customer. She could not find this in Turkey or the Balkan States, or in Russia, who was herself in a like position. The natural trade channels ran westward towards Austria and Germany. Hence there was a reason for keeping on good terms with the Central Powers far stronger than any treaty, a reason based on the livelihood of the humblest citizen. They represented for Rumania her bread and butter. A breach would only come if a crisis arose so tremendous that prudential considerations were forgotten, or an ally was found who could provide her with a more excellent way of life.

For the feeling of the people, in which the various problems of foreign policy and economics are reflected, and by which they are ultimately decided, we must look to the condition of Rumanian politics from the accession of King Carol onwards. The traditional parties were the Liberals and the Conservatives, the “Reds” and the “Whites,” representing respectively the trading, and professional classes and the landed aristocracy. At the beginning of King Carol’s reign the National Liberals, under the elder Bratianu, were in power, and it was the Liberal Prime Minister who played a chief part in effecting the Austrian Alliance of 1883. During his twelve years’ term of office he aimed at extending the area of government control and building up a bureaucracy. Among the Conservatives a group of Tory democrats, called Junimists, arose, including men like Carp, Majorescu, and Marghiloman, who stood for individual liberty, and were, on the whole, more democratic than any section of the Liberal ranks. From 1891 onward the opposition between the two tended to become stereotyped and artificial, the ordinary game of the “ins” and “outs.” But in 1910, when the younger Bratianu1910. became head of the Liberal party, the Conservatives woke into life, and, under Take Jonescu, revived the old creed of the Tory democrats. The Cabinet which conducted the war with Bulgaria had a Junimist—Majorescu—as Premier, and two others, Take Jonescu and Marghiloman, as members. It fell from power in 1914, largely1914. through its failure to secure any concessions from Hungary on the subject of Transylvania, and the Liberals, under Bratianu, took office with large majorities in both chambers.

So far there was no serious division between the parties on the question of foreign policy. The National Liberals, representing largely the commercial classes, were well alive to the value, and indeed the necessity, of the Austro-German connection. Among the Conservatives the Junimists were mainly pro-German, especially the leaders, Carp, Marghiloman, and Majorescu. Of the old Conservatives, men like Filipescu and Lahovary had leanings towards Russia, and a deep friendship for France. Take Jonescu stood by himself. He was convinced that great events were preparing, and he looked further into the future than his colleagues. He envisaged a situation in which Rumania’s course would have to be determined on other grounds than the traditional attachments of politicians. On the eve of war we may say that the general tendency of the politicians was conservative—to cling to the old Teutonic alliance, but that the Balkan Wars and the new friendliness with Russia had somewhat weakened that alliance. They were for the most part in the mood to judge a new situation on its merits, and follow that tradition of realpolitik which forty years before King Carol had learned from Bismarck.

The first days of August 1914 brought Rumania face to face with the great decision. King Carol alone had no doubts. His German training and antecedents, and his lifelong friendship with the Central Powers, arrayed his sympathies on the Teutonic side. Moreover, he considered Rumania bound by the Treaty of 1883 to intervene on Austria’s behalf. His Government took a different view. They argued, as Italy argued in a similar case, that the occasion provided for by the terms of the agreement had not arisen, since they had had no notice of the sudden and violent procedure of Vienna, and Austria-Hungary must be considered the party attacking and not the attacked. It was clear that popular opinion was not in favour of intervention, and accordingly the King summoned on 4th August a special advisory Council, to which the Ministers and the leaders of the Opposition were alike invited. The question put to the members was that of immediate intervention on behalf of the Central Powers, and the King’s policy had Carp as its sole supporter. Majorescu and Marghiloman preferred to wait, and to intervene only when Germany had made her victory certain. By an overwhelming majority the Council decreed in favour of neutrality, and the army, when appealed to, gave the same decision. The King, who believed that the verdict was against Rumania’s interests and a stain on Rumania’s honour, was compelled to acquiesce. Two months later, on the 10th of October, 1914, he died.

His successor was his nephew Ferdinand, who had married a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The new King had not the German leanings of his predecessor, and could consider his country’s interests with an undivided mind; while the Queen made no secret of her sympathy with the Allied cause. For the better part of two years, with the eyes of the world on her, Rumania suspended her judgment, swayed now hither now thither by the turn of events, while her press and her platforms were filled with propagandist strife. The only alternatives, it seems fairly clear, were continued neutrality or entry into war on the Allied side. Never since the first month of the campaign had there been any real chance of her joining the Central Powers. Germany’s performance in Belgium, her unabashed declaration of her arrogant aims, and the plans for the Near East which she had loudly proclaimed, could have no attraction for a people which cherished its national independence. Moreover, the appearance of France, Russia, and Italy in the field awakened the sentiment and memories of a race which was part Latin and part Slav, but in no way Teuton.

With the first Russian successes the contest began between those Rumanians who clamoured for immediate union with the Allies, those who advocated delay, and those who were frankly on the German side. Of the first party were Take Jonescu and Filipescu; of the second, the Prime Minister, Bratianu; and of the third, Carp, Majorescu, and Marghiloman. There is reason to believe that some time in October 1914 Bratianu received from Russia a promise of Transylvania in return for Rumanian neutrality. Having won this much, it was the obvious part of prudence to sit still and see what would happen. The Government paid little attention to the assiduous overtures from the Central Powers and the appeals of the Marghilomanist press, but kept its eyes fixed on the northern frontier, where Russia was moving towards Cracow. In January 1915 Lechitsky’s advance into the Bukovina seemed to bring Rumania’s day of action near. Britain lent her £5,000,000, the reserves were called up, and Bratianu threw out hints in Parliament of a “decisive hour” approaching. Negotiations were proceeding with Russia as to Rumania’s territorial rewards—difficult negotiations, for Rumania put her claims high, and, having already received the promise of Transylvania for neutrality alone, wanted the Bukovina and the Banat of Temesvar in return for alliance. Moreover, before she could intervene effectually she must have munitions; and since these could only come from the Western Allies, the road into the Black Sea must be cleared. The British guns then sounding at the Dardanelles were part of the inducement to Rumania to move. But, as we have seen, everything miscarried: the British naval attack on the Dardanelles failed, and the landing of 28th April promised at the best a slow and difficult campaign. That same day von Mackensen struck on the Donajetz, and Russia began her great retreat. The day of Rumanian intervention had been indefinitely postponed.

Bratianu had now an intricate game to play. He could not afford to quarrel with the triumphant Central Powers; and though he refused to allow munitions of war for Turkey to pass through his country, he was compelled to speak Germany fair, and suffer Austria to purchase part of the Rumanian wheat crop. With admirable steadfastness he resisted Austro-German blandishments and threats, and bided his time. He saw Bulgaria take the plunge and Serbia destroyed, and his country’s strategic position grew daily graver. If she joined the Allies she would be hopelessly outflanked, with a hostile Bulgaria to the south and Pflanzer-Baltin in Czernovitz. Besides, she had as yet no munitions, and hard-pressed Russia could not help her on that score. Meantime popular feeling was kindling, and might soon be beyond control. The Conservative party had split in two, and a pro-Entente group had been formed, with first Lahovary and then Filipescu as its leader. The League of National Unity was active, student demonstrations filled the capital, and the inaction of the Government was attacked alike by the Interventionists under Take Jonescu and the pro-Germans under Marghiloman. Few statesmen have been placed in a more difficult position than Bratianu during the winter of 1915-16. He did the only thing possible in the circumstances, and played for time. He allowed the sale of cereals both to Britain and to Austria-Germany. It was clear that his policy of “expectant neutrality” had the support of the great mass of the Rumanian people, as was shown by the vote of confidence which he received in both Chambers when Parliament met.

During the early summer of 1916 a fusion tookJune 4, 1916. place between Take Jonescu’s Young Conservatives and Filipescu’s group. More and more Take Jonescu, brilliant alike as an orator and a writer, was becoming the interpreter of the national ideal. Fabian tactics may be wise, but they cannot last for ever. It was his business to organize and make explicit that popular feeling which would turn the balance with the cautious Bratianu. But arguments were preparing more potent than the eloquence of the popular leaders. On 4th June Brussilov struck his first blow. OnJune 18. 18th June Lechitsky entered Czernovitz. By the end of the month the Bukovina was in Russian hands, and on the 1st of July theJuly 1. Allied armies of France and Britain advanced on the Somme.

Before narrating the last stage in the story, it is necessary to look at the military resources which Rumania possessed, and the strategic problem which she would be compelled to face on her entry into the war. In 1875, when King Carol1875. was still busy with his reorganization, the Rumanian army numbered 18,000 regulars and 44,000 Territorials. By the law of 1872 men were enlisted for eight years, though large numbers were passed into the reserve before they had served their term. After the Russo-Turkish War the army was increased, and in 1882 the German system of localized1882. corps, drawing all their recruits from one district, was introduced. Four army corps were then created. By the law of 18911891. a closer connection was established between the standing army and the Territorial force. The infantry were formed into thirty-four regiments, each with one regular and two Territorial battalions; while the Militia represented the second line, and a third line was available in the levée en masse. Territorials were trained for ninety days in their first year of service, and for thirty days in subsequent years. In 1902 the regular1902. army was about 60,000 strong, with 75,000 Territorials. By increasing the available equipment, and calling up each year larger numbers of the annual class, the numbers grew rapidly, and a fifth army corps was presently formed. The declaration of war against Bulgaria in1913. 1913, the seizure of Silistria, and the advance on Plevna afforded a good test of Rumania’s capacity for mobilization. In 1914, when1914. the European War broke out, the army was organized in three main divisions—Active Army, Reserve, and Militia. There were five corps, each of two divisions, with five more divisions formed of surplus reservists. Rumania could mobilize a first-line force of 220 battalions, 83 squadrons, 124 batteries, and 19 companies of fortress artillery—a strength of 250,000 rifles, 18,000 sabres, 300 machine guns, and about 800 field guns and howitzers, of which three-fourths were pieces of a recent pattern.

These figures by no means represented the total available forces. In 1913, when the five army corps were mobilized against Bulgaria, no less than 200,000 recruits were sent back from the depots without being embodied. When the European War began preparations were at once made for embodying the whole force of the country in case of need. Cadres were at once formed for reserve battalions, and the aim was an eventual mobilization for a first-line army of ten corps—five active corps, and a reserve corps for each. This would provide an effective fighting force of between 500,000 and 600,000 men.

The infantry were armed with the Mannlicher, the field guns and field howitzers came from Krupp, and the mountain batteries and heavy pieces from Creusot. Munitions would obviously be a difficulty, for the Krupp supply would be cut off, and the country had no large steel works. A considerable supply of shells, however, had been accumulated, and Rumania, with Russia’s aid, had endeavoured to make herself independent of Germany. She had no navy to speak of, only a small river and coast flotilla, with vessels conspicuously inferior to the Austrian Danube fleet. Her General Staff were for the most part good professional soldiers, who had imbibed much of the latest German teaching, but they suffered from the fact that few had any experience of operations in the field under war conditions.

The details of Rumania’s strategic position must be postponed till we consider her actual campaign. Here it is sufficient to note that if she joined the Allies in the summer of 1916 she would be forced into a war on two fronts. Political considerations would, no doubt, impel her to cross the Carpathian passes, then weakly guarded by Austrian Landsturm, and occupy Transylvania. There it was difficult to believe she would be forestalled. But Bulgaria, at the bidding of Germany, was certain to strike, either by an advance into the Dobrudja, towards the Tchernavoda bridge which carried the line from Constanza to the capital, or by a crossing of the Danube. The river line made a formidable barrier on the south; but it had been crossed before, and might be crossed again. Rumania must, therefore, use her forces to protect her southern borders on the Danube and in the Dobrudja, as well as to press through the passes into Transylvania. This the whole Rumanian people took for granted, and the wiser strategy—to hold the Carpathian passes as a defensive flank, and concentrate on cutting the railway to Constantinople—had little chance of consideration. Austria had been desperately depleted of men by Brussilov’s offensive, and it was believed that she could not summon any great force to hold Transylvania. It was rather in the direction of Bulgaria that danger seemed to lie. Three Bulgarian armies were held by Sarrail at Salonika, while another watched the northern and north-eastern frontiers. If the latter were reinforced with German or Turkish troops, a dangerous invasion of the Dobrudja was possible.

Hence Rumania, having made up her mind on her strategical purpose, required certain assurances before she could put it into execution. In the first place, Brussilov must continue his pressure between the Pripet and the Carpathians, so that Germany and Austria should have no troops to spare to reinforce the Transylvanian front. In the second place, Sarrail must initiate a vigorous offensive from Salonika, to keep Bulgaria’s attention fixed on that quarter. In the third place, Russia must send an army to the Dobrudja, to co-operate with the Rumanian forces there. Finally, she must see her way to adequate munitions and a continuous future supply. This could only come by way of Russia from the Western Allies. The first trainload of shells which crossed the Moldavian border would be a warning to the Central Powers of an imminent declaration of war.

On 17th July Filipescu and Take Jonescu spokeJuly 17, 1916. at a great Interventionist demonstration. They asked for national union, an amalgamation of all parties such as France had seen; and they appealed to the King to prove himself “the best of Rumanians.” Bratianu said nothing, but he was busy negotiating with the Allied Powers—negotiating not only on the objective of the coming campaign, but on Rumanian rewards and the safeguards for her future. By the middle of July the matter was settled in principle, and munitions had begun to arrive from Russia. A provisional date was fixed for intervention, but the exact moment had to wait upon the fulfilment of certain preliminary guarantees. There is reason to believe that Bulgaria grew nervous, and made overtures for an arrangement with the Allies—overtures which the character of the Bulgarian King and the profound resentment of Russia rendered abortive. The Central Powers knew perfectly well what was happening at Bucharest, and redoubled their efforts; but excellent though their intelligence system was, they seem to have been misinformed about the real date. Bratianu conducted the game with consummate finesse. He saw the Austrian and German Ministers, and left on them the impression that his mind was not yet made up. The King, as late as 25thAug. 25. August, received in audience Majorescu, who had just returned from Germany. Meantime Sarrail was already heavily engaged on the Salonika front—an event which, to the wise, told its own story. King Ferdinand followed the example of his predecessor. It was announced onAug. 26. 26th August that the King desired to hear in Council the views not only of his Ministers, but of all the party leaders. The meeting was fixed for 10 a.m. on the following day, 27th August.

The Council, in spite of the protests of Marghiloman,Aug. 27. Carp, and Majorescu, ratified by a great majority the decision of the Cabinet. That evening a Note^[14] was handed to the Austro-Hungarian Minister containing a declaration of war. That Note set forth the reasons for Rumania’s breach with the Triple Alliance. It referred to the long-standing grievance of Transylvania and the ill-treatment of the Transylvanian people. The Central Powers, it declared, had flung the world into the melting-pot, and old treaties had disappeared along with more valuable things. Rumania, governed by the necessity of safeguarding her racial interests, finds herself forced to enter into line by the side of those who are able to assure her the realization of her national unity. To the army the King sent a message in the name of the heroes of the past. “The shades of Michael the Brave and Stephen the Great, whose mortal remains rest in the lands you march to deliver, will lead you to victory as worthy successors of the men who triumphed at Rasboieni, at Calugareni, and at Plevna.” To the people at large he also appealed:—

The formal breach was with Austria-Hungary alone, and for a moment Bratianu seems to have toyed with the idea of following Italy’s earlier example, and limiting the war. The Allies made no objection. They knew that such a limitation was impracticable, and their forecast wasAug. 28. right. For on 28th August Germany declared war on Rumania, and on 1st SeptemberSept. 1. Bulgaria followed suit. Fourteen nations were now engaged in the campaigns.

The entry of Rumania had been for some months expected and prepared for by Germany. On the surface it gave the Allies a powerful recruit. It lengthened the Teutonic battlefield in the East by several hundred miles; it added half a million trained soldiers to the Allied strength; and above all it gave them control of economic assets which the Central Powers had counted on in their resistance to the British blockade. All these things were solid gains; and yet, paradox as it may seem, it is certain that the German High Command did not find the breach with Rumania wholly unwelcome.

Germany’s most serious danger lay in the new unification of the Allies’ command, and its concentration upon the main theatres. Her situation in these theatres was very grave. Everywhere the German offensive had failed; everywhere Germany was strategically and tactically on her defence. Her assets were dwindling, and if the Allied pressure continued relentlessly, the day must come, sooner or later, when her field strength would crumble. Her single hope was for disunion and divergency once more among her enemies. She believed that if their efforts were concentrated they could outlast her; but if by some fortunate chance they should once more begin to dissipate their energies, then the Central Powers, with their concentration of purpose and uniformity of organization, might prove the stronger. Her one desire was for a return of those happy days when the main fronts in Europe were stagnant, and at Gallipoli and in the Balkans France and Britain wasted themselves in vain adventures.

The appearance of Rumania in the war seemed to promise such a chance. The German Staff knew to a decimal Rumania’s strength, and knew, too, that she would not play the game of war in its true rigour. She had her eyes fixed on her unliberated kinsfolk, and would insist on advancing forthwith on Transylvania. For this blunder she would be made to pay dearly, and with good fortune Bucharest might go the way of Belgrade and Brussels. But the Allies could not permit her to suffer the fate of Serbia. Her position was strategically too vital, and their honour was too deeply committed. Therefore in the event of a Rumanian débâcle Russian armies would hasten to her aid, and Sarrail at Salonika would be reinforced by troops destined for the Western battlefield. If this happened, the concentration of the Allied purpose would be lessened, and the unity of the Allied command might go to pieces. Brussilov must slacken his efforts, and the deadly acid in the West would cease to bite. Out of an apparent misfortune the Teutonic League might win a final triumph.

The calculation was shrewd, as this narrative will show. When the Rumanians crossed the passes they marched not to victory but disaster. But the chronicle of their campaign must be postponed while we turn to the great offensive which, since the first day of July, the armies of France and Britain had been conducting in the West.

Mr. Balfour’s Statement, August 4, 1916.

The First Lord of the Admiralty issued the following message:—

The second anniversary of the British declaration of war provides a fitting opportunity for a brief survey of the present naval situation. Public attention is inevitably concentrated upon the great military operations by which the Allies are pressing with ever-increasing severity upon the Central Powers from the east, the west, and the south; and though none of us are likely to ignore the part which the Navy plays in the campaign, it is not easy even for those who reflect much on these subjects to see things in their true perspective; for those who content themselves with the daily bulletins it is impossible. They cannot believe that anything important is done when nothing important seems to happen.

It is true that the great battle off Jutland for a moment broke the monotony of the naval situation, and its consequences, moral and material, cannot easily be overrated. An Allied diplomatist assured me that in his view it was the turning-point of the war. The tide which had long ceased to help our enemies began from that moment to flow strongly in our favour. This much at least is true, that every week which has passed since the German High Seas Fleet was driven damaged into port has seen a new success for the Allies in one part or other of the field of operations.

It would be an error, however, to suppose that the naval victory changed the situation; what it did was to confirm it. Before Jutland, as after it, the German Fleet was imprisoned; the battle was an attempt to break the bars and burst the confining gates; it failed, and with its failure the High Seas Fleet sank again into impotence.

THE GERMAN “VICTORY.”

It may perhaps be objected that this is but a British view of British triumphs, and that German accounts of naval doings tell a very different story, and leave a very different impression upon the military student. But this is not so. Study the German utterances with care, and you will find that they give precisely the same general impression of British sea power and the naval position as that which I have just expressed. It is quite true that they call that a victory which the rest of the world calls a defeat. But though they talk in German, their meaning can quite easily be expressed in intelligible English, for in essence both parties are agreed.

After all, the object of a naval battle is to obtain the command of the sea, or to keep it; and it is certain that Germany has not obtained it, and that we have not lost it. The tests of this assertion are easy to apply. Has the grip of the British blockade relaxed since May 31? Has it not, on the contrary, tightened? Is it or is it not becoming more difficult for the Germans to import raw material and foodstuffs, and to pay for them by the export of their manufactures? The Germans themselves will admit that it is becoming more difficult. Hence the violence of their invectives against Britain; and hence their unwearied repetition of the cry that Britain is the arch enemy that must at all costs be humbled to the dust.

Again, if they felt themselves on their way to maritime equality, would they spend so much breath in advertising the performances of the submarine which, flying a commercial flag, carried 280 tons of German produce—to say nothing of an autograph letter of the Kaiser—from Bremen to Baltimore? The operation itself involved no naval difficulty. Its commercial results were necessarily infinitesimal; its whole interest in German eyes lay in the fact that by using a submarine they could elude the barrier raised by the British Fleet between them and the outer world—a barrier which they knew their own fleet could neither break nor weaken.

But sea power shows itself not merely in denying the waterways of the world to the enemy, but in using them for your own military purposes. And here again there is a singular discrepancy between German boasts about the greatness of the German Fleet and German admissions about its impotence. Since, nearly two years ago, England’s “contemptible little Army” was sent into France, a steady and ever-increasing flow of men and munitions has been poured across the waters of the Channel. It has reached colossal proportions; its effects on the war may well be decisive; yet never has it been more secure from attack by enemy battleships or cruisers as it has been since the German “victory” of May 31.

GERMAN BOASTS.

But there are longer sea routes and more distant operations which in this connection it is fitting to remember. It seems that on the German anniversary of the war the German Press bade the German public to take comfort from an attentive study of the map. “See,” they said, “how much enemy territory both in the East and in the West the armies of the Fatherland occupy; see—and take heart.” The amount of comfort, however, which the study of maps is capable of conveying depends partly on the maps you choose. Even the map of Europe shows an ever-shrinking battle-line. But why look only at Europe? Germany for twenty years has advertised itself as a great colonial Power; and it was to conquer and maintain its position as a great colonial Power that German fleets were built.

Let us, then, choose a map which contains her oversea Empire. At the beginning of August 1914 Germany possessed colonies in the China Seas, in the Malay Archipelago, in the Pacific Ocean, in West Africa, in South-West Africa, in East Africa. All have gone except the last; and the last whilst I write seems slipping from her grasp. The Navy has not conquered them; in the actual fighting by which they have been or are being acquired the Navy has taken a very important yet not the leading part. But without the British Navy to contain the German Fleet, the operations which bid fair to strip Germany of every one of her oversea possessions could not have been successful—could not even have been attempted.

Has, then, the battle of Jutland opened up the smallest prospect of Germany’s regaining what she has lost? Can it give a moment’s respite to the hard-pressed colonists in German East Africa? I doubt whether it has ever occurred to any German (and I am sure it has occurred to nobody else) that anything which the German Fleet has done, is doing, or can do, will delay for one moment the final triumph of General Smuts over the last of Germany’s oversea possessions.

SUBMARINE WARFARE.

If any desire yet further proof of the value which the Germans really attach to their “victorious” fleet, I advise them to study the German policy of submarine warfare. The advantage of submarine attacks on commerce is that they cannot be controlled by superior fleet power in the same way as attacks by cruisers. The disadvantage is that they cannot be carried out on a large scale consistently with the laws of war or the requirements of humanity. They make, therefore, a double appeal to German militarism—an appeal to its prudence and an appeal to its brutality. The Germans knew their “victorious” fleet was useless; it could be kept safe in harbour while submarine warfare went on merrily outside. They knew that submarines could not be brought to action by battleships or battle cruisers. They thought, therefore, that to these new commerce destroyers our merchant ships must fall an easy prey, unprotected by our ships of war and unable to protect themselves.

They are wrong in both respects; and doubtless it is their wrath at the skill and energy with which British merchant captains and British crews have defended the lives and property under their charge that has driven the German Admiralty into their latest and stupidest act of calculated ferocity—the judicial murder of Captain Fryatt.

I do not propose to argue this case; it is not worth arguing. Why should we do the German military authorities the injustice of supposing that they were animated by any solicitude for the principles of international law and blundered into illegality by some unhappy accident? Their folly was of a different kind, and flowed from a different cause. They knew quite well that when Captain Fryatt’s gallantry saved his ship the Germans had sunk without warning twenty-two British merchant ships, and had attempted to sink many others. They knew that in refusing tamely to submit himself to such a fate he was doing his duty as a man of courage and of honour. They were resolved at all costs to discourage imitation!

“FREEDOM OF THE SEAS.”

What blunderers they are! I doubt not their ability to manipulate machines. But of managing men, unless it be German men, they know less than nothing. They are always wrong; and they are wrong because they always suppose that if they behave like brutes they can cow their enemies into behaving like cowards. Small is their knowledge of our merchant seamen. Their trade, indeed, is not war—they live by the arts of peace. But in no class does patriotism burn with a purer flame, or show itself in deeds of higher courage and self-devotion. I doubt whether there is one of them to be found who is not resolved to defend himself to the last against piratical attack; but if such a one there be, depend upon it he will be cured by the last exhibition of German civilization.

And what must the neutrals think of all this? They are constantly assured by German advocates that the Central Powers are fighting for the “freedom of the seas.” It is a phrase with different meanings in different mouths; but we have now had ample opportunities of judging what it means to the Germans. It means that the German Navy is to behave at sea as the German Army behaves on land. It means that neither enemy civilians nor neutrals are to possess rights against militant Germany; that those who do not resist will be drowned, and those who do will be shot. Already 244 neutral merchant ships have been sunk in defiance of law and of humanity; the number daily grows. Mankind with now two years’ experience of war behind it has made up its mind about German culture; it is not, I think, without material for forming a judgment about German freedom.

ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR.

Admiralty, Aug. 4.

Paris, June 14-17.

I.—The representatives of the Allied Governments have met at Paris under the presidency of M. Clémentel, Minister of Commerce, on June 14, 15, 16, and 17, 1916, for the purpose of fulfilling the mandate given to them by the Paris Conference of March 28, 1916, of giving practical expression to their solidarity of views and interests, and of proposing to their respective Governments the appropriate measures for realizing this solidarity.

II.—They declare that after forcing upon them the military contest in spite of all their efforts to avoid the conflict, the Empires of Central Europe are to-day preparing, in concert with their allies, for a contest on the economic plane, which will not only survive the re-establishment of peace, but will at that moment attain its full scope and intensity.

III.—They cannot therefore conceal from themselves that the agreements which are being prepared for this purpose between their enemies have the obvious object of establishing the domination of the latter over the production and the markets of the whole world, and of imposing on other countries an intolerable yoke.

In face of so grave a peril the Representatives of the Allied Governments consider that it has become their duty, on grounds of necessary and legitimate defence, to adopt and realize from now onward all the measures requisite on the one hand to secure for themselves and for the whole of the markets of neutral countries full economic independence and respect for sound commercial practice, and on the other hand to facilitate the organization on a permanent basis of their economic alliance.

For this purpose the Representatives of the Allied Governments have decided to submit for the approval of those Governments the following resolutions:—

A.
MEASURES FOR THE WAR PERIOD.

I.—The laws and regulations prohibiting trading with the enemy shall be brought into accord.

For this purpose:—

II.—Business undertakings owned or operated by enemy subjects in the territories of the Allies will all be sequestrated or placed under control; measures will be taken for the purpose of winding up some of these undertakings and of realizing their assets, the proceeds of such realization remaining sequestrated or under control.

III.—In addition to the export prohibitions which are necessitated by the internal situation of each of the Allied countries, the Allies will complete the measures already taken for the restriction of enemy supplies, both in the mother countries and in the Dominions, Colonies, and Protectorates:—

B.
TRANSITORY MEASURES FOR THE PERIOD OF COMMERCIAL, INDUSTRIAL, AGRICULTURAL, AND MARITIME RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ALLIED COUNTRIES.

I.—The Allies declare their common determination to ensure the re-establishment of the countries suffering from acts of destruction, spoliation, and unjust requisition, and decide to join in devising means to secure the restoration to those countries, as a prior claim, of their raw materials, industrial and agricultural plant, stock, and mercantile fleet, or to assist them to re-equip themselves in these respects.

II.—Whereas the war has put an end to all the treaties of commerce between the Allies and the Enemy Powers, and whereas it is of essential importance that, during the period of economic reconstruction which will follow the cessation of hostilities, the liberty of none of the Allies should be hampered by any claim put forward by the Enemy Powers to most-favoured-nation treatment, the Allies agree that the benefit of this treatment shall not be granted to those Powers during a number of years to be fixed by mutual agreement among themselves.

During this number of years the Allies undertake to assure to each other so far as possible compensatory outlets for trade in case consequences detrimental to their commerce result from the application of the undertaking referred to in the preceding paragraph.

III.—The Allies declare themselves agreed to conserve for the Allied countries, before all others, their natural resources during the whole period of commercial, industrial, agricultural, and maritime reconstruction, and for this purpose they undertake to establish special arrangements to facilitate the interchange of these resources.

IV.—In order to defend their commerce, their industry, their agriculture, and their navigation against economic aggression resulting from dumping or any other mode of unfair competition the Allies decide to fix by agreement a period of time during which the commerce of the Enemy Powers shall be submitted to special treatment and the goods originating in their countries shall be subjected either to prohibitions or to a special régime of an effective character.

The Allies will determine by agreement through diplomatic channels the special conditions to be imposed during the above-mentioned period on the ships of the Enemy Powers.

V.—The Allies will devise the measures to be taken jointly or severally for preventing enemy subjects from exercising, in their territories, certain industries or professions which concern national defence or economic independence.

C.
PERMANENT MEASURES OF MUTUAL ASSISTANCE AND COLLABORATION AMONG THE ALLIES.

I.—The Allies decide to take the necessary steps without delay to render themselves independent of the enemy countries in so far as regards the raw materials and manufactured articles essential to the normal development of their economic activities.

These measures should be directed to assuring the independence of the Allies not only so far as concerns their sources of supply, but also as regards their financial, commercial, and maritime organization.

The Allies will adopt such measures as may seem to them most suitable for the carrying out of this resolution, according to the nature of the commodities and having regard to the principles which govern their economic policy.

They may, for example, have recourse either to enterprises subsidized, directed or controlled by the Governments themselves, or to the grant of financial assistance for the encouragement of scientific and technical research and the development of national industries and resources; to customs duties or prohibitions of a temporary or permanent character; or to a combination of these different methods.

Whatever may be the methods adopted, the object aimed at by the Allies is to increase production within their territories as a whole to a sufficient extent to enable them to maintain and develop their economic position and independence in relation to enemy countries.

II.—In order to permit the interchange of their products, the Allies undertake to adopt measures for facilitating their mutual trade relations both by the establishment of direct and rapid land and sea transport services at low rates, and by the extension and improvement of postal, telegraphic, and other communications.

III.—The Allies undertake to convene a meeting of technical delegates to draw up measures for the assimilation, so far as may be possible, of their laws governing patents, indications of origin, and trade marks.

In regard to patents, trade marks, and literary and artistic copyright which have come into existence during the war in enemy countries, the Allies will adopt, so far as possible, an identical procedure, to be applied as soon as hostilities cease.

This procedure will be elaborated by the technical delegates of the Allies.

D.

Whereas for the purposes of their common defence against the enemy the Allied Powers have agreed to adopt a common economic policy, on the lines laid down in the Resolutions which have been passed, and whereas it is recognized that the effectiveness of this policy depends absolutely upon these Resolutions being put into operation forthwith, the Representatives of the Allied Governments undertake to recommend their respective Governments to take without delay all the measures, whether temporary or permanent, requisite for giving full and complete effect to this policy forthwith, and to communicate to each other the decisions arrived at to attain that object.

[On July 28, 1916, the American Ambassador in London presented, on behalf of his Government, a formal protest against the policy of the “Black List,” to which Lord Grey of Fallodon replied on October 10. The nature of the American arguments will appear from the British rejoinder.]

Your Excellency,—His Majesty’s Government have had under consideration the note which your Excellency was good enough to communicate to me on July 28 last with respect to the addition of certain firms in the United States of America to the statutory list compiled and issued in accordance with the “Trading with the Enemy (Extension of Powers) Act, 1915.”

You will recall that shortly after this Act became law I had the honour, in my note of February 16 last in reply to your note of January 26, to explain the object of the Act. It is a piece of purely municipal legislation, and provides that his Majesty may by proclamation prohibit persons in the United Kingdom from trading with any persons in foreign countries who might be specified in such proclamations or in any subsequent orders. It also imposes appropriate penalties upon persons in the United Kingdom who violate the provisions of this statute.

That is all. His Majesty’s Government neither purport nor claim to impose any disabilities or penalties upon neutral individuals or upon neutral commerce. The measure is simply one which enjoins those who owe allegiance to Great Britain to cease having trade relations with persons who are found to be assisting or rendering service to the enemy.

I can scarcely believe that the United States Government intend to challenge the right of Great Britain as a sovereign State to pass legislation prohibiting all those who owe her allegiance from trading with any specified persons when such prohibition is found necessary in the public interest. The right to do so is so obvious that I feel sure that the protest which your Excellency handed to me has been founded on a misconception of the scope and intent of the measures which have been taken.

Neutral and Belligerent Rights.

This view is strengthened by some of the remarks which are made in the note. It is, for instance, stated that these measures are “inevitably and essentially inconsistent with the rights of the citizens of all nations not involved in war.” The note then proceeds to point out that citizens of the United States are entirely within their rights in attempting to trade with any of the nations now at war. His Majesty’s Government readily admit that the citizens of every neutral nation are free to trade with belligerent countries. The United States Government will no doubt equally readily admit that they do so subject to the right of the other belligerent to put an end to that trade by every means within his power which is recognized by international law, by such measures, for instance, as the seizure of neutral goods as contraband, or for breach of blockade, etc. The legislation, however, to which exception is taken does not belong to that class of measures. It is purely municipal. It is an exercise of the sovereign right of an independent State over its own citizens, and nothing more. This fact has not, I feel sure, been fully realized by the Government of the United States of America, for the note maintains that the Government cannot consent to see these remedies and penalties altered and extended at will in derogation of the right of its citizens; and says that “conspicuous among the principles which the civilized nations of the world have accepted for the safeguarding of the rights of neutrals is the just and honourable principle that neutrals may not be condemned nor their goods confiscated, except upon fair adjudication and after an opportunity to be heard in Prize Courts or elsewhere.”

As I have said above, the legislation merely prohibits persons in the United Kingdom from trading with certain specified individuals, who, by reason of their nationality or their association, are found to support the cause of the enemy, and trading with whom will therefore strengthen that cause. So far as that legislation is concerned, no rights or property of these specified individuals are interfered with; neither they nor their property are condemned or confiscated; they are as free as they were before to carry on their business. The only disability they suffer is that British subjects are prohibited from giving to them the support and assistance of British credit and British property.

The steps which his Majesty’s Government are taking under the above-mentioned Act are not confined to the United States of America; the policy is being pursued in all neutral countries. Nay, more. With the full consent of the Allied Governments, firms, even in Allied countries, are being placed on the statutory list if they are firms with whom it is necessary to prevent British subjects from trading. These considerations may, perhaps, serve to convince the Government of the United States that the measures now being taken are not directed against neutral trade in general. Still less are they directed against American trade in particular; they are part of the general belligerent operations designed to weaken the enemy’s resources.

American Fears unfounded.

I do not read your note of July 28 as maintaining that his Majesty’s Government are obliged by any rule of international law to give to those who are actively assisting the cause of their enemies, whether they be established in neutral or in enemy territory, the facilities which flow from participation in British commerce. Any such proposition would be so manifestly untenable that there is no reason to refute it. The feelings which I venture to think have prompted the note under reply must have been that the measures which we have been obliged to take will be expanded to an extent which will result in their interfering with genuine neutral commerce; perhaps, also, that they are not exclusively designed for belligerent purposes, but are rather an attempt to forward our own trade interests at the expense of neutral commerce, under the cloak of belligerency; and lastly, that they are, from a military point of view, unnecessary.

Upon these points I am able to give to the Government and people of the United States the fullest assurances. Upon the first point it is true, as your note says, that the name of a firm may be added to the statutory list of persons with whom British persons may not trade whenever, on account of the enemy association of such firm, it seems expedient to do so. But the Government of the United States can feel confident that this system of prohibitions will not be carried further than is absolutely necessary. It has been forced upon us by the circumstances of the present war. To extend it beyond what is required in order to secure its immediate purpose—the weakening of the resources of our opponents—or to allow it to interfere with what is really the genuine neutral trade of a country with which we desire to have the closest commercial intercourse, would be contrary to British interests. The advantage derived from a commercial transaction between a British subject and a foreigner is mutual, and for his Majesty’s Government to forbid a British subject to trade with the citizen of any foreign country necessarily entails some diminution of commercial opportunity for that British subject, and therefore some loss both to him and to his country. Consequently the United States Government, even if they are willing to ignore the whole tradition and tendency of British policy towards the commerce of other nations, might be confident that self-interest alone would render his Majesty’s Government anxious not to place upon the statutory list the name of any firm which carries on a genuine bona fide neutral trade. If they did so, Great Britain herself would be the loser.

As to the second point, there seem to be individuals in the United States and elsewhere whom it is almost impossible to convince that the measures we take are measures against our enemies, and not intended merely to foster our own trade at the expense of that of neutral countries. I can only reiterate, what has been repeatedly explained before, that his Majesty’s Government have no such unworthy object in view. We have, in fact, in all the steps we have taken to prevent British subjects from trading with these specified firms, been most careful to cause the least possible dislocation of neutral trade, as much in our interests as in those of the neutral.

Domicile and Nationality.

I turn now to the question whether the circumstances of the present war are such as to justify resort on the part of his Majesty’s Government to this novel expedient.

As the United States Government are well aware, the Anglo-American practice has in times past been to treat domicile as the test of enemy character, in contradistinction to the Continental practice, which has always regarded nationality as the test. The Anglo-American rule crystallized at the time when means of transport and communication were less developed than now, and when in consequence the actions of a person established in a distant country could have but little influence upon a struggle.

To-day the position is very different. The activities of enemy subjects are ubiquitous, and under modern conditions it is easy for them, wherever resident, to remit money to any place where it may be required for the use of their own Government, or to act in other ways calculated to assist its purposes and to damage the interests of the Powers with whom it is at war. No elaborate exposition of the situation is required to show that full use has been and is being made of these opportunities.

The experience of the war has proved abundantly, as the United States Government will readily admit; that many Germans in neutral countries have done all in their power to help the cause of their own country and to injure that of the Allies; in fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that German houses abroad have in a large number of cases been used as an integral part of an organization deliberately conceived and planned as an engine for the furtherance of German political and military ambitions. It is common knowledge that German business establishments in foreign countries have been not merely centres of German trade, but active agents for the dissemination of German political and social influence, and for the purpose of espionage. In some cases they have even been used as bases of supply for German cruisers, and in other cases as organizers and paymasters of miscreants employed to destroy by foul means factories engaged in making, or ships engaged in carrying, supplies required by the Allies. Such operations have been carried out in the territory even of the United States itself, and I am bound to observe, what I do not think will be denied, that no adequate action has yet been taken by the Government of the United States to suppress breaches of neutrality of this particularly criminal kind, which I know that they are the first to discountenance and deplore.

In the face of enemy activities of this nature, it was essential for his Majesty’s Government to take steps that should at least deprive interests so strongly hostile of the facilities and advantages of unrestricted trading with British subjects. The public opinion of this country would not have tolerated the prolongation of the war by the continued liberty of British subjects to trade with and so to enrich the firms in foreign countries whose wealth and influence were alike at the service of the enemy.

Let me repeat that his Majesty’s Government make no such claim to dictate to citizens of the United States, nor to those of any other neutral country, as to the persons with whom they are or are not to trade. They do, however, maintain the right, which in the present crisis is also their duty towards the people of this country and to their Allies, to withhold British facilities from those who conduct their trade for the benefit of our enemies. If the value to these firms of British facilities is such as to lead them to prefer to give up their trade with our enemies rather than to run the risk of being deprived of such facilities, his Majesty’s Government cannot admit that their acceptance of guarantees to that effect is either arbitrary or incompatible with international law or comity.

The Military Situation.

There is another matter with which I should like to deal.

The idea would seem to be prevalent in some quarters that the military position is now such that it is unnecessary for his Majesty’s Government to take any steps which might prejudice, even to a slight extent, the commerce of neutral countries; that the end of the war is in sight, and that nothing which happens in distant neutral countries can affect the ultimate result.

If that were really the position, it is possible that the measures taken by his Majesty’s Government might be described as uncalled for, but it is not. We may well wish that it were so. Even though the military situation of the Allies has greatly improved, there is still a long and bitter struggle in front of them, and one which in justice to the principles for which they are fighting, imposes upon them the duty of employing every opportunity and every measure which they can legitimately use to overcome their opponents.

One observation which is very commonly heard is that certain belligerent acts, even though lawful, are too petty to have any influence upon a struggle of such magnitude. It is, I know, difficult for those who have no immediate contact with war to realize with what painful anxiety men and women in this country must regard even the smallest acts which tend to increase, if only by a hair’s breadth, the danger in which their relatives and friends daily stand, or to prolong, if only by a minute, the period during which they are to be exposed to such perils.

Whatever inconvenience may be caused to neutral nations by the exercise of belligerent rights, it is not to be compared for an instant to the suffering and loss occasioned to mankind by the prolongation of the war even for a week.

One other matter should be mentioned—namely, the exclusion from ships using British coal of goods belonging to firms on the statutory list. This is enforced by rendering it a condition of the supply of bunker coal. What legal objection can be taken to this course? It is British coal; why should it be used to transport the goods of those who are actively assisting our enemies? Nor is this the only point. It must be remembered that the German Government by their submarine warfare have sought to diminish the world’s tonnage; they have sunk illegally and without warning hundreds of peaceful merchant ships belonging not only to Allied countries, but to neutrals as well. Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Greek ships have all been sunk. Between June 1 and September 30, 1916, 262 vessels have been sunk by enemy submarines; 72 of these were British, 123 Allied, and 66 neutrals. These totals included 10 British vessels, which were sunk without warning and involved the loss of 81 lives; two Allied, one of which involved the loss of two lives, no information being available as to the other; and three neutral, involving the loss of one life. Even so the list is incomplete. Probably other vessels were sunk without warning and more lives than those enumerated were lost. It may be added that where those on board did escape it was, as a rule, only by taking to open boats.

One of the first enterprises to feel the loss of tonnage has been the Commission for Relief in Belgium. Relief ships have themselves been repeatedly sunk; and in spite of all the efforts of his Majesty’s Government, in spite of the special facilities given for the supply of coal to ships engaged in the Commission’s service, that body is constantly unable to import into Belgium the foodstuffs absolutely necessary to preserve the life of the population. Can it then be wondered that the British Government are anxious to limit the supply of British coal in such a way as to reserve it as far as possible to ships genuinely employed in Allied or neutral trade?

Trustees of Sea Power.

There is, indeed, one preoccupation in regard to this use of coaling advantages by his Majesty’s Government which is no doubt present in the minds of neutrals, and which I recognize. I refer to the apprehension that the potential control over means of transportation thus possessed by one nation might be used for the disruption of the trade of the world in the selfish interests of that nation. His Majesty’s Government therefore take this opportunity to declare that they are not unmindful of the obligations of those who possess sea power, nor of that traditional policy pursued by the British Empire by which such power has been regarded as a trust and has been exercised in the interests of freedom. They require no representations to recall such considerations to mind, but they cannot admit that, in the circumstances of the times, their present use of their coal resources—a use which only differs in extent from that exercised by the United States in the Civil War in the case of vessels proceeding to such ports as Nassau—is obnoxious to their duties or their voluntary professions.

In conclusion, I cannot refrain from calling to mind the instructions issued by Lord Russell on July 5, 1862, to the merchants of Liverpool in regard to trade with the Bahamas. His Lordship there advised British subjects that their “true remedy” would be to “refrain from this species of trade,” on the ground that “it exposes innocent commerce to vexatious detention and search by American cruisers.”

His Majesty’s Government do not ask the Government of the United States to take any such action as this, but they cannot believe that the United States Government will question their right to lay upon British merchants, in the interests of the safety of the British Empire, for which they are responsible, the same prohibitions as Lord Russell issued fifty years ago, out of consideration for the interests and feelings of a foreign nation. Suspicions and insinuations which would construe so simple an action as an opening for secret and unavowed designs on neutral rights should have no place in the relations between two friendly countries.

I trust that the explanations contained in this note will destroy such suspicions, and correct the erroneous views which prevail in the United States on the subject.

[The Note handed to the Austro-Hungarian Minister at
Bucharest on 27th August 1916.]

The alliance concluded between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had, according to the precise statements of the Governments themselves, only an essentially conservative and defensive character. Its principal object was to guarantee the Allied countries against any attack from outside, and to consolidate the state of things created by previous treaties. It was with the desire to harmonize her policy with these pacific tendencies that Rumania joined that alliance. Devoted to the work of her internal constitution, and faithful to her firm resolution to remain in the region of the Lower Danube an element of order and equilibrium, Rumania has not ceased to contribute to the maintenance of peace in the Balkans. The last Balkan wars, by destroying the status quo, imposed upon her a new line of conduct. Her intervention gave peace and re-established the equilibrium. For herself she was satisfied with a rectification of frontier which gave her greater security against aggression, and which, at the same time, repaired the injustice committed to her detriment at the Congress of Berlin. But in the pursuit of this aim Rumania was disappointed to observe that she did not meet from the Cabinet of Vienna the attitude that she was entitled to expect.

When the present war broke out, Rumania, like Italy, declined to associate herself with the declaration of war by Austria-Hungary, of which she had not been notified by the Cabinet of Vienna. In the spring of 1915 Italy declared war against Austria-Hungary. The Triple Alliance no longer existed. The reasons which determined the adherence of Rumania to this political system disappeared. At the same time, in place of a grouping of States seeking by common efforts to work in agreement in order to assure peace and the conservation of the situation de facto and de jure created by treaties, Rumania found herself in presence of Powers making war on each other for the sole purpose of transforming from top to bottom the old arrangements which had served as a basis for their treaty of alliance.

These profound changes were for Rumania an evident proof that the object that she had pursued in joining the Triple Alliance could no longer be attained, and that she must direct her views and her efforts towards new paths, the more so as the work undertaken by Austria-Hungary assumed a character threatening the essential interests of Rumania as well as her most legitimate national aspirations. In the presence of so radical a modification of the situation between the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Rumania the latter resumed her liberty of action.

The neutrality which the Royal Government imposed upon itself in consequence of a declaration of war made independent of its will and contrary to its interests was adopted, in the first instance, as a result of assurances given at the outset by the Imperial and Royal Government that the Monarchy in declaring war on Serbia was not inspired by a spirit of conquest, and that it had absolutely no territorial acquisitions in view. These assurances were not realized. To-day we are confronted by a situation de facto from which may arise great territorial transformations and political changes of a nature to constitute a grave menace to the security and future of Rumania. The work of peace which Rumania, faithful to the spirit of the Triple Alliance, attempted to accomplish was thus rendered barren by those who themselves were called upon to support and defend it.

In adhering in 1883 to the group of Central Powers, Rumania, far from forgetting the ties of blood which united the populations of the kingdom to those Rumanians who are subject to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, saw in the relations of friendship and alliance which were established between the three Great Powers a precious pledge for her domestic tranquillity, as well as for the improvement of the lot of the Rumanians of Austria-Hungary. In effect Germany and Italy, who had reconstituted their States on the basis of the principles of nationality, could not but recognize the legitimacy of the foundation on which their own existence reposed. As for Austria-Hungary, she found in friendly relations established between her and the Kingdom of Rumania assurances for her tranquillity both in her interior and on our common frontiers; for she was bound to know to what an extent the discontent of her Rumanian population found an echo among us, threatening every moment to trouble the good relations between the two States.

The hope which we based from this point of view upon our adhesion to the Triple Alliance remained unfulfilled during more than thirty years. The Rumanians of the Monarchy not only never saw any reform introduced of a nature to give them even a semblance of satisfaction, but, on the contrary, they were treated as an inferior race and condemned to suffer the oppression of a foreign element which constitutes only a minority in the midst of the diverse nationalities constituting the Austro-Hungarian State. All the injustices which our brothers were thus made to suffer maintained between our country and the Monarchy a continual state of animosity which the Governments of the Kingdom only succeeded in appeasing at the cost of great difficulties and numerous sacrifices.

When the present war broke out it might have been hoped that the Austro-Hungarian Government, at least at the last moment, would end by convincing itself of the urgent necessity of putting an end to this injustice, which endangered not only our relations of friendship, but even the normal relations which ought to exist between neighbouring States. Two years of war, during which Rumania has preserved her neutrality, proved that Austria-Hungary, hostile to all domestic reform that might ameliorate the life of the peoples she governs, showed herself as prompt to sacrifice them as she was powerless to defend them against external attacks. The war, in which almost the whole of Europe is taking part, raises the gravest problems affecting the national development and the very existence of States. Rumania, from a desire to contribute in hastening the end of the conflict, and governed by the necessity of safeguarding her racial interests, finds herself forced to enter into line by the side of those who are able to assure her the realization of her national unity. For these reasons she considers herself from this moment in a state of war with Austria-Hungary.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

The footnotes have been renumbered sequentially throughout the entire book.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

A Table of Events from October 1, 1915, to June 30, 1916 is not included in the text version.

[The end of Nelson’s History of the War, Volume XV, by John Buchan]