by John Buchan
On paper the material gains did not appear excessive, for, both in ground won and in the number of prisoners, Germany had often exceeded them. But it achieved the essential purpose of all fighting, it struck a deadly blow at the spirit of an already weakening enemy. Ludendorff has confessed that “August 8th was the black day of the German army in the history of the war. . . . It put the decline of our fighting force beyond all doubt.” “We are at the end of our resources,” said the Emperor; “the war must be ended.” At a conference held at Spa the Generals informed the Emperor and the Imperial Chancellor that there was no chance of victory, and that peace negotiations should be opened as soon as possible. The most that could be hoped for was an orderly retirement to the prepared defences of the Hindenburg Line, a strategic defensive which by its vigour would win reasonable terms from the Allies. Ludendorff himself offered his resignation, which was not accepted. He had lost hope of any gains, and his one aim was to avoid an abject surrender — not a promising mood in which to enter upon the most difficult of the operations of war.
Foch was resolved to defeat his hopes, and to hustle him out of all his positions before he could entrench himself, driving the whole vast army back to the narrow gut which led to Germany. But he anticipated at this time a slow advance which would protract the war into the next year. His strategical plan was now in course of revelation. The battle must begin mobile and be kept mobile; therefore, after striking a blow, he would stay his hand as soon as serious resistance developed. He would not permit himself to become accroché, as the British had been on the Somme, at Arras, and at Third Ypres, and as Ludendorff had been before Amiens and on the Lys. But, having stayed his hand, he would attack instantly in another place. Tanks permitted him to mount a new offensive rapidly and frequently, and gave him a means of obviating the clumsiness of the modern military machine. His policy must be a perpetual arpeggio along the whole front, which would wear down the enemy’s line and diminish by swift stages his reserves. He would be like a fencer pinking his antagonist, baffling him, wearying him, drawing much blood. There must be no attempt to give a premature coup de grâce. Following Napoleon’s maxim, he made it his business to keep the battle “nourished” till the moment came for the last stage. He would not press in any section for an ambitious advance or endeavour to force a decision. The campaign must develop organically like a process of nature.
Of this great plan, to which he had contributed, Haig was to be the chief executant. But the British commander, being closer to the actual battle, was beginning to fix a different date for the last act. He was steadily coming to believe that the curtain might fall before Christmas.
II
The temper of Britain through the spring and summer was heavy and apathetic, but now and then it revealed by little spurts of violence how near men and women were living to the outer edge of their nerves. The crisis of March and April had produced a new resolution, but it was a resolution which had no exhilaration in it and little hope. People had begun to doubt if the War would ever end. The night was still so black that they had forgotten that the darkest hour might presage the dawn. The exploit of Sir Roger Keyes at Zeebrugge on St. George’s Day woke a momentary thrill, for Britain will always react to a triumph of her Navy. But as the months passed, and the word from the battle-field was only of still further retreats and losses, the popular mind sank again into a dull listlessness.
The news of the turn of the tide in early August did not stir it, for it could not realise its meaning. Everybody was tired and underfed; the alternation of feverish work and feverish gaiety had unsettled their balance; an influenza epidemic, too, was each week claiming many hundreds of victims. There was another bout of spy hunting — a sure proof of frayed nerves. All over the country there were strikes among munition-workers, followed by trouble with the transport services, with the miners, and in August with the London police. These difficulties were solved by the easy method of increasing wages, but sober people began to wonder where this facile business of doles would end. Those in authority, aware that the last stage was approaching, and knowing something of the state of the German people, were anxiously questioning themselves whether a rot might not set in at the very end to nullify all our sacrifice. . . . And then, suddenly, in the autumn the country awoke to the meaning of the news from France. At last we were winning — winning beyond belief. Without excitement, but with a deep half-conscious relief, Britain steadied herself, as a runner steadies himself for the last lap of a race.
Slowly minds began to turn from the preoccupation of the Western Front, and, since we were winning over the whole globe, to realise something of the vastness of the War. It was a task for the imagination since no man’s experience could cover all the many fields. An observer on some altitude in the north, like the Hill of Cassel, on some evening that September, could look east and note the great arc from the dunes at Nieuport to the coalfields at Lens lit with the flashes of guns and the gleam of star-shells. That was a line of fifty miles — far greater than any battle-field in the old wars; but it was a mere fragment of the whole. Had he moved south to the ridge of Vimy he would have looked on another fifty miles of an intenser strife. South, again, to Bapaume, and he would have marked the wicked glow from Cambrai to the Oise. Still journeying, from some little height between the Oise and the Aisne, he would have scanned the long front which was now creeping round the shattered woods of St. Gobain to where Laon sat on its hill. From the mounts about Rheims he might have seen France’s battle line among the bleak Champagne downs, and from a point in the Argonne the trenches of the Americans on both sides of the Meuse, running into the dim woody country where the Moselle flowed towards Metz. Past the Gap of Nancy and down the long scarp of the Vosges went the flicker of fire and the murmur of combat, till the French lines stretched into the plain of Alsace and exchanged greetings with sentinels on the Swiss frontier. Such a battle-ground might well have seemed beyond the dream of mortals, and yet it was but a part of the whole.
A celestial intelligence, with sight unlimited by distance, could have looked eastward, and, beyond the tangle of the Alps, witnessed a strange sight. From the Stelvio to the Adriatic ran another front, continuous through glacier-camps and rock-eyries and trenches on the edge of the eternal snows, to the pleasant foothills of the Lombard plain, and thence, by the gravel-beds of the Piave, to the lagoons of Venice. Beyond the Adriatic it ran through the dark hills of Albania, past lakes where the wild fowl wheeled at the unfamiliar sound of guns, beyond the Tcherna and Vardar and Struma valleys to the Ægean shores. It began again, when the Anatolian peninsula was left behind, and curved from the Palestine coast in a great loop north of Jerusalem across Jordan to the hills of Moab. Gazing over the deserts, he would have marked the flicker which told of mortal war passing beyond the ancient valleys of Euphrates and Tigris, up into the wild Persian ranges. And scattered flickers to the north would have led him to the Caspian shores, and beyond them to the table-land running to the Hindu Kush, which was the cradle of all the warring races. Passing north, his eyes would have seen the lights of the Allies from the Pacific coast westward to the Urals and the Volga, and little clusters far away on the shores of the Arctic sea.
The vision of such a celestial spectator, had it been unlimited by time as well as by space, would have embraced still stranger sights. It would have noted the Allied line in the West, stagnant for months, then creeping on imperceptibly as a glacier, then wavering in sections like a curtain in the wind, and at last moving steadily upon Germany. It would have beheld the old Eastern Front, from the Baltic to the Danube, pressing westward, checking and falling back; breaking in parts, gathering strength, and again advancing; and at last dying like a lingering sunset into darkness. Behind would have appeared a murderous glow, which was the flame of revolution. Turning to Africa, it would have noted the slow movement of little armies in West and East and South; handfuls of men creeping in wide circles among the Cameroons jungles till the land was theirs; converging lines of mounted t
roopers among the barrens of the German South-west, closing in upon the tin shanties of Windhoek; troops of all races traversing the mountain glens and dark green forests of German East Africa, till after months and years the enemy had become a batch of exiles. And farther off still, among the isles of the Pacific and on the Chinese coast, it would have seen men toiling under the same lash of war.
Looking seaward, the sight would have been not less marvellous. On every ocean of the world he would have observed the merchantmen of the Allies bringing supplies for battle. But in the North Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, in the Channel and the North Sea he would have seen uncanny things. Vessels would disappear as if by magic, and little warships would hurry about like some fishing fleet when shoals are moving. The merchantmen would huddle into flocks, with destroyers like lean dogs at their sides. He would have seen in the Scottish firths and among the isles of the Orkneys a mighty navy waiting, and ships from it scouring the waters of the North Sea, while inside the defences of Heligoland lay the decaying monsters of the German Fleet. And in the air over sea and land would have been a perpetual going and coming of aircraft like flies above the pool of war.
The observer, wherever on the globe his eyes were turned, would have found no area immune from the struggle. Every factory in Europe and America hummed by night and day to prepare the materials of strife. The economics of five continents had been transformed. The life of the remotest villages had suffered a strange metamorphosis. Far-away English hamlets were darkened because of air raids; little farms in Touraine, in the Scottish Highlands, in the Apennines, were untilled because there were no men; Armenia had lost half her people; the folk of North Syria were dying of famine; Indian villages and African tribes had been blotted out by plague; whole countries had ceased for the moment to exist, except as geographical terms. Such were but a few of the consequences of the kindling of war in a world grown too expert in destruction, a world where all nations were part one of another.
III
The advance to victory, like the Somme retreat, cannot be painted on broad lines, for it was composed of a multitude of interlinked actions. The first stage, completed by the first week of September, was the forcing of the enemy back to the Hindenburg Line, an achievement made certain by the breaking by the Canadians on September 2nd of the famous Drocourt-Quéant switch. In the south the Americans under Pershing cut off the St. Mihiel salient, and prepared for their drive northward. The next stage was the breaching of the Hindenburg defences, while Pershing attacked towards Mezières and the Belgians in the north towards Ghent — movements allotted to the last week of September.
It was now the turn of the British War Cabinet to have doubts, and, as it would have put the brake on Allenby in Palestine, so it would have held back Haig. But the British commander had reached the point which great soldiers come to sooner or later, when he could trust his instinct. On September 9th he told Lord Milner that the war would not drag on till next July, as was the view at home, but was on the eve of a decision. He had the supreme moral courage to take upon himself the full responsibility for a step which, if it failed, would blast his repute and lead to dreadful losses, but which, if it succeeded, would in his belief mean the end of the War, and prevent civilisation from crumbling through sheer fatigue.
He was justified of his fortitude. On September 26th forty British and two American divisions faced fifty-seven weak German divisions behind the strongest entrenchments in history. By the 29th they had crossed the Canal du Nord and the Scheldt canal, and in a week were through the whole defence system and in open country. By October 8th the last remnants of the Hindenburg zone had disappeared in a cataclysm. Foch’s conception had not been fully realised; Pershing had been set too hard a task and was not far enough forward, when the Hindenburg system gave, to pin the enemy to the trap which had been set. Nevertheless by October 10th Germany had been beaten in a battle which Foch described as a “classic example of the military art.” The day of doom was only postponed, and Ludendorff had now no refuge from the storm. Long before his broken divisions could reach the Meuse Germany would be on her knees.
For she was now losing all her allies. They had been the guardians of her flanks and rear, and if they fell she would be defenceless. On September 15th the Allied armies moved forward at Salonika, and within a week Bulgaria’s front had collapsed and she sought an armistice. On September 19th Allenby in Palestine opened an action which must remain a perfect instance of how, by surprise and mobility, a decisive victory may be won almost without fighting. This last crusade would have startled the soul of St. Louis and Raymond and Richard of England could they have beheld the amazing army which undertook it. Algerian and Indian Moslems, Arab tribesmen, men of the thousand creeds of Hindustan, African negroes and Jewish battalions were among the liberators of the sacred land of Christendom. Breaking the defence in the plain of Sharon, Allenby sent his 15,000 cavalry in a wide sweep to cut the enemy’s line of communications and block his retreat, while Feisal and Lawrence east of Jordan distracted his attention. The operations moved like clockwork. In two days the Turkish armies west of Jordan had been destroyed, while that on the east bank was being shepherded north by the Arabs to its destruction. By October 1st Damascus was in our hands, Aleppo surrendered on October 26th, and on the last day of the month Turkey capitulated. Meantime on the anniversary of Caporetto Italy had made her last advance, and the Austrian forces, which had suffered desperately for four years and were now at the end of their endurance, melted away. With her gallant army crumbled the country. On November 4th an armistice was arranged, and at the same time the Dual Monarchy broke up into fragments. The Emperor was left alone and unfriended in the vast echoing corridors of Schönbrunn.
While Foch continued to play his deadly arpeggio in the West, Germany strove by diplomacy to arrest the inevitable. Ludendorff stuck to his idea of a strategical defence to compel better terms, till his physical health failed and with it his nerve; but the civilian statesmen believed that the army was beyond hope, and that there must be no delay in making peace. They knew — what the soldiers did not realise — that the splendid fortitude of the German people was breaking, disturbed by Allied propaganda and weakened with suffering. The home front was dissolving quicker than the battle front. The virus of revolution, which Germany had fostered in Russia, was stealing into her own veins.
She appealed to President Wilson and attempted to secure peace on the basis of his Fourteen Points, but he very properly replied that the armistice which she sought was a matter for the Allied leaders in the field. From the meeting at Spa on September 29th till the early days of November there was a frenzied effort by German statesmen to win something by negotiations which their armies were incapable of enforcing. But “Time’s wingéd chariot” would not wait upon their appeals, for the condition of their land was too desperate. Popular feeling was on the side of Scheidemann’s view, “Better a terrible end than terror without end.” The American President had curtly informed Germany that, so long as he had to deal with military and monarchical autocrats, he must require “not negotiation but surrender.” But the height of the storm is not the moment to recast a constitution, and for the old Germany the only way was not reform but downfall.
No generous mind likes to contemplate the despairing surrender of a gallant adversary. By the end of October the German Fleet had mutinied. On the 26th Ludendorff resigned, and the High Command was superseded by the new proselytes of democracy. Everywhere in Germany kings and courts were tumbling down, and various brands of socialists were assuming power. On November 9th the Emperor abdicated and fled to Holland. In the field the German armies were not in retreat but in flight. An armistice had now become a matter of life or death, and on November 6th the German delegates left Berlin to sue for one. Haig and Milner were in favour of moderation in its demands, but Foch was implacable — it must be such as to leave the enemy no power of resistance, and be a pledge both for reparations and security. The delegates had perforce to accept his term
s. Very early on the morning of the 11th the document was signed, and it was arranged that on the whole front hostilities should cease at 11 a.m.
It is clear that the Armistice could not have been refused by the Allies, both on grounds of common humanity and in view of the exhaustion of their own troops. It is clear, too, that it was an unconditional surrender, except that it was negotiated before the hands of the fighting men were formally held up in the field. It provided the victors with all that they desired and all that the conquered could give. Its terms meant precisely what they said — so much and no more. Mr. Wilson’s Fourteen Points were not a part of them; the Armistice had no connection with any later peace treaties. It may be argued with justice that the negotiations by the various Governments between October 5th and November 5th involved a declaration of principle by the Allies which they were morally bound to observe in the ultimate settlement. But such a declaration bore no relation to the Armistice. That was an affair between soldiers, a thing sought by Germany under the pressure of dire necessity to avoid the utter destruction of her armed manhood. It would have come about though Mr. Wilson had never indited a single note. In the field since July 15th Germany had lost to the British armies 188,700 prisoners and 2,840 guns; to the French 139,000 prisoners and 1,880 guns; to the Americans 44,000 prisoners and 1,421 guns; to the Belgians 14,500 prisoners and 474 guns. In the field, because she could not do otherwise, she made full and absolute surrender.