PART IV.--DIPLOMATIC PAPERS RELATING TO THE ORIGIN OF THE WAR,

COLLATED FROM THE OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS

List of Official Documents 313

List of Sovereigns and Diplomats 315

Important Dates Preceding the War 325

Warnings of Hostile Intentions 328

Report of M. Cambon in 1913 335

The Assassination of the Austrian Archduke 341

Attempts at Mediation 356

The Austro-hungarian Note to Serbia 362

Text of the Note 366

Controversy Over Time Limit 369

Chronological Arrangement of Dates 370

Serbia's Reply to the Austro-Hungarian Note 394

Beginning of Mobilization 401

Kaiser and Czar Exchange Telegrams 438

Henry of Prussia and George V 451

Sir Edward Grey Refuses Terms of Neutrality 455

Further Exchanges Between William and Nicholas 461

Russia Explains Her Efforts for Peace 482

German Declaration of Intentions Toward Belgium 487

Serbia's Position Explained 488

Von Bethmann-Hollweg Explains Germany's Position in The Reichstag 498

Sir Edward Goschen's Interview with Von Jagow 502

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

King George and King Albert Inspecting Belgian Troops _Frontispiece_

Opposite Page

George V, King of Great Britain and Emperor of India 46

M. Raymond Poincare, President of France 78

Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias 142

Wilhelm II, German Emperor and King of Prussia 206

Franz Josef I, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary 270

Albert I, King of Belgium 318

King Peter of Serbia 382

Vittorio Emanuele III, King of Italy 446

LIST OF MAPS

Page

Conflicting Interests of the Great Powers in Europe, Africa and Asia (_Colored Map_) _Front Insert_

Europe in Twelfth Century, Historical Map 137

Europe in 1648-1789, Historical Map 150

Europe in 1793-1815, Historical Map 193

Balkan States Before the First Balkan War 217

Balkans After the Second Balkan War 254

Austria, 1815-1914 264

Poland and Its Divisions from 1772-1914 277

Armies of the Contesting Nations 293

Navies of the Contesting Nations 298

German-French Frontier, Fortresses of 303

German Confederation of 1815 307

German-Belgian Frontier, Strategic Railroads on 311

WHAT THE WAR MEANS TO AMERICA

By MAJOR GENERAL LEONARD WOOD, U. S. A.

"Go yourselves, every man of you, and stand in the ranks and either a victory beyond all victories in its glory awaits you, or falling you shall fall greatly, and worthy of your past."--DEMOSTHENES TO THE ATHENIANS.

What lesson will America draw from the present Great War? Must she see the heads of her own children at the foot of the guillotine to realize that it will cut, or will she accept the evidence of the thousands which have lain there before? Will she heed the lesson of all time, that national unpreparedness means national downfall, or will she profit from the experience and misfortunes of others and take those needed measures of preparedness which prudence and wisdom dictate. In a word, will she draw any valuable lessons from the Great War? This is the question which is so often asked. As yet there is no answer.

It is the question uppermost in the minds of all those who are intelligently interested in our country's welfare and safety. It is the question which vitally concerns all of us, as it concerns the defense and possibly the very existence of our nation. The answer must be "Preparedness." If we are to live, preparedness to oppose the force of wrong with the strength of right. Will it be? That's the question! Or will America drift on blind to the lessons of the world tragedy, heedless of consequences, concerned with the accumulation of wealth, satiated with a sense of moral worth which the world does not so fully recognize, planning to capture the commerce of the warring nations, and expecting at the same time to retain their friendship and regard. Let us hope that, in the light of what is, and as a preparation against what may be, the answer will be characteristic of a great people, peaceful but prudent and foreseeing; that it will be thorough, carefully thought-out preparedness; preparedness against war. A preparedness which if it is to be lasting and secure must be founded upon the moral organization of our people; an organization which will create and keep alive in the heart of every citizen a sense not only of obligation for service to the nation in time of war or trouble, but also of obligation to so prepare himself as to render this service effective. An organization which will recognize that the basic principle upon which a free democracy or representative government rests, and must rest, if they are to survive the day of stress and trouble, is, that with manhood suffrage goes manhood obligation for service, not necessarily with arms in hand, but for service somewhere in that great complex mass which constitutes the organization of a nation's might and resources for defense; organization which will make us think in terms of the nation and not those of city, State, or personal interest; organization which will result in all performing service for the nation with singleness of purpose in a common cause--preparedness for defense: preparedness to discharge our plain duty whatever it may be. Such service will make for national solidarity, the doing away with petty distinctions of class and creed, and fuse the various elements of this people into one homogeneous mass of real Americans, and leave us a better and a stronger people.

Once such a moral organization is accomplished, the remaining organization will be simple. This will include an organization of transportation, on land and sea, and of communications. An organization of the nation's industrial resources so that the energy of its great manufacturing plants may be promptly turned into making what they can best make to supply the military needs of the nation. By military needs we mean all the complex requirements of a nation engaged in war, requirements which are, many of them, requirements of peace as well as of war. It will also include a thorough organization of the country's chemical resources and the development thereof, so that we may be as little dependent as possible upon materials from oversea. At present many important and essential elements come from oversea nations and would not be available in case of loss of sea control. We must devise substitutes or find means of making these things. Chemistry is one of the great weapons of modern war. There must also be organization which will provide a regular army organized on sound lines, supplied with ample reserves of men and material; an army adequate to the peace needs of the nation, which means, among other things, the secure garrisoning of our oversea possessions, including the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands. These latter are the key to the Pacific, and one of the main defenses of the Pacific Coast and of the Panama Canal. Whoever holds these islands will dominate the trade routes of the Pacific, and in a large measure the Pacific itself.

The regular army should also be sufficient for the secure holding and safeguarding of the Panama Canal, an instrument of war of the greatest importance, so long as it is in our control, greatly increasing the value of our navy, and an implement of commerce of tremendous value, a possession so valuable and of such vital importance to us that we cannot allow it to lie outside our secure grasp.

It must also be adequate to provide garrisons in Porto Rico and Alaska, and at the same time maintain in the continental United States a force of coast artillery sufficient to furnish the necessary manning details for our seacoast defenses, and a mobile force complete in every detail and adequate in time of war to meet the first shock of an invasion and sufficient in time of peace to meet the various demands made upon it for home service, such as troops for home emergencies or disorders, troops for the necessary training of the National Militia, also sufficient officers and noncommissioned officers for duty at schools, colleges, military training camps and in various other capacities. It must be also strong enough to provide a strong expeditionary force, such as we sent to Cuba in 1898, without interfering with its regular duties.

The necessity of building and maintaining an adequate navy, well balanced, thoroughly equipped and maintained at the highest standard of efficiency and ready always for immediate service, with necessary adjuncts afloat and ashore, is also one of the clear lessons of the war; others are the establishment of ammunition plants at points sufficiently remote from the seacoast, and so placed as to render their capture and destruction improbable in case of sudden invasion; the provision of an adequate reserve corps of 50,000 officers, a number sufficient for one and one-half million of citizen soldiers; officers well trained and ready for immediate service; the provision of adequate supplies and reserve supplies of artillery, arms, and ammunition of all types for these troops.

We must also build up a system under which officers and men for our citizen soldiery can be trained with the minimum of interference with their educational or industrial careers, under conditions which will permit the accomplishment of their training during the period of youth, and once this is accomplished will permit their return to their normal occupations with the minimum of delay.

The lesson which we should draw from the Great War is that nothing should be left to chance or to the promise of others, or to the fair-weather relations of to-day; that we should be as well prepared, and as well organized on land as Switzerland, a nation without a trace of militarism, and yet so thoroughly prepared and so thoroughly ready and able to defend herself that to-day her territory is inviolate, although she is surrounded by warring nations.

Belgium to-day is an illustration of what may be expected from lack of adequate preparedness.

The great outstanding lesson of the war is that we must not trust to righteousness and fair dealing alone; we must be prepared to play our part, and while loving justice and dealing fairly with others, we must be always ready to do our full duty, and to defend our country with force if need be. If we do not, we shall always be helpless and at the mercy of our enemies. We can be strong, yet tolerant, just, yet prepared to defend ourselves against aggression.

Another lesson is that our military establishment on land and sea should not be dependent upon a system of militia and volunteers. These will not be found adequate under the conditions of modern war, and above all we should appreciate the fact that our military system must be founded upon _equality of service, rich and poor alike_. We must while extending equality of privilege to all, including the thousands who are coming to us every day, insist upon equality of obligation by all. With the privileges of citizenship must go the obligations and responsibilities not only in peace but also in war.

We should take heed of the lessons of the past, and remember that the volunteer system has always failed us in our wars. Such experience as we have had in war in recent years has in no way prepared us for a war with a first-class nation prepared for war. We have never engaged in such a war unaided. This experience is one which is still before us. We should look upon service for the nation in the same way as we look upon the payment of taxes, or the compliance with the thousand and one laws and regulations which govern our everyday life.

Relatively few people would voluntarily pay taxes even though they knew the money was to go to the best of purposes. They pay taxes because the law requires it. The people as a whole cannot be expected, nor can we with safety trust to their performing their military duties effectively, unless some general system of equal service for all who are physically fit, is prescribed, some system which will insure preparation in advance of war, some system which will _bear upon all alike_. The volunteer spirit is superb, but the volunteer system is not a dependable system to which to trust the life and security of the people, especially in these days when the highest degree of organization marks all nations with whom we may possibly have some day differences which will result in the use of force. The militia, willing as it is, cannot be depended upon as a reliable military asset. Its very method of control makes it an undependable force, and at times unavailable. The men and officers are not at fault; they have done all that could be expected under a system which renders efficiency almost impossible of attainment. The militia must be absolutely and completely transferred to Federal control; it must cease to be a State and become a Federal force, without any relationship whatever with the State.

The militia must have thoroughly trained reserves sufficient in number to bring it promptly to war strength. The infantry of the National Guard, as in the regular army, is maintained on a peace footing at rather less than half its maximum strength.

For a number of years we have been confronted by conditions which may involve the use of a considerable force of troops, a force exceeding the regular army and perhaps even the regular army in conjunction with the militia. This means that a thousand or more men would have to be added to each regular and National Guard infantry regiment to bring it to full strength. In the National Guard only a small proportion of the men have had long service and thorough training, and if brought to full strength through the injection of a thousand practically untrained men it would mean these regiments would go to the front with not over 30 per cent of well-trained men. In other words, they would be military assemblages of well-meaning, but undisciplined and untrained individuals, and unless we are to repeat the experiences of '98 it will be necessary to hold them for several months in camp and put them through a course of the most intensive training. It is probable that if they are called it will be under an emergency which will not permit such training, and we shall see again the scenes of '98, untrained, willing boys, imperfectly equipped under inexperienced officers, rushed to the front, willing but a more or less useless sacrifice.

Another great lesson should be to heed no longer those false prophets who have been proclaiming that the day of strife has passed, and that everything is to be settled by arbitration; prophets of the class who obstructed preparation in England, who decried universal military training, and all but delivered her into the hands of her enemies.

"Our culture must, therefore, not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season that he is born into a state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace; but warned, self-collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder; let him take both reputation and life in his hands, and with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and rectitude of his behavior."--EMERSON.

NAVAL LESSONS OF THE WAR

By REAR ADMIRAL AUSTIN M. KNIGHT, U. S. N.

Although the greatest war in history is not yet at an end, and none of us can even guess when the end will come, it is possible to draw certain very important conclusions from the developments to date, especially in so far as these developments are concerned with war upon the sea. The great sea fight for which the world has looked since its two greatest naval powers went to war against each other has not taken place. It may never take place, although both sides profess that they are eager for it. And until it does take place, the final word will not be spoken as to the relations between guns and armor, between battleships and battle cruisers, or between either of these types of "capital" ships on the one hand, and the destroyer and submarine on the other.

The submarine has proven its power, it is true, and against the battleship; but always where the element of _surprise_ has entered into its attack in quite a different fashion from that which is inherent in its always mysterious and stealthy nature. The battle cruiser has shown the value of speed and long-range guns combined, but in a comparatively restricted field. The destroyer has played a part in coast patrol and has doubtless accounted for a number of submarines; but in its proper sphere of activity it has accomplished nothing. And the wonderful achievements of the airship have been practically confined to operations on land. We have waited vainly and shall continue so to wait for the one supreme lesson which the war has been expected to yield, unless it chance that on some day to be forever memorable in the annals of the world there shall sweep out upon the stormy waters of the North Sea two fleets complete in every type of craft that human ingenuity has thus far contrived, to engage in a struggle to the death--a struggle by which the issue of the war may be decided in an hour, and in a fashion incomparably more dramatic than anything which the warfare on land, with all its horrors, has presented or by any possibility can present.

Pending this one great lesson, what is it that the war has taught?

First of all, it has taught once more the old, old lesson that has been taught by practically every war in which sea power has been a factor, that where this element is a factor, it is a factor of decisive importance. The British navy may not win the war for England, but it is every day more apparent that if the British navy did not exist, or if it dominated the sea less decisively than it does, the cause for which England stands would be a lost cause. And the extraordinary feature of the situation is that the navy is accomplishing its mission by merely existing. Thus far the "Grand Fleet" has not struck a blow. From its position on the English coast it looks across to the mouth of the Kiel Canal, and--waits! Its patrols are always on guard, the coasts which it defends are never threatened, and the commerce which trusts to its protection comes and goes with practically no thought of danger. For several months during the submarine campaign against commerce, something like one-half of one per cent of the merchant vessels bound to and from the ports of England were sunk. But no industry was crippled for a moment, and neither the necessities nor the luxuries of life were appreciably curtailed. Even at the height of the submarine operations, great transports loaded with troops crossed the English Channel freely, and out of a million and a half of soldiers so transported not a single one was lost. It is safe to say that in any three months since the war began the British navy has repaid the cost of its maintenance for a century in pounds, shillings, and pence; and in the sense of security which its existence and efficiency have imparted to the English people, the return upon the investment has been beyond all calculation.

The first and greatest lesson of the war, then, is this--that the value of an effective navy, when the time comes for it to manifest its effectiveness, is out of all proportion to the sums, vast though these may be, that it has cost; that if it overmatches the opposing navy decisively enough, the country behind it may rest secure and serenely indifferent to the thought of invasion or even of attack, so far as its sea frontier is concerned; and that the navy--still assuming it to be of commanding strength--may accomplish its whole mission of defense without ever being called upon to strike a blow.

It can hardly be necessary to point out the fact that this lesson may be read in terms of "preparedness." The British navy was prepared when the war began; the British army was not. The German army was prepared; the German navy was not--in the sense of being large enough for its mission. With these facts in mind, we have only to look at the contrast between the progress of the war on land and that on the sea to read the whole lesson of preparedness in a form so concrete that it is hard to understand how any observer can fail to grasp its full significance.

Among the minor lessons of the war, it will probably appear to most laymen that the unforeseen effectiveness of the submarine is the most significant. In a way this is true; but the significance of the lesson may be dangerously exaggerated unless we recognize the part contributed to the early successes of the submarine by the element of surprise to which allusion has already been made. When the war began, the submarine was an untried and an almost unknown weapon, and the British navy was rather contemptuous of it, or at least indifferent toward it. Its dramatic appearance in the North Sea at early dawn of a misty September morning was as great a surprise to the three British cruisers which it sank in rapid succession as the story of the disaster was to the world at large. The fact that the cruisers by their carelessness invited the fate which came to them does not, of course, deprive the incident of significance. But after all, the world has never doubted that a submarine could sink a ship that practically insisted upon being sunk.

As a result of this experience, British men-of-war operating thereafter in what they considered submarine territory, took reasonable precautions; and in such waters no other important successes have been scored against them. But neither to them nor, probably, to anyone else except their adversaries, did it occur that a submarine could make its way from the North Sea to the Dardanelles. And so it came about that when one of them appeared there, it found conditions again ideal for surprise, and taking advantage of these conditions delivered its attack and scored a success as striking as the earlier one in its own home waters.

The activities of submarines against merchant shipping we need not discuss here. The only lesson they hold for us, from the point of view of naval warfare, is the lesson that for them, as for all other activities of the submarine, there is an answer. The answer was not ready when the war began, but it was not long delayed. We are apt to think of the submarine as if it always operated under water, and completely under water. But when it is completely under water, it is completely blind and as helpless as other blind things are. To see objects at a distance, it must be on the surface, and to see them even close at hand it must at least expose its periscope. Having definitely located an object within easy range, it may wholly submerge and deliver its torpedo without seeing the target. But the chance of a hit under these conditions is remote. Normally the submarine remains on the surface until it sights an enemy. Having approached as close as seems practicable without danger of being seen itself, it submerges, _except for the periscope_, and approaches within range, directing its course and its aim, _by sight_--not by some occult instinct such as is often attributed to it. When within a zone where imminent danger threatens, it may remain wholly submerged for a long period of time, but when so submerged, it is not in any degree a threat to other craft.

In other words, the submarine is dangerous only when it can see. And when it can see, it can be seen--not easily perhaps, but certainly by an observer reasonably close at hand and on the lookout. It is especially liable to detection from an airship. Moreover, the noise of its propellers can be heard at a considerable distance, and a very sensitive microphone has been developed as a submarine detector. The waters about Great Britain are now patrolled by hundreds of small, fast craft--destroyers, trawlers, motor boats--always on the lookout for a periscope or other indication of the proximity of a submarine. If one is actually seen, its capture or destruction follows as a matter of course. If the presence of one is indicated by the microphone or other evidence, such as oil floating on the water, or bubbles rising to the surface, nets are lowered and the water dragged for miles around. It is not known how many submarines have been destroyed by these tactics, but the number is unquestionably large. Thus the submarine is being robbed of much of its mystery and much of its terror, and while it remains, and will always remain, a danger, the lesson of the war is that it must take its place beside other dangers with which modern war is filled, as something to be respected and feared, but not as having rendered the battleship and battle cruiser obsolete.

Another lesson of the war has resulted from the fact that practically all of the important operations on the British side have been conducted by battle cruisers, not by battleships. It is not to be understood from this that the battleship has been discredited, for such is not the case. The fleet to which reference has already been made as holding the gates of the North Sea and "containing" the German fleet behind the fortifications of Helgoland is made up principally of battleships, and it is largely because they have been engaged in this important duty that the few opportunities which the war has offered for active service have fallen to the lot of battle cruisers. But there are other reasons for this which spring from the nature of the battle cruiser itself and inhere in the difference between this type and the battleship. In size the types are practically identical, and in power of armament the difference is not great. But the battle cruiser sacrifices much of the armor by which the battleship is weighted down, and purchases by this sacrifice a great increase in speed. The typical battleship of to-day has some 14 inches of armor on the side; the battle cruiser, from 5 to 9 inches. The battleship has 22 knots speed, the battle cruiser 32 knots. There has been much discussion as to the relative merits of the two types, and conservative officers have been slow to accept the battle cruiser. The war has shown the necessity for both types, and no better illustration of their relative merits could be wished than that which is afforded by the spectacle of the battleships engaged in what is practically a blockade of the German fleet, while the battle cruisers have swept the German raiders, the _Scharnhorst_, _Gneisenau_, and their consorts, from the distant seas which were the chosen field of their operations. Following the destruction of Admiral Cradock's little squadron by the faster and more heavily armed _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_, the British admiralty dispatched a squadron of battle cruisers to run down the German ships, and in the battle off the Falkland Islands the history of Coronel was repeated with a change of sides, the fast and heavily armed battle cruisers under Admiral Sturdee making short work of the German ships, which they overmatched in speed and range as decisively as the Germans had overmatched the ships of Admiral Cradock's squadron at Coronel. In each case victory went to the ships of high speed and long-range guns, and these two are the determining characteristics of the battle cruiser. In the action of January 25, 1915, in the North Sea, the same characteristics won again. Battle cruisers were engaged on both sides, but the side which had the advantage in speed and range won the fight.

Thus the battle cruiser had justified itself, and its justification is one of the striking lessons of the war. We may believe that the lesson will be emphasized if the time ever comes when this type finds the opportunity to display its adaptability for work in certain other fields for which it was originally designed--in scouting operations, for example, and in flanking movements in connection with a fleet engagement.

It does not appear that aeroplanes were used for scouting in any of the operations in the open sea--either as preliminary to the battle off Coronel and the Falklands, or in the search for raiders like the _Emden_ and the _Karlsruhe_. They have been used, however, in the waters about the British Islands, and with such marked success as to leave no doubt that they would have been of great value in search operations on a larger scale. They were used also for directing the fire of ships on the fortifications at the Dardanelles, and the results indicate that they have an important field of usefulness for directing the fire of one ship or fleet against another. It is to be expected that from this time forward, vessels fitted for carrying and launching both air and water planes will accompany fleets, and it is impossible to think of a scout to be designed after the lessons of this war, which will not carry several of them. As the scouts are the eyes of the fleet, so the aeroplanes will be the eyes of the scouts, extending the scouting range by several hundred miles and making secrecy of operations at sea almost as impossible as they have already made it on land.

Allusion has already been made to the use of aeroplanes--flying not more than a few hundred feet above the water--for locating submarines; and it is not difficult to understand how effective a waterplane would be for destroying a periscope, or even a submarine itself--this last, perhaps, by dropping a bomb.

The lesson of the torpedo is connected with that of the submarine, but has many features which are individual to itself. It is known that within a very few years past the range and accuracy of the torpedo have greatly increased, but there is little evidence connecting these features with the performance of torpedoes in the present war. So far as known, the submarines have done most of their effective work at short ranges where hits were to be expected. And no one will ever know how many shots have missed. The great outstanding lesson thus far is the extraordinary destructiveness of the torpedoes that have found their mark. It would never have been believed two years ago that ships like the _Cressy_, _Aboukir_, and _Hogue_ would turn turtle a few minutes after a single blow from a torpedo. Still less would it have seemed possible to sink a _Lusitania_ in fifteen minutes. A torpedo might, of course, produce an extraordinary effect if it chanced to strike a boiler compartment or a magazine. But it does not appear that this happened in any one of the many disasters in question. It has been said that the German torpedoes carry an exceptionally heavy explosive charge, the extra weight having been gained by a sacrifice in speed and range. This may in part explain their effectiveness, but when all allowance is made for what we know or guess along this and similar lines, the fact remains that the torpedo has shown itself a weapon of vastly greater destructive power than the world has heretofore attributed to it.

The story of the Dardanelles campaign has illustrated again the futility of attacking land fortifications by battleships. Attacks of this kind have never succeeded, and the temptation is strong to accept the theory that in planning these operations the British anticipated little or no resistance from those in command of the forts. It was conceivable that the forts could be passed--as were those at New Orleans and Mobile Bay by Farragut--but not that they could be reduced by the gun fire of ships. Information is lacking as to the damage actually done. It was probably greater than the defenders have admitted; but it evidently fell far short of silencing the forts. If the world needed a new demonstration of the power of forts to stand out against ships, we may put this down as one more lesson of the war.

An important revelation of the war is the smoothness and rapidity with which large bodies of troops, with all their impedimenta--horses, artillery, etc.--have been transported by water. This has, of course, been possible only for Great Britain and her allies, and for them only because they have held unchallenged the command of the sea. It is thus, first of all, a confirmation of the lesson with which this paper opened--the lesson that command of the sea is a factor of the very first importance in any war in which it is a factor at all. It is secondarily a lesson in the ease with which a nation which has command of the sea can, in these days of large fast steamers, transport its military forces in practically unlimited numbers to any distance that may be desired. It is thus an answer to the protestations of those who insist that the United States is secured against the danger of invasion by the thousands of miles of water which separate its coasts from those of possible enemies; for it demonstrates what has, from the day of the first Atlantic crossing by a steamship, become more and more notably a fact--that the oceans which separate frontiers for certain purposes, connect them for other purposes and especially for purposes of transit and transportation. The term "Ocean Highway" is no mere figure of speech. The millions of troops that have passed by water from England into France have made the passage with infinitely less difficulty than has been connected with the further passage by land to the fighting lines; and the hundreds of thousands from England, France, India, and Australia, which have assembled in the Near East could not have covered the distances that they have covered, if they had moved by land, in ten times the number of days they have occupied in moving by sea. The sea being clear of enemy ships, the route from Liverpool to the Dardanelles has been a lane for an easy and pleasant promenade. With the Atlantic and Pacific controlled by the fleets of nations at war with us, their waters would invite, rather than impede, the movement of an army to our shores. It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance of this lesson for the United States.

A rather grewsome lesson, but one which cannot be ignored, is that in a naval battle, there are, at the end, neither "wounded", "missing", nor "prisoners" to be reported. A ship defeated is, and will be, in a great majority of cases, a ship sunk; and sinking, she will sink with all on board. Some few exceptions there may be, but the rule can hardly fail to be as thus stated. One of the first things that a ship does in preparing for battle is to get rid of her boats; and, as both her companions and her opponents are sure to do the same, her crew can neither help themselves nor look for help from friends or enemies. The _Good Hope_ and the _Monmouth_ went down in the battle off Coronel leaving not a single survivor to tell the story of their destruction. Following the battle off the Falkland Islands, the British picked up a few survivors from the German ships, but not enough to contradict the rule. In the running engagement in the North Sea on January 25, 1915, the _Bluecher_ went down with 650 out of 900 of her crew. Scarcely a man was saved from the _Cressy_, the _Aboukir_, or the _Hogue_. And so the story runs, and so it must always run when modern ships fight in earnest.

One of the most striking features of the engagements up to the present time is the range at which they have been fought. A few years ago 10,000 yards was considered the extreme range at which ships would open fire. The ranges used in the Russo-Japanese War varied from 3,000 to 8,000 yards, and the battle off Tsushima was decided at less than 6,000 yards. In the present war the ranges have been nearly three times as great as these. In the battle off Coronel, the _Good Hope_ was sunk at 12,000 yards, the _Monmouth_ at a little less. In the battle off the Falkland Islands, both sides opened fire at 17,000 yards, and the German ships were sunk at approximately 16,000 yards. The running fight in the North Sea opened at 18,000 yards, and the _Bluecher_ was sunk at 15,000 yards. This extraordinary increase in the fighting range corresponds in a measure to an increase in accuracy of fire, but it corresponds also to a new recognition of the enormous advantage which may result from a fortunate hit early in the action. The theoretical advantage which should result from this has been confirmed by practical experience, and it may be regarded as certain that battle ranges hereafter will conform more nearly to those off Coronel than to those of Tsushima.

To summarize: The great outstanding naval lesson of the war is this: That a nation whose navy commands the sea can rest secure, so far as its sea frontier is concerned, from the fear of invasion or of serious attack; that, further, its command of the sea insures to its commerce the freedom of the sea; and that, finally, this freedom extends equally to its armed forces, to which the highways of the sea are opened wide, affording a possibility of offense at distant points which is denied to the forces of the enemy.

Perhaps the lesson second in importance is that, owing to the rapid march of invention in these days of progress, it is to be expected that every war which comes suddenly upon the world will come with certain elements of surprise, some of them startling in their power and effectiveness, some of them giving promise of much and accomplishing comparatively little. However surprising and however effective the best of these may be, they will fall short of revolutionizing warfare, but they may profoundly modify it; and the nation which has them ready for use in the beginning will gain an initial advantage which may go far toward determining the issue of the war.

Lessons of more limited significance have to do with the effectiveness of the submarine and the unexpected radius of action of which it has shown itself capable; the amazing destructive power of the torpedo; the value of the battle cruiser, both for the defense of a coast from raiding expeditions, and for operations in distant seas where speed is needed to bring an enemy to action, and heavy guns to insure his destruction; the difficulty of reducing shore fortifications by fire from ships; the necessity of aeroplanes for scouting at sea, and the modifications in naval strategy and tactics which will result from their general adoption.

After many months of sparring between the British and German naval forces in the North Sea, an important engagement took place on May 31, 1916, between the two main fleets. Exactly what forces were engaged will probably not be known until the end of the war, and it is certain that we must wait long for definitely reliable reports as to the losses on the two sides. It is already clear, however, that the encounter has added little to our knowledge of naval warfare. British battle cruisers engaged German battleships at close range and were badly punished. In this there was nothing new or instructive. Nor has anything new or instructive developed from what is thus far known of other phases of the battle. Indeed the one and only striking feature of the battle appears to be the fact that everything occurred practically as it might have been expected to occur. Neither submarines nor destroyers, neither Zeppelins nor aeroplanes provided any startling features. The only lesson thus far apparent is the old one that while dash and audacity have their place in warfare, they need the directing and steadying hand of judgment and of skill.

THE WORLD'S WAR

By FREDERICK PALMER

INITIAL STRATEGY

In innumerable volumes future generations will learn the details of this war: and the discussions among delving historians will never end. For our time a simpler task is the service set for us. We require a record of the essential facts of the struggle arranged with a sense of historical perspective.

For forty years the great nations of Europe had had universal service. Every able-bodied youth, unless his government chose to excuse him, became a soldier. For forty years the diplomatists had held the balance of power so delicately poised that the mighty armed forces all kept to their own sides of their frontiers. It was in the era of modern invention and man's mastery of material power that these great armies were formed and trained for the war that was to test their steel.

Where Napoleon marched a hundred thousand men along parallel roads, the modern general sends his millions on railroad trains. The problem for each nation when war came was to concentrate with a greater rapidity than its adversary its enormous masses of men and guns against the enemy; and success in this was not due as in former days to speed of foot over good highways such as the Romans and Napoleon built, but to organized railroad and automobile transport or rather the prompt employment of all the industrial resources of the nation for war alone.

Out of the conflicting reports day by day emerge to the observer as he reviews the progress of the war, with the map before him, plans of campaign as simple in their broad lines as in Caesar's or Alexander's day. Generals fighting with a million or two million men under their command have held to the same principles as if they had only ten or fifteen thousand.

All schools of successful warfare have believed in the offensive; in quick decisive blows which take the enemy by surprise and find him unready if possible. They hold that the army in rest must always be beaten by the army which takes the initiative. This partly explains the frequent small actions indicated by the reports of trenches taken in assault along the western front, while the lines occupied by the armies did not radically change. Such actions are the natural expression by any spirited force of its sense of initiative. Unless you sometimes take some of the enemy's trenches, he will be taking yours. By striking him in one section you may prevent him from striking you in another. Von Moltke and the other great German generals were only following in the footsteps of Napoleon when they taught that the offensive should be the first thought of every soldier.

The offensive naturally seeks to flank its adversary. Lieutenant General Winfield Scott once stated that if two lines of men, without any officers, were placed in a field, one line would inevitably try to get around the end of the other. The immensity of the forces, the power and precision of modern armies in defense has lengthened the battle fronts from a mile or a mile and a half in Napoleon's time to hundreds of miles.

It is an old rule, that you cannot break through a battle front, which means that you are thrusting in a wedge which will draw fire on both sides. Pickett tried to break a battle front at Gettysburg. A frontal attack which was no less pitiful in its results was that of the Federals at Fredericksburg. Grant's hammering tactics against Lee succeeded only by the flanking operations of superior numbers.

Strategically, the situation of the Central Powers was extremely strong. Aside from the fact that their preparedness in numbers of trained men, in arms and material, is too well known for mention here, their excellent network of railways enabled them to make rapid concentration. They had what is known as the interior line, which gave Meade his advantage at Gettysburg. Whether the interior line is three miles or a thousand miles long does not affect the principle involved. Interior lines mean quick transportation of reserves from point to point in concentration. It does not matter whether their numbers are hundreds or hundreds of thousands; the advantage is intrinsically the same. Joffre had probably fifteen hundred thousand on the interior line of the Marne. Meade had seventy thousand at Gettysburg.

In keeping with all great plans that of the Central Powers was extremely simple. Austria was to look after Russia. She could mobilize more rapidly than Russia, and her army was counted upon to take the offensive into Russia and deliver a hard blow before the Russian was ready to receive her. Indeed, the Austrian was to attempt in the east what the German attempted in the west. The German army was confident that in any event the slowness of Russian mobilization would give it time for its daring venture in the west. As the French, too, had excellent railroad systems, they also would mobilize rapidly. The full strength of the German army, therefore, was thrown against the French and the little Belgian army of eighty thousand ill trained and equipped men in the first month of the war. By using their interior lines, striking first in the west and then in the east, the Germans were warranted on paper in counting on successes that might have ended the war within the first four or five months.

The frontier of France from Switzerland to Luxemburg, when manned by the large numbers of the French army, became a battle front. There was no room for a flanking operation. German ambition for a decisive and prompt victory over the French army must have room for a turning movement. The Germans made the invasion of Belgium a military necessity for their purpose, which was the destruction of the French army. They had built the great 17-inch mortars for smashing the Belgian fortresses in order to open the gate for the flood which was to sweep southward to Paris. These guns were less practicable for field work or even for trench work, being best against cities and stationary guns in forts.

Thus the German plan of campaign was fully developed the second day of the war. It was no longer a secret to the general public, let alone to the French staff, which recognized that it had to deal with this effort of the German wing to come through Belgium. A French movement into Alsace failed. The public reason given for this was that it was a political demonstration in raising the Tricolor over the "lost provinces" dear to the heart of every Frenchman. Another--a military reason--which would seem a more obvious one to the soldier, was a counteroffensive to draw off the force of the German offensive at Liege and Namur, hoping thus, at least, while Liege and Namur were holding the German right in position, to force the German left to the bank of the Rhine. If you will look at the map you will see that this strategy becomes transparently intelligible.

Thus early in August the French were trying to turn the German left, and the Germans were preparing to turn the French left. Had the Belgians had anything like an adequate army, had it been skillfully handled; had the fortress of Namur held ten days as many thought it would, the German right might have been held long enough to prevent the Germans forcing a battle on the Marne. By the third week of August, however, the Germans had won their first point. They had broken through Namur, so incapably defended. They had broken the French left, put the British to flight, compelling the withdrawal of the French from German Lorraine, and now the war in the west was being waged entirely on French soil.

Technically and strategically the French had been outdone by superior numbers and the incapable defense of Namur, but no decisive battle had been fought. Indeed in a maneuver for positions, the Germans had won. The test was to come on the Marne. Had France been beaten there, she would have been beaten for good. Her army would have been so badly shattered that the Germans would then have been able to have thrown such preponderance of force, in conjunction with the Austrians, against the Russians that Warsaw (and perhaps Petrograd) must have fallen in the first year rather than in the second of the campaign. It would not be going too far to call the Marne the greatest battle in all history, both because of the numbers engaged and the result. Barring a later successful German offensive it decided the fate of France and very likely the fate of the war. All the trench fighting that followed, after all, only nailed down as it were the results of the Marne.

The general public taking its news from the daily press, thinks of the Marne as having been waged mostly in the neighborhood of Paris. It also wonders why the Germans did not go into Paris when they were so near. Any entrance into Paris was of secondary and of superficial consideration. The object of an army is to beat an enemy's army. Had the German army beaten the French on the Marne, then it had plenty of time for its entry into Paris. If it lost the battle, it could not have held Paris.

The fate of Paris was no less decided in eastern France than on the banks of the Marne. Far and away from a spectacular point of view, the most interesting portion of that decisive conflict was among the hills and valleys and woods of Lorraine, where over a front of eighty miles the Bavarians and the French swayed back and forth in fierce pitched battle. For the Bavarians were striking at the French right flank toward the gap of Miracourt and the German Crown Prince was striking in the Argonne at the same time that Von Kluck was striking at the French left. The Bavarians and the crown prince failed, while Von Kluck extended himself too far and was nearly caught in the pincers by Manoury's new army striking on his flank. But the vital, the human, the overwhelming factor was that the French infantry after retreat, when they might have been in confusion and poor heart, held with splendid stubbornness and organization under the protection of the accurate fire from their field batteries of 75's.

It is estimated that the Germans had actually on the front, or within ready reach of the front in the battle of the Marne, 2,500,000 men, while the French had 1,500,000. As the population of France is approximately forty-five million and that of Germany seventy million, the ratio in armed men to population was substantially the same for either combatant. For any decisive offensive the Germans needed that percentage of superior numbers. The fact that they failed carried its own significance.

Though they withdrew they were by no means decisively beaten. It might be said--to give them the fullest benefit of the doubt--that they undertook to buy something and the price was too high. To insist, however, that they did not make their best effort is to imply that the Germans were unwilling to pay the price for that decisive victory which would win the war. They could not take the risk of going too far or pressing too long and too hard; for that might have meant, with the rapid mobilization of French reserves, a defeat that would have thrown them clear out of France and lost the war for them.

The Germans had profited by all the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War, which taught the importance of trenches to modern armies, and also the value of high-explosive shells, but their own expenditure of shells had been far beyond their anticipation, and so far as we can learn, at the Marne they faced a shortage. They lacked the munitions to carry on the battle to a conclusion, even if they possessed the men and the will.

Accepting the principle of the increased power of the defensive of modern armies, they fell back to the defensive line of the Aisne, and now the initiative must be with the French. There followed a movement of precisely the kind characterizing many battles over a smaller front and that was the extension of the line as reserves were brought up by either side.

The French tried to flank the German left but the Germans extended as rapidly as they, until the month of October found both armies resting one flank on the sea and the other on Switzerland. Still another reason for the German withdrawals from the Marne was the loss of the battle of Lublin by the Austrians, due not to the inferiority of the Austrian troops so much as to bad generalship.

The German staff was warranted by the defeat at Lublin in thinking that they might have overestimated the Austrian army and underestimated the Russian. In this case they might face the danger of an invasion of Germany itself from Russia. Owing to the heterogeneous character of the Austrian army with its many races and the many pessimistic prophesies that have been made about the loyalty of the Slav portions of Austria, which were fulfilled it is said by the mutiny of some Slav regiments, it looked as if such apprehensions had been well grounded.

In winning Lublin the Russians had done a distinct service to the French in relieving pressure at the Marne and by their invasion of East Prussia they undertook a service of a similar kind. The advance of the Russian "steam roller" into Prussia so much heralded at the time amounted to little more than an immense raid, as numbers go in the greatest struggle of all history.

It won laurels for Von Hindenburg, a retired general, who became the hero of the war in Germany, again illustrating that in this, as in other wars, the fortune of circumstances and the character of your enemy have much to do with the creation of martial glory. For it is an open question if as a military feat Von Kluck's skillful extrication of his army from the position beyond Paris is not as worthy of praise as Von Hindenburg's clever victory of Tannenberg.

Though the German armies had not been able to gain a decisive victory over the French, they had established themselves on French soil. All the destructive effects of war must be borne by their adversary while they could make use of the regions occupied to supply and feed their troops. They had put the burden of direct economic waste on the French and deprived them of economic supplies, while the psychologic value of driving home to the enemy population the ravages of war is considered important by military leaders.

Nor could the economic advantage be adequately measured by extent of area occupied; for the one-twenty-sixth of the territory of France which was held by the Germans represented far more than one-twenty-sixth of French producing power for war purposes. A nation's true material wealth in peace may be in its farms and vineyards, but in war it is in the coal and steel and machine shops. The "Black Country" of northern France of no interest to the tourist, plays the same part to industrial France that the Pittsburgh region plays to industrial America. Besides, with Lille in German hands, France had lost the income from her export trade in textiles.

As the Russians for lack of transport were not able to follow up their success at Lublin, the succeeding weeks showed it to be far from a decisive victory. The Austrian army soon recovered itself. In comparison with Russia, both Austria and Germany were highly organized industrial nations. They had not only been able to put larger forces into the field at the outset than their adversaries, but they had the resources in guns and rifles, and in the factories for the manufacture of munitions, which enabled them to increase their actual fighting forces faster than their adversaries, and to supply them with larger quantities of munitions.

The German army was established in well-chosen positions in France, which might be impregnable against even forces as superior as three to one; the Austrian army was safely established in front of the Russians. Both the French and the Russians were short of munitions, and particularly of guns of heavier caliber, and of high-explosive shells, which had become most essential in trench warfare. Relatively, the Germans were depending upon their guns to hold the Aisne line, while the Allies were depending upon the flesh and blood of infantry. Germany was rushing every trained man she had to the front and training a million volunteers. Now she could spare troops moved by her efficient railroad system, taking advantage of the interior line for Von Hindenburg to make a drive toward Warsaw, where he repeated the same maneuver, in keeping with German practice of the advance to the Marne. After his drive, he fell back from Warsaw, and intrenched for the winter.

An unskilled garrison of Belgians held Antwerp, which was on the flank of the German forces in Belgium. The fall of this fortress meant the release of a considerable force of Germans, and allowed their heavier concentration toward northwestern France. Having failed to defeat the French at the Marne, which would have dropped not only the ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne, but also Havre, like ripe plums into their basket, the Germans next sought to take Calais, which is twenty-two miles from the coast of England. With Calais went the possession of all Belgium, a strip of northern France, and a foothold on the coast within twenty-two miles of England, and with the free sweep of the Atlantic past the narrow English Channel in front. Von Moltke, the chief of the German staff, who was retired about this time, was said to have still favored the greater conception of a decisive victory over the French army by an attack on Verdun instead of on the Channel ports; and the kaiser's own idea was said to have prevailed against his.

Now the allied armies in the west were to face a test second only to that of the Marne. The British army, which had been in the neighborhood of Soissons, had moved down to the left flank, hoping to assist in a successful turning movement. Their little force was being increased by every reserve that they could muster and arm. From India they brought their native troops, long-service men trained by British officers. These, at a time when every man of any kind was needed, were thrown into the crucible of the coming conflict, which reached its climax during the last days of October in the chill rains and mists of Flanders, with rich fields of a flat country turned into a glutinous mud.

Meanwhile, in a futile attempt, the British rushed small forces of marines to the assistance of the Antwerp garrison. With Antwerp theirs, the Germans were free to concentrate against the Channel ports. Once more the offensive was entirely with them in the west. They even brought into action some of the regiments of volunteers who had been enlisted in August; and following the German system of expending a fresh regiment in a single charge, these new levies were sent in masses to the attack. The Belgians, including those who escaped from Antwerp and from being driven into Holland, rested their left on the sea. Some sixty thousand were all they could muster out of a population of seven millions for the defense of the sliver of country that still remained under their flag. A type of man-of-war which was supposed to be antedated, the monitor, with its low draft and powerful guns was brought into action by the British in protecting the Belgians, who finally saved themselves by flooding their front.

Next to the Belgians was a French army, and next to them the British army, which shared with the French the brunt of the attack in that sector around the old town of Ypres, which was to give its name to the Ypres salient, the bloodiest region of this war, and of any war in the history of Europe.

So far as one can learn, the losses of the British and the French here were about 150,000, and of the Germans, about 250,000. Within the succeeding year, probably another 200,000 men of both sides were killed and wounded in the same locality. At the lowest estimate, 100,000 men have been killed outright in the Ypres salient, without either side gaining any appreciable advantage. British regiments held in the first battle of Ypres in some cases when they had a loss of 80 per cent.

Both Germans and Allies fought in icy water up to their hips. Many who survived succumbed to the cold. Lacking proper artillery support, the British used to cheer when the Germans charged, as that meant the end of shell fire, and they could come to close quarters with the bayonet. Little by little, but grudgingly, they had to yield against that persistent foe. The German staff was at its best in its organized offensive, and the British at their best "sticking," as they call it--and the prize was an arm of salt water, to be all Ally or part German. When the Germans gave up the struggle, they had the advantage of ground and the British stayed where they were. Whether or not the Allies should have evacuated Ypres and the deadly Ypres salient and withdrawn to better strategic positions will ever be a subject of discussion; but the loss of the city at the time would have had a moral effect on the situation of the Allies, and the political consideration may have outweighed the military.

Thus the campaign of the first summer and fall came to an end. The Allies had failed in their hope of keeping the German within his borders; and the German had failed to win any decisive victory which could enforce peace on all or any one of the Allies.

The casualties, on account of the vast numbers engaged, had been staggering. Germany held a small strip of Poland, and about the same amount of territory in France that she was to hold a year later, while Russia held a large section of Galicia. Where the armies had operated, lay broad belts of ruins, destroyed at enormous cost by shell fire. The moralist might well ask if the nations would have entered the war if they could have foreseen the result of their first four months' struggle.

SEA POWER

For any adequate understanding of the strategy of the war as a whole, the trench line from Switzerland to Flanders must be extended to the east of England across the North Sea to Iceland. This war has again demonstrated the enormous value of sea power.

Glance at a map of the globe and you will see how small a portion of it is occupied by the great nations of Europe, which for 2,000 years have been the most vital and influential political, commercial, and intellectual force in the world. The present nations are for the most part only the modern expression of the vigorous races which Caesar found and conquered. They have been in continual competition and in frequent wars.

The Russians have had only a little hold on the sea--in the Black Sea and in the Baltic; the Germanic peoples have had the Baltic and the North Sea; France faces the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; and only twenty-two miles from France is the island of Britain and Ireland, and other little islands, or what are known as the British Isles, whose superficial area is less than that of France or Germany.

Look again at the map, at the location of the British Isles and Germany. Mark them in black, if you will, and those two little points represent the two great antagonists in the war. Then turn the globe around slowly, and you come to Canada, stretching from the frontier of the United States to the Arctic, and across the Pacific to Australia and Hongkong, the Straits Settlements and Ceylon, India, and then in Africa, the most valuable of all its area--and you have the dominions and the colonies of the British Empire!

Between Germany and the rest of the world is the British navy. Every German ship which sails the trade routes of the earth must go past the British threshold. Germany, with a rapidly increasing population, with an imperial patriotism which discouraged emigration to foreign countries, wished to extend her domain; she wanted room in which German national ambition could expand.

Through all her history, Britain has had one eye on the continent and one on the seas. Continental affairs concerned her only so far as they meant the rise of any power which might threaten her dominion of the seas. The silver-pewter streak of channel kept her safe from invasion by any continental power, yet she could land troops across the Channel and throw the weight of her forces in the balance when her dominion was threatened. It is her boast that she has always won the "last battle," which is sufficient. She had only 30,000 troops in the allied army under Wellington, which delivered the finishing blow to Napoleon.

Twenty years ago, when the German navy was in its infancy, her policy was one of splendid isolation. France then was the second naval power, and Russia the third. The British naval program was superior to any two continental powers. The increase in German population and in trade and wealth brought with it an increase in the German navy, until Germany, with her ally, Austria, became the threatening continental factor to British security.

Now Britain formed a combination for defense with Russia and France. Her military part was to send 120,000 troops across the Channel to cooperate with the French army against the Germans. She was the only one of the great nations, except the United States, that depended upon a regular army, which was occupied mostly in policing her empire. Aside from her regulars, her only military organization were her Territorials, which were something on the same order as the American National Guard.

The number of men which she could throw across the Channel was therefore insignificant, compared to the great hordes of the European armies. Her real part was command of the sea. She was either to destroy the German navy or make it helpless in interfering with allied trade on the seas. Her Government was Liberal, her people as a whole skeptical of the possibility of a European war. For centuries they had been bred to believe that her security was in her fleet. She had long enjoyed her empire, she possessed immense capital, and her inclination was toward complacency, while Germany's was that of the eager newcomer to power.

The situation in Ireland on account of the passage of the Home Rule Bill had become so strained that many people believed civil war to be inevitable. The conviction of the German Ambassador in London, as well as most German observers, was that Britain would not actually enter the war, when the test came. Upon her decision, it is now evident, depended the fate of Europe. With England out, the French army could not have saved France. For then, Germany could have had the freedom of the seas. Her navy would have sent the French into harbor, closing not only every French, but every Russian port to the entrance of supplies and munitions, which would have meant food scarcity in France, and utter scarcity of munitions in Russia.

German troops could have landed in France to the rear of the French army. The whole complexion of the war would have been changed. So well laid were their plans, so sure were they of their numbers of men and guns, which they could promptly concentrate, that there seems little question of the ability of the Central Powers to have crushed France in the first three months of the war, and then to have won a decisive victory over Russia, bringing home from either country great indemnities, and, with Germany, if she choose, annexing northern France and Belgium.

Thus the Central Powers would have established themselves so strongly as the dominant nations of Europe, that Germany with her seventy millions of people could have directed her energy as the next step in her career against the Mistress of the Seas.

Had Belgium not been invaded, it is questionable if the British public would have favored joining in the war. But this aroused public indignation to the breaking point in support of the war members of the cabinet. Sir Edward Grey, the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, had his way.

The British navy was as thoroughly prepared for an emergency as the German army. It had no illusions as to the nature of its task or of its responsibility to the nation. Britain had superior resources in shipbuilding to Germany. She had a fleet superior in every class of ship, and she had led the world in naval progress--both her dreadnoughts and her battle cruisers being of a later type than her rival's. Her desire, inevitably, was that the German fleet should come out at once and give battle. Confident of the outcome, she contemplated the removal of her rival from the seas at a single blow.

German naval policy was as careful to avoid this test as British was to invite it. The German navy was kept safely at anchor in Kiel, protected by immense fortress guns, by elaborate mine fields, scores of submarines and destroyers, and by numerous nets against the approach of any British submarine. There was no way for any enemy to reach it except by the air. The Germans would have located any British attempt to attack their navy, as it might have meant the loss of important British fighting units which would have given the Germans more nearly equal chances of victory if they chose to precipitate an engagement. Sir John Jellicoe, in command of the fleet, however, refused to take any risks of losing his units. He kept his fleet in harbor, ready at any moment to steam out into the North Sea for action. Throughout the war to this writing, not one of his great first-class battleships has fired a shot, with the exception of the _Queen Elizabeth_, which took part in the bombardment of the Dardanelles forts.

Superiority of gun power has been sufficient to keep England safe from invasion, German merchant ships from sailing the seas, protect the sea passage of millions of troops, and insure the occupation of the German colonies by British expeditionary forces. Except as it was raised over a submarine or commerce raider, the German flag was swept from the sea within the first six months of the war.

There has been no naval battle at all commensurate with the strength of the two fleets. Each time that a British and German ship have met in action, the overwhelming importance of speed and of gun range have been demonstrated. Speed and range enabled Von Spee to destroy Cradock's squadron at Coronel off Chile, with almost no loss to himself. Later at the Falkland Islands he suffered the same fate at the hands of Sturdee, who, with his second-class battle cruisers, had the speed and range of the German third-class.

Again, in the battle off Dogger Bank, the _Bluecher_, the second-class battle cruiser which had only 26 knots, was left behind by her sisters, the German first-class battle cruisers, while she was pounded into the sea by the _Lion_, the _Tiger_, and the _Princess Mary_, which were driving ahead at 30 knots. The honors of the war, so far as the offensive goes, therefore, have been with the last battle cruiser.

German naval policy, no less wise for its own ends than for the British, has depended upon the submarine, whose importance may be easily exaggerated and easily underestimated. No submarine can approach the major fighting ships of a great fleet when that fleet is properly protected by torpedo-defense guns and fast destroyers and light cruisers. The deciding test of a submarine's power in this respect was the fruitless attempts of the best German submarines to reach the _Lion_ with a deathblow, when crippled, after the battle off Dogger Bank, she was being towed home at 5 knots an hour, under the protection of the destroyers.

However, any isolated vessel, whether a merchantman or a man-of-war, is at the mercy of a submarine, which hunts the seas for this kind of target. It has only to lie in wait on the trade routes until its prey appears, submerging in case of danger. Then a torpedo sent home and a valuable piece of property goes to the bottom of the sea. What resourceful brigandage is to traffic on the highways, the German submarine became to British traffic on the seas. It is the sniper of naval warfare, but cannot give battle. It must find its protection under the sea, while all freight and all passengers, all the world's business is done on the surface of the sea; and the great guns of the dreadnoughts command the surface.

When brigandage becomes highly organized, it means enormous expense in increased police work, particularly if you cannot trail the brigands to their hiding places and force them to capitulate. In this case the brigands' hiding places are under the protection of powerful fortress guns and mine fields in secure harbors.

The British navy, with over three thousand ships, including mine sweepers and auxiliaries of all sorts under Sir John Jellicoe's command, was forced to go to immense expense and pains in combating the submarine campaign. Many submarines were taken; but the Germans kept on building them. It was a war against an unseen and cunning foe, which required ceaseless vigilance and painstaking effort. The amount of material, as well as the amount of ships required in order to combat the submarines and also to keep the patrol intact from the British channel to Iceland, could it be enumerated, would stagger the imagination. Meanwhile, England had to go on building new dreadnoughts and cruisers and destroyers at top speed, with a view to increasing her rate of naval superiority over the Germans. Once the German fleet had come out and been beaten, then the British would be secure in victory, and they could spare many guns for the army and devote all their energy to the land campaign.

While the Germans had a "fleet in being," they had an important counter for peace negotiations. They were as rightly advised in sticking to their harbor, as the British in holding their command of the sea without risking their units by trying to force an entrance into harbors equipped with every known defense of modern warfare.

In all instances the British army must wait for material if navy demands were unsatisfied. With the tide of fortune going against the Russians and French on the Continent, the original agreement for only 120,000 men became entirely perfunctory, in view of the tragic necessity of more troops to be thrown against the Central Powers on the Continent. With a large proportion of her regular officers killed in the first two months of the war, Britain had to undertake the preparation of a vast army without adequate drill masters or leaders. She had to make wholly untrained civilians into soldiers while the war was being waged. This took time, but less time than for the manufacture of rifles and guns. She had everything necessary for supplying her navy, but ridiculously inadequate plants for supplying a force of soldiers so immense. Thus England had scores of battalions of excellently drilled soldiers prepared to go to France before there were any rifles for them to fight with, or before they had the all-important artillery for their support in battle.

In the early months of the war probably she was not awake to the necessity of the situation. Besides, her manufacturers, still confident of an early victory over Germany, were more interested in permanently gaining markets which the Germans would lose than in making munitions. The war was not brought home to the Englishman as it was to the German and the Frenchman, by having bloody lines of trenches on his own soil. Every British soldier was fighting across the seas in the defense of the soil of another nation. Naturally, in many cases, he was slow to a realization that this also was his own national defense. But by the volunteer system alone, England enlisted over two million men before conscription was threatened.

In order to centralize authority under a single man, Lord Kitchener was intrusted with the stupendous task of organizing the new army and seeing that it was properly equipped. He had foreseen at the start that the war would be long and that it would be nearly two years before England could throw anything like an armed force adequately representing her population into the struggle on the Continent. He had to train his officers at the same time that he trained his men and build guns and make rifles.

Meanwhile, the German army system was complete. Indeed, there was no want of men with military experience in any one of the continental countries to act as drill masters. England was attempting a feat equaled only in our Civil War, where vast armies of untrained men were raised. But in this case, the enemy was not composed also of recruits, but of men trained under universal service by a staff which had traditions of preparedness as a basis for the preparation before the war, while the British staff and the British army had been trained in the handling of small, mobile forces in policing their empire. But as the months wore on, it was evident that the military decision of the war might rest with this new army when the other armies were exhausted, when at last it reached the front in full force with adequate arms and equipment in the hope of repeating history, thanks to the command of the sea which gave Britain time to prepare--by winning the last battle.

Had Britain lost command of the sea early in the war, she would have been utterly helpless. The Germans could readily have landed a force that would have taken London in six weeks. Even this would have been an unnecessary military action. For, with her food supply shut off by German ships, Britain would have had to throw up her hands and ask for terms.

The Dominion of Canada, Australasia and South Africa would have found themselves in the position of isolated nations, dependent for the time being upon their own resources for defense. Their loyalty to the British Empire has not been the least wonderful of the many wonderful results of this war. They have sent legions of volunteers across the seas to France and Gallipoli to fight beside the British and the French. As for Hongkong, the Straits Settlements, Ceylon, India, and all the colonies of the empire, they would have been Germany's for the occupation. Such is the meaning of sea power. But the British navy being superior to the German, held Germany in siege.

THE SECOND SUMMER'S CAMPAIGN

Germany must make the best possible use of her comprehensive industrial organization and of her preparedness for war and throw the greatest possible number of men into the fighting line at the earliest possible moment. She was practically in a race against time; and time was with the Allies. While they retained command of the sea the United States and other neutral nations overseas, once their plants for manufacture were completed, could pour out supplies of munitions.

Germany's foreign trade was practically at a standstill. From the port of Hamburg her argosies of manufactures no longer went forth to the world in return for raw material. Her many ships, from the enormous passenger steamers to the small tramps which had brought her tribute with their carrying trade, were idle. She could manufacture, then, only for home consumption and all her plants that had been manufacturing for export began producing for her armies. The energies of the one hundred and twenty-five millions of people, men, women and children, in Germany and Austria-Hungary were wholly occupied in making war. Their object must be to push the walls back as far as they could, and so to punish Russia or France that one or the other would yield a separate peace. The aim of British statesmanship must be to hold the Allies together at any expense and keep Germany from breaking the siege. If more nations could be brought in against Germany, that would strengthen the siege lines and lengthen the front the Central Powers were building.

Through the winter of 1914-15 the diplomats of the Allies and the Central Powers in Rome fought for Italy's hand with all the skill and resources of trained European diplomacy. Responding to the sentiment for the recovery of Trentino and Trieste which she considered ethnologically and geographically a part of her domain she was to throw in her fortunes with the Allies against her old enemy, Austria.

Serbia had her troops still on the boundary of the Danube and the Save. Rumania, facing Austria with Russia on her flank, also much courted, was even more coy than Italy. Bulgaria, with her excellent army, was on the flank of Serbia and blocked the road to Turkey. Little Greece was another state watching the conflict with the selfish interest of a small spectator, trying to judge which side would be the victor.

Russia of the steppes and the multitudes of men was short of munitions; her plants were incapable of making sufficient supplies. The Baltic was closed to her by the German navy, Archangel was frozen in and the closing of the passage of the Dardanelles shut her off from the Mediterranean. She was in touch with the sea only in the Far East, with the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains between her and the manufacturing regions of the United States. Her crop of wheat, which she exchanged for manufactured goods in time of peace was no less interned than the manufactured products of Germany. If the Dardanelles were opened she could empty her granaries and receive arms and munitions in return. Therefore, the first winter of the war, while their main armies were intrenched in colder climes, both sides turned their attention to the southeast. In November the Turks had joined the Central Powers, thus flying in the face of the historical Turkish policy, so cleverly applied by Abdul Hamid, in playing one European power against another and profiting by their international differences.

For many years German diplomacy, capital and enterprise had been busy building up German influence in Asia Minor. Abdul Hamid had been overthrown under the leadership of Enver Pasha and other officers who had been trained in Germany according to German military methods and who had absorbed the German ideas. Von der Goltz, a German general, had reorganized the Turkish army. The access of Turkey to the Central Powers formed the addition of another thirty million people, which gave them one hundred and fifty million on their side.

Through the assistance of the Turks, the Germans never for a moment deserting their idea of keeping the initiative and forcing their enemies to follow it, threatened an offensive against the Suez Canal, which was abortive, but served the purpose of requiring British preparation for its defense. Germany saw more than mere military advantage in the Turkish adventure. She was reaching out into the Mohammedan world which stretches across Persia and Asia Minor, through little known and romantic regions, to India where, as a part of her Indian Empire, England rules more Mohammedans than the population of the German Empire. The unrest which was reported to have been ripe in India for the last decade might thus be brought to a head in a rebellion against British authority; as it might, too, in Egypt, the Sultan of Turkey being the Padishah or head of the Mohammedan faith.

At least Britain would be forced to maintain larger garrisons than usual both in Egypt and India against any threat of insurrection. Among all who have had to deal with the Oriental peoples, and particularly those who know them as intimately as the British rulers of India, the importance of power--and publicly demonstrated power--is fully understood. To the average British Indian or Egyptian subject, Britain has been an unconquerable country, the mistress of the world.

Many reasons united in calling for some action on the part of the British to offset that of the Germans. With Russia in retreat the Balkan States, which had regarded her prowess as irresistible, were losing their faith in the Allies. One successful blow would do more to dispel their skepticism and to bring Italy in on the side of the Allies than sheafs of diplomatic cablegrams and notes. During such a crisis every message in the game of war diplomacy becomes only a polite calling card that represents armed men.

The British decided to take the initiative though their new army had as yet received hardly sufficient training to make them soldiers and their supply of rifles, guns and munitions was insufficient. Indeed, England was just beginning to awaken fully to the fact that the forces of France and Russia alone were insufficient to cope on land with the Central Powers, particularly now that the weight of Turkey was thrown in the balance.

With her casualties three times the number of her original expeditionary force, with more than the original number of her army engaged in Flanders, she undertook an offensive against Constantinople itself. Second-class men-of-war which were not required with the grand fleet and a single first-class dreadnought of the latest type, the _Queen Elizabeth_, in conjunction with a French squadron, bombarded and reduced the ancient forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles and then attacked those in the narrows. British bluejackets even smoked their pipes and cracked jokes as they sat on the crest of Achi Baba, which became an impregnable Turkish position after the British Mediterranean force was landed. Had the _Queen Elizabeth_ been able to fire an army corps ashore, the corps could have marched on into Constantinople.

The success or failure of the Gallipoli expedition depended upon surprise. Superficially it seems a colossal blunder. There are inside facts about it which have never been disclosed. Greece, it is supposed, agreed to send troops, but at the last moment changed her mind. Undoubtedly the expedition was an important influence in bringing Italy in. There was a fatal delay in its departure from Alexandria. Too much time elapsed between the preparatory bombardment and the landing. The Turks had been forewarned what to expect. They had leisure for concentration and preparation. On a narrow front of difficult shore where the landing was to be made, they had stretched their barbed-wire entanglements into the sea itself, while along the beach were carefully concealed machine guns and back of them ample forces of men and artillery.

No effort in history was ever more gallant than that of the British force, including the Australians, which threw itself ashore in the face of simply insurmountable obstacles and fire, under the cover of the guns of the men-of-war. As a surprise, the affair was a complete failure. Its only chance of success being as a surprise, most competent military leaders and experts agree that this was sufficient reason, in a military sense, for an immediate withdrawal; yet British stubbornness would not yield.

Indeed, the Gallipoli expedition was a political move, a violation of the true military principle--that you should always go against the main body of your enemy, which was at this time on the frontiers of Russia and France. Of course the effort was not entirely without its compensations; no expedition is, which holds any part of the enemy's troops in place in front of your own. The pressure was withdrawn from the Russians in the Caucasus and also further adventures from the outskirts of Asia Minor toward India in stirring up the Mohammedan population were for the time abated.

The attempt to reach the heart of Turkish power, the sultan's capital itself, by opening these famous straits and sending British ships to lay Constantinople under their guns, was a splendid conception worthy the military imagination of the daring ages when the British Empire was built and the days of the Spanish Main, but the only criterion in the ghastly business of war remains success.

Yet the spring of 1915 opened with no rebellion in India except sporadic outbreaks of the frontier tribes which are always recurring, while Egypt itself remained peaceful. The Germans inaugurated their second year's campaign by closing the Belgo-Dutch frontier and by the administrative use of every possible means for safeguarding their movements on the western front, which would indicate that they were to undertake another effort for the Channel ports. This was an obvious feint to conceal an effort elsewhere. Instead of using troops to make it, they tried out for the first time a form of warfare which was not new in the consideration of any army, though it had not been used because it was considered inhuman.

With the wind blowing in the right direction, the Germans released an immense cloud of chlorine gas. Its gravity held it close to the ground as it swept down upon the British and French in the famous Ypres salient. The effort was successful beyond their expectation, more successful than they realized and had they had sufficient reserves to press on, they might have broken the allied line at this point.

The effect of the gas was that of a horrible form of asphyxiation; the soldiers who did not succumb retreated in face of a weapon which could not be countered by any in their possession. The casualties were heavy, the sufferings of the wounded indescribable in their torment. From the military point of view, which holds that war is killing and that any method whatsoever is warrantable, the attack was a success as it gained ground, and for the time being confused the enemy. But it was a form of attack which could succeed only once. After the soldiers were provided with proper respirators containing a chemical antidote, they were in no danger of being "gassed." Among those in the thick of the gas attack were the first Canadian contingent, who bore themselves with unflinching fortitude, not only that, but after the first surprise of the attack was over, the survivors charged with rare heroism.

Strategy which formerly meant the swift movement of a few thousand troops to one flank or another overnight, or in a two or three-hour march, now means the concentration of hundreds of thousands by railway trains upon a particular point and of many thousands of guns and enormous quantities of material of every kind from shells to that for building railroads to keep up with your advance.

But the general of to-day no less than the general of yesterday, would always know where his enemy is most vulnerable, and strike him at that point. In the spring of 1915, the line of least resistance for the German army was obviously to the east where the loose organization of the Russian army, lacking munitions, was stretched over a front of over a thousand miles.

The French were better off in munitions, and their army and the British had a front of four hundred and fifty miles of intact trench line. It is estimated that in order to hold a battle front with modern troops, about three thousand men to the mile are required. This does not mean that there are three thousand actually on every mile; but counting the thin line in the trenches, the thicker line in the reserve trenches and the soldiers who are out of the trenches resting and the battalions in reserve and the reserve supplies of men in the depots who can promptly be brought into action.

For example, to hold a mile of the famous Ypres salient might require double the number of men necessary to hold a mile where the lay of the ground was in the favor of your troops. Owing to the use of motor trucks and to railway trains, whenever there is an attack, concentration of men at any point is very rapid. Holding to this rule, the Germans maintained all through the summer of 1915, 1,500,000 men on their western front, and they had that number at least to spare for their eastern front. Field Marshal von Hindenburg said that by hammering he would get Warsaw, and he was to keep his word with stolid German persistence. Napoleon, who had depended upon the number of his guns, would have fully appreciated the Austro-German plan of action against Russia.

The Russian army has been compared to cotton wool. The farther you went into Russia, the more cotton wool there was. The Russian army would yield, but there never seemed any end of it. Gaining a passive victory over the Russian army has also been compared to brushing the snow off the front doorstep. The more you brushed, the more snow banked up. Russia could afford to lose territory equivalent to the area of all France without having received a vital blow. Russia has plenty of room in which to retreat, as Napoleon learned. She is confident in the safety of her distances. When the enemy falls back she follows on his heels.

At the end of the winter, 1914-15, she was still in the possession of a large portion of Galicia. But the Germans were preparing a battering ram which their generals thought irresistible. Their plan now was to deliver so hard a blow at the Russian that he would be forced to yield a separate peace. Von Mackensen formed his unprecedented phalanx of soldiery and of artillery in Galicia and destroying all the fortifications and covering the trenches with torrents of shell fire he skillfully worked his legions forward, first breaking the Przemysl line, which compelled a general retreat, and then breaking the Lemberg line. Thus, having beaten back the Russian left wing, the Austro-Germans turned their attention to the Warsaw front and there repeated the same organized machine method of warfare. There were no brilliant strokes of genius, but merely the use of superior systems of railroads in making the concentration; of trained engineers and workmen in advancing the railroad lines; of systematic overwhelming attacks at critical points, directed by the unsurpassed German staff organization.

With the fall of Warsaw the Russian army was inevitably badly broken. They had lost multitudes of prisoners, and staggering quantities of material. But still it remained an intact army. It was not decisively beaten. The prisoners were taken by brigades, regiments, and divisions--thousands of them in reserve, without a rifle in their hands, as they waited their turn to pick up the rifle of a dead man. For six months, March to August, the greatest of all campaigns in numbers of troops and length of line continued in the east, Von Mackensen and the Austrians striking in the south and Von Hindenburg in the north. Its details will be read in the history which follows. Characteristic of either adversary was his method. The German with concentration of population, resources, artillery, soldiery, and organization, and the Russian part, glamorous, slow, yielding to the terrific blows, flowing back like an ebb tide, and taking his time, never risking a decision, his army never surrounded or cut in two.

While Von Hindenburg's guns were hammering the Russians in front, German political influence was occupied in Petrograd in the rear, where certain official circles were under German influence in the hope of getting Russia to capitulate. The situation was the most critical for the Allies since the Battle of the Marne. A most influential court party was undoubtedly in favor of capitulation. Russia was bleeding cruelly. She was suffering the psychological as well as the material effects of defeat. In Paris and London the possibility of having to go on with the war without the Russian's assistance had become a serious consideration. In short, the fate of Europe was then in the hands of diplomatic and court intrigue.

According to the accounts it was the mass of the Russian people whose pressure undoubtedly defeated the aims of German diplomacy. Uninformed of the real situation, conscious only of the enormous cost of the war in blood and treasure, their spirit of race patriotism was undaunted. They realized if Russians in high places did not, that surrender by Russia then meant a defeat, which would set the Russian power back for another fifty years. England could make peace and be in possession of more territory than she had at the beginning of the war. France could be certain of retaining what she had before the war. But Russia had not only lost Poland, but the Slav had bowed the knee to the Teuton.

At the same time there was widespread unrest among the Russian people. They felt that they had deserved victory, but had been denied it. It was not a question of the grand duke's skill in conducting the retreat from Warsaw, or his indomitable will and sturdy patriotism, but of satisfying popular sentiment. The announcement that the czar himself was to take command unified and heartened the Russian people, who felt that "The Little Father" was the natural God-given head of the army.

There was discontent in Russia too, with the situation on the western front. All the news that Russia had from France was of an occasional hundred or five-hundred-yard trench won or lost, while the Russian army had been swept from Galicia and been swept back again and had gone through the fearful ordeal of the retreat of July and August. Why shouldn't France and Britain do something to release the pressure on the Russians? For not the least of the advantages the Central Powers had had was single-headed direction. They represented one united force, working out a consistent and simple plan of campaign. But Russia, England, and France had to cooperate in council.

With Russia so hard pressed and with the danger of her yielding to the Germans so deeply impressed on London and Paris there was nothing for the French staff to do but to respond by some sort of action in loyalty to her allies as a matter of military necessity if not of military wisdom. The attacks in Artois had fully demonstrated the arduousness and cost of any such undertaking, particularly until there was an unlimited supply of shells to draw on. A gain of two or three miles' depth on a front meant no positive advance for either side, but rather a waste of life. Indeed, any considerable attack on that western trench line which did not actually break the line must be considered a failure. And against their will, no doubt, the French and British undertook another offensive on September 25, 1915.

On many sections of the western front the nature of the ground makes an attack absolutely unfeasible. The place chosen by the French was the Champagne region, in the neighborhood of the great army review ground of Chalons. It is a rolling, sterile country, dotted with sparse roads. There is a thin loam over a subsoil of chalk--excellent for the defensive, but also permitting the rapid movement of artillery troops in dry weather.

So far as can be learned the Germans had already given up their offensive in Russia before the French began theirs. At least they were well advised that the French offensive was under way, and they needed to know it only a week beforehand, in order to transfer reserves from their eastern front, which they brought to the number of 300,000, concentrating them mostly in the Champagne region, where they were to be needed. Coincident with the Champagne attack, the British, who are for command purposes a part of the French army, launched one in the region of Loos.

In northern France the country was extremely difficult, and as unsuited for offense as the rest of the ground occupied by the British. Aside from their object in assisting the Russians, the French hoped to break the line. In this they failed. Over a twelve-mile front they gained depths varying from one-half to three miles; and altogether, with the British, they took some 25,000 prisoners and 160 guns. Both the numbers of prisoners and of guns were small compared with the "bags" on the eastern front. But the character of the fighting, the heavy volume of artillery fire and extraordinary coordination of the first-class fighting units by the most skilled armies in history, make this action memorable in military annals in the same way as the German attack on Verdun in the following February. The ground lost in no wise endangered the German tenancy of their line.

Along the Italian front the summer had developed something of the same kind of stalemate that had existed in France. Fighting in the Alpine country so favored the defense that the Austrians did not have more than three or four hundred thousand troops engaged in holding the Italians in position. Therefore it had been easy for anyone taking a superficial view to exaggerate the military value of Italy's entry into the war. The Austrian troops had fought with extreme tenacity, for naturally the Austrian staff had sent against the Italians all those troops in Franz Josef's heterogeneous empire who had any racial antagonism against the Italians, including those who had been lukewarm in fighting against the Slav.

Unquestionably, honors at the end of the campaign in 1915 were with Germany. She had held her line solidly in the west. She had stripped the country of northern France and Belgium of all the machinery of its factories which would be useful to her. She had been relieved of any necessity of feeding the Belgian population, or of the menace that would have come from the threat of a famine in either Belgium or northern France by the American Food Commission which at first had received supplies from America to carry on their work, and later had depended almost altogether upon grants from the French and English Governments and upon large voluntary contributions from England. In the east she had gained territory almost equal in area to that of Prussia itself. All Poland was hers. Her governor general ruled Warsaw. Her situation as to food supplies was improved by the occupation of immense productive areas. She had made war with all her energy, and in want of able-bodied men to gather her own harvests, she had used the hosts of prisoners which she had taken from Russia. But, despite her victories, bravely and skillfully won, she was still a nation in siege, with no communication with the outside world, except through neutral countries.

In the second winter with uninterrupted energy she again turned toward the southeast for another military adventure. Rumania still held fast to her neutrality. In Bulgaria the Central Powers were to succeed in gaining a fourth ally, which in sheer military advantage was probably worth more than the accession of Italy to her enemies. Though Russia had won her freedom for Bulgaria in '76, no sentiment drew her to Russia's assistance when Russia was losing. No statesmanship is more matter of fact than that of the Balkans. Bulgaria had an old score to settle with Serbia, which had joined Rumania and Greece against her in making the Second Balkan War, after she had borne the brunt of the first against Turkey. Then, besides, the military temptation offered the Bulgarian staff was irresistible. Serbia had been through two wars before the heavy drain of this one. A country of swineherds and miserable villages, dependent for munitions upon England and the Allies--she was caught in a wedge, with Bulgaria on the one side and the Austro-Hungarian advance on the other. At the most the Central Powers had probably no more than 300,000 troops--about the same number that the Bulgars had. Against such a combination, Serbia, caught between the blades of a pair of scissors, could make no successful resistance unless assistance came from England and France, which the British and French public demanded should be sent. There was no hope of sufficient allied forces reaching Serbia in time to rescue her, but the Allies, particularly the British, could not afford to see Saloniki occupied by the Austro-Germans or by their friends, the Bulgarians. Up to the Balkan War Saloniki was Turkish; then it became Greek. This excellent port had long been the goal of Austrian ambition, which sought an outlet to the Mediterranean, no less than the traditional policy of Russia was aimed at the occupation of Constantinople.

In the Crimean War France and England fought to thwart Russia's designs on Turkey and now France and England were prepared to oppose Austria's designs on Saloniki.

In order to defend Saloniki British and French troops must land on the soil of Greece and march across the Greco-Serbian frontier, which was no doubt one of the reasons that had kept the Allies from sending forces before, in order to assist the Serbians on the Danube and Save in closing "the ring of steel."

Venizelos, the Greek statesman, who had been the Greek Bismarck in the extension of the Greek domain in the Balkan War, had taken sides with the Allies; and he favored concessions by Greece as well as Serbia to Bulgaria, in order to satisfy Bulgarian ambitions and keep her from striking hands with the Central Powers, while the King of Greece, with the Queen, a sister of the kaiser, had decidedly pro-German leanings. The Greeks had a most difficult part, even for Levantine diplomacy, to play. If they cast their fortunes with the Allies and the Teutons won, then they could count upon the Central Powers not only taking Saloniki away from them, but bringing themselves practically under Germanic domination. If they openly espoused the German side, then as the country depended upon the sea, their ports would be blockaded, if not bombarded by the allied fleets. In the event of an allied victory over the Central Powers they were certain that Saloniki would not be annexed by the Allies, bitter as they were against Greece because she was supposed to have broken her pledged word to assist them in the Gallipoli expedition. Following a policy of drift and protest, the Greeks consented to the British and French landing troops at Saloniki and to their making it a base of action.

Certain forces were sent into Serbia before the Serbian army had been completely driven back, and whatever the public thought, certainly with no expectation of gaining a victory over the Bulgarians. This obvious movement was only for the purpose of gaining time for fortifying a line around Saloniki and bringing sufficient men and guns to defend it.

German diplomacy and staff work had not in all of the war gained a more important technical advantage for less cost in time, money, and troops, than it had in the fall of 1915 in the Balkans when they made the Bulgars to serve as they had the Turks, to secure their ends. At last the British withdrew from Gallipoli with such small losses that the evacuation of this position on an exposed coast is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant pieces of military maneuvering of its kind in all history. No credit is ever given for retreats. But this was a good deal more than a retreat. It was withdrawing from a beach in face of a well-armed enemy. The story of it--as yet unwritten--will some day bring a tribute to British military skill from professional soldiers, if not from the lay public.

The Bulgarians decided not to invade Greece; the Greeks made no attack. Those who looked forward to the war being settled in the Balkans, and to Saloniki becoming another Port Arthur, had missed their calculations. But every gun and every man that the Allies had to maintain at Saloniki might be a gun and a man kept idle, when they might be needed elsewhere.

The Germans having disposed of Serbia, had at the same time forced the further dissipation of English and French troops. That they could once more turn to the main theatre of the war and try to push back the siege wall in another direction. Meantime, Turkey had been doing their bidding in another quarter. The natural response of the British to any threat to their Indian Empire was to take the offensive, for this was one certain way to impress the Oriental mind. Having annexed Egypt and Cyprus and occupied the German colonies throughout the world, Britain now proceeded to the extension of her Asiatic domain. The threat of Mohammedan insurrection was met by an invasion of Mohammedan regions.

Her expedition toward Bagdad, had it not been in the midst of the greatest war in all history, would perhaps have been the most spectacular and interesting of all the small campaigns in remote regions which have gradually extended British influence. It marched through Mesopotamia and the Garden of Eden. The Turks under German direction replied with an offensive which in turn put General Townshend's army in siege, requiring that it should have relief.

The self-interest of each one of the parties to the war is evident, with the exception of Turkey. Why she ever entered in on the side of Germany, or on either side, is a puzzle. She was the one to lose in any event. German success meant German domination. German failure must mean that Russia would realize her ambition to take Constantinople, and the British must further strengthen their empire at her expense.

For many decades the British and Russian empires have glowered at each other across the dividing belts of Thibet, Afghanistan, and Persia. The fear of a Russian invasion of India haunted British statesmen until the German power became so threatening that England struck hands with France and Russia. Now while the British were advancing northward, the Russians made a southerly move to her assistance. The grand duke, who had been sent to the Caucasus in February, 1916, took the offensive and captured the fortress of Erzerum, an action which was bound to relieve pressure on the British. Thus, the Turk who had been led to believe that he was to regain Egypt and recover some of his lost territory, was simply losing more. Indeed, after Saloniki, despite the talk to that effect, the far-seeing Germans neither carried out their threatened attempt to invade Egypt, nor, as many expected, were they drawn from the main theatre of war by dispatching troops by rail to Turkey. In dissipating the allied troops by their threats, they had taken care not to dissipate their own.

Thus Germany would supply Turkey with officers, and all her munitions, but she would not risk an army on the other side of Bulgaria with a long line of communications threatened by the Allies from Saloniki and Dedeagatch.

The approach of the spring of 1916 found them facing much the same problem as in the spring of 1915. Despite the territory they had gained, to ask for peace was to imply that their economic situation was weaker and their casualties heavier than they were willing to admit. Even if their economic situation was strong and the reserves plentiful, any suggestion that they were ready for negotiations must convince the Allies that they were reaching the end of their resources. There could be no doubt of Russia's immense reserves of men. It was only a question with her as to whether or not she could make them into an efficient army properly equipped and supplied, and whether or not she would be able to maintain her organization and railway facilities and sufficient forces at the actual fighting front to strike a successful blow against her enemies.

On the western front there had been an enormous accession of munitions during the winter, while the British new army with two million men yet to go under fire was gradually getting its rifles and guns. Victory comes in war either when you are exhausted or when you have taken from the enemy his capital or something of such vital importance to him that he must yield in order to recover it. Neither France nor Russia was by any means in that pass. Belgium had merely become a dead land, a shop within a garden, cut off from all trade, when it had been a nation of manufacturers and traders.

Germany, unless she were exhausted in men and supplies, could not consider any peace which did not accord her the results of her gains, while she was still in possession of much of the enemy's territory, and she still maintained the power of the offensive. The purpose of the Allies was to contain her, to strengthen "the ring of steel." Her own purpose must be to strike some vital blow which would win a separate peace either from Russia or France. The moment she gave up her offensive and settled down to the defensive, which was naturally against the policy of her staff and the vigorous nature of her people, she was acknowledging that she had reached the limit of her prowess. Then the Allies, with the sea at their command, would bid her await their pleasure--unless she had so far exhausted them that they considered a decided victory over her hopeless, and they made a compromise.

Saloniki now being an incident of her military past, the next plan of her staff was an effort on Verdun, the great fortress which occupied a salient in the French siege line. Here, as elsewhere when she attacked, she concentrated both her own and the Austrian heavy artillery, and following the system of intense artillery preparation, threw in her waves of infantry. This blow was struck at the most inclement season of the year, in February snow and slush and rain, as if to anticipate the allied attack which was generally thought bound to come later in the spring when sufficient munitions had been accumulated on the western front and the weather was favorable.

By this time experts who had thought the war would be decided in the Balkans had again realized that it never pays to desert the simple military principle that the decision comes between the main bodies of armies and not in remote regions from any clash of subsidiary forces.

Paris or Petrograd in the hands of the Germans might mean such a decision. Certainly, should the western front be broken by either side, it would be the most telling blow of the war in both the moral and the military sense. But after all, was the line of least resistance for Germany the line of the western front? Would she really strike her great blow of 1916--if she still had the power to strike one--against the western rather than the eastern front? Hitherto, attacks had succeeded against Russia.

It was in Russia that she had had her success. German officers had always stated their confidence that with their superior gun fire and tactics they could always force the Russians back. Could they press back the French and the British?

When would the war end? seemed as unanswerable to the lay observer in the spring of 1916 as in the spring of 1915. How long was the fearful attrition to go on? Could either side ever strike a decisive blow, or would the eventual result be a bloody stalemate, with England still in command of the sea?

The significant generic lesson of the war is not in the power of artillery, but the power of all material organization, when nations set out to gain their ends by force: its military lesson was that both sides had pretty well followed sound policy considering the situation, despite armchair critics who knew nothing of inside facts.

Europe was spending $100,000,000 or more a day in the business of destruction--of life and of property. A broad belt of ruins spread across France and Belgium for 450 miles; a broader one of 1,000 miles across Galicia and Russia. No nation engaged could be said to be victorious except the Japanese. Japan had gained Kiao-chau; strengthened her influence in China enormously, and was making immense profits by working her arsenals and every plant at full speed making munitions for Russia.

The United States at peace, preparing to make munitions as fast as she could, and able to produce only 3,000 rifles a week for the Allies on the 1st of December, 1915, and 5,000 a week March 1, 1916, was enjoying an era of "boom" prosperity, thanks to the eager market of nations whose own production was arrested while their workers were at war. From the gloom of London and Paris, where men and women had given up all luxuries, the transatlantic voyage brought you to New York, which was the only gay capital in the world, enjoying all the privileges of extravagance when money is plentiful.

WAR BY MACHINERY

This has been a war of machinery; but the old rule has been true that development in any weapon of offense has been countered by further development of means of defense. Nor is the theoretical power of weapons ever equaled by their actual power when the test of war comes. With self-preservation remaining the first law of nature, man is in nothing so skillful as in avoiding the enemy's blows.

When one watches a 15-inch gun fired and hears its 2,000-pound shell go screaming through the air, his concept of its destructive action is exaggerated by imagination, and further confirmed if he sees that shell burst inside a house, reducing its interior to wreckage. But the shell may not hit the house; it may fall in an open field and merely make a crater in the earth. Besides, someone must be in the house when it is hit if there are to be any casualties; and it is quite possible that a single person present might be dug out of the debris unharmed. Vulnerable as man's flesh is, he remains a pretty small object on the landscape. If he knows that his house is in danger of being struck he then either goes into the cellar at the first alarm, after having covered his floor with sandbags, or he may take to a dugout in his yard.

When one has seen ten 15-inch shells strike a town of 25,000 inhabitants in a busy hour of the day and only half a dozen persons killed and injured, he may learn a contempt for shell fire which, however, is promptly turned into a tragic respect when one of the same sort of shells strikes in a stone-paved courtyard where a hundred soldiers are at their evening meal, and two-thirds of them are killed and wounded.

The bursting of a shrapnel shell and its spray of low-velocity bullets is also theoretically most destructive, but a roof of 6-inch boards will furnish perfect protection from the bullets. Mother Earth remains the best protection there is from fire. No rifle bullet can penetrate through a 3-foot thickness of sandbags. A 6 or 8-inch high-explosive shell, which is the largest caliber practicable for trench warfare, may burst near a double layer of bags of stone rubble without hurting anyone in a cellar 30 feet underneath. The rain of shrapnel bullets which mows the barbed wire in front of a trench, as hail mows ripening grain, will not reach a single man in the trench to the rear, if he keeps his head down.

At first thought it seems utterly inconsistent when bullets carry effectively a mile and a half, and guns carry twenty miles, that infantry should be fighting so close that they can throw bombs at each other from distances of 15 and 20 yards. The very destructiveness of modern weapons has contributed toward this result.

There has never been anything like so many guns used in battle, and never have they been capable of such rapid fire. The field gun can fire consistently eight or ten shots a minute, thanks to its modern recoil cylinder and to the steadiness of aim, and literally establish a "curtain of fire" with its torrent of bullets shot down from the air and the cataracts of earth shot up by the bursting of high-explosive shells in the ground, which no infantry can pass.

A machine gun behind a shield firing 500 shots a minute is practically safe from rifle fire, and soldiers intrenched on either side of it add to its volume their own more accurate fire from their rifles. Infantry in the open, though they were not subjected to the fearful concentration of artillery fire, could not survive through a mile of machine-gun and rifle-swept space. Successful advances against anything but very inferior numbers badly armed become impossible in any frontal attack in the open. Thus all modern infantry operations must have more or less a siege character, as the only practicable means of approach is by digging your way forward. The spade has become almost as important a weapon as the rifle.

Impatience with digging, which was characteristic of the early days of the American Civil War, and which has been generally resented by all armies in the past, has now become second nature to every soldier, because its value is brought home to him by the most telling kind of lesson in experience--death. He puts earth between himself and the enemy's fire as instinctively as one holds up his hand to ward off a blow.

In trench fighting all that is exposed of a man firing is his head and shoulders, which accounts for the high percentage of dead to wounded in this war. In other wars it has been as one to five; while in this war, on the western front, it has varied from as one to two and three. If the trenches are brought extremely close together then either side is safe from the other's artillery fire, because there is as much danger of hitting your own trench as the enemy's with your shells. A distance of 20 or 30 yards meant that at any time either side could start in throwing bombs or grenades by hand across that one definitely neutral country--the zone of death between the trenches. Beyond that range up to the average range, trench mortars which "lobbed" a charge of high explosive from trench to trench could be used. Thus the war of machinery became a war of explosives. Anything that could be dropped into the trench and burst might kill or wound some of the enemy, which meant debit on their side of the ledger in a war of attrition and exhaustion. The higher the angle of flight the more likely the charge actually to fall into the narrow ditch in the earth, instead of breaking its force against the wall, which accounts for the superiority of the howitzer with its high angle of flight and shorter range to the gun with its lower trajectory and longer range.

Thus there can be no limitation to the amount of artillery and the quantities of explosives serviceable in this kind of warfare. No one of the armies has ever had anything like enough shells. None ever can. Five hundred guns of all ranges set back of one another from 3,000 to 20,000 yards' range to a mile could be placed, or 225,000 for the western front, and they could readily use five million shells a day in this contest of munitions and manufacturing resources.

All armies had to conserve their ammunition, and in parts of the line, which were known as "quiet corners," for tactical reasons the stalemate was almost peaceful, either side holding its fire unless the other became restless. But between the trenches which had remained in the same position for many months, no living thing was visible day after day except a rabbit or a field mouse where the ground birds made their nests, and there the piping of birds joined with the song of the bullets. Except for occasional snipers' shots at the sight of anything moving on the enemy's parapet, the day wore monotonously on--when to expose the head for half a minute meant death.

Naturally the trenches do not run straight. They bend in and out at sharp angles in order to localize the explosions of shells; they are so narrow in most places that two men can pass with difficulty. A few soldiers are on guard, the rest may be lying about their dugouts or probably engaged in building new traverses or in putting up new layers of sandbags or deepening their dugouts. They become beavers rather than warriors, day laborers with spade and shovel rather than knights. There is no marching and countermarching; they have no use for the skirmish drill or the maneuver ground. Sharpshooters with clamped rifles watch for a target patiently as fishermen for a bite.

Back from the first line trench runs a winding communication trench, a foot or more deeper than the average man's height and the turns in its walls stop any bullets which otherwise might sweep its length in enfilade. In the reserve trenches are other men in burrows who have not even the excitement of sniping. They do nothing but wait and dig, repairing damages wrought by occasional shells on dull days.

At any hour the enemy may suddenly decide to attack and they may find their houses pounded down about their heads and perhaps half of a company wiped out in a quarter of an hour. Then other communication trenches lead back until finally you are in the open country out of the range of bullets, but not outside the range of shells. Here the munition caissons and the transport wagons come up by night bringing the food for men and guns which is taken up to the hungry mouths under the cover of darkness; and here, on an average day, one will occasionally observe the passing of an ambulance with its green roof and sides which melts it into the road and the landscape--and processions of ambulances when there is battle. All the detail of army existence is as precise as that of the best organized industrial plant.

As you walk along you will spy at intervals a hidden battery, perhaps in a house, perhaps in a hedge, perhaps in a group of trees, perhaps beautifully roofed over with sod, so that it is invisible from the air. You rarely look up without seeing an aeroplane flying overhead. When there is action, you will see many. A faint pur comes out of the heavens and two planes are seen circling as they exchange bullets from their machine guns. Another plane is turning to the right and left and ducking to avoid the thistle blows of smoke which burst from the shrapnel shells fired by the antiaircraft guns.

Follow the course of the long procession of motor trucks which feed the army and you arrive at one of the great supply depots which every day send out the precise quota of supplies that are needed, with every motor truck having its schedule and keeping that schedule with the accuracy of a first-class passenger train. Follow the ambulances back from station to station, where the wounded men are examined to see if they are suffering from a hemorrhage and whether they are able to stand the farther journey and do not need an immediate operation, and you are brought to the immense base hospitals in a closely guarded and well ordered camp where every sanitary tradition known to modern life is absolutely enforced. One of these hospitals had twelve thousand beds and in the offensive of September 25, 1915, it discharged seven thousand patients in a day.

Soldiers are restricted to the neighborhood of their billets and officers themselves must have passes if they travel outside the region occupied by their battalions. Everyone is a policeman under an intricate system guarding every detail of army secrets from any spy and from those gallant aviators who risk antiaircraft gunfire in the hope of bringing home some information to their side.

Never has the Intelligence Service of an army had so many secrets to guard; never has it required such complicated measures of protection against espionage. In Napoleonic times, it was enough to know that your adversary was marching a hundred thousand men along parallel roads. This your cavalry scouts might discover; or a spy who had crossed the frontier in an unfrequented place might be watching the enemy's army and counting his numbers as they passed. Now the frontier is an intact line of trenches.

The spies of Richelieu's day have been surpassed in this, our day--with their stories yet to be told. Many a man who spoke the enemy's language well has put on the enemy's uniform, joined one of his scouting parties between the trenches in the darkness, entered the enemy's trenches, heard all the talk and slipped back to his own lines safely. If apprehended, his fate was certain--death.

The most efficient spy, of course, is the one with military training He knows the value of what he sees. Usually he is an officer of good family who has been cashiered for gambling or debt and takes a desperate chance out of patriotism and the hope of atonement. Naturally, the easiest route for spies was through Holland and Switzerland which became the gateway of passing spies and the playground of espionage and counterespionage. Gradually the restrictions tightened for all neutral travelers from capital to capital, while none were permitted to go into the zones of the armies, some twenty or thirty miles from the trenches.

The problem of the Intelligence Corps is much like that of putting the parts of a picture puzzle together. A line from a newspaper in one part of the world, a line from a newspaper in another taken in connection with a photograph, an excerpt from a letter found on a prisoner or a fact got from a prisoner by skillful catechism, might develop a valuable contributory item. The amount of information procured by either side about the other was only less amazing to the outsider than how it was obtained. Again, events revealed amazing ignorance. Most baffling and most secret of all branches is this, whose work is both gaining and conserving information, and just as professional, just as carefully prepared before the war as any other.

A single instance illustrates how small a fact may be of value to the enemy. A certain well known "military expert" went out to British headquarters as a guest of a general. From a tower in the square of a small town, he watched a certain action. When he wrote his account of it, it was submitted to the general who was his friend; and the general carelessly passed one little statement which no Chief of Intelligence of any army would ever have passed and probably no correspondent of experience would have had the temerity to submit to the censor unless he wanted to be responsible for the death of men who were his hosts and his friends. For the writer stated that he saw the battle from this tower.

Now the London papers reach Holland at four o'clock in the afternoon where they are seized promptly by the tentacles of the German Intelligence Service, which did not need to undertake any "picture puzzle work" on this occasion. It was plain as day that this tower must be used as an artillery observation post by the enemy. From there he could see the fall of shells from his batteries and know whether they were "on" or not. Out of the blue sky the next morning, came a German artillery concentration which brought the tower down like a house of cards, and many British soldiers billeted in the neighborhood were killed or wounded.

In order to deepen the shroud of mystery over his side which baffles the enemy, many military men would undoubtedly make the press merely the herald of official bulletins. The British Admiralty carried out this system to the letter, as a navy may better than an army, in the resistance of the German submarine campaign. Thus the "Untersee-boots" came out from Kiel or Zeebrugge and disappeared in the mists of the North Sea with no message of how they had been destroyed when they never returned.

The Intelligence Service in common with army transport and the sanitary service and every other expert branch has for its object the conserving of the lives of your own soldiers and the taking of those of the enemy, best expressed by an infantry attack on the enemy's trenches, whether to gain a few hundred yards or a belt of eight to ten miles as in the case of the French attack in Champagne in September, 1915, and the German attack on Verdun in February, 1916. The first step is the concentration of batteries for artillery preparation. Gradually, these guns all try out their range with the aeroplanes spotting the fall of their shells. Then, at the scheduled minute they loose their blasts upon the front line trenches which are to be taken. In front of the trenches, of course, are the elaborate barbed-wire entanglements. These are often twenty, thirty or even forty feet deep. There may be more than one series of entanglements and some may be screened in some fashion or other from the effects of artillery fire. Aside from these, _trous de loup_, pits with sharpened sticks to impale the invader, and all the other devices of former times are used--in short, every obstacle from the time of Moses to the modern machine gun. No invader can possibly reach the enemy's trench to contest it with him until these impedimenta are removed. Thousands of short-cut plans and inventions have been offered for cleaning away the barbed wire before an attack, but not one has succeeded because it requires that whoever is to carry out the suggestion or remove the obstruction, must be submitted to murderous grilling machine-gun and rifle fire. Shrapnel shells with their sprays of bullets bursting at a height of a foot above ground remain the approved method of cutting barbed wire. If the barbed wire is not destroyed, the men in the charge are "hung up" in it, as the saying is. Then if a machine gun is still in position in the enemy's trench, they are riddled with bullets where they lie. No form of death could be more pitiless or helpless for the soldier than this. He becomes a target on a spit, as it were.

Granted that the barbed wire is swept away perfectly, no charge can succeed if many machine guns or rifles from the trenches are playing upon it. Then men simply rush into a spray of bullets. Therefore, all the teeth must be drawn from the trench itself. This is done by the concentration of high-explosive shells from guns of larger caliber, mostly howitzers, which burst in the earth, tossing up great fountains of dust, burying and smashing the machine guns and driving all the operators into their dugouts, where they are sometimes buried alive.

Back of the trench, the guns of smaller caliber which destroy the barbed wire place a "curtain of fire," as it is called, which does not permit the enemy to escape from a trench, or any reserves to come to his assistance. This process is kept up for such a length of time as is deemed sufficient. At a given moment, the invader charges, often protected by a screen of smoke which is sent out from his own trenches.

As the burrowers in the earth crawl from the parapets and take to their legs, they know that their fate is almost altogether dependent upon the preparation by the guns rather than any effort of their own. Ahead of them is this wall of smoke and dust from the explosions, in which they are lost to the observer. Keeping units together and protecting them is as difficult as maneuvering ships in a fog. The delicate problem of the gunner is to protect the invader just as far forward as possible, without putting shells into his own men. A few from defective fuses must fall short. This is expected and is a part of the cost of a charge; but none with correct fuses and dependable powder should. The gunners time their part to that of the invader, by lifting their fire from the first to the second line trench, as their own men are entering the first.

Granted that the barbed wire is cleared and the men enter the enemy's trench, they may find themselves struggling over heaps of dust mixed with the rags of sandbags, splintered timbers and the flesh and uniforms of their enemy--at first see not a single adversary. They will be instantly due for heavy shell fire; and also for heavy machine gun and rifle fire from the second line enemy trench. They begin to dig at once in order to establish protection. Out of this wreckage they have to reverse the enemy's trench, so that it shall face toward him. This becomes a matter of desperate effort and usually it is in the course of this that the severest casualties are suffered. But should the artillery destruction of the trench be imperfect, upon entering it they may still take the enemy by surprise in his dugouts. In that case, bombs in hand, at the doorways of these cellars they demand surrender. In case it is not given, they throw the bombs into the dugout; for, to enter, means that they will be shot down.

Or, upon entering the trench, they may meet the enemy's soldiers running out of their dugouts for hand-to-hand battle. The traverses are so narrow that the length of the rifle makes it a clumsy weapon, and the adversaries in modern war, whose guns carry twenty miles, engage hand to hand, using knives, bombs and even their fists. With discarded rifles and bombs lying about a trench, it is difficult to give quarter. For a prisoner who is down may pick up a rifle or a bomb and turn on his captor. It is not human savagery so much as conditions that has made the fighting so grim. Having established themselves in a certain section or sections of the trench, naturally the new occupants have the enemy on their right and left. That is, on one side of one of the winding traverses will be a German, and say on the other side a Frenchman. Neither sees the other's head, for both are hidden behind these walls of earth. If one starts around the corner, it means a bayonet or a bullet for him.

To gain ground in a trench requires a superior supply of bombs. Any small package that will contain a high explosive would serve the purpose. Early in the war, bombs were made out of jam tins and bottles or any other receptacle which could be filled with an explosive and set off by a fuse. Later on, different varieties of manufactured bombs in great quantities appeared. There have been instances of five thousand being used in a single day over two hundred yards of trench. After throwing a bomb from the traverse, the offensive follows up the explosion by rushing along the traverse and catching the defender with a bayonet while he is _hors de combat_ from the effect of the explosion. While this orgy--characteristic of cave dwellers battling on a precipice in its ferocity--is proceeding, all is precision at the rear. As the caissons bring up the supplies of ammunition, the green-curtained motor ambulances speed on to the hospital with the wounded and the military police direct the congested traffic and keep watch for spies.

VITAL LESSONS

War is force, violence, killing. Whoever tries to disguise its character is a poor soldier and a poorer citizen. If you would avoid it, and if you would prepare for it, you must look at it as a fact, squarely in the face. Never has war been so savage as it is in this most progressive age in history. We had popular education, aseptic surgery, the wireless, and antitoxin, but war came nevertheless, and in the wake of Hague conferences and much preaching of internationalism. It came when the nations were supposed on account of the press and the telegraph to have been farther removed from parochialism than ever before, when more people in every nation in Europe knew the language of their neighbors than ever in history.

In the cave dweller's time, combatants used a stone hatchet which was the best weapon that science could produce. To-day by land and sea they have used all the powers of destruction known to modern man; all the scientific brains of Europe have been at the disposal of commanders. Yet no single revolutionary invention has appeared in the course of the war. The idea of the gas was old. Man already had learned to fly. Guns have been larger and shells more powerful, but the principle is the same. Weapons have been further developed, but the types have not changed.

All the essential lessons which the Germans applied they learned in the Russo-Japanese War. The line of trenches throughout the winter of 1904-05 before Mukden were much the same type as those along the Aisne. There were trenches in the Civil War and in the Crimea, and in the American Revolution and in many wars before that. So far as one can learn, there has not been a single invention by a civilian which would have been of any use to the British navy in fighting submarines. All have been devised and applied by naval experts who knew conditions. No profession is more expert than soldiering and none is older, because it began when Cain killed Abel.

War being the ultimate resort of force, then the poet, the dreamer, the scholar, the doctor and the organizer of the arts of peace may succumb to the bully with the square jaw, the low brow and flesh-tearing incisors, unless the civilized man uses his resources and talents to make weapons which are stronger than the bully's fist. This is precisely what civilization does in order to protect itself.

The two forces which were really prepared for this war were the British navy and the German army. The British navy has kept command of the seas and the German army has planted its trenches on foreign soil. For any nation which is separated from other nations by the sea, the military lesson of this war is that the sea is the first line of defense. You will escape bloody trenches at home if you never allow an enemy to land. He cannot land until he has driven your navy off the seas.

The other lesson is that a nation should know its method of defense and have it as complete, practicable and ready as the German army and British navies were. For three or four years, the Belgians saw the Germans constructing railroad sidings at Aix and making their preparations for the blow they struck. Yet the Belgians did not modernize their forts, or adequately strengthen their army for defense. If to the staffs of England and France war seemed inevitable, their governments refused to be convinced.

Any nation which is considering preparedness for national defense must have a national policy. It must know what it is going to defend and how it is going to defend it. The British navy was built for the specific problem of either defeating the German navy in battle or keeping it fast in its lair. The German army was organized for the purpose of the invasion of France and then of Russia; the French army for defense from Germany.

Their efficiency was not the result of the expenditure of money, for money will not buy defense. It requires training, organization, and patriotism, and courage, which are not for sale in the market places of mankind.

Until this war the opinion among English-speaking peoples was universal that the volunteer system was the best method of recruiting. This on the principle that the man who offers himself to fight, fights better than the one who is called to arms by government order. Thus England raised 3,000,000 men. But to a man who has lived much with armies, it seems an immoral method; it means hiring men to fight for you. One man's life is just as valuable to him as another's. It is the final sacrifice which he makes for the defense of his country or his home. He should make it himself and not ask others to make it for him. Those who should be the first into battle are the men of wealth, of position, the favored ones. They owe their country more than the others, because their country has done more for them.

The courage which every Continental army has exhibited has forever destroyed the idea that universal service weakens the valor of an army. Millionaire and peasant, nobleman and workman fighting side by side in the ranks, and doing all the drudgery of the trenches in common, develop a democracy which means that a man appreciates his fellow man for his own sake.

The old idea that wars must be frequent in order to keep up a nation's virility has also been disproved. Universal service both in France and Germany through forty years of peace, had been an important influence in the better physical development of the race, which led to the fortitude, precision, and courage exhibited. At the same time, a realization of the seriousness of war on the part of all men, because they knew before this war began the punishing effect of rifle or machine-gun and artillery fire, is a powerful deterrent to making war in any spasm of emotion.

There is no more glory, there is no more sport to war. It has become scientific, businesslike, and commonplace. Never has an unprepared nation been so helpless against the prepared as to-day. The American Revolution could never have been won by untrained levies to-day against the British regulars if they possessed modern weapons. Our forefathers had their fowling pieces, taken from the walls in the days when the cannon fired a solid shot for a few hundred yards, and there were few cannon; and so far as weapons were concerned, they were almost on a level with their enemy, the enemy's only superiority being that of their drill and organization. Now the enemy would have guns and rifles which it takes many months to make, even if you have the plants.

In an era of sanitation and bodily cleanliness and popular education, it has been shown that far from men having lost their virility, they fought far better than the so-called "strong" and primitive man, and those soldiers of former ages who "drank hard six days a week and fought like the devil on Sunday" and would look down upon this age as effeminate. Physically, mentally, and morally, the soldiers who sprang to arms in the beginning of this war were superior unquestionably to any soldiers who have ever gone into any war in Europe. They had more skill, more courage, more determination. Their pride was greater, and that alone made them more gallant. Those who wanted to know what war was like, to have the experience of their first baptism of fire, soon had it in the swift processes of mobilization and attack. Then, in their stubbornness, they settled down to the long, grim business of seeing through a task that was begun. The trenches were the last places where you would hear the advocacy of war as war. There the sentiment was simply of duty that must go on until a decision was reached.

Never has war been more savagely fought, possibly because the modern mind reasons that war being force and violence and killing, this principle should be applied to the limit. Yet never have the wounded been so tenderly cared for, never has the hospital organization been so complete. Never probably in the history of European warfare have prisoners, once they were taken, been so well treated. In other wars 100,000 survivors or so returned home when the struggle was over. Here millions will go. Every home will either have its dead hero or its living veteran. These are the men who will rule Europe in the future. Behind the lines, among the civilian population, the war has acted as a scourge. It has submerged self into the whole. Fatty degeneration of the heart of the body politic has been cut away to the muscle.

THE THEATRES OF THE WAR'S CAMPAIGNS

By F. H. SIMONDS

MAIN MILITARY FEATURES

The purpose of this review is to summarize briefly the main military phases of the first year and a half of the Great War. To do this it is perhaps simplest to accept the unity supplied by the three major campaigns of the Central Powers, that of Germany against France, that of Austria and Germany against Russia, and that of Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria against Serbia.

There is no intention of discussing here any ethical or political considerations. Certain historical details are, however, of real interest and value. Thus it is worth while to recall that the present conflict differs little, if at all, from the earlier coalition wars of Europe, in which one nation, numerically weaker, has sought to impose its will upon a group of nations collectively larger, richer, and potentially capable of employing greater numbers of men. In a word, the present war is a pretty accurate repetition of the wars of Louis XIV and Napoleon I, with Germany playing the French role.

Now in such struggles it had always been true, and German writers, notably Bernhardi, insisted it would be true of any future war, that the single chance for a decisive victory for the smaller nation lay in crushing the several foes before they were able to get their collective strength in the field, while the superior preparedness, training, general military efficiency of the smaller nation still enabled it to put the superior numbers at the decisive point at the crucial moment.

This whole conception is made perfectly clear by a glance at the familiar and classic parallel of the Napoleonic wars. In 1805 Napoleon, facing a European coalition, which included Russia, Great Britain, and Austria, and was bound to enlist Prussia ultimately, quite as the present anti-German group enlisted Italy, had to solve the same military problem.

Consider what he did. Breaking his camp at Boulogne, which he left in September, 1805, he sent his Grand Army into southern Germany and against Ulm. On October 20 he captured Mack's army at Ulm. On December 2 he routed the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz, and on December 26 there was signed the Treaty of Pressburg, which eliminated Austria from the war. Prussia now intervening, he destroyed the Prussian armies at Jena and Auerstaedt on October 14, 1806. In June, 1807, he completed his task by defeating the Russians at Friedland. The Peace of Tilsit, which followed immediately, removed Russia and Prussia from the fighting line, as Austria had already been removed. Between the capitulation of Ulm and the victory of Friedland there intervened nineteen months. More than eighteen have now passed since the fall of Liege in the present war.

The Peace of Tilsit made Napoleon the master of Europe with only Great Britain left in the field against him. The subsequent military and political history which led to Napoleon's downfall has no pertinence in the present discussion. What it is essential to recognize is that the German high command in August, 1914, approached a Napoleonic problem in the Napoleonic fashion.

In German quarters there had been before the war, and there has been since, a debate as to the comparative advantage of making the first campaign against France or against Russia. The fact that the attack on France failed has doubtless contributed to strengthen the case of those who held the view of the elder Moltke and advocated an eastern offensive. But this is merely an academic discussion. What is of interest to us now is to recognize that Germany did decide to attack France, that she did direct against the republic the first and necessarily the greatest blow she could deliver. It was not until April, 1915, that she actually undertook an attack upon Russia, and then the prospect of a decisive victory, on the Napoleonic order, had practically disappeared.

THE ATTACK UPON FRANCE

Turning now to the first campaign, the attack upon France, it is to be recognized at the outset that the German purpose was to dispose of France in the military sense for the period of the war by a campaign that should repeat the success of 1870. It was essential that this victory should be achieved before France could profit by Russian activity in the east and before Great Britain could render material military assistance to her French ally. It was equally essential that the blow should be so swift and heavy that it would crush the French before they could equip and organize their great reserves, for whom, thanks to legislative folly and pacifist agitation, there was lacking equipment and arms.

For the accomplishment of this great task, Germany counted upon her superior numbers, the greater speed of her mobilization, and the excess of her population over France to give her a decisive advantage. She counted also upon her advantage in heavy artillery and machine guns, on her organization of motor transport, which was to establish new records in invasion. Only in field artillery, in the now famous "seventy-fives," could France claim any advantage.

In 1870 Sedan had come four weeks after the first German troops had entered France. For the new campaign the Germans allowed six weeks. For this time German high command reckoned that Russia could be mobilized in the east, and that any incidental Russian success in East Prussia or Silesia would be counterbalanced by the tremendous victories to be won in northern France. Paris itself would be a sufficient counterprize for Posen, Breslau, or Cracow.

The time limit, however, imposed certain other conditions. The Franco-German frontier from Luxemburg to Switzerland had been transformed into one long barrier, garnished with detached forts and resting upon the first-class fortresses of Verdun, Toul, Epinal, and Belfort. To pierce such a barrier was not impossible but to break through in three weeks, with the whole French army before the forts and the shortness of the front offering the Germans no opportunity to take advantage of their superior numbers, was recognized as next to impossible.

There was left the roads through Belgium and Luxemburg. To come this way Germany had for more than a decade been constructing strategic railways leading from the Rhine and Moselle valleys to the Belgian frontier, double-track roads that served in a desolate country, but were provided with all the necessary machinery for detraining thousands of soldiers.

Belgium might not consent to suffer this invasion of her territory but the Belgian army was negligible, and the German heavy artillery was known to be adequate to dispose of the antiquated forts of Namur and Liege with brief delay. Once the Germans had passed the Meuse and deployed upon the Belgian plain, they could turn south and pass the Franco-Belgian frontier, which was destitute of real defenses, the few fortresses being obsolete, and thence the road ran down to Paris clear and open.

Conceivably Great Britain might make the Belgian invasion a cause for joining France. But, again, the British army was small, there was the gravest doubt as to whether it would be sent to the Continent at all, and even if it came, it would not redress the balance between the French and German armies. Such being the case, as German high command saw it, Belgium was summoned, and refusing, was attacked, the German armies passing the Belgian frontier in the direction of Liege on August 4, 1914, the day on which Germany declared war upon France, and the forty-fourth anniversary of the invasion of France in the Franco-Prussian War.

FROM THE MEUSE TO THE MARNE

To grasp the main circumstances of the opening campaign it is simplest to think of the whole German invading forces as comprising one army. The right of this army under Kluck and Buelow came west through Belgium by Brussels and Namur, swinging south after the Belgians were disposed of, and leaving a guard to curtain the Belgian army which had retreated on Antwerp. The center moved southwest through the Belgian Ardennes and Luxemburg, entering France between Longwy and Givet on the Meuse. The left moved from Metz and Strassburg, attempting to force the French barrier line between Toul and Epinal. The center was commanded by the German Crown Prince, Albert of Wuerttemberg, and Hausen, the left by the Crown Prince of Bavaria and Heeringen. Smaller forces operating in Upper Alsace played little real part in the operations.

Taking up first the German right: It did not begin its real advance until August 12, 1914. Liege had been captured on August 7, the last fort fell on August 15. Meantime the Germans pushed a heavy screen of cavalry forward, and there was steady skirmishing between Liege and Brussels, which was magnified into battles and German defeats. In point of fact, the Belgian army was rapidly pushed back, and once the main German advance began, it fled to Antwerp.

Kluck took Brussels on August 18, 1914, and turned south, meeting the first serious resistance at Mons. Buelow, moving across the Meuse at Huy, took Namur on August 23, 1914, and his troops fought at Charleroi, while those of Hausen forced a passage of the Meuse south of Namur. The French were beaten at Charleroi, and the British while the battle of Mons was still undecided, were forced to retreat, because Buelow's success in taking Namur had imperiled the whole allied left flank.

Because he delayed his retreat too long, Sir John French was immediately threatened with destruction, Kluck having succeeded in getting on his flank, while sending superior numbers against his front. For a week there was grave danger that the Germans would be able to destroy the British and intervene between the French left and the city of Paris. At Cambrai on the 25th, British destruction seemed imminent, but the British just managed to win clear, and French troops coming up on their exposed flank by September 1, they were safe.

The French center had essayed an offensive into the Ardennes at the moment the battle of Charleroi was beginning. In this they did not succeed, and the Fourth Army under Langle de Cary fell back in perfect order from the Belgian-Luxemberg frontier across the Meuse near Sedan, where they held their line until the general retreat began. Henceforth the French armies from left to right were not seriously threatened until the final struggle at the Marne.

But the right under De Castelnau had been obliged to retreat. It had opened the campaign by a series of victories which had carried the main force into German Lorraine as far as Saarburg on the railroad from Metz to Strassburg. To the south Muelhausen had been taken, lost, and recaptured. But in the third week of August the main army encountered strong forces in the region of Morhange and fell back on Nancy, the frontier town of Luneville being momentarily occupied by the Germans. At Nancy it stood. But its stand was one of the important battles of the western war and a contributory cause to the subsequent victory at the Marne. By this victory the eastern barrier was held and the German effort to isolate Verdun and Toul blocked. Some of the most terrible fighting of the war took place here, and the Germans, fighting under the eye of the kaiser suffered colossal losses.

In the last days of August Joffre had to make his great decision. His right was holding before Nancy, and was soon to make a successful advance, clearing most of eastern Lorraine. His center, stretched across the Champagne country from the Argonne to the Oise, had recovered from early reverses and won several considerable local counteroffenses, notably at Guise. But his left was still shaky, his reserves were not yet up and his reconcentration was incomplete. Should he risk all now, or take his army back until his left rested upon Paris? To do this latter would be to surrender more French territory, but it would mean a further exhaustion of the Germans, a further increase in his numbers. The morale of his troops was unshaken. He had suffered defeats, but merely incidental defeats, the real test had not yet come.

THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE

Joffre decided to continue his retreat, and took his army south of the Marne, his left formed by the British resting upon the forts of Paris, behind which he had massed a new army, his center stretching between Paris and Verdun, his right along the barrier line from Verdun to Switzerland. The German armies, already worn down by their exertions and their losses, were now to be attacked by their foe, whom they regarded as already vanquished.

The first phase of the Battle of the Marne was fought northeast of Paris along the Ourcq, which gives its name to the local battle. Kluck had marched past the French capital, going south along its eastern front and leaving only small guards to cover his rear and flank. He had before him the British and on his flank the new Paris army, of the existence of which he was totally ignorant. In Joffre's strategy this army was to strike east while the British struck north, together they were to act like the two blades of a pair of scissors. Between them Kluck was to be destroyed and his rout would expose the flank and rear of all the German forces in France.

The French struck with great promptness, but the British failed to move quickly enough. Kluck extricated himself from between the blades with supreme generalship, brought his main force back against the French, borrowing a corps from Buelow and presently the French were driven back upon Paris. British slowness had wrecked the master stroke of Joffre's strategy.

But in the center the situation was changing. Joffre had issued his famous order to attack upon September 5. The Paris army under Manoury had struck on the 6th, and the French offensive had steadily communicated itself from west to east along the whole line, that is, to the British army, then to the armies of Franchet d'Esperey, of Foch, of De Langle de Cary, of Sarrail. In the French center about September 9, General Foch, commanding still another new army, had begun his attack. By a combination of operations, which remain the most brilliant of the war, he flung a portion of the Germans before him into the marshes of St. Gond and routed the remainder. In this field the Germans now began a retreat which was almost a rout. Meantime, further to the east, Sarrail, holding Verdun, had begun to attack the crown prince, who was in difficulty.

Foch's success was decisive, Kluck and Buelow began their retreat, leaving their own fights undecided. Hausen, who faced Foch, was removed in disgrace, and his army now in bad shape, went back to Chalons and then to the Rheims-Argonne district. The crown prince with difficulty drew his forces out of the lower Argonne and north of Verdun. The French victory in Lorraine had also become absolute, and the Germans were back on the frontier.

But there was lacking to the French the numbers and the strength to make their victory conclusive. They had been outnumbered at the moment of victory, their twenty-two corps facing twenty-seven at the Marne, 900,000 at most against 1,200,000. The fall of Maubeuge had released fresh German troops, who came south, and, reenforcing Kluck, enabled him to stand at the Aisne. The German front was reconstituted, running from the Oise at Noyon to Metz and the deadlock was about to begin, had in fact begun.

The remainder of the western campaign requires little comment. There now followed that operation, well described as "the race to the sea." The French coming east around the right flank of the Germans north of Noyon attempted to reach their rear at St. Quentin and turn them out of France. The Germans endeavored to extend their line westward to the sea and thus secure their flank and, in addition, take possession of the whole French coast from the mouth of the Somme to Belgium.

Neither side succeeded. Instead a line was erected from the Oise due north to the German Ocean at Nieuport, which became the new battle front. Antwerp fallen, the Germans made a supreme effort to shorten and straighten their line by attacking the French, British, and Belgians, who held the extreme left of the allied forces between Nieuport and La Bassee, along the Yser and about Ypres. This struggle lasted for nearly a month, and was desperate in the extreme. For the British it was a gigantic repetition of Waterloo, and they were again asked to hold a position, not now for hours, but for days, under heavy pressure, and in the face of odds such as Napoleon did not possess in the earlier conflict. In the end the line held, German approach to the Channel was blocked, and by December 1 the western war had dropped to trench fighting which still persists along the lines that had been substantially occupied in November, 1914.

GERMAN FAILURE

Such briefly was the history of the first German venture, the effort to dispose of France. So far as its main object was concerned it failed absolutely. It failed because Joffre met the German thrust with a parry which turned it aside. French military power was not destroyed, it was not even shaken. France was not eliminated by a crushing defeat as Austria had been eliminated at Austerlitz in a similar conflict.

The victory had been won because Joffre had deliberately held his forces in hand and avoided a decisive issue, until he had brought the Germans to his own battle field. He had avoided a German net which might have encircled a portion of his armies, as Bazaine had been encircled at Metz; he had declined to consider political conditions and fight as MacMahon had been compelled to fight at Sedan. With inferior numbers, with smaller resources in heavy artillery and transport, with a handicap of inferior subordinates, who in Alsace and in the Ardennes, as well as at Charleroi, had by their incompetence imperiled his first plans, he had won a campaign. That the success was not conclusive cannot be charged to him, Sir John French's failure along the Grand Morin, as other critics assert, or Manoury's excess of zeal at the Ourcq, by enabling Kluck to avoid Joffre's embrace, possibly saved the Germans from a general disaster.

The Battle of the Marne denied Germany the continental supremacy which Austerlitz prepared for Napoleon. It saved France, gave Great Britain time to raise her volunteer armies, mobilize her industries. To win it France had put in her last ounce of available strength, and there was needed for her, too, time to reorganize her armies, and prepare to conduct a long war. She was not able and she has not yet been able to turn Germany out of that twenty-fifth of French area, which Germany holds, and has held since October, 1914.

But in every sense this Battle of the Marne was one of the few really decisive battles of all human history. It was a French victory, organized by French genius and won by French soldiers. The British contribution was slight, just as the British numbers were insignificant. It was not due to Belgian resistance, as has been so frequently asserted in the past, and the determining phase was the wonderful fight of Foch at Champenoise, after the Paris army had failed against Kluck.

AGAINST RUSSIA

The character of the German operations against Russia in the opening days of the war was determined by the decision to attack France. Necessarily all troops save that minimum which represented the barest margin of safety were sent to the west and there was left to a small force the duty of defending the East Prussian marshes. Germany counted upon the slowness of Russian mobilization to give her six weeks of immunity on her eastern frontier. She expected in that time to dispose of France, and she believed that at the end of it Russia would still be engaged in concentrating her masses. Both calculations were wrong.

But the main reliance of Germany in the east was Austria, whose whole force, save for one or two corps borrowed by Germany to defend Alsace and four corps sent against Serbia, was available for the invasion of Russian Poland. If Austria could organize a resistance that would last for six weeks, Germany was prepared to do the rest. This she expected of Austria, and again her calculations were wrong.

A glance at the map serves to explain the opening moves in the eastern campaign. Russian Poland projects into Austro-German territory, and is nearly encircled by German East Prussia and Austrian Galicia. Russian mobilization had therefore to take place not at the frontier, but behind the Vistula and the armies, once concentrated, advanced from the Niemen, west of Kovno, from Warsaw, from Brest-Litovsk on the Bug and from the Rowno-Dubno-Lutsk fortresses west of Kiev. Thus the military as contrasted with the political frontier of Russia was behind the Vistula, the Niemen and the Bug.

The Austro-German plan contemplated a defensive fight on the north, in East Prussia, and an offensive campaign from the south, aimed at Lublin and Brest-Litovsk. The Russians on their side planned an immediate invasion of East Prussia from Warsaw and Kovno and a far more considerable offensive into Galicia from the Rumanian boundary to Rowno. The objective of the northern operation was the conquest of the whole of Prussia east of the Vistula, that of the southern the capture of Lemberg and the conquest of all Galicia. Combined, these two movements would abolish the Polish salient and give the Russian right flank the protection of the Baltic, the left the cover of the Carpathians. Only then could there be any safe advance by the center through Poland upon Posen and Breslau and thence upon Berlin.

Russian mobilization was more rapid than Russia's allies could have hoped for and it wholly confounded the Germans. While the Battle of the Marne was still two weeks off Russian forces were sweeping west from the Niemen and approaching Koenigsberg, a second army was striking north from Warsaw. East Prussian populations were fleeing before the invaders and a German disaster seemed imminent.

The genius of Hindenburg, who now appeared upon the eastern battle ground, saved the situation. Gathering in all his available forces and leaving the Russian army coming from the Niemen almost unopposed, he caught the Warsaw army in the swamps about the frontier in the last days of August and, thanks to his generalship and heavy artillery, destroyed a Russian army. Tannenberg was a great victory and it saved East Prussia. The Niemen army had to retreat rapidly to escape destruction. At the time, it was asserted that the Russian invasion had compelled the Germans to draw upon their western front to meet the thrust and thus to weaken their armies in advance of the decisive battle. This is not now believed to be true, but there is no doubt that it drew reserves who might otherwise have gone to the west or to the south.

Tannenberg was a victory which filled the world with its splendor, but it merely disguised for the moment the far more considerable Austrian disaster to the south. One Austrian army had crossed the frontier and approached Lublin, another had advanced east from Lemberg. Upon the Lemberg army the full weight of the Russian thrust now fell and the army was promptly routed, driven through Lemberg and west of the San or across the Carpathians. The force that had approached Lublin was thus left in the air and succumbed to a series of disasters, which culminated in the terrible defeat of Rawa-Ruska. Meantime the Austrian troops, which had invaded Serbia were routed in the Battle of the Jedar, which preceded the other Austrian disasters and was, in fact, the first considerable triumph for the Allies in the whole war.

AUSTRIAN PERIL

Austria was now in dire straits and her whole military structure seemed on the point of crumbling. Russian armies flowed west through Galicia and approached Tarnow, Przemysl was isolated, tens of thousands of prisoners, innumerable guns and vast quantities of stores fell to the victors. While the great German attack upon France was failing, Russia seemed on the point of achieving against Germany's ally what Germany had failed to achieve against France.

Germany was now compelled to intervene. At the moment when she was organizing her final effort in the west and sending her best troops to hack their way to Calais, she had to divert other troops to the east. Hindenburg undertook a new offensive, this time from the Silesian frontier, and pushed with great rapidity to the very suburbs of Warsaw. He only failed by a narrow margin, Siberian troops coming up just in time to save the Polish capital, and Hindenburg, now outnumbered, conducted a swift and orderly retreat to the frontier. But his intervention had disorganized the Russian campaign in Galicia and Russian armies there had been compelled to retreat and send reenforcements north.

Hindenburg's retreat was a signal for a fresh Russian advance, this time the czar's forces reached the gates of Cracow and began to crowd through the Carpathian passes and sweep down into the Hungarian Plain. Przemysl was again invested, Russian troops for the first time entering German territory west of the Vistula. It was necessary for Germany to intervene again.

This time Hindenburg was more successful. He had retreated upon Cracow and Breslau; gathering up his armies he transported them rapidly to the north by strategic railways, brought them back into Poland south of the Vistula, interposed between the Russians and Warsaw and very nearly repeated at Lodz his great success of Tannenberg. But this time the Russians after desperate fighting won clear, and fell back to the lines in front of Warsaw, which they were to hold for so many months. At the same time they retreated in Galicia from before Cracow to Tarnow and stood behind the Dunajec River. Austria was saved again, but having, in her extreme peril recalled some of her corps from an army engaged in a new invasion of Serbia, that army was routed and well-nigh destroyed.

GERMANY'S SECOND OFFENSIVE

From December to April the eastern campaign lacked decisive circumstances. In the north Hindenburg won a new and splendid victory at the Mazurian Lakes, expelling a Russian army which had renewed the invasion of East Prussia. In the south the Russians steadily pushed the Austrians back into the Carpathians, took Przemysl with more than 125,000 prisoners, and as spring came seemed on the point of crowning the Carpathians and descending into the Hungarian Plain.

But the Germans were already organizing their second great offensive. They were raising new armies, collecting fresh stores of ammunition and preparing for a thrust against Russia as gigantic as that against France, with the deliberate purpose of eliminating Russia from the war. There was no longer any chance of a Napoleonic success in Europe. But if Russia were eliminated, they could still hope to win a peace that might leave them Belgium. Some portion of their plans was spoiled almost as the spring campaign opened, by the entrance of Italy on the Allies' side, but Italy came too late to save Russia from the disasters that had begun.

The German plan of campaign was simple. Hindenburg was to strike east and south from East Prussia at the Russian lines along the Niemen-Bobr-Narew. Mackensen, having pushed the Russians out of Galicia, was to strike north through Lublin and toward Brest-Litovsk. A new army was to invade Courland and aim at Riga. It was the German hope that the main Russian masses would be caught and enveloped by Hindenburg and Mackensen, that Poland would be taken and all its garrisons, and the bulk of the Russian military power be destroyed.

The first blow fell at Gorlice in Galicia in the last days of April. Mackensen, furnished with the greatest train of artillery war had ever seen, burst through the Russian lines along the Dunajec, destroyed Dmitrieff's army, which faced him, almost captured the Russian Carpathian forces and drove the Russians rapidly beyond the San, retook first Przemysl and then Lemberg, thus clearing all but a corner of Galicia.

The main German and Austrian armies were then sent north toward Brest-Litovsk, while Hindenburg began his thrust by attacking Ossowetz and the Niemen-Bobr-Narew barrier of forts. By this time the world knew that Russian ammunition had failed and for many weeks the possibility of a tremendous Russian disaster existed. Step by step the Russians were pushed back. The fall of Warsaw was assured in July and it was not until August that the escape of the Russian garrison was certain. The same problem was raised about Kovno and Brest-Litovsk, but again the Russians won clear. Late in August the final net of the Germans about Vilna was drawn, but for the last time the Russians eluded it.

And with the battle of Vilna the German eastern campaign practically ends. In the north the Russians held Riga and the Dwina line, in the center they were behind the great marshes of Pinsk, to the south they were behind the Styr and Stripa, still holding Rowno, still clinging to a corner of Galicia. They had lost hundreds of thousands of prisoners and many guns. All of Russian Poland, most of Courland, and much other territory had been surrendered. But they had kept their armies intact and were once more in line.

In so far as the German campaign had been designed to free Austrian soil and relieve the pressure upon Austrian and German fronts in the east, it had been a shining success. It had served, too, to restore German prestige in the Balkans. But it had come too late to keep Italy out, and it had not eliminated Russia.

Unless the Germans were prepared to repeat the fatal Napoleonic march upon Moscow, there was now nothing for them to do but abandon their eastern campaign for the winter, to dig in and hold until the spring permitted new operations. But this offered to the Russians a period of recuperation and rest. In the spring they would have new armies and fresh artillery. These circumstances were the measure of the German failure in their second offensive. In their first they had set out to dispose of France and had suffered defeat at the Marne. In the second they had undertaken to put Russia out, and after a long series of victories, Russia had escaped and was now beyond their grasp.

From the military point of view the Russian failure was even more serious than the French, because it came a year later, and at the hour when the superior numbers and resources of the enemies of Germany were already beginning to tell.

THE THIRD GERMAN OFFENSIVE

The two preceding German campaigns had been based on purely military considerations. The first was a true Napoleonic conception designed to grasp a Napoleonic opportunity. The second was partly imposed upon Germany by Russian success and Austrian failure. There was no longer a question of destroying the opponents in order, it was a question of eliminating one and then finding a basis for peace with the others. The third German campaign, that in the Balkans, was political quite as much as it was military. It was designed to provide Germany with some profit for her great sacrifices and her great losses, but it was no longer a question of the conquest of any considerable foe.

By the operations of British sea power, Germany had now practically lost her colonial empire. It was certain that with peace she would not again be permitted to make use of British colonies or ports, as she had done before. Her overseas commerce with belligerents and their colonies was bound to be ruined, even if peace came soon, for the period of the war it was, of course, abolished.

The entrance of Turkey on the German side had opened for the Germans a new field for industrial exploitation, if there could once be opened a road from the Danube to Constantinople. This field would be beyond the reach of sea power. Once Germany had taken actual command at Constantinople, once the railroad from Hamburg to the Bosphorus was open, it was possible to threaten Britain in Egypt, and perhaps ultimately in India by the Bagdad and Mecca railways.

Such a threat, coupled with one more successful campaign, might exercise a decisive influence upon the minds of the people of the allied countries, and in opening a road to the Golden Horn, Germany might find the path to peace. Already there was apparent willingness in Berlin to evacuate Belgium and northern France, only from Russia did Germany now insist upon tribute in the form of conquered provinces. But until the road to Constantinople was open, until the Serbian nuisance was abolished, peace could not be considered.

Turkey, too, was calling for aid. Early in the year the Anglo-French fleets had tried to force the Dardanelles. Their failure had been followed by a land attack at Gallipoli, which had so far failed, but Turkish ammunition and artillery was inadequate for a sustained fight, and there was needed German aid. To lose the Dardanelles was to see Turkey conquered, Russia provided with munitions, and the whole German dream of expansion to Asia Minor destroyed.

It was necessary, too, to provide the German people with a new victory. They had been bitterly disappointed that the Russian campaign had not brought peace, or, at the least, the elimination of Russia. A new and relatively cheap success, the conquest of the Balkans, would fire their imagination and again stimulate their hopes for a victorious peace. In addition, Bulgaria now beckoned to the Germans. Her army was at the disposition of the two kaisers, but there was plain peril that if the coming were too long delayed, the Allies might succeed in persuading Ferdinand to cast his lot with the camp that now offered him Serbian Macedonia and Turkish Thrace, and were suggesting the further _pourboire_ of Greek Kavala.

Accordingly Germany decided to go south, having gone west and east without finding peace or decisive victory. She had available for this operation troops no longer needed against Russia since the campaign on this front had died out, and she had to command it, the great Mackensen, whose fame now rivaled that of Hindenburg, whose victories had regained Galicia. "Constantinople and Peace" became the new German watchword, just as "Paris and Peace" and "Warsaw and Peace" had been in preceding months.

And at the outset of this third campaign it is perhaps appropriate to point out that Germany was now to achieve that complete military success that had been denied to her in France and Russia, she was to win a victory in the military sense which was beyond cavil, but she was this time to lose the political profit she had hoped, because she had mistaken the importance in the minds of her enemies of the Balkan field and fatally overestimated the war weariness of the peoples that opposed her. At the Golden Horn she was to find not peace, but the necessity for new campaigns.

THE SERBIAN PHASE

On the military side the Serbian campaign was the simplest of operations. For many months the Serbian forces had been posted south of the Danube and the Save and east of the Drin, looking over their frontiers into Hungary and Bosnia. Behind them from the Danube at Belgrade to the Aegean at Saloniki ran the Orient railroad, by which they were munitioned. At Nish halfway to the sea, the line drew near to the Bulgarian frontier and sent a branch off, which passed through Bulgaria and reached Constantinople.

The Saloniki railway was the life line of Serbia, it was also the natural route for a retreat, if the Austro-German attack became too heavy. But it was fatally exposed, should Bulgaria enter the war against Serbia. In the Treaty of Bucharest, Greece and Rumania had undertaken to join Serbia should she be attacked by Bulgaria, and the mission of Greece was to cover the Saloniki railroad as far north as it was necessary to join hands with the Serbians.

Now, while the Bulgarians were beginning to mobilize and the Austro-German hosts were gathering to the north, Serbia appealed to her former allies to keep their agreement. Both declined, and their refusal was fatal. The Allies had relied upon Greek promises, and had failed to collect any considerable force at Saloniki. They had trusted Bulgaria and refused to let Serbia attack her neighbor before Bulgarian mobilization was complete. Once Bulgaria had mobilized the doom of Serbia was settled.

What happened was this: The Germans forced the passage of the Danube north and east of Belgrade and came south along the broad Morava River Valley, driving the Serbs before them. Thanks to the heavy artillery of the invaders Serbian resistance was impotent. The Austrians, meantime, crossed the Drin and came east from Bosnia. Think of Serbia as a rectangle and you can visualize two sides of the figure as closing in on the center, which was the heart of Serbia.

At the appointed moment the Bulgarians struck west from a third side of the rectangle, speedily crossed the Belgrade-Nish-Saloniki railroad, and thus cut off the true line of Serbian retreat, that upon Saloniki.

Very early in the campaign the Bulgars seized Uskub, thus interposing a wedge between the small Anglo-French force at Saloniki and the Serbs about Nish to the north of Uskub. Meantime a desperate concentration was taking place at Saloniki, and an Anglo-French force, commanded by Sarrail, was being pushed up the Saloniki railroad toward Uskub to open a road to the Serbs to join their allies. The operation suggested that successfully conducted in Flanders in the opening months of the war, which enabled the Belgian army to escape from Antwerp and join their allies in Flanders.

But this operation failed. The French came north to the outskirts of Veles, twenty miles from Uskub, just too late to save the Serbians, who now fled west to Monastir and south to Montenegro and Albania. As a fighting force the Serbs were eliminated, the wrecks of their armies barely escaping to the Adriatic and Aegean coasts at Durazzo and Saloniki. Bulgarian troops forced the Katchanik gorges and took Prisrend, and German and Austrian forces entered the ill-omened Plain of Kossovo and overran the ancient Sanjak of Novibazar.

Before the storm that was now moving south, the French and British retreated upon Saloniki, and presently began to construct about this Greek city lines and defenses recalling those Wellington built at Torres Vedras before Lisbon to restrain the flood of Napoleonic invasion in the Iberian peninsula. The conquest of the Balkan peninsula, save for Greece, was now as complete as Napoleon's own success in Spain had been more than a century before.

In due course of time an Austrian army repeated the operations of the Germans, this time succeeding in reducing the strongholds of Montenegro, which had defied the Turk through long centuries. Mount Lovetcen, the peak which looks down upon Cattaro and commands the inner bay, was at last taken, Scutari followed, northern Albania was overrun, Nicholas followed Peter into exile. All Macedonia was taken and the Allies forced out of Serbia, which had become an entirely conquered country. To complete the conquest of the Near East there was needed nothing but a successful siege of Saloniki, but this required preparation and the rebuilding of destroyed railroads, and so the Allies found respite in this Aegean port for a brief time.

Such was Germany's third campaign. Her victory enabled her to send munitions to Constantinople, and insured the failure of the allied attack at the Dardanelles. Only a few weeks later the allied armies evacuated the Gallipoli Peninsula; thus testifying to the decisive character of the German operation. Still later Turkish reenforcements, doubtless drawing upon German sources for munitions, defeated another British expedition almost under the walls of Bagdad and drove it in retreat down the Tigris, ultimately surrounding it at Kut-el-Amara, a hundred miles to the south.

Again, there came immediately forecasts of another Turkish thrust at Suez, under German direction, a first attack having failed in the previous winter. Whether Germany actually obtained any considerable stock of provisions or foodstuffs may be doubted by her succor, but it is clear that her campaign had enabled her to make use of many thousands of Turkish troops, who were waiting only for arms, it had given her control of the Bulgarian army, a small but efficient force, and it had provided an eventual means of attacking the British Empire by land, once the advance upon Egypt could be organized.

This last circumstance is worth noting, for the time had now arrived when the Germans perceived that Great Britain had so far escaped injury, was the single one of the larger powers who had drawn profit without terrible loss from the war and was becoming the determining force in the allied camp, because its resources were still unexhausted and its armies only just coming into the field, while German numbers were approaching a positive decline. If Germany could reach Suez, conquer Egypt, using Turkish armies and German genius and munitions, she would deal a heavy blow to the British Empire, and she might compel the British to listen to proposals for peace, which were now contemptuously thrust aside by London.

In sum, the Serbian campaign saved Turkey, disposed of Serbia, enlisted Bulgaria, opened the road to the Near East and to subsequent attacks upon Egypt and perhaps upon India, but it did not bring peace, and it did not inflict any immediate injury upon any one of Germany's larger foes, only Serbia and Montenegro actually suffered serious loss, and the destruction of their armies was but a detail in a world war.

ITALY

For the purposes of a summary it is unnecessary to review in detail the Italian operations. They have no distinctive challenge to the reader. Italian statesmanship imposed upon the Italian high command a task which made immediate victory impossible, and assigned to Italy the useful but inglorious role of occupying some 400,000 Austrian troops, and thus contributing to the strain imposed upon the Central Powers and to the hastening of the moment when exhaustion might be expected to set in.

Had Italy decided to enter the war at the moment when Russia was destroying Austrian armies in Galicia in September and October of 1914 she would almost unquestionably have supplied the necessary numbers to bring a speedy and decisive defeat for the Central Powers. Again, had she selected the moment when Russian armies were at the crests of the Carpathians, and Przemysl had just fallen, she would have probably made the German offense against Russia impossible, brought Rumania in with her, and produced the collapse of Austria. Bulgaria would not have enlisted with the Central Powers, Greece would almost certainly have attacked Turkey, and the Balkan campaign would not have taken place.

But German diplomacy averted the second peril, and Italian alignment with Austria and with Germany in the Triple Alliance made an attack at the opening of the war unthinkable. When Italy did come in, the German victory in Galicia had been won, Russia was in retreat, the allied defeat before the Dardanelles forts and the Russian disasters had produced a profound effect in Balkan capitals, and Austria was able to find the troops to meet and check the Italian advance almost at the frontier. Since that time the Italian operations have been merely trench conflicts, and Italy has nowhere penetrated a score of miles into Austrian territory, nor has she taken Trieste, Trent, or even Gorizia.

If one desires a parallel for the Italian operations it is to be found in the later phases of the Peninsula War against Napoleon. This field was never of decisive importance, but it did require the attention of several of Napoleon's best marshals, and drew off thousands of French soldiers needed by the great emperor in the campaigns in eastern Germany, where his fortunes were finally decided. What Wellington did, the Italians under Cadorna have been imitating in their own peninsula, and their service to their allies has thus been very considerable.

Nor is it necessary for the purposes of so rapid a review of the main phases of the war to dwell upon the allied failure in the west between the end of the battles of Flanders in November, 1914, and February, 1916. At the beginning of 1915 what were allied hopes and purposes in the west? Unquestionably French and British public believed that with the coming year the Grand Alliance would be able to crush Germany. Unquestionably French and British high commands planned to open the summer with a drive that would clear France and Belgium. As for the Germans, having laid their plans to go to Russia, they asked nothing of their western armies save that the lines should be held.

The French began their spring drive in Artois and in Champagne. The Artois fighting of May and June was exceedingly severe, incidental gains were made, but the British were suddenly disclosed lacking in all proper ammunition, lacking in numbers to support the French offensive, and barely able to hold their own lines about Ypres, after desperate fighting, made memorable by the first use by the Germans of gas as a weapon of offense.

From June until September the western armies stood still, while Britain organized her munition manufactures and continued to send her new troops to the Continent. Kitchener's "million" was not realized until the late fall, instead of the early spring. But when, in the latter days of September, the British attacked about La Bassee, and the French in Champagne, the muddling of British officers cost the Allies a considerable triumph in Artois, and the French victory in Champagne was purely local. Some 30,000 prisoners, 200 cannon, this was the fruit of an offensive which cost the British 60,000 casualties, and the French hardly less than twice as many.

German defense, therefore, fulfilled its mission in the west, German armies were able to drive deep into Russia without having to detach reenforcements to the west. Such offensives as the Allies ventured were either complete failures or merely local successes, without major value. Belgium and northern France were not liberated, and there was, as yet, not even a promise of the crushing of Germany.

ALLIED POLICY

In the brief space that remains I desire to discuss the policy of the nations which are fighting the Teutonic Alliance. The German purpose at the outset of the war has been discussed. Franco-Russian preparation had been made long before the war, and the general plan of the high commands of the two allies worked out without any material interruption. The same is true of the cooperation of the British army. This simply followed out the plans agreed upon years before.

It is not true, as has been frequently asserted, that France or her allies were surprised by the German invasion of Belgium, this had long been foreseen. It is not true, as was believed widely at the time, that Joffre invited disaster by sending the mass of his troops into Alsace-Lorraine, yielding to political and patriotic sentiment. He did nothing of the sort. Such troops as were sent into these provinces fulfilled their mission and contributed to drawing German corps away from the north. The bulk of the French armies and the British Expeditionary Corps were in line along the Belgium frontier from Arlon to Mons when the Germans began their great drive.

The French were surprised in two respects. They had not foreseen the rapidity with which the German heavy artillery would reduce the forts in Belgium, the fall of Namur was the greatest catastrophe of the first period of the campaign, and they had not dreamed that the Germans would be able to mobilize so many troops in so short a period. Joffre had planned to meet the Germans along the Meuse and the Sambre, that is along the French frontier, but when the German advance began, his troops on these fronts were outnumbered by at least two to one, not because the mass of the French troops had been sent to Alsace-Lorraine, but because the French had not foreseen the capacity of the Germans to mobilize their reserves and had little more than their first-line troops ready, while the Germans were making use of Landwehr and even Landsturm formations in the first shock.

Once this fact was clearly established, Joffre resolutely drew his forces back until he was able to put more reserves in the field and thus approximately restore the balance between the two armies. But he was still heavily outnumbered at the decisive moment, winning his great battle with inferior forces. His enemy had reckoned on the traditional eagerness of the French to attack, and had expected to obtain a decisive victory, through superior numbers, in the first days of the war. The impression which the press reports gave in the early days, that the French were driven from defeat to defeat and almost succumbed to the German attack is far from accurate. In point of fact, the French armies, after suffering marked but relatively insignificant reverses at the outset, reverses due to the blunders of the subordinate generals in part, and to the greatly superior German numbers and artillery in the main, were drawn back in obedience to a carefully conceived plan, were denied the opportunity to fight, as they desired, until the exhaustion of German strength, ammunition, and transport, and the increase in French numbers gave the opportunity for a victory. The whole opening campaign was fought on the French side with a very keen recollection of the mistakes of 1870, and the result justified the strategy.

But with the end of the Battle of the Marne both the Allied and the German plans collapsed. Neither side had foreseen clearly the possibility of a battle in which the French might win a decisive victory, yet lack the numbers to enforce the decision absolutely. But the Germans were able to meet the situation promptly and, by preparing a position on the Aisne, to retain a considerable portion of the ground they had occupied in their first rush. Thus in failing to repeat their triumphs of the Franco-Prussian War and of the Seven Weeks' War, they had escaped the disaster of Napoleon at Waterloo, when he, too, had staked all on a single throw.

In the weeks and months that followed the German defeat at the Marne, allied understanding of the actual nature of the war developed only slowly. Until the coming of spring and the British failure to get men or munitions, the French and the British public, and probably their soldiers, believed that the Germans were shortly to be turned out of France. But with the failure there was at last established the real situation, the war had taken on the character of our own Civil War, it had become a struggle in which the decision would follow the exhaustion of one of the contending forces and the incidental victories of either side could not contribute materially to the ending of the war.

In the Civil War the North was exceedingly slow in learning this lesson and it was not until General Grant at last assumed the command of all the Northern armies that an intelligent policy was adopted. This policy has been summarized as the policy of attrition and it is now generally recognized as the policy on which the enemies of the Central Powers rely for ultimate success. Grant's own statement of this policy was as follows: "To hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be left to him nothing but submission." By this policy Grant won his war.

Now the allied policy, which it is necessary to recognize, to understand the war as it is viewed by one of the two contending forces, is this: The Allies are satisfied that the German numbers have begun or are beginning to fail. They fix at around 8,000,000 the total man power of Germany at the outset, using all means of computation including their own experience. They figure that at the end of the first eighteen months Germany had lost permanently not less than 3,500,000, possibly 4,000,000. They know that it requires upwards of 3,000,000 men to hold Germany's present lines and about 1,000,000 to perform other necessary services.

Now no such wastage has to be faced by the Allies as a whole. France is in the German situation, but Great Britain is still possessed of large numbers of men and her losses are under 600,000, while her population together with that of her colonies is above 60,000,000, whites alone being considered, against Germany's 67,000,000. Russia's man power is practically limited only by the ability to equip and munition. Italy has, as yet, made little draft upon her resources. Austria, on the other hand, has suffered more heavily, proportionately figured, than Germany.

Within a time that can be approximately fixed, the Allies believe that Germany will have either to shorten her lines or underman them. If she undermans them she will face the peril that overtook Lee about Richmond, when, as he said, his lines were stretched so thin, they broke. If Germany shortens her lines, this will be a confession of defeat and will deprive her of the conquered territories. Meantime the entire strategy of the Allies is summed up in Grant's grim words, and as Grant kept up his hammering on all the fronts of the Confederacy so the Allies are keeping up their pressure.

But attrition of men is only half; there is the question of food and of money. Command of the sea insures the food supply of the Allies and their financial resources greatly surpass those of Germany. Germany is suffering--we have Harden's word for this, because of food shortage, she is suffering from economic paralysis resulting from the blockade and she is suffering from the lack of certain materials needed in war. She is compelled to find money for her other and poorer allies. The enemies of Germany do not expect that she will be starved out or that she will have to surrender for lack of materials to make ammunition. But they do believe that shortage of food, economic pressure, financial difficulties, will go hand in hand with the failure of numbers.

In a word the Allies are fighting a war with many weapons of which the army is only one and the British navy another, perhaps the most effective. They are not fighting to win a campaign and they are not basing their expectation of victory on the incidents in any one field or in any single campaign. The Germans, on the contrary, as we have seen, have undertaken three tremendous campaigns, the first to win an absolute victory on the battle field, a victory which would make the Germany of William II the successor of the France of Napoleon I in Europe; the second to dispose of one of the great foes and thereby win a limited but considerable success; the third to win peace and an incidental opportunity to expand toward the east, the only direction in which expansion cannot be checked by sea power.

The Allies still expect to crush Germany; by crushing Germany they mean bringing her back to her frontiers of 1914, detaching Alsace-Lorraine from her and possibly Prussian territory east of the Vistula. They mean to destroy her fleet, demand indemnities for Belgian and French sufferers, they mean to abolish what they regard as the Prussian menace to peace. They are fighting Germany as Europe fought Napoleon and with the same determination. On the German side the struggle is also being waged in the Napoleonic fashion, Germany is seeking to employ the Napoleonic method and has so far achieved something of the early success of the great emperor.

But the simplest fashion in which to describe the later phases of the conflict is to say that a war of action has become a war of endurance, that Germany has sought and missed a decision on the battle field and her foes are now seeking the decision through economic forces quite as much as military and through casualty lists rather than brilliant campaigns.

THE WAR CORRESPONDENT

By ARTHUR RUHL

When the American fleet was sent to Vera Cruz in the summer of 1914 and it looked for a time as if an army might go into Mexico, Major General Funston explained the conditions under which correspondents were to go to the front. There was to be no repetition of the scandalous free-for-all of the Spanish War, when news prospectors of all sorts and descriptions swarmed over to Cuba in almost as haphazard fashion as Park Row reporters are rushed uptown to cover a subway explosion or a four-alarm fire.

The number of men was to be limited and their privileges strictly defined. Only the press associations and some twenty or thirty newspapers were to send correspondents, and they must put up substantial bonds for each man--one for his good behavior, the other to serve as an expense fund against which would be charged his keep as a civilian guest of the army. These conditions fulfilled, the men were to accompany the expedition with the privileges, practically, of officers or neutral attaches.

They would join an officers' mess or have a mess of their own with similar service; they might provide their own horses which would be cared for with the other horses of the unit to which they were attached. They were to stay where they were put, so far as nearness to the fighting was concerned, according to the judgment of the commanding officer, and all their dispatches must first pass a military censor.

These rules were read with some dismay by those not included in the provisional list. To many who had hoped to see something of a war they doubtless seemed severe, yet it is a fact that had they been put into effect, the correspondents in Mexico would have seen much more, comparatively speaking, than any group of correspondents has seen in Europe. They would actually have accompanied the army, sharing throughout the expedition the day-to-day life of the fighting men, like the old-fashioned "horseback correspondent"--and nobody in Europe has done that.

At the beginning of the war, England permitted no correspondents at all at the front, and while a group was chosen, it was well into 1915 before they were even allowed to cross to France. Once they reached their headquarters they saw a good deal. They lived at or near the front instead of merely shooting up and back for a glimpse of it. They met many officers more or less intimately, saw the life behind and in the trenches; occasionally they were taken to observation stations from which they saw the effect of artillery fire, and even, perhaps, in the distance, charging infantry. Yet the number who had even these privileges was so limited that it included but one American.

Mr. Frederick Palmer was thus chosen to act as a sort of correspondent at large for the American press. Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, an English journalist, acted in a similar capacity for the English press and, indeed, for the rest of the world, at the Dardanelles. He saw a great deal, as much, perhaps, as any reporter has seen of any campaign, but he was almost alone in his glory, and so far as the distribution of such privileges is concerned, the English have been more cautious than any of the belligerents.

The French military authorities were more open minded, yet, while a few favored sons or the head of some press association whose position in Paris was almost as secure as that of an accredited diplomat, were quietly taken up to the trenches from the first, several months had elapsed before a group of correspondents went to the front. The desirability of publicity was better understood later, many neutral correspondents visited the trenches, and a few specially favored individuals spent some time at or near the front, but, even here, permission was obtained as a result of individual effort rather than as a part of a general scheme for handling, more or less impersonally, all applicants in good standing.

In Germany, correspondents were rather freely taken to the various fronts from the first. One reason for this, was, perhaps, that the Germans, with their thorough organization of everything, including censorship and secret service, may have known better just how far they could go. They were not afraid of what might get through the wall, because the wall was tight, and they knew just what could get out and what couldn't. At any rate, many reporters, both native born and foreign, were getting glimpses of the various fronts while the English group were still eating their heads off in London. Once there, however, they saw less, as a rule, than the English correspondents finally did, for their trips were generally mere visits--a sort of Cook's tour in war time.

A quotation from an article of mine in "Collier's" written after a trip through Belgium and down to the first-line German trenches at Givenchy will suggest the nature of these excursions:

"You go out a sort of zoo--our party included four or five Americans, a Greek, an Italian (Italy had not yet gone into the war), a diminutive Spaniard and a tall, preoccupied Swede--under the direction of some hapless officer of the General Staff. For a week, perhaps, you go hurtling through a closely articulated program, almost as helpless as a package in a pneumatic tube--night expresses, racing military motors, snapshots at this and that, down a bewildering vista of long gray capes, heel clickings, stiff bows from the waist, and punctilious military salutes. You are under fire one minute, the next shooting through some captured palace or barracks or museum of antiques. At noon the guard is turned out in honor, at four you are watching distant shell fire from the Belgian dunes; at eleven crawling under a down quilt in some French hotel where the prices of food and wines are fixed by the local commandant. Everything is done for you--more, of course, than one would wish--the gifted young captain conductor speaks English one minute, French or Italian the next, gets you up in the morning, to bed at night, past countless sentries and thick-headed guards demanding an _Ausweis_, contrives never to cease looking as if he had stepped from the bandbox, and presently pops you into your hotel in Berlin with the curious feeling of never having been away at all."

There were a great many trips of this sort under the auspices of the German General Staff, and every neutral correspondent who came to Berlin with letters establishing his position as a serious workman in good standing in his own country, could hope, after a reasonable interval for getting acquainted, to obtain permission to go on one of them. It was not an ideal way of working, to be sure, yet the "front" was a big and rather accidental place, and one could scarcely touch it anywhere without bringing back something to help complete the civilian's puzzle picture of war.

One man would get a chance to spend a night in the trenches, with the sky criss-crossed with searchlight shafts and illuminating bombs; an automobile party might be caught on some East Prussian road with the woods on either side crackling with rifle fire as the skirmishers beat through the timber after the scattered enemy as after so many squirrels. Our moment came one afternoon in the German trenches at Givenchy, when, with the English trenches only a stone's throw away, both sides began to amuse themselves by shooting dynamite bombs.

Groups of native-born correspondents were likely to see rather more than outsiders, and the more authoritative home writers were attached not infrequently to an army corps or staff headquarters for weeks at a time. The Berlin and Vienna bookshops are filled with books and pamphlets written by such men, though, of course, little of their correspondence has ever reached America. A man like Ludwig Ganghofer, for instance, became so much of an institution that papers even joked about him, and I remember a cartoon--in "Jugend," I think--picturing him puffing up a hill where a staff was waiting and the commanding officer saying "Ganghofer's here. The attack may now begin!"

In Germany, however, as in France, at least during the first year of the war, each correspondent, particularly a foreigner, was merely a privateer, making his own fight for a chance to work, and pulling what wires he could. After his brief excursion he returned to Berlin, a mere tourist, so to speak, and had to begin the old tiresome round--his own embassy--the German Foreign Office--the War Office--all over again. There was no organization in which he could enroll, so to speak, he had no permanent standing. This drawback--from the correspondent's point of view--was met in Austria-Hungary by the Presse Quartier, an integral part of the army like any other branch of the service, whose function it was to handle the whole complicated business of war correspondence.

The Austro-Hungarians, prepared from the first for a large number of civilian observers, including news and special writers, photographers, illustrators and painters, and, to handle them satisfactorily, organized this Presse Quartier, once admitted to which--the fakers and fly-by-nights were supposed to be weeded out by preliminary red tape--they were assumed to be serious workmen and treated as the army's guests.

The Presse Quartier--the Germans later organized one on somewhat different lines--was in two sections; an executive section with a commandant responsible for the arrangement of trips to the various fronts and the general business of censorship and publicity; and a second, an entertainment section, so to speak, also with its commandant, whose business it was to board, lodge, and otherwise look after correspondents when they were not on trips to the front. At the time I visited the Presse Quartier the executive section was in the city of Teschen, across the border of Silesia; the correspondents lived in the village of Nagybicse in Hungary, two or three hours' railroad journey away. In this village--the most novel part of the scheme--some thirty or forty correspondents were living, writing their past adventures, setting forth on new ones, or merely inviting their souls for the moment under a regime which combined the functions of tourists' bureau, rest cure, and a sort of military club.

For the time being they were part of the army--fed, lodged, and transported at the army's expense, and unable to leave without formal military permission. They were supposed to "enlist for the whole war," so to speak, and most of the Austro-Hungarian and German correspondents had so remained--some had even written books there--but a good deal of freedom was allowed observers from neutral countries and permission given to go when they felt they had seen enough.

Isolated thus in the country--the only mail the military field post, the only telegrams those that passed the military censor--correspondents were as "safe" as in Siberia. They, on the other hand, had the advantages of an established position, of living inexpensively in pleasant surroundings where their relations with the censor and the army were less those of policemen and of suspicious characters than of host and guest. To be welcomed here, after the usual fretful dangling and wire-pulling in war office anterooms and city hotels was reassuring enough.

Correspondents were quartered in private houses, and as there was one man to a family, generally, he was put in the villager's room of honor, with a tall porcelain stove in the corner, a feather bed under him and another on top. Each man had a soldier servant who looked after his boots and luggage, kept him supplied with cigars and cigarettes from the Quartier commissariat--for a paternal government included even tobacco!--and whack his heels together whenever spoken to and flung back an obedient "Ja wohl!" We breakfasted separately, whenever we felt like it, lunched and dined--officers and correspondents--together. There were soldier waiters, and on every table big carafes of Hungarian white wine, drunk generally instead of water. For beer one paid extra.

The commandant and his staff, including a doctor, and the officer-guides not on excursions at the moment, sat at the head of the long U-shaped table. Anyone who came in or went out after the commandant was supposed to advance a bit into this "U," catch his eye, bow and receive his returning nod. The silver click of spurs, of course, accompanied this salute when an officer left the room, and Austro-Hungarian and German correspondents generally snapped their heels together in semi-military fashion. All our goings and comings, indeed, were accompanied by a good deal of manner. People who had seen each other at breakfast shook hands formally half an hour later in the village square, and one bowed and was bowed to and heard the sing-song "habe die Ehre!" a dozen times a day.

With amenities of this nature the Quartier guests passed their time while waiting their turn to go to the front. There were always, while I was there, one or more parties in the field, either on the Italian or the Russian front, or both, while a few writers and artists were well enough known to be permitted to go out alone. The Hungarian, Mr. Molnar, for instance, whose play, "The Devil," was seen in America a few years ago, was writing at that time a series of letters under the general title, "Wanderings on the East Front," and apparently, within obvious military limitations, he did wander. One day, another man came into lunch with the news that he was off on the best trip he'd had yet--he was going back to Vienna for his skis, to go down into the Tyrol and work along glaciers to the battery positions. Another man, a Budapest painter, started off for an indefinite stay with an army corps in Bessarabia. He was to be, indeed, part of the army for the time being, and all his work belonged to the army first.

Foreigners not intending to remain in Austria-Hungary could not expect such privileges, naturally; but if they were admitted to the Quartier at all they were sent on the ordinary group excursions like the home correspondents themselves. Indeed, the wonder was--in view of the comparative ease with which neutral correspondents drifted about Europe; the naivete to put it mildly, with which the wildest romances had been printed in American newspapers--that we were permitted to see as much as we did.

When a group started for the front it left Nagybicse in its own car, which, except when the itinerary included some large city--Lemberg, for instance--served as a little hotel until they came back again. The car was a clean, second-class coach, of the usual European compartment kind, two men to a compartment, and at night they bunked on the long transverse seat comfortably enough. We took one long trip of a thousand miles or so in this way, taking our own motor, on a separate flat car, and even an orderly servant for each man.

Each of these groups was, of course, accompanied by an officer guide--several were detailed at the Quartier for this special duty--whose complex and nerve-racking task it was to answer all questions, make all arrangements, report to each local commandant, pass sentries, and comfortably waft his flock of civilians through the maze of barriers which cover every foot, so to speak, of this region near the front.

The things correspondents were permitted to see differed from those seen on the other fronts less in kind than in quantity. More trips were made, but there is and can be little place for a civilian on a "front," any spot in which, over a strip several miles wide, from the heavy artillery positions of one side to the heavy artillery of the other, may be in absolute quiet one minute and the next the center of fire.

There is no time to bother with civilians during an offensive, and, if a retreat is likely, no commander wishes to have country described which may presently be in the hands of the enemy. Hidden batteries in action, reserves moving up, wounded coming back, flyers, trenches quiet for the moment--this is about as close to actual fighting as the outsider, under ordinary circumstances, can expect to get on any front.

The difference in Austria-Hungary was that correspondents saw these things, and the battle fields and captured cities, not as mere outsiders, picked up from a hotel and presently to be dropped there again, but as, in a sense, a part of the army itself. They had their commandant to report to, their "camp" and "uniform"--the gold-and-black Presse Quartier arm band--and they returned to headquarters with the reasonable certainty that in another ten days or so they would start out again.

Another advantage of the Quartier was the avoidance of the not uncommon friction between the civilians of the Foreign Office and the soldiers of the War Office. The Foreign Office runs things, so to speak, in times of peace and it is to the Foreign Office that the diplomatic representatives of foreign powers apply for favors for their own fellow-citizens. But in war time the army runs things, and the Foreign Office official who has charge of correspondents is continually promising things or wishing to do things he is not sure of being able to carry out. The result is often a rather unpleasant sort of competitive wire-pulling between correspondents, some trying the Foreign Office, some the War Office, some attacking both at the same time--one would even hear it said now and then that the surest way to get anything from the soldiers was to complain to them that the Foreign Office civilians wouldn't do anything for you!

In Austria-Hungary the Presse Quartier acted as a bridge between the two. It was the definite court to which all applicants were referred and a good deal of aimless waiting about and wire-pulling eliminated at once. And having cleared away the preliminary red-tape, the correspondent had, in the Quartier commandant, an agent more likely to push his interests than the civilian officials back in the capital and more likely to be listened to by those at the front.

The war correspondent had been "killed off" so many times in newspapers and magazines of late years that one might expect him to be as dead as the dodo, and of course the old-fashioned "horseback" correspondent--a sort of unofficial envoy extraordinary from the reading public, who carried his own elaborate outfit and rode more or less where he pleased--is extinct. A horse would have been about as useful on most of the European fronts, under the conditions prescribed, as a rowboat. What the correspondent needed, in the few hours he was permitted to see anything, was a fast motor car, and quite as much as the car itself the pass, without which it would have been stopped at the first crossroads.

Wandering round the active front where any point in a strip of several miles wide, however apparently peaceful, is under observation and likely to be at any moment under fire, is not practicable even were it permitted. Modern artillery, long range rifles, aeroplanes and field telephones have put an end to such strolling; while the elaborate system of communication in such highly civilized neighborhoods as those in which the present war is being fought, and the care with which every scrap of information about the enemy is pieced together and coordinated, makes it imperative that every possible source of such information shall be controlled.

Nevertheless the Great War had no sooner started than the old guard bobbed up serenely, and with them new ones--men and women writers, adventurous novelists, privateers of all sorts. They have kept on working and seeing more or less, and have performed necessary and valuable service. They have described the life behind the front, the life in towns, camps, prisons, hospitals and given the news--the rough general outlines--of the swiftly changing drama. Very few have seen any fighting, properly speaking, and although bits of their work here and there deserve to become part of the permanent history of the war, they themselves would be the last to suggest that they have told the real story.

The real story is of two kinds. There is the narrative of the events, the orderly, understanding arrangement and coordination of the showers of facts and rumors that blow in from a hundred sources to the great news centers far from the front. And there is the story of personal experience, the sensations of the individual as he looks into the face of war. The first tells what happened, the other how it felt. For the one, the correspondent is too near, for the other too far away.

The division of the enormous battle fronts into innumerable little news-tight compartments, so to speak, understood in their entirety only by the commanders in chief at the centers of the telegraph and telephone network far behind the front, makes it impossible for a correspondent to see very far beyond his own nose. Even were he permitted to understand the general plan of his own army he could scarcely know, while still at the front, the general plan of the enemy. A well-informed observer working comfortably at his desk in one of the capitals, with the news of the world at his disposal, with experts on every subject within easy calling distance, and with every sort of map and reference book, is much better able to write a story of the war--such a story as this, for instance--than any correspondent actually at the front, however fortunately situated. There have been many such "correspondents at home" and reporters returning from first-hand glimpses of this and that, have often for the first time understood the significance of such details when they were seen through the broad perspective and leisurely analysis of such long-distance observers.

The nourishing flavor of such a little book as Fritz Kreisler's "Four Weeks in the Trenches"--scarcely more than a magazine article, with no sensational adventures and no attempt at rhetorical effect, and of several little collections of published letters--reveals at once the correspondent's other disability. People feel that this man really was _there_--this is what one real man with a gun in his hand did feel, and not what some civilian, sitting safely out of range, imagines crowds of men might have felt. Its very incompleteness, things left out because of sensibilities so stunned that events made no mark as they whirled by, is often more impressive than the conventional war correspondent's cocksureness and windy eloquence. There are scores of men like this gifted violinist--playwriters, painters, journalists, men trained to see things in various ways--drawn in by universal service and now buried in the mass, but destined some day to emerge to normal life.

From them the story of the individual, of the fighting itself, must come long after the war is over. It will come piecemeal, from diaries now stuck away in the soldiers' pockets, from memories that will only begin to act when peace has given weary brains a chance to work again, from men now tired and dirty and horror-stunned and scarcely able to remember their own names.