The Story of the Great War (Vol. 1-8). Various Authors
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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 Châlons. 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