VICTORY
“O God! Thy arm was here;
And not to us, but to Thy arm alone,
Ascribe we all.”
Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act IV, Sc. viii.
The last year of the Great War was undoubtedly the most critical and momentous year in the modern history of these islands. By an amazing combination of events, Western Europe was subject to a sudden revival of extreme peril exceeding in violence the menace of 1914. Looking back from the security of the present time (1920) it is easy to underrate the threat of that great attack by the Central Powers: and, indeed, in our present discussions there is an almost perilous oblivion of the dangers through which we have passed. But those who study the memoirs of the German War Leaders, which have poured out since the close of the war,[[116]] will realise the complete confidence of the German General Staff in the victory which seemed to lie ahead of them, as the natural climax to the series of smashing blows which they had delivered to their enemies during the two previous years (1916-17).
General Ludendorff finds the chief reason for the German defeat in the war spirit which had been aroused in England under the leadership of Mr. Lloyd George, and in France by the inspiration of M. Clemenceau. Neither of those leaders would admit that they alone could have achieved so great a triumph for liberty over the menace of militarism. It was the spirit of the peoples of France and Great Britain that really achieved resounding victory—the peoples who shrank from no sacrifice and faced every trial rather than accept defeat. I have in my memory the spectacle of a regiment of boys of eighteen and nineteen—London boys, freshly plucked from the counter and the van—whom I met one evening, at the height of the crisis in the spring of 1918, marching to be entrained from Norfolk to Northern France. “Shall we win the war?” shouted one half of them, and the other half replied with an echoing shout—“Yes!” Those youths had been cut off from all leave and were being plunged into the firing-line at a few hours’ notice. They went singing to almost certain death. They were the fit crusaders of a race that never contemplated defeat; and no man who had such a people behind him could vainly boast of his own single achievements.
Yet leadership counts for much, and vainly do the masses struggle if those at the top weaken and faint. There is no greater misfortune that can befall a race than failure of valour and resolution in high places. It was because Mr. Lloyd George kept, in the utmost stress of those events, his courage undimmed and his spirit unshaken, that he has rightly earned so large a part in the credit of victory.
Another scene comes back to me from those dark days. I was standing in front of one of the large-scale maps at Downing Street, noting the point reached by the German legions in one of those tremendous and determined efforts to drive us into the sea during the April of 1918. There was the sound of a step behind us, and suddenly we turned to find the Prime Minister also observing the map with a close and concentrated gaze. We knew that things were serious, and that there were influences at the centre in favour of withdrawing our armies from France. But of all the company he was the serenest. “Serious? Yes!” he said. “But by no means desperate. Look here!” and he pointed to the north of Calais. “We can flood that area if necessary. Then, if they drive us south of Calais, we can still hold on. France is a large place, and it has many ports. Retire from France? No, we will stand by our Allies to the last!” And he went away singing, as undismayed as those boys whom I had seen marching to France. A worthy leader of a worthy nation!
On another day I remember him describing to me a visit he had paid to the fighting line at the most critical moment of that great peril. He spoke with flashing eyes. “We motored,” he said, “from the coast right up to the fighting front, and we did not meet a single British soldier in flight. Not one had turned his back to the enemy, not one!” Yet during that time the German guns were enfilading our trenches lined with English boys, and the chance of survival in that defence without death or injury had been reduced almost to the point of zero.
What was the cause of this last and most perilous phase? It was the collapse of Russia, produced by the Bolshevist coup d’état in Petrograd on November 7th, 1917. On that day, Lenin achieved the purpose for which the Germans had given him his passports into Russia. He destroyed Kerensky, who combined revolution with national war, and he substituted a policy of international peace combined with civil war. Both edges of that policy were sharpened to the destruction of Russia as a war power, and on December 20th Mr. Lloyd George warned the House of Commons that the collapse of Russia, following on the Italian defeat, would require a new and still greater output of man-power by Great Britain. A Bill for that purpose was introduced into the House of Commons on January 14th, abolishing almost the last exemptions from military service. Events in Russia moved swiftly. On November 21st the Bolshevists made to the Germans a definite proposal for armistice, and peace negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk on December 2nd. The Bolshevists twice broke up the Constituent Assembly at Petrograd by force of arms. The Germans put forward peace terms of such severity that even the Bolshevists were dismayed, and Trotsky attempted to declare peace without signing the treaty. Thereupon the Germans advanced their armies into Russia, meeting with no resistance, and occupying Minsk in the north and Kieff in the south. Powerless in the face of this invasion, the Bolshevists signed the peace treaty on March 2nd, surrendering Lithuania, Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic Provinces, promising demobilisation of their armies and internment of their ships. Russia was out of the war. On March 5th the Germans followed this up by signing peace with Rumania, and on March 6th they signed peace with Finland. Their great armies in the East of Europe were now free to work their will on the West.
Ludendorff has told us that even then there was some debate among the German military chiefs between the policy of defence in the West and the policy of attack. But Mr. Lloyd George saw clearly that the Germans would be obliged to attack. They were compelled by the logic of the blockade. With all her feverish triumphs in the East of Europe, Germany was, at that moment, in a parlous plight. She was in the position of a besieged city. She had either to break out or to surrender. The fearful ravage which she perpetrated in Rumania and the Ukraine, and in the western provinces of Russia also, were really the measure of her need. Food and materials were more necessary for her at that moment than military triumphs, and she hastened to cash all her victories into material produce of one kind or another. Like a hungry tiger, she devoured her prey. But there were other beasts afoot in Eastern Europe at the same time, and we know now that the division of the loot caused extreme bitterness between Germany and Austria-Hungary, and that the resentment of the Ukraine forced Germany to keep troops in the East of Europe which might have struck the decisive blow in the West. Such is the Nemesis of greed.
But still Germany could realise immediately over 2,000,000 new fighting men for the grand sortie now planned on the Western Front, and Ludendorff has told us how quickly and strenuously he trained the troops for this gigantic effort. The blow came on March 21st, against the Third and Fourth British Armies between the Scarpe and the Oise. Forty German divisions attacked, and on the second day, the 22nd, there was a break-through west of St. Quentin. On the following days the British line had to withdraw nearly fifteen miles, back to the line of the Somme, losing prisoners all the way, but inflicting very heavy losses on the attacking division. The British line was broken, but not the British Army. During the following days the German divisions steadily poured through the gap, crossing the Somme, capturing Albert and Mezières, some 90,000 British prisoners, and over 1,300 guns.
The peril opened by this event both to France and the British Empire lasted for four months, and during that period there was scarcely a day on which the strain was relaxed. Colossal issues were at stake, and among the chief was whether the British Empire should survive. Mr. Lloyd George rose to the height of the crisis at once, and kept on the summit until the close. Day by day he never relaxed his energy or his courage. He did not abate, in those dark days, one jot of heart or hope. There was no resource or reserve of national strength which he did not bring to bear. There was no device that he left untried. It is easy to speak of the hurricane and storm when you have reached harbour, but there is little doubt that, unless we had had a good captain on the bridge, the great ship “British Empire” would have foundered.
He envisaged the problem in two ways—strategy and numbers. He saw the Allied Forces faced by overwhelming myriads of Teuton troops, combined under one central command. To resist this assault he was more than ever of the opinion that the defenders also must be placed under one command, and he carried his faith to the full logic of his conclusion. In April he agreed to the appointment of General Foch as supreme Commander of the Allied Forces. It was a step involving great risks and great faith. Fortunately Sir Douglas (now Lord) Haig agreed with Mr. Lloyd George, and played the game to the full, like the great soldier he was. Otherwise the thing could not have been done. The trial came for the British when, as the crisis deepened, Marshal Foch began to exercise his full powers, and to withdraw from the direction of the coast great British forces which had been placed there in reserve for the protection of the British line and the security of the Channel.
Like all great commanders, Foch himself had to take risks and to meet the German concentrations by great concentrations on his own side. For this purpose he had to wield full power over both British and French Armies, and he exercised it to the full in the great battles of that summer. It was an anxious time for the British Government. But Mr. Lloyd George had taken the full measure of Foch as a soldier: he fully believed in him, and he went to the whole extent of his faith. A working arrangement was come to by which Mr. Lloyd George went over to meet Clemenceau and Foch at Paris periodically, and the supreme conduct of the war was now in the hands of these three men. So far for the strategy which governed the great battles of that summer.
Then for numbers. Mr. Lloyd George saw in a moment that, unless drastic and exceptional measures were taken the Allied Forces would simply be snowed under by the hosts of the enemy. To meet this danger the natural counter-measure was to throw across the Channel all the troops in England sufficiently trained to go into the shock of battle. For this purpose he was obliged to suspend all the usual age limits from active foreign service and to send across the Channel the great army of youths enlisted under the Conscription Act, and hitherto prepared only for home defence. These great forces streamed across in the months of April, May, and June, and did something to fill up the gaps in the line. But as the weeks went by Mr. Lloyd George perceived that the British reinforcements alone would be unequal to the great task. The Germans were still straining every nerve, and they were fighting against time. Our Government could not precisely tell how many reserves the Germans still possessed, or how many men they could spare from their Eastern Front. The Germans were working on the calculation that the Americans could not come across till 1919 or 1920, and their submarines were operating feverishly to keep up the alarm on the Atlantic Ocean. The Americans themselves were too far removed from the scene of danger to realise at once the greatness of the emergency. But they only required the S.O.S. signal. Mr. Lloyd George determined to give it.
One morning that spring he made up his mind.
“We have to get 500,000 Americans over in four months, at the rate of 125,000 a month. How can that be done?” That was the problem as he saw it and as he expressed it. He began to send a series of telegrams to President Wilson through Lord Reading, explaining to Mr. Wilson the peril and the need of instant help. President Wilson immediately grasped the crisis. Mr. Lloyd George organised the Navy and the Merchant Service for the work of transport on the British side of the Atlantic, and President Wilson did the same on his side. So began that great Armada of help from the New World. The American divisions poured across the Atlantic, overcrowded on their transports, packed almost to suffocation, but willing to suffer all things in the great crusade on which they were bent. The Americans, indeed, did far better than the British Government had expected. They sent a million men. It was a magnificent performance, and must ever be remembered to the credit of that great nation.
Then President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George, acting together, went one step further. When the American troops arrived many of them were instantly brigaded with the British and French forces, and so they learnt with the greatest rapidity possible all the craft and ruses necessary for modern warfare. They did their utmost to acquire in a few months all those new arts of destruction which it had taken Europe years to evolve. To achieve this, for the time they gave up America’s great dream of a national army. But, after all, the greatest fact of all was their arrival.
Meanwhile, during these weeks of suspense and endeavour the German armies had struck again and again in the last desperate campaign for victory. Through April, May, and June the issue still hung in the balance.
The second great attack on April 4th, when twenty German divisions, advancing towards Amiens, attempted to divide the British Armies from the French. That attack came very near to success. We all know how the Germans arrived at positions from which they could bombard Amiens and paralyse the communications, and it is blazed on the records of fame how the armies of the British Empire—men from Australia and Canada—held the line at Villers-Brettoneux, and by their invincible blending of defence and attack kept the assailing German divisions from achieving their purpose.
A few days later a new attack developed, this time farther north, west of Lille. From the British point of view this was the most menacing attack of all. It was a determined attempt to drive the British armies into the sea. On April 10th Armentières was occupied and the bloodstained Ridge of Messines crossed. On the 15th Bailleul was taken, and on the 25th the attack came to a climax with the capture of Kemmel Hill under the eyes of the German Emperor. Yet the Germans could not gain the decision they require. The British troops gave ground, but always fought on. The line bent, but it did not break.
But, as the weeks went on, the British Government replied in stern deeds which the whole British people supported. Not only did the younger men stream across the Channel, but the older men lined up to take their places. It was on March 9th that Mr. Lloyd George introduced that last and tremendous Military Service Act, raising the age to fifty, with a reserve possibility of fifty-five, and threatening to extend conscription to Ireland. Such extreme measures became in the result unnecessary: but partly because the British people showed that they were possible.
Ludendorff has described to us the gradual waning of his hopes[[117]] in face of the unbroken resolution of the British people under Mr. Lloyd George, the swift dying off in the fire of battle of all their best troops, and the failing of human morale which took place under the stress of those costly onslaughts. There is no more dramatic story in history than his account of the way in which the revolutionary poison which the Germans had inoculated into Russia by the sending of Lenin returned back into the German Army and gradually destroyed by its discipline and undermined its desire for victory.[[118]] But there is another side to that story. Ludendorff describes, without apparently understanding the significance of his narrative, the way in which his troops, when they had captured a position, would spend the precious minutes in overhauling and devouring the stores of food which they found.[[119]] He seems to regard that as merely a sign of the weakening of military discipline. But the plain fact is that hunger has no respect for discipline; and it was hunger that was eating at the vitals of the German nation—hunger and want of all the essentials of war. The blockade was completing the work of our armies. For our prisoners found that the Germans were lacking in the most elementary medical necessities and that their transport had reached a point of decay which made it almost impossible for them properly to feed and maintain their armies.
Ludendorff blames the German nation for not supporting the German Army, but the fact is that this was not a war of armies, but a war of nations. The German Army was still capable of great deeds, but the German nation behind was stricken to the heart. Therefore, the strength of the Army, which drew its vitality from the nation, was rapidly waning even in those moments of victory.
With his instinctive insight for the real facts of the situation, Mr. Lloyd George saw that even in the darkest hour here was the governing issue—which nation could hold out the longest. So now he set himself, with all his great powers, to hearten and encourage both the peoples and the Armies in France and Great Britain. He kept travelling between London and Paris, attending the meetings of the Versailles Council, visiting the armies at the front, and exchanging cheerful messages between the fighting men and the civilians. On the day Bailleul was captured, April 15th, he boldly declared that we had lost “nothing vital.” On May 3rd he returned from the Versailles Council with a message from the troops to the nation at home—“Be of good cheer. We are all right!”
But the crisis was by no means at an end. In May there came a third German attack, this time towards Paris, and before it was broken it had driven the British and French armies across the Aisne and the Marne and had come within almost thirty miles of Paris. Those were anxious days. But the lure of Paris was again to prove fatal to the German Army. Foch withdrew his armies only to prepare for a fiercer spring. “My left is driven back, and my right is driven back. I shall attack with my centre!” was his famous utterance. The Germans were drawn perilously on, until with a sudden smashing blow on July 18th Foch crumpled up the right side of the phalanx which they were driving towards Paris. Ludendorff tells us that, even after that unexpected defeat, the German Staff still cherished hopes of victory towards the north, although, to all outside observers, their aggressive powers seemed to be exhausted.
It was the attack on August 8th of the British and French troops together, aided by an army of tanks, storming the German lines east of Amiens, that came to Ludendorff as the final blow to his hopes. From that time onward, until November, is one long story of unbroken victory for the Allies. But it was victory dearly purchased by blood and endurance; for the German armies retired sullenly and inflicted heavy casualties.[[120]] We must not underrate the heroism of those months. It is no small thing that the armies endured to the end. It is clear, from the memoirs of the German chiefs, that they were still looking eagerly for any sign of weakness, and that the smallest symptom of war-weariness would have led to a renewal of German hopes. Mr. Lloyd George saw this clearly, and never to the end did he give way to boasting. “The worst is over,” he said at Manchester on September 12th, “but the end is not yet.”
We know now from Ludendorff that suggestions for an armistice were made by him to the German Government immediately after August 8th. But at first the civilian power, under Count Hertling, the German Chancellor, and his successor Hintze, was inclined to hold out. It was not until after the smashing up of Bulgaria on September 16th, ending with its surrender on the 30th, that Hintze resigned and gave place to Prince Max of Baden. It was now the turn of the German military chiefs to resist the civilians in their passion for surrender. For Ludendorff was in favour of a final rally, whilst Prince Max was resolute to make peace.
It was to President Wilson that Prince Max made his overtures for an armistice based on the Fourteen Points,[[121]] and the negotiations continued all through October. No one who lived through those days will forget the high, austere dignity of the American President’s replies, which fell on the German Government and people with all the inexorable force of impartial justice. He insisted that the Germans should leave all invaded soil, that they should cease their barbarisms on land and sea, and that the terms of Armistice must be such as to make a renewal of hostilities impossible.[[122]]
President Wilson carried the correspondence with Prince Max as far as he could without being in control of the armies, and then he telegraphed the letters to the Governments of his Allies in Europe. Mr. Lloyd George at once saw the practical peril of the new situation. It was that the German military chiefs might use the Armistice for a recovery of strength, and Ludendorff’s Memoirs show that he had full justification for that fear.[[123]] He resolved at once that the only safe armistice would be one of complete disarmament, and with that policy in his mind he went to Paris to meet M. Clemenceau and Marshal Foch. There at Versailles a full historic conference of all the Allies took place, and lasted a fortnight. The European Allies modified President Wilson’s terms on certain essential points. Great Britain excluded the control of the seas from the sphere of negotiations, and France insisted on a wider interpretation of President Wilson’s reparation demand. President Wilson agreed to both these modifications.
Then the Versailles Council passed to their immediate practical conditions. Marshal Foch insisted that the Germans must ask for an Armistice in the ordinary military way from himself, the Allied Commander. That being agreed, the terms were framed—and they were pretty drastic terms. The German armies must retire across the Rhine and must be demobilised. German guns and ships must be surrendered.[[124]] In fact, Germany must be rendered incapable of resuming the war. Only on those terms was an Armistice possible with an enemy who had given such dire proofs of ill-faith.
Faced with these terrible terms, Ludendorff made a last effort to rally Germany to a final war of defence. But he was too late. He himself had fatally weakened the German fighting power when he suggested negotiations in August. Then the civilians had protested. But now that they had been converted to peace, nothing could make Germany face the guns again. Their military strength suddenly collapsed. Turkey surrendered on October 31st, and Austria-Hungary on November 4th. The bell of doom had begun to toll.
On November 4th the German Government made a final effort to command their fleet on to the high seas. But the fleet mutinied, and from that mutiny a revolution began in Hamburg which soon spread over Germany. On November 7th the British troops entered Valenciennes: on the 8th Prince Max resigned and was succeeded by Herr Ebert. On the 9th the Kaiser abdicated and fled into Holland. On that day the German envoys were received by Foch at his headquarters and the new German Republic accepted the terms of Armistice. On the morning of the 11th the Canadians entered Mons, that little town where firing had opened more than four years before, and precisely at 11 o’clock on that very morning the Armistice began. There was a sudden stillness from the North Sea to the frontier of Switzerland.
“Germany is doomed!” cried Mr. Lloyd George, speaking at the Mansion House on November 9th; and he proved a true prophet.
The Allies had won the war. . . .
[116] The Memoirs of Von Tirpitz and Falkenhayn, and last, but not least, the frank and outspoken War Memories of General Ludendorff.
[117] War Memories (Hutchinson & Co., London), Vol. II, pp. 613-4 for decline of morale, pp. 643-5 for effect of our propaganda.
[118] Vol. II, pp. 642-4, 767-9.
[119] Vol. II, p. 611.
[120] There were seven distinct great battles after August 8th—Bapaume, Epehy, two battles of Cambrai, Courtrai, Selle, and Valenciennes.
[121] See Appendix D for the Fourteen Points.
[122] American Note of October 23rd, 1918.
[123] Page 721. The armistice terms were to permit a “resumption of hostilities on our own borders.”
[124] Five thousand guns and 30,000 machine-guns, 5,000 locomotives, 22 big ships, and 50 destroyers.