The British Campaign in France and Flanders, 1916

by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Italian armies had in the meanwhile given a splendid account of themselves, as every one who had seen them in the field, predicted that they would. Though hard pressed by a severe Austrian attack in the Trentino in May, they rallied and held the enemy before he could debouch upon the plains. Then with three hard blows delivered upon August 6 to August 9, where they took the town of Gorizia and 12,000 prisoners, on October 10, and on November 1 they broke the Austrian lines and inflicted heavy losses upon them. The coming of winter saw them well upon their way to Trieste.

On August 4 the British forces in Egypt defeated a fresh Turco-German attack upon that country. The battle was near Romani, east of the Suez Canal, and it ended in a creditable victory and the capture of 2500 prisoners. This was the end of the serious menace for Egypt, and the operations in this quarter, which were carried on by General Murray, were confined from this time forwards to clearing up the Sinai peninsula, where various Turkish posts were dispersed or taken, and in advancing our line to the Palestine Frontier.

On August 8 our brave little ally, Portugal, threw her sword into the scale of freedom, and so gave military continuity to the traditions of the two nations. It would have rejoiced the austere soul of the great Duke to see the descendants of his much-valued Caçadores, fighting once more beside the great-grandsons of the Riflemen and Guardsmen of the Peninsula. Two divisions appeared in France, where they soon made a reputation for steadiness and valour.

In the East another valiant little nation had also ranged herself with the Allies, and was destined, alas, to meet her ruin through circumstances which were largely beyond her own control. Upon August 27 Roumania declared war, and with a full reliance upon help which never reached her, advanced at once into the south of Hungary. Her initial successes changed to defeat, and her brave soldiers, who were poorly provided with modern appliances of war, were driven back before the pressure of Falkenhayn's army in the west and Mackensen's, which eventually crossed the Danube, from the south. On December 6 Bucharest fell, and by the end of the year the Roumanians had been driven to the Russian border, where, an army without a country, they hung on, exactly as the Belgians had done, to the extreme edge of their ravaged fatherland. To their Western allies, who were powerless to help them, it was one of the most painful incidents of the War.

The Salonica expedition had been much hampered by the sinister attitude of the Greeks, whose position upon the left rear of Sarrail's forces made an advance dangerous, and a retreat destructive. King Constantine, following the example of his brother-in-law of Berlin, had freed himself from all constitutional ties, refused to summon a parliament, and followed his own private predilections and interests by helping our enemies, even to the point of surrendering a considerable portion of his own kingdom, including a whole army corps and the port of Kavala, to the hereditary enemy, the Bulgarian. Never in history has a nation been so betrayed by its king, and never, it may be added, did a nation which had been free allow itself so tamely to be robbed of its freedom. Venezelos, however, showed himself to be a great patriot, shook the dust of Athens from his feet, and departed to Salonica, where he raised the flag of a fighting national party, to which the whole nation was eventually rallied. Meanwhile, however, the task of General Sarrail was rendered more difficult, in spite of which he succeeded in regaining Monastir and establishing himself firmly within the old Serbian frontier—a result which was largely due to the splendid military qualities of the remains of the Serbian army.

On December 12 the German Empire proposed negotiations for peace, but as these were apparently to be founded upon the war-map as it then stood, and as they were accompanied by congratulatory messages about victory from the Kaiser to his troops, they were naturally not regarded as serious by the Allies. Our only guarantee that a nation will not make war whenever it likes is its knowledge that it cannot make peace when it likes, and this was the lesson which Germany was now to learn. By the unanimous decision of all the Allied nations no peace was possible which did not include terms which the Germans were still very far from considering—restitution of invaded countries, reparation for harm done, and adequate guarantees against similar unprovoked aggression in the future. Without these three conditions the War would indeed have been fought in vain.

This same month of December saw two of the great protagonists who had commenced the War retire from that stage upon which each had played a worthy part. The one was Mr. Asquith, who, weary from long labours, gave place to the fresh energy of Mr. Lloyd George. The other was "Father" Joffre, who bore upon his thick shoulders the whole weight of the early campaigns. Both names will live honourably in history.

And now as the year drew to its close, Germany, wounded and weary, saw as she glared round her at her enemies, a portent which must have struck a chill to her heart. Russian strength had been discounted and that of France was no new thing. But whence came this apparition upon her Western flank—a host raised, as it seemed, from nowhere, and yet already bidding fair to be equal to her own? Her public were still ignorant and blind, bemused by the journals which had told them so long, and with such humorous detail, that the British army was a paper army, the creature of a dream. Treitschke's foolish phrase, "The unwarlike Islanders," still lingered pleasantly in their memory. But the rulers, the men who knew, what must have been their feelings as they gazed upon that stupendous array, that vision of doom, a hundred miles from wing to wing, gleaming with two million bayonets, canopied with aeroplanes, fringed with iron-clad motor monsters, and backed by an artillery which numbered its guns by the thousand? Kitchener lay deep in the Orkney waves, but truly his spirit was thundering at their gates. His brain it was who first planted these seeds, but how could they have grown had the tolerant, long-suffering British nation not been made ready for it by all those long years of Teutonic insult, the ravings of crazy professors, and the insults of unbalanced publicists? All of these had a part in raising that great host, but others, too, can claim their share: the baby-killers of Scarborough, the Zeppelin murderers, the submarine pirates, all the agents of ruthlessness. Among them they had put life and spirit into this avenging apparition, where even now it could be said that every man in the battle line had come there of his own free will. Years of folly and of crime were crying for a just retribution. The instrument was here and the hour was drawing on.