enemy’s means of meeting our attack have been far greater than either he or we could have expected.”
It was a year of disappointment, but was not a year without achievement. We had failed against the Turk at Gaza, but had succeeded at Baghdad; the French spring offensive had not succeeded, and our own could only be described as a steadying blow at the Germans; Kerensky came on the scene in Russia in May, and no doubt did his best, but discipline had gone, and the offensive of Brussiloff and Korniloff, though it succeeded at first, was well in hand, so far as the Central Powers were concerned, in July. The East was the weak spot in our calculations, with Russia going to ruin and dragging Rumania with her. It was as well that Britain was at the crest of the power wave.
After all, battles have a further object than the mere killing of men. For quite a long while after the commencement of the war the Germans talked boastfully of their “will.” The will to victory was going to crush the moral of their enemies. But although the Russian revolution caused great rejoicing, although the German High Command claimed a long list of victories, it seemed that German moral was somehow flagging, and their enemy’s will to victory was as determined as ever.
Ludendorff admits that in the summer of 1917 the position of the Central Powers was better than that of the Entente, but that there were other causes for “our spiritual decline.” He says that Field-Marshal Hindenburg wrote to the Emperor on the 27th June that “our greatest anxiety at this moment, however, is the decline of the national spirit. It must be
revived or we shall lose the war.” There were speeches in the Reichstag containing the despairing cry that it was impossible to win the war. On the 7th July Hindenburg and Ludendorff met members of the Reichstag to discuss “our defensive attitude throughout the first half of 1917, the various failures near Arras, in the Wytschæte salient, and in Galicia, where we had not as yet attacked, the absence up to date of any decisive result from the submarine war, and our serious situation as regards food and raw materials....” And finally, on the 25th July, General Ludendorff wrote that “it is certain that the Independent Social Democrats are carrying on an agitation in the army which is in the highest degree detrimental to discipline.”
And the allies of Germany were giving her a great deal of trouble.
One can only ask what created this frame of mind? Even a Social Democrat must have the ground prepared before his doctrines can germinate and flourish; it must be fertilised with dissatisfaction and watered with despair. The German and Austrian nations were as one in their desire for war in August 1914, and so strong that they had little difficulty in winning the Turkish and Bulgarian nations to their cause. Then surely we may answer the question by saying that it was the guns of the Allied artillery and the rifles of the Allied infantry that caused the “will” to falter, even when the position seemed most favourable to the War Lord and his advisers. It was a slow process, but a sure one.
One must admit disappointment to France and Britain, as the leaders of the countries allied against the Central Powers, but we cannot see the justice of
the German contention that their own position was good. In considering the events of this war, it is not easy to appreciate the mind of a man who says “the military situation was good, but the condition of the country behind the army was bad.” Country and army surely hang together. The Germans never looked upon war as a clash of armies alone, but sought by every means in their power, by oppression, by slavery, by terror, to bend the non-combatant population to their will. It is a logical view. This war, at least, was waged by country against country, by nation against nation, and as a nation Germany was cracking, and her allies with her.
This was the state of affairs when the Battles of Ypres, 1917, after an artillery preparation which had been growing in volume for a month, opened with a stupendous crash on the 31st July—an official date.