THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT.
The disappointments of 1916 and 1917—The collapse of Russia—The Cambrai Battle—The German propaganda—Fears of irresolution at Home—Reassurances from Home—Effects of the Submarine war—An economical reorganisation at G.H.Q.—A new Quartermaster General—Good effects of cheerfulness at Home.
The Somme campaign, 1916, had been begun with very high hopes. The main conception of it was a sound one, to attack the German line at the point of junction between the French and British forces, the point where, according to all the accepted principles, the Allied line should have been weakest but actually was not. That was the only way to bring an element of the unexpected into a grand attack in those days of long and laborious artillery preparations. (The Tank did not appear on the scene until the Battle of the Somme was two months old and did not develop its usefulness as a substitute for artillery preparation until nearly a year later).
For the Somme battle an enormous artillery concentration was made, and a special "Army of Pursuit" was trained in the rear of our lines to follow through when the German line had been breached. Then there was a preliminary bombardment of the German positions from the sea to beyond the Somme, and, amidst many feint attacks, the British and the French offensive north and south of the Somme was launched.
The First Battle of the Somme made the walls of Jericho quake but just failed to bring them down. The Army of Pursuit was given no chance of pushing to the Rhine; its energies had to be diverted towards sustaining the attack. The fighting season closed in 1916 with the Germans still holding their main defences but convinced, so far as the reasonable section of their leaders were concerned, that the game was up and that the best thing to do was to work for a peace on the best terms possible.
ON THE RAMPARTS
Thus 1916 was a somewhat disappointing year; 1917 was even more so. The fighting season, that year, closed with the Allied cause in a worse position than in 1916 and with Germany correspondingly encouraged. There would have been some reasonable excuse if in the winter of 1917-18 tails drooped at G.H.Q. The weather was particularly vile. Every day the winds that howled over the bleak hill-top seemed to have come straight from Russia and Germany, bringing with them a moral as well as a physical cold. The casualty lists of the Autumn were not cheerful to ponder over; and it was singularly depressing to hear from Home that in some political circles those casualty lists were being conned over with the idea of founding on them a case against the Army.
Nobody was inclined to try to represent the late Autumn campaign as altogether satisfactory. But it was felt by the soldiers that "they had done their durn'dest, angels can do no more;" and that there was not sufficient appreciation of the fact at Home that with Russia down and out, France in a very bad way, Italy tottering, the British Army had had to step into the breach, had had to take a gruelling without being able to accomplish much more than defence.