At the opening of the year 1917 the general situation of the World-war in Europe offered fair promise for the cause of the Entente Allies. On the Western front the immense latent resources of the British Empire were now coming effectively into play and were creating an opportunity for a really serious and formidable offensive. Tremendously reinforced in men and munitions through the powers of the Munitions and Military Service Acts, our gigantic armies inspired every observer with immeasurable hopes of victory. The soldiers themselves were full of that and fresh sanguine spirit in which the valour of the British race has always expressed itself. France was now recovering from the grievous losses of men endured in the first two years of the war; and the new Generals, men of the younger school like Nivelle and Pétain, were looking forward with no less confidence than ourselves to the results of a new Western aggressive on a larger and more effective scale.
But the Western front was only a portion of that far-flung line of embattled hosts who were holding back the great Teutonic armies from desolating the fairest regions of Western and Southern Europe. Far away across the snowy barriers of the Alps and beyond the interval of neutral Switzerland the Italian armies lay in caves and trenches stretched from the eastern frontier of the Swiss Canton Ticino right across the eastern Alps down to the shores of the Adriatic Sea. On the west of this hazardous line the Italians still held the Austrian armies to the edges of the main Alpine ridge. On the east they had pressed them in a series of heroic onslaughts through the mountains and across the deep valley of the rushing Isonzo. They had captured the high and coveted city of Gorizia, and they were threatening the suburbs of Trieste. They seemed on the eve of momentous conquests. But the very achievements of their heroic valour, so splendid to the outward eye, concealed a perilous and precarious military position.
“No one,” said Mr. Lloyd George later on at Paris, “can look at these frontier mountains without a thrill of respect for the gallantry that has stormed them in face of the entrenched legions of Austria.” Certainly no one who, like the present writer, has escaladed those peaks in days of peace. There are no greater episodes in this war than those of that titanic, gigantesque conflict amid the mighty jagged precipices and the deep gloomy abysses of the Eastern Alps.[[107]]
But the greater the effort, the greater the exhaustion. It is written large in letters of fire and blood across the history of the World-war that any excess of human loss is in itself one of the gravest of military perils. Italy poured out her blood without stint. Alone among the Allied nations she possessed one organised party—the official Socialists—genuinely opposed to the war. Taking advantage of this weakness, the Germans had made a special effort to weaken her home front. The great industrial centres of the north of Italy—Turin and Milan—had been the objective of perhaps the most sustained effort of German peace propaganda. The missionaries of this strange crusade had crossed the Alps by every mountain path and had mixed themselves among the armies, scattering their poisoned leaflets among the tired troops. Thus every preparation had been made for an easier assault. Like Hannibal when he crossed the Alps in a greater campaign, they had melted the rocks with vinegar.
The military position, indeed, was not so strong as it looked. The right wing of the Italian army was lunging forward victoriously, while the centre and left were still entangled in the mountains. These things were not clear to observers in the west of Europe; but there were English visitors with the Italian armies who became uneasily aware of them.
In the absence of any unified control it was impossible to take any effective steps to avert the coming danger. The British military chiefs had their views about the position of the Italian army; many Italians themselves had their views. But though these views were platonically interchanged there was no machinery by which they could be compared and collated, or produce any real effect on the course of the campaign. In other words, there was no central power of vision or action—no active organism that was responsible for the war as a whole, right from the North Sea to the Adriatic. As Mr. Lloyd George afterwards pointed out in the House of Commons, “there was a sort of feeling that that front was not our business.”[[108]]
This did not, indeed, prevent Mr. Lloyd George from using such opportunities as presented themselves for urging his views. In January of that year (1917) there was an important Conference at Rome between the Allied Premiers and Generals; and at that Conference the whole European situation was surveyed in one of the most candid and exhaustive discussions that had taken place up to that time. These conversations extended over the whole ground, from the political relations between Italy and her neighbouring Allies to the question of the proper strategy for the Italian frontier. Mr. Lloyd George boldly placed before that Conference his own views as to the proper campaign to be adopted in the war between Italy and Austria. He pointed out the grave dangers to which Italy was exposed; and his own characteristic remedy was a reinforced aggressive across the Eastern Alps into the plains of Austria. That proposal afterwards tentatively put forward in his Paris speech received much foolish ridicule from English critics. If those critics would follow the advice of the late Lord Salisbury, and study large maps, they would observe that the most vulnerable flank of the Central Powers was to be found precisely through that very Alpine door north of Trieste round which the battle was then raging. While Berlin is remote from the Teutonic frontiers, Vienna is dangerously exposed to attack from the south and east, and every student of European wars knows that the great captains of war, like Napoleon, have always availed themselves of that fact.
This proposal was a revival in a more modest form of Mr. Lloyd George’s earlier scheme for seeking a military decision on the Eastern front; and subsequently in his Paris speech he stoutly maintained that if there had been in January 1917 a proper unified machinery for military debate and execution the history of that year (1917) might have been different.[[109]]
But at that time both the Premiers of the Allied nations and the Generals of the Allied armies were fighting the war in water-tight compartments. It was not yet realised that the Italian front was actually a back door to the West. It required more startling events to convince the Allies that if either side broke through the line at any point, East or West, the whole line would be in peril. Until those events occurred there was not enough political or military driving power behind any proposal for unified control.
So throughout those months from August to October 1917 the military control was practically left to each set of military chiefs in his own section of the war. The communications and consultations between them were casual and uncertain; and naturally each set played for their own hand. For, other things being equal, the first duty of a soldier is the care of his own army. In our country it seemed the wisest course for the War Cabinet to leave all important military decisions to the military chiefs. The previous Government, indeed, had fortified the Generals with an Order in Council which practically gave them strategic control. It was considered best for the time being to fall in with that arrangement. There was, indeed, no alternative. “Never,” as Mr. Lloyd George said afterwards in the House of Commons, “never in the whole history of war in this country have soldiers got more consistent and more substantial backing from politicians than they have had this year (1917). . . . No soldiers in any war have had their strategical dispositions less interfered with by politicians. There has not been a single battalion, or a single gun, moved this year except with the advice of the General Staff—not one. There has not been a single attack ordered in any part of the battle-field by British troops except on the advice of the General Staff—not one. There has not been a single attack not ordered. The whole campaign of the year has been the result of the advice of soldiers.”