The Way to Win

by William Le Queux

Let us go back to the beginning of things and examine some of Germany’s blunders from the very outset. We have, in the first place, ample evidence that Germany counted with confidence that the War would be short—that she would, in effect, repeat her triumph of 1870-71 on a grander scale. We know that this was so from the evidence of her own writers and statesmen and people, both before and since the War began. The programme was, on paper, delightfully simple. In view of the solemn treaties into which Germany had entered, France had refrained from fortifying her Belgian frontier.

This simplified matters for Germany. Belgian neutrality was to be contemptuously violated and France attacked on her weakest front, the inconvenient line of fortresses along the Rhine being thus carefully avoided. Belgium, it was calculated, would not dare to resist her mighty adversary, or, if she did, so much the worse for her. France was to be shattered in a brief campaign—so effectively shattered, as Germans themselves boasted, that she could never again be a menace. England, fat and lazy England, it was confidently reckoned, would not interfere, or could not interfere in time on land. France disabled permanently, the victorious Germans were to turn on slow-moving Russia, whose mobilisation could not be completed for months, and who was to be hopelessly smashed by the weight of the combined Austro-German arms before she could get her giant legions into the field. Serbia, of course, the ostensible cause of all the trouble, would be of no account, and could be crushed with hardly an effort, leaving the way open for German domination through Bulgaria and Turkey, and on to Persian Mesopotamia and the East. England, the chief adversary in the German dream of world-power, was to be left to be settled with at a more auspicious season.

Now, we have had our trials and disappointments since war broke out, and we shall have more, but I ask in sober seriousness if a fraction of our plans have gone wrong so completely as has every single factor upon which Germany counted for the success of her scheme? We know what happened. Belgium refused to barter her honour for peace, and it is beyond question that the three weeks’ delay her heroic resistance secured for the Allies saved Europe. France showed herself as great as of old, and her sons flung themselves into the fight with a gallantry which has proved unconquerable. The outrage on Belgium brought England into the fray, and her “contemptible little army” played no inglorious part in shattering the German advance. Russia mobilised with a speed which startled the world, and her legions were thundering at the gates of Germany weeks ahead of what the Germans had been pleased to regard as the “schedule time.” Serbia threw back the Austrian armies in an appalling defeat, and in a very few weeks Germany must have realised that she had to face that long and dragging war which every single one of her military writers had foretold must prove ruinous to her. When I say “Germany” I mean, of course, the German military authorities; the German people were kept in an abysmal ignorance of the facts of the case. It is not too much to say that within three months of the outbreak of the War the German Higher Command must have begun to realise that whatever might be the outcome of the struggle it was not going to be a German triumph. And we may be sure that they have since realised it with ever-growing clearness.

It cannot, of course, be supposed that the Germans neglected altogether the possibility that England might join the Alliance against them, though there is very good ground for the belief that they were vastly surprised that we should fight them over “a scrap of paper.” But they took the risk, and they took it the more readily because they had for years been assured that England, if not too proud to fight, was at least too wealthy and too lazy to have any stomach for such an enterprise as an armed conflict with the supermen of Germany. Hence the insolent offers that were made to buy us off at the expense of France. And there is little doubt that the Germans believed that even if we did come in we should be of trifling account in the land war, while they reckoned that they could at least keep their Fleet in safety until their submarines had either starved us into submission or had so weakened our Fleet that it could hope to operate at sea with a reasonable chance of success. They thought, in fact, that as a factor in a continental war England could safely be neglected. Certain is it that they never for a moment dreamed that England could raise and put into the field armies on the scale of millions which, in respect of equipment and training, would rival or eclipse anything that Germany could show to the world.

Yet that is precisely what England has done. Man for man the British Army is superior to that of Germany, and it is better trained and better equipped. And it has not yet developed its full fighting force, while the armies of Germany, weakened by eighteen months of terrific fighting, have long passed their zenith. Germany has squandered her best troops, and is beginning at last to fall back on inferior organisations; we have millions of the pick of the nation who have not yet taken the field. They will do so in good time, and with ample reserves behind them. “General French’s contemptible little army” has been a surprise for the Kaiser.

So much for German blunders on land; what can we say about her blunders at sea? The policy of attrition has failed lamentably, and we are not yet starved out by the submarines or greatly perturbed by the threats of new “frightfulness” which periodically emanate from Berlin. Our Fleet is actually stronger than it was when war began; Germany has lost far more in proportion, and her losses in cruisers—the eyes and ears of the battle squadrons—have been particularly disastrous. The German flag, except as shown by the submarine pirates and occasional raiders, has vanished from the oceans of the world, and with it has gone Germany’s gigantic overseas trade, which was the very life-blood of her industrial prosperity.

The probable attitude of England towards the War must have been the subject of a good deal of speculation in the Wilhelmstrasse before Germany threw down the gauntlet to the world, and here again we have an excellent example of the blundering of German diplomacy. We shall never know exactly what advice Prince Lichnowsky gave from London to his Imperial master. It is said that he warned the Kaiser not to allow himself to run away with the idea that England was too much occupied with internal disputes to fight. However that may be, there is every reason for thinking that those who at the time were preaching the possibility of civil war in Ireland did much to convince Germany that the time was ripe for the great adventure. The Germans failed, in the blundering German way, to realise that while England’s troubles are her own, her cause is the cause of humanity and civilisation, and that the first threat of attack on either would bring her warring parties into one formidable cohesion which would defy any possible menace of trouble within. That is precisely what happened, and it must have been the surprise of their lives for the German diplomats.

The Colonies, as we know, represented in the eyes of the Germans so much ripe fruit ready at a touch to drop from the rotten parent tree. India was seething with revolt—according to the German war party; South Africa was represented as ready to throw itself into the lap of Germany for the sake of shaking off the very shadowy British yoke. Can any of the mistakes we have made in politics or strategy match this record of blundering ineptitude? We know how India and the Dominions and South Africa responded to the call of Empire. India, Canada, and Australia have sealed anew with their blood the tie which binds them to the Mother Country; to-day a Dutch South African is busy turning the Germans out of the last bit which remains to them of their once huge Colonial Empire. Perhaps we blundered in our diplomacy in the Balkans, but at least we have not blundered, as the Germans have done, in every part of the world where chance of blundering lay open to us.

So far I have dealt only with German blunders, political and military, in anticipation of war. Let us turn now to some of her blunders in the actual conduct of operations in the field. I do not mean the blunders of subordinates, but the mistakes of strategy and policy which are capable of ruining the best-planned and most carefully-thought-out campaign.

The violation of the neutrality of Belgium may have been an advantage from the point of view of strategy; whether it was or not, the Germans thought it was, and that was good enough for them. If it would be an advantage to Germany, they were prepared to undertake it, and treaty obligations troubled them not one whit. That it would instantly range all civilised opinion against them seems never to have entered their heads. But even after they had crossed Belgium their grand strategy was lamentable. They succumbed to the lure of Paris at a time when they ought to have been thinking solely of the northern ports of France, which were practically open to them, and Paris proved to be the magnet which drew them on to their undoing.