THE following article, from the pen of Frank H. Simonds, Editor of the New York Evening Sun, gives a survey of the results of the war up to August last. The judgment of an independent and impartial neutral is valuable, as it enables us to correct our perspective in viewing the world events whose ultimate issue no man can foresee.
Twelve months' summing up
On the first anniversary of the Great War there is an inevitable temptation to estimate in terms of achievement and result the meaning of twelve months of world war. In this period not less than 10,000,000 men have been killed, wounded, or have gone into foreign prisons; a territory exceeding in area Ohio or Pennsylvania has been ravaged. Cities known through the centuries as the treasure-houses of art or in the last century become the centres of modern industrial life have been destroyed. Written history has no record to compare with the tale of recent months of suffering, slaughter, destruction, human misery, and human grandeur. But what now is the result?
The simplest answer to make to this question is to take the premise that peace would come to-morrow on the basis of things as they are. Such a settlement it is instantly apparent would mean that Germany, helped rather by her use of the resources of her two allies than by any capacity of theirs, has won more European territory than any State has acquired by a single war since the treaty of Westphalia, a more complete victory than any people since the Napoleonic episode. To-day her armies occupy practically all of Belgium and 8,000 square miles in France, that region which before the war was the centre of French industry and French mineral production. In the East, victorious forces have pushed deep into Poland arid approached Warsaw, Riga and Brest-Litovsk.
On the field of battle Germany has won mighty and memorable triumphs. Her defeats have been repulses, when her foe was in his last ditch. They have resulted in the interruption of an advance, the recoil from the extreme point of progress. But at the close of a year German armies are fighting on French, Belgian, Russian soil; only in a tiny corner of Alsace has the foe retained a foothold in the Fatherland. Allied offensives in the West, after terrible losses, have invariably been beaten down within sight of their starting-places. Since von Kluck re-crossed the Aisne in September Germany has suffered no material loss, despite the masses she has sent to the East. The "Spring Drive" of the Allies has dwindled to a gallant but only locally successful push of the French at the edge of the Lorette hills.
In the East, the amazing victories of Tannenberg, Lodz, the Mazurian Lakes, and in the recent terrific campaign in Galicia have checked, repulsed, routed Russian advances, and to-day (late in July) Russian hosts are clinging desperately to the permanent line of fortifications about Warsaw, against which German masses are steadily driving with still unchecked vigour. The greatest battles of modern warfare have been won between the Baltic and the Roumanian boundary by generalship and military efficiency in men as in commanders that has only the Napoleonic parallel.
At the Dardanelles German-led Turkish troops have for months held back Allied fleets and army corps. Around the Gallipoli peninsula the troops that lost Lule Burgas and Kumanovo are making a fight un-surpassed at Plevna, unrivalled in the long history of Osmanli power in Europe. More English and French troops than perished in the long Crimean campaign have found their graves in the few weeks of fighting north of the Dardanelles; and five Allied battleships have been sunk in the narrow waterways.
Serbian efforts have declined to mere passivity. Italy, bringing new and eager masses into the field against the shaken regiments of Austria, directed by German officers, has, as yet, made but small progress in emerging from the constricted field in which the Austrian fortified mountains confine her. To hold France, England and Belgium at bay in the West, to sweep Russia back over hundreds of miles in swift defeat, to give Austria and Turkey the necessary support to withstand tremendous attacks – this has been within the resources of German genius in the past months. Only on the water has she suffered real defeat. There her few free ships have been sunk; her commercial fleets have been scattered, sent to prize-courts, or interned. Beyond the seas, Kiao-chau, South-West Africa, Togoland, Kamerun, and Samoa, have been conquered. Sea power has dealt with her as with Napoleon. But as Napoleon conquered the continent, Germany has successfully defeated Russia, France, Great Britain, Belgium. The victory for the first year is then hers. Such difference of opinion as exists must be over the extent of the victory, which, however great, is nowhere yet decisive.
Why Germany has won successes
Conceding, then, that Germany has, without actually or approximately achieving a decision, won a remarkable series of triumphs in the first twelve months of the war, what are the causes? Outnumbered, inferior in population, wealth, resources, cut off from the sea, how has she been able to conquer provinces and win campaigns? At the outset of the war the world ascribed German success to that marvellous military machine which impressed itself upon the mind and the imagination of mankind. German preparation, foresight, military genius held the wonder of the world. Yet the cold fact is that the military genius failed. It was not equal to the task set for it. At the Marne it broke down, not as the Prussian machine broke down at Jena, but it was defeated and the decision for which it had risked all turned against it.
Yet the consequences of defeat were relatively slight and they were slight because behind the machine there was a nation, organised, disciplined, united. A world, which talked about helpless masses hurled by Hohenzollern might against the foe unwillingly, knows better now. It recognises that Hohenzollern and stable-boy were but component parts of a nation, a people, which had submitted itself to age-long discipline, which had endured severe training and was prepared to suffer untold hardships, because it was serving a national ideal.
Germany was not merely possessed of a marvellous military machine. Her people through long years had been taught, had been trained, had come to believe in a destiny for their country that could be realised only by supreme effort. Before the present war the average Englishman talked somewhat vaguely of the Boer War; the Frenchman of 1870; but the average German began his historical review with the Thirty Years' War and passionately, bitterly lamented the loss that had come to Germany by years when Europe took advantage of her helplessness to divide the East.
Out of this state of mind had sprung the spirit that recalls Sparta — the civilisation, the ideals, the virtues, and indeed the vices which were Lacedemonian. Germany was not merely ready with an army. Every detail of national life was mobilised with the call to arms industry, agriculture, every branch of the life of a people was ready. The victories won by the 42-centimetre were in the opening days, but the real battles were won behind the firing line later.
Thus after the Marne and the Battle of Flanders the German resources rapidly mounted, while those of the Allies almost stood still. Ammunition, equipment, all the necessaries of war, were turned out by German factories, food was stored and distributed. National organisation repaired the failure of the military machine. German armies made head against a world in arms because behind them was an organised nation, not only trained, but moved by a spirit quite as genuinely patriotic. quite as national, as the French, more intelligently alert than the British.
On the battlefield, save in the opening weeks, the German troops have not proven themselves superior to the French. The French field artillery has been more effective than the German. Russian armies have not been lacking in courage; their commanders have shown skill. But the Russian nation has not mobilised to meet the situation as has the German. The French were not mobilised. They have overtaken the Germans now, but the dark blot on the map of France is the price that has been paid because the French nation was not ready.
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The Crown Prince: "I don't believe I was meant to win battles; I believe I was meant to be loved."
Sketch by "Punch" (magazine)
Germany has so far won because she knew her own mind from the outset, was moved by a national spirit quite as splendid in its vigour as that of the French in 1792, and had over long years subjected herself to a discipline which the years of her weakness and suffering had taught her was essential to her safety and then to her larger success. In a year of war Germany has taught the world the meaning of national organisation. It may prove to be as enduring a lesson, when the merely military details are eliminated, as the other lessons of the French Revolution. In this thing the Germans call Kultur the army is but a detail, a major detail to-day, but one that may vanish to-morrow and leave the real lesson useful to mankind.
Where Germany has failed
Notwithstanding her great success, it is plain that the real prize has so far, if not permanently, slipped through Germany's fingers. What has been the cause of this failure? Why have the most splendid army and the most perfect national organisation, despite the most complete and systematic preparation, missed a decision against disorganised, if collectively stronger, foes? Plainly because German science and German foresight failed to reckon with the imponderables — above all with the national spirit and patriotism of other races.
The invasion of Belgium was not the military mistake it seemed to most of us in the opening days of the war. The Belgian army did not interrupt German plans or assure German defeat, as has been said so often. But it did rouse the moral sense of Europe. It did give to every Frenchman, to every Englishman, precisely that inspiration which adds the decisive force in close contests. More than all else it explains the presence of Italy in the battle-lines to-day. It assured the presence of the British in France in the opening days of the war. But its effect upon the French can hardly be described. It gave a nation which always needs the stimulus of a great idea to fight best one of the most deeply stirring of incentives. It united 1792 to 1914 in the mind of every soldier of the Republic. It enlisted and continues to enlist neutral support and neutral sympathy for the foe, of Germany. To strike France quickly Germany invaded Belgium, and the invasion gave to French and British arms new force. It even spurred the slower-moving Slav to the unexpected success in mobilisation which made the invasion of East Prussia possible and fatal to German plans.
The German spirit of Nationality in the very opening hours of the struggle awakened the same opposing spirit which ultimately overthrew Napoleon. 1914 took on the character of 1813, but the French and Prussians had changed sides. Yet behind this spirit of other races there was no national organisation such as Germany possessed. There was just the necessary strength to check the flood at the Marne, and again in Flanders repulse could not be turned into decisive victory, because only the German people had been ready. Yet from the day the first German soldier set foot on Belgian soil to the present moment the consequences have been fatal to German plans. France, with the Belgian example before her, saved herself and Europe at the Marne. Serbia answered Austrian tyranny and arrogance by the victory of the Jedar. The war took on the character of a war of liberation for subject races. The Balkans stirred uneasily. Italy, driven by a reaction of the Belgian episode, moved from neutrality to war. Roumania, with her millions to liberate, is to-day almost on the edge of war, and Greece is apparently at the point of casting her lot with the Allies to free her fellow-Hellenes in Asia Minor.
A war between France and Germany, between Austria and Russia, a conflict between the two sets of allies, would have been a different thing. It would have been one more in the long series of European conflicts over questions of power. In such a conflict German success cannot be questioned and men would have differed as their sympathies run. But instead, four great and two smaller States are fighting two Great Powers and crumbling Turkey. Other States seem on the point of entering and the war has changed character utterly.
The Slav, the Latin, the Anglo-Saxon, differing in every conceivable fashion, have been brought into an alliance which grows closer rather than weakens with defeat and delay. So far this alliance has only availed to hold back German masses from their goal. It is not as yet clear that it will succeed, although the great crisis is now at hand. But if it does hold, this incongruous alliance, it will be because the German has armed his possible foes with the one weapon that could save them, the weapon of national spirit, the spirit that liberated Prussia from Napoleon.
More and more as the terrible conflict proceeds we are passing from the stage of the battle of men to the battle of ideas. More and more. too, the conflict is taking on the aspect of a battle of the world against the German, and as it progresses the world is learning from the Germans the secret of their success — the value of national organisation. To this extent the German idea is conquering the world. But the German arms have so far failed, because the German idea enlists new enemies to replace conquered hosts and the German has, so far, failed to understand the idea, the nationalism of his foes.
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