TOPICS OF TFIF, DAY.
THE WAR AND THE NEW YEAR.
THOUGH the corning of the New Year makes, and could make, no difference at the front, it does present a convenient opportunity for taking stock of the military situation. The year 1915 finds the Allies and their enemies in a condition approaching stalemate. Neither side has won, neither side has lost, and neither side is able to make a new move with the pieces actually on the Board. Of course, no analogies of this kind are perfect ; but, roughly speaking, the sacrifices which the Allies in the western theatre of the war would have to make in order to carry the German trenches are, for the present at any rate, held too great to bo worth making. When you have got to attack a fortified front nearly three hundred and fifty miles long the risks of a general advance are too enormous to contemplate with anything in the nature of a light heart. On the other hand, the plan of finding out the weakest place and driving a wedge into the line there becomes well- nigh impossible when the two hostile forces have been sitting opposite each other for so long. On both sides every weak place is by this time known and defended with special care. From the Dutch frontier at the mouth of the Schelde to the Swiss frontier near Belfort, there is literally not a mile of ground which is not guarded so closely that the side which attacked in force would be bound to suffer a great deal worse than the aide which stood on the defensive and awaited attack. That is the general position in the west. In the eastern theatre of the war things are, of course, much more fluid, and there is a good deal more possibility of local advance and retreat. Still, speaking generally, there too the situation is tending to equalization. The German advance towards Warsaw is held up. At the same time, the Russian advance to the south, though not held up locally in the same way, is restricted by what is happening in the centre. The Russians cannot press on to the south and west as much as they would like, or as much as they are locally capable of doing, for fear of making a gap in their line. They are controlled by, and have to conform to, the general situation. Thus the year opens with both sides in both theatres of the war marking time, or at least not in a position to make notable progress. What is the solution for this condition of things ? Though apparently everybody is hung up, like the com- batants in The Critic, because each man's sword threatens the other man's heart, it requires no great prophetic power to assert that somehow or other in the course of the next three months some means will be found for breaking through the enchantment and resuming the power of movement. We shall not stand grinning at each other across the trenches till our hair turns white, or till a new generation has arisen and the sons come to relieve their fathers in the dug-outs. The solution, it seems to us, must come, if looked at from the point of view of the Allies, which is the point of view that can be most profitably taken by us, in one of two ways, or possibly by a com- bination of both. Either some change will take place in the political situation which will, as it were, automatically break up the German system of defence in the western or in the eastern theatre of war, or in both, or else we and our allies must introduce some perfectly new factor into the military situation. Let us consider first a change due to internal causes. Though it would be foolish to trust too much to a great alteration in the political position in Austria, it would at the same time be absurd to ignore the possibility, or even the likelihood, of portions of the Austrian Empire becoming either so much exhausted, or else so much disgusted with the war, that resistance there will cease. For example, the Slavonic and Roumanian, or, to put it more generally, the non-Teutonic and non-Magyar, portions of the Hapsburg Empire may before long show such disinclination for further sacrifices that they will largely sterilize Austrian military effort. There would no longer be any serious attempt to oppose the Russian and Serbian advances. Again, it is conceivable that the Magyar population of Hungary may lose their faith in the alliance between the Magyar and German portions of the Empire—an alliance which, after all, is a plant of recent growth. The Hungarians may come to a determination to make the best terms they can for themselves, and may let the Russians know that Hungary is to be regarded as an independent nation for the purposes of peace and war. If that happened, or anything approaching it, the embank- ments which are now keeping back the flood of Russian invasion would at once show huge gaps through which the pent-up waters would pour.
This process of internal disintegration might at any moment be greatly accelerated by the determination of the Roumanians to occupy Transylvania. Another and even more important factor in the dissolution of the Austrian Empire may be the appearance of Italy in the arena of war. We do not wish to say a single word to influence Italy in this direction. Again, we do not doubt that what the Italians would prefer, and would not unnaturally prefer, is to remain strictly neutral in the struggle. Had Turkey not been induced to make war on the Allies, Italy might probably have been able to maintain successfully her position of armed and watchful neutrality. When, how- ever, the Germans played their Turkish card they opened up a whole new series of difficulties for themselves. At any moment a false move on the part of Turkey—and Turkey, as the Germane will find, is not a Power easy to control in detail—might force the Italians to take action and to abandon the position of neutrality. But once Italy is forced to take up arms against Turkey she will find it, we venture to think, impossible to remain at peace with the allies of Turkey. In that case the situation would develop very unfavourably for the maintenance of the Austrian Empire. It is therefore quite possible that in the course of the next three or four months events in Austria may so shape themselves that the Germans will have to reconsider their military position and make such new dis- positions as will automatically put an end to the stalemate.
Let us assume, however, that this will not happen, and that Austria, though hard pressed, will somehow or other manage to keep going and to hold the fort against Russia. In that case the way in which the change will come must be from one or other of the combatants introducing some new fader into the war and making a bold stroke for victory. As in the case of the Punic War, one or other of the combatants must try to create a diversion by "carry- ing the war into Afried "—that is, into some portion of the enemy's country as yet unaffected by the struggle. The Germans have made one effort in this direction already by attempting to inspire a Turkish invasion of Egypt. Although it would be premature to shout while we are still in the wood, it does not seem as if the Turkish armies would, after all, be able to cross the desert in sufficient force to do us any great harm. Unless all the omens are deceptive, the Australians, New Zealanders, and Terri- torials collected in Egypt are far more likely to have their first taste of fire in Europe than along the course of the Suez Canal. But this, of course, does not exhaust the possibilities of German activity. If, as we hold is likely to be the case, the Germano-Turkish invasion of Egypt proves abortive, the Germans must turn to some other scheme. Clearly what they will attempt to do is to carry the war not into Africa but into England. They have always longed for an opportunity of invasion, and stalemate will to them seem to make the satisfaction of that longing a military necessity, instead of, as before, a military luxury. If they are held up both in the east and the west they must do something, and almost the only remaining thing to be done will be to attempt invasion. The fact that our Fleet is undefeated will no more deter the Germans froth attempting an invasion than the fact that the Carthaginian Fleet was undefeated deterred the Romans from attempt- ing to invade Carthage. A pause in the fighting in the east and west will therefore probably mean the preparation by the Germans of an expeditionary force, and their trying every con- ceivable expedient for placing that expeditionary force on our shores. On this matter we shall only say that, in our opinion, the Germans will be very much misled if they think it is as easy to land troops on our East Coast, or say at Romney Marsh, as it was to bombard Scarborough. Their trial runs may have taught them something, but they have taught us a great deal more, and, without boasting, we can affirm that our naval preparations for dealing with invasion are very much more effective now than they were three months ago. It was all very well for six or 'eyes
specially swift vessels to dash across the North Sea on a foggy night, but it may be taken as certain that no such undetected incursions could be made by a fleet of trans- ports, which, even if only one hundred and fifty thousand men were to come, must lie floating many a mile. Further, even if the Germans were by some miracle to get their hundred and fifty thousand men ashore, and to begin the attempt to hack their way through to London, they would find us far better prepared for dealing with them than we were at the beginning of the war. And this in spite of the fact that the bulk of our first-line troops are now in Flanders. It is true that we have not got as many men as we want and must have in order to finish the war before we, like our enemies, are bled white, but we have got quite sufficient to deal with a raid of one hundred and fifty thousand men, even if they were all veterans of the Prussian Guard, and even if they brought with them their biggest guns in giant profusion and a million rounds of shell. A raid on this scale at the end of last September might, we admit, have been a somewhat tough proposition from the military point of view. It would now be one which we could confront with a force four or five times stronger than that of our assailants.
Let us now consider what we and our allies could do if Germany resolved to stand upon the naval defensive and not risk her Fleet in an invasion, or, again, if the attempted invasion had taken place and proved ineffectual. If it had been ineffectual, and the main German Fleet had been destroyed, there are so many possibilities possessed by a Power which would then have complete command of the sea, both in the North Sea and in the Baltic, that we shall not attempt to sketch them. One has only to look at the German coastline from Memel to Flensburg in the Baltic, or from Ribe to Emden on the North Sea, to realize how great are the opportunities offered to those who not only command the sea, but also have plenty of transports and plenty of men to put into them. We shall be betraying no secret to the enemy when we note that within a compara- tively short time our New Army, not counting our Terri- torials, will approach a million trained men, that France has notoriously not used anything like her whole Army in the trenches between Belfort and Nieuport, and that Russia, again, has more men than she can employ upon her battle front, enormous as it is. If we once secure complete com- mand of the sea owing to the Germans having played their invasion card and lost, it is obvious that we and our allies shall be able to afford the world some very interesting examples of how great amilitaryandlandweapon lies implicit in sea power. Remember, too, that our sea power, if once secured by the destruction of the German Battle Fleet, will not be confined to the North Sea and the Baltic, but may also be exercised in other and unexpected places. This, how- ever, we admit, is dreaming. The German Battle Fleet has not yet been destroyed, and perhaps will not be, for it may be that, in spite of the German desire for invasion, more conservative counsels will prevail. But even if they do, and if we are still hampered by the Fleet in being at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, it must be remembered that we shall still possess, though not in so great a degree, a power of introducing a new factor into the war which will put an end to the condition of stalemate. By the spring we and the French alone shall have ready a force of two million men of first-rate quality not immediately required else- where—that is, not immediately required in the great defensive line from the Alps to the mouth of the Schelde. If we cannot contrive a use for these men which will break down the condition of stalemate, our strategy will indeed be bankrupt, and we shall deserve to become a race of per- manent troglodytes. That our troops can and will be quite willing to "stick it out" in the trenches till June we do not doubt, but by the time the water-lilies are springing up in the ditches in Flanders we ought to be able to give them the opportunity to stretch their legs once more, and to reconvert fortress troops into marching units.
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