The Great War (All 8 Volumes). Various Authors

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ at any expense and keep Germany from breaking the siege. If more nations could be brought in against Germany, that would strengthen the siege lines and lengthen the front the Central Powers were building.

      Through the winter of 1914–15 the diplomats of the Allies and the Central Powers in Rome fought for Italy's hand with all the skill and resources of trained European diplomacy. Responding to the sentiment for the recovery of Trentino and Trieste which she considered ethnologically and geographically a part of her domain she was to throw in her fortunes with the Allies against her old enemy, Austria.

      Serbia had her troops still on the boundary of the Danube and the Save. Rumania, facing Austria with Russia on her flank, also much courted, was even more coy than Italy. Bulgaria, with her excellent army, was on the flank of Serbia and blocked the road to Turkey. Little Greece was another state watching the conflict with the selfish interest of a small spectator, trying to judge which side would be the victor.

      Russia of the steppes and the multitudes of men was short of munitions; her plants were incapable of making sufficient supplies. The Baltic was closed to her by the German navy, Archangel was frozen in and the closing of the passage of the Dardanelles shut her off from the Mediterranean. She was in touch with the sea only in the Far East, with the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains between her and the manufacturing regions of the United States. Her crop of wheat, which she exchanged for manufactured goods in time of peace was no less interned than the manufactured products of Germany. If the Dardanelles were opened she could empty her granaries and receive arms and munitions in return. Therefore, the first winter of the war, while their main armies were intrenched in colder climes, both sides turned their attention to the southeast. In November the Turks had joined the Central Powers, thus flying in the face of the historical Turkish policy, so cleverly applied by Abdul Hamid, in playing one European power against another and profiting by their international differences.

      For many years German diplomacy, capital and enterprise had been busy building up German influence in Asia Minor. Abdul Hamid had been overthrown under the leadership of Enver Pasha and other officers who had been trained in Germany according to German military methods and who had absorbed the German ideas. Von der Goltz, a German general, had reorganized the Turkish army. The access of Turkey to the Central Powers formed the addition of another thirty million people, which gave them one hundred and fifty million on their side.

      Through the assistance of the Turks, the Germans never for a moment deserting their idea of keeping the initiative and forcing their enemies to follow it, threatened an offensive against the Suez Canal, which was abortive, but served the purpose of requiring British preparation for its defense. Germany saw more than mere military advantage in the Turkish adventure. She was reaching out into the Mohammedan world which stretches across Persia and Asia Minor, through little known and romantic regions, to India where, as a part of her Indian Empire, England rules more Mohammedans than the population of the German Empire. The unrest which was reported to have been ripe in India for the last decade might thus be brought to a head in a rebellion against British authority; as it might, too, in Egypt, the Sultan of Turkey being the Padishah or head of the Mohammedan faith.

      At least Britain would be forced to maintain larger garrisons than usual both in Egypt and India against any threat of insurrection. Among all who have had to deal with the Oriental peoples, and particularly those who know them as intimately as the British rulers of India, the importance of power—and publicly demonstrated power—is fully understood. To the average British Indian or Egyptian subject, Britain has been an unconquerable country, the mistress of the world.

      Many reasons united in calling for some action on the part of the British to offset that of the Germans. With Russia in retreat the Balkan States, which had regarded her prowess as irresistible, were losing their faith in the Allies. One successful blow would do more to dispel their skepticism and to bring Italy in on the side of the Allies than sheafs of diplomatic cablegrams and notes. During such a crisis every message in the game of war diplomacy becomes only a polite calling card that represents armed men.

      The British decided to take the initiative though their new army had as yet received hardly sufficient training to make them soldiers and their supply of rifles, guns and munitions was insufficient. Indeed, England was just beginning to awaken fully to the fact that the forces of France and Russia alone were insufficient to cope on land with the Central Powers, particularly now that the weight of Turkey was thrown in the balance.

      With her casualties three times the number of her original expeditionary force, with more than the original number of her army engaged in Flanders, she undertook an offensive against Constantinople itself. Second-class men-of-war which were not required with the grand fleet and a single first-class dreadnought of the latest type, the Queen Elizabeth, in conjunction with a French squadron, bombarded and reduced the ancient forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles and then attacked those in the narrows. British bluejackets even smoked their pipes and cracked jokes as they sat on the crest of Achi Baba, which became an impregnable Turkish position after the British Mediterranean force was landed. Had the Queen Elizabeth been able to fire an army corps ashore, the corps could have marched on into Constantinople.

      The success or failure of the Gallipoli expedition depended upon surprise. Superficially it seems a colossal blunder. There are inside facts about it which have never been disclosed. Greece, it is supposed, agreed to send troops, but at the last moment changed her mind. Undoubtedly the expedition was an important influence in bringing Italy in. There was a fatal delay in its departure from Alexandria. Too much time elapsed between the preparatory bombardment and the landing. The Turks had been forewarned what to expect. They had leisure for concentration and preparation. On a narrow front of difficult shore where the landing was to be made, they had stretched their barbed-wire entanglements into the sea itself, while along the beach were carefully concealed machine guns and back of them ample forces of men and artillery.

      No effort in history was ever more gallant than that of the British force, including the Australians, which threw itself ashore in the face of simply insurmountable obstacles and fire, under the cover of the guns of the men-of-war. As a surprise, the affair was a complete failure. Its only chance of success being as a surprise, most competent military leaders and experts agree that this was sufficient reason, in a military sense, for an immediate withdrawal; yet British stubbornness would not yield.

      Indeed, the Gallipoli expedition was a political move, a violation of the true military principle—that you should always go against the main body of your enemy, which was at this time on the frontiers of Russia and France. Of course the effort was not entirely without its compensations; no expedition is, which holds any part of the enemy's troops in place in front of your own. The pressure was withdrawn from the Russians in the Caucasus and also further adventures from the outskirts of Asia Minor toward India in stirring up the Mohammedan population were for the time abated.

       The attempt to reach the heart of Turkish power, the sultan's capital itself, by opening these famous straits and sending British ships to lay Constantinople under their guns, was a splendid conception worthy the military imagination of the daring ages when the British Empire was built and the days of the Spanish Main, but the only criterion in the ghastly business of war remains success.

      Yet the spring of 1915 opened with no rebellion in India except sporadic outbreaks of the frontier tribes which are always recurring, while Egypt itself remained peaceful. The Germans inaugurated their second year's campaign by closing the Belgo-Dutch frontier and by the administrative use of every possible means for safeguarding their movements on the western front, which would indicate that they were to undertake another effort for the Channel ports. This was an obvious feint to conceal an effort elsewhere. Instead of using troops to make it, they tried out for the first time a form of warfare which was not new in the consideration of any army, though it had not been used because it was considered inhuman.

      With the wind blowing in the right direction, the Germans released an СКАЧАТЬ