Ten years ago to-day the civilised world trembled upon the brink of a convulsion more violent than any in previously recorded history. It will, I think, be of interest to many to recall the incidents of those crowded times, and the stirring events of the four years of agony which followed. Such a brief review may, perhaps, help to clarify our conflicting views upon the problem of the defence of Australian territorial integrity and of our national freedom. We may, in our ignorance, imagine that we have little interest in the turmoil of European politics; but let us spare a few moments to recall the which actually happened.
The political assassination of an Austrian Prince in Sarajevo, a few weeks earlier, lighted a train which rapidly blazed into a stupendous conflagration. Austria, egged on by her ally, Germany, seized upon this episode to bully the little kingdom of Servia. The whole resources of international diplomacy failed to compose the resulting situation. Servia offered humiliating atonement, but Austria meant to fight. And so Belgrade was bombarded and captured by the Austrians, and Europe was confronted with yet another Balkan upheaval. Except for one paramount consideration, it might still have been possible to avert a general catastrophe. Russia and France stood by treaty in close military alliance; and Russia was the friend of Servia. So, when the Government of the Czar began to move, diplomatically at first, for the protection of little Servia, Germany had to face the problem of either calling off her Austrian bulldog, or else challenging the united power of France and Russia.
For many years before, German militarism had realised and prepared for this latter contingency. Germany had, by reason of this alliance, the disadvantage of having a potential enemy on both her eastern and western frontiers. She had, however, in the language of strategy, the great advantage of "interior lines," that is, her communication from east to west were inviolate, and all within her own territory; so that she could, in the event of trouble, hold the one enemy at bay with small "containing" forces, whilst concentrating her main strength upon the defeat of the other. The whole of Germany 's extensive military preparations of a generation had been designed to this very end. All this we well knew; but there was at first nothing in the imminent prospect that events would take that course which would have necessarily involved the British Empire. It was, however, also known that the German plan would be, by a lightning blow, to dispose first of France; and to do this she must invade France by way either of Alsace-Lorraine, or through Belgium.
But the neutrality of Belgium had been guaranteed international agreement, in which Germany had participated. France, relying upon that engagement, had concentrated her pre-war defensive preparations solely upon the region of Verdun, and had left her Belgian frontier unguarded. The temptation proved too much for Germany: First, on August 1, she declared war on Russia, under the doubtful plea that the Czar had ordered a general mobilisation for the purpose of overawing Austria; and immediately she began an armed advance into Belgium, thereby committing a gross breach of neutrality and of international honour. It was high time for Great Britain to intervene. Her ultimatum, awaited anxiously by the whole of her people, was that, unless Germany gave by midnight on August 4 the assurance that she would forthwith evacuate Belgian soil, a state of war with the British Empire would exist.
Now, in this Britain was actuated primarily by a traditional high respect for the sanctity of treaties and by a humane impulse to save Belgium from the horrors of war. But there lay, beneath, the realisation of the vital importance of the immunity of the Belgian coast to the safety of the Empire. The events which followed amply proved what the position of Britain, and therefore of the whole Empire, would be, so long as the littoral of the Low Countries remained in the hands of a powerful adversary. Much historical significance centres upon this thought. For many centuries England had fought in Flanders, once at least in every 100 years, and usually in the early years of the century to deny this very region to an enemy. We fought for Calais, and seized it in the fourteenth century, though we lost it again in the reign of Mary. In the days of Elizabeth we helped the Dutch to throw off the Spanish yoke in that territory. In Cromwell's time our redoubtable Blake challenged with this whip the broom of Van Tromp of the Netherlands. We then took Dunkirk and Ypres. William of Orange became King of England, mainly to secure our aid to stem tide of French invasion into Holland, and Namur fell under Marlborough, who cleared the French out of Flanders. Next we challenged Napoleon at Waterloo, and defeated his claim to those regions. Here, in 1914, we found ourselves once again confronted with the task of denying the Continental littoral closest to the shores of England to the permanent occupancy of a powerful rival.
So our Ambassador in Berlin turned a deaf ear to the plea of the German Chancellor that two great Teutonic peoples should not engage in a mortal combat, merely for the sake of a "scrap of paper"; and next day the people of the Empire found themselves involved in the dreadful ordeal of war.
Our sea-power is the bond which holds our empire together. Germany, by the building of a great fleet, had definitely challenged that supremacy. Her sailors habitually toasted '"he Day" when the trial of strength would come. Her fleet, in capital ships, nearly rivalled ours. The dominating consideration, as to the form which the war would take, was therefore our own naval strategy. Had we lost command of the sea, the co-operation of the British Dominions and the later assistance of America, indeed the feeding of the people of the British Isles, would have been impossible. With admiral prescience the British Fleet had, in the closing days of July, been mobilised "for manoeuvres." Our entire vast naval strength was at sea, fully manned, victualled, and munitioned. The Navy was ready for the emergency, and straightway, upon the first tremor of August 1, our mighty naval squadrons slipped quietly away to their predestined battle stations in the North Sea. That single act of naval strategy determined absolutely the fate of the Central Empires. For the German High Sea Fleet was thereby bottled up at Kiel, and never after made any effective bid for sea command. A few of her detached warships gave us, for a while, a little trouble - the Emden in the Indian Ocean, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the Pacific, and the Goeben in the in the Mediterranean. The last-named alone slipped through our fingers (for we accounted for the others in due course), and refuged at Constantinople terminating the neutrality of the Turks, who thereupon declared for Germany, a situation creating severe embarrassments for the Allies by exposing our tender eastern flank and by threatening Egypt, the Suez Canal and the highway to India, and the East.
The German field army was immediately put into operation "according to plan." Liege and Namur speedily fell to modern heavy artillery attack and Belgium was over-run. The march upon Paris began, retarded only slightly by the gallant sacrifice of the British Expeditionary Force of six divisions. The clash with them came at Mons. But the German numbers swept them aside. The fall of Paris seemed inevitable, and what that may have meant to the temperamental French people the enemy well understood. But then a miracle happened. The blow spent itself on the Marne, and the western field army of Germany withdrew to a line of carefully chosen defensive positions extending from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier, and it dug itself in. What had happened? The Russian mobilisation had proceeded more quickly than the Great General staff had calculated. Their eastern frontier, lightly guarded so as to release all possible forces for the western onslaught, yielded to the pressure of the Russian army, which, in a few days, overran East Prussia. There was consternation in Germany, and an imperious demand that the situation in the east must be restored. Thus, army plans had to yield to popular clamour, with the same disastrous results as have so often happened in history. Falkenhayn had precipitately to detach a number of divisions from the western army to fling them, under Hindenberg, into East Prussia, in order to stem the Russian advance on Berlin. That diversion, coupled with the small delay caused by the interposition of the British troops at Mons, destroyed the whole of the much-vaunted combination. The German plan of attack, designed to overwhelm France and so end the war before Christmas, collapsed in ruins; and the world was committed to the long agony of a four years' war of attrition.
Not all the European Powers that mattered had yet taken sides. Italy, Holland, Bulgaria, and Roumania were standing neutral to the end. The crafty Ferdinand of Bulgaria waited to see how we would fare with Turkey. Only Italy and Roumania remained our friends, and in due course entered the conflict. But early in 1915 a condition of stalemate had already set in on all land fronts, and the oceans had been swept clear of enemy tonnage. Then the world began to realise that there could be no early end in sight, that this would be a war not between armed forces alone, but between the entire people of the nations concerned; that, indeed, their whole resources in man-power, in food, in material, in science, and in industry would have to be mobilised; that, in short, the current slogan of "business as usual" must be dropped.
In only one zone of the far-flung battle fronts did there remain any opportunity for manoeuvre. Our Dardanelles and Mesopotamian enterprises were in the nature of a flanking movement, the success of which would have seriously embarrassed the Central Powers. The former, sound in strategic conception, was miserably ineffective in execution. The chance was taken of conquering Turkey by fleet action alone. It failed, and it doomed to failure the subsequent combined land and sea operations. Yet the Gallipoli campaign was not entirely in vain. It immobilised the whole Turkish army, thereby relieving the pressure upon Russia's southern flank and it kept Bulgaria out of the war until the end of 1915. The subsequent Palestine campaign continued to keep the Turks diverted from any participation in the main theatre of war.
But the most pregnant event of 1915 was the inauguration oi the German submarine campaign, and the sinking of the Lusitania. This led to the long protracted disputations between President Wilson and the enemy Government, which ended in America joining the Allies two years later. During 1916 the submarine menace grew in gravity month by month; British merchant shipping began to disappear from the face of the waters in ever increasing tonnage, and the situation of England with regard to the maintenance of essential seaborne supplies became ever more serious. Nor were these disadvantages compensated by any perfection in our blockade of Germany; for the interests of neutrals in both hemispheres had to be respected. The outstanding events of the first half of 1916 were the loss of the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, and the naval engagement of Jutland. Then followed the first offensive operation on a large scale so far undertaken by the British army, and now known as the first battle of the Somme. It lasted many weeks and was indecisive and costly; but it led to the deliberate and well-ordered retirement of the Germany forces on the western front to a carefully prepared defensive position known to them as the "Siegfried," and to us as the ''Hindenburg" line". Here, they wintered in security, and defied all the pressure which France and Britain were able to exert.
It seems clear that by the end of 1916 the resources of the Central Powers had reached the limit of development, and that so long as the Russian pressure on the eastern front remained effective, the enemy could release no sufficient forces to undertake manoeuvre or attack on a grand scale. The stalemate on land became consequently intensified, but at sea a mighty struggle developed between the now really formidable submarine menace and the many and diverse exertions of the Navy and the Mercantile Marine to concert effective countermeasures. The use which the Germans made of the Belgian coast, now in their secure grasp, as a base for their submarine warfare and for their air offensives over London provides a lesson for the British people which they dare not forget. The year 1917 was marked by two great political events which overshadowed in their consequence the importance to be attached to the steadily growing military strength of the British field army, as manifest in the victorious battles for the Vimy Ridge, the Messines Ridge, Broodseinde, Passchendaele, and the first Cambrai; in all of which Dominion troops greatly distinguished themselves. These events were the revolution in Russia, and, as an antidote, the entry of America into the war.
The breakdown of the eastern pressure upon the enemy by the rapid dissolution of Russia's armed power changed the situation to our grave disadvantage, and the winter of 1917-18 found the statesmen and soldiers of the Allies perturbed by the expectation that, at the first opportunity, Germany would put forth a mighty effort to obtain a decision. The Russian debacle released enormous enemy resources in men, in guns, in aircraft, and in munitions; and it seemed certain that these would be transferred to the still active battle fronts for employment in a great offensive as soon as the passing of winter conditions should permit. The first symptom of the enemy's renewed vigour was his sudden onslaught upon the Italian front, which came within an ace of crumpling the further Italian co-operation in the war. But a British army, under Plummer, hastily transferred by rail from Flanders, greatly helped to steady the situation there.
As, early in 1918, the end of the winter drew near, the surmise that a great assault was pending grew plainer (for we had a daily tally of the enemy's troop trains travelling front east to west), and speculation was rife as to the form which it would take and the zone in which it would strike. But the British front was much extended, and Haig had few reserve divisions.
To create some sort of mobile reserve, several Australian and Canadian divisions were withdrawn from line service, and held available for emergency action. Perhaps it was this discerning preparation and the manner of it which saved the Allies from defeat on land. For the front of the British Fifth Army, attenuated by these withdrawals, bore the full force of the great enemy attack which opened on March 21, and it suffered, in consequence, complete disintegration. The position became extraordinarily serious. The Germans had still at their disposal a mighty striking force, while we had only a few British and French divisions in reserve. American troops, which only now began to arrive in appreciable numbers, were yet wholly untrained and unfit for line service. The British front fell back rapidly. The French recoiled south-westerly to cover Paris, and right opposite to Amiens—that key position where junctioned all the railways and main roads which secured communication between us and the French—a dangerous and hourly widening gap of several miles resulted. On March 26, at Doullens, then already within gun range of the rapidly advancing enemy artillery, a hastily summoned meeting of the inter-Allied War Council appointed Foch as generalissimo. This meant the creation of a final arbiter of the respective role of the French and British armies and a pooling of their spare resources.
The British reserves, comprising several Australian divisions, led by the third, rushed by 'bus and forced marches to the threatened point, and by April 5, after a week of strenuous endeavour, including the heroic defence of Dernancourt, the German advance had been brought to a complete standstill. Amiens was saved. Events began to move rapidly, and the enemy's land offensive flickered cut in three final attempts to penetrate the Allied front, and so to reach the Channel coast—first at Villers-Brettoneux on April 24-25, valiantly frustrated by Glasgow's and Elliott's brigades; next at Kemmel, in Belgium, which drove back our line to Hazebrock, where the First Australian Division brought it to a halt; and last at Soissons, where the French and the first American troops to enter any battle zone, checked any nearer approach to Paris. So ended the German offensive in the war. The enemy's reserves of fit, rested divisions were now reduced to negligible numbers, and many divisions were 40 per cent. under-strength. We knew his resources accurately from day to day.
The Allied War Council was, however, taking no risks, and during June the decision was taken to play a waiting game—to undertake no counter-attack on a major scale, but to wait for the spring of 1919, to allow United States troops to arrive in adequate numbers, and to prepare all our armies for a great and final assault.
The Australian victory of Hamel on July 4—a purely local conception, pregnant with far-reaching consequences—transformed the situation and the outlook, and little difficulty resulted in persuading Foch to permit a much larger offensive operation by the combined total strength of Australia and Canada. The result was the battle of Amiens fought on August 8, which bit deeply into the enemy's waning resources. It was the beginning of the end. It was Germany's ''black day.'' Back to the Hindenburg line he fell under our relentless pressure, fighting desperately, but nevertheless losing Mont St. Quentin and Peronne (though defended by picked Prussian Guard's divisions), losing the Somme defensive line, and losing the outposts of the great Hindenburg defensive system itself. Then, from September 28 to October 5, a titanic, struggle ended with Australian, American, and British divisions in secure possession of the famous canal defences, and on the evening of October 5, her last bulwark lost, Prince Max von Baden wirelessed the world that Germany sued for peace, and was ready to accept President "Wilson's 14 points.
While this stirring drama was being enacted on the tortured soil of France our Palestine campaign had beaten Turkey to her knees; Bulgaria, realising that she had backed the wrong horse, withdrew; we had retrieved our reverses on the Euphrates, and it had been definitely shown that our navy had learned to destroy submarines faster than Germany could build them.
So the German people realised at last that the game was up, and their clamour for peace led to the Armistice and to terms of surrender of the most humiliating character. The whole German fleet was yielded up, to be ingloriously sunk by treachery at Scapa Flow. Armaments, aircraft, and munitions were delivered to the Allies in such vast quantities for destruction that a vainglorious would-be world conqueror was reduced to impotence. And he lost besides the rich provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, Bohemia, and Posen, and his entire colonial possessions.
With the subsequent political developments, leading to the Treaty of Versailles, these reminiscences are not particularly concerned. But they may be appropriately closed with a suggestion of what the war has wrought for the world, and particularly for the British Empire. None who participated in the long drawn struggle need be suspected of advocating war as a means of adjusting international disputes or animosities. But it takes two to keep the peace as well as to make a quarrel, and one need only, in the light of actualities, try to contemplate what would have happened if England had stood aloof in the face of a deliberate threat by a powerful empire to her vital interests. No-one can doubt that Germany would have overwhelmed her Continental victims, would have established a European hegemony and a vast colonial empire, and would, as soon as she was ready, have challenged Britain and America to a duel for world dominion, which only one combatant could have survived. In saving us from this, and in preserving our Empire, with undimmed prestige for honourable dealing, for the valour of her fighting men, and the fortitude of her people, the war was surely not fought in vain. \
