The British at War

I

THE British at war are invariably a puzzle to their neighbors, whether friendly or hostile, and not a little of a puzzle even to themselves. Ever since the happy loss of Calais forbade to them further dreams of conquest on the Continent of Europe, they have been essentially a peace-loving folk, content for the most part to see other European powers tear each other to pieces, and to dwell at home, congratulating themselves that they were not as other nations were. But almost simultaneously with the closing of the old world to them, the new world was opened; and they gradually woke to the fact that, by their geographical position, they held the gate to the northern waterways of Europe. Thenceforward the key to their purely European policy was the principle that no great power must ever be mistress of the mouths of the Scheldt. That policy, indeed, may be summed up in one word, Antwerp.

Since the sixteenth century three great powers have striven to hold Antwerp permanently: first Spain, then France under Louis XIV, and under the Republic and Empire, and lastly, Germany. In every case Britain has battled against them long, bitterly, and successfully. Queen Mary Tudor declared, in her anguish over the loss of Calais, that after her death the name of Calais would be found graven upon her heart. Antwerp is the name which, consciously or unconsciously, has for three centuries been written on the heart of every British statesman who has held the direction of foreign affairs. So Antwerp be in safe hands, the rest of Europe may in great measure be ignored.

But the British, albeit essentially insular and self-satisfied, have always been restless and enterprising. A ring of salt water tempts men abroad no less surely than it confines them at home; and the British wandered away and founded commercial settlements — at the outset these were all built upon a commercial basis — in the East Indies, in the West Indies, on the West Coast of Africa, and in North America, little dreaming that they were adding to themselves fresh Antwerps all over the world. In India they fortunately received one such Antwerp for themselves as the dowry of an English Queen¹ — the island of Bombay. In North America there were two Antwerps,— both at first in the hands of rival powers, — New Amsterdam and Quebec. It was a matter of no great difficulty to convert New Amsterdam into New York, and by presents of laced coats, duffles, full-bottomed wigs, and rum, to turn the Five Nations into a buffer against the French neighbor. But there the French neighbor was, at Quebec, active, well-organized, and aggressive. In the East Indies the same neighbor was present, equally ambitious and busy; and finally, in the West Indies, the French held St. Nicholas Mole, the key of the passage by which, in the days of masts and sails, all homewardbound vessels must make their way to Europe. Moreover, the Spaniards claimed the Caribbean Sea as in a sense their own, though they trusted to the British to provide them with negro labor. Altogether, the prospects of building up an empire were not, in the seventeenth century, very promising. The first of the resolutions they have kept. It is still the fashion to charge George III with the entire responsibility for the loss of the American Colonies, which is both morally unjust and historically incorrect. But the second was beyond their power to keep. After all, they still had Canada, and it was only a question of time before they would take over practically the whole of India; for it was impossible to hold even a part of it while the rest was in a state of anarchy. Moreover, in the brief interval of peace between 1783 and the

They were the less so because the British at large were resolutely opposed to the maintenance of a standing army. Each of the two principal political parties had suffered in turn from oppression at the hands of such a force; and both viewed the institution with impartial loathing. Possessions beyond sea were supposed to look after themselves, whether in India, or in North America, or in the West Indies; and for a time, after a fashion, they did so. But together with Bombay, Queen Catherine of Braganza brought Tangier as part of her dowry; and Tangier demanded a garrison of white troops. This garrison, together with a small bodyguard for the protection of the sovereign’s person, was the nucleus from which has grown the present British army.

It would, perhaps, be little beyond the truth to say that, out of the original struggle with France for the safety of Antwerp on the Scheldt, there has grown up the present British Empire. The fight with the French in the Low Countries led to fighting with them all over the world. At the close of the first stage of the contest, England had little to show for more than twenty years of war; for the Peace of Utrecht gave her not much more than Gibraltar, the key of the Southern waterways of Europe, and Minorca, an advanced post in the Mediterranean. But both of these places required garrisons; and therefore, when Marlborough’s fighting army was disbanded, a few battalions were perforce reserved for this purpose. The nation hated a standing army as bitterly as ever, but was obliged, in spite of herself, to maintain one; and the people avenged themselves upon the little band of detested soldiers by heaping upon them every kind of task. They abjured the national duty of defending their country, and saddled it on the back of the red coats, who were thus expected to be the police of the British Isles, the police of the Empire, the first line in offensive operations abroad, and the first line of defense at home. None the less, before the eighteenth century was more than half spent, the fight for Canada and India had been decided in England’s favor. The Empire had been won; the next question was, how it was to be defended.

It is too often forgotten that the problem of imperial defense was the proximate cause of the quarrel between England and her American Colonics. The ultimate cause, curiously enough, was the commercial regulations, best known as the Acts of Trade and Navigation, which were the one statutorybond that purported to hold the Empire together. No sooner, therefore, had the Empire been built up than it fell to pieces; and the British agreed to fasten the whole blame for the disaster upon the King, and to have nothing more to do with empires.

French Revolution, they had formed a settlement in the huge island of Australia. Lastly, the Seven Years’ War had compelled them to reimpose upon themselves the duty of national service in defense of their own shores.

Then came the war of the French Revolution and Empire, and a long and bitter struggle, primarily (as usual) for the security of Antwerp on the Scheldt, and later, to avert the domination of all Europe by France. It was in one respect a different war from those of 1689-1713 and 1756-1763. A Polish revolution, breaking out simultaneously with the French Revolution, turned the eyes of the Central Powers of Europe as much to the East as to the West; and England was consequently left for considerable periods almost or quite alone in her struggle with France. Of course, she had no army ready, and she took a very long time to create one. In fact, it was not until 1806 that Lord Castlereagh discovered a method by which an army of 40,000 men could be maintained more or less permanently for active service on the Continent of Europe; and the acts of parliament passed for the levying and organization of the British military force between 1803 and 1814 numbered over seventy.

However, the British had at least a navy; and Pitt endeavored to crush France by sweeping her trade off the seas and mastering the whole of her colonial possessions, so as to bring her to financial ruin. He failed in his ultimate object; but France was actually left in 1814 without an acre of territory outside the Continent of Europe; and Britain ended the war with a new empire. In the course of the struggle she had, through sheer force of circumstances, immensely increased her territory in India, and she had strengthened her hold also upon the approaches to it by taking Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch, and Mauritius from the French. She had secured at Malta a new advanced post in the Mediterranean, and incidentally she had sent an expedition to Egypt, and, while temporarily occupying that country, had realized its importance as the gate to India by way of the Red Sea.

In the matter of military experience she had learned that, having command of the sea, she could wield great military power by holding a comparatively small force in readiness to be thrown at any moment upon a hostile coast. She had not, it is true, made good use of this power; indeed, she had thrown away many opportunities of turning it to great account. But she had at last kept an army permanently in Spain, thereby making the safe occupation of that country by the French impossible; and that army had ended by driving the French across the Pyrenees.

The Peninsular War was a long and tedious business, demanding the extremity of patience alike in the general and in the government which employed him; but the general was, as it happened, a true military genius, who saw his way from the first through a very difficult problem, and adhered to his methods of solution until they were finally vindicated by triumphant success. Strategically, perhaps the most striking feat of the British was the dispatch of troops from India and from Malta simultaneously to Egypt in 1801, and the march of the Indian contingent across the desert to the Nile, where it joined hands with the troops which had landed at the Mediterranean port of Alexandria. This signified once for all that the British had now two bases of military operations — India in the East and the British Isles in the West.

II

The nineteenth century was occupied, at least, so far as imperial matters were concerned, chiefly with the consolidation of India and South Africa, with the development of Canada and Australia, and with the settlement of New Zealand. The opening of the overland route to India, superseded some fifty years ago by the Suez Canal, gave Egypt and the Red Sea new importance; and steam-navigation dictated as essential the occupation of coaling stations at Aden and Perim, at Singapore, the gate of the China seas, and at Hong Kong. On account of internal troubles in Egypt, Great Britain was obliged to intervene in 1882, inviting France to join her in proof of her honest intention. But France refused; and the task of rescuing the country from invasion by savage tribes was left to Britain. After long friction between the two nations, an amicable settlement was at last arrived at, and Britain was left in predominant control of Egypt and the Soudan, or, in other words, of the Southern gate from Europe into Asia. This was the more important to her, looking not only to the rapid rise of Australia and New Zealand in wealth and importance, but to the development of Central Africa. It was the scramble for this vast territory, from thirty to forty years ago, which first, revealed Germany to Great Britain in the light of a serious rival. However, the British took their share in the partition by annexing the tract now known as British East Africa.

It is hardly surprising under the circumstances that England should have gained a reputation for rapacity. She has emerged from all great wars with something to the good, and after the war of 1793-1815, with a great deal. All of her neighbors and allies were more or less ruined — indeed, the allies could never have taken the field without British subsidies; but England, though burdened by an enormous debt, had absorbed most of the carrying trade and much of the commerce of the world. Yet it is the simple truth that, for a full century after the Declaration of American Independence, British statesmen fairly groaned over the extension of the Empire. The East India Company deplored the cost of the wars that made her borders secure. West Indian islands were of no great importance one way or the other; but extensive white settlements, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, were simply a thankless burden. It was (such was the current presumption) only a matter of time before they would cut themselves adrift; and meanwhile their wars against native tribes were troublesome and costly. The best that could be hoped for was that they would take their leave speedily and in friendly terms. Imperial Defense was a problem which baffled and perplexed administration after administration, and was perpetually set aside in the hope that it might solve itself when the self-governing colonies should proclaim their independence.

At last, the overwhelming triumph of Germany over France in 1870-71 warned Great Britain to set her military house in order; and the reorganization of the army was seriously taken in hand. Then a generation arose which suggested that, in spite of our failure in North America in 1775, we might yet keep an empire together, and look upon it as a source of pride and power instead of a mere incumbrance. The growth of the German navy also caused the British navy to be steadily increased; and after many experiments and a great many failures, Mr Haldane, now Lord Haldane, in 1906-07 reorganized the British army, copying (though unconsciously) the principles of Castlereagh, and persuaded the selfgoverning colonies to accept the same organization for their local forces. Lord Haldane’s scheme allowed for the mobilization and dispatch of six divisions — say 20,000 men — as a striking force to any quarter of the world; and it was thought that, by the help of the navy, these numbers would gain, in any war, time sufficient to organize Britain as a nation in arms. The margin of security was thus cut down to the very narrowest limit; but it was thought marvelous at the time that the House of Commons did not cut it down still further. Moreover, no corresponding effort was made to increase the efficiency of the Indian army. On the contrary, the arrangement of a friendly understanding with Russia — the only dangerous neighbor of India — encouraged the Indian Government to truncate military expenditure to the utmost. A thousand warnings had been given as to the evil designs of Germany; but these, though seconded by men of the highest military authority, were unheeded. The British are a gambling race, and, under cover of a specious unwillingness to believe ill of human nature, are prone to ignore all unwelcome facts. So the six divisions were barely tolerated in England; and India, the second base of the Empire, was left wholly unprepared for serious war.

III

In August, 1914, came the crash. Germany, innocent, smooth-speaking Germany, who had for years abused the hospitality of her neighbors in order to compass their destruction, flung off the mask, and threw the best of her strength against France, in the hope of crushing her at a blow, and using her territory as a base for attack on England. Four of the six British divisions, pursuant to an informal agreement with France, were at once sent out to join the French army, and in a few days were joined by a fifth. This was the force which the Kaiser is said to have dubbed the ‘contemptible little army’; but he knew well enough that, in the language of a German publicist, it was ‘of quite extraordinary fighting value.’ And so it proved itself to be. Compelled at the very outset to undergo the supreme test of an army’s merit or demerit, — a rapid and prolonged retreat,— it emerged from the ordeal with incomparable splendor. I write with no idle prejudice in favor of my own countrymen. I have followed the fortunes of the British army since its first creation, recording its failures and disgraces as candidly as its successes; and I say deliberately that it has done nothing greater in the whole of its history than the retreat from Mons. Being an army of longer service and of higher training than any other in Europe, it would have failed if it had not shown itself superior—so far as its numbers went—to any troops in the field; but its moral strength in adversity was the amazement even of its own officers. It is hard to overestimate the value to the Allied armies of this tiny body of men, who believed themselves to be better than any number of Germans, and whom no amount of fatigue, hardships, and hunger could persuade to the contrary.

The retreat was brought to an end by a brilliant counter-stroke of General Joffre. The Germans retreated to the line which, with a few insignificant fluctuations, they held till the autumn of 1918. A deadlock followed; and then both sides raced to outflank each other in the north. By this time the sixth of the six British divisions had joined its comrades; a seventh had been gathered in from garrisons over-seas; and two more, composed for the most part of Indian troops, had been brought over from India. The Germans won the race to the sea, though by too short a length to give them the advantage that they required; and then, summoning every man that they could raise, they made a desperate effort to break through the Allied line to the ports of the Channel.

In the struggle that followed, it is hard to decide whether the French marine battalions at Dixmude, or the British immediately to the south of them, deserve the greater praise. The British array has been truly described by a highly distinguished general officer as ‘ a thin fighting line, no supports, and no reserves except scattered groups of excit ed generals.’ Yet that thin fighting line held its own unbroken, though it perished in the effort. The six divisions were designed to hold the field for six months. They, and three more, hastily called from over-seas, had with difficulty brought the Germans to a standstill from exhaustion; and after four months of desperate fighting, every one of them was reduced to a mere wreck. But their spirit was not broken, as the following instance will prove. The 1st battalion of the Grenadier Guards is the senior battalion of the British infantry, and its senior company has since 1660 been the King’s Company. When withdrawn from the first battle of Ypres, this battalion (which had already been repeatedly refilled by drafts) numbered one officer and eighty-five men. Its first proceeding upon leaving the line of battle was to reconstitute the King’s Company and to do an hour’s steady drill. This example is only typical of many; but the fact remained that the British regular army had been practically destroyed within four months of the outbreak of war; and not the British army only, but also a good part of the flower of the Indian army.

This was a more serious matter than at first sight appears. One of Germany’s most effective blows against the British was the gaining of Turkey outwardly for her ally, inwardly for her servile and obedient tool. Turkey held one of the gates of Asia at Constantinople, and directly threatened the other, Egypt, which was in British hands. More than that, she dominated in Mesopotamia a route by which German agents could penetrate to the shores of the Red Sea and of the Persian Gulf, to Persia, to Afghanistan, and to the northwest frontier of India, to stir up Arabs and mountain tribes against the British, and to make mischief everywhere. British interests in the Persian Gulf had been established far back in the seventeenth century; in the Delta of the Euphrates they had recently been much augmented by the acquisition of certain Persian oil-fields, and by the laying of a line of oil-pipes from these fields to oil-factories in the delta.

The Arabs loathe the Turks, but they also fear them; and if the Turks should succeed in persuading the Arabs to join them in a holy war, there was the prospect of trouble along the whole line, from Egypt to the Persian Gulf, and possibly even in East Africa. In ordinary times the military force of India would have sufficed to counter any blow that Turkey might attempt in the Far East; but two divisions of the Indian army had been drawn away to France; other important forces had been transferred to Egypt; and the result was that remarkably little was left in India. Yet India was responsible for the safety of all posts in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and also, in some measure, for the security of British East Africa, to say nothing of her troublesome neighbors in the mountainous marches of the northwest. It cannot be gainsaid that, by first drawing away British forces from India to the West by its tremendous onslaught upon the French and British in France, and by then inciting Turkey to war in the East, the German General Staff had laid its plans shrewdly and well.

To remain passive, and to give the Turks a free hand in the East, was absolutely impossible. Their entry into the war practically compelled the British to initiate important military operations against them in some quarter. The Indian Government very early sent a small force to cover the oil-pipes and oil-factories in the Delta of the Euphrates; and these troops, acting skillfully and successfully by surprise, seized the posts of Basra and Kurna, which covered the Delta from the north, almost before the Turks were aware that an enemy was before them. This was well done, for the supply of oil was of the greatest importance to the British Admiralty, alike for fuel and for the manufacture of high explosives; but it was not to be supposed that the Turks would allow a few thousand men to remain on the Euphrates unmolested. They had a considerable army of their own, and little to do with it except to molest Russia, whose hands were already full with operations on her western frontier and in the Caucasus.

The situation called for close coöperation between Great Britain and Russia in the Near East of Europe, where a successful stroke might rally the whole of the Balkan States to the side of the Allies against the Central Powers. The point at which the blow should be struck was one for careful consideration. If Greece should throw in her lot against the Central Powers, there was Salonica as a port and as a base; but the geographical situation of Greece was not, owing to the lack of railways, favorable for military operations on a large scale. Alexandretta offered a good harbor and the prospect of severing, at Aleppo, all railway communication between the Ægean on one side and Mesopotamia and Syria on the other. Lastly, the occupation of the Dardanelles, menacing the very heart and head of the Turkish Empire, promised the greatest results of all.

Unfortunately there was little coördination of effort between Russia, Britain, and France during the first year of the war. Unfortunately also the British Government appears not to have realized the true significance of Turkey’s entry into the lists against her. The breathless effort to stop the advance of the Germans in the West seems to have left them with little leisure to devote to the East; and they were seriously embarrassed by the dearth of troops. In fact, they were paying the penalty for the persistent unwillingness of the British nation to make provision for war in time of peace. It was easy for strategists, even of the most ordinary ability, to urge that Germany was the real enemy, that her allies would soon fall away if she were crushed, and that therefore every soldier must be employed against Germany and Germany only. But the Turkish forces were practically an auxiliary army to the German, their operations being dictated by Germany, and directed by Germans for German objects. The Kaiser’s armies might take long to crush; and meanwhile the peace of three hundred millions of people in India and the security of their communications with Europe were at stake. Moreover, there was, and is, in India military material of the highest value among the fighting peoples of the North; and to risk the waste of this material through internal trouble would have been, not only a political, but a military blunder. Come what might, no matter what critics might say about wasting men upon secondary objects and the British greed of territorial aggrandizement, it was imperatively necessary for the British to initiate military operations on a more or less grand scale against some quarter of the Turkish Empire.

This the British Government, so far as can be judged at present, did not at first perceive. The expedition to the Delta of the Euphrates was left to the Indian Government, as a purely Indian matter, with which England had, militarily and strategically, no concern. That expedition was very soon in trouble, for the Turks moved reinforcements down the Tigris and Euphrates. The very rumor of their coming sufficed to turn many Arab tribes against the British; and for a few weeks the situation was extremely serious. However, by reducing the garrison of India itself to dangerous weakness, sufficient troops were scraped together to reinforce the little army in Mesopotamia, and a brilliant attack drove the Turks back in headlong flight, which the treacherous Arabs, turning against their former friends, converted into a disastrous rout. This was well done; but, though it eased the situation temporarily, it left matters in the main unchanged. The Turks were already menacing Egypt, in the hope of keeping large bodies of British troops idle there; and unless the Sultan’s forces could be distracted at some other point, it was only a question of time before they would move in greater force than before down the Tigris and Euphrates, in order to drive the British into the Persian Gulf.

Curiously enough, that distraction or diversion was forthcoming, though without the slightest reference to Mesopotamia or to any general scheme of operations in the East. Impatient of the deadlock on the Western Front, a party in the British Cabinet began, toward the end of 1914, to advocate an attack in the Near East, with the general idea of saving Serbia and of preventing the extension of the Central Powers’ array in an uninterrupted line to Constantinople.

The bare fact that this proposal emanated from a party sufficiently shows that there was another party which was opposed to it; but in truth the opposition was perhaps due less to disapproval of the scheme on principle than to the difficulty of finding the means to execute it. The First Lord of the Admiralty, however, suggested that it might be within the powers of the fleet, without the help of an army, to force the passage of the Dardanelles, steam up the Bosphorus, and overawe Constantinople. Troops would, of course, be needed to hold the Peninsula of Gallipoli and occupy Constantinople; but there need not be many, nor, probably, need they be long detained. Practically, therefore, a great object might be achieved without weakening seriously or permanently the British force on the Western Front.

This solution of a tough problem seems to have been so acceptable that it was embraced with rather remarkable eagerness, first, as a mere experiment, which might be abandoned if it should prove impracticable, and next, by slow degrees, as an operation which must be carried through at all costs. It was this transitional character, this uncertainty whether the attack upon the Dardanelles was to be an experiment or a serious venture, which wrecked the entire enterprise. The fleet tried to force the passage of the Straits unaided, but failed; and then, when the enemy had been fully warned and had received ample time for preparation, troops were hurriedly collected, and what had been a naval became a military expedition. As such, it suffered from all the evils of haste, imperfect prevision, and still more imperfect equipment. The whole affair, instead of being carefully thought out and prepared to the very last detail, was improvised in the bad old English fashion. The military force, though absurdly small in numbers, might have sufficed for the work if it had been steadily kept up to strength of men, guns, and ammunition : for its quality was superb, and its feats of hardihood, courage, and endurance almost incredible. But as fast as it beat one Turkish army, it was confronted by another, until it had fought itself to a standstill. Reinforcements were sent out; but in the form of fresh battalions, which arrived in driblets, and very soon fought themselves to a standstill likewise. The whole of them massed together at one time, as one army, might well have mastered the defenses of the Straits in the face of all difficulties, and have opened the passage to the fleet; but doled out, as they were, in small portions, by the government, they were doomed to destruction in detail. All this was the result of the infirmity of purpose of the administration, an infirmity due to various causes but chiefly to the failure to realize from the first that serious operations against the Turks, no less than against the Germans, were imperatively dictated by the military requirements of the Empire.

After desperate fighting to no purpose, the military expedition was withdrawn from the Dardanelles; and the first great enterprise against the Turk ended in acknowledged failure. It had, as a matter of fact, weakened the Turkish army far more than was realized at the time; but for the moment there was nothing to show for it. Shortly afterwards, through a combination of civil and military blunders, things began to go wrong in Mesopotamia, and culminated in a bad mishap to the British arms. Then, at last, it seems to have dawned upon the government that operations against Turkey were a serious business and must be treated as such. The resources of India in the matter of fighting men were at length turned to real account; and two armies, the one in Mesopotamia and the other in Palestine, took the field. In Mesopotamia brilliant success soon effaced all previous disgraces; and all seemed to be going well, when the collapse of Russia and the disappearance of her armies from the Caucasus gave the Turk a respite. It was only a respite, however, for in the autumn of 1918 General Allenby won his stupendous victory of Esdraelon; and after one more small but finishing stroke in Mesopotamia, the Turk collapsed. No doubt, after so crushing a defeat he will be easier to deal with when the day comes for settling the final account; but it has cost much delay, with untold effort and treasure, to accomplish this end. Had the enterprise against Constantinople in 1915 been conducted, as it might have been, with due forethought and preparation, it might almost certainly have been carried to a successful issue; then the Balkan States might have been united against Germany, the war would have been greatly shortened, and incalculable evils would have been averted from Eastern Europe.

As it is, the British armies are practically in possession of Asiatic Turkey; and, as usual, Britain seems to have seized a vast territory for her own selfish ends; whereas she has simply been forced into these conquests because at the outset she took too little thought of the defense of her Eastern Empire. If, upon Turkey’s declaration of war, anyone had predicted that within four years Asiatic Turkey would be everywhere overshadowed by British bayonets, responsible British statesmen, one and all, would have stood aghast. They would have said with one voice, ‘For heaven’s sake, no more territory, no more responsibility. We will fight Germany to the death, but we only ask to live, not to make profit.’ And this would have been the truth, uttered from their inmost hearts.

So it has been from the beginning. From Robert Clive onward, the administrators of India strove in vain to set bounds to the Indian Empire. Many shrank from transgressing the limits assigned to it, until their shrinking became, not merely a danger, but almost a crime. When Braddock marched to the Ohio in 1755, no one dreamed that the expedition would lead to the conquest of Canada in 1760. Even when Canada had been conquered, the nation was half terrified at what it had clone, and cowered before the burden of defending so vast a territory. So strange a people are we who have planted the Union flag all over the world, so indolent, so easy-going, so slow to wrath, so unconscious of our strength, so hard to set in motion; yet so dangerous when roused, so irresistible when once moving, so resolute not to stop short of the goal. At the beginning of the present war it was the fashion to speak of Russia as ‘the steam-roller’; but the true steam-roller of Europe is Great Britain.