THE military chiefs had not been caught napping, even in the states most adverse to war—the captains were to meet their surprises later. On the civil side it was otherwise. Nobody had experienced a war on this scale. Other conflicts had been preceded by longer warning, so that adjustments could be made. Cushions such as the rise of money rates had softened the shock. In this case bank rates in London, Paris, and Berlin stood at 3, 3½, and 4 per cent respectively a week before the invasion of Belgium. In the first week the British bank rate rose to 10 per cent. The export of gold was prohibited and—a striking measure in ‘a nation of shopkeepers’—a moratorium on debts was declared. The Stock Exchange closed on 31 July. That of every great city in the world followed suit. In the neutral United States it remained shut until the following April. All belligerents went on to paper money.1 All put into force a series of war-time regulations.
Britain rapidly increased her fighting strength, in the Army above all. The regular units overseas were brought home to form five divisions and replaced either by British Territorial or by local forces. The Territorial divisions and mounted Yeomanry brigades, fourteen of each, were mobilized. Instead of expanding on this basis, however, Lord Kitchener, almost a stranger to his own country and doubtful about the Territorial principle, raised thirty divisions in three ‘new armies’, formed one after another. Recruits poured in so fast that the manufacture of equipment and munitions was handicapped.
The volunteers included the prime of the nation’s youth. Their spirit was amazing. The like of it had not been seen before. Men barged and jostled to get into the recruiting offices. For young and old belief in the justice of the cause was no convention but a clear reality. To begin with, a few foolish and unworthy exhibitions of excitement and spleen occurred—for example, wrecking of German bakers’ shops; but they were not widespread. A characteristic of university students was a combination of eagerness to dedicate themselves and a gaiety based on peace of mind rejoicing in an aim beset by no doubts.
Expansion was simpler for other belligerents than for Britain. In her Territorial divisions there were commonly about half a dozen professional officers—the commander and staff. In the New Armies retired officers and a handful on leave from the Indian Army filled gaps. Foreign armies, on the other hand, built new units on a nucleus of about 25 per cent trained officers and men. Only Russia suffered comparably or even worse, from shortage of equipment. In the British camps dummy rifles made by carpenters and dummy guns of piping were used.
The United Kingdom could call on one magnificent reinforcement, the Empire—that institution which the Germans had expected to break up in war. There was no guarantee that the United Kingdom would be supported by contingents of specified strength from the Dominions. In 1911 the then Prime Minister of Canada, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, had said that she was not bound to fight in any and every ‘British war’, though the Government was legally bound to recognize a state of war with the enemies of the United Kingdom. Now Laurier, in opposition, said that there was in Canada ‘but one mind and one heart’. The first Canadian contingent (mainly the 1st Division), 33,000 men and 7,000 horses, left the St Lawrence on 3 October. It was the largest armed force yet to cross the Atlantic as a unit. It reached Plymouth without a casualty.1 Pace the critics, the Navy must have been doing something.
The Anzac Corps, made up of the 1st Australian and the Australian and New Zealand Divisions, began arriving in December in Egypt, the station in which the British Government desired to see it. South Africa relieved the British troops, but could not accomplish much more until a revolt had been disposed of. The rebels were in a sense pro-German, but the primary sentiment behind the business was anti-British feeling in veterans of the South African War. The revolt was extinguished by South Africans, whose leaders had fought against the British. It lasted until January 1915.
India’s first contributions were invaluable, though small by comparison with what was to come. As already stated, a corps (two divisions) arrived in France at a critical moment. In November two newly formed divisions arrived in Egypt and in the course of the same month another division reached the Persian Gulf. The proclamation of a Jihad, or holy war against the infidel, in Turkey caused some anxiety in view of the large numbers of excellent Moslem soldiers in the Indian Army. A handful of desertions did in fact occur, but virtually all the Indian Moslem soldiers remained true to their salt. In this war there was no equivalent to the ‘Indian National Army’ in Japanese pay which appeared in the Second World War—and it was Hindu, not Moslem.
Before the year was out Britain and her Russian ally had to face a new foe. On 2 August a secret Turco-German treaty involving the entry of Turkey into the war had been signed in Constantinople. Britain’s unexpected appearance on the other side, the German defeat on the Marne, and the Austrian defeats at the hands of Russia and Serbia caused the Turks to hesitate. They did not mind fighting, but it must be on the winning side. The Germans put an end to this dallying by a plot in which Enver Pasha, the Turkish War Minister, collaborated. Since the German cruisers had arrived in the Bosporus they had, by a transparent fiction, formed part of the Turkish fleet, and Admiral Souchon had gone through the motions of entering the Turkish service. On 28 October he led the combined fleet into the Black Sea and next morning, on a false and even ridiculous pretext, bombarded Odessa, Sebastopol, Theodosia, and Novorossiisk. The Goeben sank a transport and Turkish destroyers a gunboat. The object, which was war with Russia, was attained. The method was infamous as regards Russia, but it served the Turks right and was almost justified by the possibility that they would break their word.
Enver was an adventurer with plenty of personality, but, despite the fact that he was a soldier, ignorant of how to manage any kind of war. Turkey’s only enemy immediately to hand was represented by the Russian forces in Caucasia. Enver came forward with one of those colossal plans dear to the dreamer who fancies himself an Alexander or a Napoleon. It was based on the roads—and there at least did not err, for the generally scanty communications are the key to mountain warfare. In brief, it depended on a lightning stroke which would place a powerful Turkish force between the Russians and their main bases at Ardahan and Kars, destroying their Caucasian army and opening the way for the invasion of Georgia, where all the ‘Turanian’ people would rise against Russia. It disregarded the fact that the troops would have to live on the country in winter; night temperatures twenty degrees below freezing-point; bitter winds, amounting to gales on the higher ground; the inadequacy of a mere 50 per cent superiority in infantry for such an ambitious venture.
Both sides fought like savage heroes. Death came quickly in the cold to the wounded left lying out. The fate of thousands of stout Turkish askers touches the emotion of him who contemplates it even today. One division, with 8,000 rifles, after four days’ marching in the mountains numbered 4,000. The rest were frozen as hard as boards, but for stragglers who had found shelter in hamlets on the slopes. In the whole army these two causes, frost and desertion, reduced Enver’s force of 95,000 to 70,000 in the phase of deployment alone. The decisive Russian victory was won at Sarikamish, half-way between Kars and Erzerum, during the first days of 1915. By mid-January, when the Turkish defeat was acknowledged and Enver had fled from the scene of his destruction of his own army, the 95,000 had fallen to 18,000. How many died is unknown; the Germans heard that 30,000 were buried. The campaign brought to light one fine Russian soldier, Yudenich, at the outbreak of war staff officer to the Viceroy of Caucasia, later in command of a corps. The scope of this Turkish disaster was wide. Turkish strength and fighting power were affected for the rest of the war.
Turkey had mobilized and brought more or less up to strength by the end of September, a month before she entered the war, a force of thirty-six divisions. The reorganization of the Army after the disastrous Balkan Wars was the work of a German military mission headed by a capable officer, General Liman von Sanders, supported by German subsidies, weapons, and equipment. The modernization and military value of the forces varied, largely with the distance from the capital and the workshops. In Syria, Mesopotamia (roughly the modern Iraq), and southern Arabia, equipment was primitive, and, into the bargain, there were strong reasons to suppose that unrest in the Arab world would render Arab troops unreliable. The communications with these outposts were weak. Tunnels needed to carry the Constantinople-Baghdad railway through the Taurus and Amanus mountains had not been pierced, and the railway extended only to Ras el Ain, half-way between Aleppo and Mosul.
The farthest corps was in the Yemen, in south-western Arabia. Here and even in the Hejaz the troops still dozed and the officers smoked on divans in the old style, whereas under the eyes of Liman von Sanders and his ever-growing staff all was bustle and modernity. The fundamental strength of Turkey lay, however, as always, in the fighting qualities of the Anatolian peasant, disciplined, frugal, hardy, and brave, normally quiet and good-tempered, but savage when his blood was up.
The reinforcement of the Turkish garrison in Syria was the cause of the parallel reinforcement of the British garrison in Egypt, though it would have been strengthened in any case. In place of a reinforced brigade, there were now four divisions and some other troops, amounting early in 1915 to 70,000 men. The Suez Canal was of immense importance to the British Empire, which reacted violently throughout the war to every hint of a threat to its security. For the moment this precious waterway helped to provide for its own defence, playing the humble part of a moat behind which its defenders lined up. However, the besetting sin of British politicians and their military advisers in this war, that of going a little farther step by step without any clear appreciation of why they were doing so or what they were heading for, was to carry the advanced guard of a great army over five hundred miles northward before the war was done.
A somewhat similar train of events was now being prepared at Basra, on the Shatt-al-Arab, which carries the waters of three great rivers, the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Karun, into the Persian Gulf. It started with a suggestion from the India Office that a reinforced brigade should be sent ‘to encourage the Arabs to rally to us and confirm the local Sheiks of Mohammerah and Kuwait in their allegiance’1; also, less vaguely, to protect the Anglo-Persian oil installations on Abadan Island. The Government of India agreed and the force arrived on 23 October. This was before Turkey had entered the war, but the Navy virtuously and prudently waited until she was in before bombarding a fort which covered the landing-place. On 6 November the landing took place under long-range fire. The Turks were so slow in bringing up their force at Basra, rather stronger than the brigade which had landed, that the remainder of the 6th Indian Division arrived in the interval. With the aid of naval guns the Turkish force was routed on 17 November and disappeared up river.
Then leave was given to go as far as Basra—quite a sensible move, as it was a good place for a base. Next the Government thought the division might as well go as far as Qurna, at the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris, and that such a move would look well in Arab eyes. Perhaps it did, but the Arabs did not appear vastly impressed when Qurna was occupied on 9 December. But nobody must suppose, said the Government earnestly, that any project for an advance on Baghdad could be entertained. It remained to be seen how long this restraint would last.
‘In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend’, wrote Macaulay of Frederick the Great, ‘black men fought on the Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’ In order that a more virtuous man than Frederick, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, might violate the integrity of a neighbour whom his country was pledged by ‘a solemn testimony’ to support, men of variously coloured skins fought far and wide, though the main battlefields were in Europe. The modern historian Keith Feiling has rivalled Macaulay with: ‘So the circle widened until a war, begun by a squalid murder in Bosnia, ended with British soldiers fighting in Syria, on the Caspian, at Archangel, in East Africa, the Alps, and the Caucasus.’
Japan entered the war on the side of the Entente on 23 August. British and American commentators have dwelt upon the self-interest which inspired her, but nations do not commonly join in wars, once they have started, out of pure idealism. Japan had certain aims, and apart from them she meant to play a limited role and resist all attempts to draw her soldiers to Europe. Yet her contribution was valuable and whole-hearted within its bounds. Some of her cruisers and destroyers accompanied British troop convoys as far as Marseilles, and the keenness and efficiency of the crews created a good impression.
Japan was determined to get the Germans out of Kiao-chow, their holding in the Shan-tung province of China. To do this she had to take the fortress-port of Tsing-tao, held by a German garrison—excluding Chinese—not far short of 4,000 strong. The Japanese Army and Navy took the job very seriously, assembling two fleets, which included six battleships, and a large land force. On 31 October they started their bombardment, and on the night of 6 November they assaulted and took a line of redoubts in Port Arthur style. Next day the German governor ran up the white flag. Losses on both sides had been fairly high.
In the Pacific the Japanese Navy secured the Marianas, the Carolines, and the Marshalls, which the Germans had no means of defending. Meanwhile a New Zealand force had occupied Samoa. The Australians had landed on an island which Germany had renamed Neu-Pommern, soon to become again New Britain. They occupied its so-called capital, a place few had heard of and no one expected to hear of again—there they were wrong, for it was Rabaul, so famous in the Second World War. The Governor’s surrender involved the downfall of German authority throughout German New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and possessions in the Solomons. The German holdings in the Pacific had been a façade, with no defensive power except at Tsing-tao, a show of prestige without foundation. It collapsed without prestige.
The delay in starting in German South-west Africa, which has been mentioned, was atoned for by the vigour of the campaign when it was started. The commander was the South African Prime Minister, General Louis Botha, who had acquired useful military experience in fighting the British. This country, some eight hundred miles from the Orange River in the south to the frontier of Portuguese Angola in the north, was semi-desert and had, like some other German territories, been acquired largely because so vast a block of land looked imposing. It had turned out to possess a more material and satisfactory asset—diamonds in great quantity.
Though the Germans had only about two thousand regular troops in the colony, a force numerically increased to about threefold on mobilization, its subjugation was no easy matter. The worst difficulty was the extreme scarcity of water, which involved the use of long columns carrying it and of tanks on the railways which ran inland from Lüderitz and Swakopmund. Some sixty thousand South African troops entered the territory from first to last, but it need hardly be said that the administrative ‘tail’ was a long one and that but a small proportion ever came under fire. Botha used mounted riflemen in the traditional Boer style on a large scale, and these troops, fighting in a country which was a very bleak version of their own veldt, proved very suitable. The railways also proved valuable, permitting a simultaneous advance in the south and half-way up the country.
Botha, thanks to his strength in cavalry, succeeded in preventing the Germans from getting away into Angola, which they would have had almost at their mercy in view of the weakness of the Portuguese garrison. On 9 July Major Francke, the German commander, capitulated. Counting men previously captured, over five thousand Europeans laid down their arms.
Of the other German colonies, nothing need be said of Togoland, where the garrison surrendered surprisingly quickly to British and French forces. The campaign in the Cameroons may be dealt with entirely here, though it was eighteen months before the last German post surrendered. This great territory, larger than Germany, mainly grass lands but containing also scrub and forest, was picturesque enough but possessed a bad climate and a horrible assortment of diseases. Among its plagues was the tsetse fly, though this was not universal. Three allies took part in the reduction of this German colony: the British occupiers, the French from Equatorial Africa, and the Belgians from the Congo. All these troops were natives, excepting officers and non-commissioned officers—the British also employed a handful of Indian and West Indian troops. The total was a round twenty-four thousand men, the French contingent being the biggest. There is no figure for porters, but at least forty thousand is the estimate.
The Allies soon found they had bitten off more than they could chew. The waves of malaria and dysentery—with other diseases on a smaller scale—which swept over the troops and the virtual absence of roads brought the grandiose scheme of a concentric advance on Yaounde to a dead stop. The French were the first to get on the move again, but the general advance was not resumed until October 1915. The German commander bolted southward and with over six thousand troops was interned by the Spanish garrison of Río Muni. British soldiers facetiously accused the Royal Army Medical Corps of using fearsomely heavy needles, so that a shot of anti-toxin was as bad as a stab with a bayonet, but the corps knew something by now about tropical diseases. Only six Britons died from disease in this campaign and eighty-four askaris. The porters were less fortunate.
Command of the sea was the decisive factor in overcoming the loca difficulties of these campaigns. On balance they were well conducted. German East Africa—today Tanganyika—was another affair altogether. It started with a humiliating British blunder, and the German force remained at large throughout the war. The campaign is a fascinating story, which must be followed year by year. It includes a naval struggle for control of a chain of great lakes. A brilliant soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck, stamped it with his name.
West of the coast plain the country was a high plateau, in parts, especially on the frontier of British East Africa, mountainous. The famous peak of Kilimanjaro is not far short of 20,000 feet. The greater part was typical African bush, but there were also large and dense forests. Motor roads were almost non-existent. The assessment of horse and mule casualties was simple. One hundred per cent would die from the bite of the tsetse fly, though care might keep a proportion alive for a year or so. Human beings faced a long list of tropical diseases. Yet the Germans had to be dealt with for the sake of the neighbouring British and Belgian colonies.
The German garrison was small but homogeneous, a dozen little companies of askaris, afterwards expanded to perhaps 16,000, a quarter of them white. The British in Uganda and British East Africa to the north and the Rhodesias and Nyasaland to the south, the Belgians in the Congo, gradually built up what amounted to a considerable army. South Africa, as has appeared, had her hands full at the outbreak of war, so India was asked for aid. She sent, among other troops, a force of half a dozen Indian battalions and one British, with one battery. This was ordered to capture the little port of Tanga, between Mombasa and Zanzibar, by a landing from the sea.
The British sometimes become unscrupulous in their wars, but they start them with a purity half-way between innocence and fatuity. A project for keeping the Negroes of African colonies out of the war had been discussed and it was therefore thought right by the naval commander to give warning of hostilities. In other ways, mine-sweeping and the like, time was provided for the bustling von Lettow to run a few reinforcements—including his own valuable person—down the railway from Moshi at the foot of Kilimanjaro. The leading Indian battalion walked into the fire of the German askaris, and then took to its heels. After three days’ fighting, during which Indian morale was not improved by attacks from colonies of wild bees, the troops were re-embarked. They had been outfought by a small fraction of their numbers. Tanga stands for a fruitful lesson on how not to start a colonial campaign.