Chapter 5
1915: Cunning Plans to Win the War
In This Chapter
Planning for a breakthrough
Learning trench warfare the hard way on the Western Front
Rolling back the Russians on the Eastern Front
Widening the war
The year 1914 had been a disappointing one all round. Both sides hoped for greater success in 1915, but with deadlock in the west and no clear dominant side in the east, reality was sinking in. By the time 1915 rolled around, no one had any illusions about the scale of the challenge ahead. Everyone knew that they needed to do some major rethinking about the war and how to fight it in the coming year.
Some countries felt they had reason to think positively – Britain, for example. The British naval blockade of Germany would start to take effect in 1915 and many thousands of volunteers would soon be finishing their training and be ready to fight, swelling the numbers of men that the British could send to the field. Other countries would be joining in the war too, on each side, providing yet more men and munitions on more fronts. So although Christmas 1914 had proved to be a false hope, may be there was a chance that the war would be wrapped up by Christmas 1915.
Hopes such as these were dashed, one by one, on both sides as the year progressed. By the end of 1915, stalemate was as firmly entrenched as ever on the Western Front. The Allies hadn’t broken through, and neither had the Germans. On the Eastern Front, the Germans might have rolled them back but the Russians were determinedly hanging on. On other fronts, the Allied efforts at Gallipoli had been a disaster; the Italians had failed to break through in the Alps; the Germans, Austro-Hungarians and Bulgarians had managed to beat Serbia; and the French and British were stuck at Salonika, achieving little. This chapter looks at how, and why, 1915 turned out the way it did.
Winning Wheezes in the West
Despite some countries’ hopes of turning the war around to their advantage in 1915, plenty of doubts still remained. What about that unbroken line of trenches on the western front, for example? Should armies keep trying to break through there, or should they try to break through somewhere else?
Some people, such as Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for war, and Falkenhayn, the Chief of the German General Staff, thought it was best to keep trying to break the deadlock on the Western Front whilst attempting to achieve a breakthrough somewhere else. Falkenhayn did succeed in refocusing German efforts eastwards in 1915 (see ‘Rolling Back the Russians; Seeing Off the Serbs’, later in this chapter), but the Allied commanders on the Western Front, such as Sir John French and General Joffre, reckoned that the west was the only front that mattered. They thought that sending troops and materials to other fronts – ‘sideshows’, as they called them – was a complete waste of time. And the biggest waste of time, money and lives, they reckoned, was an idea that Winston Churchill (Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty) had to help the Russians by invading the Ottoman Empire at a place called Gallipoli, in modern-day Turkey. The invasion went disastrously wrong (check out Chapter 9 to find out what happened), and the Allied governments realised that if attacking Turkey wasn’t going to end the war then they’d have to find a way to break through and win on the Western Front. Doing that would require two things: men and artillery shells.
Come in, men! Your time is up!
Thanks to the recruitment campaign in Britain, thousands of young men, almost all with zero military experience, were in training by the end of 1914 (to give you an idea of the numbers, 33,204 men joined up on 3 September alone!). (See the nearby sidebar, ‘It’s training, men!’ for the lowdown on military training.) These men would be ready for frontline fighting by the spring or summer of 1915, just in time to replenish the seriously-thinned out ranks in the trenches and to launch the long-awaited breakthrough attack.
The increasing numbers of British soldiers on the Western Front were bolstered by large numbers of Indian troops. The Indians were experienced soldiers who were very proud to be standing by Britain in its hour of need, and they soon showed their worth in battle. The French army, too, was being reinforced by similarly professional troops from France’s north African colonies.
The situation on the shells front wasn’t quite so good.
She sells HE shells … and we need more
The Western Front was a long unbroken line of trenches (see Chapter 4 to find out how it had taken this quite unexpected form). The armies needed constant supplies of sandbags, barbed wire and wooden planks for maintaining their trenches, as well as flare pistols, which could light up the sky during night attacks, and trench mortars – specially designed guns for lobbing bombs from one trench to another. Above all, they needed high explosive (HE) artillery shells. Attacking an enemy’s trench was suicidal unless you’d destroyed his defences first, and the only way to do that seemed to be for artillery to blow them to smithereens. The problem was that by the start of 1915, the armies had fired so many thousands of shells that they were beginning to run out.
In France, the ‘shell shortage’ crisis brought the government down. In Britain the shell scandal forced the Liberal government to form a coalition with the Conservative (Unionist) and Labour parties. As a result, the government reorganised the munitions factories, with young women replacing the male workforce, and the newly-created Ministry of Munitions made better checks to ensure that commanders were getting the sort of shells that they actually required. Getting supplies right was essential if the Allies were ever going to achieve their planned breakthrough in the west.
Germany’s way to win
Like the Allies, who hoped to win the war by attacking at Gallipoli, the German high command was also thinking much more broadly about how to win the war. The Chief of the General Staff, General Falkenhayn, was convinced that victory would only come from a breakthrough in the west, but it didn’t seem very likely that that would happen in 1915. Falkenhayn did authorise one major offensive against the British at Ypres (see ‘The deadly second Battle of Ypres’, later in the chapter), but it didn’t break through and the Western Front reverted to deadlock. So Falkenhayn decided to leave the Western Front on hold and concentrate Germany’s efforts on defeating Russia in the east (see ‘Rolling Back the Russians; Seeing Off the Serbs’).
The Germans were also keen to use their fleet of submarines (U-boats) to cut off Britain’s food supplies. Admiral Tirpitz, the German naval commander, pressed for unrestricted U-boat warfare, sinking any vessel, of any nationality, heading to or from the British Isles. The German government was nervous about this idea: they feared it would alienate public opinion in the United States – and they were right. Americans were particularly outraged when a U-boat sank the British passenger liner Lusitania, killing over a thousand people, including 128 Americans. (I look in more detail at the war at sea in Chapter 8.)
How to Break Through in the West and Win the War in a Year
General Joffre and Sir John French, the Allied commanders on the Western Front, were certain that they could break through the German lines on the Western Front and win the war by the end of 1915. The only question was, where? They had three main potential jumping-off bases:
- Artois: In northern France. Good, firm farmland, ideal for fighting. British commander: Sir Douglas Haig.
- Champagne: Yes, the area where the wine comes from. Champagne was much farther along the line of trenches, well into the French sector. French commander: General Joffre.
- Ypres: Farther north than Artois, this Belgian town was in a salient (a bulge) in the Allied line, which meant the Germans could shell it on three sides. British commander: Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien.
The original idea was to launch simultaneous British and French attacks, but when Sir John French asked for reinforcements, instead of Regulars he got Territorials (that is, volunteer part-timers). Sir John was furious, especially as the Regulars he’d been hoping for had been sent off to Salonika, of all places (see the later sidebar ‘Salonika?’ to find out why). This substitution prompted Joffre to cancel the French part of the attack: the British would be on their own. Sir John decided the attack would be at Neuve Chapelle, in Artois, and General Haig’s men would launch it. (By the way, the Territorials proved just as good in battle as the Regulars, so Sir John and Joffre had had nothing to worry about.)
The battle of nerves at Neuve Chapelle
The British offensive of March 1915 at Neuve Chapelle illustrates many of the things that can go wrong in trench warfare.
Sir Douglas Haig gave the job of planning the attack on Neuve Chapelle to General Sir Henry Rawlinson (you also meet this Haig–Rawlinson partnership in Chapter 6). Contrary to what you may have heard about British generals in the First World War, Rawlinson prepared the battle in meticulous detail. He had a clear, limited objective, he had sufficient heavy artillery and huge numbers of shells, and he had enough men, including a large contingent of experienced Indian troops. And everything went according to plan: the Germans were pulverised by the shelling, and the first wave of the attack took the town and nearly the whole of the German line of trenches. And yet the attack was – not a failure, exactly, but definitely a disappointment. Instead of breaking through the German lines, the British and Indians advanced only about 1,000 yards.
The British encountered four problems at Neuve Chapelle that would recur time and time again throughout the war:
- Advancing too far: The farther the attackers went forward, the farther they went from ammunition, medical help, orders from headquarters and so on. On the other hand, the farther the defenders were pushed back, the closer they were to their supplies, ammunition and reinforcements, and the easier they found it to resist the attack.
- Communications: As soon as troops climbed out of their trenches, communication with them was almost impossible. Without field telephones they could tell HQ what was happening only by waving flags (which HQ might not see), or by sending pigeons or runners (both easily shot by the enemy).
- Following through: Attacking the enemy lines was pointless if you couldn’t follow through and drive the enemy back before he had time to counter-attack. But the men who’d attacked were too exhausted to follow through and fresh infantry took time to come up. (And following through wouldn’t work without proper communications anyway.)
Machine guns: The small section of the German trenches the British didn’t manage to capture happened to contain two machine guns, and these alone caused 1,000 British casualties.
The Allies would need to learn the lessons of Neuve Chapelle quickly, because they’d be fighting plenty more battles like it on the Western Front.
The deadly second Battle of Ypres
The German commander on the Western Front, General Falkenhayn, had a political problem. He was a firm believer that the war would be won or lost on the Western Front, but Germany’s ‘star’ generals, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, were ‘easterners’ and they were using their friends in the German government to undermine him. Falkenhayn badly needed a victory in the west. He decided to get it at Ypres: he launched his attack in April 1915. He also decided to use gas.
No one had thought to issue troops with gas masks, and so when the Allies at Ypres saw German gas heading towards them, most of them ran, except for a remarkably tough Canadian unit that somehow managed to hang on.
The Germans made good progress at Ypres and took a lot of ground, flattening out the salient around the town. The British commander, General Smith-Dorrien, thought this German advance was actually no bad thing: it made the British line much more compact and easier to defend. He even proposed falling back to an even shorter line. But Sir John French didn’t want to hear this sort of talk (he wanted a victory and he didn’t like Smith-Dorrien anyway), so he sacked him and appointed General Plumer instead. Who immediately fell back to a shorter line, just as Smith-Dorrien had suggested. The town was still in British hands, but the Germans were now dug in much closer.
Remember, men, you’re fighting for king, country – and for me to keep my job: Aubers Ridge
Just like Falkenhayn, Sir John French had to watch his back: his enemies in London and Paris wanted him sacked. The best way to see off his critics would be for him to win a battle and break through, and so in April, he ordered an attack by British and Indian troops at Aubers Ridge, just beyond the site of the disappointing attack at Neuve Chapelle (see the earlier section ‘The battle of nerves at Neuve Chapelle’). It achieved nothing.
Sir John told The Times newspaper that this failure was because the army hadn’t had enough shells (in fact, the Germans had learned their lesson from Neuve Chapelle – see ‘The battle of nerves at Neuve Chapelle’ – and had simply improved their defences and positioned more machine guns). The stink this allegation caused in the press forced the Prime Minister to bring the opposition parties into a new coalition government and to appoint the dynamic and ambitious David Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions, responsible for providing the army with enough shells. Even so, Sir John French’s reputation was on the line, and he knew it. He needed a victory and he needed one fast, or he’d be on the next boat home.
Fight at Loos, lose at Loos
Nineteen fifteen wasn’t turning out the way the Allies had confidently predicted at the start of the year. They hadn’t so far broken through the German lines and they’d suffered enormous casualties. By September, General Joffre was ready to launch the big attack postponed from the spring (see the earlier section ‘How to Break Through in the West and Win the War in a Year’ for why he’d cancelled the spring offensive). He would attack in the Champagne region, supported by a British attack at a French town with the not-very-promising name of Loos, farther north, in Artois. The Loos attack would be Sir John French’s last chance to rescue his reputation, or his enemies at home would get him recalled.
The British attacked at Loos on 25 September. This time, they used gas, though the wind was so low that it hung in the air and even drifted back into the British lines. The British did manage to take the German front-line trenches and the town, but when reinforcements moved up, they were mown down by German machine-gun fire. Once again, the British hadn’t had enough shells to destroy the German defences. And once again the British had lost thousands of men for a few feet of ground.
The Battle of Loos finally convinced the British government that Sir John French would have to go. The obvious man to replace him was Sir Douglas Haig, who had commanded the successful (well, as successful as any attack could be in 1915) attack on Neuve Chapelle.
How not to win the Battle of Champagne
General Joffre had never been particularly impressed with the efforts of the British Expeditionary Force (and he was decidedly unimpressed with its commander, Sir John French). He hoped his attack in Champagne in September 1915 would show the Tommies (that is, the British soldiers) how to fight a battle properly. Unfortunately for Joffre, the only people teaching anyone how to fight in the Battle of Champagne were the Germans. The French had several problems:
- They didn’t have anything like enough artillery to flatten the German defences.
- They attacked on a fairly narrow front. That meant the Germans knew exactly where the French would be coming from, which gave them a pretty good idea of where the French were heading for.
- When the French took the German front line, the Germans simply fell back to a second line of trenches that they’d prepared earlier. These trenches were on higher ground and in pristine condition; the French were on the lower ground and utterly exhausted.
Just like the British at the Battle of Loos, the French had lost thousands of men just so they could move their front line forwards a few hundred yards. Meanwhile, the Germans were nicely dug in at new defensive positions that were much stronger than the ones the French had taken. This situation wasn’t what Joffre had had in mind when he talked about breaking through the German lines.
How to win the war next year
The Allied commanders’ general verdict on 1915 was that the attacks on the Western Front hadn’t been big enough and, above all, hadn’t been supported by enough artillery bombardment. The solution, clearly, was to launch much bigger attacks that would completely overwhelm the German defences and give the Allies complete superiority. It would be Haig’s job to prepare for these super-offensives to be launched in the new year.
Rolling Back the Russians; Seeing Off the Serbs
Because it looked clear that no one was going to break through on the Western Front any time soon (and the whole first half of this chapter tells you why), Chief of the German General Staff Falkenhayn decided to go all out for a major victory against the Russians in the east. The Germans had crushed the Russians at Tannenberg the year before, but the Russians had regrouped and done very well farther south against the Austro-Hungarians (see Chapter 4). In the spring of 1915, after an epic siege in freezing conditions, the Russians finally took the Polish fortress town of Przemysl from the Austro-Hungarians. Defeating Russia in 1915 was going to take careful planning.
Falkenhayn’s priority was the Western Front. Ideally, he wanted to make peace with Russia and then turn on Germany’s main enemy, Britain. That meant Falkenhayn needed a victory in the east that was heavy enough to make the Russians pull out but not so humiliating that they’d fight on to the death or resent the Germans for years. Getting such a victory was likely to prove tricky. It was.
Polishing off Poland
Falkenhayn prepared very carefully for the 1915 eastern offensive. He transferred men from the Western Front (he gave the troops in France and Belgium extra machine guns to make up for the loss) and he identified clear and limited targets. Hindenburg and Ludendorff wanted to lead an invasion right into the heart of Russia, but Falkenhayn had read his history and knew how previous invaders of Russia, such as Charles XII of Sweden and Napoleon I of France, had come to grief attempting that very thing. With help from their Austro-Hungarian allies, the Germans would launch hammer-blow attacks on the Russian positions in Poland and the Baltic, driving the Russians back but not charging ahead towards Moscow.
Falkenhayn’s Polish campaign, which he launched in April in the Gorlice-Tarnow region, was a triumphant success. The Russians weren’t expecting it, and when they did finally wake up to what was happening, their rail connections were far too slow to get reinforcements where they were needed. This lack of organisation may have been part of the reason for the Russian commanders’ not-very-original response to the German assault: they just told their men to stand fast and not retreat an inch (this, incidentally, was Hitler’s tactic in Russia during the Second World War. It didn’t work then either). The Russians put their trust in the line of fortresses they’d built in Poland, but the Germans knew just how to deal with these: they brought up their heavy artillery and smashed them to pieces.
On 4 June the Germans took Przemysl, the fortress the Russians had spent so long taking from the Austro-Hungarians, and on 22 June they took the Polish city of Lvov. Finally, on 4 August the Germans took Warsaw. The Russians fell back in confusion. They lost over a million casualties and another million were taken prisoner. It was the worst defeat in Russian military history.
The Russians didn’t know what had hit them. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians had hammered them with artillery and the Russians simply hadn’t had enough shells to hit back. To make things worse, they had had huge stockpiles of shells in Przemysl and Lvov, but those were now in German hands. The Russians simply had no way of hitting back. They had no choice: they’d have to retreat.
Oh, those retreating Russians
Retreating may sound like an admission of defeat, but the Russians had long experience of using retreat to their advantage. The trick was to destroy everything that might be useful to the enemy: houses, bridges and, above all, food. That way, the enemy has to advance into a complete wasteland with no food or water: imagine advancing into a vast desert and you get the idea. This tactic is known as a scorched earth policy, because it usually involves burning everything. It had worked against Napoleon and now it worked against Falkenhayn. The Russians retreated over 300 miles and the Germans realised, sensibly, that they couldn’t follow.
A scorched earth policy can be a very useful way of fighting an invader but it creates appalling suffering for the people who live in the area. The hardship the Russian people suffered due to the actions of their own leaders would be a big factor in the Russian revolution two years later.
Curb your victorious enthusiasm!
Despite its success, Falkenhayn knew how costly the Polish campaign had been: the Germans and Austro-Hungarians had lost nearly a million men. He didn’t think Germany could afford to lose such large numbers of troops and he badly wanted to bring the war with Russia to an end. He was in a strong position to impose terms on the Russians, as long as the Russians were prepared to listen. His problem was that some people in the German government and high command wanted him to crush Russia even more.
General Ludendorff wanted to push ahead towards Moscow itself. Falkenhayn, on the other hand, thought Ludendorff had underestimated the Russians’ ability to fight, especially on their home ground, and that invading Russia would be a massive waste of money and lives. Others thought that Germany should annex Poland: after all, they’d just conquered it. But Falkenhayn was still hoping to negotiate some sort of deal with Tsar Nicholas II. He didn’t want to crush irrevocably or humiliate the Russians; he just wanted to beat them, have a chat with the Tsar about how to conclude the war in the east to the winner’s advantage, and turn his attention back to the Western Front, which he saw as priority number one. The Tsar, however, wouldn’t be able even to consider talks if Germany took over such a huge amount of Russian territory. It would be like France and Alsace-Lorraine all over again. (The Germans had taken Alsace-Lorraine off France in 1871 and the French had never forgiven them.)
All the signs were that Falkenhayn’s fears were right. Far from offering to talk with the Germans, in September 1915 Tsar Nicholas II took personal command of the Russian armies. He would carry on the fight against Germany into 1916 and on to the bitter end. So much for Falkenhayn’s hopes of a deal with the Russians.
Things must be bad – the Tsar of Russia’s in charge
Nicholas II was a kind man, a loving father – and a hopeless tsar. He believed firmly in his right to rule as an autocrat, but he didn’t have the nous or the strength of character to do so successfully. In 1905 he’d ordered his troops to open fire on demonstrators outside his palace in St Petersburg, and then couldn’t understand why more and more Russians turned against their ‘little father’. He insisted that power in Russia belonged to him alone and that no one else had a right to share it, but in 1906 he gave in to pressure and allowed the Russians to have an elected parliament (duma in Russian). Then, when he didn’t like what the duma did, he dismissed it and changed the electoral rules so he could get a duma he did like. Then he closed that down too. You really knew where you were with Nicholas II – he always changed his mind.
Nicholas had hoped that a quick victory over the Germans would win the Russian people over and help them forget the poverty and hunger that so many of them faced each day. That meant that Russia’s defeats in 1914 and 1915 weren’t just military disasters: they were political disasters for Nicholas too. Nicholas took his duties very seriously and he decided that in Russia’s hour of need his place was at very top – of the army. In September, as the Russians were still reeling from their defeats in Poland, Nicholas announced that he was taking over as Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies in the field. He was hoping, of course, that his presence alone would inspire the officers and men to greater efforts, and that he’d lead them to a great victory. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that taking command also meant that if anything went wrong – and on current form that was quite likely – he’d get the blame.
Swansong for Serbia
Austria-Hungary had wanted to crush Serbia ever since Franz Ferdinand was assassinated (see Chapter 3 for more on this momentous murder). They’d made good progress against the Serbs at the start of the war, but then they’d had to divide their forces in order to fight the Russians as well, and the Serbs had been able to recover. Now that the Russians had been pushed back in Poland, Falkenhayn reckoned it was time to deal with the Serbs once and for all.
Falkenhayn decided on a two-pronged attack on Serbia: the Germans and Austro-Hungarians would attack from the north, and their new allies, the Bulgarians (see the later section, ‘Bulgaria – picking a winner’), could attack from the east. The commander Falkenhayn chose for this campaign was a tough old boot who’d distinguished himself in the campaign in Poland earlier in the year, Field Marshal August von Mackensen. Unfortunately for the Serbs, von Mackensen proved just the man for the job.
The Serbs (see Figure 5-1) were in a very bad way. They’d gained themselves a breathing space by beating the Austro-Hungarians back in 1914, but they’d achieved nothing since then and by the autumn of 1915 their troops were tired, demoralised and wracked with typhus. They were in no state to stand up to the onslaught von Mackensen was about to unleash.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 32447)
Figure 5-1: Serbian troops moving to a forward area on the Balkan front.
In October 1915 the Germans, Austro-Hungarians and Bulgarians descended on Serbia and the Serbs crumbled. The French did what they could to help the Serbs from their base in Salonika (see the nearby sidebar ‘Salonika?’), some 280 miles from the Serbian front. At one point von Mackensen nearly had the Serbian army completely surrounded; the Serbs managed to escape but they could do nothing to stop the conquest of their country. In blinding snow the Serbs were forced onto what they called the Great Retreat through the mountains to the Albanian coast, where British and French ships were waiting to transfer them to Salonika.
Serbian nationalists had hoped that assassinating Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo would lead to a great future and a greater Serbia. Little more than a year later, their dreams, and their country, lay in ruins.
This Looks Fun – Can We Play? Italy and Bulgaria Join the War
However difficult the war was proving to be for its combatants, other countries still saw it as a not-to-be-missed opportunity to advance their own interests while they still had time. Two countries – Italy and Bulgaria – were looking to do just that when they joined the war in 1915.
From 1915 onwards, after these countries joined the war on their side, Britain, France and Russia began to refer to themselves – officially – as the Allied Nations, or Allies for short. Being allied meant that none of them would make a separate peace with the Germans: they’d all see this war through to its bitter end.
Italy – looking after numero uno
Italy was allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary, so you might think that deciding which side to support in the war was a no-brainer for the Italians. If so, you’d be wrong. During their long 19th-century struggle to unify Italy, their implacable enemy had been Austria, and the Italians hadn’t forgotten. They weren’t comfortable with being allied to Austria-Hungary.
More importantly, the Italians had started to talk about what they called Italia Irredenta, which means something like ‘Italy with all the recovered bits included’. The policy, called irredentism, meant that Italian nationalists got out their historical atlases and identified all sorts of areas that had once belonged to the various Italian states in ages past and decided to reclaim them. Most of these territories were in Austria-Hungary, either in the Alps or along the Croatian coast. The fact that no Italians lived there any more was neither here nor there: as far as nationalists were concerned, these territories should be reunited with Italy whether the people living in them wanted it or not.
The Italian Prime Minister, Antonio Salandra, called his foreign policy ‘sacred self-interest’. Full marks for candour, then. The Allies were quick to take advantage of it. The British and French put a tempting package before Salandra’s eyes: if Italy joined the war on the Allied side, the Italians could reclaim all the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish land they wanted (the Italians also thought they really ought to have a bit more land in Africa). The plan worked. In April 1915 Italy signed the Treaty of London, declaring itself allied to its enemies and declaring war on its allies. If you see what I mean. However, the war didn’t bring the Italians the quick gains they were hoping for. They opened a difficult front line against the Austro-Hungarians high up in the mountains – think trench warfare with crampons (see Figure 5-2) – which quickly settled into stalemate. Just like all the other fronts.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 60442)
Figure 5-2: Austrian troops manning trenches on the Italian front.
Bulgaria – picking a winner
The war put the Bulgarians (see Figure 5-3) in a dilemma:
- They got on well with the Russians, so they ought to join the Allies. But Russia was supporting the Serbs, and the Bulgarians had very serious issues with Serbia. So maybe they shouldn’t join the Allies.
- The Turks were Bulgaria’s old enemies, so Bulgaria should join the Allies. But Bulgaria depended very heavily on Germany and Austria-Hungary for its imports. So perhaps Bulgaria shouldn’t join the Allies.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 60367)
Figure 5-3: Bulgarian troops manning trenches in a mountain position.
The Allies and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey) all tried to persuade Bulgaria to join the war on their side, and Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, sensible chap, decided to see which side made him the better offer.
In the end, Bulgaria decided to join the Central Powers. The reason? Easy: it looked as if they’d win. The British and French clearly weren’t winning on the Western Front and were being heavily defeated at Gallipoli; Russia had just lost to the Germans in Poland. Moreover, if Bulgaria joined the German side, it could join in the attack on Serbia that Falkenhayn had planned for the autumn of 1915 (see the earlier section, ‘Swansong for Serbia’). Joining the (apparently) winning side and getting revenge on Serbia for the Balkan Wars (see Chapter 3 for details of Bulgaria’s beef about these conflicts) … what was not to like?