Book: A General Sketch of the European War

H >> Hilaire Belloc >> A General Sketch of the European War



* * * * *




A
GENERAL SKETCH
OF THE
EUROPEAN WAR

BY
HILAIRE BELLOC

THE FIRST PHASE


THOMAS NELSON & COMPANY
LONDON, EDINBURGH, PARIS, AND NEW YORK





_First published June 1, 1915_
_Reprinted June 1915_




CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION 7


PART I.

THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.

(1) THE GERMAN OBJECT 17

(2) CONFLICT PRODUCED BY THE CONTRAST OF THIS GERMAN
ATTITUDE OR WILL WITH THE WILLS OF OTHER NATIONS 23

(3) PRUSSIA 27

(4) AUSTRIA 39

(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR 50

(6) THE IMMEDIATE OCCASION OF THE WAR 64


PART II.

THE FORCES OPPOSED.

(1) THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF THE BELLIGERENTS 80

The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of
the Germanic Body 86

The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of
the Allies 121

(2) THE OPPOSING STRENGTHS 136

The Figures of the First Period, say to
October 1-31, 1914 145

The Figures of the Second Period, say to
April 15-June 1, 1915 151

(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR 164


PART III.

THE FIRST OPERATIONS.

(1) THE BATTLE OF METZ 316

(2) LEMBERG 322

(3) TANNENBERG 345

(4) THE SPIRITS IN CONFLICT 365




INTRODUCTION.


It is the object of this book, and those which will succeed it in the
same series, to put before the reader the main lines of the European
War as it proceeds. Each such part must necessarily be completed and
issued some little time after the events to which it relates have
passed into history. The present first, or introductory volume, which
is a preface to the whole, covers no more than the outbreak of
hostilities, and is chiefly concerned with an examination of the
historical causes which produced the conflict, an estimate of the
comparative strength of the various combatants, and a description of
the first few days during which these combatants took up their
positions and suffered the first great shocks of the campaigns in East
and West.

But in order to serve as an introduction to the remainder of the
series, it is necessary that the plan upon which these books are to
be constructed should be clearly explained.

There is no intention of giving in detail and with numerous exact maps
the progress of the campaigns. Still less does the writer propose to
examine disputed points of detail, or to enumerate the units employed
over that vast field. His object is to make clear, as far as he is
able, those great outlines of the business which too commonly escape
the general reader.

This war is the largest and the weightiest historical incident which
Europe has known for many centuries. It will surely determine the
future of Europe, and in particular the future of this country. Yet
the comprehension of its movements is difficult to any one not
acquainted with the technical language and the special study of
military history; and the reading of the telegrams day by day, even
though it be accompanied by the criticisms of the military experts in
the newspapers, leaves the mass of men with a most confused conception
of what happened and why it happened.

Now, it is possible, by greatly simplifying maps, by further
simplifying these into clear diagrams, still more by emphasizing what
is essential and by deliberately omitting a crowd of details--by
showing first the framework, as it were, of any principal movement,
and then completing that framework with the necessary furniture of
analysed record--to give any one a conception both of what happened
and of how it happened.

It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over which
the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to the author
of this), so to describe such ground to the reader that he will in
some sort be able to see for himself the air and the view in which the
things were done: thus more than through any other method will the
things be made real to him. The aim, therefore, of these pages, and of
those that will succeed them, is to give such a general idea of the
campaigns as a whole as will permit whoever has grasped it a secure
comprehension of the forces at work, and of the results of those
forces. It is desired, for example, that the reader of these pages
shall be able to say to himself: "The Germanic body expected to
win--and no wonder, for it had such and such advantages in number and
in equipment.... The first two battles before Warsaw failed, and I can
see why. It was because the difficulties in Russian supply were met by
a contraction of the Russian line.... The 1st German Army was
compelled to retreat before Paris, and I can now see why that was so:
as it turned to envelop the Allied line, a great reserve within the
fortified zone of Paris threatened it, and forced it back."

These main lines, and these only, are attempted in the present book,
and in those that are to follow it in this series.

The disadvantage of such a method is, of course, that the reader must
look elsewhere for details, for the notices of a particular action,
and the records of particular regiments. He must look for these to the
large histories of the war, which will amply supply his curiosity in
good time. But the advantage of the method consists in that it
provides, as I hope, a foundation upon which all this bewildering
multitude of detailed reading can repose.

I set out, then, to give, as it were, the alphabet of the campaign,
and I begin in this volume with the preliminaries to it--that is, its
great political causes, deep rooted in the past; the particular and
immediate causes which led to the outbreak of war; an estimate of the
forces engaged; and the inception of hostilities.


PLAN OF THIS BOOK.

This first volume will cover three parts. In Part I. I shall write of
The Causes of the War. In Part II. I shall Contrast the Forces
Opposed. In Part III. (the briefest) I shall describe the First Shock.

In Part I., where I deal first with the general or historical causes
of the war, later with the particulars, I shall:--

1. Define the German object which led up to it.

2. Show how this object conflicted with the wills of other nations.

3. Briefly sketch the rise of Prussia and of her domination over North
Germany.

4. Define the position of Austria-Hungary in the matter, and thus
close the general clauses.

5. The particular causes of the war will next be dealt with; the
curious challenge thrown down to Great Britain by the German Fleet
_before_ the German Empire had made secure its position on the
Continent; the French advance upon Morocco; the coalition of the
Balkan States against the remainder of the Turkish Empire in Europe.

6. Lastly, in this First Part, I shall describe the immediate occasion
of the war and its surroundings: the ultimatum issued by the
Austro-Hungarian Government to the little kingdom of Servia.

In Part II. I will attempt to present the forces opposed at the
outbreak of war.

First, the contrast in the geographical position of the Germanic
Allies with their enemies, the French, the English, and the Russians.
Secondly, the numbers of trained men prepared and the numbers of
reserves available in at least the first year to the various numbers
in conflict. Thirdly, the way in which the various enemies had thought
of the coming war (which was largely a matter of theory in the lack of
experience); in what either party has been right, and in what wrong,
as events proved; and with what measure of foresight the various
combatants entered the field.

In Part III, I will very briefly describe the original armed
dispositions for combat at the outbreak of war, the German aim upon
the West, and the German orders to the Austrians upon the East; the
overrunning of Belgium, and the German success upon the Sambre; then
the pursuit of the Franco-British forces to the line Paris-Verdun, up
to the eve of the successful counter-offensive undertaken by them in
the first week of September. I will end by describing what were the
contemporary events in the Eastern field: in its northern part the
overrunning of East Prussia by the Russians, and the heavy blow which
the Germans there administered to the invader; in its southern the
Austrian opposition to the Russians on the Galician borders, and the
breakdown of that opposition at Lemberg.

My terminal date for this sketch will be the 5th of September.




A GENERAL SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR.

PART I.

THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE WAR.


War is the attempt of two human groups each to impose its will upon
the other by force of arms. This definition holds of the most
righteous war fought in self-defence as much as it does of the most
iniquitous war of mere aggression. The aggressor, for instance,
proposes to take the goods of his victim without the pretence of a
claim. He is attempting to impose his will upon that victim. The
victim, in resisting by force of arms, is no less attempting to impose
his will upon the aggressor; and if he is victorious does effectually
impose that will: for it is his will to prevent the robbery.

Every war, then, arises from some conflict of wills between two human
groups, each intent upon some political or civic purpose, conflicting
with that of his opponent.

War and all military action is but a means to a non-military end, to
be achieved and realized in peace.

Although arguable differences invariably exist as to the right or
wrong of either party in any war, yet the conflicting wills of the two
parties, the irreconcilable political objects which each has put
before itself and the opposition between which has led to conflict,
can easily be defined.

They fall into two classes:--

1. The general objects at which the combatants have long been aiming.

2. The particular objects apparent just before, and actually
provoking, the conflict.

In the case of the present enormous series of campaigns, which occupy
the energies of nearly all Europe, the general causes can be easily
defined, and that without serious fear of contradiction by the
partisans of either side.

On the one hand, the Germanic peoples, especially that great majority
of them now organized as the German Empire under the hegemony of
Prussia, had for fully a lifetime and more been possessed of a certain
conception of themselves which may be not unjustly put into the form
of the following declaration. It is a declaration consonant with most
that has been written from the German standpoint during more than a
generation, and many of its phrases are taken directly from the
principal exponents of the German idea.


(I) THE GERMAN OBJECT.

"We the Germans are in spirit one nation. But we are a nation the
unity of which has been constantly forbidden for centuries by a number
of accidents. None the less that unity has always been an ideal
underlying our lives. Once or twice in the remote past it has been
nearly achieved, especially under the great German emperors of the
Middle Ages. Whenever it has thus been nearly achieved, we Germans
have easily proved ourselves the masters of other societies around us.
Most unfortunately our very strength has proved our ruin time and
again by leading us into adventures, particularly adventures in
Italy, which took the place of our national ideal for unity and
disturbed and swamped it. The reason we have been thus supreme
whenever we were united or even nearly united lay in the fact, which
must be patent to every observer, that our mental, moral, and
physical characteristics render us superior to all rivals. The German
or Teutonic race can everywhere achieve, other things being equal,
more than can any other race. Witness the conquest of the Roman Empire
by German tribes; the political genius, commercial success, and final
colonial expansion of the English, a Teutonic people; and the peculiar
strength of the German races resident within their old homes on the
Rhine, the Danube, the Weser, and the Elbe, whenever they were not
fatally disunited by domestic quarrel or unwise foreign ideals. It was
we who revivified the declining society of Roman Gaul, and made it
into the vigorous mediaeval France that was ruled from the North. It
was we who made and conquered the heathen Slavs threatening Europe
from the East, and who civilized them so far as they could be
civilized. We are, in a word, and that patently not only to ourselves
but to all others, the superior and leading race of mankind; and you
have but to contrast us with the unstable Celt--who has never produced
a State--the corrupt and now hopelessly mongrel Mediterranean or
'Latin' stock, the barbarous and disorderly Slav, to perceive at once
the truth of all we say.

[Illustration: Sketch 1.]

"It so happens that the various accidents which interrupted our
strivings for unity permitted other national groups, inferior morally
and physically to our own, to play a greater part than such an
inferiority warranted; and the same accidents permitted men of
Teutonic stock, not inhabiting the ancient homes of the Teutons, but
emigrated therefrom and politically separated from the German Empire,
to obtain advantages in which we ourselves should have had a share,
but which we missed. Thus England, a Teutonic country, obtained her
vast colonial empire while we had not a ship upon the sea.

"France, a nation then healthier than it is now, but still of much
baser stock than our own, played for centuries the leading part in
Western Europe; she is even to-day 'over-capitalized,' as it were,
possessing a far greater hold over the modern world than her real
strength warrants. Even the savage Slavs have profited by our former
disunion, and the Russian autocracy not only rules millions of
German-speaking subjects, but threatens our frontiers with its great
numbers of barbarians, and exercises over the Balkan Peninsula, and
therefore over the all-important position of Constantinople, a power
very dangerous to European culture as a whole, and particularly to our
own culture--which is, of course, by far the highest culture of all.

"Some fifty years ago, acting upon the impulse of a group of great
writers and thinkers, our statesmen at last achieved that German unity
which had been the unrealized ideal of so many centuries. In a series
of wars we accomplished that unity, and we amply manifested our
superiority when we were once united by defeating with the greatest
ease and in the most fundamental fashion the French, whom the rest of
Europe then conceived to be the chief military power.

"From that moment we have incontestably stood in the sight of all as
the strongest people in the world, and yet because other and lesser
nations had the start of us, our actual international position, our
foreign possessions, the security that should be due to so supreme an
achievement, did not correspond to our real strength and abilities.
England had vast dependencies, and had staked out the unoccupied world
as her colonies. We had no colonies and no dependencies. France,
though decadent, was a menace to our peace upon the West. We could
have achieved the thorough conquest and dismemberment of France at any
time in the last forty years, and yet during the whole of that time
France was adding to her foreign possessions in Tunis, Madagascar, and
Tonkin, latterly in Morocco, while we were obtaining nothing. The
barbarous Russians were increasing constantly in numbers, and somewhat
perfecting their insufficient military machine without any
interference from us, grave as was the menace from them upon our
Eastern frontier.

"It was evident that such a state of things could not endure. A nation
so united and so immensely strong could not remain in a position of
artificial inferiority while lesser nations possessed advantages in no
way corresponding to their real strength. The whole equilibrium of
Europe was unstable through this contrast between what Germany might
be and what she was, and a struggle to make her what she might be
from what she was could not be avoided.

"Germany must, in fulfilment of a duty to herself, obtain colonial
possessions at the expense of France, obtain both colonial possessions
and sea-power at the expense of England, and put an end, by campaigns
perhaps defensive, but at any rate vigorous, to the menace of Slav
barbarism upon the East. She was potentially, by her strength and her
culture, the mistress of the modern world, the chief influence in it,
and the rightful determinant of its destinies. She must by war pass
from a potential position of this kind to an actual position of
domination."

Such was the German mood, such was the fatuous illusion which produced
this war. It had at its service, as we shall see later, _numbers_,
and, backed by this superiority of numbers, it counted on victory.


(2) CONFLICT PRODUCED BY THE CONTRAST OF THIS GERMAN ATTITUDE OR
WILL WITH THE WILLS OF OTHER NATIONS.

When we have clearly grasped the German attitude, as it may thus be
not unfairly expressed, we shall not find it difficult to conceive
why a conflict between such a will and other wills around it broke
out.

We need waste no time in proving the absurdity of the German
assumptions, the bad history they involve, and the perverse and
twisted perspective so much vanity presupposes. War can never be
prevented by discovering the moral errors of an opponent. It comes
into being because that opponent does not believe them to be moral
errors; and in the attempt to understand this war and its causes, we
should only confuse ourselves if we lost time over argument upon
pretensions even as crassly unreal as these.

It must be enough for the purposes of this to accept the German will
so stated, and to see how it necessarily conflicts with the English
will, the French will, the Russian will, and sooner or later, for that
matter, with every other national will in Europe.

In the matter of sea-power England would answer: "Unless we are
all-powerful at sea, our very existence is imperilled." In the matter
of her colonies and dependencies England would answer: "We may be a
Teutonic people or we may not. All that kind of thing is pleasant talk
for the academies. But if you ask whether we will allow any part of
our colonies to become German or any part of our great dependencies to
fall under German rule, the answer is in the negative."

The French would answer: "We do not happen to think that we are either
decadent or corrupt, nor do we plead guilty to any other of your vague
and very pedantic charges; but quite apart from that, on the concrete
point of whether we propose to be subjugated by a foreign Power,
German or other, the answer is in the negative. Our will is here in
conflict with yours. And before you can proceed to any act of mastery
over us, you will have to fight. Moreover, we shall not put aside the
duty of ultimately fighting you so long as a population of two
millions, who feel themselves to be French (though most of them are
German-speaking) and who detest your rule, are arbitrarily kept in
subjection by you in Alsace-Lorraine."

The Russians would reply: "We cannot help being numerically stronger
than you, and we do not propose to diminish our numbers even if we
could. We do not think we are barbaric; and as to our leadership of
the Slav people in the Balkans, that seems as right and natural to us,
particularly on religious grounds, as any such bond could be. It may
interfere with your ambitions; but if you propose that we should
abandon so obvious an attitude of leadership among the Slavs, the
answer is in the negative." There is here, therefore, again a conflict
of wills.

In general, what the German peoples desired, based upon what they
believed themselves to be, was sharply at issue with what the English
people, what the French people, what the Russian people respectively
desired. Their desires were also based upon what _they_ believed
themselves to be, and they thought themselves to be very different
from what Germany thought them to be. The English did not believe that
they had sneaked their empire; the French did not believe that they
were moribund; the Russians did not believe that they were savages.

It was impossible that the German will should impose itself without
coming at once into conflict with these other national wills. It was
impossible that the German ideal should seek to realize itself without
coming into conflict with the mere desire to live, let alone the
self-respect, of everybody else.

And the consequence of such a conflict in ideals and wills translated
into practice was this war.

* * * * *

But the war would not have come nor would it have taken the shape that
it did, but for two other factors in the problem which we must next
consider. These two other factors are, first, the position and
tradition of Prussia among the German States; secondly, the peculiar
authority exercised by the Imperial House of Hapsburg-Lorraine at
Vienna over its singularly heterogeneous subjects.


(3) PRUSSIA.

The Germans have always been, during their long history, a race
inclined to perpetual division and sub-division, accompanied by war
and lesser forms of disagreement between the various sections. Their
friends have called this a love of freedom, their enemies political
incompetence; but, without giving it a good or a bad name, the plain
fact has been, century after century, that the various German tribes
would not coalesce. Any one of them was always willing to take service
with the Roman Empire, in the early Roman days, against any one of the
others, and though there have been for short periods more or less
successful attempts to form one nation of them all in imitation of the
more civilized States to the west and south, these attempts have never
succeeded for very long.

But it so happens that about two hundred years ago, or a little more,
there appeared one body of German-speaking men rather different from
the rest, and capable ultimately of leading the rest, or at least a
majority of the rest.

[Illustration: Sketch 2.]

I use the words "German-speaking" and "rather different" because this
particular group of men, though speaking German, were of less pure
German blood than almost any other of the peoples that spoke that
tongue. They were the product of a conquest undertaken late in the
Middle Ages by German knights over a mixed Pagan population,
Lithuanian and Slavonic, which inhabited the heaths and forests along
the Baltic Sea. These German knights succeeded in their task, and
compelled the subject population to accept Christianity, just as the
Germans themselves had been compelled to accept it by their more
powerful and civilized neighbours the French hundreds of years before.
The two populations of this East Baltic district, the large majority
which was Slavonic and Lithuanian, and the minority which was really
German, mixed and produced a third thing, which we now know as the
_Prussian_. The cradle of this Prussian race was, then, all that flat
country of which Koenigsberg and Danzig are the capitals, but
especially Koenigsberg--"King's Town"--where the monarchs of this
remote people were crowned. By an historical accident, which we need
not consider, the same dynasty was, after it had lost all claim to
separate kingship, merged in the rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg, a
somewhat more German but still mixed district lying also in the Baltic
plain, but more towards the west, and the official title of the
Prussian ruler somewhat more than two hundred years ago was the
Elector of Brandenburg. These rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg were a
family bearing the title of Hohenzollern, a castle in South Germany,
by which name they are still distinguished. The palace of these
Hohenzollerns was henceforward at Berlin.

Now, much at the same time that the civil wars were being fought in
England--that is, not quite three hundred years ago--the Reformation
had produced in Germany also very violent quarrels. Vienna, which was
the seat of the Imperial House, stood for the Catholic or traditional
cause, and most Germans adhered to that cause. But certain of the
Northern German principalities and counties took up the side of the
Reformation. A terrible war, known as the Thirty Years' War, was
fought between the two factions. It enormously reduced the total
population of Germany. In the absence of exact figures we only have
wild guesses, such as a loss of half or three-quarters. At any rate,
both from losses from the adherence of many princes to the Protestant
cause and from the support lent to that cause for political reasons by
Catholic France, this great civil war in Germany left the Protestant
part more nearly equal in numbers to the Catholic part, and, among
other things, it began to make the Elector of Brandenburg with his
Prussians particularly prominent as the champion of the Protestant
cause. For, of all the warring towns, counties, principalities, and
the rest, Prussia had in particular shown military aptitude.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.