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was enhanced by her wonderful system of military railways. That system, by giving an unrivaled mobility to her armies, practically duplicated their value. She could always have her men where she most needed them. She had not only mass, but volition, and could strike her blow where she pleased.

The measure of this intrinsic superiority was only slowly realized by the Allies as the war progressed, but it had been the basic fact from which German strategy started. Its value was highest in the early stages of the struggle, when the Allies were staggering under the shock that came with such frightful suddenness; but it continued to dominate the war far into the second year, and at the time of writing it may be said that the initiative is still in the hands of the Germans, though the command of exterior lines, the evolution of a common strategy, and the slow development of superior resources are visibly changing the balance in favor of the Allies.

It will be the task of the historian to discover why, with so overwhelming a superiority of men, material, preparative study, centrality, and mobility, the Germans did not succeed in shattering the Allies before they collected their strength. The programme was simple and apparently easily within achievement. France was to be crushed in one overwhelming movement; Russia, held up temporarily by Austria, was to be disposed of at leisure, and the war was to be over in six months. Three things vitiated the scheme: (1) The rapidity of the Allied retreat through France led the Germans to outrun themselves, so that when they came to deliver the fatal blow at the Marne they were an exhausted army; (2) the Russian raid into East Prussia disarranged the plan of campaign; (3) the collapse of Austria fundamentally changed the problem of the war. The subsequent failure to reach Calais finally left the original

strategy of Germany in ruins. Thenceforward a new plan of campaign had to be devised. And it was in the second phase of the war that German generalship revealed its strength, its boldness, its breadth of conception, and its resourcefulness. It had failed when its advantages were at their maximum; it recovered when those advantages, though still great, were declining.

The fact is due, I think, mainly to the part which personality still plays in war. Germany entered the struggle, not with the wrong strategy, not with unsound ideas of relative values, but with the wrong men in command. The contrast between events up to the disastrous failure of the attempt on Calais, which led to the deposition of Count von Moltke, and the events of 1915 is the most striking fact of the war. It is not easy to say how far Moltke was responsible for the failure of the first four months and how far he was over-ruled by the Supreme War-Lord. It is clear, however, that both before Paris and before Calais there was a very remarkable indecision- the result, apparently, of sharp divergences of view. This was especially true in the attack on Calais. No military authority has defended the reckless squandering of effort on four separate attempts to break through the Allied line-on the coast, at Arras, at Armentières, and finally at Ypres. It is agreed that the episode revealed a collision of political and military aims and a serious conflict in the higher command. Moltke was never more than the shadow of a great name, and it is generally assumed that his power was entirely subordinated to the will of the Kaiser, who, though a cavalry commander of very considerable ability, is far too impulsive and neurotic for the large operations of war.

And if the higher command in this stage of the war was defective, it was no less obvious that the commands in the

field were in indifferent hands. The Crown Prince was a mere popinjay whose incapacity was notorious and whose extravagances and improprieties were a legend of irresponsible folly or worse. The Crown Prince of Bavaria was conspicuous only for the venom of his tongue; the Duke of Württemberg was a name and nothing more. Hausen vanished after the Marne, and Kluck is remembered only for his vain boast that he had the British Army in 'a ring of iron' at Maubeuge, and for his fatal attempt to march across the British front at the Marne when the reinforcements from Paris appeared on his flank.

IV

It is to the appointment of Falkenhayn as Chief of the General Staff and to the emergence in the field of Generals Hindenburg and Mackensen that the remarkable revival of German prestige during 1915 was due. Of these three men, not one was in a position of great authority when the war began. Indeed, only one, Mackensen, was in active service at all. Hindenburg was in retirement at Hanover; Falkenhayn was in the political position of Minister of War, and Mackensen was in command at Danzig, where he had come into serious collision with the Crown Prince and was in consequence under a cloud.

Of the three reputations made by the war, that which has had far the greatest réclame is probably least important. Hindenburg's victory in the Masurian Lakes district was certainly one of the few decisive incidents of the war. It was a victory in that complete and final sense which has become so unusual under modern conditions. It was a victory, too, due entirely to superior generalship. Hindenburg had been something of an oddity in the Army owing to his obsession on the subject of the military importance of the lake dis

trict of East Prussia. When it was proposed to drain that region he fought for his marshes as a wild animal for its young, and finally stampeded the Kaiser himself on the subject by the energy of his advocacy. The region had been his favorite theatre of study, and in the manoeuvres there he unfailingly engineered his foe into the marshes. "We're going to have a bath to-day,' was the saying of the soldiers when 'old Hindenburg' was against them. But when the war broke out Hindenburg was neglected, and his application for a post was ignored until the Russian invasion of the sacred soil of East Prussia spread panic in the capital and throughout the country. Then the boycott collapsed. 'Suddenly,' he said, after he had become the national hero, 'there came a telegram informing me that the Emperor commissioned me to command the Eastern Army. I really only had time to buy some woollen clothing and make my old uniform presentable again. Then came sleeping cars, saloon cars, locomotives

and so I journeyed to East Prussia like a prince. And so far everything has gone well.'

It had. On the ground that he knew so thoroughly he manœuvred Samsonov's army into the swamps and achieved the most sensational victory of the war. He became the savior of his country and in the popular imagination overshadowed every other figure. He had the whole nation at his feet, and being rather a breezy, simple-minded man who had never before known what popular acclamation was like, he reveled in the sunshine with the frank enjoyment of a schoolboy.

But great as the achievement was, it was not so great as the public estimate, inflated by the panic that preceded it, conceived it to be; and those who have followed the campaigns on the Eastern frontier with expert knowledge and have examined the battles in detail

have a higher regard for the genius of Mackensen than for that of Hindenburg. Like Hindenburg he was ignored at the beginning of the campaign. His troubles with the Crown Prince at Danzig had culminated earlier in the year in a request to the Kaiser that either he or the Prince should be removed. Mackensen remained and the Prince was recalled to Berlin; but when the war broke out it was the latter who was in command of the central army in the West, while Mackensen was left to cool his heels in obscure tasks. Not until some months had passed with their tale of disappointed hopes did he emerge as the second in command to Hindenburg on the Russian front.

His name first came into prominence by his skillful extrication of his army when its envelopment east of Lodz was regarded as complete; and thenceforward every task of critical importance was committed to his hands. It was he who delivered that smashing blow on the Dunajec which opened so sensationally the new and most formidable phase of German attack. The series of operations that followed by which he forced the Russian left back to the Privit marshes revealed a grim power not inferior to Hindenburg's and a constructive subtlety which, except on the ground that he had studied all his lifetime, Hindenburg has not rivaled.

The campaign in Serbia was on a smaller scale, but again the strategy was of that fresh and original character that commands the respect of the student of war. It is, I believe, true to say that no campaigns in connection with the war are being studied by the military experts with so much attention as those of Mackensen. Like Hindenburg, Kluck, Bülow, and most of the German generals, he is nearer seventy than sixty. He won the Iron Cross in the War of 1870, and the Iron Cross was relatively a much less famil

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Unlike Hindenburg, Mackensen is a man of silent, almost morose habit. It is popularly attributed to the blow which the loss of a much-loved wife inflicted on him, but it is in reality the natural habit of a singularly absorbed and self-contained character. His brevity of speech is the expression of a ruthless temper, and in the severity of the demands he makes on all who come under his iron will, as well as in his cold and concentrated silence, he is reminiscent of Lord Kitchener. Miracles have been performed by soldiers and civilians alike during his advances, not because of the affection they have for him, but because of the fear of his merciless hand. He has been said (with what truth I do not know) to have Scots blood in his veins, but in all his characteristics he is typical of the Prussian mind, manner, and thought.

But the true key to the renascence of the German cause after the failure of 1914 is to be found in Falkenhayn, who was appointed Chief of Staff on the fall of Moltke. Falkenhayn is, apart from the royal leaders, considerably the youngest of the generals in high position in the German army. He is 54the same age as General Haig. He is a man whose ambitions are as unlimited as his powers to achieve them. Four years or so ago he was unknown to the German public, and his promotion from an obscure provincial command to the position of Prussian Minister of War is supposed to have been the result

of one of those court intrigues which play so large a part in Prussian public life. He had family influence in the Kaiser's household and his advancement was not unconnected with that fact.

But he had brains as well as influence, and an aggressive personality disguised by the arts of the subtle and far-sighted intriguer. From his advent to the Ministry of War he set himself to undermine Moltke. It began to be hinted that Moltke was 'getting old,' that the General Staff needed new and young blood, and so on; and when the Zabern incident occurred, Falkenhayn made a bid for popularity with the army by his emphatic approval of the infamous action of Colonel Reutter and Lieutenant Förstner. It was his hand more, perhaps, than another that forced the declaration of war prematurely, in face of the hesitation of the Kaiser and the opposition of Bethmann-Hollweg; but when the war came it was Moltke who remained in the position on which Falkenhayn had set his heart. The ambitious minister waited for his opportunity. He had Moltke's measure, knew that he was unlikely to survive, opposed his strategy regarding Belgium, and, on the collapse of the campaign at Ypres, he knew that his moment had come.

In the military sense it is indisputable that his promotion has been triumphantly justified by events. A new and more masterful spirit pervaded German strategy from the moment of his assumption of the control of military policy. There was no longer any sense of conflict between political and military aims, still less of any evidence of the collision of wills. The disastrous experience of the first four months of the war had aged the Kaiser and modified his imperious self-will. He was in the frame of mind to forget that he was the Supreme War-Lord and to distrust his own judgment, and Falkenhayn had the force and the adroitness to

avail himself of this fact. He established over his master an intellectual authority which left him the practical dictator of military policy. This ascendency has been confirmed by the success which attended his far-reaching and powerful strategy throughout 1915, and in presenting him with the Order of the Black Eagle the Kaiser used terms of flattery which almost touched the level of obsequious reverence.

General Falkenhayn has fortified his position by an artful policy of excluding possible rivals from access to his master. In an unusually informing analysis of the forces around the Kaiser at the present time, published in Le Temps, Mr. Hendrik Hudson, who, as a neutral, has spent a long time in Germany, declares that Falkenhayn is the most powerful man in the country. "The power of General Falkenhayn,' he says, 'comes from the extraordinary influence, inexplicable even to those who know this personage, which he wields over the Emperor. He is very jealous of his authority, and keeps away from headquarters all who he thinks might seek to gain the confidence of the soVereign. This isolation of the Emperor is an important fact, as the sovereign learns only what General Falkenhayn wishes him to know. William II is the prisoner of his military camarilla.'

It is not the first time that the Kaiser has been the prisoner of a camarilla, as the revelations of the Eulenburg case witness. But it is not improbable that he is on this occasion a willing prisoner. In the vast disaster that has befallen him, when his

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THE MACHINES

BY WILLIAM J. ROBINSON

WHEN the British blockade was tightening its coils about Germany, a sigh of relief went up from the Entente powers, and their press proclaimed that with gasoline and rubber cut off from the enemy the war would soon come automatically to an end. I am not concerned with the failure of these prophesies to reckon with German chemical ingenuity; they merely throw light on the interesting fact that modern warfare, with its demand for swift-striking movement in every branch of the complicated military organism, could not exist without the motor-vehicle in its various forms.

Through the illustrated weeklies and the moving pictures, Americans have become familiar with the Skoda howitzers, taken to pieces for travel, rumbling along behind great Mercédès traction-motors. They have seen the London motor-busses, loaded to bursting with grinning Tommies on their way to the front, flaunting Bovril and Nestlé's Food signs against an unfamiliar background of canals and serried poplar trees. They cannot realize, however, because they have not witnessed with their own eyes, the vast orderly ferment of wheeled traffic that fills the roads on both sides of that blackened, blasted battle-line between the armies of Western Europe. Where once the task of fulfillment fell to straining horse-flesh, the burden is now laid on wheels winged by gasoline. From the flashing wire spokes of the dispatchrider's motor-cycle to the clanking, crushing 'feet' of the caterpillar tractor

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that pulls the big guns into action, the incredibly complicated machinery of war is now dependent on an element which, at the time of the SpanishAmerican War, was unknown to military use.

It was chance which got me into the British Army; it was also by chance that I was attached to the staff of a captain of the 5th Dragoon Guards and sent off to Belgium five days after my enlistment, without the usual weary months of training in the riding-school. On October 8, 1914, our regiment landed at Ostend; this was the beginning of 13 months of service, during which I passed from my regular duties in the Dragoon Guards to the Army Service Corps as motor-driver to General Byng, and was subsequently attached to the Headquarters Staff of the 5th Army Corps. While in this, I saw service in an armored car of the Royal Naval Air Service, went into action with the Motor Machine-gun Section, and also acted as a dispatch rider. This enabled me to get a fairly good first-hand idea of the use made by the British Army of the various types of motor-vehicle; and if some of my experiences left me in doubt as to the ability of the human nervous system to stand up under the racking, killing pace demanded by these branches of the service, I came away from my term at the front full of admiration for the men behind the organization which is responsible for the smooth functioning of the motorvehicle wing of the British Army.

My first good opportunity to see this

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