CHAPTER XLIV

AMERICA AND THE WAR

It is not the place of this volume to tell the story of the war further than needful to explain America's part in it. The Germans had planned a short war. They expected (1) to go through Belgium swiftly with little opposition, and to take Paris within four weeks; (2) then to swing their strength against Russia before that unwieldy power could get into the war effectively, and crush her; and (3), with the Channel forts at command, to bring England easily to her knees, if she should really take part.

Thanks to Belgium, the first of these expectations fell through and the others fell with it. The Germans had allowed six days to march through Belgium. But for sixteen days little Belgium held back mighty Germany. When the French began mobilization, after August 2, they began it to meet an honest attack through Lorraine; but before the Belgians were quite crushed, the French contrived to shift enough force to the north so that, along with a poorly equipped "Expeditionary Army" of 100,000 from England, they managed to delay the advance through northern France for three weeks more ground for which the Germans had allowed eight days. Tremendously outnumbered, outflanked, trampled into the dust in a ceaseless series of desperate battles, the thin lines of Allied survivors fell back doggedly toward the Marne. There September 6, Battle of when the boastful invaders were in sight of the the Marne towers of Paris, only 20 miles away, the French and English turned at bay in a colossal battle along a two-hundred mile front. The Battle of the Marne wrecked the German plan. To save themselves from destruction the invaders then

retreated hastily to the line of the Aisne, whence the exhausted Allies failed to dislodge them. Both sides "dug in," along a 360-mile front from Switzerland to the North Sea. Then began a trench warfare, new in history. The positions stabilized, and, on the whole, in spite of repeated and horrible slaughter, were not materially changed until the final months four years later.

sea power

While England's first heroic army died devotedly to gain their country time, England reorganized herself for England's war, and eventually put into the field a splendid fighting force of six million men a million ready for the second year. From the first, too, England's superb navy swept the seas, keeping the boastful German dreadnaughts bottled up in the South Baltic, and gradually running down the few German raiders that at first escaped to prey on English commerce. Except for the English navy, Germany must have won the war before the end of the second summer. England did not enforce her blockade of Germany rigidly, in the first months, for fear of offending unsettled opinion in America; but America's resources in food and munitions were for the most part closed to Germany, and were kept fully available for the Allies.

Meantime, the war was spreading. Within the first few weeks, England's distant daughter-commonwealths – A World Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, War" and even her subject India -were rousing themselves nobly to defend their common civilization. Japan, England's ally in the Orient, entered the war, too, to seize Germany's holdings in China and in the northern Pacific. Turkey had openly joined the Teutonic powers; and, in the second autumn, Bulgaria did so, hoping to wreak vengeance on Serbia for 1913 and to make herself the dominant Balkan state. In the spring of that same year, after driving a hard bargain for territory with the Allies in a secret Pact of London, Italy broke away from the Triple Alliance and declared war on Austria.

THE YEARS 1914, 1915

705

two years

On the whole, however, the close of the first two years saw great gains for Germany. The Russian armies, after gallant fighting, betrayed by generals in the field German and by a traitorous pro-German war office at success in home, had suffered absolutely indescribable losses; the first and Serbia, after heroic resistance, had been wiped from the map. Germany now dominated a solid broad belt of territory from Berlin and Brussels and Warsaw to Bagdad and Persia, map, page 725. True, she began to feel terribly the blockade of the English navy. Her stocks of fats, rubber, cotton, and copper were running low, and her poorer classes were suffering from undernourishment was shown by a horrible increase in the infant death rate. But the ruling classes felt no pinch, and looked hopefully now to the domination of the East to retrieve the markets.

warfare

as

From the first the warfare in the field was marked by new and ever more terrible ways of fighting, with increasing ferocity and horror from month to New month. Ordinary cannon were replaced by methods of huge new guns whose high explosives blasted the whole landscape into indescribable and irretrievable ruin burying whole battalions alive, and forming great craters where snipers found the best shelter in future. advances. Ordinary defense works were elaborated into many lines of connected trenches beneath the earth, protected by mazy entanglements of barbed wire and strengthened at intervals by bomb-proof "dugouts" and underground chambers of heavy timbers and cement. To plow through these intrenchments, cavalry gave way to monstrous, heavily armored motor-tanks. New guns belched deadly poison gases, slaying whole regiments in horrible strangling torture when the Germans first used this devilish device, and infernal "flame-throwers" wrapped whole ranks in liquid fire. Scouting was done, and gunfire directed, by airplanes equipped with new apparatus for wireless telegraphy and for photography; and daily these aërial scouts, singly or in fleets, met in deadly combat ten thousand feet above the

ground, combat that ended only when one or both went hurtling down in flames to crashing destruction. Worse than these terrors even, the soldiers dreaded the beastly filthiness of trench war: the never absent smell of rotting human flesh; the torture of vermin; the dreary monotony.

German

One other phase of the war compelled from the first the attention of the world even outside Europe. This was the policy of "Frightfulness" deliberately "Fright- adopted by the German High Command. For fulness centuries, international law had been building up rules of "civilized" war, to protect non-combatants and to try to preserve some shreds of humanity even among the fighters. But the military rulers of Germany, in official war manuals, had for years referred to such "moderation" as "flabby sentimentality,”—and indeed they had already given to the world one remarkable practical application of their own doctrine. In 1900 a force of German soldiers set out to join forces from other European countries and from the United States in restoring order in China, after the massacre of Europeans there in the Boxer Rebellion. July 27 the Kaiser bade his troops farewell at Bremerhaven in a set address. In the course of that brutal speech he commanded them: "Show no mercy! Take no prisoners! As the Huns made a name for themselves which is still mighty in tradition, so may you by your deeds so fix the name of German in China that no Chinese shall ever again dare to look at a German askance."

At the opening of the World War, this "Hun" policy was put into effect in Western Europe. Belgium and northeastern France were purposely devastated. Whole villages of innocent non-combatants were wiped out, men, women, children, burned in their houses or shot and bayoneted if they crept forth. All this, not by the passionate fury of brutalized soldiers,' but by deliberate order of polished

1 It is a relief to be assured by an excellent authority (Philip Gibbs, the English war correspondent, in his recent, Now It Can Be Told) that many at least of the stories of outrage by individual German soldiers, widely accepted as such stories were during the war, are without basis in fact.

ATTEMPT AT NEUTRALITY

707

soft-living "gentlemen," just to break the morale of the enemy, to make it easy to hold conquered territory with small forces, and to intimidate neighboring small peoples, Danes and Dutch. So, too, German airplanes bombed hospitals and Red Cross trains, assassinating doctors and nurses along with the wounded soldiers; and soon the submarines began to torpedo hospital ships, clearly marked as such (on suspicion, perhaps, that such vessels carried munitions). No wonder that even neutral lands began to know the German no longer as the kindly "Fritz" but only as "Hun" or "Boche."

America's

To the United States, even more than to France or England, the war came as a surprise; and for some time its purposes and its origin were obscured by a skillful German propaganda in our press "neutraland on the platform. President Wilson issued ity" the usual proclamation of neutrality, and followed this with unusual and solemn appeals to the American people for a real neutrality of feeling. For two years the administration clung to this policy. Any other course was made difficult for the President by the fact that a good many members of Congress were either pro-German, or at least bitterly antiEnglish, or extreme pacifists. Moreover, the President seems to have hoped nobly that if the United States could keep apart from the struggle, it might, at the close, render mighty service establishing lasting world peace.

True, the best informed men and women saw at once that France and England were waging America's war against a militaristic despotism. Tens of thousands of young Americans, largely college men, made their way to the fighting line, as volunteers in the Canadian regiments, in the French "Foreign Legion," or in the "air service"; and hundreds of thousands more blushed with shame daily that other and weaker peoples should struggle and suffer in our cause while we stood idly by. But to millions the dominant feeling was a deep thankfulness that our sons were safe from slaughter, our homes free from the horror of war. Vast portions of the American people had neither cared