before the Germans could withdraw or reorganize, Foch began his great offensive, by counter-attacking upon the Foch's exposed western flank of the invaders. This offensive move took the Germans completely by surprise. Their front all but collapsed along a critical line of twenty-eight miles. Foch allowed them no hour of rest. Unlike his opponents, he did not attempt gigantic attacks, to break through at some one point. Instead, he kept up a continuous offensive, threatening every part of the enemy's front, but striking now here, now there, on one exposed flank and then on another, always ready at a moment to take advantage of a new opening, and giving the Germans no chance to withdraw their forces without imperiling key positions. Before the end of August the Allies had won back all the ground lost in the spring. The Germans had made their last throw and lost. Foch's pressure never relaxed. In September American divisions began an offensive on a third part of the front, culminating in a drive toward Sedan, to cut one of the two main railways that supplied the German front, and at the same time the British were wrenching great sections of the “Hindenburg Line" from the foe. In the opening days of October the German commanders reported to Berlin that the war was lost. Victories This result was determined largely by events in the East. In September, the Allied force, so long held inactive at Saloniki, suddenly took the offensive, crushing in the East the Bulgarians in a great battle on the Vardar. Political changes had made this move possible. In 1917, now that there was no Tsar to interfere, the English and French had deposed and banished King Constantine of Greece; and Venizelos, the new head of the Greek state, was warmly committed to the Allied cause. Foch's pres sure made it impossible for the Germans to transfer reinforcements to the Bulgarians from the West. The Saloniki forces advanced swiftly. Tsar Ferdinand abdicated, and (September 30) a provisional Bulgarian government signed THE TEUTONIC COLLAPSE 729 an armistice amounting to unconditional surrender — opening also the way for an attack upon Austria from the south. Another series of events put Turkey out of the war. The preceding year a small British expedition from India had worked its way up the Tigris to Bagdad; and another from Egypt had taken Jerusalem. Now this last army had finally been reinforced, and in September, in a brilliant campaign it freed Syria from Turkish rule. October 30, Turkey surrendered as abjectly as Bulgaria. The Dardanelles were opened, and Constantinople admitted an Allied garrison. Austria too had dissolved. After the June repulse on the Piave, the Austrian army was never fit for another offensive. At home the conglomerate state was going to Fall of pieces. Bohemia on one side, and Slovenes, Austria Croats, and Bosnians on the other, were organizing independent governments with encouragement from America and the Allies. Then, October 24, Italy struck on the Piave. The Austrian army broke in rout. Austria called frantically for an armistice, and when one was granted (November 4) the ancient Hapsburg Empire had vanished. The Emperor abdicated. Fugitive archdukes and duchesses crowded Swiss hotels. And each day or two saw a new revolutionary republic set up in some part of the former Hapsburg realms. Germany had begun to treat for surrender a month earlier, but held out a week longer. October 5, the German Chancelor (now the liberal Prince Max of Baden who had been a severe critic of Germany's war policy) had asked President Wilson to arrange an armistice, offering to accept the Fourteen Points as a basis for peace. The reply made it plain that America and the Allies would not treat with the old despotic government, and that no armistice would be granted at that. late moment which did not secure to the Allies fully the fruits of their military advantages in the field. Meantime the fighting went on, with terrific losses on both sides. The French and Americans, pushing north in the Argonne and across the Meuse, were threatening the trunk railway at Sedan, the only road open for German retreat except the one through Belgium. The British and Belgians pushed the discouraged invaders out of northern France and out of a large part of Belgium. The pursuit at every point was so hot that retreat had to be foot by foot, or in complete rout. As a last desperate throw, the German warlords ordered the Kiel fleet to sea, to engage the English navy; but the common sailors, long on the verge of mutiny, broke into open revolt, while everywhere the Extreme Socialists - all along opposed to the war - were openly preparing revolution. Late in October the War Council of the Allies made known to Germany the terms upon which she could have Fall of an armistice preliminary to the drafting of a Germany peace treaty. Germany could save her army from destruction, and her territory would not suffer hostile conquest. But she was to surrender at once Alsace-Lorraine, and to withdraw her troops everywhere across the Rhine, leaving the Allies in possession of a broad belt of German territory. She was to surrender practically all her fleet, most of her heavy artillery, her aircraft, and her railway engines. Likewise she was at once to release all prisoners, though her own were to remain in the hands of the Allies. In March, Germany had treacherously and arrogantly set her foot upon the neck of prostrate Russia in the Brest-Litovsk treaty: November 11, she made this unconditional surrender to whatever further conditions the Allies might impose in the final settlement — though they did pledge themselves to base their terms, with certain reservations, upon Mr. Wilson's Fourteen Points. Germany had already collapsed internally. None of the revolutionary risings could be put down; and November 7, Bavaria deposed her king and proclaimed herself a republic. In Berlin the Moderate Socialists seized the government. State after state followed. November 9, the Kaiser fled to Holland, whence he soon sent his formal abdication. German autocracy and militarism had fallen. CHAPTER XLV THE PEACE AND THE WORLD LEAGUE JANUARY 18, 1919, in the ancient palace of French kings at Versailles, where the fallen German Empire had been first proclaimed just forty-eight years before, the Peace Congress met to reconstruct the world. The government that had precipitated the great war had been crushed: it remained to see whether the world had been chastened by its suffering so that it would strive in earnest to remove fundamental causes of war. There was a chance such as had never been before and there was supreme need. 1 Eight out of every nine men on the globe had belonged to the warring governments. Fifty-nine millions had been under arms nearly all the physically fit of the Cost of the world's leading peoples. These had suffered thirty- war three million casualties, of which some fourteen millions 1 were death or worse, besides the incalculable number of enfeebled and vitiated constitutions. Hardly less numerous (though less accurately counted) were the victims of famine and pestilence among civilian populations. Nor does the loss to one generation begin to tell the story. In all the warring countries the birth rate has declined alarmingly, and the human quality has deteriorated. A vast part of the world's choicest youth were cut down before marriage, while the civilian deaths and enfeeblement were very largely among child-bearing mothers and young children. As to material wealth, a huge portion of all that the world had been slowly storing up for generations was gone, and over wide areas all machinery for producing wealth was in ruins, 1 Nearly eight million deaths, and more than six million cases of irremediable mutilation and physical ruin. while future generations were mortgaged to pay the war debt. The moral losses were beyond words - sickening to the imagination, and war enthusiasm was replaced by profound discouragement or cynicism. Politically alone the situation was grave indeed. All Central Europe, broken in fragments, was tossing on wave after wave of revolution. 1. In Germany, extreme Socialists of the Bolshevist type had seized control in many districts as in Berlin and Munich-until finally overthrown, in the bloodiest Germany of street fighting, by momentary union of all other classes from Junker to Moderate Socialist. In the first quiet interval, it is true, a National Assembly had been elected; and, while waiting for the Allies to dictate terms of peace, that body drew up a constitution, which, quickly ratified by a universal franchise vote, turned the old Empire into a democratic federal republic - imperiled, to be sure, by incessant plots from both reactionaries and radical extremists. The old 2. In the former Austrian Empire a like chaos was intensified by the dissolution of even the old territorial arrangements. The German district, just about Austrian Vienna, had become a republic; but its natural Empire dis- and proper desire to join itself to Germany was solved, forbidden by the Allies because they were unwilling that Germany should be so strengthened. Accordingly the seven million people crowded into this little region "a capital without a country" and a people without ports or mines or any other industrial resources dragged out the next years in famine relieved only by meager charity. Hungary, stripped of all its non-Magyar districts, had also become a little inland republic, and its nine million disarmed and starving people were ravaged for months by revengeful Roumanian invaders. Farther north, an enlarged and free Bohemia (the Czecho-Slovak Republic) was practically at war for months, not merely with Germany |