CHAPTER VI

THE SECOND YEAR, 1915

At the opening of 1915, the chief danger to England and The danger France was their too great trust in Russia, their belief that of Russian collapse the Russian "steam-roller," fully prepared, would now crush its way to Berlin or at least into Hungary. As a matter of fact, there was no ground for this expectation. Russia was near the end of its supply of munitions, and its industries were too primitive to cope with longer war. The minister of war, too, had secretly sold himself to Germany and was doing his best to hinder military movements and to waste and misdirect the scanty supplies.1 Similar treason permeated a large part of the official classes and the court circle, centering around the Hohenzollern wife of the Tsar.

The Germans understood this Russian situation-though the Allies did not-and accordingly they planned only to hold their trenches in the West and to concentrate their energies in putting Russia quickly out of the war.

Russia was almost isolated from the other Allies. Germany closed the Baltic; Turkey closed the Black Sea; Archangel was ice-closed during most of the year; and Vladivostok was so distant as to be almost negligible for the coming year. If Russia were to receive badly needed supplies, the Allies must Necessity force the Dardanelles and capture Constantinople. Success that the in this project in 1915 would have ended the war. The waver- cure the ing Balkan states would have joined Russia. Turkey would Dardanelles have been crushed. The conglomerate, ill-cemented Austrian

1 Two years later this man was executed for high treason. Of Russia's four important munition factories, the largest was directly controlled, secretly, by Germany.

Allies se

The attempt and failure

The German drive against Russia

empire would have been open to invasion on the south; and the Allies must have won.

Thus both parties planned now to transfer the decisive struggle to the East front. The Allies were able to strike first. In February, the Allied navy attacked the Dardanelles. The outer forts were taken or battered down, but the inner fortresses resisted successfully. In March a more formidable attack all but succeeded. Had the Allies known how exhausted the Turkish ammunition was, they might have opened the straits. Not informed of this, however, and discouraged by heavy losses in ships, the navy now waited nearly two months for the arrival of land forces to coöperate in storming the Turkish defenses. When the British transports arrived, late in April, the Turks were perfectly prepared. British and Australian troops were landed, with horrible loss, under destructive fire; but the heroic attempts of the Anzacs1 to storm the fortresses of the Gallipoli Peninsula failed deplorably. In August the attempt was renewed, and came once more just short of decisive success. After this, there was no chance against the greatly strengthened Turkish positions.

Meantime, in May, the Germans opened their drive against Russia in Galicia with the first enormous concentration of artillery in the war. The Russians were admirably commanded in the field, and they fought, as always, with reckless valor. But their cannon were useless from want of ammunition, and even with the infantry many a soldier had to wait until a comrade had fallen before he could get a gun to fight with. With amazing success, under the circumstances, their retreat was saved from becoming a rout. But the Austrians recaptured Lemberg in June, and the Germans took Warsaw early in August. The Teutonic armies then cleared most of eastern Poland of Russian garrisons before they halted their drive late in September, in order to attempt a more important drive on the southeast (below). Russia had lost an enormous

1 Australian New Zealand Auxiliary Corps.

number of lives, with a million and a half of prisoners; she had been driven out of a huge territory; and her offensive power had been destroyed for months to come.

on the West

joins the

On the West front, there was continuous trench fighting, with Trench war much loss of life, but the only important event of the year was the German offensive at Ypres (Second Battle of Ypres, April 17May 17) when the English line was almost broken by the German asphyxiating gas, then first used in war. That the line held against this devilish attack was due largely to the splendid gallantry of the new Canadian divisions. Lack of high explosives kept the Allies from attempting a serious offensive until just before the season closed in September and the event proved that the supplies even then were insufficient to prepare the way for successful infantry attack, so that the only result was one more terrible lesson with pitiful sacrifice of lives. The Germans had stopped their triumphant progress into Bulgaria Russia only to avail themselves of a more attractive program. Central In October, Bulgaria finally joined the Central powers (fear Empires of Russia gone), hoping to wreak vengeance on Serbia for 1913 and to make herself the ruling state in the Balkans. Her secretly prepared army invaded Serbia from the east while a huge Teutonic force attacked from the north. Serbia had counted upon her treaty of 1913 with Greece for protection against possible Bulgarian attack. But King Constantine of Greece, brother-in-law of the German Kaiser, now repudiated that treaty and dismissed his prime minister Venizelos for desiring to keep Greece faithful to her ally. A Franco-British army had been sent to Salonika, but, after the defection of Greece, it could accomplish nothing. In spite of their gallant resistance, the Serbs were overwhelmed. The survivors of Serbia is their army made their way over the mountains of Albania to the coast, and were ferried across to Corfu by British ships. All of Serbia and Montenegro and much of Albania was occupied by the Bulgars and Teutons; and the Bulgarian atrocities toward the conquered populations during the next years exceeded anything those unhappy peoples had ever suffered from

crushed

the Turk. The military gain by Germany in this campaign was immense. She now dominated a solid broad belt of territory from Berlin and Brussels and Warsaw to Bagdad and Persia.

This gloomy second year of the war brought to the Allies only one gain. From the outset of the struggle, Italy had repudiated the Triple Alliance. The Teutonic powers, who had forced on the war without consulting her in the least particular, had not expected help from her, but they did hope that she would remain neutral. The sympathies of the libertyloving Italian people, however, were overwhelmingly with the Allies; and the government saw its opportunity to recover the "unredeemed" Italian territory about Triest and Trent. It drove a hard bargain with the Allied governments, securing in a secret treaty (since known as the Secret Pact of London, April, 1915) promises for not only those districts but also for Dalmatia at the expense of martyred Serbia. Then May 23, just when the Russian retreat was beginning, Italy declared war on Austria, and launched her armies in a drive across the Isonzo for Triest. But the Austrians had fortified the Alpine passes with every modern device, and for two years the Italians made little advance, in spite of much gallant fighting. The threat of their advance, however, kept large Austrian forces busy, and so lessened the pressure upon the Allies elsewhere at critical moments.

This same year, 1915, saw also a serious extension of Germany's barbarous submarine warfare, with the invasion of neutral rights and the murder of neutral lives. This was to bring America into the war two years later, and so hasten the close; but it was only one more phase of the deliberately adopted German policy of "Frightfulness" which from the first had compelled the attention of the world outside Europe. For centuries, international law had been building up rules of civilized war, so as to protect non-combatants and to preserve some shreds of humanity among even the fighters.

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But German military rulers, for some years, had referred slurringly to such "moderation" as a deceitful attempt on the part of the weak to protect themselves against the strong. Humane considerations the official German War Manual referred to as flabby sentimentality.1

command to

The first practical application of this German doctrine of Frightfulness had been given to the world in 1900. In that year 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 The prisoners! As the Huns made a name for themselves which is Kaiser's still mighty in tradition, so may you by your deeds so fix the emulate the name of German in China that no Chinese shall ever again dare Huns to look at a German askance. Open the for Kultur." At the opening of the World War, this "Hun" policy was put into effect in Western Europe. Never since the ancient blood-spattered Assyrian monarchs stood exultingly on pyramids of mangled corpses had the world seen so huge a crime. Belgium and northeastern France were devastated. Whole villages of innocent non-combatants were wiped out, women, children,

...

way

"2

men,

burned in their houses or shot and bayoneted if they crept forth. All this by deliberate order of the “high

1 Extracts in Harding, Ch. vii, IV.

American, Japanese,

2 The troops reached China too late to be of use. French, and Italian troops had already restored order. But the Germans made a number of savage "punitive expeditions" for booty and rapine. In these they indulged not merely in indiscriminate murder of innocent noncombatants, but even in many indescribable outrages upon women. General Chaffee, the commander of the United States troops, and the senior officer among the Western forces, called together the commanders of the other allies, and then as their spokesman interviewed Von Waldersee, the German commander. Von Waldersee declared haughtily that there would be no change in his policy. His soldiers "must have some chance to indulge themselves." Said Chaffee: "We have not come to make requests, but to tell you that this sort of thing must stop." It stopped.