Le Queux William
The Way to Win
Foreword
I do not think anyone who has studied the progress of the War with care and patience can deny that, during the past few months, a mighty change has come over the aspect of the great struggle.
A year ago, when I wrote Britains Deadly Peril, the fortunes of the Allies appeared to be at the lowest ebb. Indomitable energy and perseverance have since worked wonders. To-day we plainly see that the conquering march of the Teuton has been arrested and the process of forcing back his hordes has begun.
Britain the fierce Lion of Britain is at last fully aroused to the momentous issues which hang on the decision, and has flung herself with all her unrivalled tenacity, and with a unanimity unparalleled in our history, into the titanic conflict.
Russia, France, and Italy have responded to the call with equal nobility. To-day the Allies are more than a match for the Hun in manpower; they are equal to them, at least, in the supply of munitions, the lack of which so badly hampered our cause last year. Finally, the great new masses of the British Army, straining at the leash, are eagerly awaiting the signal to hurl themselves at the foe for his destruction.
The British Navy, silent and invincible, holds the seas of all the world, and Germany and her Allies are to-day feeling the pinch of war in most deadly earnest. Prices in enemy countries are rising by leaps and bounds; the food supply is beginning to fail; money is lacking; the value of the mark is falling, and there is every prospect of a shortage of men cannon-fodder they were once called by Germans in the near future.
We are on the eve of great events.
Already we hear the ominous rumblings which prelude the breaking of the storm. The great clash is at hand which, for good or ill, shall settle the destinies of our world for many generations to come perhaps for ever.
Can we doubt the issue? Assuredly not. The spirit of our dear old Britain and her glorious Allies is unbroken, and still unbreakable. Cost what it may, they are fully determined to smash, once and for ever, the accursed Teuton attempt to dominate the world and throw back the clock of civilisation for centuries. There will be no faltering and no turning back on Great Britains part until that great end is attained.
Courage and resolution and a hard fist are the keys of the situation for the Allies. We have them in abundant measure. And unless Britain is unthinkably false to all the traditions that have made her great, our triumph in the Near To-morrow is assured.
William Le Queux.Devonshire Club, London, March, 1916.Chapter One
The Rift in the Clouds
If we could imagine a being from another planet dropped suddenly on this old earth of ours and left with the aid of maps to figure out for himself the real position of the world-war, we could readily imagine that it would seem to him that the Germans were winning hands down.
Perhaps there would be a good deal of excuse for such a belief.
He would see, in the first place, that the Germans had overrun and captured the whole of Belgium except one very small portion. He would see that the greater part of Northern France was in their undisputed possession. He would see that they had driven the Russians from Poland and penetrated far within the boundaries of Russia proper.
He would also see that they had almost completely conquered or cajoled the Balkan States, and that German trains were running from the North Sea to Constantinople. He would see them holding apparently impregnable lines of defences against forces at least as strong as their own probably much stronger. He would see them or their Allies holding up British forces in Persia and in Mesopotamia. He would see the Italians apparently firmly held along the mountainous boundaries of the Austrian Empire. He would see that a great British army had been driven out of Gallipoli. He would unquestionably come to the conclusion that the cause of the Allies was a lost cause, and would probably conclude that the best thing they could do would be to make a speedy peace on the best terms the victors could be induced to grant.
And he would be unquestionably wrong in his deduction, even though we admit the accuracy of his facts.
For, like the thoughtless and the whimperers among us, he would for want of knowledge leave out of his consideration certain hard facts which, properly considered, would reverse his judgment. Like the thoughtless and the whimperers, he would judge too much from mere appearances and would fail to see the real essential things. He would fail to see the wood for the trees; he would mistake the shadow for the substance. Just so the German people to-day are making the mistake of thinking that the occupation of enemy territory, a mere temporary advantage gained through treacherous preparation for war at a time when they professed to be working for peace, constitutes the victory that must be theirs before they could hope to gain the world-dominion upon which, as we now know, their hearts and the hearts of their rulers have been set for the last forty years.
For eighteen months the civilised world has been struggling against the most formidable menace to its liberties by which it has ever been faced. For eighteen months we have seen the enemy apparently going on from triumph to triumph. We have seen the devastation of Belgium, the crucifixion of a little people whose only wish was that they should be allowed to live their happy lives in peace, and whose only crime was that they dared to resist the Prussian bully. We have seen the martyrdom of Poland. We have seen the very heart of France incomparable Paris threatened with destruction.
We have seen the stately memorials of a great civilisation, such as Germany has never known and never can know, wrecked and plundered. We have seen innocent civilians murdered in hundreds, women and children sent to death or a far worse fate. We have seen the ruin of Serbia. We have lost thousands of our best and bravest sons. We have seen the tragic failure in the Gallipoli Peninsula itself a mere incident of the world-war, yet one of the greatest military undertakings upon which we have ever embarked. We have failed conspicuously to protect the little nations in whose cause we drew the sword, and who have gone down in ruin under the iron heel of a ferocious tyranny beside which the worst oppression of historic times seems mild in comparison. Can it be a matter of wonder if the cry, How long, O Lord, how long? goes up from the fainting heart of outraged civilisation?
Yet the darkest hour is ever the herald of the dawn; and if to-day we try with a single mind to penetrate the fog and mystery with which this greatest of all wars is surrounded, we shall see that there is really and truly a rift in the clouds. No doubt we have still many days of storm and stress before us. The end is not yet. But, in the noble language of the King, the goal is drawing into sight. The sun of victory is not yet shining fully upon us, but none the less the dawn is at hand. Already its first faint gleams are breaking in upon our eyes; there are abundant signs, if we lift up our hearts and our courage, that the long period of gloom and depression is passing away.
Properly to understand the position as it exists to-day we must look backward to the years 1870 and 1871, for in those years was born the spirit of aggression and arrogance which ever since has been the driving power of Germany. After years of preparation, when so far as possible everything was ready, Germany fell suddenly upon a France torn by internal dissensions, weak through want of preparation, and utterly unready for war. Naturally there could be but one end to such a conflict, and a few short months saw France helpless beneath the heel of the invader. Germany emerged from that war with almost incalculable profit, firmly imbued with the idea that she was invincible, and convinced that at any moment she chose she could reach out her greedy hands and grasp the sceptre of European domination. Then, as she thought, she could with safety enter upon a conflict with an England which had grown over-rich and perhaps over-lazy. Then the real enemy could be crushed, and the world-dominion of which her megalomaniac rulers dreamed would be within her grasp.
If a nation has determined upon war, there is never any lack of excuse, and Germany chose her time well. Her blow fell at a time when no single one of the Allies was prepared for war. That fact alone fixes absolutely the responsibility for the present appalling conflict, and in the days to come the unanimous verdict of history will be that the War was deliberately provoked by Germany through sheer greed and lust of power.
For, be it remembered, there was no legitimate ambition before Germany which she was not perfectly free to enjoy. Her trade was free and unhampered, the seas were as open to her use as to our own, she possessed vast colonial dominions which gave her every opportunity for all the legitimate expansion of which she could dream for centuries to come. She had grown rich and prosperous in the exercise of the freedom which she has ever been the first to deny to others. No one menaced her or sought to do her injury. But she was the nouveau riche among the nations. She had been poisoned for a long course of years with the false doctrine that the German was something essentially superior to the peoples of other races, and she owes her approaching downfall, which is as certain as the rising of to-morrows sun, to the blind teachers of the blind who have imbued her with that spirit of envy and arrogance which may be as fatal to a nation as to an individual.
We all know only too well what happened when war broke out. Germany, with her armies trained to the hour after years of patient preparation, with her forces ready to the last man and the last gun, shamelessly broke her plighted word with the invasion of Belgium. She had counted that there, at least, she would meet with no resistance; she could not realise that a little people, even to save its honour, would dare to oppose the onrush of her countless hordes. In that she made her first and, perhaps, her greatest mistake. Just as she thought that England would not draw the sword for a scrap of paper, so she thought that Belgium would not dare to resist.
We know now that she was wrong; we know, too, that the heroism of the Belgians surely saved Europe in those first days by gaining the priceless time which enabled France and England to throw their scanty forces across the path of the invader, which led ultimately to the great battle of the Marne, that titanic conflict which surely and decisively smashed once and for ever the German plans. In spite of all that has happened since, in spite of the apparent victories Germany has won, in spite of the territories she has occupied, the defeat of the Marne marked the beginning of her final overthrow.
But the peril was appalling. France, Russia, and Britain were alike unprepared for war, short of men, short of munitions, short of everything which would have enabled them at once to meet the common enemy on anything like equal terms. The days are gone for ever when victory can be won by men alone; modern war is too machine-like in its developments, the importance of supplies and organisation is far too great to give a poorly equipped army the slightest chance of success. Not men alone, but munitions are the secret of success to-day, and every single advantage that Germany has won since war broke out has been won by her superiority in mechanical equipment. Her men, considered individually, are certainly not the equals of either the French or the Russians or the British; they have neither the dash of the French, nor the dogged courage and endurance of the Russians, nor the personal sang-froid and cool initiative of the British. But Germany had the numbers and the equipment, and to numbers and equipment alone she owes such successes as she has gained.
Caught unprepared at the outset of war, the Allies were naturally in a position which must well have seemed hopeless. Germany reaped to the full the advantages which she had sought in long preparation for war under the guise of peace. Her armies plunged forward with resistless momentum until they were within sight of the very gates of Paris, and in the eyes of the world it was merely a matter of time as to when she would occupy the French capital. Then came Von Klucks amazing blunder, the swift stroke of the French and British against the German right wing, and the precipitate retreat which led to the defeat at the Marne. From that day, in spite of apparent successes, the fortunes of Germany have been on the wane.
There was no mistake about the reply of civilisation to the German menace. France, Russia, and England threw down the guage in the most unmistakable terms in the historic declaration that neither would conclude a separate peace without the others. That, we have now to recognise, is one of the main facts which must operate most powerfully in bringing about the final defeat of Germany. In no particular can she hope to rival the resources of the Allies, and so long as the Allies hang together they are unmistakably on the road to final victory. It is for this reason that at the present moment it is the main object of German diplomacy to sow distrust and suspicion among the partners in the Quadruple Entente. Their one and only hope and they know it is to provoke a quarrel among the Allies which would not merely rob the Allies of all hope of final victory, but would give the Huns and their dupes a reasonable chance indeed, more than a reasonable chance of snatching triumph from the very jaws of defeat.
There is a school of croakers very much in evidence in England at present who can see nothing of good in anything which their own country has done and is doing. They remind one of Gilberts
Idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone
Each century but this, and every country but his own.
They are, of course, always with us, but at the present moment they are more than usually aggressive, and we notice them perhaps more than is good for us. They are the chief source of that dangerous form of pessimism which we see exemplifying itself in a constant belittling of the enormous efforts and the enormous sacrifices which this country has made. According to these mischievous propagandists, nothing we do or have done can possibly be sufficient or right. The effects of this perpetual calamity howling on our own people is bad enough; it is far worse upon the peoples of the Allied countries and the neutrals, because, not understanding our national peculiarities, they are apt to take us at a wholly absurd valuation and to think that, as our own people are constantly accusing us of slackness in a war in which we have so much at stake, there must be something in the charge. If plenty of mud is thrown, some of it is tolerably sure to stick, and there can be no doubt that the perpetual depreciation of British efforts by people in this country has had a most dangerous effect, and has, in fact, played the German game to perfection both here and abroad.
Those who wish to form an adequate realisation of what Britain has really done in the cause of civilisation should try to take a longer view, and try also to throw their minds backward to the condition of affairs which existed when the declaration of war came eighteen months ago. They should try, in fact, to learn something of the lessons taught by our past history.
We can start with the indisputable and undisputed fact that so far as the war on land was concerned this country was entirely unprepared to take up the rôle it has since assumed. That is a proposition which not even the Germans, who are so ready to accuse England of having caused the War, can very well dispute. Throughout our history we have been a naval and not a military Power, though it is of course true that, judged by the standards of other days, we have now and again put forward very considerable military efforts.
But it was many a long year since British troops had fought on the Continent of Europe, and it is safe to assume that the great majority of people in this country, had they been asked, would have replied without hesitation that we should never again take part in the land fighting in a continental war.