Part 5 (1/2)
The strategical position of modern Germany is embarra.s.sed because each of these four corners must be saved by the armies. 1 is Belgium--before the war indifferent to Germany, but now destined to be vital to her position--2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is Silesia, and the German commanders, as well as the German Government, must remain to the last moment--if once they are thrown on the defensive--in grave indecision as to which of the four can best be spared when invasion threatens; or else, as is more probable, they must disperse their forces in the attempt to hold all four at once. It is a situation which has but rarely occurred before in the history of war, and which has always proved disastrous.
Germany then must--once she is in Belgium--hold on to Belgium, or she is in peril; she must hold on to East Prussia, or she is in peril; she must hold on to Alsace-Lorraine, or she is in peril; and she must hold on to Silesia, or it is all up with her. If there were some common strategical factor binding these four areas together, so that the defence of one should involve and aid the defence of all, the difficulties thus imposed upon German strategy would be greatly lessened. Though even then the mere having to defend four outlying corners instead of a centre would produce confusion and embarra.s.sment the moment numerical inferiority had appeared upon the side of the defence. But, as a fact, there is no such common factor.
Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium, East Prussia and Silesia, stand strategically badly separated one from the other. Even the two on the East and the two on the West, though apparently forming pairs upon the map, are not dependent on one system of communications, and are cut off from each other by territory difficult or hostile, while between the Eastern and the Western group there is a s.p.a.ce of five hundred miles.
Let us, before discussing the political embarra.s.sment to strategy produced by these four widely distant and quite separate areas, translate the diagram in the terms of a sketch map.
On the following sketch map, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia, and Silesia are shaded, as were the four corners of the diagram. No. 1 is Belgium, 2 is East Prussia, 3 is Alsace-Lorraine, 4 is Silesia. The area occupied by the German Empire, including its present occupation of Belgium, is marked by the broad outline; and the areas shaded represent, not the exact limits of the four territories that are so important, but those portions of them which are essential: the non-Polish portion of Silesia, the non-Polish portion of East Prussia, the plain of Belgium, and all Alsace-Lorraine.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch 13.]
Now the reason that each of these must at all costs be preserved from invasion is, as I have said, different in each case, and we shall do well to examine what those reasons are; for upon them depends the political hesitation they inevitably, cause to arise in the plans of the Great General Staff.
1. _Belgium._ The military annexation of Belgium has been a result of the war, and, from the German point of view, an unexpected result.
Germany both hoped and expected that her armies would pa.s.s through Belgium as they did, in fact, pa.s.s through Luxembourg. The resistance of Belgium produced the military annexation of that country; the reign of terror exercised therein has immobilized about 100,000 of the German troops who would otherwise be free for the front; the checking of the advance into France has turned the German general political objective against England, and, to put the matter in the vaguest but most fundamental terms, the German mind has gradually come, since October, to regard the retention of Belgium as something quite essential. And this because:--(_a_) It gives a most weighty a.s.set in the bargaining for peace. (_b_) It gives a seaboard against England.
(_c_) It provides ample munition, house-room, and transport facility, without which the campaign in North-eastern France could hardly be prolonged. (_d_) It puts Holland at the mercy of Germany, for she can, by retaining Belgium, strangle Dutch trade, if she chooses to divert her carriage of goods through Belgian ports. (_e_) It is a specific conquest; the Government will be able to say to the German people, ”It is true we had to give up this or that, but Belgium is a definite new territory, the occupation of which and the proposed annexation of which is a proof of victory.” (_f_) The retention of Belgium has been particularly laid down as the cause of quarrel between Great Britain and Germany; to retain Belgium is to mark that score against what is now the special enemy of Germany in the German mind. (_g_) Antwerp is the natural port for all the centre of Europe in commerce westward over the ocean. (_h_) With Belgium may go the Belgian colonies--that is, the Congo--for the possession of which Germany has worked ceaselessly year in and year out during the last fifteen years by a steady and highly subsidized propaganda against the Belgian administration. She has done it through conscious and unconscious agents; by playing upon the cupidity of French and British Parliamentarians, of rum s.h.i.+ppers, upon religious differences, and upon every agency to her hand.
We may take it, then, that the retention of Belgium is in German eyes now quite indispensable. ”If I abandon Belgium,” she says, ”it is much more than a strategic retreat; it is a political confession of failure, and the moral support behind me at home will break down.”
If I were writing not of calculable considerations, but of other and stronger forces, I should add that to withdraw from Belgium, where so many women and children have been ma.s.sacred, so many jewels of the past befouled or destroyed, so wanton an attack upon Christ and His Church delivered, would be a loss of Pagan prestige intolerably strong, and a triumph of all that against which Prussia set out to war.
2. _Alsace-Lorraine._ But Alsace-Lorraine is also ”indispensable.” We have seen on an earlier page what the retention of that territory means. Alsace-Lorraine is the symbol of the old victory. It is the German-speaking land which the amazingly unreal superst.i.tions of German academic pedantry discovered to be something sacredly necessary to the unity of an ideal Germany, though the people inhabiting it desired nothing better than the destruction of the Prussian name. It is more than that. It is the bastion beyond the Rhine which keeps the Rhine close covered; it is the two great historic fortresses of Stra.s.sburg and Metz which are the challenge Germany has thrown down against European tradition and the civilization of the West; it is something which has become knit up with the whole German soul, and to abandon it is like a man abandoning his t.i.tle or his name, or surrendering his sword. Through what must not the German mind pa.s.s before its directors would consent to the sacrifice of such a fundamentally symbolic possession? There is defeat in the very suggestion; and the very suggestion, though it has already occurred to the Great General Staff, and has already, I believe, been mentioned in one proposal for peace, would be intolerable to the ma.s.s of the enemy's opinion.
3. _East Prussia._ East Prussia is sacred in another, but also an intense fas.h.i.+on. It is the very kernel of the Prussian monarchy. When Berlin was but a market town for the Electors of Brandenburg, those same Electors had contrived that East Prussia, which was outside the empire, should be recognized as a kingdom. Frederick the Great's father, while of Brandenburg an Elector, was in Prussia proper a king, a man who had emanc.i.p.ated that cradle of the Prussian power. The province in all save its southern belt (which is Polish) is the very essence of Prussian society: a ma.s.s of serfs, technically free, economically abject, governed by those squires who own them, their goods, and what might be their soil. The Russians wasted East Prussia in their first invasion, and they did well though they paid so heavy a price, for to wound East Prussia was to wound the very soul of that which now governs the German Empire. When the landed proprietors fled before the Russian invasion, and when there fled with them the townsfolk, the serfs rose and looted the country houses. In a way quite different from Belgium, quite different from Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia is essential. Forces will and must be sent periodically to defend that territory, however urgently they may be needed elsewhere, as the pressure upon Germany increases. The German commanders, if they forget East Prussia for a moment in the consideration of the other essential points, will, the moment their eyes are turned upon East Prussia again, remember with violent emotion all that the province means to the reigning dynasty and its supporters, and they will do anything rather than let that frontier go. The memory of the first invasion is too acute, the terror of its repet.i.tion too poignant, to permit its abandonment.
4. _Silesia._ Silesia, for quite other reasons (and remember that these different reasons for defending such various points are the essence of the embarra.s.sment in which German strategy will find itself), must be saved. It has been insisted over and over again in these pages what Silesia means. Its meaning is twofold. If Silesia goes, the safest, the most remote from the sea, the most independent of imports of the German industrial regions, is gone. Silesia is, again, the country of the great proprietors. Amuse yourselves by remembering the names of Pless and of Lichnowsky. There are dozens of others. But, most important of all, Silesia is what Belgium is not, what Alsace-Lorraine is not, what East Prussia is not--it is the strategic key. Who holds Silesia commands the twin divergent roads to Berlin northwards, to Vienna southwards. Who holds Silesia holds the Moravian Gate. Who holds Silesia turns the line of the Oder, and pa.s.ses behind the barrier fortresses which Germany has built upon her Eastern front. Who holds Silesia strikes his wedge in between the German-speaking north and the German-speaking south, and joins hands with the Slavs of Bohemia. Not that we should exaggerate the Slav factor, for religion and centuries of varying culture disturb its unity. But it is something. The Russian forces are Slav; the resurrection of Poland has been promised; the Czechs are not submissive to the German claim of natural mastery, and whoever holds Silesia throws a bridge between Slav and Slav if his aims are an extension of power in that race. For a hundred reasons Silesia must be saved.
Now put yourself in the position of the men who must make a decision between these four outliers--Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia, and Silesia--and understand the hesitation such divergent aims impose upon them. Hardly are they prepared to sacrifice one of the four when the defensive problem becomes acute, but its claims will be pressed in every conceivable manner--by public sentiment, by economic considerations, by mere strategy, by a political tradition, by the influence of men powerful with the Prussian monarchy, whose homes and wealth are threatened. ”If I am to hold Belgium, I must give up Alsace. How dare I do that? To save Silesia I must expose East Prussia. How dare I? I am at bay, and the East must at all costs be saved. I will hold Prussia and Silesia, but to withdraw from Belgium and from beyond the Rhine is defeat.” The whole thing is an embroglio.
That conclusion is necessary and inexorable. It would not appear at all until, or if, numerical weakness imposed on the enemy a gradual concentration of the defensive; but once that numerical weakness has come, the fatal choices must be made. It may be that a strict, silent, and virile resolution, such as saved France this summer, a preparedness for particular sacrifices calculated beforehand, will determine first some one retirement and then another. It may be--though it is not in the modern Prussian temperament--that a defensive as prolonged as possible will be attempted even with inferior numbers, and that, as circ.u.mstances may dictate, Alsace-Lorraine or Belgium, Silesia or East Prussia will be the first to be deliberately sacrificed; but one must be, and, it would seem, another after, and in the difficulty of choice a wound to the German strategy will come.
The four corners are differently defensible--Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium only by artifice, and with great numbers of men; Silesia only so long as Austria (and Hungary) stand firm. East Prussia has her natural arrangement of lakes to make invasion tedious, and to permit defence with small numbers.
Between the two groups, Eastern and Western, is all the s.p.a.ce of Germany--the s.p.a.ce separating Aberdeen from London. Between each part of each pair, in spite of an excellent railway system, is the block in the one case of the Ardennes and the Eifel, in the other of empty, ill-communicated Poland. But each is strategically a separate thing; the political value of each a separate thing; the embarra.s.sment between all four insuperable.
Such is the situation imposed by the geography of the European continent upon our enemies, with the opportunities and the drawbacks which that situation affords and imposes.
I repeat, upon the balance, our enemies had geographical opportunities far superior to our own.
Our power of partial blockade (to which I will return in a moment) is more than counterbalanced by the separation which Nature has determined between the two groups of Allies. The ice of the North, the Narrows of the Dardanelles, establish this, as do the Narrows of the Scandinavian Straits.
The necessity of fighting upon two fronts, to which our enemies are compelled, is more than compensated by that natural arrangement of the Danube valley and of the Baltic plain which adds to the advantage of a central situation the power of rapid communication between East and West; while the chief embarra.s.sment of our enemies in their geographical arrangement, which is the outlying situation of Hungary coupled with the presence of four vital regions at the four external corners of the German Empire, is rather political than geographical in nature.
I will now turn to the converse advantages and disadvantages afforded and imposed by geographical conditions upon the Allies.
_The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Allies._
It has been apparent from the above in what way the geographical circ.u.mstance of Germany and Austria-Hungary advantaged and disadvantaged those two empires in the course of a war against East and West.