第62章 THE ENDING OF THE WAR(1)
1
About the end of the war there are two chief ways of thinking, there is a simpler sort of mind which desires merely a date, and a more complex kind which wants particulars.To the former class belong most of the men out at the front.They are so bored by this war that they would welcome any peace that did not definitely admit defeat--and examine the particulars later.The "tone" of the German army, to judge by its captured letters, is even lower.It would welcome peace in any form.Never in the whole history of the world has a war been so universally unpopular as this war.
The mind of the soldier is obsessed by a vision of home-coming for good, so vivid and alluring that it blots out nearly every other consideration.The visions of people at home are of plenty instead of privation, lights up, and the cessation of a hundred tiresome restrictions.And it is natural therefore that a writer rather given to guesses and forecasts should be asked very frequently to guess how long the war has still to run.
All such forecasting is the very wildest of shooting.There are the chances of war to put one out, and of a war that changes far faster than the military intelligence.I have made various forecasts.At the outset I thought that military Germany would fight at about the 1899 level, would be lavish with cavalry and great attacks, that it would be reluctant to entrench, and that the French and British had learnt the lesson of the Boer war better than the Germans.I trusted to the melodramatic instinct of the Kaiser.I trusted to the quickened intelligence of the British military caste.The first rush seemed to bear me out, and I opened my paper day by day expecting to read of the British and French entrenched and the Germans beating themselves to death against wire and trenches.In those days I wrote of the French being over the Rhine before 1915.But it was the Germans who entrenched first.
Since then I have made some other attempts.I did not prophesy at all in 1915, so far as I can remember.If I had I should certainly have backed the Gallipoli attempt to win.It was the right thing to do, and it was done abominably.It should have given us Constantinople and brought Bulgaria to our side; it gave us a tragic history of administrative indolence and negligence, and wasted bravery and devotion.I was very hopeful of the western offensive in 1915; and in 1916 I counted still on our continuing push.I believe we were very near something like decision this last September, but some archaic dream of doing it with cavalry dashed these hopes.The "Tanks" arrived to late to do their proper work, and their method of use is being worked out very slowly....I still believe in the western push, if only we push it for all we are worth.If only we push it with our brains, with our available and still unorganised brains; if only we realise that the art of modern war is to invent and invent and invent.Hitherto I have always hoped and looked for decision, a complete victory that would enable the Allies to dictate peace.
But such an expectation is largely conditioned by these delicate questions of adaptability that my tour of the front has made very urgent in my mind.A spiteful German American writer has said that the British would rather kill twenty thousand of their men than break one general.Even a grain of truth in such a remark is a very valid reasoning for lengthening one's estimate of the duration of the war.
There can be no doubt that the Western allies are playing a winning game upon the western front, and that this is the front of decision now.It is not in doubt that they are beating the Germans and shoving them back.The uncertain factor is the rate at which they are shoving them back.If they can presently get to so rapid an advance as to bring the average rate since July 1st up to two or three miles a day, then we shall still see the Allies dictating terms.But if the shove drags on at its present pace of less than a mile and four thousand prisoners a week over the limited Somme front only, if nothing is attempted elsewhere to increase the area of pressure, [*This was written originally before the French offensive at Verdun.] then the intolerable stress and boredom of the war will bring about a peace long before the Germans are decisively crushed.But the war, universally detested, may go on into 1918 or 1919.Food riots, famine, and general disorganisation will come before 1920, if it does.The Allies have a winning game before them, but they seem unable to discover and promote the military genius needed to harvest an unquestionable victory.In the long run this may not be an unmixed evil.Victory, complete and dramatic, may be bought too dearly.We need not triumphs out of this war but the peace of the world.
This war is altogether unlike any previous war, and its ending, like its development, will follow a course of its own.For a time people's minds ran into the old grooves, the Germans were going /nach Paris/ and /nach London/; Lord Curzon filled our minds with a pleasant image of the Bombay Lancers riding down /Unter den Linden./ But the Versailles precedent of a council of victors dictating terms to the vanquished is not now so evidently in men's minds.The utmost the Allies talk upon now is to say, "We must end the war on German soil." The Germans talk frankly of "holding out." I have guessed that the western offensive will be chiefly on German soil by next June; it is a mere guess, and I admit it is quite conceivable that the "push" may still be grinding out its daily tale of wounded and prisoners in 1918 far from that goal.
None of the combatants expected such a war as this, and the consequence is that the world at large has no idea how to get out of it.The war may stay with us like a schoolboy caller, because it does not know how to go.The Italians said as much to me.
"Suppose we get to Innsbruck and Laibach and Trieste," they said, "it isn't an end!" Lord Northcliffe, I am told, came away from Italy with the conviction that the war would last six years.