World War I - 9 Book Collection: Nelson's History of the War, The Battle of Jutland & The Battle of the Somme. Buchan John
Marne and back again to the Aisne, and then for four years in bitter trench battles, and had now returned, after our patient fashion, to their old campaigning ground. Even the slow imagination of the British soldier must have been stirred by that strange revisiting. Then he had been marching south in stout-hearted bewilderment, with the German cavalry pricking at his flanks. Now he was sweeping to the north-east on the road to Germany, and far ahead his own cavalry and cyclists were harassing the enemy rout, while on all the eastern roads his aircraft were scattering death.
On the 7th the line of the Scheldt broke. On the 8th Condé fell, and on the 9th the British Guards entered Maubeuge. On the 7th Pershing and the Americans had reached Sedan. On the 10th the British left was approaching Mons, and the centre was close on the Belgian frontier. These were feverish days both for victors and vanquished. Surrender hung in the air, and there was a generous rivalry among the Allies to get as far forward as possible before it came. Take, for example, the 8th Division of the British First Army. On the 10th November one of its battalions, the 2nd Middlesex, travelled for seven hours in buses, and then marched 27 miles, pushing the enemy before them. They wanted to reach the spot near Mons where some of them had fired some of the first British shots in the war; and it is pleasant to record that they succeeded.
The Front in July on the eve of the Allied Offensive, and on the day
of the Armistice, November 11, 1918.
Meantime, in Germany, the revolution had begun. On Saturday the 9th, a republic was declared in Berlin, and throughout the country, in every State, the dynasties fell. On Sunday the 10th, the Emperor left the Army Headquarters at Spa, crossed the Dutch frontier, and sought refuge in a friend's house at Amerongen. The Imperial Crown Prince, like his father, found sanctuary in Holland. The German delegates left Berlin on the afternoon of Wednesday the 6th, and on the 8th met Foch and petitioned for an armistice. They received his terms, and communicated them to Spa and Berlin. On the night of Sunday, 10th November, the terms were accepted, and at 5 o'clock on the morning of Monday, 11th November, the armistice was signed. The acceptance of the terms meant the surrender of Germany to the will of the Allies, for they stripped from her the power of continuing or renewing the war. It was an admission of her utter defeat in the field.
The morning of Monday, 11th November, was cold and foggy, such weather as the year before had been seen at Cambrai. The Allied front was for the most part quiet, only cavalry patrols moving eastwards in touch with the retreat. But at two points there was some activity. The Americans on the Meuse were advancing, and the day opened for them with all the accompaniment of a field action. At Mons, on the Sunday night, the Canadians were in position round the place, fighting continued during the night, and at dawn the 3rd Canadian Division entered the streets and established a line east of the town, while the carillons of the belfries played "Tipperary." For Britain the circle was now complete. In three months her armies had gained seven victories, each greater than any in her old wars; they had taken some 190,000 prisoners and 3,000 guns, and they had broken the heart of their enemy. To their great sweep from Amiens to Mons was due especially the triumph which Foch had won, and on that grey November morning their worn ranks could await the final hour with thankfulness and pride.
The minutes passed slowly along the front. An occasional shell, an occasional burst of fire, told that peace was not yet, but there were long spells of quiet, save in the American area. Officers had their watches in their hands, and the troops waited with the same grave composure with which they had fought. Men were too weary for their imaginations to rise to the great moment, for it is not at the time of a crisis, but long afterwards, that the human mind grasps the drama. Suddenly, as the watch-hands touched 11, there came a second of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound which observers, far behind the front, likened to the noise of a great wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges to the sea.
CHAPTER XXXII.
LOOKING BACKWARD.
The greatness of the contest is not easy to realize, for it was so much the hugest war ever fought in the history of humanity that comparative tests fail us. During its four years it took from the world a far heavier toll of life and wealth than a century of the old Barbarian invasions had done. More than 8,000,000 men died in battle, and the casualties on all fronts were over 30,000,000. If we add deaths from disease and famine it cannot have cost the population of the globe less than 20,000,000 dead, and as many more maimed and weakened for life. At least 40,000 millions sterling of money were spent by the nations in the direct business of war. Let it be remembered that this devastation was wrought not in the loose society of an elder world, but in one where each state was a highly-developed thing, and depended for some necessaries upon its neighbour, and where myriads of human souls could only support life so long as the machine of civilization performed its functions smoothly and securely.
We can best grasp the immensity of the struggle by attempting to grasp the immensity of the battleground. Such a task is for the imagination only, for the soldier saw only his little area, and no man's first-hand experience could cover all the many fields. An observer on some altitude in the north, like the Hill of Cassel, on some evening in September 1918, could look east and note the great arc from the dunes at Nieuport to the coalfields about Lens lit with the flashes of guns and the glare of star-shells, and loud with the mutter of battle. That was a line of 50 miles—far greater than any battlefield in the old wars. Had he moved south to the ridge of Vimy he would have looked on another 50 miles of an intenser strife. South, again, to Bapaume, he would have marked the wicked glow from Cambrai to the Oise. Still journeying, from some little height between the Oise and the Aisne he would have scanned the long front which was now creeping round the shattered woods of St. Gobain to where Laon sat on its hill. From the mounts about Rheims he might have seen Gouraud's battle-line among the bleak Champagne downs, and from a point in the Argonne the trenches of the Americans on both sides of the Meuse, running into the dim wooded country where the Moselle flowed towards Metz. Past the Gap of Nancy, and southward along the scarp of the Vosges, went the flicker of fire and the murmur of combat, till the French lines stretched into the plain of Alsace, and exchanged greetings with the sentinels on the Swiss frontier. Such a battle-ground might well have seemed beyond the dream of mortals, and yet it was but part of the whole.
A celestial intelligence, with sight unlimited by distance, would have looked eastward, and, beyond the tangle of the Alps, witnessed a strange sight. From the Stelvio Pass in the Alps to the Adriatic ran another front, continuous through glacier-camps and rock-eyries and trenches on the edge of the eternal snows, to the foothills of the Lombard plain, and thence, by the gravel beds of the Piave, to the lagoons of Venice. Beyond the Adriatic it ran, through the sombre hills of Albania, past the great lakes, where the wild-fowl wheeled at the unfamiliar sound of guns, beyond the Tcherna and Vardar and Struma valleys to the Ægean shores. It began again, when the Anatolian peninsula was left behind, and curved from the Palestine coast in a great loop north of Jerusalem across Jordan to the hills of Moab. Gazing over the deserts, he would have marked the flicker which told of mortal war passing beyond the ancient valleys of Euphrates and Tigris, up into the wild Persian ranges. And scattered flickers to the north would have led him to the Caspian shores, and beyond them to that tableland running to the Hindu Kush which was the cradle of all the warring races. Still farther north, his eyes would have seen the lights of the Allies from the Pacific coast westward to the Urals and the Volga, and little clusters far away on the shore of the Arctic Sea.
Had the vision of our celestial spectator been unhindered by time as well as by space, it would have embraced still stranger sights. It would have beheld the old Allied Eastern front, from the Baltic to the Danube, pressing westward, checking, and falling east; breaking in parts, gathering strength, and again advancing; and at last dying like a lingering sunset into darkness. Behind would have appeared a murderous glow, which was the flame of revolution. Turning to Africa, it would have noted the slow movement of little armies in west, and east, and south—handfuls of men creeping in wide circles among the Cameroons forests till the land was theirs; converging lines of