SEVEN

THE WAR BEYOND THE WESTERN FRONT

BY THE END OF 1915, none of the original combatants was fighting the war that had been wanted or expected. Hopes of quick victory had been dashed, new enemies had appeared, new fronts had opened. France had the war that most nearly conformed to its General Staff’s peacetime appreciation of strategic contingency, a war against Germany on its north-eastern frontier. Both timetable and costs had gone disastrously wrong, however, and it had unexpectedly found itself involved in subsidiary campaigns in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, as a result of Turkey’s unanticipated intervention in November 1914. Turkey’s entry had also upset Russia’s calculation that it would have to deal with the Germans and Austrians alone; it was now also fighting a bitter and difficult campaign in the Caucasus. Germany had expected a one-front war fought in two stages: first against France, while a token force held its eastern front, then another victorious campaign against Russia. Instead, it was heavily engaged on both the Western and the Eastern Front, on the latter sustaining substantial forces on Austrian territory to prop up its Habsburg ally. Austria, which had thought the war might be limited to a punitive expedition against Serbia, had reaped the whirlwind of its folly, and found itself locked in combat not only with Russia but Italy as well. Serbia had reaped the whirlwind of its intransigence and found extinction as a state. Britain, which had committed itself at the outset only to providing an expeditionary force to widen the French left in Flanders, found itself assuming responsibility for ever longer stretches of the Western Front, while simultaneously finding men to fight the Turks at Gallipoli, in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, to assist the Serbs and to reduce the garrisons of Germany’s African colonies; men had also to be found to reinforce the crews of ships denying the North Sea to the German High Seas Fleet, dominating the Mediterranean, chasing the enemy’s surface commerce raiders to destruction and defending merchant shipping against U-boat attack. The war that men were already beginning to call the Great War was becoming a world war and its bounds were being set wider with every month that passed.

THE WAR IN THE GERMAN COLONIES

Germany had had to become an empire itself, the Second Reich, proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in January 1871, before it could join Europe’s great powers in the competition for empire. Their extensive conquests left the new state few pickings. North Africa was by then French, Central Asia and Siberia Russian, India British. Heinrick von Treitschke, the ideologist of German nationalism, announced that ‘colonisation was a matter of life and death’.¹ Even so, there was little popular enthusiasm for the acquisition of colonies, perhaps because the only areas still available for exploitation were in the less favoured parts of Africa. It was German traders who supplied the impulse to enter the continent. Between 1884 and 1914, they had established commercial enclaves in Kamerun, Togo, and South-West Africa (Namibia) on the west coast, and what is now Tanzania on the east coast, which the imperial government had then consolidated. Purchase (from Spain) and deliberate imperial effort had meanwhile secured Papua, Samoa and the Caroline, Marshall, Solomon, Mariana and Bismarck Islands in the south and central Pacific. The coastal region of Kiaochow, and its port of Tsingtao, had been seized from China in 1897.

On the outbreak of war, the British and French at once took action to reduce the garrisons of Germany’s colonies; the Japanese, who had entered the war (on 23 August) on a narrow interpetration of their obligations under the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1911, but in practice to improve their strategic position in the Pacific at Germany’s expense, likewise moved against Tsingtao and the central Pacific islands. Japan occupied the Marianas, Marshalls and Carolines during October. Transferred to her by mandate after 1918, they were to form the outer perimeter of her island stronghold in the war against the United States twenty-five years later. Samoa fell to a New Zealand force on 29 August. German New Guinea (Papua) was surrendered unconditionally to an Australian expedition on 17 September, together with the Solomons and the Bismarcks. The reduction of Tsingtao took longer. Heavily fortified, and defended by 3,000 German marines, it presented a formidable military obstacle to any attacker. The Japanese, taking no chances, landed 50,000 men and commenced a deliberate siege. They were later joined by the 2nd South Wales Borderers and the 36th Sikhs from the British treaty part of Tientsin.² Three lines of defence confronted the attackers. The first two were abandoned by the Germans without resistance. Against the third, the Japanese dug parallels in regulation siege-warfare style and opened a bombardment with 11-inch howitzers, like those which had reduced the Russian defences of nearby Port Arthur ten years earlier. On the night of 6/7 November an infantry assault was delivered, across a no man’s land which had been reduced to 300 yards in width, and the following morning Captain Meyer Waldeck, the naval officer serving as governor, surrendered his force. His marines had lost 200 men killed, against 1,455 Japanese fatal casualties. It had been a brave, if purely symbolic resistance.

In Africa, the tiny territory of Togo, sandwiched between the British Gold Coast (now Ghana) and French Dahomey (now Benin) was quickly overrun (27 August) by troops of the West African Rifles and the Tirailleurs sénégalais. Kamerun (now Cameroon), a much larger territory, equal in size to Germany and France combined, proved more difficult to conquer. The garrison numbered about a thousand Europeans and three thousand Africans. The Allied force included troops of the Nigeria, Gold Coast and Sierra Leone Regiments under British command, French African infantry and a Belgian contingent brought up from the Congo. Together with tens of thousands of carriers, essential support to any campaign in African forest or bush, the army eventually rose to a strength of 25,000. Despite its preponderance of numbers, distance, climate and topography blunted its early efforts. Three British columns were in motion across the Nigerian border by the end of August, each separated from the other by 250 miles of roadless terrain. Near Lake Chad, on the old Central African slave-trading route only recently conquered by the French, one was advancing towards Mora; a second was approaching Yarua, 500 miles from the sea; a third, near the coast itself, was directed at Nsanakang. All three encountered strong resistance and were turned back with heavy losses. The French did better, seizing a coastal bridgehead and winning a small battle at Kusseri, just south of Lake Chad. The arrival of reinforcements then gave the British the advantage and, with the assistance of four British and French cruisers and a fleet of small craft, they secured the coast, captured Douala, the colonial capital and wireless station, on 27 September and started inland up the rivers and the two short colonial railways. The objective was Yaounda, 140 miles inland, where the enemy had an ordnance depot. Skilful German resistance, sustained during the torrential rainy season, delayed the renewal of the advance until October 1915; in the interval, the African soldiers cultivated gardens to supplement their intermittent ration supply.³ Finally, as the dry season opened in November, the Allies pushed forward into the central mountainous region and forced most of the Germans to seek internment in the neutral enclave of Spanish Guinea. The last German post of Mora, where the campaign had opened in the far north eighteen months earlier, surrendered in February 1916.⁴

The Cameroon campaign differed little in character from those by which the British and French had subdued the warrior tribes during the original conquests. That which opened in German South-West Africa in September 1914 was of a different quality altogether. ‘German South-West’, now Namibia, is an enormous territory, six times the size of England, arid, infertile and populated then by only 80,000 Africans. Mostly Herero tribesmen, whose rebellion in 1904 had been put down with ruthlessness by the Governor, the future Reichsmarschal Hermann Goering’s father, they were kept under close control by the German garrison of 3,000 and the 7,000 German male settlers. The German government had hoped, as elsewhere in its African possessions, to avoid a conflict in ‘South-West’; they put their trust in a vague, mutual, pre-war commitment to neutrality in Africa between the colonial powers. The British, however, were determined otherwise and, despite the fact that the withdrawal of their garrison from the neighbouring Union of South Africa on the outbreak of war left them dependent on its Defence Force, of which their former opponents in the Boer War of 1899–1902 formed a large proportion, they embarked at once on an expedition by sea and land against the German colony. Some 60,000 troops were available. A few, the South African Permanent Force, were regulars, wholly loyal to Britain, from which many came. The Citizen Force was divided; some of its units, the Durban Light Infantry, the Imperial Light Horse, were Anglo-South African and loyal to the crown, as were the contingents of white Rhodesians (one of whom was the future Air Marshal ‘Bomber’ Harris) who arrived from East Africa to take part. Others were a touchier proposition. Of the leading commanders of the Boer War now in British service, General Louis Botha had made his peace and would not shift; he had a personal commitment to Jan Smuts, one of the most dashing ex-Boer generals but now Prime Minister of the Union. Christiaan de Wet, a Boer hero, and Christiaan Beyers, who held post as commander of the Defence Force, went into active rebellion. So, too, did General Jan Kemp and Colonel Soloman Maritz; the former resigned his commission, the latter refused to obey orders. At the very beginning, therefore, Britain found itself engaged both in a colonial campaign against the German enemy and in a Boer rebellion.⁵

Germany’s African Territories

The rebellion, fortunately for the British, did not take fire. About 11,000 Afrikaners joined in but, opposed by 30,000 loyalists, Boer and British, they had all been forced into surrender or, a few, into German territory by January 1915. The war against the Germans then began in earnest. The army was formed into four columns. Mainly mounted, many of the soldiers Boer ‘burghers’, some of whom had fought the British at Majuba in 1881, they converged on the German centres of resistance from the coast, from the Orange River and from Bechuanaland, the enormous protectorate (now Botswana) to the north of the Union. The objective was Windhoek, the German colonial capital, on which the Germans fell back in a fighting retreat. Resistance continued after its capture on 12 May 1915, though with the exchange of courtesies on both sides. The Germans were in a hopeless position. Outnumbered many times, and forced to campaign in one of the most desolate regions of the world, without any prospect of resupply from outside, they eventually surrendered unconditionally on 9 July 1915. The German officers were allowed to retain their swords, the German settler reservists to return to their farms with arms and ammunition to protect themselves, their families and their properties.⁶ Windhoek remains today the only distinctively German city in the southern hemisphere.

By 1916, the last centre of German resistance to the British and French forces in the colonial empires was in ‘German East’, today Tanzania. The war in that enormous colony, almost exactly the size of France, had begun on 8 August, when the British cruiserAstraea had bombarded its port of Dar-es-Salaam. Hostilities then lapsed. When resumed, they were to last until after the negotiation of the European armistice in November 1918, testimony to the extraordinary tenacity and prowess in leadership of Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, commander of the colony’s Schutztruppe. Lettow-Vorbeck, aged forty-four in 1914, was an experienced imperial campaigner; he had served previously in the German contingent sent to suppress the Boxer Rising in China and in German South-West. Appointment to German East Africa was a denomination of his standing; Baroness Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, who sailed with him on the boat out, remembered that no other German had given her ‘so strong an impression of what Imperial Germany was and stood for’.⁷ This colony was, indeed, the pearl of the Second Reich’s overseas possessions. Togo was a trifle, Kamerun an unpeopled land of fever, ‘South West’ a beautiful but empty desert. German East Africa, bounded by British Uganda and Kenya to the north, the Belgian Congo and Rhodesia to the west, British Nyasaland and Portuguese Mozambique to the south, straddled the Great Lakes region, the most romantic and potentially productive part of the continent. Its boundaries were crossed or formed by Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika and Nyasa, and Mount Kilimanjaro stood within its territory.

At the outset it seemed that the pre-war understanding between the powers to exempt black Africa from hostilities might prevail. The German governor, Schnee, forbade offensive operations; the Governor of British Kenya declared his colony had no ‘interest in the present war’. Moreover, neither governor disposed of any force with which to fight. They reckoned without the aggressiveness of the young men on both sides. Lettow-Vorbeck simply ignored Schnee and began assembling his forces, few though they were, about 2,500 askaris and 200 white officers. Nairobi, capital of Kenya, meanwhile began filling up with bellicose young settlers and white hunters, all bearing arms and demanding uniforms and a mission. Like the Confederate bloods and dandies of April 1861, they formed military units of their own, with outlandish names – Bowker’s Horse, the Legion of Frontiersmen – and marched out to repel Lettow-Vorbeck as he made his first move. In September the war was under way, whatever the governors’ wishes.

The home governments wanted war also. A German cruiser, the Königsberg, was operating off East Africa before the war began and opened hostilities by sinking a British warship, HMS Pegasus. Small though she was, her loss drove the admiral commanding the South African station to concentrate all his force, of three cruisers, against Königsberg. She was soon driven into the swampy depth of the Rufiji river, where her captain conducted a brilliant exercise in evasion that lasted 255 days. The cruiser was eventually sunk only after the Admiralty had sent out two shallow-draft monitors, the Severn and Mersey, from Britain to nail her in her lair. Even as a hulk, however, she continued to contribute to the campaign. Many of her crew went ashore to serve with Lettow-Vorbeck’s askaris and some of her guns were dismounted and used as field artillery.

Lettow’s aggressiveness had by then caused Britain to prepare a full-scale military expedition against him. He was not only raiding into Uganda and Kenya, where he raised the German flag on British territory under Mount Kilimanjaro, but conducting inland naval operations on the Great Lakes; prefabricated gun boats were eventually sent out from Britain to regain control of those inland waters. The most important reinforcement, however, was two brigades of British and Indian troops from India. The Indian regiments were second-rate but the British regulars should have compensated for that. They did not; the expedition’s first landing at Tanga on 2 November 1914 ended in humiliation. The Indians ran away, the British got lost; though outnumbered eight to one, the Germans easily drove their enemies back to the beaches, where they re-embarked on 5 November, leaving sixteen machine guns, hundreds of rifles and 600,000 rounds of ammunition behind.

These supplies would help to sustain von Lettow’s campaign throughout 1915, a slack period in which the British built up their strength and he learnt the essentials of the war he was going to fight. Better British troops arrived; he won a small victory at Jassin. The cost in German lives there and in ammunition – his askaris had fired off 200,000 rounds – taught Lettow that ‘we had to economise our forces to last out a long war . . . the need to restrict myself to guerrilla warfare was evidently imperative’. That, thereafter, would be his strategy.⁸ In March 1916, Jan Smuts arrived from South Africa, bringing the Defence Force troops released by the conquest of German South-West. He began to plan a convergent offensive, from Kenya, Nyasaland, the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Mozambique, designed to crush Lettow’s little army in the interior. Lettow had no intention of being caught. Instead he would resist the British as fiercely as he could, springing savage ambushes as they pushed forward; then, before they could bring superior numbers against him, he would slip away, destroying anything of value as he retreated. Since his soldiers could live off the land, and resupply themselves with ammunition by capture from the enemy, his capacity to evade defeat in the enormous spaces of the bush was almost limitless, as he would demonstrate throughout 1916, 1917 and 1918.

CRUISER WAR

Before Lettow set off on his extraordinary venture into the vastness of the African interior, while indeed he was still conducting his opening border skirmishes, another, briefer but dramatic campaign had been mounted by the overseas squadrons of the Imperial German Navy in the depths of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Germany’s main fleet, built to confront Britain with ‘risk’ to its dominant maritime position, was deliberately concentrated in Germany’s North Sea ports. It was from those places that it could menace the Royal Navy with the threat of a break-out on to the high seas and with the danger of a surprise encounter in which Britain’s superior numbers might be outbalanced by the vagaries of weather or chance. Germany also maintained, however, small forces in the Pacific, at Tsingtao and in the islands. In August, the cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were in the Carolines, Emden was at Tsingtao, Dresden and Karlsruhe were in the Caribbean, Leipzig was off the Pacific coast of Mexico and Nürnberg was en route to relieve her; the Königsberg, already mentioned, was on a lone mission off East Africa. Though few in number, these eight ships represented a major threat to Allied shipping, particularly to convoys bringing Australian and New Zealand troops to European waters, for they were of recent construction, fast, well-armed and commanded by officers of ability, notably Admiral Maximilian von Spee, who led the Scharnhorstand Gneisenau squadron. It was a major weakness of British naval planning that its own cruiser fleet consisted either of old, so-called ‘armoured’ ships too slow to catch their German equivalents, and too poorly protected and armed to harm them if taken at a disadvantage, or of light cruisers which had speed to match that of the Germans but lacked the firepower to fight. The technological gap was supposed to be filled by the newly fashionable battlecruisers, fast, lightly armoured Dreadnoughts, but their high construction costs had kept their numbers small while absorbing the funds which might have gone to modernising the conventional cruiser fleet. This unintended consequence would, in the first months of the war, cause the Royal Navy heavy loss of life and ships and grave damage to its prestige.

The navy lacked, moreover, any concerted plan to deal with an aggressive German cruising campaign. Its vast network of coaling stations diminished the incentive to plan for resupplying a pursuit across oceanic distances; the Germans, by contrast, had a train of colliers and began at once to capture prizes as a source of coal, food and water. They also sailed victualling ships from home waters to rendezvous with the raiders, and to act independently as armed merchant cruisers. If there was a weakness in the German arrangements, it was that meetings had to be arranged by wireless, in a code which the British quickly broke.

Two of the raiders were swiftly run down. Königsberg, the least well-handled, ceased to count after she was driven into the Rufiji delta. Emden, under an energetic captain, Karl von Müller, caused havoc in the Pacific and Indian oceans, though pursued at times not only by British but also French, Russian and Japanese ships. She was eventually intercepted and sunk by the Australian cruiser Sydney at Direction Island in the Cocos and Keeling group on 9 November 1914, after the local wireless station managed to get off a signal before the German landing party destroyed the transmitter. Sydney had been detached from one of the large escorted convoys bringing Australian troops to the Mediterranean. That was not quite the end of Emden’s remarkable cruise. The commander of the landing party on Direction Island evaded the Australians, appropriated a schooner, sailed it to the Dutch East Indies, got passage aboard a German steamer to Yemen in Arabia, fought off Bedouin attacks, reached the Hejaz railway built to bring pilgrims to Mecca and eventually arrived to a justifiably extravagant welcome in Constantinople in June 1915.⁹

Karlsruhe was destroyed by a mysterious internal explosion off Barbados on 4 November, after sinking sixteen merchant ships. Leipzig and Dresden, with varied adventures behind them, rendezvoused with Admiral von Spee in South American waters in October; Nürnberg had joined him earlier. These five ships then formed the most formidable threat to Allied control of the seas outside the North Sea. Spee exploited his advantage. Deterred from operating in the northern Pacific by the menace of the large Japanese fleet which cruised widely and aggressively in the early months of the war, mopping up many of the German island possessions it would use so successfully in 1941–4, Spee acted against the French possessions in Tahiti and the Marquesas but met resistance and found coaling difficult. With bold strategic sweep, he therefore decided to transfer from the Pacific to the South Atlantic, signalling Dresden, Leipzig and his colliers to meet him near Easter Island, the most remote inhabited spot on the globe.¹⁰

Interception of his insecure signals alerted the British admiral commanding the South American station, Christopher Cradock, of his intentions. Passing through the Straits of Magellan, Cradock brought his squadron into Chilean waters. The light cruiserGlasgow went ahead; Cradock followed with the cruisers Monmouth and Good Hope and the battleship Canopus, so old (1896) and slow that it was left to escort the accompanying colliers. Monmouth and Good Hope were almost as old, not much faster and poorly armed. They steamed to join Glasgow, which had put into the little Chilean port of Coronel. Intercepted intelligence then gave Spee the advantage. Hearing that Glasgow was at Coronel, he waited outside for the old cruisers to appear. When they did, on the evening of 1 November, he kept out of range until darkness fell, then opened fire in the gloaming.Monmouth and Good Hope were quickly sunk, not one of the 1,600 sailors aboard surviving. Glasgow escaped to warn Canopus and save her from a similar fate.

Coronel was the first British defeat at sea for a hundred years. The outrage it caused was enormous, far exceeding that following the loss of Hogue, Cressy and Aboukir, three other old cruisers sunk by submarine U-9 off Holland on 22 September. Admiral Sir John Fisher, who had become First Sea Lord on 31 October, at once set in motion a pan-oceanic redeployment of forces designed to intercept Spee wherever he moved. The Cape, South American and West African stations were reinforced, while the Japanese navy also repositioned units, so threatening Spee’s freedom of action in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.¹¹ Most dangerously for Spee, Fisher decided to detach two of his precious battlecruisers, Invincible and Inflexible, from the Grand Fleet and send them to the South Atlantic. Spee might still have remained free to cruise for a long time, losing himself in the vast expanses of the southern oceans and coaling from prizes and remote neutral ports, had he not decided to act aggressively and attack the British Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Having left the Pacific after Coronel, he arrived off Port Stanley on 8 December. Fatally for the Germans, Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee, commanding the battlecruiser squadron, had also decided to visit Port Stanley and was coaling his squadron when the Germans appeared. Making steam in haste, Sturdee left harbour and worked up speed to run the five German ships down. None was a match, for the battlecruisers were both faster than Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, his strongest ships, and far more heavily gunned. Bravely, Spee turned them to cover the escape of the others but was overwhelmed by salvoes of 12-inch shells at ranges his 8.2-inch guns could not match. Two of his light cruisers were also run down by Sturdee’s light cruisers. Only Dresden got away, to skulk for three months in the sub-Antarctic inlets around Cape Horn, until cornered and forced to scuttle on 14 March 1915, by a British squadron that included the only survivor of the Coronel disaster, HMS Glasgow.

The victory of the Falklands terminated the high seas activity of the German navy. A few armed merchant ships would subsequently manage to slip through the North Sea into great waters and raid the shipping lanes, but the navy’s regular units were not risked in such adventures. After the Falklands, indeed, the oceans belonged to the Allies and the only persistent naval surface fighting, pending a clash of the capital fleets in the North Sea, took place in landlocked waters, the Black Sea, the Baltic and the Adriatic. The Mediterranean was wholly controlled by the Royal and French Navies, assisted by the Italian after Italy’s entry, and their command of it was to be disturbed only by the appearance of German U-boats there in October 1915. Inside the Adriatic, cordoned at its bottom end by an Italian mine barrier anchored on Otranto, the Austrians waged a tit-for-tat war with the Italians, of which the only strategic point was to deny the Allies more direct amphibious access to the Balkan war zone than the Mediterranean coast allowed. A similar war was waged in the Baltic between Germany’s light forces and pre-Dreadnoughts and Russia’s Baltic fleet. There was much mine-laying, which deterred the Russians risking their Dreadnoughts far from Finnish ports, coastal bombardment and, eventually, some daring British submarine operations. Russia’s beautiful British-built Rurik (1906), model of the cruisers Britain should have been building for herself, was frequently and effectively engaged until badly damaged by a mine in November 1916.¹² From a naval point of view, the war in the Baltic was most notable for what did not happen there. Fisher, as ready with bad as with good ideas, had advocated a large-scale naval penetration of the Baltic as early as 1908. In 1914 he converted Churchill, equally undiscriminating if a strategic project were grand enough, and even secured funds to build three huge shallow-draft battlecruisers to make the attempt. Fortunately better sense prevailed and the monsters, which could outrun destroyers at speed, were spared inevitable destruction in the Baltic’s narrow waters to become post-war aircraft carriers.¹³

In the Black Sea, where Russia maintained the second of her three fleets – the third, in the Pacific, played a minor part in the conquest of Germany’s possessions there and the destruction of her raiding cruisers – her command was complete. The Turks, after their declaration of hostilities in November 1914, had neither sufficient nor good enough ships to challenge, and the Russians, if sporadically and inefficiently, mined Turkish waters and attacked Turkish ports and shipping at will. Such operations, however, were peripheral. Turkey did not depend on sea lines of communication to sustain her war effort nor could Russia project military power through her fleet; a project to land the V Caucasian Corps near Constantinople in 1916 was abandoned after the difficulties became apparent.¹⁴

Yet Turkey’s navy was, nevertheless, to prove, even if indirectly, one of the most significant instruments in the widening of the world crisis. The Ottoman government, under the control of the ‘Young Turk’ nationalists since 1908, had spent the years since taking power in modernising the empire’s institutions. That was a recurrent enterprise. Attempts to modernise in the first years of the nineteenth century had resulted in the murder of the Sultan, a second attempt in 1826, apparently successful, had foundered on the profound conservatism of courtiers and religious leaders. All Europeans who dealt with the Turks – and Germans, including Moltke the Elder, were prominent among them – recorded their frustration and contempt at the Ottomans’ seemingly incurable indolence. The Germans nevertheless persisted with eventual success. The Young Turks, who included numbers of Balkan Muslims, seemed different from the old, welcoming German military advice and commercial investment. The railway system benefited from German money, the Ottoman army was re-equipped with Mauser rifles and Krupp guns. The Young Turks nevertheless looked to Britain, as all emergent powers of the period did, for naval armament and in 1914 were about to take delivery from British yards of two magnificent Dreadnoughts, the Reshadieh and the Sultan Osman, the latter the most heavily armed ship in the world, with fourteen 12-inch guns. On the outbreak of war with Germany, Britain peremptorily purchased both. Two days earlier, however, on 2 August, Turkey had concluded with Germany an alliance against Russia, her neighbour, oldest enemy, protector of her ex-Balkan subject peoples and conqueror of vast swathes of former Ottoman territory.¹⁵ Germany at once sailed its Mediterranean squadron, comprising the battlecruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau, into Turkish waters, evading a mismanaged British effort to head them off. On arrival at Constantinople, they hoisted the Turkish flag and changed their names to Sultan Selim and Midillui: Souchon, the squadron commander, became a Turkish admiral. British protests were met with the riposte that the ships had been ‘purchased’ as necessary replacements for the two Dreadnoughts commandeered by Britain which, as Erin and Agincourt, now formed part of the Grand Fleet.

For the next three months, Goeben and Breslau remained peacefully at anchor off Constantinople. The conditions for Turkey’s entry into the war were, however, already in place, for the treaty pledged her to assist Germany in the event of the latter having to support Austria-Hungary against Russia, a diplomatic circumstance already in force when it was signed. Enver Pasha, the leading Young Turk and Minister of War, was meanwhile completing his military preparations. Liman von Sanders, his senior German military adviser, expected him to open hostilities by an expedition into the great plains of the Russian Ukraine. Instead, Enver chose to make his attack into the wild mountains of the Caucasus, where terrain and the Muslim loyalties of the population would, he believed, work to Turkey’s advantage. As a public signal of precipitation of the new war, however, he sent Souchon, Goeben, Breslau and some of Turkey’s own raggle-taggle warships to engage the Russian fleet ‘wherever it was found’.¹⁶ Souchon, interpreting his orders broadly, divided his force and, on 29 October, attacked the Russian ports of Odessa, Sebastopol, Novorossisk and Feodosia. Three days later, Russia declared war on Turkey and by 5 November Turkey was at war with France and Britain also.

THE WAR IN THE SOUTH AND EAST

Turkey’s entry did not merely add another member to the alliance of the Central Powers or another enemy to those the Allies were fighting already. It created a whole new theatre of war, actual and potential, drawn in several dimensions, religious and insurrectionary as well as purely military. Turkey was the seat of the Muslim Caliphate and, as the successor of Mahomet, Sultan Mehmed V declared ‘holy war’ on 11 November and called on all Muslims in British, French and Russian territory to rise in arms. The effect was negligible. Though the British felt concern that the Muslim soldiers of their Indian Army might be swayed, few were, and those mainly Pathans of the North-West Frontier, natural rebels who ‘would probably be sniping at British troops within a year or two of going on pension and at home in their tribe . . . [they] owed allegiance to no man, living in an anarchic paradise ruled by the bullet and the blood feud’.¹⁷ The troopers of the 15th Lancers who mutinied at Basra in February 1915 were Pathans, as were the sepoys of the 130th Baluchis who had mutinied at Rangoon in January. Both episodes were explicable in terms of unwillingness to serve outside India, a repetitive occurrence in the Indian Army. The mutiny of the 5th Light Infantry at Singapore on 15 February 1915 was more serious, since the sepoys were not Pathans but Punjabi Muslims, the backbone of the Indian Army, who did not merely disobey orders but murdered thirty-two Europeans and released some interned Germans, whom they hailed as fellow-combatants in the holy war.¹⁸ Most of the Germans, putting loyalty to colour above country, rejected liberation and the mutiny was swiftly crushed. The loyal half of the regiment was, however, judged too untrustworthy to commit to any regular theatre of war and was sent to fight in the Kamerun campaign.¹⁹ In four other cases the British decided not to risk using battalions largely Muslim in composition against the Turks; yet large numbers of Muslims did fight against the Sultan-Caliph’s soldiers without demur. The numerous Muslim regiments of the French army fought the Germans without paying the Sultan’s call to jihad any attention whatsoever.

Mehmed V’s holy war was therefore a flop. The engagement of his empire, by contrast, was a strategic event of the greatest importance, for so wide was its geographical extent that its territory touched that of his enemies at many points, so ensuring the opening of new fronts wherever it did. In the Persian Gulf it formally did not, but the effect was the same, for Britain regarded the Gulf and its coastline as a British lake. The ‘Trucial’ Sheikhs of the Arabian coast had been bound by treaty since 1853 to refer disputes between them to the Government of India, whose power to maintain peace and punish its breach the same treaty established. The Viceroy’s political officers acted as residents, in effect overseers, at the sheikhs’ courts and, on the Persian side, as consuls with wide executive powers; since 1907 Persia had been divided into northern, Russian, and south-western, British, spheres of influence, an arrangement the feeble Persian government had no means to resist.²⁰ The discovery of oil had further strengthened Britain’s interest in the Gulf and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s refinery on the Persian island of Abadan at the head of the Gulf was by 1914 an imperial outpost in all but name. As the main supplier of fuel for the latest generation of oil-burning Dreadnoughts (the Royal Sovereignand Queen Elizabeth classes), the company was judged a vital strategic asset and a controlling interest in its shares had been bought by Britain, at Winston Churchill’s instigation, in 1913.²¹

Turkey’s undisguised inclination towards Germany from August 1914 onwards decided Britain to secure its position at the head of the Gulf, which was Turkish territory, by military occupation. The obvious source of troops for the operation was India and in September part of the 6th Indian Division was shipped to Bahrein, then the most important of the Gulf sheikhdoms. On Turkey’s declaration, the British government also took the opportunity to recognise the separate sovereignty of Kuwait, while the convoy carrying the division proceeded to the mouth of the Shatt el-Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Turkish Mesopotamia, bombarded the Turkish port and landed troops on 7 November. The expeditionary force then marched inland and by 9 December had occupied Basra, the chief city of southern Mesopotamia, and advanced to Qurna, where the two rivers join. There it paused, while decisions were taken about its future employment. They were to prove among the most ill-judged of the war.

Meanwhile the Turks had taken an initiative of their own in another corner of their enormous empire. Egypt remained legally part of it but, since 1882, had been under the administration of a British ‘Agent’ with powers of government. The higher tax officials were British and so were the senior officers of the police and army; Kitchener, British Minister of War, had first made his name as Sirdar of the Egyptian army. One of the few positive results of Mehmed V’s call to holy war was to prompt his nominal viceroy of Egypt, the Khedive, to reaffirm his loyalty.²² The British instantly abolished his office and declared a protectorate. That was resented by the Egyptian upper classes but, in a country where all power rested with the new protector and most of the commercial life was in the hands of expatriates, British but also French, Italian and Greek, their objections were wholly ineffective. Moreover, Egypt was filling up with troops, Territorials sent from Britain to replace the regular British garrison of the Suez Canal, recalled to France, and Indians, Australians and New Zealanders staging to Europe. By January 1915 their numbers had risen to 70,000.

It was this moment that the Turks, at German prompting, chose to attack the Suez Canal, which Britain had illegally closed to enemy belligerents at the outbreak of war. The conception was faultless, for the Canal was the most important line of strategic communication in the Allies’ war zone, through which passed not only much essential supply but, at that moment, the convoys bringing the ‘imperial’ contingents from India and Australasia to Europe. The difficulty was in execution, for the Turkish approaches to the Canal lay across the hundred waterless miles of the Sinai desert. Nevertheless, careful preparations had been made. Pontoons for a water crossing were prefabricated in Germany and smuggled, through pro-German Bulgaria, to Turkey and then sent by rail across Syria to Palestine. In November the Ottoman Fourth Army was concentrated at Damascus, under the command of General Ahmed Cemal, with a German officer, Colonel Franz Kress von Kressenstein, as his Chief of Staff. Both hoped there would be an Egyptian rising once the attack was launched: even more wishfully, they expected to ‘be joined by 70,000 Arab nomads’.²³ The approach chosen promised well, a direct march across the sands rather than down the traditional coastal route. Nevertheless, even in this very early age of aerial surveillance, a large army could not hope to pass unnoticed in terrain totally without cover during a journey of several days. It was, indeed, detected by a French aircraft before it reached the Canal, near Ismailia above the central Great Bitter Lake, on 3 February. The British were well prepared and, though fighting lasted a week, only a single Turkish platoon managed to drop its pontoon, so laboriously transported from Central Europe, into the Canal’s waters. Cemal, frustrated by British resistance and the failure of the Arab tribes to ride to his support – Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, was already in revolt – turned his troops away and retreated.

The war in the Middle East

The only outcome of the campaign was to keep in Egypt a larger British garrison than necessity dictated during 1915. Kress, however, remained in place and would cause the British trouble later; and there was one flicker of activity by the Arabs. In Libya, taken by Italy from Turkey in 1911, the fundamentalist Senussi sect embarked on a tiny holy war of raids against the western Egyptian border, the Italian occupiers, French North Africa and the Darfur province of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Some of the veiled Tuareg warrior tribe joined them and the Senussi leader, Sidi Ahmad, found a secure base in the Siwa oasis, ancient seat of the oracle to which Alexander the Great made his pilgrimage in 331 BC before setting out on the conquest of the Persian empire. Sidi Ahmad appears to have been inspired by the hope that his display of loyalty to the Caliph would win him the guardianship of Mecca in place of the rebellious Hussein. In the event, his Ottoman liaison officer, Jaafar Pasha, after being wounded and captured by South African troops at Aqqaqia on 26 February 1916, defected to the Allies and became commander of Hussein’s northern army in the later stages of the successful Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule in 1916–18.

The third front opened by Turkey’s entry into the war, that in the Caucasus, was by far the most important, both for the scale of the fighting it precipitated and because of that fighting’s consequences. The Ottoman advance into Russian Caucasia so alarmed the Tsarist high command that it prompted an appeal to Britain and France for diversionary assistance, and so led to the campaign of Gallipoli, one of the Great War’s most terrible battles but also its only epic.

Enver, whose conception the Caucasus campaign was, chose the theatre for a variety of reasons. It was far from the main areas of deployment of the Russian army in Poland, therefore difficult to reinforce and already stripped of troops to fight the Germans and Austrians. It was of emotional importance to the Turks, as a homeland of fellow Muslims, many speaking tribal languages related to their own. It was, Enver believed, a potential centre of revolt against Russian rule, which had been imposed by brutal military action in the first half of the nineteenth century. To the Russians the wars in Caucasia had been a romantic epic, celebrated in the writings of Pushkin, Lermontov and the young Tolstoy, in which heroes of the times had battled in chivalrous combat against noble savage chieftains; Shamil, the most famous of them, had won the admiration even of his enemies.²⁴ To the mountaineers themselves, the Russian conquest had been the bitterest of oppressions, marked by massacre and deportation. ‘By 1864’, one contemporary calculated, ‘450,000 mountaineers had been forced to resettle . . . entire tribes were decimated and relocated to assure Russian control of key areas, routes and coastlines.’²⁵ Enver counted on the memories of these atrocities to bring the ‘Outside Turks’, as Turkish nationalists liked to call all Muslims residing on territory once or potentially Ottoman, to Turkey’s side. His plans, indeed, went wider, envisaging a dual-pronged offensive – of which the advance to the Suez Canal was one, that into the Caucasus the other – that would result in the raising of revolt in Egypt, Libya and the Sudan and in Persia, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Enver’s grand design was flawed on two counts. The first was that the non-Turkish peoples of the Ottoman empire, who formed the majority of the Sultan’s subjects, were already awakening to their own nationalisms; they included not only the Arabs, who outnumbered the Turks, but such important minorities as the Muslim Kurds.²⁶ During his preparations for the advances on the Suez Canal, Cemal Pasha had found time to execute a number of Syrian Arab nationalists, who would become the original martyrs of the Arab renaissance, while many Kurds, oppressed by Ottoman officialdom for years past, took the opportunity the war presented to desert with their arms to the Russians as soon as mobilised.²⁷ In the circumstances, ‘Outside Turks’, whatever their historical associations with the Ottoman caliphate, were unlikely to respond to his appeal to holy war. The second flaw in Enver’s plan was graver still, being unalterably geographical. ‘The Caucasus’, the Russian General Veliaminov had written in 1825, ‘may be likened to a mighty fortress, marvellously strong by nature . . . only a thoughtless man would attempt to escalade such a stronghold.’

Enver was worse than thoughtless. His decision to attack the Caucasus at the beginning of winter, during which temperatures descend to twenty degrees of frost even in the lower passes and snow lies for six months, was foolhardy. He had superior numbers, about 150,000 in the Third Army, to the Russians’ 100,000, but his line of supply was defective since, beyond the single railway, the troops depended on the roads, which were too few and snowbound to bear the weight of necessary traffic. His plan was to draw the Russians forward and then strike behind to cut them off from their bases. The first stage of the scheme succeeded, for the Russians favoured him by advancing during November as far as the great fortress of Erzerum and to Lake Van. This was the territory where the Seljuk ancestors of the Ottomans had won their victory of Manzikert against the Byzantines in 1071, the ‘dreadful day’ from which their decline to extinction at Constantinople in 1453 dated. The Turks then had been free-ranging horse nomads, unencumbered by heavy equipment. The Ottoman Third Army brought with it 271 pieces of artillery and proceeded ponderously. The weather, too, slowed its advance and caused much suffering and death; one division lost 4,000 of its 8,000 men to frostbite in four days of advance. On 29 December 1914 the Russian commander, General Mishlaevski, counter-attacked at Sarikamis, near Kars, on the railway between Lake Van and Erzerum, and triumphed. The victory was complete by 2 January, when the whole of the Turkish IX Corps surrendered, and in mid-month no more than 18,000 of the 95,000 Turks who had fought the campaign survived. Thirty thousand are said to have died of cold, an entirely plausible outcome of a campaign fought in winter at a mean elevation of 6,500 feet. Much of the credit for the victory belonged to Mishlaevski’s Chief of Staff, General Nikolai Yudenich, who subsequently held command in the Caucasus with great success until the end of Russia’s part in the war. The victory was, however, to have one lamentable local outcome. Among the troops the Russians had employed was a division of Christian Armenians, many of them disaffected Ottoman subjects, who took the opportunity offered by Russian sponsorship to commit massacre inside Turkish territory. Their participation in the campaign, and the declaration in April 1915 of a provisional Armenian government by nationalists on Russian-held territory, underlay the Ottoman government’s undeclared campaign of genocide against their Armenian subjects which, between June 1915 and late 1917, led to the deaths of nearly 700,000 men, women and children, force-marched into the desert to die of starvation and thirst.

Despite its initial failure in the Caucasus, which the Ottoman government took care to conceal at home, Turkey’s influence on the war continued to ramify. For all its long decline, which had begun with the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699 and persisted until the conclusion of the Second Balkan War in 1913, Turkey remained, in the memory of its neighbours, particularly its European neighbours, a menacing military presence. For much of the preceding six centuries, ever since the Ottoman Turks had established their first foothold on the continent at Gallipoli in 1354, the Turks had been on the offensive against Christian Europe and, in the Balkans, had long been entrenched as occupiers and overlords. Greece, the first of the southern European Christian countries to win full independence from the Sultan, had done so only in 1832. Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania had achieved freedom much later, and the presence of Muslim minorities on their borders or within their territories was a constant reminder of former Ottoman overlordship. Italians, too, kept the memory of Ottoman power strongly in mind. Venice had waged centuries of war against Turkey and the loss to the Turks of the Venetian island empire in the Aegean rankled with them almost as much as did the more recent loss of the ports across the Adriatic to Austria. Turkey, weak though it had become, remained the only great power in the eastern Mediterranean. Its revival under the Young Turks had awoken ancient south European fears, which its defeat in the Balkan Wars had not quelled. Its alliance with Germany and Austria and its entry into the war had reinforced them.

Moreover, the reputation of the Turk as a fighting man had never dulled. Pony-riding nomad he might no longer be, farmer he might have become, but the hardiness of the Anatolian peasant, indifferent to cold, heat, privation and apparently danger also, was known to all his neighbours. The Ottoman forces, under the Young Turks, had undergone a programme of modernisation that promised to make better use of his soldierly qualities. The army, organised into four Armies, based at Istanbul, Baghdad, Damascus and Erzinjan, could put thirty-six divisions into the field. Divisions were weaker in artillery than their European equivalents, with only 24–36 guns, but the material was modern, and there were sixty-four machine-gun companies.²⁸ The supply and administration of the army, despite the efforts of the German military mission, led by General Liman von Sanders, remained dilatory, but the Turkish, if not the Arab, component of the army made up for shortcomings by its ability to live on very little and to march great distances without complaint. The Ottoman style of warfare had also traditionally laid great emphasis on digging. Behind earthworks, as at Plevna in 1877, the Turkish soldier fought with endurance and tenacity.

Turkey’s decision to attack Russia in the Caucasus, however, its attempt against Egypt and its need to find forces to oppose the British expedition to the Tigris and Euphrates, appeared to create a military vacuum in the eastern Mediterranean that could be exploited by those with ambitions on its territory. Greece had such ambitions and, under its great nationalist leader, Venizelos, tilted towards joining the Allies. It was deterred by its military weakness and its common border with pro-German Bulgaria. Italy’s territorial ambitions lay towards Austria first, from which it had failed to ‘redeem’ the Italian-speaking parts of the Tyrol and Slovenia in the last Austro-Italian War of 1866, but also towards the Turkish Dodecanese islands (of which she had been in occupation since 1912) and part of Turkish Syria. Diplomatically, Italy was still a party to the Triple Alliance of 1906, binding her to Germany as well as Austria, but had wriggled out of its provisions in August by a narrow interpretation of its terms, recognising that it was not strong enough to fight France by land or Britain and France by sea. The Italian navy, though recently modernised, was outgunned by their Mediterranean fleets.²⁹ Moreover, while Austria proved unwilling to offer any transfer of territory as a bribe to bring Italy in on her side, the Russians had made free with promises of Austrian territory if she joined the Allies, and their readiness to alter boundaries in the event of an Allied victory aroused hopes that the other Allies might do likewise. In March the Italian ambassador in London began negotiations with Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, about what Italy might be offered if she came over to the Allies, and the talks proceeded into April.³⁰ With Germany heavily engaged in France and Russia, Austria in the throes of a military crisis and Turkey overcommitted at the Asiatic borders of her empire, the reversion of alliance appeared not only risk-free but potentially highly profitable.

Moreover, Britain was already undertaking operations in the eastern Mediterranean which gave assurance that Italy would not be fighting alone in that theatre. Russia’s appeal for assistance against Turkey, following the attack into the Caucasus, had had its effect. On 16 February part of the British Mediterranean fleet had entered the mouth of the Dardanelles, the waterway between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and bombarded the Turkish forts. The Italians had done likewise during their war with Turkey in 1911–12 and had sent light forces as far as the channel’s narrows before they were turned back. Italy’s purpose then had been to bring pressure on Turkey from Russia, by interfering with the economic life of Russia’s Black Sea provinces, dependent as they were on the Dardenelles for access to the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Britain’s purpose in 1915 was wider by far: to open a supply route to Russia through the Dardanelles and, in so doing, to ‘knock Turkey out of the war’ by bombarding Istanbul. An indirect effect of Britain’s naval action against Turkey-in-Europe, however, was to buttress Italian resolution, promising as it did to sustain Serbia’s continued resistance to Austria, thereby weakening the Austrians’ ability to deploy troops on the Austro-Italian border, to deter Bulgaria from hostilities and eventually to bring arms and war supplies to Russia in quantities large enough to arm its unequipped millions and to reverse the balance of advantage on the Eastern Front.

Territorial avarice and strategic calculation prodded Italy towards a declaration of war throughout March and April. The German ambassador, Prince Bernhard Bülow, laboured to check the momentum, even offering Italy the Austrian territory Vienna had previously been unwilling to give. The majority of Italians, people and parliamentarians alike, had no enthusiasm for the dangerous adventure. The impetus came from Salandra, the Prime Minister, Sonnino, the Foreign Minister, the King, Victor Emmanuel III, and a collection of political and cultural revolutionaries, including Mussolini, then a socialist, the poet D’Annunzio and the artist Marinetti, inventor of Futurism.³¹ The last, in particular, saw war as a means of dragging a backward Italy into the present and modernising it even against its will. The final stages of war preparations were conducted as a virtual conspiracy between Salandra, Sonnino and the King. On 26 April a Treaty of London was signed in secret with Britain, France and Russia, committing Italy to go to war within one month (in return for most of the Austrian territory it wanted, together with the Dodecanese islands in the eastern Mediterranean). On 23 May she declared war on Austria, though not yet against Germany.

From the beginning things went badly, as any realistic appreciation of the state of the Italian army and the nature of the terrain in which it would have to operate should have warned. The whole of the Italian frontier with Austria rested against the outworks of the highest mountains in Europe, from the Tyrol in the west to the Julian Alps in the east, forming a semi-circle of often precipitous crags 375 miles in extent, along which the enemy everywhere held the crests. At the western end, the Trentino, nine routes led through passes into the mountains; at the eastern end, where the Isonzo river cuts through the curtain, there is an avenue of advance. The Trentino, however, was a detached pocket of Austrian territory and so an unprofitable objective, while beyond the Isonzo valley the ground rises to form two desolate plateaux, the Bainsizza and the Carso, ‘enormous natural fortresses towering two thousand feet or more above the surrounding lowlands’. The former is broken by a succession of steep ridges, the latter has been described as a ‘howling wilderness of stones sharp as knives’.³²

The terrain would have tried the skills of the best mountain troops. Italy possessed such soldiers, recruited from its own alpine districts, but they were few in number, forming only two brigades equipped with their own mountain artillery.³³ The majority of the army came from towns and farms, a quarter from the south and Sicily. The southerners had been subjects of the Kingdom of Italy for less than fifty years, had a low military reputation and looked to America rather than the cold and distant north as a point of emigration from their poor villages and overworked fields. The army as a whole was undertrained, it having no dedicated manoeuvre areas equivalent to those of France or Germany, was deficient in modern artillery, had only 120 heavy guns and had generally not made good its losses in all forms of equipment suffered during the Turkish War in Libya of 1911–12. Though able to put twenty-five infantry divisions into the field at the outbreak, it would remain the weakest among those of the major combatants throughout the war.

Its main strength was the officer corps it had inherited from the Kingdom of Savoy, whose army had been the instrument of the unification of Italy in 1870. Patriotic, professional and well-educated – the King of Savoy’s army was the only one in Europe in which Jews enlisted freely and rose to high rank – the northern officers knew their business and had a mission to teach it to others. The Chief of Staff, Luigi Cadorna, was a martinet. He not only stood on his constitutional rights of supreme authority – independent of King and Prime Minister – over the army once war began; he exercised that authority with a brutality not shown by any other general of the First World War. During its course, he dismissed 217 generals from duty and, in the crisis of 1917, ordered the summary shooting of officers of retreating units with pitiless inflexibility.³⁴ This style of command, as opposed to leadership, had its effect on the Italian army at the outset. Hopeless attacks were renewed, heavy losses accepted with an abnegation as remarkable as that of the British on the Somme or the French at Verdun. Indeed, given the uniquely impenetrable nature of the front the Italian army was set to attack, its early display of self-sacrifice may be thought unparalleled by any other. The price was paid later, in its moral collapse at Caporetto in October 1917.

Cadorna’s plan for the opening of the war promised a rapid breakthrough that would avert losses. Choosing the Isonzo as the front of attack, he foresaw an advance, once the mountain barrier was broken, through the gateways cut by the rivers Drava and Sava to Klagenfurt and Agram (Zagreb) and thence into the heartland of the Austrian empire. His hopes resembled those of the Russians who, earlier in 1915, had believed that, once the crestline of the Carpathians could be taken, they would descend victorious into the Hungarian plain and capture Budapest. Cadorna’s were even more misplaced. The land beyond the Isonzo is not a proper plain and the Julian Alps are an obstacle far more formidable than the Carpathians. When the Italian army attacked in what would become known as the First – of twelve, though the future kindly hid that from those involved – Battle of the Isonzo, beginning on 23 June 1915, its advanced guards did little more than establish contact with the enemy front line. That consisted of a single entrenchment, weakly manned. The Austrian army, already fighting a two-front war, in Poland and Serbia, had been holding the Italian border before the outbreak of hostilities with local militia battalions. In February some of these had been organised into two divisions. Early in May another division was detached from Serbia and later in the month three more sent from Poland.³⁵ By 23 May, the day of Italy’s entry, General Boroevic, the Austrian commander of the Isonzo sector, had scraped together seven divisions in total, to form the Fifth Army, but they were heavily outnumbered. Had the precaution not been taken to dynamite shelters in the rock of the Carso and Bainsizza, and had the Italians been able to deploy more than 212 guns, Cadorna’s hopes of a breakthrough might have been achieved. As it was, the Italian infantry, moving forward with great bravery but little tactical skill, were stopped in no man’s land. Nearly 2,000 were killed and 12,000 wounded. The very high proportion of wounded was to prove a recurrent feature of the campaign, rock splintered by exploding shells becoming secondary projectiles which caused frequent injury, particularly to the head, and eyes.

There were to be three more battles of the Isonzo in 1915, in July, October and November, each incurring a heavier toll of killed and wounded, 6,287, 10,733, 7,498 dead respectively, for almost no gain of ground at all. The Austrians also suffered heavily, since artillery had the same effect on defenders in their rock-cut trenches as on attackers in the open, and by the end of the Fourth Battle they counted 120,000 killed, wounded and missing.³⁶ Nevertheless, they had held their positions and were beginning to receive reinforcements to strengthen the overpressed trench garrisons which had borne the brunt of the first months of fighting. By the end of 1915 the Isonzo front had been stabilised and no longer posed a major hazard to the strategic provisions of the Central Powers.

Italy’s decision to go to war had, in truth, been ill-timed. If taken earlier, during the desperate battles around Lemberg, which tried the Austrians so hard, or later, when the British army had developed its full fighting strength and the Russians had staged their military recovery, an Italian initiative might have precipitated a real crisis for the German and Austrian general staffs. As events fell out, the First Battle of the Isonzo was narrowly preceded by a genuine German-Austrian victory, the breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow, which devastated the Russian position on the Eastern Front, saved the Austrian army from impending collapse and won the breathing space for Germany in its two-front war that would allow it to mount the Verdun offensive against France in 1916.

Gorlice-Tarnow was to be a second Limanowa-Lapanow, the battle that had saved Austria-Hungary from disaster in December 1914, but on a larger scale and with far more dramatic consequences. Like Limanowa, Gorlice was launched on a narrow front, in the gap between the River Vistula and the Carpathian Mountains; unlike Limanowa, it was to be a German rather than an Austrian victory for, though Conrad von Hötzendorf contributed sizeable numbers to the striking force, its cutting edge was German and so was its direction. The plan was Austrian, nevertheless, in its conception. Conrad was aware that the Russian army, for all its superiority of numbers, was in severe material difficulty. Between January and April, its divisions on the Eastern Front, excepting the small number in the Caucasus, received from the factories only two million shells, at a time when preparatory bombardments with several hundred thousand shells were becoming the norm; worse, the output of the Russian arsenals was insufficient to provide soldiers with the most essential tool of warfare, a personal weapon.³⁷ About 200,000 rifles were needed each month, to equip the new intakes of recruits, but only 50,000 were being produced. The stories of Russian infantrymen waiting unarmed to inherit the rifle of another killed or wounded were not tittle-tattle; they were nothing less than the truth.³⁸ Shell shortages, admittedly, were the common experience of all armies in 1914–15. All had myopically underestimated shell expenditure in intensive fighting, despite the evidence from the Russo-Japanese War that daily rates consistently exceeded factory output, with the result that production often lagged behind use by a factor of ten or more. In April 1915, for example, the field artillery of the BEF was receiving ten rounds of 18-pounder ammunition per gun per day, when ten rounds was easily shot off in a minute of bombardment.³⁹ Britain managed to increase its production of field-artillery ammunition from 3,000 rounds per month at the outbreak to 225,000 rounds by April 1915, and acquired other stocks by placing purchasing orders in America, but was still obliged to adjust demand to supply by limiting expenditure to a fixed number of rounds per day. The French and Germans were similarly obliged, though industrial mobilisation would dramatically increase output during 1915.⁴⁰ Russia would also, by 1916, secure adequate, if not ample, supplies of shell, much of it from British and American sources. In 1915, however, Russia’s deficiency was serious, and compounded by inefficiency in distribution. For the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive, the Germans accumulated a stock of a million shells, a quantity available to the Russians only in a few fortified sectors, such as Novogeorgevisk and Kovno, where shells were stockpiled in quantities not disclosed by the fortress commanders to the General Staff.⁴¹

The covert concentration of men, shells and guns on the Gorlice-Tarnow sector during April 1915 therefore predisposed towards a victory. The front was short, only thirty miles. On the Russian side, it was defended by the fourteen infantry and five cavalry divisions of General Radko-Dmitriev’s Third Army; opposite the assault sector, between Gorlice and Tarnow, the front was held by only two divisions, the 9th and 31st. Against them the Germans had positioned some of the best of their troops, including the 1st and 2nd Guard Divisions and the 19th and 20th (Hanoverian) Divisions. On the whole attack front, the Germans and Austrians had a superiority of over three to two in men and a very large superiority in guns, generously supplied with ammunition; their total artillery strength was 2,228 guns, heavy and light. The Russian entrenchments were sketchy and the no man’s land separating them from the enemy’s was wide, enabling the Germans and Austrians to push their outposts forward and dig new positions, close to the Russian wire, in the days before the attack, without being detected.

The plan for the offensive was Falkenhayn’s, who entrusted its execution to Mackensen, victor in the East Prussian battles of 1914. Ludendorff and Hindenburg would have preferred not to prepare a breakthrough in the centre but to launch a double envelopment of the Russians from the Baltic and Carpathian fronts; like Schlieffen, they disfavoured ‘ordinary victories’, which led only to Russian withdrawal to lines further east, and argued for cutting off the enemy from the great spaces of the Tsar’s empire by a manoeuvre of encirclement. Though exercising command in the east, they were, however, subordinate to Falkenhayn, whose fear was that their encirclement plans would require withdrawals of troops from the west on a scale dangerously weakening the German front there, and so overruled them. Moreover, the Ludendorff-Hindenburg plan placed a reliance upon Austrian participation which the continuing decline in quality of the Habsburg forces, Falkenhayn believed, made unrealistic.⁴²

Mackensen’s operation order stressed the importance of a break-in rapid and deep enough to prevent the Russians bringing forward reserves to stem the flow. ‘The attack of Eleventh Army must, if its mission is to be fulfilled, be pushed forward fast . . . only through rapidity will the danger of the enemy renewing his resistance in the rearward positions be averted . . . Two methods are essential: deep penetration by the infantry and a rapid follow-up by the artillery.’⁴³ These orders anticipated the tactics which would be employed with such success against the British and French in 1918. The Germans were as yet insufficiently skilled to make them work against the densely defended trench fronts in the west. Against the Russians in Poland, where barbed-wire barriers were thin, entrenched zones shallow and supporting artillery short of shell, they were to prove decisive. The preparatory bombardment, which began on the evening of 1 May, devastated the Russian front line. On the morning of May 2 the attacking German infantry stormed forward to meet little resistance. Soon waves of Russian infantrymen were stumbling rearward, casting away their weapons and equipment and abandoning not only the first but also the second and third lines of trenches. By 4 May the German Eleventh Army had reached open country and was pressing forward, while 140,000 Russian prisoners marched in long columns to the rear. As the break-in widened, so did it deepen. By 13 May the German-Austrian front had reached the outskirts of Przemysl in the south and Lodz in central Poland. On 4 August the Germans entered Warsaw and between 17 August and 4 September the four historic Russian frontier fortresses of Kovno, Novogeorgievsk, Brest Litovsk and Grodno were surrendered to the enemy. The number of Russian prisoners taken had risen to 325,000 and 3,000 guns had also been lost.

The scale of the Austro-German victory had encouraged Ludendorff during June to press for a favourable reconsideration of his two-prong plan by Falkenhayn and the Kaiser. At a meeting, under the Kaiser’s chairmanship, with Falkenhayn, Mackensen and Conrad, at Pless on 3 June, he requested reinforcements that would enable him to mount a wide sweeping movement from the Baltic coast southwards, cutting off the Russian armies as they retreated eastward and so, he argued, bringing the war in the east to an end. Falkenhayn, concerned as ever for the security of the Western Front, disagreed, demanding a net withdrawal of divisions from Poland to France. Conrad, who was incensed by Italy’s entry into the war, wanted to send troops to the Isonzo front. Mackensen was for persisting in his demonstrably successful offensive in the centre. He, with Falkenhayn’s consent, got his way.⁴⁴ As the advance continued, however, Ludendorff returned to the issue. Meeting the Kaiser and Falkenhayn again, at Posen on 30 June, he outlined an even more ambitious plan which would carry the German armies in the north from the mouth of the River Niemen on the Baltic as far as the Pripet marshes in the centre of the Eastern Front in a manoeuvre designed to cut the Russians off from their heartland and force a capitulation. Once again he was overruled and though he was permitted to stage an offensive in the Baltic sector, it was to take a frontal form as a subsidiary effort to Mackensen’s continuing push eastward.

Outraged though Ludendorff was by what he saw as the supreme command’s timid refusal to embrace the grand solution, Falkenhayn was reading the strategic situation more accurately than he. The Russians had been hard hit at Gorlice-Tarnow and had surrendered more ground than they would have freely chosen to do. By late July, however, they had accepted that the state of their army and its shortage of weapons and ammunition left them no recourse but retreat. The Germans had the impression of breasting forward against an undefended front. The Russians knew that they were deliberately retreating, shortening their front by withdrawal from the great bulge in central Poland and consequently lengthening the enemy lines of communication as the Germans struggled to follow, across country deficient in railways and roads, particularly all-weather roads. The heavy vehicles of the German supply columns were rattled to pieces by the rutted surface of the Polish farmers’ byways, and units got forward only by requisitioning the rattle-trap panje waggons of the rural population. ‘Every day the Russians would retreat three miles or so, construct a new line and wait for the Germans to stumble up towards it . . . In time the Germans came up to primaeval forest . . . and the great marshes of the Pripet. The railway lines stopped on the Vistula [in the German rear]; even field-railways came only to . . . the Narev [river] and supplies had to be dragged forward for the next forty or fifty miles.’⁴⁵

By September the Russians had, by abandoning the Polish salient, shortened their front by nearly half, from a thousand to six hundred miles, an economy in space which produced a major economy in force, releasing reserves to oppose the German advance along the Baltic coast and in the centre, and even to counter-attack in the south against the Austrians at Lutsk in September. Ludendorff achieved a final success of his own in September, when he took Vilna in Russian Lithuania; but he did so at heavy cost. As the autumnrasputitsa, the liquefying of the surface under seasonal rain, set in, the advance came to a halt on a line that ran almost perpendicularly north-south from the Gulf of Riga on the Baltic to Czernowitz in the Carpathians. Most of Russian Poland had been lost but the territory of historic Russia remained intact and so, too, did the substance of the Tsar’s army. It had suffered great losses, nearly a million dead, wounded and missing, while three-quarters of a million prisoners had been captured by the enemy. It had unwisely defended the fortresses of Novogeorgevisk west of Warsaw in late August, where huge quantities of equipment passed into German hands, and it had also lost the fortresses of Ivangorod on the Vistula, Brest-Litovsk on the Bug and Grodno and Kovno on the Niemen, all defending crossings over river lines that formed traditional lines of resistance in the otherwise featureless Polish plain. Generals had been sacked by the score, some imprisoned for dereliction of duty in the face of the enemy.⁴⁶ On 1 September the Tsar had taken the grave step of assuming executive Supreme Command himself, with Alexeyev as his Chief of Staff, the Grand Duke Nicholas being transferred to the Caucasus. All these outcomes of the German advance and the Russian retreat brought disadvantage to Russia’s military situation, or threatened to do so in the future. Nevertheless, the Russian army remained undefeated. Shell output was increasing – to 220,000 rounds a month in September – and its reserves of manpower still amounted to tens of millions. Four million men would be called up in 1916–17, against the eleven million already in the ranks, or lost by death, wounds and capture, but the real reserve, reckoning 10 per cent of the population as available for military service, approached eighteen million.⁴⁷ Russia would be able to fight on.

What it needed was a breathing space, while its armies reorganised and re-equipped. The Italian intervention had failed to divert significant numbers of Austrian troops from Galicia and the Carpathians and, though the quality of the Austrian army was in progressive decline, German assistance kept it in the field. Serbia, whose unexpectedly successful resistance in 1914 had disrupted the Austrian mobilisation, could help no further. French and British plans for a great offensive on the Western Front could not be realised until 1916. Throughout the travails of 1915, Russian hopes for a strategic reversal, which would deter Turkey from further offensives and perhaps destroy her as a combatant, had therefore turned on the faraway campaign in the Dardanelles where, in April, Britain and France had opened an amphibious operation designed to break through to Istanbul and seize the direct passage to the Black Sea and Russia’s southern seaports.

GALLIPOLI

The Dardanelles, which separates Europe from Asia, is a passage thirty miles long, at its narrowest less than a mile wide, leading from the Mediterranean into the landlocked Sea of Marmara. On its north-east coast Istanbul, or Constantinople (formerly the capital of Byzantium, in 1915 that of the Ottoman empire) guards the entrance to the Bosphorus, a waterway narrower than the Dardanelles, which gives on to the Black Sea. The European shore of the Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara and Bosphorus was, in 1915, a narrow strip of Turkish territory. From the Asiatic shore, the expanses of the Ottoman Empire stretched north, east and south to the Caucasus, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The strategic location of the Dardanelles had brought armies, and navies, to it scores of times in history. At Adrianople, in its hinterland, fifteen recorded battles had been fought; at the first, in AD 378, the Emperor Valens was killed by the Goths, a disaster that caused the collapse of Rome’s empire in the west; at the most recent, in 1913, the Turks had repelled a Bulgarian attempt on Istanbul itself.

Gallipoli

It had long been an ambition of the Tsars to complete their centuries of counter-offensive against the Ottomans by seizing Constantinople, thus recovering the seat of Orthodox Christianity from Islam and securing a permanent southward access to warm water; it stood high among Russia’s current war aims. The French were disinclined, the British even more so, to concede such a dramatic enlargement of Russian power in southern Europe. Nevertheless, in the crisis of 1914–15, they were prepared to consider opening a new front there as a means both of bringing relief to their ally and of breaking the impasse on the Western Front. An attack on the Dardanelles, by sea or land, or both, appeared to be one promising version of such an initiative and, during the spring of 1915, it gathered support.

The first proposal was French. In November 1914 Aristide Briand, the Minister of Justice, raised the idea of sending an Anglo-French expedition of 400,000 troops to the Greek port of Salonika, with the object of assisting Serbia, persuading neighbouring Romania and Bulgaria, old enemies of Turkey, to join the Allies and developing an attack through the Balkans on Austria-Hungary. Joffre, whose constitutional powers as Commander-in-Chief were paramount, refused to countenance any diminution of his effort to win the war on the Western Front. Nevertheless, Franchet d’Esperey, one of his subordinates, then took the liberty of suggesting it to President Poincaré who, with Briand and Viviani, the Prime Minister, put it again to Joffre at a meeting at the Elysée palace on 7 January 1915.⁴⁸

Joffre remained adamantly opposed. Meanwhile however the idea was attracting attention in Britain. On 2 January, the Russian Commander-in-Chief, the Grand Duke Nicholas, had sent an appeal to London for help against the Turks’ attack in the Caucasus by the mounting of a diversion elsewhere. His telegram was discussed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, with Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War. Later the same day, Kitchener wrote to Churchill, ‘We have no troops to land anywhere . . . The only place a demonstration might have some effect would be the Dardanelles.’⁴⁹ Kitchener struck a chord. On 3 November Churchill had, in response to Turkey’s declaration of war and on his own initiative, sent the British Aegean squadron to bombard the forts at the mouth of the Dardanelles. A magazine had exploded, disabling most of the heavy guns on the European point.⁵⁰ Though the ships then sailed away, without attempting to penetrate further, the success had kindled a belief in Churchill that naval power might be used against the Dardanelles with strategic rather than tactical effect.

He raised the suggestion at the first meeting of the new War Council, military sub-committee of the British cabinet, on 25 November 1914 and, though it was rejected, it was not forgotten. The consolidation of the trench line in France and Belgium, the disappearance of ‘flanks’ around which decisive results were traditionally achieved by manoeuvre, had persuaded Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence and effectively the executive officer of Britain’s war government, as well as Churchill, that flanks must be found beyond the Western Front. They were supported by Kitchener, who was as depressed as they by the prospect of persisting in the frontal attacks in France favoured by Joffre and Sir John French, and they soon engaged the interest of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher, who on 3 January urged a joint military and naval attack on Turkey, with the stipulation that it should be immediate and that only old battleships should be used.

The Fisher plan might have worked, for the Turks were only slowly repairing and strengthening the Dardanelles defences, had the War Council acted immediately, as he urged. It did not, instead falling into a consideration of alternative strategies. While it did so, Churchill took his own line. Having secured Fisher’s agreement to consult Admiral Carden, commanding the British Mediterranean fleet, about practicalities, he extracted from him the admission that while it would be impossible to ‘rush the Dardanelles . . . they might be forced by extended operations with large numbers of ships’.⁵¹ That was all the encouragement Churchill needed. A romantic in strategy, an enthusiast for military adventures, of which his raising of the Royal Naval Division and its commitment to the Antwerp operation had been one, he proceeded to organise the fleet of old battleships Fisher was prepared to release and to direct it against the Dardanelles in an enlarged attempt to reduce its fortifications by naval bombardment.

Fisher accepted Churchill’s forcing of the issue with ‘reluctant responsibility’ and as an ‘experiment’; his heart, if there were to be adventures, was in a Baltic expedition; his head told him that there should be no diversion of attention from the confrontation in the North Sea.⁵² He had, nevertheless, allowed Churchill the leeway he needed to proceed with his Dardanelles project. Not only was a fleet of old battleships, French as well as British, to be assembled, the brand-new Queen Elizabeth, prototype of the super-Dreadnought class, was to be detached to the Mediterranean fleet also, to use her 15-inch guns against the Dardanelles fortifications, and a base on the Greek island of Lemnos was to be prepared for a landing force, if it was decided to commit troops ashore. Kitchener made the 29th Division, composed of regular soldiers of the imperial overseas garrison, available. Churchill had the Royal Naval Division at his disposal, and the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), awaiting onward movement from Egypt to France, was also on hand.

Whether the troops would be committed depended on the success of the naval bombardment. At the outset it was expected that the ships would prevail. The Turkish defences were antiquated, those at Cape Helles, on the European point, at Kum Kale on the Asiatic shore opposite and at Gallipoli, guarding the Narrows, medieval or older. There were known to be batteries of mobile howitzers present and the Turks had also laid minefields in the channel of the Dardanelles itself. It was believed, nevertheless, that a systematic advance of the battleships, working up-channel with minesweepers clearing a way ahead, would overcome the Turkish guns, open the Narrows and drive a way through to the Sea of Marmara and Istanbul.

The naval operation began on 19 February, with sensational political, if not military, effect. Greece offered troops to join the campaign, the Bulgarians broke off negotiations with Germany, the Russians indicated an intention to attack Istanbul from the Bosphorus, the Italians, not yet in the war, suddenly seemed readier to join the Allied side. All those who believed that an initiative against Turkey would alter the situation in southern Europe to the Allies’ advantage seemed proved right in their judgement. In practice, the bombardment had done little damage and landings by Royal Marines at the end of February, though scarcely opposed by the Turks, were equally ineffective. On 25 February, Admiral Carden had renewed the bombardment but got no further than the Dardanelles’ mouth. By 4 March, when a party of Royal Marines attacking the old fort at Kum Kale suffered heavy casualties, it had become obvious that the enthusiasts’ early optimism had been misplaced. The Turkish garrison was more determined than had been thought, its guns either too well-protected or too mobile to be easily knocked out and the minefields too dense to be swept by the haphazard efforts of the fleet of hastily assembled trawlers. ‘Forcing the Narrows’ would require a carefully co-ordinated advance of all the ships available, with the trawlers working under the protection of the guns of big ships, which would suppress the fire from the shore as they moved forward.

The grand advance began on 18 March, with sixteen battleships, twelve British, four French, mostly pre-Dreadnoughts, but including the battlecruiser Inflexible and the almost irreplaceable super-Dreadnought Queen Elizabeth, arrayed in three lines abreast. They were preceded by a swarm of minesweepers and accompanied by flotillas of cruisers and destroyers. Even in the long naval history of the Dardanelles, such an armada had never been seen there before. At first the armada made apparently irresistible progress. Between 11.30 in the morning and two in the afternoon it advanced nearly a mile, overcoming each fixed and mobile battery as it moved forward. ‘By 2 p.m. the situation had become very critical’, the Turkish General Staff account reports. ‘All telephone wires were cut . . . some of the guns were knocked out, others were left buried . . . in consequence the fire of the defence had slackened considerably.’⁵³ Then, suddenly, at two o’clock, the balance of the battle swung the other way. The old French battleship Bouvet, falling back to allow the minesweepers to go forward, suddenly suffered an internal explosion and sank with all hands. A torpedo fired from a fixed tube ashore seemed to the worried fleet commander, Admiral de Robeck, to be the cause.⁵⁴ Later it became known that, on the night of 7 March , a line of mines had been laid by a small Turkish steamer parallel to the shore and had remained undetected. In the confusion that followed, the minesweepers, manned by civilian crews, began to fall back through the fleet and, as it manoeuvred, the old battleship Irresistible was damaged also and fell out of the line. Next Ocean, another old battleship, also suffered an internal explosion and soon afterwards the French pre-Dreadnought Suffren was severely damaged by a plunging shell. AsGaulois and Inflexible, the modern battlecruiser, had been damaged earlier, de Robeck now found himself with a third of his battle fleet out of action. By the end of the day, Ocean and Irresistible had, like Bouvet, sunk. Inflexible, Suffren and Gaulois were out of action and Albion, Agamemnon, Lord Nelson and Charlemagne had suffered damage. As darkness fell, de Robeck drew his fleet away. The ten lines of mines laid across the Narrows, numbering 373 in all, remained unswept and most of the shore batteries, though they had shot off all their heavy shell, preserved their guns.⁵⁵

By 22 March, when Admiral de Robeck met General Sir Ian Hamilton, the nominated commander of the military force-in-waiting, aboard Queen Elizabeth, to discuss whether the naval advance towards the Narrows should be resumed, it was quickly agreed that it could not, without the assistance of strong landing parties. The combination of numerous moored mines and heavy fire from the shore was deadly. While the bigger Turkish guns in fixed positions could be targeted, the mobile batteries could move, as soon as they had been identified, to new positions, from which they could resume fire against the fragile minesweepers, thus preventing the clearing of the lines of mines running between the European and Asiatic shores and so denying the battleships the chance to get forward. The only solution to the conundrum was to land troops capable of tackling the mobile batteries and putting them out of action, so that the minesweepers could proceed with their work and the battleships follow in the swept channels.

Bold spirits, who included Commodore Roger Keyes, commanding the minesweepers, were for pressing on regardless of loss. Keyes believed the Turks were demoralised and out of ammunition. The more cautious officers thought more risk-taking must lead to more losses and the intelligence that came later to light revealed that to be certain. The cautious party in any case prevailed. By the end of March, the decision for landings had been taken – by de Robeck and Hamilton, independent of the Cabinet – and the only question remaining to be settled was where the landings should take place and in what strength. Raids by Royal Marines would not suffice. The intelligence service of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, as Hamilton’s command was now known, estimated that the Turks had 170,000 men available. That was an exaggerated guess; Liman von Sanders, their German commander, had six weak divisions with 84,000 men to guard 150 miles of coastline. As, however, there were only five Allied divisions in the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force – the 29th, Royal Naval, 1st Australian and Australian and New Zealand Divisions, and the Corps expéditionnaire d’Orient, of divisional strength provided by the French – every one would have been needed to secure beachheads, even had the Turks been weaker than they actually were. In practice, the decision to use all five divisions was taken at the start. From a hastily established base in Mudros Bay on the nearby Greek island of Lemnos, they would be embarked as soon as possible and got ashore. In the month between the naval defeat of 22 March and the eventual D-Day of 25 April, an extraordinary improvisation was carried forward. Mudros was filled with stores, a fleet of transports assembled and a collection of boats and improvised landing-craft got together to transship the troops to the beaches.

Nothing was more improvised than the plan. In the absence of firm intelligence about Turkish dispositions, it had to be based on guesses as to where landings would be least opposed and do most good. The Asiatic shore was tempting, for there the shore is level – Troy’s windy plain leads inland nearby – but Kitchener had forbidden it to Hamilton, for the excellent reason that a force as small as his could all too easily be swallowed up in the vastness of the Turkish hinterland. Kitchener’s diktat determined that the European peninsula, known as Gallipoli from the tiny town at the Narrows, must be the choice, but its topography presented difficulties. The narrow waist at Bulair, forty miles from the point of Cape Helles, offered level beaches on the Mediterranean side and the chance to cut off all the Turkish forces below. They, however, had covered the Bulair foreshore with barbed wire that looked impenetrable. Along much of the rest of the seaward side of the peninsula, steep cliffs descend to the water. Only at one place was there a practicable beach, which was allotted to ANZAC. The only other possibilities were at Cape Helles itself, where there is a chain of small, if narrow, beaches giving by reasonable gradients to the summit of the headland. As it could be covered all round by fire from the fleet standing offshore, Helles was chosen as the objective of the 29th Division. The Royal Naval Division was not to land at once, but make a demonstration at Bulair, designed to draw Turkish reinforcements away from Cape Helles, and the French were to do likewise on the Asiatic shore, at Kum Kale near Troy, before landing later alongside the 29th Division. Five beaches at Helles were selected, lettered, Y, X, W, V and S, Y lying three miles from the point on the Mediterranean side, S within the Dardanelles, and X, W and V under the Cape itself.

In retrospect, it is possible to see that Hamilton’s plan could not work, nor could any other have done with the size of the force made available to him. Seizing the tip of the peninsula, below the minefields, still left them covered by Turkish artillery. An Asiatic landing would have proved equally ineffectual, and very exposed, while even a successful landing at Suvla Bay, below Bulair, would have left the Turkish forces between it and Helles not only intact but easily to be resupplied and reinforced across the Narrows. The only certainly successful scheme would have required the deployment of a force large enough to land at and hold Bulair, Helles and the Asiatic shore simultaneously. Such a force was not available nor could it have been assembled speedily enough to bring urgent aid to the Russians. A large commitment of troops was, in any case, outside the spirit of the enterprise, which was designed to achieve large results without dissipating the force engaged on the Western Front. Hamilton’s only hope of achieving success in the essentially diversionary mission he had been given, therefore, lay in the Turks mismanaging their response to the landings. Surprise there could not be. The naval offensive had alerted them to the Allies’ interest in Gallipoli and they had used the month following the fleet’s withdrawal to dig trenches above all the threatened beaches. Only if the Turks failed to counter-attack quickly could the Allies secure footholds deep enough from which to threaten their possession of the Gallipoli peninsula.

The soldiers of the 29th Division and ANZAC, dissimilar as they were, expected to succeed. Those of the 29th Division were regulars of the pre-war army, sunburnt Tommy Atkinses of the type Kipling knew, collected from the overseas garrisons for service in France but then brought to Egypt in case troops were needed at Gallipoli. The ANZACs, staging through Egypt to Europe, were citizen soldiers, products of the most comprehensive militia system in the world, which trained every male from early school age upwards for military service and enrolled all fit men in their local regiments. A comparable military obligation, accepted in Australia, was taken with deep seriousness by the tiny colonial community of New Zealand, strategically the least vulnerable settled place on earth. ‘To be a New Zealander in 1914 was to be taught that: “The Empire looks to you to be ready in time of need, to think, to labour and to bear hardships on its behalf.”’⁵⁶ More practically, when the call came, ‘university classes emptied . . . sports fixtures were abandoned. To be left behind was unthinkable. If your mate was going, then somehow you had to get away too.’⁵⁷ Out of a male population of half a million, New Zealand could provide 50,000 trained soldiers aged under twenty-five. Australia furnished proportionate numbers. Fewer of the Australians were countrymen than the New Zealanders, whose settler independence and skills with rifle and spade would win them a reputation as the best soldiers in the world during the twentieth century, but Australian dash and individualism, combined with an intense spirit of comradeship, were to create units of formidable offensive power, as the Germans would later acknowledge and the Turks were soon to discover.

Before dawn on 25 April, 200 merchant ships, of every variety from liners to tramp steamers, supported by most of the bombardment fleet that had been turned back from the Narrows on 18 March, stood in towards ANZAC cove – as the Australians’ and New Zealanders’ landing place was soon to be known – and Cape Helles. Queen Elizabeth was flagship and headquarters, though its 15-inch guns were also to join in the preliminary bombardment by the older battleships. They were also troop carriers, however; from them, and other warships, the landing parties were to move to the beaches in ‘tows’, lines of rowing boats pulled in column behind steam pinnaces commanded by junior officers; two of those were thirteen-year-old first-term Royal Naval College cadets. As the shore shelved, the tows were to be cast off and the boats rowed ashore by bluejackets. Only one specialised landing ship had been included, the collier River Clyde, which was to be grounded off V Beach, alongside the old Byzantine fortress of Sedd el-Bahr. Holes had been cut in its bow through which the soldiers of the Royal Munster Fusiliers and the Hampshire Regiment were to run down gangplanks on to lighters, positioned between ship and shore, and so onto the beaches, under the covering fire of machine guns positioned behind sandbags on the forecastle.

The bombardment began about five o’clock, as day dawned, and soon the tows for all beaches were moving inshore. What lay ahead was largely unknown, for the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force intelligence service was deficient not only of information about Turkish strength and dispositions but even lacked maps of the area to be assaulted. It was believed, for example, that the ground behind Cape Helles, in fact broken by numerous gullies, formed ‘a . . . uniform and [un] accidented slope’.⁵⁸ The terrain behind ANZAC cove was known to be dominated by ridges but the chosen landing place was to their south, from which routes opened to a central crest where, it was intended, observation posts could be established to direct naval gunfire against the batteries at the Narrows.

That might or might not have been possible. In the event, and for reasons never satisfactorily explained, perhaps human error, perhaps a last-minute but inadequately communicated change of plan, the forty-eight boats of the ANZAC tows touched ground a mile north of the beach originally selected, under steep slopes that give onto a succession of ridges, rising in three jumbled steps above the cove. To north and south, high ground comes down to the sea, so that ANZAC takes the form of a tiny amphitheatre – the smallness of the Gallipoli battlegrounds is the most striking impression left on the visitor – dominated on three sides by high ground. Unless the Australians and New Zealanders could reach the crests before the enemy, all their positions, including the beach, would be overlooked, with calamitous effect on subsequent operations.

The ANZACs knew the importance of getting high quickly and, after an almost unopposed landing, began climbing the ridges in front of them as fast as their feet could take them. The reason their landing had been unopposed soon, however, became apparent. The enemy were few because the Turks had dismissed the likelihood of a landing in such an inhospitable spot and the landing parties rapidly found that the terrain was as hostile as any defending force. One crest was succeeded by another even higher, gullies were closed by dead ends and the way to the highest point was lost time and again in the difficulty of route-finding. Organisation dissolved in the thick scrub and steep ravines, which separated group from group and prevented a co-ordinated sweep to the top. If even some of the 12,000 ashore could have reached the summits of the Sari Bair ridge, two and a half miles above ANZAC cove, they would have been able to look down on the Narrows, and the beginnings of a victory would have been under their hands.⁵⁹ Their maximum depth of penetration by early afternoon, however, was only a mile and a half and, at that precipitous point, they began to come under counter-attack by the assembling Turkish defenders. The ANZACs, clinging lost and leaderless to the hillsides, began, as the hot afternoon gave way to grey drizzle, to experience their martyrdom.

Ten miles south, at Cape Helles, day had also broken to the crash of heavy naval gunfire, under which the ninety-six boats of the tows and the crammed River Clyde moved shoreward. On the flanks, at Y and X Beaches in the Mediterranean and at S Beach within the Dardanelles, the attackers met little or no opposition and soon established themselves ashore. Across the water, at Kum Kale on the Asiatic shore, the French also found their landings unopposed and, after early delays, took possession of the old Byzantine fort, the village under its walls and the cemetery on the outskirts. The Turks in the vicinity were disorganised and badly led. At Y, X and S Beaches on the peninsula the British experience was similar: the enemy was either not present or else stunned by the explosion of 12-inch shells around their positions. The landing parties sunned themselves, made tea, humped stores up from the shore and wandered about in the pretty countryside, as if the war was miles away. At W and V Beaches, just down the coast, the Lancashire Fusiliers and the Dublins, Munsters and Hampshires were fighting for their lives and dying in hundreds. The two beaches are separated by the headland of Cape Helles itself. To the west, on W Beach, ever afterwards known as Lancashire Landing, the Lancashire Fusiliers were struck by a hail of rifle and machine-gun fire a hundred yards from the shore. Most of the boats beached, nevertheless, only to find themselves in front of barbed wire at the water’s edge, behind which Turks in trenches were shooting every man who rose from the sea. Major Shaw, of the Lancashire Fusiliers, recalled that ‘the sea behind was absolutely crimson, and you could hear the groans through the rattle of musketry. A few were firing. I signalled to them to advance . . . I then perceived they were all hit.’

Amid these ghastly scenes, a few Lancashire Fusiliers managed to struggle through the wire and find a way round, reorganise and advance. Out of the 950 who landed, over 500 were killed or wounded but the survivors pressed inland, chasing the Turks before them and by evening had consolidated a foothold. On the other side of the headland, at V Beach, the scenes were even worse. The Dublin Fusiliers, landing from tows, thought themselves unopposed until, as the boats touched bottom, they fell under a hail of bullets. As the River Clyde grounded and the Hampshires and Munster Fusiliers struggled to find a way out of the ship and on to the gangplanks that were to lead them ashore, four Turkish machine guns opened fire. They had already raked the tows which beached first. The columns on the gangplanks, packed like cattle ranked for slaughter in an abattoir, tumbled one after another to fall bleeding into the sea, there to drown at once or struggle to their death in the shallows. Yet some survived, found shelter under the lip of the beach, gathered their force and drove the Turks from their trenches.

At Lancashire Landing and V Beaches many Victoria Crosses, Britain’s highest award for bravery, were won that morning, six by Lancashire Fusiliers, two by sailors who struggled in the sea to hold steady the lighters bridging the gap between River Clyde and the shore. There were numerous other, unrecorded, feats of courage, inexplicable to a later, more timorous age. By evening, above beaches choked with bodies and a shoreline still red with blood, Lancashire Landing had been consolidated with X Beach, and V, Y and S were secure. There had been 2,000 casualties at ANZAC, at least 2,000 at Cape Helles, out of 30,000 men landed, and the number was rising by the hour, as the Turks gathered to counter-attack. The question remained whether beachheads gained at such cost could be held on the morrow.

What should have alarmed the British commanders – Hamilton of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF), Hunter-Weston of the 29th Division, Birdwood of ANZAC – was that the injuries done to their brave and determined soldiers had been the work of so few of the enemy. MEF’s estimate of the Turkish strength committed to the defence of the Dardanelles had been a gross exaggeration. The number of troops deployed by Liman von Sanders on the Gallipoli peninsula was only a fraction of his force, the rest being dispersed between Bulair and Kum Kale, between Europe and Asia. The assault area was held by a single division, the 9th, with its infantry deployed in companies all the way down the coast from ANZAC to Cape Helles and beyond. In places there were single platoons of fifty men, in some places fewer men or none: at Y Beach none, at X twelve men, at S a single platoon. Even at ANZAC there was only one company of 200 men, while V and W Beaches were defended by single platoons.⁶⁰ The massacre of the Lancashire, Dublin and Munster Fusiliers and the Hampshires had been inflicted by fewer than a hundred desperate men, survivors of the naval bombardment, and killing so that they should not be killed.

Some of the Turks, nevertheless, had run away; those at Kum Kale surrendered to the French in hundreds before the withdrawal on 26 April. More might have turned tail on the peninsula had not reserves been close at hand and under the command of an officer of outstanding ability and determination. Mustapha Kemal had been one of the earliest Young Turks but his career had not followed that of the leaders. In April 1915, he was, aged thirty-four, only a divisional commander. Fate decreed, however, that his division, the 19th, stood at the critical place at the critical moment. Massed on the peninsula just opposite the Narrows, it was only four miles from ANZAC and, though high ground lay in between, could by forced marching intervene against the landings even while they were in progress. Kemal, reacting instantly to the sound of the naval bombardment, forced the march, himself at the head. Having reached the crest of Sari Bair, the dominating ground that was the ANZAC objective, ‘the scene which met our eyes was a most interesting one. To my mind it was the vital moment of the [campaign]’. He could see warships offshore and, in the foreground, a party of Turks of the 9th Division running towards him. They told him that they were out of ammunition and he ordered them to lie down and fix bayonets. ‘At the same time I sent [my] orderly officer . . . off to the rear to bring up to where I was at the double those men of the [57th Regiment] who were advancing [behind me] . . . When the men fixed their bayonets and lay down . . . the enemy lay down also . . . It was about 10.00 hours when the 57th Regiment began its attack.’

The Australians had seen Kemal on the crest and fired at him, without effect. Their failure to hit him and to push forward to the top in those minutes may indeed be judged ‘the vital moment of the campaign’, for Kemal, as soon as his troops were to hand, began a series of counter-attacks against the Australian bridgehead that lasted until nightfall. Several high points taken earlier in the day were lost and from little of the line held did the ANZAC positions dominate the Turks. Almost everywhere they were overlooked, and a constant rain of enemy bullets sent a steady stream of wounded back to the narrow beach, passing, as they limped or were carried down, an only slightly more numerous stream of reinforcements coming up to replace them. That scene, wounded down, fresh troops up, was to be repeated every day the campaign lasted and remained every ANZAC’s most abiding memory of those precipitous hillsides.

By 4 May both sides at ANZAC were exhausted. The Turks had lost 14,000 men, ANZAC nearly 10,000. After a final attack on 4 May, Kemal recognised that the enemy was too tenacious to be driven into the sea, and ordered his men to dig in. The line when finished enclosed an area a thousand yards deep, a mile and a half around the perimeter, the whole canted upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees, where the surface was not actually perpendicular. The scene reminded ANZAC’s chief cipher officer, ‘of the cave dwellings of a tribe of large and prosperous savages who live on the extremely steep slopes of broken sandy bluffs covered with scrub’.

On the lower ground at Cape Helles, the days after the landing had also been filled with savage fighting, as the 29th Division, and the French withdrawn from Kum Kale, struggled to connect the beachheads and push the line inland. On 26 April, the castle and village of Sedd el-Bahr were captured and next afternoon there was a general advance, the Turks locally having retreated exhausted from the scene. The objective was the village of Krithia, four miles inland. A deliberate assault was made on 28 April, known as the First Battle of Krithia, and another on 6 May. Neither reached the village, despite the arrival of an Indian brigade from Egypt and parts of the Royal Naval Division. By 8 May the British were stuck just short of Krithia, on a line that ran from Y Beach to a little north of S Beach, three miles from Cape Helles.

There it remained throughout an unbearably hot summer, balmy autumn and freezing early winter. The War Council, despite opposition from the French and within its own ranks, sent more troops to Egypt and the base on Lemnos, first one and then three more Territorial Divisions, then three Kitchener divisions. The French also added, reluctantly, to the expeditionary corps, and in August the 2nd Australian Division and 2nd Mounted Division were sent to Lemnos. To break the stalemate, General Sir Ian Hamilton decided on a fresh amphibious assault north of ANZAC at Suvla Bay. It took place on 7 August and a bridgehead was quickly seized. Mustapha Kemal, now appointed to command all Turkish troops in the northern sector, was soon on the scene, however, rushing reinforcements to the heights with the same determination to pen the Allies close to the sea as he had shown three months earlier at ANZAC. By 9 August he had succeeded and no addition of force by the British – the hard-tried 29th Division was brought up by sea from Helles – could gain ground. The attackers and defenders dug in and Suvla Bay became simply the third shallow and static enclave maintained by the Allies on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Turks now had fourteen divisions in place against an exactly equal number of Allied which were more and more obviously doing no good at great cost. There had been calls within the Dardanelles Committee of the War Council for evacuation earlier. In November they became overwhelming. Kitchener, arriving on a personal reconnaissance, was persuaded by General Sir Charles Monro, who had succeeded the discredited Hamilton, that evacuation was inevitable, and a freak storm, which drowned soldiers in their trenches and wrecked many of the beach facilities, concluded the arguments. Between 28 December and 8 January 1916, the garrison began to slip away, little troubled by the Turks who had failed to detect that a complete evacuation was in progress. By 9 January, ANZAC, Suvla and Cape Helles were empty. The great adventure was over.

The Turks, who bothered neither to bury nor count their dead, had probably lost 300,000 men killed, wounded and missing.⁶¹ The Allies had lost 265,000. The 29th Division had lost its strength twice over, while the New Zealanders, of whom 8,566 served on the peninsula, recorded 14,720 casualties, including wounded who returned two or three times.⁶² Yet of all the contingents which went to Gallipoli, it was the Australians who were most marked by the experience and who remembered it most deeply, remember it indeed to this day. Citizens of an only recently federated country in 1915, they went as soldiers of the forces of six separate states. They came back, it is so often said, members of one nation. The ANZAC ordeal began to be commemorated at home in the following year. Today the dawn ceremony on 25 April has became a sacred event, observed by all Australians of every age and ANZAC cove has become a shrine. The Gallipoli peninsula, now preserved as a Turkish national park, in which a memorial erected by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, as President of post-imperial Turkey, magnanimously recalls the sufferings of both sides, has reverted to nature, a beautiful but deserted remoteness on the Mediterranean shore. Yet not deserted by Australians. Few British make the journey; those who do, and find their way to ANZAC’s tiny and terrible battlegrounds at Lone Pine, Russell’s Top and Steele’s Post, never fail to be moved by the appearance of young Australians, men and women, who have trekked across Europe to see where their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought and often died. Two-thirds of the Australians who went to the Great War became casualties and the first of the nation’s Great War heroes won their medals in the two square miles above ANZAC cove. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren often bring those medals back with them to Gallipoli on their pilgrimage, as if to reconsecrate the symbols of the ANZAC spirit, a metaphor for that of the nation itself, on sacred soil.

Yet nothing at Gallipoli can fail to touch the emotions of those who descend from the soldiers of any nation that struggled there. The village of Kum Kale, under the walls of the medieval fortress, has disappeared but the overgrown cemetery of Muslim headstones remains to mark the furthest limit of the French advance of 25 April. The war cemetery above W Beach is full of the dead of Lancashire Landing, while at Sedd el-Bahr the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers lie in graves only a few yards above the water’s edge where they gave their lives for a state many of their countrymen, at Easter 1916, would confront with rebellion. Most poignant of all Gallipoli memorials, perhaps, is that of the white marble column on the Cape Helles headland, glimpsed across the water from the walls of Troy on a bright April morning. Troy and Gallipoli make two separate but connected epics, as so many of the classically educated volunteer officers of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force – Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Arthur Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son, and the poet, Rupert Brooke, dead of blood-poisoning before the landing – had recognised and recorded. It is difficult to say which epic Homer might have thought the more heroic.

SERBIA AND SALONIKA

Gallipoli, though it succeeded eventually in attracting fourteen of Turkey’s thirty-six Nizam (first-line) divisions away from potential deployment to the Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Caucasian fronts, had failed as a military campaign. It had failed to open a supply route through the Black Sea to Russia’s southern ports. It had also failed in its secondary purpose, the bringing of relief to Serbia. That beleaguered country’s survival, always conditional upon its enemies’ preoccupations elsewhere, had been prolonged by the opening of the Gallipoli campaign and by the entry of Italy into the war, itself hastened by the landings at the Dardanelles. As the Gallipoli vision faded, however, so too had the hopes pinned on its expected subsidiary effects, including encouraging Greece to join the Allies and deterring Bulgaria from joining the Central Powers. The Turks’ containment of the Suvla Bay landing in August swung neutral opinion decisively the other way in each case. Bulgaria had a strong local interest in siding with Germany, since the Macedonian territory it had lost, after the briefest possession, at the end of the Second Balkan War in 1913 had gone to Greece and Serbia. The Allies, as suitors and protectors respectively of those two countries, would not, Bulgaria recognised, assist in its return. The Germans, on the other hand, could. The magnitude of their victory at Gorlice-Tarnow in May impressed the Bulgarians, moreover, and a month later they entered into negotiations.⁶³ The Allies suddenly forgot their commitment to Serbia and on 3 August offered Bulgaria its desired share of Macedonia after all. The offer, however, came too late. The dual stalemate on the Italian and Gallipoli fronts convinced the King and political leadership of Bulgaria that their best interests lay in alliance with the Central Powers rather than Britain, France and Russia – warm though Russia’s patronage of Bulgaria had traditionally been – and on 6 September 1915 four treaties were signed. The terms included financial subsidy and future transfer of territory at Serbia’s expense; more critically and immediately, Bulgaria undertook to go to war against Serbia within thirty days. The purpose of the campaign, in concert with Germany and Austria, was ‘decisively to defeat the Serbian army and to open communications with Istanbul via Belgrade [the capital of Serbia] and Sofia [the capital of Bulgaria]’. It was at once transmitted by Falkenhayn to Mackensen, the victor of Gorlice-Tarnow, who proceeded to assemble an army. Serbia ordered general mobilisation on 22 September. A fruitless effort was made to draw Romania into the war but, unlike Bulgaria, its sympathies lay with the Allies. Meanwhile, Colonel Hentsch, whose report from the Marne battlefield had brought about the entrenchment of the Western Front a year earlier, made a survey of the Serbian theatre as a preliminary to drawing up invasion plans.

Since the failure of the second Austrian offensive in December 1914, the Serbian army had remained deployed on the northern and eastern frontiers. Mackensen’s plan was to extend the front of attack far south, where Bulgaria could force the Serbs to dissipate their numbers in the defence of Macedonia. The Serbs had only eleven weak divisions, particularly weak in artillery. Against them the Bulgarians could deploy six divisions, the Austrians seven, and the Germans ten, twenty-three in all. All but one of the German divisions were regular formations, belonging to the Eleventh Army, which had led the Gorlice-Tarnow breakthrough and would be brought down to the Danube, under the command of von Gallwitz, initiator of the Namur operation, by rail.⁶⁴

The odds overwhelmingly disfavoured the Serbs, fighting though they would be in the difficult terrain of their own country and behind wide and unbridged rivers – the Sava, the Danube, the latter a mile wide – at the frontiers. Voivode Putnik disposed of 200,000 men, of very varying quality, Mackensen of 330,000, with 1,200 guns to the Serbs’ 300. Serbia’s only hope of altering the balance lay in attracting Allied troops into the Balkans, via the Greek port of Salonika. That project had recommended itself to the French as early as November 1914 and actually underlay the inter-Allied discussions which resulted in the decision to land at Gallipoli.⁶⁵ In the hope that an Allied intervention might now allow them to defeat the Bulgarians in the south before the Germans and Austrians developed their attack in the north, the Serbs made a plea to the Allies to review the initiative once more. The British, still hoping to bribe the Bulgars into inactivity, declined to do so, urging Serbia to surrender the Macedonian territory they coveted. That price was one too high for Serbia to pay, even though disaster stared it in the face. An inducement to undertake the Salonika project now came from an unexpected direction. On the day Bulgaria mobilised, the Greek Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, advised the British and French governments that if they would send 150,000 troops to Salonika, he was confident of bringing his country into the war on their side, under the terms of an existing Serbo-Greek treaty.

The campaign in Serbia, 1915

Venizelos, ‘the lion of Crete’, who had won the independence of his island from Turkey in 1905, would have been a large man in any country and absolutely dominated the politics of the small Greek kingdom. He was the standard bearer of the ‘Great Idea’ – the national reunion of the Greek-speaking communities of the Aegean and its hinterland at Turkey’s expense – and believed equally in the necessity of the Allies’ support to achieve it and in the likelihood of their eventual victory. He therefore viewed the organisation of aid to Serbia as both realistic and essential. At his persuasion, Britain and France agreed to send troops to Salonika at once, first a token force, later the 150,000 troops that, by his interpretation of the Serbo-Greek treaty, would justify Greece ending its neutrality. He had, however, overestimated the strength of his position at home. King Constantine was not only the Kaiser’s brother-in-law but believed his kingdom’s interests best served by preserving its neutrality. On 5 October he dismissed Venizelos from office. Venizelos would return to politics in October 1916, form a government at Salonika which Britain would recognise as legitimate and, after Constantine’s abdication in June 1917, resume the premiership with popular support. In the autumn of 1915, however, none of that could be foreseen. Meanwhile, the Allies took matters into their own hands. Greece, as a neutral without the means to resist, was obliged to acquiesce in the arrival of a Franco-British (and later also Russian) expeditionary force, formed in part by withdrawals from Gallipoli, in the transformation of Salonika into a vast Allied base and in the despatch in October of an Allied advance guard into Serbian Macedonia.

Its arrival came too late to assist the Serbs. On 5 October the Germans and Austrians began a bombardment across the Sava and Danube, followed by the bridging of both rivers on 7 October. Rough weather and Serbian fire destroyed some pontoons but the Austrian Third and German Eleventh Armies managed to secure footholds nonetheless and on 9 October entered Belgrade. Mackensen’s plan, after gaining his lodgement, was to envelop the Serbs by driving them southward into the centre of their country. As agreed a month earlier, the Bulgarians crossed the frontier from the east on 11 October, simultaneously sending troops south to oppose the British and French in Macedonia, while the Germans and Austrians pressed down from the north. The plan, logical on paper, took insufficient account of the terrain, the climate of the approaching Balkan winter or of the Serbs’ pre-modern capacity to endure hardship. The inhabitants of the central Balkans, materially the most backward region in Europe in 1915, were accustomed to seasonal privation, roadless habitat and extremes of temperature; to the hardihood that the snows and shortages of winter taught, their long history of insubmission to the Turks, and prosecution of the blood feud, added fierce tribal comradeship and contempt for danger. Hard as the Germans and Austrians pressed their pursuit after the fall of Belgrade, they found it impossible to corner the Serbs against any obstacle. Thrice they seemed to have succeeded, notably at Kosovo, the battlefield where the Turks had extinguished Serbian independence in 1389, but the Serbs, encumbered as they were by tens of thousands of refugees and the train of only symbolically useful artillery they insisted on dragging behind them, disengaged and slipped away, towards the brother-Serb principality of Montenegro, Albania and the sea. Their old King Peter marched in the centre of the columns struggling towards the coast, while the enfeebled Voivode Putnik was carried by his devoted soldiers in a closed sedan chair along the snowbound tracks and over the mountain passes. Only an army of natural mountaineers could have survived the passage through Montenegro, and many did not, dying of disease, starvation or cold as they fell out of the line by the wayside. Of the 200,000 who had set out, however, no less than 140,000 survived to cross in early December the frontier of Albania, independent since 1913 and still a neutral, and descend into the gentler temperatures of the Albanian Adriatic ports. Thence by ship, mostly Italian, the survivors, with thousands of miserable Austrian prisoners forced to accompany them in the retreat, were transferred to Corfu. In their wake the Austrian Third Army took possession of Montenegro, while the Bulgarians, whom neither the Germans nor Austrians wished to see established on the Adriatic, turned back from the border to join in the counter-offensive against the Allied invasion of Macedonia.

Other Bulgarian troops had already blunted the French and British effort to relieve pressure on the Serbs in Macedonia and by 12 December the two Allied divisions – the French 156th, the British 10th, both transferred from Gallipoli – that had crossed the Serbian frontier in October were back again on Greek territory. The British government, correctly judging that the Salonika project could serve no useful further purpose, now pressed the French to agree to the withdrawal of the Allied troops altogether. The French, in the grip of a domestic political crisis, demurred. Briand, who had replaced Viviani as premier in October, had been pro-Salonika from the start and made support for the project a test of loyalty to himself and his government. Moreover, he drew parliamentary support from the Radical Socialists, whose military favourite, Sarrail, commanded the Salonika army. To withdraw from Salonika would be to leave Sarrail without a command and unlikely to be given another, since Joffre feared and detested him. Briand therefore resuscitated his original arguments for the expedition: that it kept Greece and Romania neutral and that it posed a threat to the Austrian flank in the Balkans, which might be enlarged as later circumstances allowed. To those he added the argument that the Serbian army had not been destroyed and could, once reformed as a fighting force, be used (as it would be) on the Balkan front. As bait to Joffre, he elevated him to the command of French armies everywhere, not just in France alone; as bait to the Radical Socialists, he pointed out that Joffre must now support Sarrail because his elevation made his rival his subordinate. Between 1 and 6 December, at Calais, at GQG at Chantilly, and in London, the British and French political and military leaders took decisions for and against Salonika in rapid succession. The British nearly prevailed. Eventually, however, they were persuaded, by fear of provoking a collapse of Briand’s government and by the heartfelt plea of the Russians to sustain a western pressure in the eastern theatre of operations, to leave their troops in Salonika after all.⁶⁶

It was an odd outcome, both politically and strategically. The British and French, whose efforts in the struggle for the Greeks’ liberty had been the chief cause of their winning of independence from the Turks in 1832, and who had championed independent Greece in every subsequent international crisis, now began to behave as if its sovereignty was entirely secondary to their convenience. They had already requisitioned Greek Lemnos, largest island of the northern Aegean, as a base for the Dardanelles campaign. Their landing at Salonika, the kingdom’s second city, had been made without a by-your-leave. Once the Anglo-French decision had been taken to remain in Greece, the Allies proceeded to transform their Salonika base into an extraterritorial military settlement. King Constantine, at one point, protested feebly, ‘I will not be treated like a native chieftain’ but the Allies did so nonetheless.⁶⁷ The Greek army maintained a nominal presence at the settlement’s perimeter. Within, in an area of 200 square miles, the French encamped three and the British five divisions, and together created an enormous stockpile of stores and war material. Strategically, their presence exerted no pressure at all on either the Bulgarians or the Germans, who maintained a scratch force on the frontier. It drew no enemy force away from the Western Front, brought no aid to the Russians and posed no threat to the Turks. The Salonika divisions suffered, nonetheless; malaria, endemic in northern Greece, caused ten casualties for every one inflicted by the enemy, and from the mosquito, as long as the Allies remained in the disease zone, there was no escape. German journalists contemptuously described Salonika in 1915 as ‘the greatest internment camp in the world’. It was worse than that. As numbers grew, and malaria rampaged, it became a great military hospital, where casualties from disease sometimes exceeded one hundred per cent of the strength of some units present.⁶⁸

The year of 1915 thus ended on an inconclusive note. In the external theatres of war, the Western Allies had prevailed. Germany’s colonies had been occupied, its colonial forces largely overcome and its cruising squadrons destroyed. Its Turkish ally had won a great, if local, victory at Gallipoli but had failed in its attempts to make either British Egypt or the Russian Caucasus diversionary fronts and was itself threatened by the British penetration of its Arab possessions in Mesopotamia. In southern Europe, Serbia had been overwhelmed and Bulgaria drawn into the Central alliance but Greece had been appropriated as an Anglo-French base and Italy persuaded to open an anti-Austrian front at its head of the Adriatic. On the two great fronts, Western and Eastern, the balance of success appeared to lie with the Central Powers. In France, the Germans had repelled every attempt by the French and British to break the trench line and had inflicted heavy losses on their enemies as the price of their efforts. On the Eastern Front, they had won a spectacular victory, at Gorlice-Tarnow, and pressed the Tsar’s armies back to and, in some places, beyond the frontiers of old Russia. Poland and the Baltic coastline were theirs and the danger of a Russian invasion of Austria-Hungary across the crests of the Carpathians had been averted, apparently permanently. On the other hand, the fighting power of the Russian army had not been destroyed, the French army had sustained its aggressive spirit and the British army was transforming itself from a maritime expeditionary force of marginal significance into an instrument of continental offensive power. Germany’s success in the seventeen months of fighting since the war had begun had been to survive the defeat of its plan to win quickly on two fronts, to rescue its weak Austrian ally from the collapse threatened by the prolongation of hostilities, to acquire secondary allies in the Balkans and Near East and to create a central strategic position, rich in industrial resources and raw materials, that extended from the Aisne in the west to the Drina, the Pripet and the Dniester rivers in the east. It had failed, however, to defeat any of its major enemies by land, to destroy the capacity of the Franco-British or Russian armies to return to the offensive, or to find means of breaking the maritime stronghold that was tightening about the perimeter of its landlocked base of operations. The coming year of 1916, all parties to the war recognised, would bring crisis on land, east and west, and at sea also. It would be a year of great battles between armies and fleets.