Settling old scores

THE LOGIC OF events suggested that the moment for a decisive breakthrough in the West had passed.

The fact was grimly acknowledged by British and French, but absorbed by the Germans only with great reluctance. On 2nd December, they tried to cross the Yser on rafts, south of Diksmuide, but were thrown back decisively. Yet again they bombarded Rheims on 5th December, rather in the spirit of one who would rather be hanged for a sheep than a lamb, and the following day essayed a long-distance bombardment of Dunkirk from a distance of some 22 miles. The Yser continued to haunt them, however, and it was upon that their efforts were concentrated at the week’s end, when once more (and again vainly) they attempted a crossing near Pervyse. Meanwhile, British morale was discreetly lifted when the Indian Expeditionary Force was brought to full strength following the arrival of Sirhind Brigade from Egypt on 5th December.

For the French, it was a time of cautious hope. They recovered Vermelles, near Béthune, on 1st December and the following day re-occupied Lesmenils in the Moselle and Burnhaupt in Alsace, both areas rich in historical symbolism. Over the next days they progressed towards Altkirch, also in Alsace, and strengthened their hold on Vermelles. Finally they captured Langemarck in Belgium – the scene of such an appalling loss of life by all protagonists. Having invested honours upon General Joffre the previous week, King George V took advantage of his visit to the troops to confer the Order of the Garter upon King Albert when he visited Belgian Headquarters on 4th December – a signal mark of recognition and personal favour. The monarchs then reviewed Belgian troops at Furnes before the King returned to London the next day.

Fierce fighting in the suburbs of Lodz dominated the Eastern Front for much of the week. On 6th December the Russians, realising at last the extent of their plight, evacuated Lodz and withdraw towards the Bzura–Ravka lines. The following day, a second battle for the control of Warsaw was initiated by the Germans. At the same time, the Russians launched a series of attacks in East Prussia – a humiliation for the Germans rather than a catastrophe – and bombarded the northern sector of the forts of Cracow in Galicia. They were also moving in on other Fronts they deemed unfriendly, capturing Sarai and Bashkal in Armenia. It seemed at the time a remarkable bouleversement. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

They took perhaps their keenest pleasure in the humiliation of their old adversary, Austria-Hungary, whose most recent invasion of Serbia had now run into difficulties. On 2nd December, the Serbs began a counter-offensive in Suvobor region and the following day the so-called Battle of the Ridges (Rudnik Malyen) began. Within 48 hours, the Austrians had been defeated, giving up a tidy 15,000 prisoners and 19 guns. Thereafter they took flight, heading any old how to the frontier to what remained of their homeland. On 5th December, the government in Belgrade declared that Serbia would never make peace without Allied consent.

The defeat (a conclusive one) of the South African rebel de Wet brought an equivalent satisfaction to the British. They retained uncomfortable memories of the Boer War, even if these had been overtaken by greater and more recent events. De Wet’s surrender on 1st December was followed three days later by a rout of the rebels near Reitz by President Botha’s forces. Somewhat optimistically, the rebels now offered to negotiate terms for an armistice but Botha was scornful. He wanted nothing less than unconditional surrender and was now in a position to wait on events. On 7th December, the rebel General Beyers was defeated at Bothaville and drowned on his flight in the Vaal River. The following day, 1,200 rebels surrendered and the rebellion collapsed.

To the satisfaction of the British, news also broke during the week of anti-German rioting in Valparaiso in Chile. Protest had been sparked by the price hike demanded by the German company which operated the city’s tramway system – a hike interpreted, probably correctly, as a punishment for the unbending neutrality of the Chilean government. There was also British success at Mezera in Mesopotamia against the Turks, who were driven back south of Batoum in Transcaucasia.

As news of the Indian soldier in France who had been recommended the previous week for a VC filtered into general consciousness, Lord Curzon took the chance to pay tribute to his audacity in an address he was making to a gathering of City men on behalf of the Indian Soldiers’ Relief Fund. The Daily Express took keen delight on 3rd December in contrasting Anglo-Saxon pride in the excellences of its imperial comrades with the xenophobia of the Germans. It commented:

To most of the German newspapers the fact that our Indian troops are fighting so splendidly in the cause of the Allies is a sort of perpetual nightmare; the one subject that they can never let alone and the one around which they weave their most fantastic fictions.

Elaborating the point, it quoted a outburst of the Frankfurter Zeitung on the subject:

The old German kindness of heart is manifesting itself conspicuously in our treatment of our Indian prisoners. We have it from a native Indian officer that the British are driving the Indian troops to the front with machine guns, men being further animated by plentiful doses of rum and whisky.

The hand of friendship, nonetheless, did not really extend across the Liffey – not even in patronising and tight-lipped fashion it favoured for India. “The Irish Government has at length taken action against seditious pro-German newspapers in Ireland to which the Daily Express has repeatedly called attention” crowed the paper on 4th December. Yet, in its own eyes, the paper attempted a kind of even-handedness, extolling the extraordinary bravery of a posse of soldiers in Flanders from the Royal Irish Regiment who had recently been forced to abandon trenches they had held against fearful odds. According to an eye-witness, Corporal Hayden of the Worcesters,

in the retreat about ten men were separated from the rest, and surrounded by thousands of the enemy. They were called on to surrender, but they would not hear of it, and then they were forced into a position where they had to choose between surrender and fight to the death; they chose the latter, and with their backs to the wall received the German attack. They went down after a time, and when we came up we only found dead Irishmen surrounded by heaps of dead Germans.

For almost the first time since the war had begun, a week elapsed without a significant naval drama. To allied irritation, the German submarine U.16 succeeded in entering Esbjerg Harbour in Denmark on 5th December despite having been damaged (although not, in the tetchy assessment of the Admiralty, nearly enough). On 4th December the first Seaplane Unit founded by the German navy officially came into service, beginning operations from Zeebrugge. The following day, anticipating a further drastic departure in the weapons of warfare, French airmen bombed air sheds at Freiburg-in-Breisgau. Hitherto, while there had been plenty of fevered speculation about the potential of aircraft to transform the potential parameters of conflict, their function had been overwhelmingly one of reconnaissance. No longer apparently.

The war was set to last. So much was evident in an intemperate speech made on 2nd December by the German Chancellor, Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg. “Now that all the details of the Anglo–Belgian war plan have been brought to light,” he claimed,

the policy pursued by English statesmen can be identified for all time. But English diplomacy itself has committed yet another crime. On its orders Japan has seized heroic Kiautschau from us and thereby violated Chinese neutrality… Has England intervened against this breach of neutrality? Has it shown in this instance, its scrupulous concern for neutral states?

This was the same man who had earlier coined the phrase “a mere scrap of paper” when referring to the treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. Neither then nor later did the Chancellor’s revisionism attract favourable criticism outside a purely domestic audience.

Adopting the rather supercilious tones so beloved of the British, newspapers during the week pondered weightily upon young women. The Daily Express on 2nd December considered that “Winter nights and darkened streets, far from acting as a deterrent, have encouraged more and more girls to linger about the streets until late into the night, and the evil has at last become so obvious that complaints are now pouring in from many quarters…”

To be fair, this was an article with a point rather than a pastiche:

The girls who are now drifting into undesirable courses do not… belong to the vicious class. At the worst they are silly, undisciplined, and unhinged by the upheaval of the times; at the best they are animated by a sense of patriotism which fills them with an incoherent but ardent desire to do something, and so play their part in the hour of the nation’s need…

On 3rd December it reported, with genial condescension, that

Hundreds of young girls and women have been engaged at the Armstrong-Whitworth works at Elswick, and other Tyneside factories are following their example. The girls are found very useful for the lighter work formerly entrusted to men.

According to the Varsity that week, “headmasters of schools, public and private, have naturally been hard hit by the war in consequence of releasing so many assistant-masters for service, and this naturally throws many good and lucrative posts vacant temporarily or otherwise”. There was no suggestion, naturally, that some of the feckless young women might have found a place in these bastions of masculinity.

By now nearly all news in the papers was filtered through the prism of war. There was an ongoing fascination as to how hostilities were viewed in the neutral USA – which, given her almost limitless wealth, was a matter of pragmatic concern. An interview given by the Crown Prince, eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm, was reported by the New York Herald on 1st December. In the view of the Daily Express, reported the following day, “The German Crown Prince’s ‘interview’ failed to create the desired impression in America that Germany is an injured, peace-loving nation which the rest of Europe is trying to subdue as a warning to other meek and lowly nationalities.”

Another newspaper report during the week became news in its own right. The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia printed an interview with Lord Kitchener – a veritable scoop for the paper and the interviewer in question, Irvin Cobb, then a famous writer. “The war will end only when Germany is thoroughly defeated by land and sea,” Lord Kitchener was quoted as having said.

I do not think it is likely to end in a month from now or six months, or a year, so to be on the safe side I say three years — at least three years. The Germans still think they will win. I wonder how long they think it will take them to win. Their campaign in the west is a failure, and will become more and more a failure as time passes.

So far, so prescient – and perhaps surprisingly candid in the circumstances. A furious row erupted following publication. The Daily Express seemed only too happy to rubbish the article, writing on 5th December that “although Lord Kitchener saw Mr. Cobb for a few minutes on October 21, nothing in the nature of a special interview was granted, and the remarks attributed to the Secretary of State are imaginary”. Irving Cobb didn’t much care for that, and the Express, a couple of days later, felt constrained to acknowledge that he stood by his account of his interview with Lord Kitchener. In hindsight it seems likely that Lord Kitchener, like many a grandee, may have been flattered into indiscretion.

If the old soldier had indeed given voice to his deepest concerns, it is no mystery as to why people would have been upset. On 3rd December, the Daily Express suggested that “According to Mr. Lloyd George, we are now on the way toward the third million of fighting men. We shall want them all. Meanwhile Mr. Ellis Griffith has again been hinting at the possibility of conscription.” That last sentence struck terror into many hearts, especially those with young sons. It is unlikely that they would have been afforded much consolation by the ruminations of Margot Asquith at the start of the week who reflected on the burdens shouldered by the Prime Minister: “Henry looks tired which always makes me sad… I’m glad to say he had a little snooze in the afternoon [NB this was Monday] after a little golf. He never thinks of himself.”

Tension seems to have been consistently understated and yet ubiquitous among civilian society. Another story the paper carried that day is most certainly susceptible to that interpretation: “Among rich and poor alike, keen anxiety to learn the fate of their men has brought a rich harvest to the fortune-tellers, crystal gazers, card diviners, palmists, and other occult folk, against whom the police in calmer times than these make spasmodic raid.”

And – with the insouciance of a hero – Sir Ernest Shackleton, on board HMS Endurance, left South Georgia Island on 5th December for his third expedition to the Antarctic. He had loaded extra clothing, supplies and coal –bearing in mind the possibility of being stuck in the Weddell Sea. There was always the risk, he had acknowledged, that it might freeze while he and the crew were still in transit. The timing of this adventure, anything between unfortunate and unforgivable in terms of the war raging across much of the rest of the globe, proved uncommonly lucky in one respect. Three days later the Battle of the Coronel exploded right across what would have been his path. History, and the tales it spins, owe much in the end to coincidence.

To neatly tie God and mammon: His Holiness the Pope endeavoured on 6th December to secure a Christmas truce so that “the guns may fall silent at least upon the night the angels sang”. Meanwhile, the next day, the French Bourse re-opened for business.