A Ground War for All Time: Churchill's Forgotten Masterpiece
Valiunas, Algis
Algis Valiunas A GROUND WAR FOR ALL TIME: CHURCHILL'S FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE In the despair following World War I, The World Crisis restored the politics of national interest to its rightful...
...Everywhere was blood and bloody rags...
...At the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, General Byng used them, however "tardily and doubtingly," to win a swift victory almost without casualties...
...I confess I stick to it more because I see nothing better, and because my instinct prompts me to stick to it, than because of any good argument by which I can support it.' These are terrible words when used to sustain the sacrifices of nearly four hundred thousand men...
...Siegfried Sassoon sees a soldier in his death throes "flapping along the fire-step like a fish . . ." Hemingway's Frederic Henry reviles the obscenity of abstract words like glory, honor, courage: "The things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it...
...Churchill's strategy ran afoul of the Allied command in France...
...III C hurchill's criticism of the doctrine of the Offensive, a criticism thatinformed his own action throughout the war, is bitter, eloquent, and incontrovertible...
...The hideous injuries they inflicted and bore, the privations they endured, the grand loyalties they exemplified, all were in vain...
...only by removing himself from it can a man truly hope to live...
...The foremost object of Churchill's contemplation is the injuries "wrought to the structure of human society which a century will not efface, and which may conceivably prove fatal to the present civilization...
...the Great War is notable for the wealth of instances it provides of imprudence of all sorts...
...The crippled, broken world in which we dwell today is the inheritor of these awful events...
...The gap between conception and !execution was an abyss...
...There are cases in which prudence in the limited sense might be imprudence in the larger sense...
...By returning Alsace-Lorraine to France, by withdrawing from Belgium, the Germans might have secured their huge gains in Russia, cut their losses, and brought an end to the slaughter...
...When Churchill indicts the policies of the Allied leadership, he takes pains to point out that he does not do so merely with the easy wisdom of hindsight...
...The World Crisis celebrates the Allied triumph—especially the British part in it—but mourns the European tragedy...
...to see a compassionate and sorrowing soul regard without flinching the greatest catastrophe of human devising...
...W ith the Allied defeat at Pas- schendaele, the collapse of Russia, the German-Austrian victory at Caporetto that all but defeated Italy, the Germans had an opportunity to begin negotiating for peace...
...everything that they had given was given in vain...
...When the Germans attacked them, the Germans took the heavier losses...
...To read the war writings of Re-marque, Barbusse, Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Ford Madox Ford is to plunge far deeper into the world's horror than one has likely ever been, and to know that the pressure of such depths threatens to crush all that one hopes to be durably fine in himself, all that one trusts would see him through the hardest trial...
...The doctrine of the Offensive, raised to the height of a religious frenzy, animated all ranks, and in no rank was restrained by any foreknowledge of the power of magazine rifles and machine-guns...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 battle of the Frontiers, the magnitude and terror of which is scarcely now known to British consciousness, more than 300,000 Frenchmen were killed, wounded, or made prisoners...
...There are manoeuvres in time, in diplomacy, in mechanics, in psychology...
...The poems, novels, and memoirs of frontline soldiers of the Great War dwell almost exclusively upon the purposelessness of individual suffering, and have erected a public memorial to the death of national politics...
...To measure the full effect of this general heedlessness, one must read Churchill's history of the Second World War...
...In May 1917, shortly after writing the obituary in the Times of a friend killed in action (Valentine Fleming, the father of spy novelist Ian Fleming), he poured forth his anguish in a letter to his wife: "Never for a moment does the thought of this carnage & ruin escape my mind...
...Taken in stiff doses, these writings induce an acute and morbid awareness 'The World Crisis is out of print...
...on the other hand it gives it an irremediable sadness: It is a tale of the torture, mutilation or extinction of millions of men, and of the sacrifice of all that was best and noblest in an entire generation...
...The war's devastation also inspired men to imagine a universal brotherhood of socialism that would forever spell an end to international discord, as one finds in the careers of Sassoon, Graves (in yet another mood), and the French novelist Henri Barbusse...
...Je les grignotte," Joffre declared of his strategic intentions...
...The manoeuvre which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which placates or overawes a dangerous neutral...
...And these could have been discovered and made mercifully effective, not by any departure from the principles of military art, but simply by the true comprehension of those principles and their application to the actual facts...
...Hard and somber war...
...To read The World Crisis is to begin to understand how the crisis in political thought that the war brought on ought to have been resolved...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 21 the story of prudence unheeded...
...Mercifully the military authorities of all countries belonged to the same school of thought...
...he attributes the extremity of its horror to the failures of particular policies, not to modern political life itself...
...war of winter...
...Yet all the time there were ways open by which this slaughter could have been avoided and the period of torment curtailed...
...However, with Ludendorff in command, the military had gained ascendancy over the Kaiser, and the military was incapable of the comprehensive understanding which would have recognized the political gains that certain military concessions might have gotten the Germans...
...In the mighty The nation that instructs its men to risk death for its sake is hopelessly rotten, and fear that compels a man to save his life at all costs is the highest of sentiments...
...The French took the worst of it...
...its primary characteristic is foresight...
...U nless it is the damage done to an entire civilization...
...all were stricken...
...And I answer it, pointing to the Battle of Cambrai, "This could have been done...
...Devotion, glory, king, country, justice: these are the phantasms of a public life that is founded upon unreality, the pernicious visions of nationwide hallucination...
...The singular excellence of The World Crisis reflects Churchill's masterly grasp of what was required of statesmanship during both the time he was writing about and the time he was writing for...
...Ludendorff perceived the war not as an extension of politics by other means, but as the means to further war...
...the dead uncounted, unburied...
...During the whole war the Germans never lost in any phase of the fighting more than the French whom they fought, and frequently inflicted double casualties upon them...
...It was [the Germans'] own offensive, not ours, that consummated their ruin...
...At the entrance the arrival and departure of the motor ambulances, each with its four or five shattered and tortured beings, was incessant...
...As life is the thing of supreme value, then courage must be a vice, the nation that instructs its men to risk death for its sake is hopelessly rotten, and fear that compels a man to save his life at all costs is the highest of sentiments...
...On May 9, 1915, as the second battle in the Dardanelles campaign was taking place, Churchill spent the day on the Western Front, where an Allied attack against the Aubers Ridge was being hurled back: On the evening of this day I witnessed also the hideous spectacle of a large casualty clearing station in the height of a battle...
...For the first time since Ypres in 1914, the Germans lost two soldiers for every British one, three officers for every British two...
...War, which knows no rigid divisions between French, Russian, and British Allies, between Land, Sea and Air, between gaining victories and affiances, between supplies and fighting men, between propaganda and machinery, which is, in fact, simply the sum of all forces and pressures operative at a given period, was dealt with piecemeal...
...Although Sir John French, Commander of the British Army in France, lost his command for his part in that defeat, his successor, General Haig, was to surpass him in folly and destruction...
...The world it presents seems more thickly populated with corpses and human fragments than with actual living men...
...To Paul Biumer, the narrator of All Quiet on the Western Front, the sight of a hospital crammed with the wounded nullifies all that European civilization had achieved: "How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, orthought, when such things are possible...
...He renders the war as nightmare but also makes clear that the nightmare did not take place in a void...
...horses dying in the traces...
...The war problem, which was all one, was tugged at from many different and disconnected standpoints...
...The literature of the Great War is full of brute facts about men who die like beasts...
...At the summit true politics and strategy are one...
...For if their art were nothing more than a dreary process of exchanging lives, and counting heads at the end, they would rank much lower in the scale of human esteem...
...The opportunity was a brief one: the Americans had declared war, and, when they arrived, the German advantage would be gone...
...however, even when the French were on the defensive, which for them was the occasion for counter-attack, they took losses at a rate of at least 3 to 2. The British fared better, though badly all the same...
...wounded frozen in their own blood...
...The amphibious assault became a debacle because Kitchener declared against such an assault at first, claiming that no troops were available for it, then decided to mount it after all but with an inadequate force, and subsequently reinforced those troops less rapidly than the -Dirks reinforced their own...
...Churchill was not averse to straightforward attack...
...The virtues that Churchill honors as pre-eminent are, awfully, those of the men who were smashed in the general wreckage...
...the cavalry was actually called up "to press the victory to a decisive conclusion," but its presence managed only to give the fiasco—an inconsequential advance that cost 500,000 casualties—an unendurable goofiness...
...Ludendorff and Hindenburg] were only acquainted with a portion of the problem, and they could only carry out such parts of the indispensable resultant policy as fell within their own military sphere...
...Here success vindicates the prudence that defied the orthodoxy that merely thought itself prudent...
...Churchill laments the hopelessness of this assault upon an enemy "almost equal in strength, intensely fortified, and fully prepared...
...Every inch of the body seems designed as a potential site for affliction, as though eyes were made to be blinded, limbs to be splintered, genitals to be sheared away...
...Unfortunately, the general did not know what to make of his success, and ten days later a forceful German counter-stroke recaptured the ground...
...however, "in all the British offensives the British casualties were never less than 3 to 2, and often nearly double the corresponding German losses...
...Drawing the carnage of war withbroader, swifter strokes than writers like Remarque and Barbusse use, Churchill nevertheless conveys the effect of mass suffering that is infernal in its intensity...
...there were devices by which fronts could have been pierced...
...While he recognizes the truth of the soldier's story—as a battalion commander in France, he was beloved by his men and renowned for his fearlessness—he knows it is a fragmentary truth...
...To inhabit a world where only crippling or death puts an end to relentless fear permanently alters the soldier's moral understanding...
...For Haig and Robertson, who basked in the certainty that perseverance in the war of attrition finally wore the Germans down, Churchill has a mordant retort...
...An unbroken file of urgent and critical cases were pressed towards the operating room, the door of which was wide open and revealed as I passed the terrible spectacle of a man being trepanned...
...Apportioning the responsibility for disaster among the political and military leaders of both sides, he de-mystifies and disperses the pall of evil that the cataclysm has cast over the very idea of nationality...
...He was likelier to make a good book out of his helplessness and ignorance than out of a pretended THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 19 power to see the whole thing in perspective...
...Men who by temperament were capable of doing the most harm regularly found themselves in circumstances where they could pursue disaster virtually unimpeded...
...The men of the Beginning must not be judged wholly by the light of the End...
...Everywhere along the battle front, whenever Germans were seen, the signal was given to charge...
...His colleague Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, "drifted ponderously," with the same lamentable result...
...The war on the Eastern Front, which resulted in the destruction of the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov dynasties, inspires this horrified dirge: . . . all were defeated...
...The reasons his rulers adduce for requiring his attendance at their quarrel, the noble sentiments that might have surged through him as he stepped forth to do his part, belong to a world of illusion, and lie immeasurably far from the ultimate reality of war: the physical facts of mayhem and death, and one's fear of them...
...The French and British offensive at Loos in September 1915, conceived by Joffre, was an extravaganza of imbecility...
...The battle of Arras in late March and early April 1918 was commonly considered a German victory, but Churchill calls it a defeat...
...For the Central Powers, Russia, and the Balkans, the heroic sacrifices of millions really did amount to pointless slaughter, since the nations in whose names men died were themselves smashed, in "the most mournful conflict of which there is record...
...The history is decidedly partisan, leaving no doubt that the right side won, yet it is withering in its appraisal of both sides' folly...
...In examining the political and military failures that were responsible for the slaughter and in suggesting how prudence might have averted disaster, Churchill reasserted the dignity of the political life, which the war had made men regard as ignominious, unnatural, and mad...
...all of which are removed from the battlefield, but react often decisively upon it, and the object of all is to fmd easier ways, other than sheer slaughter, of achieving the main purpose...
...Algis Valiunas A GROUND WAR FOR ALL TIME: CHURCHILL'S FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE In the despair following World War I, The World Crisis restored the politics of national interest to its rightful place...
...Churchill uses prudence in the Machiavellian sense to mean the ability of the political mind to use whatever means is required to gain a desired end...
...There are manoeuvres far to the flank or rear...
...Those who survived, the veterans of countless battle-days, returned, whether with the laurels of victory or tidings of disaster, to homes engulfed already in catastrophe...
...The struggle to convince the military leadership of the tank's supreme usefulness was difficult...
...black and barren regions...
...One room was filled to overflowing with cases not worth sending any further, cases whose hopelessness excluded them from priority in operations...
...Outside in the quadrangle the drumming thunder of the cannonade proclaimed that the process of death and mutilation was still at its height...
...His advocacy rested on his confidence in the tank's ability to "destroy wire without a bombardment which would warn the enemy, and consequently restore the element of surprise to a modern offensive...
...He strips the disaster of its apparent inevitability...
...If political life is insane, one can hope only to survive this particular outbreak of it, then make his getaway into the burrow of his strictly private concerns, from which neither duty nor honor nor country can ever hope to ferret him out again...
...The misunderstanding of the strength of modern weaponry was the war's signal tragedy, as General Joffre's failures in the early going demonstrate: It was for the tactical sphere that General Joffre and his school of "young Turks," as they came to be called in France, had reserved their crowning mistakes...
...That things should have gone as wrong as they did required a concatenation of imbecilic schemes and feckless actions that is perhaps unrivaled in the history of human folly...
...With this depiction of utter woe, of total defeat even on the so-called victors' part, Churchill draws a harsh political lesson for those Englishmen who taught that the war had meant the loss of everything they valued: there is loss, and there is loss...
...The trouble is that the truth about the individual reaction has eclipsed the truth about the war...
...The spectacle takes place under a pitiless emotional overcast that is relieved by only the rarest glimmers of magnificence...
...The French Infantry marched into battle conspicuous on the landscape in their red breeches and blue coats...
...His history recounts not only the war that was actually fought, but also the war as it ought to have been fought...
...To address matters of stategic import, to study war as the extension of politics by other means, is to overlook the ultimate truth of war, which is to be discerned only in the fear, anguish, physical agony, and political disaffection of the men who know it best...
...Churchill reasserts the capability of political intelligence to control its most pernicious and most willful instruments, even though he cannot show it doing so...
...Yet almost no one reads the writer who described the war's devastation most movingly and who discerned its causes most clearly: Winston Churchill's masterpiece The World Crisis is virtually unknown.' Churchill knew everything about the war's horror that the other writers knew, but he rejected their conclusions: for him, the war did not mean the death of political life as men had previously known it...
...The scene that he draws is one of reason doing what it can in a bloody shambles, and it implicitly remarks what reason has failed to do: the icy clinical reasonableness that sorts the hopelessly wounded from those who have a chance of survival is a cruel necessity, but the irrational command that sent the men at German machine-guns was needless cruelty...
...Churchill's plan was to coordinate a diplomatic initiative to unite the quarrelsome Balkan states with an amphibious military attack that would make short work of Turkey...
...The distinction between politics and strategy diminishes as the point of view is raised...
...But it was not those who learned the slowest who were made to suffer most...
...The helplessness of the common soldier becomes "the whole thing in perspective...
...The principal opponents seem not so much the Allies and the Central Powers, as men of prudence and men of imprudence...
...Here all Central Europe tore itself to pieces and expired in agony, to rise again, unrecognizable...
...This in many variants, this in larger and better forms ought to have been done, and would have been done if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war...
...The men in power were not wise enough or strong enough to do things the right way, but the right way was there, at certain crucial moments, and it was seen to be there...
...In 1915, the destructive stupidity of the early fighting was eclipsed by the insensate obstinacy and lack of comprehension which, without any large numerical superiority, without adequate artillery or munitions, without any novel mechanical method, without any pretence of surprise or manoeuvre, without any reasonable hope of victory, continued to hurl the heroic but limited manhood of France at the strongest entrenchments, at uncut wire and innumerable machine-guns served with cold skill...
...Nevertheless, Churchill regards this use of the tank, although belated and incomplete, as a turning point in the war: Accusing as I do without exception all the great ally offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917, as needless and wrongly conceived operations of infmite cost, I am bound to reply to the question, What else could be done...
...The military understanding of things was all the more dangerous because it was not complete...
...In his essay "Inside the Whale" (1940), George Orwell observed that most of the writings that came out of World War I were the records of something completely meaningless, a nightmare happening in a void...
...In fact, the Germans, "mown down in heaps" as they attacked, were sealing their own doom...
...And years of cruel teaching were necessary before even imperfect unifications of study, thought, command and action were achieved...
...Though the Germans invaded, it was more often the French who attacked...
...Nothing was gained by any...
...The collision was general along the whole battle front, and there was a universal recoil...
...Had this heroic army been handled in the First Shock with prudence, on a wise strategic scheme, and with practical knowledge of the effects of modern firearms and the use of barbed wire and entrenchments, there is no reason to doubt that the German invasion could have been brought to a standstill after suffering enormous losses within from thirty to fifty kilometres of the French frontiers...
...If we lose three or four times as many officers and nearly twice as many men in our attack as the enemy in his defense, how are we wearing him down...
...In The World Crisis, the sight of the dead and dying, however movingly described, is not so much cause for mourning as it is a goad to resolute action...
...Unfortunately for them, they were most ruthless to themselves...
...The soldier's story is the heart of his history, but his own greater understanding informs it...
...He knows well that their agony eats away at the foundations of public life...
...No loss exceeds in cruelty the ruin of one's country...
...Churchill calls his account of the failed campaign a lesson in "the profound significance of human choice and the sublime responsibility of men...
...T he suspicion of idiocy was accu- I rate, the estimate of the havoc it would cause, too benign...
...What undid the operation was Kitchener's inability to choose between, or reconcile, the two major conceptions of Allied strategy...
...His mind has a grip on the war's abominations, and he devotedly considers how best to dispatch them...
...Borodino...
...Unfortunately, when he and Joffre plotted their decisive attack in July 1916, they chose the Somme, "the strongest and most perfectly defended position in the world...
...II hurchill is an exemplar of the po‘„, litical life that the Great War is alleged to have repudiated forever...
...The antithesis between Churchill's esteem for the troops and his contempt for their commanders is a prominent feature of his history: That the French Army should have survived this frightful butchery, the glaring miscalculations which caused it, and the long harassed retreats by which it was attended, and yet should have retained the fighting qualities which rendered a sublime recovery possible, is the greatest proof of their martial fortitude and devotion which history will record...
...In the opening weeks of the war, the Austrians, like the French, hurled "precipitate offensives" straight into machine-gun fire that nearly destroyed their army...
...The absence of a King-Warrior-Statesman who might have kept the Great War from taking place or conducted it by the least ruinous means makes it necessary for the Warrior-Statesman-Historian to illuminate the war's devastation...
...to hear a majestic voice, ringing with admiration, piercing in anger, hushed with grief and pity, speak those words which alone preserve dead and survivors alike from the ashen wastes of the meaningless and unspeakable...
...the Beresinaall the sinister impressions of these names revive, divested of their vivid flash of pomp, and enlarged to a hideous size...
...Yet, by turning regularly to his own strategic designs, Churchill enables the reader to see how a prudent intelligence might have guided events to a less ruinous conclusion...
...His scrutiny of the casualty lists published after the war bears out his conviction that the war of attrition was a hopeless monstrosity...
...V T he co-existence in Churchill's mind of the war that might have been and the one that was actually fought gives his history its sense of the moral dignity, the high purposefulness, of the political calling...
...As for mind and spirit, they seem to exist chiefly to intensify the body's agony...
...It is above all to demonstrate how the chronic infirmity of political and military command made them suffer as they did that Churchill writes this history...
...In Joffre's offensives of 1915, the French suffered 1,300,000 casualties, and inflicted 506,000...
...Behind the "welter of slaughter" lies (continued on page 24) Men who by temperament were capable of doing the most harm regularly found themselves in circumstances where they could pursue disaster virtually unimpeded...
...Sadly, Churchill's voice was not heeded as it should have been...
...Although the British used twenty tanks at the Somme, far too few to be of any use, and plunged them into the mud at Passchendaele, where they wallowed, the Germans failed to profit from these improvident revelations of the Allies' secret weapon...
...I arnage on an unprecedented scale was the salient feature of the First World War, and the writing on that carnage is largely responsible for the modern disgust not only with war but also with politics in general...
...Long swathes of red and blue corpses littered the stubble fields...
...He subjects the "assertions and theories of the military schools of the three great belligerents to a blood test as pitiless as that to which [they] doomed their valiant soldiers...
...There was altogether lacking that supreme combination of the King-WarriorStatesman which is apparent in the persons of the great conquerors of history...
...To conduct war in a way that avoids slaughter, that allows a nation to achieve its political ends while holding the loss of men to a minimum, is crucial to the art...
...Aspern...
...Against the protestations of Lloyd George, who could complain but not command, Robertson urged the great offensive at Passchendaele in the autumn of 1917, which was to become "a forlorn expenditure of valour and life without equal in futility...
...They floundered in the mud, they perished in the snowdrifts, they starved in the frost...
...to study a composed and resolute intelligence as it resists the nihilistic desperation and utopian fantasy that the carnage has begotten...
...Like Joffre, Haig was certain that the Western Front was, throughout the entire war, the decisive theater, and he intended to win there by killing Germans in a war of attrition...
...Kitchener's chronic wavering let irretrievable opportunities for victory slip away...
...We may make our pictures of this front from Napoleon's campaigns...
...They were worn down not by Joffre, Nivelle and Haig, but by Ludendorff...
...Tiro successive campaigns, one on either front, each undertaken with sufficient force for its success, might have achieved an Allied victory by 1916...
...As it happened, two simultaneous and conflicting efforts, each hopelessly undermanned and ill-timed, assured that victory would come only much later, and at ruinous cost...
...Eylau...
...In December 1914, Churchill wrote to the prime minister, Lord Asquith, that the contending armies were deadlocked in the west, "that the position of both armies is not likely to undergo any decisive change—although no doubt several hundred thousand men will be spent to satisfy the military mind on the point...
...IV hurchill's most ambitiously conceived operation as First Lord of the Admiralty was the Allies' greatest failure: the Dardanelles campaign of 11915...
...Abetting this intractability was the fatal blend of imperiousness and hesitancy in Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War...
...Part of Churchill's story is the tragedy of far-seeing intelligence, most notably but not only his own, outranked by short-sightedness...
...His history pinpoints the controlling forces that ordinary soldiers' memoirs tend to consider some vague malignity inherent in the life of nations...
...from the back door corpses were being carried out at brief intervals to a burying party constantly at work...
...Ever in his mind is the reason for suffering on such a scale: the particular failures of military and political leadership...
...War teaches the two things one must know about them: they are meaningless, and they can get you killed...
...their Artillery Officers in black and gold were even more sharply defined targets...
...A hospital alone shows what war is...
...The war's horror provoked a general withdrawal from—indeed, revulsion at—the public life, as one discovers in the writings of Ford Madox Ford, Robert Graves, and Wyndham Lewis...
...Fear and horror abridge the moral F lexicon to the single, paradoxically nihilistic, word life—nihilistic, because if nothing else is so important as life itself, then there is nothing that one will not do to preserve it...
...What ruined the Germans was their ruthless advances in France during the spring and early summer of 1918...
...It is a literature that overcomes one with physical horror, that compels one to imagine the innumerable ways in which a man's body can be broken...
...The life of nations is purposeless mass death...
...Yet their suffering was insufficiently severe to dissuade them, and others, from trying again and again...
...long marches forward and back again under heavy burdens...
...Reflecting upon the diplomatic mishandling of crucial events that led up to the war, the sclerotic orthodoxies of military strategy that dragged the war out to its murderous immensity, the shameless demagoguery that assured that the peace would be odious to victors and vanquished alike, Churchill maintains the focus continually upon the soldiers who slogged on to no apparent end...
...Wagram...
...Although Churchill writes brilliantly of the origins of the war—he treats Kaiser Wilhelm, Count Berchthold, and von Moltke with superb contempt—it is war itself that commands his greatest powers...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991...
...It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands...
...That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was the truth about the individual reaction...
...of human existence as simply that of soft objects in a world full of much harder and sharper ones...
...Although one might expect Joffre's adherence to "the doctrine of the Offensive" to be a misjudgment unique in its monstrosity, it is in fact but one instance of devotion to a belief professed ardently, widely, and tenaciously...
...Had the Alliesoriginally decided to attack with a force of the size that the course of events by and by compelled them to employ—and sacrifice—the operation would have succeeded...
...Thanks to the suicidal Allied efforts at Passchendaele, the Germans enjoyed an immense manpower advantage, and they seemed to be winning victories that spelled the end for the Allies...
...He also uses prudence in its more common and limited meaning of "care" or "circumspection...
...Robertson wrote to Haig that he could not say for certain why they were doing what they were doing but that he nevertheless considered it the thing to do...
...Fortune seemed to abet the worst in human character...
...For the "mechanical danger" that the machine-gun posed to the advancing soldier, a "mechanical remedy" was needed...
...The result of every one of these offensives was to leave us relatively weaker—and in some cases terribly weaker—than the enemy...
...As one entrusted with the conduct of war—Churchill served as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 until the failure of the Dardanelles campaign in 1915, and during the final year of the war was Minister of Munitions—Churchill thought above all of how to keep more soldiers from ending up dead...
...For these a cup of tea, a cigarette, and another long motor journey were reserved...
...he simply favored a means of doing it that was not suicidal...
...The ability to outmaneuver one's opponent, the intellectual adroitness of true strategy, including "an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten," characterizes the military art at its highest, in which the statesman's understanding of war and the general's are one...
...This continual referral to his own role in events might be seen as mere opportunism...
...The soldier advancing into a machine-gun barrage or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here was an appalling experience in which he was all but helpless...
...The British strategy was a war of attrition, "but it was on our own side that its ravages fell, and not on the German...
...when the generals finally decided to use tanks, they misused them...
...the living pressed again into the mill...
...The horror of the battlefield might not be the worst of it...
...Admiral Bacon and Colonel E. D. Swinton were at work on devising such a remedy—the tank—and Churchill became their patron...
...Churchill reasserts the capability of political intelligence to control its most pernicious and most willful instruments, even though he cannot show it doing so...
...repeatedly, he cites the criticisms that he made of policy as it was being developed...
...The great generals of the past would have found intolerable the current military conviction that slaughter alone was a sufficient way of waging war...
...According to this view, to suffer in war without understanding why is to acquire the most profound understanding of war—indeed, of political life...
...Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Chicago...
...Their vaunted success consisted in recapturing the ravaged battlefields that they had held and lost the year before...
...It is essential to Churchill's teaching about the proper way of conducting war that the unity between the political and military arts be recognized: There are many kinds of manoeuvres in war, only some of which take place on the battlefield...
...More than 1,000 men suffering from every form of horrible injury, seared, torn, pierced, choking, dying, were being sorted according to their miseries into the different parts of the Convent at Merville...
...Churchill is intimate with the physical horror and the mental torment that the common soldiers' memoirs are full of...
...Instead, as events were cast, the French Army in the first few weeks of the war received wounds which were nearly fatal, and never curable...
...Lord Balfour called The World Crisis "Winston's brilliant autobiography disguised as a history of the universe...
...The conception was this: the impasse on the Western Front and the lethal threat to Russia, which was expending more ammunition in a day than it was able to produce in a month, called for a strategy that, by turning the enemy's flank, would link Russia to her western allies and revive her flagging strength...
...Success would have gained the Allies a significant increase in manpower and opened the crucial shipping route between Russia and the West, perhaps enabling the Allies to concentrate their forces in the west for a push strong enough to break the Germans...
...while the French were nibbling away, however, they were being chewed to bits...
...he wanted to hold on to all the territory that the German armies occupied in order "to obtain a good strategic starting-point for a future war...
...There were regions where flanks could have been turned...
...upon the correct understanding of their terrible fate hinges the political future of Great Britain, indeed of Europe...
...Other rooms were filled with "walking wounded" all in much pain, but most in good spirits...
...The most recent edition was issued by Scribner's in the 1950s...
...To man the Dardanelles expedition adequately required the diversion of troops assigned to the Western Front, but the leadership in the west begrudged the expedition their every man—not unexpectedly, as, in their view, the last man standing in France would be declared the winner...
...All had to learn and all had to suffer...
...Although the British and French staffs, like the German, had the habit of claiming that their offensives hurt the enemy more than they did the attacking army, the opposite was the case...
Vol. 24 • April 1991 • No. 4
