8 
ir 
LAND & WATER 
August 10, 1916 
He was beginning to enter a new state of affairs with 
regard to his man power, and upon that his next plans 
would depend. He had hoped for a decision in the East 
before reaching such straits ; he had failed to achieve 
that decision and he must now consider some alternative. 
How did he stand as against his opponents ? 
These opponents were four in number of the great 
Powers with the Serbian and a fraction of the original 
Belgian forces among the smaller Powers. 
The Italian forces were possessed, he knew, of a very 
large reserve indeed. The enemy believed that the 
Italian armies in the field would do little more for many 
months than " hold " some twenty to twenty-five 
Austrian divisions upon either frontier. But he knew 
that the factor of wastage would here be of no significance 
in his own favour ; though the Italians should do no 
more than " hold " from 20 to 25 Austrian divisions, 
yet they could go on holding those forces indefinitely. 
France he knew to be more or less in the same stage 
of exhaustion as himself. The French had the discipline 
and courage to refuse casualty lists. The enemy's 
information was therefore always imperfect. As it is 
in his character to exaggerate his own chances he corre- 
spondingly exaggerated the exhaustion of the French 
and believed the French losses to have been greater than 
they were — an error in which the French by every means 
in their power continued to lead him. There remained 
the Russian and the English. 
BRITISH AND RUSSIAN RESERVES 
Now the Russian and the Enghsh were, in different 
degrees, unknown quantities to the German General 
Staff, though for very different reasons. The British 
offensive power in the future was an unknown quantity 
because they had no data from which to judge the pro- 
bable success of the British authorities in training, 
officering and staffing perfectly new armies formed from 
material hitherto quite ignorant of war and of military 
affairs. ^ As they always do, the German Higher Command 
under-estimated their enemy. They did not believe 
that for a full year, or, at any rate, not until well into 
the summer of 1916, would Great Britain be able to 
produce a formidable offensive force in mere numbers, 
and when or if those mere numbers should appear, they 
were confident that the difficulties of officering such a 
force and the impossibilities of giving it fully trained 
staffs would leave it incapable of arriving at any decision 
in the West. The English power of equipment, upon 
the other hand, they did not under-estimate, for they 
knew the industrial capacities of Great Britain and they 
appreciated the strength of the British Fleet and its 
power of keeping the sea open for the obtaining of 
raunitionment and material from neutral markets — 
notably from the United States. 
Upon the whole they under-estimated even this factor 
in the growth of the British power, but they still more 
under-estimated the probable offensive strength of British 
personnel after winter and spring should be passed. 
What of Russia ? Here the enemy's Higher Command 
estimated that two factors would gravely modify the 
value of the large numerical reserves possessed by this 
particular opponent. The first of these factors was the 
difi&culty of re-equipping, re-arming, re-munitioning, 
Russia. The Dardanelles was closed. Archangel would 
be closed during the whole winter. Vladivostock, though 
kept artificially open during the winter, was at a distance 
of 6,000 miles from the scene of conflict and united with 
it by but one line of railway, while all munitionment 
coming in from these very distant points must first also 
pass over many thousand miles of sea. Further, it was 
believed that disorganisation within the Russian State 
would gravely delay the re-arming of the forces. 
The second factor upon which the enemy relied in this 
case was the difiiculty Russia would find in officering; 
her new armies. More than half the original forces, ful'y 
trained as they had been, were gone. To find appro- 
priate leadership for the completely new bodies which 
would next appear would be a difficult task. It was pro- 
bably imagined at Berlin that it would be if not impossible, 
at any rate, the cause of quite immoderate delay. We 
know from a hundred officially-inspired articles in the 
German Press, from the whole tone of their neutral propa- 
ganda, and indeed from their military dispositions, that 
the enemy's Higher Command regarded the Russian 
army as incapable of serious offensive action for at least 
a year— that is, throughout all useful months of 1916. 
One may sum up and say that the enemy in this 
turning point, the month of October, 1915, looked upon 
the whole field of war somewhat as follows : 
He knew that in the long run newly-equipped armies 
and newly-raised millions would bring the balance at 
least e\cn, but he thought that the delay would be pro- 
longed by at least a year ; in the case of Russia by more 
than a year. He proposed so to act as, first, to bring 
in further effectives in alliance with his own ; in other 
words, to undertake a campaign which, though it might 
be called purely political and should subserve no directly 
rnilitary object, would ha\e the military advantage of 
giving him a further recruitment in numbers. Secondly, 
to create disarray in the plans of one or more of his 
opponents by threatening them unexpectedly in distant 
parts of their dominions. Thirdly, to strike hard while 
yet there was time at the most militarily formidable of 
his opponents, the only fully mobilised conscript great 
Power with which he had had to deal, the French. 
The French were, luckily for him, normally only one- 
third of his own strength. And though he was here 
meeting what he regarded as equals, he hoped to meet 
them with overwhelming numbers before his exhaustion 
should have gone too far. 
This combined scheme he began putting in order at 
once in this same month of October 1915, when he saw 
that the separate peace with Russia was hopeless, and 
that his anxieties in recruitment were beginning. 
He first of all withdrew from his still ample forces in 
the West six divisions which he put into the interior and 
subjected to a special training, to form the spear head of 
the blow he intended to strike against the French in the 
early part of the next year. He designed to give these 
six divisions between three and four months of repose from 
fighting and of exercise peculiar to the task they would 
have to undertake. His plans even included a special 
scale of victualling for these bodies ! 
Next, he informed the King of Bulgaria that an attack 
upon Serbia was planned. The King of Bulgaria had 
been secretly in alliance with the Central Empires for 
some months, and only waited a signal to come into the 
field. It was Austria which had denied Bulgaria the 
fruits of her victories in the Balkan War ; it was due to 
Austria that Serbia had not been granted those Albanian 
territories which were her goal and an outlet upon the 
Adriatic. It had been due to Austria that those terri- 
tories where Serbia proper, Greece and Bulgaria join, 
which are mainly Bulgarian in population, had not been 
granted to Bulgaria, as the secret Treaty between the 
Balkan States agreed, but had been put under Serbian 
rule. There is, therefore, something tragically ironical 
in the fact that Bulgaria now entered into the war upon 
Austria's side for the destruction of Serbia. 
It was evident that with these forces at play, a strong 
Austro-German attack from the north, and a Bulgarian 
attack from in flank, the position of the Serbian Army 
was untenable. It was equally evident that the over- 
running of all Serbia could not possibly give a decision 
to the enemy, nor even approach the end of the war. 
W^hat it could do was to open a highway to unite the 
Central Empires and their Ally Turkey, whom they could 
now amply provision, while it was just possible that the 
absence of a censorship in England would allow panic, or 
at any rate some disarray, to arise when uninstructed 
opinion should note the presence of the Central Powers 
at Constantinople, and the possibility apparent only to 
men insignificant in judgment but numerous and power- 
ful, that Egypt might be threatened. It is even conceiv- 
able that the more foolish and extravagant might have 
fears for India. Further, the entry of Bulgaria upon the 
enemy's side shut in Roumania and made that neutral, 
whose national sympathies were opposed to the Central 
Empires, incapable of movement for the moment ; 
while it was possible the overrunning of Serbia would 
give the Prussian Court at Athens an excuse for turning 
against the Allies. i 
With these mixed objects in view — only indirectly 
military, and a clear proof that decisive military success 
was no longer possible, the enemy opened his bombard- 
ment across the Danube, upon the 3rd of October. 
By the 14th of November the whole Serbian territory 
