10 
LAND 
WATER 
December"" 1 9, 191 8 
only port of that region, its one outlet, Salonika. They 
even attempted an advance up the Varna VaJloy to relieve 
the Serbian situation The latter task was too great for 
them. They failed to accomplish it. They had to fall back 
before tlie Bulgarians and the Germans and to leave 
Serbia for the moment to its fate, but they held Salonika 
and no less than one-lialf of the Serbian forces managed, 
though only at the expense of ' 
terrible suffering, to escape across 
the mountains. They were re- 
ceived by the Allies on the 
Adriatic, and re-equipped. Two 
years later, by one of the most 
dramatic incidents in history, they 
reappeared and took their revenge. 
The year 1915 ends then with 
the following situation : — 
The sipge is still a siege, but 
the besieged have immensely 
extended their area towards the 
I£ast, have proved, or have appar- 
ently proved, that their defensive 
is invulnerable, have demon- 
strated the need for a vast indus- 
trial p oduction for which they 
are specially equipped and of 
which their Eastern opf>onents 
are incapable. Though the be- 
siegers have a great apcession of 
strength in Italy the besieged 
have a greater one through the 
occupation of Poland, tlirough 
the accession of Bulgaria linking 
them up with their Turkish ally 
and through the overrunning of 
the Balkans. It was at this 
moment the opinion of perhaps 
all neutrals, and unfortunately of 
a very large section of opinion 
among the Western AllieS, that 
the war could now only terminate 
in favour of the enemy. His organisation, his ceniral posi- 
tion, his numbers, but much more the prestige of his recent 
successes, were the foundations of this opinion. 
The enemy, thus already partially successful, had still 
the task before him of breaking the Western side of the siege 
line. The war was not won until the Western armies were 
defeated. He prepared for this task in the same fashion, 
though upon a still larger scale 
tlian he had prepared for the task 
of breaking the Russian lines in 
the preceding spring. He chose 
for his sector of attack upK>n the 
West a far better point than that 
which he had erroneously chosen 
previously towards the North 
Sea. The sector which he se- 
lected this time was that of 
Verdun, the very centre of the 
Allied line. There did he propose 
by a massed attack, precisely 
similar in-««character but still 
greater in scale than the attack 
of the previous year in the East, 
to break through the lines con- 
taining him and in the last week 
of February, 1916, there opened, 
a few miles to the north-east of 
the town of Ver .un, the most 
severe bombardment that the war 
had hitherto seen followed by a 
concentrated assault. 
Tne attack on Verdun failed. 
It not only failed in the sense 
in which the great Eastern sortie 
had failed, that is, in the 'cnse 
that it did not completely b eak 
the sice-line, though it severely 
bruised it, and pushed it back ; 
it failed comi letely. After the 
first day's attack, wliich covered a 
belt of some four to six thousand 
yards, numbered several thousand prisoners, and put a 
very heavy strain upwn the defence, it became a thing with 
which the next few months were to render both parties 
wearisomely familiar ; what Marshal Foch has called " the 
spending c f the wave." That is, these great attacks against 
the modern defensive proved, even when the utmost energy 
was put into them, like a wave which breaks upon the shore, 
loses energy as it proceeds, and is at last checked to immobility. 
GENERAL THE HON. SIR JULIAN BYNG 
GENERAL SIR HERBERT PLUMER 
or even to retrogression. We weft to have bitter experience 
of this our elves later on upon the Somme, at Vimy, upon 
the heights of the Aisne, at Passchendaele ; and in the greatest 
example of all, the Germans also were to learn the lesson, 
in the failure of the great attack on tie Amiens sector this 
3'ear. 
The significant, the determinant, point in the great assault 
upon the Verdun front was the'' 
conclusion of the Prussian Gen- 
eral Staff to continue after the 
first effort had failed. 
Note the great effect of that 
deliberate judgment upon their 
part : — 
Since the German armies and 
their Austrian colleagues had 
proved so successful in the East 
during the immediate past, any 
doctrine laid down by them was 
certain to weigh upon the military 
mind of Europe. When, therefore, 
they laid down the doctrine of 
continuing a desperate adventure 
against the strength of the modern 
defensive, with no more than the 
old tactical appliances (with no 
more than the guns, and the 
infantry following them up), they 
were certain of a hearing, and 
they were likely to be copied. 
If we ask ourselves upon what 
they based that judgment, we 
cannot get a- complete answer 
until their own books and docu- 
ments appear ; and even these 
will be vitiated, as all Genrian 
military documents have been 
since Frederick, by conceit. 
But I think we can give a 
rough answer to the question. 
The determination to continue 
after the initial failure in front of Verdun seems to have been 
based upon some such idea as this : " Though I have not 
broken through as I did against the Russians, yet if I hammer 
and hammer I can wear down the local resistance. I can 
mortify it, as it were. I can bruise it until something will 
happen. That something may be a breakdown in moral, 
whether in the armies actually opposed to me, or in the 
spirit of the civilians behind the 
lines ; or in the economic strength 
of my opponent, or in the solidity 
of their allies. It is a gamble, 
and an exjjensive gamble ; but I 
will stake upon the chance of its 
oming off." 
It was rather like the action 
of a man, who, having tried to 
break down a dcor by charging 
against it ard having only suc- 
ceeded in badly hurting his face, 
should none the less have the ten- 
acity to continue in the hope that 
it would ultimately give way. 
This policy deliberately adopted, 
not without a certain admixture 
of disappointed vanity, cost the 
enemy, in major and minor 
casualties, about seven hundred 
thousand men ; not double, but 
nearly double, what it cost the 
defence. ^ 
To a certain extent he obtained 
the moral effect he desired. The 
newspapers and the politicians, 
after this hammering of the Ver- 
dun sector had gone on some 
weeks, with the gradual retire- 
rnent of the French from line to 
line, began to talk th' most 
amazing nonsense about an im- 
pending " fall of Verdun." As 
, though the place were an old- 
tashioried fortress which had been invested and the capitulation 
ot which would determine the campaign ! As a matter of 
lact, of course, there was nothing doing except the hammering 
oJ a particular sector within which Verdun, a geographical 
point happened to he, and Verdun was no more a fortress 
than Ypres or Rheims. But the enemy did get up a certain 
excitement about the mere name of Verdun and one hear 
pariiamentanans and others talking of it with bated breath. 
