Free World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone

as it had to be rowed in, each boat carrying none too much and usually vulnerable to fire from the dominating slopes. In August, with three fresh divisions, the British tried a landing further north, along the coast at Suvla Bay, and that, too, failed – the troops did not move inland very far, although for a time they were unopposed, because the elderly commander wanted to make sure all stores were properly landed before proceeding. Meanwhile the Turks, far from collapsing, put up a display of extraordinary resilience, one young commander, Kemal (the later) Atatürk, making his national reputation in this battle. Eventually the government in London lost faith in the whole enterprise, and the expedition was brought to a (professionally managed) end early in January 1916. It had cost half a million Allied casualties, mainly British, and cost the Turks at least quarter of a million. In this periodof the war there were further setbacks for the British, as when an expedition to Baghdad, an epic of inefficiency, was stopped in the winter of 1915–16 and a British division surrendered at Kut-el-Amara in the spring. Ottoman intervention, as far as the Germans were concerned, was now working out tolerably well.
    But the Germans had done well elsewhere, too, mainly because the blockade had given them the will and the way for a proper war economy, ahead of others. The new commander (in effect: in this war, imperial figures were the nominal commanders-in-chief, and chiefs of staff were the real ones, much as generals pranced around on horses in public but used motor-cars if they had anything serious to do), Erich von Falkenhayn, was a much more calculating man than Moltke. He had a sense (perhaps exemplifying Goethe’s famous line, ‘genius knows when to stop’) that taking on three Great Powers was beyond Germany’s strength, and he told the Kaiser that if she did not lose this war she would in effect have won. His hope, and it dictated his doings, was that Russia could be persuaded to drop out and resume the partnership with Prussia that had reigned in much of the nineteenth century. He was a Bismarckian, not wishing, as Bismarck had said, ‘to tie the trim Prussian frigate to a worm-eaten Austrian galleon’, and he did not like the Austro-Hungarians, in his view frivolous Catholics with fancy manners (there was only one Catholic officer in the Prussian Guard – Franz von Papen, who ineptly organized sabotage of the American economy when he was military attacheá in Washington, and whose subsequent claim to fame is that he in effect appointed Hitler). Like Bismarck, Falkenhayn thought that Germany should never part company with Russia, and his relations with Conrad became, at times, frigid, to the point where he simply did not reveal major decisions that affected Austria-Hungary very greatly. At an important stage he even got his liaison officer to find out by stealth what the railwaycapacity north of Cracow was, so as to stage an offensive about which he told his allies only a week beforehand. At an even more vital point, he and Conrad quite separately planned grand, supposedly war-winning, attacks on France and Italy in complete isolation from each other.
    German peace-feelers towards Russia were left more or less ignored, though the brightest retired Tsarist statesmen would have taken up the offer. The western Powers had offered the Tsar Constantinople, which Falkenhayn could not do, and in any case there was a campaign, somewhat vicious, against the substantial German element in Russia, much of which dated back to the days of Catherine the Great, who had brought in German peasants to show the Russians how to practise agriculture. Land reform – land to the peasant – had been a great theme in Russian politics before 1914 and now, if you were a war hero, there were provisions for you to get confiscated German land. The Tsar’s German wife became a liability. At any rate, the Tsar was in no position to discuss peace terms