ANNUAL REGISTER

FOR THE YEAR

1916.

PART I.

THE EUROPEAN WAR.

CHAPTER I.

NEW YEAR TO THE MIDDLE OF MAY.

AT the beginning of the year the geographic positions of the opposing armies in the Western Theatre of war were identical with those occupied by the forces twelve months earlier. The line of the German Armies still ran from the neighbourhood of Westende, east of Ypres, past La Bassée, Lens, and Arras, across the Somme, and turning eastward, ran past Rheims to Verdun, and then turning southward again, ran north-east of Nancy into Alsace, and so reached the Swiss frontier. (See A.R., 1915, p. 1.) During 1915 one great effort had been made by the Germans (near Ypres in April) to break this deadlock, and several similar attempts had been made by the French and British forces, but in every case the assaults had failed. each of these offensives, the attacking armies had been able to gain a slight preliminary advantage, and had seized the advanced trenches of the defenders, but subsequently the assaults had broken themselves in vain against the second or third line of the defensive works, and the casualties of the attacking armies had always proved disproportionately heavy, especially in the case of the French offensive in Champagne in September. Thus the armies still faced one another in the lines which had been established in October, 1914, after the fall of Antwerp.

In

In the Eastern Theatre the course of the war had been very different. There the situation so far from having remained a deadlock had altered greatly during the previous twelve months, and to the advantage of the Central Empires. At the beginning of the year, the Austro-German line in Russia was

A

substantiaily that established at the end of September, after the great Russian retreat from Warsaw. This line began on the coast a few miles west of Riga, ran along the left bank of the Dvina, which it crossed at one spot, and passed close to Dvinsk, which, however, the Russians still held, in spite of frequent German assaults. At Dvinsk the German line left the course of the Dvina, and ran southwards to the neighbourhood of the junction of Molodetchno. The Germans held Smorgon, but not Molodetchno. The line continued southwards to Pinsk, cutting the main Warsaw-Moscow railway a few miles east of the junction of Baranovitche, about fifty miles west of Minsk. In the neighbourhood of Pinsk the line entered the region of the enormous Pripet Marshes, and was therefore less continuous and less strongly held in this district. Indeed, the Pripet Marshes virtually divided the Eastern Theatre into two distinct spheres, the northern being mainly held by German troops and the southern chiefly by Austro-Hungarian forces. In Volhynia the Austro-Germans held Luck and Dubno, but neither Rovno nor Sarny, these two towns never having been reached by the invaders. South of Dubno the line entered Galicia, a small segment of which the Russians still retained, and ended on the Rumanian frontier, the Austrians having retaken Czernovitch in 1915.

The course of the war was not, however, to be judged solely by territorial advances and retreats. In the very early stages of the war, before the difficulties attending any offensive operations against an entrenched foe were realised, it was, indeed, hoped and expected in France and England that the Entente Armies would speedily out-manoeuvre and overpower the AustroGerman forces and would win victories strategically similar to those achieved by the successful commanders in the Napoleonic and Franco-German wars. And in its earliest phases the conflict really was, even in the West, a war of great movements, and this freedom of movement was never at any stage more than partially lost in the Eastern Theatre. But in the West, as already stated, there had been a deadlock ever since the fall of Antwerp. The entrenchment of opposing forces, equally well supplied with guns, reduced the scope of strategy, as distinct from tactics, almost to vanishing point. It was no longer possible for one army to out-manoeuvre and destroy the other in a few days or a few weeks; and hence during 1915 students of military affairs in France and England had evolved a new scheme of victory. The war was to be a war of attrition.” It was pointed out that the number of men possessed by the Entente Powers was much greater than the number that the Central Powers could command. The war was therefore to be a crude process of sheer killing. And then, assuming that each side killed equally effectively, the Entente would reach victory in an inevitable manner through the working of a simple mathematical law, for the proportionate man-power of the two groups

of armies would be constantly altering to the disadvantage of the Central Empires, until at last the odds would become overwhelming, and the enemy would collapse. This was believed to be the theory adopted by Marshal Joffre and the French General Staff, and in considering the course of the war it is therefore fully as necessary to remember this question of exhaustion of man-power as to note the geographical and strategic changes which occurred in the various theatres from time to time.

THE WAR OF ATTRITION.

The series of tables which follows is intended to show how far the process of attrition had gone after a year and a half of war, or in other words, with what forces the two sides were able to enter upon the new year's campaigning. It should be noted that the statistics of casualties given here are approximately accurate only, not exact. The British casualties were known very accurately, and the French losses were published in England, in round figures, at the beginning of 1916. Also, if the lists and estimates published in Germany and AustriaHungary be credited-and nearly all serious military writers credit them-the losses of the hostile Powers are known with a high degree of accuracy. In the case of Russia, however, there is a wider margin of uncertainty and exact figures were not available. The Russian losses in respect of killed and wounded up to the end of January were known, however, to have been somewhat greater than those of either Germany or Austria-Hungary severally, and in respect of prisoners much greater. In the following tables the German and Austro-Hungarian statistics of their own losses are accepted as true, as is also the German report of the number of Russian prisoners captured by the Central Powers, and hence the tables certainly do not give an unduly favourable picture of the Entente's position at this time. The first two tables show the man-power of the opposing sides at the beginning of the war, and it may be remarked that the efforts put forth by the Powers most strained were so great that the customary estimate of the maximum size of a nation's army, to wit, 10 per cent. of the population, was undoubtedly exceeded :