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continuing.
The peoples of Europe, now as weary of blood as earlier they had been enthusiastic, prayed
fervently that new men would . bring about a new situation. France replaced General Joffre
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GERALD SUSTER  HITLER AND THE AGE OF HORUS
with General Nivelle, who claimed that he possessed the secret of victory. Germany made
Hindenburg and Ludendorff her Supreme Commanders. the latter became what amounted to
Germany's dictator, and slandered the Jews as slackers and war profiteers, thus breeding
the germs of a future myth. Certainly 1917 did bring about a new situation, but again, it was
nothing like what anyone had imagined.
1917
It was in 1917 that the world balance of power altered fundamentally, for this most terrible
year saw the birth of one of our modern Superpowers, the USSR, and the mobilisation for
total war of the other, the USA.
On 29 December 1916, Rasputin was assassinated: this took enough cyanide to kill a room
full of people, numerous revolver bullets, and the Little Nevka River. His prophecy that the
Romanov dynasty would not long outlive him was soon grimly fulfilled. On 8 March 1917,
riots broke out in Petrograd; by 12 March the soldiers had mutinied; and on 15 March, Tsar
Nicholas II abdicated. His rule was replaced by that of a provisional government pledged to
liberal reforms and continuation of the war.
It did not take the German Government long to make a grave decision. This was to send to
Russia in a sealed train one Vladmir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, a Marxist
revolutionary then in exile in Switzerland. It was hoped that Lenin, who was committed to a
withdrawal from the war, would spark off a further revolution. Lenin failed to seize power,
and had to flee to Finland, but he returned after an abortive Russian offensive in the
summer, which had left the country completely demoralised. On 7 November, Lenin and
Trotsky seized power and set up a communist dictatorship. Four months later, the new
regime signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which took Russia out of the war.
Ludendorff now decided that Great Britain could be starved into submission, and hence
advocated unrestricted submarine warfare. Kaiser Wilhelm II agreed. This brought the
United States into the war, together with her discovery of a German proposal to Mexico for
an alliance against her. On 6 April, President Woodrow Wilson, who had won the 1916
election with the slogan  he kept us out of the war', declared war on Germany. Immediately
the Americans contracted the plague of war fever. To give just one minor example, when a
speaker in a Christian Church demanded that the Kaiser, when captured, be boiled alive in
oil,  the entire audience stood on chairs to scream its hysterical approval'.
Madness, however, did not affect the Americans alone. Given the Russian collapse, and the
enormous resources of the United States, it is obvious that the Allied strategy should have
been to economise their manpower and defend until America could make her presence felt.
But this was not obvious to General Nivelle, who wanted to prove that he indeed possessed
the secret of victory, nor to Sir Douglas Haig, who seems to have wanted to win the war
before the Americans could arrive.
While the Allies were preparing their offensives, the Germans withdrew to a line of especially
prepared fortifications, the Hindenburg Line. This left General Nivelle unmoved. On 16 April,
the French attacked on the Aisne, guided by an outdated battle plan. In four days, they
suffered 187,000 casualties. This finally broke the offensive spirit of the French Army,
certainly until 1944, possibly for ever. The troops mutinied, Nivelle was dismissed, and the
new Commander, Petain, had to struggle to restore order.
Nor did the British fare any better. The Battle of Arras cost them 158,000 casualties in return
for a trench or two. There followed the Battle of Passchendaele, which lasted from 31 July to
20 November. It was a tactically impossible battle, fought on reclaimed swampland, which
became a vast bog for the wounded to drown in. British casualties amounted to 380,335
men.
The only British triumph was the battle of Cambrai, in which tanks were successfully
employed. The greatest British advance in the war so far took place, but inept . infantry
general-ship resulted in retreat. Nevertheless, the lessons learned at Cambrai would be
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GERALD SUSTER  HITLER AND THE AGE OF HORUS
employed in 1918, to the delight of the Chief General Staff Officer of the new Tank Corps, J.
F. C. Fuller, the ex-disciple of Aleister Crowley. It was Fuller too who most neatly summed
up the situation at the end of 1917:
 & the British were bled white, the French were morally exhausted, the Italians nearly out of
the war, and the Americans not yet sufficiently involved to make good a fraction of the losses
sustained. 1
1918
On 21 March, just after making peace with Communist Russia, Ludendorff flung Germany's
entire resources at the Allies in a final bid for victory. Once more the Germans came within
sight of Paris. By 2 August, each side had lost roughly 1,000,000 men. The Germans could
not make up their losses, but Allied resistance was stiffened by the large numbers of
American soldiers who were finally arriving.
The Allies now made their own final effort. The great Battle of Amiens was commenced on 8
August, which Ludendorff termed  the blackest day of the German Army' and  the worst
experience I had to go through'. Assisted by massed tank formations, the Allies forced
retreat upon the Germans. The British fought eight victorious battles in continuous
succession, and stormed the Hindenburg Line on 27 September. One day later, Ludendorff
advised an immediate armistice.
The German Army was not  stabbed in the back'; it was defeated in the field. The myth came
about because the British naval blockade reduced German civilians to starvation level and
provoked both a decline in morale and some anti-war agitation. It is true that Allied soldiers
did not reach German soil, but no one knew better than Ludendorff that Germany could hold
out no longer. On 5 October, the Germans accepted President Wilson's Fourteen Points as
the basis for armistice negotiations. On 9 November, the Kaiser abdicated, and the Weimar
Republic was proclaimed. There followed the Treaty of Versailles, which was dictated to
Germany by the victorious Powers.
Aftermath
 The influences of the first of the world wars on vanquished and victors were cataclysmic. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]