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By Root 1237 0

equipped with. They preferred blinking lights at night, and, by day, the tradition-hallowed system of colored signal flags dating from the days of sail—both of which were difficult or impossible to see through rain squalls and the dense smoke from both funnels and guns. In foggy weather just before the battle, two British battle cruisers collided, a battleship ran into a merchant vessel, and three destroyers managed to collide. More confusion reigned as the main action began: the rival armadas of tall, lumbering ships shelled and sank one another; vessels exploded when their ammunition magazines were hit; thousands of men from both sides were blown to bits or carried to the bottom of the sea as their vessels became giant steel coffins. The Germans sank more ships and killed more enemy sailors than the British, but failed to cripple the Royal Navy enough to break its blockade of Germany. The scarred surviving ships steamed home in different directions as both sides claimed victory.

On more distant fronts in Africa, small contingents of British, South African, French, and Belgian troops—with far larger numbers of African conscripts—had fought German soldiers (with their own conscripts) everywhere from Cameroon on the west coast of the continent to German Southwest Africa near the southern tip to Tanganyika in the east. While exhausted troops succumbed to tropical diseases, the top commanders treated each other with an old-world courtesy: at one point, South African General Jan Smuts, commanding the British Empire forces in East Africa, sent a messenger under a white flag to congratulate his German counterpart, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, cut off from communications from home. The Kaiser had awarded him one of Germany's highest medals.

Just as Germany openly coveted the central African colonies of France and Belgium, which would give Berlin an unbroken belt of territory stretching across the continent—Mittelafrika, Berlin's strategists called it—so the Allies were maneuvering to seize Germany's African possessions. The British cabinet set up a group, the Territorial Desiderata Committee, to keep an eye out for precisely such acquisitions—and not just in Africa. The oil-rich land around the Persian Gulf, much of it under Ottoman control, looked attractive to an empire whose military was increasingly oil-powered. All this was glossed with high purpose by John Buchan. Germany ran its African colonies with "the lash and the chain," he wrote, while Britain generously allowed "ancient modes of life to continue side by side with the new."

Driven by similar ambitions, more countries were joining the war: Bulgaria, promised chunks of Serbia, had joined the Central Powers; Greece, promised pieces of Turkey; and Romania, its eye on Austro-Hungarian territory, would join the Allied side later in 1916. In the Pacific, Japan had jumped into the fray, helping itself to some of Germany's island colonies and, aided by British troops, to the German-controlled port of Tsingtao in China. Australia and New Zealand, which had sent troops to Europe and the Mediterranean to fight under British command, had taken over German Samoa, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. From desert and rain forest to remote atolls, the war was engulfing the globe.

Through the docks of French ports flowed a torrent of supplies for Haig's divisions as they prepared to smash through the German lines near the Somme. Half a million British troops, three times as many as had tried to break through at Loos, were concentrated along an 18-mile sector of the front; 120,000 of them would attack on the first day alone. This was to be the "Big Push," a concentration of manpower and artillery so massive and in such a small space that the German defenses would burst open as if hit by floodwaters. Once that happened, the generals believed, a key weapon in the hands of the soldiers pouring through would be the bayonet. The military's leading bayonet expert, the bushy-browed Major Ronald "Bloody" Campbell, an apostle of physical fitness whose broken nose and battered ears were proud