To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [173]
For the Allies, the signs were not good. A year before there had been roughly three British Empire, French, or Belgian soldiers for every two Germans in the west. Now, every week, trains were racing across Germany bringing troops no longer needed against Russia—just as tens of thousands of British and French soldiers were being urgently diverted from the Western Front to prop up the collapsing Italian army. By January 1918, therefore, there were some four Germans for every three Allied soldiers in the west. The U.S. Army was not yet much help: although millions of men were being drafted and trained, barely more than 100,000 of them, almost all inexperienced, had made it to Europe. And if casualties continued at the current rate, British forces would need to find more than 600,000 men in the coming year just to replace their losses—far more than conscription could supply. As Churchill put it, "Lads of eighteen and nineteen, elderly men up to forty-five, the last surviving brother, the only son of his mother (and she a widow), the father the sole support of the family, the weak, the consumptive, the thrice wounded—all must now prepare themselves for the scythe." Nonetheless, Haig wanted to launch new attacks in Belgium once the weather allowed. The War Cabinet was dismayed.
Behind the scenes, Milner continued to promote his belief that the real enemy was not Germany but revolutionary Russia, an idea so inflammatory that almost all mentions of it are only in diaries. Writing after a dinner with Milner, a member of the War Cabinet staff predicted that the remainder of the war would be "to decide where the Anglo-German boundary shall run across Asia." A similar note was sounded in the diary of the well-connected writer Beatrice Webb in early 1918, just after she met with Lloyd George: "The EM. and Milner are thinking of a peace at the expense of Russia.... With Russia to cut up, the map of the world is capable of all sorts of rearrangements."
The Germans, however, showed no signs of being interested: they had already beaten Russia and, following the end of the fighting, had helped themselves to a colossal additional expanse of its territory. Why should they share the spoils? They were determined to next achieve a similar victory over Britain and France and dictate a Europe-wide peace. While Milner's imagined rearrangement of the globe languished, the Germans prepared a new offensive.
Although the balance of troops on the Western Front favored Germany, the army high command, which by now was largely running the government, could hear two clocks ticking. They knew that the great battle to decide the war had to be won before summer; otherwise hundreds of thousands, and soon millions, of American troops would join the fight. And in Germany itself there were signs that the country might not be able to hold out long.
Civilians were suffering more painfully than ever. With imports kept out by the British naval blockade, metal was so scarce that everything possible—kettles and cooking pots, doorknobs, brass ornaments, telephone wire, and well over 10,000 church bells—was being confiscated and melted down for munitions. Buried pipes were ripped from beneath the streets. Coal was in short supply, and those waiting in line for it were often shod in cardboard shoes with wooden soles, since scarce leather was saved for soldiers' boots. So many horses had been sent to the front that the Berlin Zoo's elephants were put to work hauling wagons through the streets. Real wages in nonmilitary industries had dropped to almost half of prewar levels. Nitrates once used in fertilizers went into explosives, making food even scarcer. Bread was made from potato peels and sawdust, coffee from bark, and with horsemeat a rare luxury, often the only meat on sale was that of dogs and cats. The rich turned to a thriving black market, while the poor were left to forage in harvested fields and