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Updated: June 15, 2025
"The enemy's intention of breaking through our fronts has not, so far, succeeded, and will not succeed, any more than his Salonika and Dobrudja offensives. On the other hand, the operations of the Central Powers against Rumania are making encouraging progress.
He spoke a little more clearly than he was used to do, but even so I had to walk round to a place close under the tribune before I could hear him. He sketched the history of the various steps the Soviet Government has taken in trying to secure peace, even including such minor "peace offensives" as Litvinov's personal telegram to President Wilson.
The day was coming when Italy would win back all she had lost, and far more than she had ever won before, far more swiftly and cheaply than in her early brave offensives, and Austria, like Germany, would be broken in hopeless, irretrievable defeat.
It should be very exciting. In the two former battles we were on the defensive; this time we shall be on the offensive. And I must say pessimistic as I am on all Western offensives this idea holds forth a faint ray of hope of success. I have always held that there is only one way in which the war can be won in the West by a flanking offensive in the North.
There could be no restraining the public, with the wish father to the thought, from believing that the attack of July 1st on the Somme was an effort at immediate decision, though the responsible staff officer was very careful to state that there was no expectation of breaking the line and that the object was to gain a victory in morale, train the army in actual conditions for future offensives, and, when the ledger was balanced, to prove that, with superior gunfire, the offensive could be conducted with less loss than the defensive under modern conditions.
The Austrian misadventure was a meagre morsel with which to fill the gap between the latest German offensives and the crowning mercy for which the German public had been led to look; and as the precious summer weeks flew by uneasiness must have filled any German minds that were capable of discerning the realities of the situation.
Offensives on a large scale such as that which had been prevented by the "Winter Battle of the Mazurian Lakes" were not attempted by the Russians on their northern wing after the short counterattack that had pushed their lines into the Mlawa angle in the corner of the Vistula and the Prussian boundary beyond Przasnysz, to the east of Thorn.
Nivelle's failure in April 1917 combined with the Russian collapse to preclude an Entente repetition of the German invasion of August 1914; and Lord Curzon's mental vision of Gurkhas encamping in Berlin was destined to remain a dream. The breakdown of Russia and of the French campaign paralysed other offensives than those on the Western front, and a sympathetic inertia spread to the Balkans.
The campaign began with scattered Italian offensives all along the northern frontier, designed to wrest from the Austrians their control of the Alpine heights and passes, and to secure the flank of the main attack across the Isonzo towards Trieste. Slight successes were gained at various points, and the enemy was pressed back almost to the head of Lake Garda.
It is also clear that the Germans would have been at least as successful at Verdun as we were on the Somme but for the relief afforded by counter-offensives elsewhere, and that we should have profited no more from the Somme than the Germans did from Verdun had our Somme campaign been interrupted by German offensives on other fronts.
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