he year 1919 did not mark the end of the cycle that began in 1914, nor, indeed,did it illustrate any shifts in the violence of war

he power of identity stakes in a war that radicalisedpositions on both sides; and surely the brutalisation that the Great Warseems to have brought in its wake to the Europe of the 1920s

n this context as well, paramilitary groups appeared; they were responsiblefor much of the post-war violence. The distinctions between civilians andcombatants, already vague during the First World War, completely vanishedin this type of conflict.

‘War Communism’ (1918–21), political splits betweencommunists and (real or supposed) counter-revolutionary opponents, cur-rents of social antagonism between urban and rural societies and ethnicstruggles and national confrontations all came together to sustain a climateof permanent and varied violence.

Bolshevik regime sensed that it was fighting for its survival.

Everything seemed to favour a radical-isation of political violence: the eschatological anguish aroused by the defeat,the fear of contamination by communists or Jews, the hope that the fraternityof soldiers in the trenches could be recreated against a common enemy

. To deal with the revolutionarythreat, it depended on recently demobilised veterans, on groups of studentstoo young to have fought in the war but keen to use their strength in thestruggle against the ‘Reds’63 and on local militias

The German state no longer held a monopoly on legitimate violenc

the end of the war brought with it a collective traumatic shock, and areformulation of the ‘culture of war’ into the struggles between counter-revolutionary and revolutionary movements.

n other cases it was the collapse of the structure of the state, combined withmaterial chaos, which lay behind the explosions of violence

liberation of countries occupied during theGreat War and the occupation of the Rhineland by the victors, which gave risein both cases to violence against individuals and property

Certain forms ofviolence were a direct consequence of whether a country had been victoriousor defeated in the war, and related to the implementation of the Armisticeconventions.

Inthis extremely diverse and complicated climate, a clear delineation of anycontinuity between the ‘cultures of war’ in 1914–18 and post-war violence istherefore far from straightforward

national or ethnic tensions inherited from the disintegration of the four greatempires

mphasise the ten-sions between transnational ideals and the persistent rivalries among nation-states, which deeply affected the inner workings of the institution.

‘If you want peace, cultivate justice.’

uest for socialjustice lay the ambition for a world free from war.

hrough the establishment ofstandards designed to improve the living conditions of workers and to protecttheir rights, the ILO gave substance to the belief in universal justice born fromthe ruins of the First World War.

It was the war that made the legislation of labour a matter of primordialimportance

absence of any sanction against those who contravened international law, andin the absence of armed forces capable of imposing peace, the League ofNations could not ‘attain the goal of high international morality, the aim withwhich it had been founded’

‘We must deliberately and definitively reject the notion of sovereignty,for it is false and it is harmful’

For many legal scholars in the 1920s, the transnational nature of thequestions arising during the transition from war to peace required a profoundredefinition of international law.

A new legal category arose,that of the stateless person, who lacked any of the rights belonging to citizenswith a country of their own.

Thus when Russian refugees flooded into Western Europe after the defeatof the White armies in the Russian civil war (1919–21), their presence inspiredgreat anxiety

In the eyes of many Westerners, however, the most serious threat came fromthe disintegration of the great empires of Central and Eastern Europe, andfrom the growth of communism.

In how many grieving families did hatred of the enemy mark a large part ofthe interwar years?

A form of remobilisation can even be seen in the immediate post-war period, delaying and hindering the process of mourning: to turn the pageon the war would be to betray the dead. I

pacifist message that in the end became established as a kind of shared culturein the second half of the 1920s:

societies tormented by the mem-ory of the dead, and by a form of moral responsibility imposed on them by thesacrifice of so many soldiers.

In every country, the construction of a national memory of the Great Warwas inseparable from the memory of the war dead

In Germany, in a context of defeat compounded by political revolution, thearmy literally fell apart in the space of two months.

By ignoring the hopesof colonised peoples, and by refusing to ratify equality between the races,29the negotiators in Paris ran the risk of disappointing all those who had placedtheir hopes in the doctrine of President Wilson

In January 1919, many saw the Paris Peace Conference asa test of Western determination to see the right to self-determination putinto practice.

Thanks to developments in journalism in Egypt, India and China,Wilson’s speeches were translated and his message widely diffused anddebated in nationalist circles,

‘When the survivors returned home in 1918 and 1919, they faced a newsocial phenomenon . . . the end of the myth of the invincibility and honesty ofthe white man’,

n practice, Wilson had in mind theterritories of the three empires – German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman –rather than Asian or African colonies.

And yet the beginning of 1919 was marked by thegrowing consciousness worldwide of a right to self-determination, which firstemerged in 1917 in the writing by Lenin and Trotsky condemning the RussianEmpire.

‘We were preparing not Peace only, butEternal Peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission.

Treaty of Versailles, often presented as a victors’ peace,was in fact a compromise peace: a compromise between Wilson’s idealisticaspirations and a more realistic post-war approach

Nonetheless, the question of reparations poisoned diplomatic relationsthroughout the interwar years; their cost was the subject of endless negotia-tions in numerous subsequent conferences and nurtured nationalist feeling inGermany.

n early tendency emphasised thedisastrous consequences of the reparations on the German economy and theyoung Weimar Republic.

renewed energy in 1918–19 of the theme of ‘German atrocities’ – weighedheavily on the heads of state and diplomats at the Paris Conference.

The sting of this moral condemnation was compounded by asense of humiliation, shared by the Austrians, over their territorial losses andthe end of imperial grandeur.

The fact remains that for the Germans, and for most of the Allies,Articles 231 and 232 were seen as a form of moral condemnation

Article 231 assigned responsibility for the damages suffered bythe Allies to Germany and the Central Powers, while Article 232 reached theconclusion that a guilty Germany owed reparations for the damages that it hadcaused

peace should be a ‘just peace’, based on a kind of moral pact that he called a‘covenant’, that it should not take place at the price of a severely weakenedGermany and that a distinction had to be made between the German peopleand their rulers, who alone were responsible for the war.

Italy wanted to seethe Allies keep the promises made during the London Conference in 1915

econcile whathe considered a just punishment for the war crimes committed by the CentralPowers with maintaining economic harmony in Europe.

For the British, who suspectedthe French of harbouring ambitions to annex the Rhineland, the reinforce-ment of French power in Europe was at least as alarming as the matter ofGerman power.

rance must makeconcessions, not to Germany but to her Allies.’

For France, both security and justice were at stake: ten Frenchdépartements had suffered from direct experience of battle or occupation,and the entire nation had lost a quarter of its male population between theages of 18 and 27.

Peace Treaty and its 440 articles were drawn up in great haste.

The procedures of the conference remained nonetheless somewhat chaotic.No one had considered exactly how the negotiations would progress, nor atwhat speed

he Paris Peace Conference was a carefully structured hierarchical edifice inwhich the representatives of the Great Powers controlled the game.

To my mind it is out of keeping with the new era which we profess an ardentdesire to promote’,

he year 1919 to some extent symbolises all the hopes of the post-war era: anew diplomacy based on world peace and collective security; major transna-tional organisations like the ILO (International Labour Organisation) estab-lished in Geneva early in 1919; recognition of the right to self-determination.

Seen as the dawn of a new era, the peace treaties embodied collectivehopes for a profound change in international relations.

a ‘Wilsonian moment’, a shortperiod in which significant collective expectations coalesced.

transition from war to peace’, it is almost as if the year 1919 represents only thebeginning of a larger phenomenon: a slow and chaotic demobilisation

All these conflicts, each deadlyto some degree, prolonged and magnified the effects of the First World War, tothe extent that national histories sometimes associate the Great War with laterconfrontations as part of the same chronological sequence

1919 meant that outbreaksof violence were still occurring between armed factions and against civilians:

. This term refers to a transition period ofseveral years, characterised by the return home of soldiers and prisoners ofwar, the pacification of the belligerent nations and the far slower demobilisa-tion of minds and attitudes, or what is also called ‘cultural demobilisation’

Nevertheless, the contention here is not that a given environment leadsautomatically to a certain form of rebellion or revolution.

legacy of peasant rebellion was an important ingredient in theCdmmunists' rural success,

structuralweaknesses that facilitated endemic insurrection in premoderntimes are said to have enabled revolutionary breakthrough aswell.

Tied into a complex social, economic, and political network, peasants may rebel not only against immediatethreats to livelihood, but against perceived injustices in thewider system.

raise questions about this interpretation, askingwhether secret-society influence may not have been less sig- _nificant than the fact that the two movements represented contrary solutions to fundamental dilemmas of peasant survival

The Nien are shown tohave emerged from the-predator-y-behavior—smuggling, ban-ditry, feuds—endemic to this unruly border region. By contrast,The Red Spears illustrate the protective reaction against just suchactivities.

catalyst for rebellion, turning endemic forms of collective actioninto vehicles for antistate revolt.

when violence reached anunacceptable level it would elicit state repression

Natural catastrophe was a major stimulus to increased predationand protective response. Invasion by outside forces—whetherrebels, warlords, or foreign armies—-also gave rise to heightened local competition.

Higher-order collectivities definedthe membership, and often the ideological justification, of groupsurvival strategies

it admits the importance of kinship, patron-client ties, and other communal allegiances in determining the degree and manner in which thestruggle was conducted

peasant society, where land constitutes the most prized resource, we would expect predatory behavior to be more common among the landless and protective measures to be moretypical of landowners.

Theprotective response, by contrast, was generally led by those whohad both something to lose and the wherewithal to defend it.

rational means that villagers used to maximize gain and minimizerisk in a situation where alternative opportunities were extremely limited

The first method of survival, termed the predatory strategy, entailed illegally expanding the resources of some membeiTof thecommunity at the expense of others

Repeated ravages of flood and drought created adifficult and insecure milieu in which aggressive survivalstrategies flourished.

Environments where resources are in short and unpredictable supply may breed conflict as a way of life.

violence against fellow competitors is often a rationalstrategy.*

In certain environments, the most adaptive strategy for survival may well be collective violence

When we recall, however, that rebelliontends to be concentrated in certain geographical areas, the importance of the natural setting is immediately apparent.

an alternative interpretation of traditional peasant insurrection as a sustained, structured, and sgn-sible form of collective action. .The analysis focuses upon thertiral inhabitants themselves, emphasizing the adaptive value*ofpeasant violence for coping with the local environment they inhabit.

aipings had rejected the values and institutions of traditionalsociety made it harder for them to spread their control into the ruralhinterland beyond the walls of their captured cities

Purism andesoteric ideology were hardly advantages in forging alliances with groupswhose outlooks, however anti-Manchu, were based on traditional assump-tions and traditional modes of organization

messianism and doctrinal ex-clusiveness had concrete disadvantages in the traditional Chinese setting

Indeed the traditionalism of their social base was paralleled by theindeterminacy of their political orientation.

argely to their intimate ties to the institutions of local society

Even at this stage, the Niens are probably best understood as anoutgrowth of a Mafia-like local underworld which, in the process of re-organization and expansion, found it expedient to flourish a miscellaneousarray of symbolic paraphernalia from the well-stocked storehouse oftraditional heterodoxy.

his militarization servedonly to broaden the Nien community base as Nien leaders took charge oflocal defence in scores of villages.

nien bands were ableto fit themselves into the prevailing social ecology by taking the lead invillage defence against neighbouring settlements.

Hung Hsiu-ch'iian's political incapacity meant that a singlecentralized authority could emerge only through rivalry among his imme-diate followers.

diverted significant Taiping forces from the defence ofthe Heavenly Capital itself, now under siege by Tseng Kuo-ch'iian, andthereby hastened the final downfall of the movement

vailability of modern arms to theforces of orthodoxy meant that, for the ensuing fifty years, domesticorder could be maintained widi considerable success, notwithstandingChina's inability, during the same period, to build an armed counterweightto foreign aggression

From Westerners he bought large quantities ofrifled small-arms and foreign-style field artillery and hired British andFrench officers to train his troops in their use.

was unmatched as amilitary base

his frag-mentation of command was but one aspect of the Taipings' failure to re-establish centralized leadership after the death of Yang Hsiu-ch'ing.

fear that the Europeanswould 'gradually encroach upon the authority [over Ch'ing armies]'.

hat Shanghai remained safe from the Taipings must be credited toactive European intervention through late May 186

But the provision ofmodern arms was ultimately of greatest historical significance; for, alongwith the munitions manufacturing enterprises that accompanied it, thistechnical advance served as the spark for the modernization of China'sarmies and military industry. 2

no evidence that the Britishfeared the Taipings as a potentially stronger and more anti-foreign govern-ment. On the contrary, it was their supposed weakness and indisciplinethat drove the British to oppose them and support the Ch'ing.

he British, meantime, were beginning to see their future interests interms of a revitalized and secure Ch'ing regime

growing aversion ofthe Western community to the 'blasphemous' Taiping Christianity, aswell as the blunt fact that the Taipings were against the opium traffic,must have affected the British attitude.

n increasingly hostile view of the Taipings, stressing the 'destruc-tive nature of the insurrection and. . . the blasphemous and immoralcharacter of the superstition on which it is based'

the rebelswere seen primarily as a threat to foreign trade

eeply suspiciousof foreign involvement, Tseng was convinced that the way to make use ofthe West was not to engage foreign troops but to establish Chinese arsenalsto make Western-style munitions.

For the Ch'ing government, this linkage of personal military power andregular provincial authority was a portentous move.

here followed a momentous reorientation of imperial policy:there was now no choice but to entrust Tseng Kuo-fan with the leader-ship of the entire campaign.

for the Powers were in no frame ofmind to cooperate with the rebels and were more impressed with therevival of imperial power in the lower Yangtze province

ssued in 1859, outlined a policy of strengthening central control, modern-izing China's economy and communications by the adoption of Westerntechniques, and cultivating friendship with the Western powers.

An equally grievous loss was that of centralized authority.

this arena of carnage, greed and paranoia perished whateverremnants of its original vision the Taiping movement might have re-tained.

Shih hadoverwhelming support among the Taiping armies, Hung rallied hisforces in mid-November and killed Wei along with some 200 of hisfollowers.

The catastrophe that struck the Taipings in 1856 sprang neither from thedeficiencies of their local administration nor from the strength of theiropponents, but from the instability of their own central leadership.

hardly a situation conducive either to firm local control or to genuinereshaping of local society

the Taipings found it difficult to impose theirartificial numerical subdivisions upon the indigenous units of localorganization and often found themselves simply applying new terminologyto existing institutions

Taiping systemshared a weakness with that of the Ch'ing, namely that the regular localbureaucracy was thinly spread

propagated a radically Utopian social programme,they had now to accommodate theory to reality

Thus the needs of local militarization set in train serious and lastingchanges in the structure of Chinese financial administration, involving apartial shift from agricultural to mercantile taxation, and a dispersal ofsome of Peking's fiscal authority into the hands of provincial leaders.

Once Tseng became ahigh provincial official himself, he furthered the trend towards provincialcontrol of regular categories of revenue.

The administrative decentralization exemplified by likin was visiblealso in Tseng's other financial measures.

his meant,first, establishing new categories of local revenue that were not under theBoard of Revenue's direct control; and second, once Tseng's group hadachieved high provincial offices, gathering fiscal power into the hands ofthe governors and governors-general and bypassing the Board ofRevenue.

The personal links thus formed supplied the cohesiveness which theGreen Standard army and its mercenary adjuncts so conspicuously lacked.

All ranks were in fact fastened together by personal relation-ships.

The rise of the Hunan Army represented irregular forms of organiza-tion - by implication highly subversive of imperial authority - which werenevertheless so cloaked in orthodoxy that they were able to coexist withthe established Ch'ing order.

Tseng, however, knew t'uan-lien to be wholly unequal to the Taipingchallenge and after some hesitation resolved to use existing resources ina new way.

Having begun his military career in responseto purely local threats, he was now firmly committed to the larger anti-Taiping campaign.

Militia raised fromChiang's t'uan-lien association played a major role in defeating the rebel-lions of Lei Tsai-hao and Li Yuan-fa.

champion the traditional order during the mid-century rebellions wasalso to contribute in some measure to the early phases of China's moderntransformation.

Yet it retained anasset that the rebels would now have to reckon with: the stubborn hos-tility of significant segments of the orthodox elite towards the alien creedand the new order, a hostility that could now be put to the service of theManchu monarchy.

his faith elevated the Hakka struggles to a new planeof significance: a battle of the saved against the damned.

Ultimately, however, there emergedthe potent combination of minority-group alienation and intense ideo-logical consciousness that was embodied in the Hakka-organized God-Worshipping Society.

ligarchic and hierarchic trends cast seriousdoubt upon the ultimate capacity of the Taipings to carry out a thorough-going and lasting social revolution in China.

Taiping movement was indeed a pro-found social revolution,

the anti-Ch'ing and anti-landlord messages were hardly distinguishable by thosewho considered themselves victims of a system in which power andproperty were so closely entwined

beneath the surface of Taiping social theory lay the interests of thetheocratic state.

A gentrydiarist, recording conditions around occupied Nanking, found thathatred of officials and hatred of landlords contributed in roughly equalproportions to popular support of the Taipings

The abolition of restrictive boundariesamong men, a recurrent theme of Chinese Utopian thought, was constantlyrestated in terms of the brotherhood of men under the supremedeity

heir nationalist aims, the Taipings openly revealed their ultimate inten-tion to build on earth a heavenly kingdom that would embrace all.

theTaipings hid their religious message under more traditionally acceptablenationalist appeals.

ebellionwas proclaimed to be a national uprising against alien oppressors. Theappeal was to national pride in the face of usurpatious rule by China's'traditional enemies' - the northern barbarians - who had fastened uponChina a cruel and corrupt government and had befouled her culture withalien uses.

e leadership group wasthereby established as a band of brothers, with somewhat diminishedstatus for the movement's founder.

impoverishment and social polarization of central China,already apparent in the turmoil of the tax resistance movement of the1840s, had brought its inevitable results

out of theKwangsi river systems and into the Yangtze tributary network.

isorganized and poorly regimented Ch'ing armiesfailed to divert them from their larger strategic purpose

eadership of the God-Worshippers that itwas no longer possible to survive in the Kwangsi environment, and it wasprobably during this critical period that they reached the decision torevolt.

e fatally-fragmented character of theTaiping leadership group can thus be traced to the absence of its foundersduring a critical period of development.

pocalyptic political implications of Liang's tract,which Hung himself had been unready to accept, came to the fore as faithbecame organically bound to social reality.

During the feuds of the 1840s thesepoor and indefensible Hakka communities were sometimes utterly dis-placed from their holdings

partly becauseof the deterioration of local government; and partly because of the tra-dition of intercommunity vendettas

he politicization of hisvision and the absorption of the Good words' rebellious undertone were notto take place until Hung's revelation had become firmly embodied in thebeleaguered Hakka communities of Kwangsi.

the leaders of which despised the Manchus for their weakness beforethe barbarians.

he sequential confusion of the biblical materialsuggests that the coming of the Messiah was not simply an historicalevent that happened at a single point in the past, but rather an apocalypticworld crisis that might occur any number of times.

Liang's Good words embodies seriouspolitical implications. There is, first, the repeated suggestion that Chinesesociety as a whole stands at the brink of disaster as a result of a long pro-cess of moral decline - an unmistakable suggestion, to a Chinese readerof the 1830s, of the low point in a dynastic cycle.

ocal gentry, convinced that they could expect little aidfrom a corrupt and incompetent officialdom, formed local defenceassociations (t'uan), which assumed a leading role in community affairsand mobilized defence militia

Cleavage theory conceives layers of partisan attachment rather than thereplacement of one dimension of contestation by another.

Both parties give these issues much greater salience in theirappeals to voters than mainstream parties, and they are less handicappedby internal divisions.

their efforts are constrained by the policycommitments of self-selected activists and leaders, by brand reputationsembedded in the expectations of voters, and by the interests and values oftheir social base.

Hence, opposition to transnationalism is for many a populist reaction againstélites who have little sympathy for national borders

Nationalism has long been the refuge ofthose who are insecure, who sense they are losing status, and who seek stand-ing by identifying with the group.

European integration raised fundamental issues of rule and belongingfor those who wished to ‘defend national culture, language, community andnational sovereignty against the influx of immigrants, against competingsources of identity within the state, and against external pressures fromother countries and international organizations’

political parties are programmatically inflexible;

It was experiential, the outcome of repeatedconflict which defined and solidified the composition of in-groups and out-groups

national revolution that produced a cleavage between the central state andperipheral communities and between the central state and a supranationalchurch; and the industrial revolution that produced an urban/rural cleavage,and later a worker/employer cleavage.

Cleavage theory, originating in Lipset and Rokkan (1967), conceives a nationalparty system as the expression of underlying social conflicts.

The emergence of a new cleavage reveals the causal power of social forcesin the face of established institutions.

We term this cleavage a transnational cleavage because it has as its focalpoint the defense of national political, social and economic ways of lifeagainst external actors who penetrate the state by migrating, exchanginggoods or exerting rule.

y began slowly and reluctantlyto reassess the realism of this in the summer of i9i5 when it becameapparent that the Germans would not oblige the allies by attackingtheir line in the west and that the French and Russians were not preparedto bear the burden of the land war alon

The policy-making elite knew the ends they wanted to achieve,maximum victory for Britain at minimum cost, but they could notagree about the me

nt. It was now the way in whi

It meant that tactically the high commandnow conducted a sequence of assaults each with limited objectives.

heinsisted that Rawlinson should seek to break through the Germandefences in his first assault by 'getting as large a combined force ofFrench and British across the Somme and fighting the enemy in theopen.

best way to do thisappears to me to be to seize points of tactical importance which willprovide us with good observation and which we may feel quite certainthe Germans will counter-attack.

Robertson and Haighad so blurred the distinction between Kitchener's concept of attritionand a break-through battle that they had lulled them into believingthat the forthcoming operations would not seek to break through theGerman line but would be no more than 'nibbling & gnawing' ona large scal

alled for a series of co-ordinated offensives to exhaust the enemy'sreserves before the final attempt at a break-through was made

January I9I6 the conscriptionists won because in theend a majority of Cabinet ministers were convinced by Robertson'sand Kitchener's arguments that unless they agreed to conscription andparticipated in the plans arranged at Chantilly there was a strong possi-bility that one or more of Britain's allies might make a separate pe

at French manpower reserves were now so ser-iously depleted that a growing burden of the land war in the westwould fall on the BEF.

But in private their most telling argument wasthat without conscription Britain would not be able to marshal herhuman and economic resources to sustain herself and her allies througha long war.

the resources of the Allies aresufficient to enable them to wear out the enemy and finally to beathim, if only the will to conquer and a sound direction of their unitedefforts and resources are not wantin

by a co-ordinated series of allied offensives on the eastern,western and Italian fronts designed to bring the Central Powers tothe peace table by the end of i9i6

2 Clearly they could not afford to slacken theirefforts and on i S November French ordered his army commandersto mount local offensive operations throughout the winter 'to wearout and exhaust the enemy's troop

he failure of the Loos offensive caused them to lay more stresson the need to prolong the 'wearing-out' stage of the next atta

e commander-in-chief had discovered theweakest point in the enemy's line, should he commit his army reservesin a break-through attemp

Haigexplained that this might be done if the British launched an offensiveon a front of twenty-five miles preceded by a heavy artillery bombard-ment of several days duration followed by infantry attacks all alongthe front to draw in and exhaust the enemy's reserv

We must keep hammering away & todo that must have more & more men & more and more ammunition.If we can only keep our attacks going we shall wear Germany out& the war will be over in six mo

, although the British high command was well aware of the poten-tially annihilating results of defensive fire-power, they nurtured notionsabout offensive warfare which emphasized that superior moral qualitiesrather than sheer weight of fire-power would lead to victories andthat remaining on the defensive for prolonged periods was dangerousbecause it sapped their troops' offensive spiri

. They believed that with sufficient men, guns andammunition they could break through.

'we must act with all our energy, and do our utmost to helpthe French, even though by so doing, we suffered very heavy lossesindeed.'S

s. It collapsed inlate August in the face of the failure of Sir Ian Hamilton's second majorattempt to carry the Gallipoli peninsula, the German capture of Warsawand two political crises in Paris and Petrograd which frightened theCabinet into believing that the very stability of the Entente alliancewould be endangered unless they agreed to the BEF participating inthe major offensive Joffre planned for the autum

hey gave the French a timetable showing when the New Armies wouldbe ready and when they would be sent to France, but also pointedout that they were short of artillery ammunition, that they could onlybe used to hold the trenches and were not ready to take part in majoroffensive operation

o support the French by 'an active defenas possible on the enemy, & nibbling & gnawing along the wholefront, but no great offensive movement until ample supplies of ammuni-tion are available

best be furthered by the allies in the Wesattrition by means o

Haig warned that unless some progresswas made in driving the Germans out of France the 'peace-party mayget the upper hand & peace may be made before wint

disgusted by Britain's reluctance to commitherself to the continental land war and who might be ready to listento German blandishment

here is no prospect,I believe, of the Allies obtaining an old-fashioned victory over theGermans at this stage of the w

'Lord Kitchener's stra-tegy is to continue for the present the war of attrition in the hopethat the Germans will continue to break themselves up by costlyattempts to shatter our lines - attempts which can never succeed aslong as we keep proper reserves in hand to meet the

.' Kitchener'spreference was very much for attrition. He was afraid that if the allieslaunched another premature offensive they would simply exhaust theirown reserves and enable the Germans to bring back their troops fromRussia and inflict a serious defeat on the Anglo-French armies in thewest

But Kitchener was adamant.Apart from two Territorial divisions already earmarked for the BEFhe would not send the New Armies to France 'till the line was brok

t 'If we are victorious, the end of the war mustcome through one of the two following causes: (i) By a decisive victory,or a succession of decisive victories, of the Allies ... (2) by attrition,for when Germany is no longer able to support her armies in sufficientstrength in the field she must sue for peace.

New Armies were intended to win the peace forBritain, after the French and Russians had all but won the war.