



Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England




The Way to Win
By William Le Queux
Published by Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co Ltd, London.
This edition dated 1916.

The Way to Win, by William Le Queux.

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THE WAY TO WIN, BY WILLIAM LE QUEUX.

Foreword.

I do not think anyone who has studied the progress of the War with care
and patience can deny that, during the past few months, a mighty change
has come over the aspect of the great struggle.

A year ago, when I wrote "Britain's Deadly Peril," the fortunes of the
Allies appeared to be at the lowest ebb.  Indomitable energy and
perseverance have since worked wonders.  To-day we plainly see that the
conquering march of the Teuton has been arrested and the process of
forcing back his hordes has begun.

Britain--the fierce Lion of Britain--is at last fully aroused to the
momentous issues which hang on the decision, and has flung herself with
all her unrivalled tenacity, and with a unanimity unparalleled in our
history, into the titanic conflict.

Russia, France, and Italy have responded to the call with equal
nobility.  To-day the Allies are more than a match for the Hun in
manpower; they are equal to them, at least, in the supply of munitions,
the lack of which so badly hampered our cause last year.  Finally, the
great new masses of the British Army, straining at the leash, are
eagerly awaiting the signal to hurl themselves at the foe for his
destruction.

The British Navy, silent and invincible, holds the seas of all the
world, and Germany and her Allies are to-day feeling the pinch of war in
most deadly earnest.  Prices in enemy countries are rising by leaps and
bounds; the food supply is beginning to fail; money is lacking; the
value of the mark is falling, and there is every prospect of a shortage
of men--cannon-fodder they were once called by Germans--in the near
future.

We are on the eve of great events.

Already we hear the ominous rumblings which prelude the breaking of the
storm.  The great clash is at hand which, for good or ill, shall settle
the destinies of our world for many generations to come--perhaps for
ever.

Can we doubt the issue?  Assuredly not.  The spirit of our dear old
Britain and her glorious Allies is unbroken, and still unbreakable.
Cost what it may, they are fully determined to smash, once and for ever,
the accursed Teuton attempt to dominate the world and throw back the
clock of civilisation for centuries.  There will be no faltering and no
turning back on Great Britain's part until that great end is attained.

Courage and resolution and a hard fist are the keys of the situation for
the Allies.  We have them in abundant measure.  And unless Britain is
unthinkably false to all the traditions that have made her great, our
triumph in the Near To-morrow is assured.

William Le Queux.

Devonshire Club, London, March, 1916.

CHAPTER ONE.

THE RIFT IN THE CLOUDS.

If we could imagine a being from another planet dropped suddenly on this
old earth of ours and left with the aid of maps to figure out for
himself the real position of the world-war, we could readily imagine
that it would seem to him that the Germans were winning "hands down."

Perhaps there would be a good deal of excuse for such a belief.

He would see, in the first place, that the Germans had overrun and
captured the whole of Belgium except one very small portion.  He would
see that the greater part of Northern France was in their undisputed
possession.  He would see that they had driven the Russians from Poland
and penetrated far within the boundaries of Russia proper.

He would also see that they had almost completely conquered or cajoled
the Balkan States, and that German trains were running from the North
Sea to Constantinople.  He would see them holding apparently impregnable
lines of defences against forces at least as strong as their own--
probably much stronger.  He would see them or their Allies holding up
British forces in Persia and in Mesopotamia.  He would see the Italians
apparently firmly held along the mountainous boundaries of the Austrian
Empire.  He would see that a great British army had been driven out of
Gallipoli.  He would unquestionably come to the conclusion that the
cause of the Allies was a lost cause, and would probably conclude that
the best thing they could do would be to make a speedy peace on the best
terms the victors could be induced to grant.

And he would be unquestionably wrong in his deduction, even though we
admit the accuracy of his facts.

For, like the thoughtless and the whimperers among us, he would for want
of knowledge leave out of his consideration certain hard facts which,
properly considered, would reverse his judgment.  Like the thoughtless
and the whimperers, he would judge too much from mere appearances and
would fail to see the real essential things.  He would fail to see the
wood for the trees; he would mistake the shadow for the substance.  Just
so the German people to-day are making the mistake of thinking that the
occupation of enemy territory, a mere temporary advantage gained through
treacherous preparation for war at a time when they professed to be
working for peace, constitutes the victory that must be theirs before
they could hope to gain the world-dominion upon which, as we now know,
their hearts and the hearts of their rulers have been set for the last
forty years.

For eighteen months the civilised world has been struggling against the
most formidable menace to its liberties by which it has ever been faced.
For eighteen months we have seen the enemy apparently going on from
triumph to triumph.  We have seen the devastation of Belgium, the
crucifixion of a little people whose only wish was that they should be
allowed to live their happy lives in peace, and whose only crime was
that they dared to resist the Prussian bully.  We have seen the
martyrdom of Poland.  We have seen the very heart of France--
incomparable Paris--threatened with destruction.

We have seen the stately memorials of a great civilisation, such as
Germany has never known and never can know, wrecked and plundered.  We
have seen innocent civilians murdered in hundreds, women and children
sent to death or a far worse fate.  We have seen the ruin of Serbia.  We
have lost thousands of our best and bravest sons.  We have seen the
tragic failure in the Gallipoli Peninsula--itself a mere incident of the
world-war, yet one of the greatest military undertakings upon which we
have ever embarked.  We have failed conspicuously to protect the little
nations in whose cause we drew the sword, and who have gone down in ruin
under the iron heel of a ferocious tyranny beside which the worst
oppression of historic times seems mild in comparison.  Can it be a
matter of wonder if the cry, "How long, O Lord, how long?" goes up from
the fainting heart of outraged civilisation?

Yet the darkest hour is ever the herald of the dawn; and if to-day we
try with a single mind to penetrate the fog and mystery with which this
greatest of all wars is surrounded, we shall see that there is really
and truly a rift in the clouds.  No doubt we have still many days of
storm and stress before us.  The end is not yet.  But, in the noble
language of the King, the goal is drawing into sight.  The sun of
victory is not yet shining fully upon us, but none the less the dawn is
at hand.  Already its first faint gleams are breaking in upon our eyes;
there are abundant signs, if we lift up our hearts and our courage, that
the long period of gloom and depression is passing away.

Properly to understand the position as it exists to-day we must look
backward to the years 1870 and 1871, for in those years was born the
spirit of aggression and arrogance which ever since has been the driving
power of Germany.  After years of preparation, when so far as possible
everything was ready, Germany fell suddenly upon a France torn by
internal dissensions, weak through want of preparation, and utterly
unready for war.  Naturally there could be but one end to such a
conflict, and a few short months saw France helpless beneath the heel of
the invader.  Germany emerged from that war with almost incalculable
profit, firmly imbued with the idea that she was invincible, and
convinced that at any moment she chose she could reach out her greedy
hands and grasp the sceptre of European domination.  Then, as she
thought, she could with safety enter upon a conflict with an England
which had grown over-rich and perhaps over-lazy.  Then the real enemy
could be crushed, and the world-dominion of which her megalomaniac
rulers dreamed would be within her grasp.

If a nation has determined upon war, there is never any lack of excuse,
and Germany chose her time well.  Her blow fell at a time when no single
one of the Allies was prepared for war.  That fact alone fixes
absolutely the responsibility for the present appalling conflict, and in
the days to come the unanimous verdict of history will be that the War
was deliberately provoked by Germany through sheer greed and lust of
power.

For, be it remembered, there was no legitimate ambition before Germany
which she was not perfectly free to enjoy.  Her trade was free and
unhampered, the seas were as open to her use as to our own, she
possessed vast colonial dominions which gave her every opportunity for
all the legitimate expansion of which she could dream for centuries to
come.  She had grown rich and prosperous in the exercise of the freedom
which she has ever been the first to deny to others.  No one menaced her
or sought to do her injury.  But she was the _nouveau riche_ among the
nations.  She had been poisoned for a long course of years with the
false doctrine that the German was something essentially superior to the
peoples of other races, and she owes her approaching downfall, which is
as certain as the rising of to-morrow's sun, to the blind teachers of
the blind who have imbued her with that spirit of envy and arrogance
which may be as fatal to a nation as to an individual.

We all know only too well what happened when war broke out.  Germany,
with her armies trained to the hour after years of patient preparation,
with her forces ready to the last man and the last gun, shamelessly
broke her plighted word with the invasion of Belgium.  She had counted
that there, at least, she would meet with no resistance; she could not
realise that a little people, even to save its honour, would dare to
oppose the onrush of her countless hordes.  In that she made her first
and, perhaps, her greatest mistake.  Just as she thought that England
would not draw the sword for a "scrap of paper," so she thought that
Belgium would not dare to resist.

We know now that she was wrong; we know, too, that the heroism of the
Belgians surely saved Europe in those first days by gaining the
priceless time which enabled France and England to throw their scanty
forces across the path of the invader, which led ultimately to the great
battle of the Marne, that titanic conflict which surely and decisively
smashed once and for ever the German plans.  In spite of all that has
happened since, in spite of the apparent victories Germany has won, in
spite of the territories she has occupied, the defeat of the Marne
marked the beginning of her final overthrow.

But the peril was appalling.  France, Russia, and Britain were alike
unprepared for war, short of men, short of munitions, short of
everything which would have enabled them at once to meet the common
enemy on anything like equal terms.  The days are gone for ever when
victory can be won by men alone; modern war is too machine-like in its
developments, the importance of supplies and organisation is far too
great to give a poorly equipped army the slightest chance of success.
Not men alone, but munitions are the secret of success to-day, and every
single advantage that Germany has won since war broke out has been won
by her superiority in mechanical equipment.  Her men, considered
individually, are certainly not the equals of either the French or the
Russians or the British; they have neither the dash of the French, nor
the dogged courage and endurance of the Russians, nor the personal
_sang-froid_ and cool initiative of the British.  But Germany had the
numbers and the equipment, and to numbers and equipment alone she owes
such successes as she has gained.

Caught unprepared at the outset of war, the Allies were naturally in a
position which must well have seemed hopeless.  Germany reaped to the
full the advantages which she had sought in long preparation for war
under the guise of peace.  Her armies plunged forward with resistless
momentum until they were within sight of the very gates of Paris, and in
the eyes of the world it was merely a matter of time as to when she
would occupy the French capital.  Then came Von Kluck's amazing blunder,
the swift stroke of the French and British against the German right
wing, and the precipitate retreat which led to the defeat at the Marne.
From that day, in spite of apparent successes, the fortunes of Germany
have been on the wane.

There was no mistake about the reply of civilisation to the German
menace.  France, Russia, and England threw down the guage in the most
unmistakable terms in the historic declaration that neither would
conclude a separate peace without the others.  That, we have now to
recognise, is one of the main facts which must operate most powerfully
in bringing about the final defeat of Germany.  In no particular can she
hope to rival the resources of the Allies, and so long as the Allies
hang together they are unmistakably on the road to final victory.  It is
for this reason that at the present moment it is the main object of
German diplomacy to sow distrust and suspicion among the partners in the
Quadruple Entente.  Their one and only hope--and they know it--is to
provoke a quarrel among the Allies which would not merely rob the Allies
of all hope of final victory, but would give the Huns and their dupes a
reasonable chance--indeed, more than a reasonable chance--of snatching
triumph from the very jaws of defeat.

There is a school of croakers very much in evidence in England at
present who can see nothing of good in anything which their own country
has done and is doing.  They remind one of Gilbert's

  Idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone
  Each century but this, and every country but his own.

They are, of course, always with us, but at the present moment they are
more than usually aggressive, and we notice them perhaps more than is
good for us.  They are the chief source of that dangerous form of
pessimism which we see exemplifying itself in a constant belittling of
the enormous efforts and the enormous sacrifices which this country has
made.  According to these mischievous propagandists, nothing we do or
have done can possibly be sufficient or right.  The effects of this
perpetual "calamity howling" on our own people is bad enough; it is far
worse upon the peoples of the Allied countries and the neutrals,
because, not understanding our national peculiarities, they are apt to
take us at a wholly absurd valuation and to think that, as our own
people are constantly accusing us of slackness in a war in which we have
so much at stake, there must be something in the charge.  If plenty of
mud is thrown, some of it is tolerably sure to stick, and there can be
no doubt that the perpetual depreciation of British efforts by people in
this country has had a most dangerous effect, and has, in fact, played
the German game to perfection both here and abroad.

Those who wish to form an adequate realisation of what Britain has
really done in the cause of civilisation should try to take a longer
view, and try also to throw their minds backward to the condition of
affairs which existed when the declaration of war came eighteen months
ago.  They should try, in fact, to learn something of the lessons taught
by our past history.

We can start with the indisputable and undisputed fact that so far as
the war on land was concerned this country was entirely unprepared to
take up the role it has since assumed.  That is a proposition which not
even the Germans, who are so ready to accuse England of having caused
the War, can very well dispute.  Throughout our history we have been a
naval and not a military Power, though it is of course true that, judged
by the standards of other days, we have now and again put forward very
considerable military efforts.

But it was many a long year since British troops had fought on the
Continent of Europe, and it is safe to assume that the great majority of
people in this country, had they been asked, would have replied without
hesitation that we should never again take part in the land fighting in
a continental war.

Now it must be obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to give the
matter a moment's thought that, for the purposes of war as it is
understood by the great military nations of Europe, the British Army as
it existed in August, 1914, was hopelessly inadequate.  Our real
strength lay on the sea, where it has always lain.  It is true that, for
its size, the British force which was thrown into Flanders in the early
days of the struggle was perhaps the most perfectly trained and equipped
army that ever took the field.

But no one will contend that it was adequate in size, and we know that
the Germans regarded it as a "contemptible little army" that was to be
brushed aside with hardly an effort by the German hordes.  It consisted
of perhaps 120,000 men, and undoubtedly, as our French friends have
generously admitted, it played a part worthy of "the best and highest
traditions" of our race.  But it was not an army on the continental
scale.

What has been done since