Since September, 1914, both sets of belligerents had made offensives, but these had failed, though in each case an initial success had raised the highest hopes. Stupendous preparations had been made, artillery had been employed on an unprecedented scale, lives had been sacrificed ruthlessly, but, invariably, the forward movement had been arrested, had ebbed a little and immobility had ensued. Some law appeared to operate in this most modern form of warfare. Killing without manœuvre had become an exact science, but battles are not merely battues, the armies must advance, and this they could not do--their mass and the enormous assemblage of destructive appliances, necessary for the preliminary process of annihilation, produced a congestion which brought the best organized offensive to a standstill. In such circumstances it seemed that final victory might be postponed for months and even years.
In 1917. The Central Empires held the land routes of South-Eastern Europe and Turkey was their vassal State, whereas the Allies disposed of precarious sea communications, which linked them with no more than the periphery of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans at three widely separated points. In these regions the populations were being Germanized, inevitably and in spite of themselves. The Germans were on the spot, they might be arrogant and unsympathetic, but they were efficient, and suffering, unsophisticated people could justifiably argue that these intruders were better as friends than enemies, and that it paid to be on their side. To neglect this situation, until we had won a victory in the West, exposed the Allies to the risk of letting German influence become predominant throughout the Middle East. For the British Empire such a state of affairs would have spelled disaster; after untold sacrifices in the Allied cause, Great Britain would have lost the war.
These weighty considerations had influenced certain British statesmen ever since the intervention of Turkey on the side of the Central Empires, but their plans had been frustrated by official inertia and mismanagement. At last, a serious effort was made to restore our prestige in the East by operations in the direction of Palestine and in Mesopotamia. These operations were against the same enemy and were carried out almost exclusively by British forces, but were independent of each other and not part of a concerted plan. The British War Office had undertaken the supply and maintenance of three “side-shows” (including Salonika), but had neither the time nor the inclination to prepare a scheme for the co-ordination of operations in the Eastern theatres. Perhaps it was feared that such a scheme would involve the dispatch of reinforcements.