Page:The Outline of History Vol 2.djvu/544

 the Germans upon the Western front. Russia, though fast approaching exhaustion, was still fighting, Italy was pressing the Austrians hard, and Roumania was just entering the war on the side of the allies. But the waste of men in this disastrous July offensive, coupled with the obstinate neglect of the possibilities of the tanks by the military authorities, brought the Allied cause to the very brink of disaster.

Directly the British failure of July had reassured the Germans, they turned on the Roumanians, and the winter of 1916 saw the same fate overtake Roumania that had fallen upon Serbia in 1915. The year that had begun with the retreat from Gallipoli and the surrender of Kut, ended with the crushing of Roumania and with volleys fired at a landing party of French and British marines by a royalist crowd in the port of Athens. It looked as though King Constantine of Greece, that protégé of the Allied foreign offices, meant to lead his people in the footsteps of King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. But the coast line of Greece is one much exposed to naval action. Greece was blockaded, and a French force from Salonika joined hands with an Italian force from Valona to cut the king of Greece off from his Central European friends.

On the whole, things looked much less dangerous for the Hohenzollern imperialism at the end of 1916 than they had done after the failure of the first great rush at the Marne. The Allies had wasted two years of opportunity. Belgium, Serbia, and Roumania, and large areas of France and Russia, were occupied by Austro-German troops. Counterstroke after counterstroke had failed, and Russia was now tottering towards a collapse. Had Germany been ruled with any wisdom, she might have made a reasonable peace at this time. But the touch of success had intoxicated her imperialists. They wanted not safety, but triumph, not world welfare, but world empire. "World power or downfall" was their formula; it gave their antagonists no alternative but a fight to a conclusive end.

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Early in 1917 Russia collapsed.

By this time the enormous strain of the war was telling hardly upon all the European populations. There had been a great