THE “SOIXANTE-QUINZE”
The capture of St. Mihiel and the Camp des Romains was the last real
triumph—I had almost said the only real triumph—that the Germans won in
the east of France. For the scene of their other great positive success
was not in France but in the annexed part of Lorraine, even though as
the result of it they still hold one corner of the Department of the
Vosges. But there, as everywhere else, since the end of September, 1914,
they have not only made no progress, but have been on the whole driven
further back. That is an obvious fact, but it is one which no one who
studies the course and the probabilities of the war can afford to
overlook. It is true that the French in all that time have made very
little appreciable advance. Measured by distance the ground they have
recovered is nothing in comparison with the number of lives that it has
cost. But the sacrifice of lives must be made. It is the only way of
deliverance, and every yard of blood-drenched soil that France has won
back from the invader brings one step nearer the victory of freedom over
oppression and of right over wrong.
Also it must never be forgotten that few though the steps have been
every one of them has been away from Paris and towards Berlin. The
Germans began the war. For more than forty years they had been preparing
for it. In spite of all the warnings they gave us of what we had to
expect, England and France and Russia were not prepared. From one point
of view that is a good thing. It throws the onus of the crime against
humanity on to the right shoulders, and at the same time exposes the
grotesque absurdity of the German fiction, intended chiefly for home and
neutral consumption, that it was merely the instinct of
self-preservation which forced them against their will to take up arms,
and that they attacked their neighbours only to secure themselves
against annihilation.
Of all the people whom the annihilation lie was intended to
influence—and did influence—by far the most important was the Emperor
William himself. Englishmen must always remember that he is the son of
an English mother, and that at heart he is a pacifist and a Christian,
even though the God in whom he quite sincerely believes is the God of
the Old Testament. But he is also a hegemonist. He constantly sees (or
saw) himself and his country and his army playing the big _rôle_ on the
world’s stage, and the cunning and unscrupulous advisers by whom he is
surrounded took advantage of that weakness in his nature to make him
believe that Germany’s salvation could only be secured by Germany’s
domination of Europe. Themselves they never made any secret of their
determination to bring about the war, nor of their object in doing so.
Wretched creatures like Bernhardi and Tannenberg frankly proclaimed that
they were out for plunder—the plunder of the world; that they could only
secure it by crushing the rest of Europe in a world’s war; and that in
order to bring about and win that war Germany would deliberately refuse
to fetter her actions by the universally accepted canons of right and
wrong. The whole scheme was so monstrous that in spite of the nakedness
of these threats—and God knows they were numerous enough—very few
Englishmen or Frenchmen could bring themselves to believe that they were
made in earnest, and the result was that, sheltered behind the
prevailing feeling of incredulity excited in other countries by the
utterances of the Pan-Germanist extremists, the rest of the war-party
were able to go on quietly with their preparations for war without
calling into being any corresponding activity on our part. And then,
when at last the moment for which they had all been waiting had
arrived—as soon, that is to say, as the men appointed for the task had
convinced the Kaiser that Germany was in mortal danger—the war was
declared.
After that only one more step was necessary to complete his downfall.
Being a man of humane instincts and not a degraded savage like some of
his advisers, he had to be persuaded—and he has allowed himself to be
persuaded—that the surest means of shortening the war, and therefore of
curtailing as far as was possible its inevitable horrors, was to make it
more horrible still by instituting the Hunnish system of terrorism—of
which the examples given in this book can convey only the very feeblest
impression.
There is nothing immoral in a fight between an elephant and a tiger, or
even in a leopard’s pursuit of goats and other small deer—the neutral
states and the helpless villagers of the jungle. The lions roaring after
their prey do seek their meat from God. Attila and the Huns, whose
methods the Kaiser ordered his soldiers to imitate in the war in
China—even then the poison was working in his mind—were not, like the
Emperor William and the Germans, an enlightened and semi-civilized
state. The cruel ferocity of the modern Huns is infinitely more cruel
and criminal than theirs was, because they call themselves Christians
and have undoubtedly got a kind of Kultur. Every vile thing that they
have done they have done deliberately and with their eyes open, and for
that reason sooner or later their punishment is sure. For nations, like
men and women, cannot for ever continue to sin with impunity against the
light.
Still, at the beginning, because they were ready and also unscrupulous
and we were neither, they scored a great advantage over us, and it was
only because we and the French had the enormous moral stimulus that we
were fighting for the right that we were able to throw them back from
the Marne and the Grand Couronné. For the inequality of men and
material—but especially material—was still great, and I take it that if
the positions had been reversed, if the Allies had been the aggressors
and Germany the object of our iniquitous invasion, we could not have
made nearly as good a showing as they did. The positions being, however,
as they were, we were the better men, and, with the single exception
that they were allowed to push forward the St. Mihiel salient through
the gap between the armies in the Woevre, everywhere in the west we
drove them many miles back from the advanced positions which they had
reached at the end of their first irresistible rush.
Then, along the whole line, including the two sides of the St. Mihiel
triangle, we were brought up short by far the strongest and most
elaborate system of earth entrenchments that the world had ever seen. It
was a perfectly legitimate means of making war, and although, like every
other step in the campaign, it had been devised by the enemy as part of
their grand plan for destroying the French, from a military point of
view they deserved every credit for having thought it out. They were the
first people to see that no soldiers could stand up for any length of
time in the open, or with only the protection of the shallow ditches
which used to be called trenches, against modern weapons. Thanks to
their foresight they had invented or perfected a simple means of defence
infinitely stronger than the strongest and most modern fortress. We all
know now that compared to a properly constructed trench with
well-disposed shell-proof shelters the bastions and casemates and
cupolas of such places as Toul and Verdun, which till the war was well
under way were considered the _dernier cri_ in fortifications, are as
flimsy as a Gladstone bag compared to a fire-proof safe. But it was the
Germans who taught us, and all that we could do—but we did it—was to set
to work resolutely to play them at their own game.
Not, unfortunately, to fight them with their own weapons, or at least
with their own shells. It took us all, especially our own country, which
has always borne a strong family resemblance to its ancient King
Ethelred, a very long time to learn that particular lesson. The French
were quicker and more adaptable. Their main difficulty, thanks to
shortsighted and ignoble political squabbles before the war, was that
when war began they were very short of big guns, as a consequence of
which in the earlier engagements their pieces were constantly outranged,
sometimes by as much as two miles, by those opposed to them. But they
had, and still have, one gun which, for its size, was far superior to
any possessed by Germany, though they had produced a colourable
imitation of it.
To every French civilian, and to every French soldier, no matter to what
arm of the service he belongs, the Soixante-Quinze is the real hero of
the war. And in one sense they are not far wrong. For without it not the
most splendid courage and most dashing exploits of the chasseurs-alpins,
chasseurs-à-pied, and all the splendid French and African regiments of
their armies could have held out against the German advance, much less
have rolled it back.
In the year 1894, in the month of July, the then German Military Attaché
in Paris, Colonel Schwartz Koppen, was for some time considerably
worried and puzzled during his morning rides in the Bois de Boulogne by
the frequency of the reports of artillery fire, which he heard coming
from the direction of Mont Valérien. He would have been still more
worried if he could have looked into the future and seen what those
sounds betokened for his countrymen twenty years ahead. They were due to
the experimental firing of the new gun invented by Colonel Duport (who,
like most inventors, got nothing for his trouble), which was being put
through its paces under the auspices of General Mercier, the Minister of
War, largely owing to the public-spirited action of another Minister,
now President of the Republic. For it was M. Raymond Poincaré, at that
time Minister of Finance, who proposed in the Chamber a vote of credit
for “Repairs to artillery material,” which really meant (as the members
of the Chamber were well aware) the construction of twenty-four guns of
75 millimetres calibre, the first of their race, and the actual
disturbers of Colonel Schwartz Koppen’s morning peace of mind.
How long it was before he found out that his ears, though not his eyes,
had assisted at a first appearance of some military and historical
importance, I do not know, but at all events the Germans were at the
time so much occupied with the subject of their own new 77 mm. field-gun
that the genesis of its slightly smaller rival apparently escaped their
notice.
After that, in spite of the efforts of General Deltoye, nothing further
was done about the Soixante-Quinze for two or three years, when General
Billot, Minister for War in the cabinet of M. Méline, took the matter in
hand, and enough money was voted for their manufacture on a large scale.
But once that was done no time was lost, and in 1897 the first
Soixante-Quinzes, considerably improved by Colonel Sainte-Claire Deville
and Colonel Rimailho, the inventor of the 155, were served out to the
artillery of the army corps of the north-east. Apparently the moment
chosen for their _début_ could not have been more happily timed: the
revival of the Dreyfus case had just suggested to the minds of the
war-party in Germany that the golden opportunity for declaring war,
while France was torn by internal strife, had arrived, and it is said
that it was only the reports of the foreign military attachés on the
great superiority of the 75 mm. to the 77 mm. in stability and rapidity
and precision of fire that caused them to change their minds. Since then
they have been able to introduce certain improvements into their own
gun, modelled on the chief features of the Soixante-Quinze, but it still
remains an inferior weapon.
I need not go into technical details about the French gun, though
naturally all its secrets, including that of the famous liquid substance
in its hydropneumatic brake, are well known to the Germans. For English
readers it is enough to say that its muzzle diameter (75 mm.) is a
trifle more than 3 inches, or one-thirty-third of its length, which is
therefore just under 9 feet, that it fires two kinds of shells, a
shrapnel shell of about 16 pounds, containing 300 balls, with a muzzle
velocity of 1735 feet, and a high explosive shell of 11 pounds,
containing 30 ounces of melinite, with a muzzle velocity of 1915 feet.
These shells can be fired at the rate of thirty a minute, or about twice
the rate possible for the 77 mm.
Its further superiority over the German gun the Soixante-Quinze owes,
partly to the excellence of its _débouchoir_ (the instrument by which
the bursting point of the fuse is automatically regulated before the
shell is put into the breech) and partly to the control of its liquid
brake, which causes the gun to return after the recoil as nearly as
possible to its exact original position. The Germans use a
hand-_débouchoir_, which takes longer to manipulate and gives less
accurate results, and because of its less powerful brake the aim of the
77 mm. has constantly to be readjusted.
The other chief French field guns are the 155 _court_, called the
Rimailho after its inventor; the 120 _long_, a siege gun converted into
a field gun; the 120 _court_; the 105, which is like a larger 75, and
fires a shell of thirty-six pounds; and the 65, a mountain gun, which
can be carried in four pieces on the backs of mules, and has done
excellent work in the fighting in the Vosges. In English measurements
the diameters of the shells fired by these different pieces are
approximately: 65 mm., 2½ inches; 75 mm., 3 inches; 105 mm., 4¼ inches;
120 mm., 4¾ inches; and 155 mm., 6 inches.
Before they knew by actual experience what the Soixante-Quinze could do
the Germans nicknamed it “the cigar-holder.” Now it has become (it was
what they called it in Lorraine when we were there) “a barbarous and
disgusting engine of war,” and the French artillerymen “the black
devils.” Learn a lesson from the German gunner. Whereas he complains of
“barbarous engines” and “black devils,” the French soldier greets his
various projectiles as _la grosse_ or _la petite marmite_, or “the
slow-coach,” or “the whistler,” or “the train,” just as our own men talk
of Black Marias and Jack Johnsons. The contrast is significant. For it
means that the Germans fear the French shells more than the French fear
theirs. If the difference in the mental attitude is well founded, hardly
anything could augur better for our eventual success. And it is. The
ideal of Krupp, as of all Greater-Germanists, is the Kolossal. But the
Frenchman is the better gunner. He not only has in the Soixante-Quinze a
finer weapon, with better-regulated fuses, but he is incomparably
quicker in serving it, and has a disconcerting way in hot actions of
placing his battery in position (in an incredibly short space of time),
firing the appointed number of rounds of spreading or direct fire, and
then limbering up and departing to fresh woods and pastures new before
the Germans have discovered where he is.
It is not a bad thing to have a gun which hits as hard and as quick as
Bombardier Wells, and battery commanders as elusive as the Scarlet
Pimpernel. For the combination means that the Soixante-Quinze and its
sister field guns do the maximum of damage to the enemy with the minimum
risk of destruction for themselves. No wonder the French people are
proud of their artillery and work for it with unbounded enthusiasm. And
no wonder—for a different reason—that the British Mission which went to
France towards the end of 1915 to study the production of ammunition
were greatly impressed by the state of things which they found in the
French workshops. There was, they reported, no loss of time, no
trade-union restrictions, no limitation of profits, no objections raised
by the workpeople, no difficulties created by the introduction, in
practically all cases, of female labour, and no restrictions on the
women working the same hours as the men “with a good-will which is most
impressive,” and, in short, everything done to increase production. “As
the war has proceeded,” says the report of the Mission, “the French
nation has settled down with determination and a feeling of set purpose
to the fulfilment of the task allotted to it. There is no question but
that the nation is at war, and the dominant sentiment, not only of the
men but also of the women, is to carry the war to a successful
termination. Everything else is subordinated to this determination.”
In that spirit the French nation and the armies of the east settled down
to the second period of the war—the struggle of the trenches. It was not
so picturesque as what had gone before, not so pregnant with
possibilities of thrilling victories or saddening but stimulating
defeats, not so anxious, not so inspiring. It was utterly foreign to the
genius of the French soldier. Morning after morning the official
communiqués hardly ever varied. _Rien de nouveau sur le front
occidental._
And yet, though there was nothing new there was always the same
thing—always suffering and exposure and wounds and death, and always
fresh names added to the roll of honour. And sometimes, though one never
knew any of the glorious details till even the men who had taken part in
them had almost forgotten about them, there were more decided efforts to
make headway and bloodier encounters than the minor struggles to gain a
hundred yards of trench, wasting and deadly as that daily routine was
bound to be. When the historians get to work they will give us, I
suppose, a real record of all this trench warfare. They will tell us how
the different battalions and regiments fared on different parts of the
line, how one charged brilliantly across fifty yards of open ground and
barbed wire and drove the enemy out of the opposite trench, only to be
enfiladed by a murderous fire of mitrailleuses and forced to retire to
their old trench, leaving half their men behind them, and all for
nothing. They will tell of how another repelled a night attack with such
gallantry and vigour that they drove the enemy helter-skelter before
them and occupied after half an hour’s work a position which they had
been sitting in front of for months, harassed all the time by the daily
wastage caused by snipers, gas attacks, hand-grenades, bombs of all
kinds, trench mortars, Minenwerfers, and all the other improved
prehistoric death-dealing devices which have sprung into being from the
mud and chalk and solid rock of the trenches. Then we shall know the
names of the gallant living and the gallant dead, and many other details
of intense interest which at present it is impossible to know and still
more to realize.
But for a general description I doubt if any of them will give us
anything much better than the following account, written by a German
journalist, of the wearing monotony of the life of the men at the front.
I give it partly for that reason, but chiefly because I think it is
useful for all of us to realize that French and English soldiers are not
the only ones who, however brave and however cheerful they are, must
sometimes be appalled by the unendingness of the struggle. There are two
sides to the nightmare of the trenches, just as there are to the moral
effect of shell-fire and the horror of the horizon. And sometimes
non-combatants—I do not say the soldiers—are apt to forget the way in
which it may be and must be affecting the enemy. Let them listen to this
German, writing from the other side of the line:—
* * * * * *
“And the siege goes on.
“Along the whole front, hundreds of miles long, from the North Sea to
Switzerland, the faithful soldiers are posted in the trenches.
“In Flanders the water reaches to their knees. The pumps are working,
but without much success. In spite of cement and joists and props, the
trenches fall in every day, and the sandbags have to be renewed with
infinite trouble every minute. When they leave the trenches the soldiers
march through water for miles. In Champagne they are white with chalk,
in the Argonne and the Vosges they are coated with mud up to their
forage-caps. There, too, the pumps are working to get the mastery over
the water.
“It pours with rain, it snows, the wind blows. When our soldiers go to
their quarters to rest, many of them support themselves with sticks; for
the water and the cold have stiffened their legs. No army of ancient
days could have shown such energy as this. Even Napoleon would never
have dared to ask of his armies, though they were used to hardship, such
prodigious efforts. At the present time the willingness of the men is
tenfold. The soldier marches in blood up to his ankles, the blood of the
enemy, and the blood of the comrade he loved; but his brow is crowned
with laurels.
“The soldier stands there, in the mud and the water, among the wet
sandbags pierced with bullets, in the narrow labyrinths of the trenches,
behind crumbling walls and among shattered tree-trunks. And that is seen
from the seashore where the waves break on the beach to the Swiss
frontier where the mountains rise. A hundred thousand men, at this
moment, are there, every ten paces, searching the horizon. Behind the
sandbags machine-guns are on the watch day and night. In these damp
shelters their comrades are sleeping curled up, but ready to dash out
and risk their lives at the sentinel’s first alarm, as they have done
for seventeen months. Water oozes from the walls. They are silent; their
eyes are looking for the Fatherland. They are lying down in their dirty
overcoats, they are asleep or thinking of nothing. When the sentinel
calls them, they start. They eat their soup while the water trickles
down between the sacks, and they are wet through with rain.
“Rusting iron covered with mud, shell-holes filled with slimy water,
scattered bundles of clothes, half buried in the earth, dead bodies
which have lain there for weeks, and which it has been impossible to
bury, and just over there, thirty or forty or a hundred yards away, the
enemy.... That is all that the soldiers see, that is their horizon, that
is their world. Hundreds of thousands of vigorous men are perishing
there, though their destiny was to perpetuate the human race. Death has
done good business this year. Already the rats are coming from the
destroyed villages and hunting about in the ground. Near Souchez, a
prisoner tells me, they are arriving in formidable swarms. The crows are
croaking greedily. But there is no fear and no giving way. No soldier
who is at the front, right at this point, has not the right to tremble.
The war is pitiless. For, by God, it is not demanding too much to ask
people who are in safety to look death in the face! A dead man is a dead
man, and at this moment there are much more horrible things than death.
Many French and English, whose nerves have given way, have jumped on the
sandbags and asked death to set them free.
“And death is everywhere. It is everywhere, the whole length of the
front, from the sea to the snow-mountains. Bullets whistle, mines and
hand-grenades fly about, shells fired a long distance off plough into
the ground with terrific explosions, a bit of trench trembles and flies
into the air. Death takes officer and man without distinction. It is in
the destroyed villages where the soldier is trying to rest, in the
forests, in the thickets, and in the shelters where the cannons thunder,
above in the air, below under the earth, everywhere.
“Honour to the brave men who fall in these days.
“Death, which stalks across Belgium, France, Alsace, has its special
quarters, its craters which are always boiling over, to burst out every
now and then and vomit blood and fire. The Yser canal, Souchez and Vimy,
Berry-au-Bac, Tahure, the hills of Champagne, the Argonne, the heights
of Vauquois, which have swallowed up thousands and thousands of men,
Bois le Prêtre and Hartmannsweilerkopf—all these places and others still
are the craters which boil without ceasing. All of a sudden the air
shrieks and shells arrive in swarms. Like heavy hammers in a smithy for
hours at a time they hammer violently on the trenches and reduce
everything to fire and blood.
[Illustration:
FRENCH ATTACK FROM CEMETERY OF REHAINVILLER NEAR LUNÉVILLE.
_From “En Plein Feu.” By kind permission of M. Vermot, Rue
Duguay-Trouin, Paris._
]
“An attack. The trench is turned inside out and left defenceless. The
enemy comes. The air shrieks again as our shells soar off towards the
enemy, leaving behind them a curtain of smoke, gases, and scraps of iron
which cover the lost trench. No one can cross that zone.
“It is impossible for the enemy to bring up reinforcements. A
counter-attack. The reserves advance, the enemy falls exhausted, and the
trench is ours again. It is always the same thing, always as savage and
always as heroic. France is besieged, and she keeps trying and trying to
burst the girdle that surrounds her. The insignificant breach that her
shells have made is closed again at once. It was like this in the month
of May and in June on the heights of Lorette. This is just what
happened, too, in September near Loos and Vimy and in Champagne. The
French launched asphyxiating gases and bombs and millions and millions
of shells against the ramparts of their besiegers, but it was in vain.
Her regiments, though they were heroic and daring, broke themselves up
without gaining any success. Our rampart resisted. Joffre and French,
who had tried everything, recognized the impossibility of destroying
this rampart, and retired despairing and worn out from the theatre of
the war. Will Castelnau be able to discover the secret which Joffre and
French have not been able to discover?...
“Telephones, automobiles, railways, long-range guns, and incalculable
supplies of munitions have completely changed the methods of attack and
defence. This war is less a war of men against men and courage against
courage than a war between two industries. It is iron-mines, coal,
chemical factories, huge furnaces, that conduct the war, and also the
brains of inventors and manufacturers. The soldier of to-day is a
courageous and intelligent machine who, with the life that he risks,
works for this giant industry of the nations. Newer and more ingenious
methods would be needed to destroy these dreadful engines. The enemy
have not discovered them so far....
“A trench is taken and lost again, and that is all. Nothing important in
the west. And the siege goes on. The rifles crack in the trenches, the
revealing Bengal lights soar up into the thick night, the search-lights
explore the darkness. The sentinels are crouching in the saps and
look-outs. The aeroplanes fly and the batteries destroy each other. The
pioneers work underground and the mines explode.
“The German soldier will stay at his post in spite of it all, faithful
and magnificent. He will stay there as long as his country has need of
him, or till he falls for her. Never, at any hour of the day or night,
must we forget our valiant and wonderful soldiers.”
I think we most of us have an idea by now of what trench-life is like,
even though we may not have seen it. Even if we have seen it we should
find it difficult to better that description of the sameness and the
horrors of it. There are points in it which are naturally coloured by
the imagination and predisposition of the writer. Joffre and French have
not retired, despairing and worn out, from the theatre of the war. Nor
is France besieged. That is the grand mistake that he makes. By rights
it should be, since Germany was the attacking party. But with the one
exception of the abortive attempt to attack Calais, which was foiled by
French’s contemptible little army, ever since the Germans were driven
back to their trenches from the Marne to the Aisne, and from Nancy to
the Seille, it is the Allies who have been the assailants. They have
been met by a marvellous defence. There have been countless desperate
sallies. But gradually, steadily, little by little, line upon line,
trench by trench, they are sapping their way up to the earthen walls
defended by the beleaguered garrison.
And the end is sure. The German garrison, for all their brave deeds and
all the brave words of their Xenophon, are obviously getting
downhearted. When you have spent a few hours in the trenches, with your
head always below the level of the ground, with nothing above you but
the sky and nothing in front of you or behind you but endless lines of
mud or chalk, like the earth thrown up by the side of a newly-made
grave, you can understand the wonderful descriptive truth of those four
words, “That is their horizon.” To live for days and nights at a time—to
live for long months with scanty intervals of cave-dwelling in holes
scooped out in the sides of hills—down there in the newly made grave, on
a floor of mud between walls of mud, with tiny loopholes for your only
windows, through which you see a narrow segment of the landscape (always
with another mud-bank in front of you) between the stalks of the
grasses, with your eye on a level with their roots—that, quite apart
from the question of shells and fighting, has been the life and the
outlook of our men and the French soldiers at the front, ever since they
began fifteen weary months ago to be a besieging force. But, as I have
tried to show earlier in this book, the French do not think about their
life as this German and his compatriots in the trenches obviously do—for
the simple but all-sufficient reason that they are the besiegers and not
the besieged.
For the French and the English, though for them, too, “that is their
horizon,” can see beyond it, not perhaps the Angles of Mons, but
decidedly the Angel of Victory.