[Illustration: THE THRILL OF OLD-TIME WAR
The stirrup charge of the Scots Greys at St. Quentin. Holding on to
the stirrup leathers of the cavalry the Highlanders crashed like an
avalanche upon the German lines, tearing great gaps in their massed
formations.]
COMPLETE EDITION
HISTORY OF THE
WORLD WAR
An Authentic Narrative of
The World’s Greatest War
BY FRANCIS A. MARCH, Ph.D.
In Collaboration with
RICHARD J. BEAMISH
Special War Correspondent
and Military Analyst
With an Introduction
BY GENERAL PEYTON C. MARCH
Chief of Staff of the United States Army
With Exclusive Photographs by
JAMES H. HARE and DONALD THOMPSON
World-Famed War Photographers
and with Reproductions from the Official Photographs
of the United States, Canadian, British,
French and Italian Governments
MCMXIX
LESLIE-JUDGE COMPANY
NEW YORK
Copyright, 1918
FRANCIS A. MARCH
This history is an original work and is fully protected by the
copyright laws, including the right of translation. All persons are
warned against reproducing the text in whole or in part without the
permission of the publishers.
CONTENTS
VOLUME III
PAGE
CHAPTER I. NEUVE CHAPELLE AND WAR IN BLOOD-SOAKED TRENCHES
War Amid Barbed-Wire Entanglements and the Desolation
of No Man’s Land--Subterranean Tactics Continuing Over
Four Years--Attacks that Cost Thousands of Lives for
Every Foot of Gain 1
CHAPTER II. ITALY DECLARES WAR ON AUSTRIA
Her Great Decision--D’Annunzio, Poet and Patriot--Italia
Irredenta--German Indignation--The Campaigns
on the Isonzo and in the Tyrol 29
CHAPTER III. GLORIOUS GALLIPOLI
A Titanic Enterprise--Its Objects--Disasters and Deeds
of Deathless Glory--The Heroic Anzacs--Bloody Dashes up
Impregnable Slopes--Silently they Stole Away--A Successful
Failure 58
CHAPTER IV. THE GREATEST NAVAL BATTLE IN HISTORY
The Battle of Jutland--Every Factor on Sea and in Sky
Favorable to the Germans--Low Visibility a Great Factor--A
Modern Sea Battle--Light Cruisers Screening Battleship
Squadron--Germans Run Away when British Fleet
Marshals Its Full Strength--Death of Lord Kitchener 78
CHAPTER V. THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN
The Advance on Cracow--Von Hindenburg Strikes at
Warsaw--German Barbarism--The War in Galicia--The
Fall of Przemysl--Russia’s Ammunition Fails--The Russian
Retreat--The Fall of Warsaw--The Last Stand--Czernowitz 104
CHAPTER VI. HOW THE BALKANS DECIDED
Ferdinand of Bulgaria Insists Upon Joining Germany--Dramatic
Scene in the King’s Palace--The Die is Cast--Bulgaria
Succumbs to Seductions of Potsdam Gang--Greece
Mobilizes--French and British Troops at Saloniki--Serbia
Over-run--Roumania’s Disastrous Venture in the Arena of Mars 145
CHAPTER VII. THE CAMPAIGN IN MESOPOTAMIA
British Army Threatening Bagdad Besieged in Kut-el-Amara--After
Heroic Defense General Townshend Surrenders
after 143 Days of Siege--New British Expedition
Recaptures Kut--Troops Push on Up the Tigris--Fall of
Bagdad the Magnificent 187
CHAPTER VIII. IMMORTAL VERDUN
Grave of the Military Reputations of von Falkenhayn and
the Crown Prince--Hindenburg’s Warning--Why the Germans
Made the Disastrous Attempt to Capture the Great
Fortress--Heroic France Reveals Itself to the World--“They
Shall Not Pass”--Nivelle’s Glorious Stand on
Dead Man Hill--Lord Northcliffe’s Description--A Defense
Unsurpassed in the History of France 209
ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME III
PAGE
THE THRILL OF OLD-TIME WAR _Frontispiece_
THE GLORIOUS CHARGE OF THE NINTH LANCERS 4
CHARGING THROUGH BARBED-WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS 6
BRITISH INDIAN TROOPS CHARGING THE GERMAN TRENCHES AT NEUVE
CHAPELLE 10
CHARGING ON GERMAN TRENCHES IN GAS MASKS 12
AN INCIDENT OF THE WAR IN FLANDERS 18
ITALY’S TITANIC LABOR TO CONQUER THE ALPS 30
WAITING THE ORDER TO ATTACK 38
TRANSPORTING WOUNDED AMID THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE ITALIAN
MOUNTAIN FRONT 42
THE LOSS OF THE “IRRESISTIBLE” 68
THE HISTORIC LANDING FROM THE “RIVER CLYDE” AT SEDDUL BAHR 76
ADMIRAL WILLIAM S. SIMS 98
ADMIRAL SIR DAVID BEATTY 98
GERMAN FRIGHTFULNESS FROM THE AIR 110
BAGDAD THE MAGNIFICENT FALLS TO THE BRITISH 208
AMMUNITION FOR THE GUNS 224
HOW VERDUN WAS SAVED 224
THE WORLD WAR
CHAPTER I
NEUVE CHAPELLE AND WAR IN BLOOD-SOAKED TRENCHES
After the immortal stand of Joffre at the first battle of the Marne
and the sudden savage thrust at the German center which sent von Kluck
and his men reeling back in retreat to the prepared defenses along the
line of the Aisne, the war in the western theater resolved itself into
a play for position from deep intrenchments. Occasionally would come a
sudden big push by one side or the other in which artillery was massed
until hub touched hub and infantry swept to glory and death in waves
of gray, or blue or khaki as the case might be. But these tremendous
efforts and consequent slaughters did not change the long battle line
from the Alps to the North Sea materially. Here and there a bulge
would be made by the terrific pressure of men and material in some
great assault like that first push of the British at Neuve Chapelle,
like the German attack at Verdun or like the tremendous efforts by both
sides on that bloodiest of all battlefields, the Somme.
Neuve Chapelle deserves particular mention as the test in which the
British soldiers demonstrated their might in equal contest against
the enemy. There had been a disposition in England as elsewhere up to
that time to rate the Germans as supermen, to exalt the potency of the
scientific equipment with which the German army had taken the field.
When the battle of Neuve Chapelle had been fought, although its losses
were heavy, there was no longer any doubt in the British nation that
victory was only a question of time.
The action came as a pendant to the attack by General de Langle de
Cary’s French army during February, 1915, at Perthes, that had been
a steady relentless pressure by artillery and infantry upon a strong
German position. To meet it heavy reinforcements had been shifted
by the Germans from the trenches between La Bassée and Lille. The
earthworks at Neuve Chapelle had been particularly depleted and only
a comparatively small body of Saxons and Bavarians defended them.
Opposite this body was the first British army. The German intrenchments
at Neuve Chapelle surrounded and defended the highlands upon which were
placed the German batteries and in their turn defended the road towards
Lille, Roubaix and Turcoing.
[Illustration: THE BATTLE-GROUND OF NEUVE CHAPELLE]
The task assigned to Sir John French was to make an assault with only
forty-eight thousand men on a comparatively narrow front. There was
only one practicable method for effective preparation, and this was
chosen by the British general. An artillery concentration absolutely
unprecedented up to that time was employed by him. Field pieces firing
at point-blank range were used to cut the barbed wire entanglements
defending the enemy intrenchments, while howitzers and bombing
airplanes were used to drop high explosives into the defenseless
earthworks.
Sir Douglas Haig, later to become the commander-in-chief of the British
forces, was in command of the first army. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien
commanded the second army. It was the first army that bore the brunt of
the attack.
[Illustration: THE GLORIOUS CHARGE OF THE NINTH LANCERS
An incident of the retreat from Mons to Cambrai. A German battery of
eleven guns posted in a wood had caused havoc in the British ranks. The
Ninth Lancers rode straight at them, across the open, through a hail of
shell from the other German batteries, cut down all the gunners, and
put every gun out of action.]
No engagement during the years on the western front was more sudden
and surprising in its onset than that drive of the British against
Neuve Chapelle. At seven o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, March
10, 1915, the British artillery was lazily engaged in lobbing over
a desultory shell fire upon the German trenches. It was the usual
breakfast appetizer, and nobody on the German side took any unusual
notice of it. Really, however, the shelling was scientific “bracketing”
of the enemy’s important position. The gunners were making sure of
their ranges.
At 7.30 range finding ended, and with a roar that shook the earth the
most destructive and withering artillery action of the war up to that
time was on. Field pieces sending their shells hurtling only a few
feet above the earth tore the wire emplacements of the enemy to pieces
and made kindling wood of the supports. Howitzers sent high explosive
shells, containing lyddite, of 15-inch, 9.2-inch and 6-inch caliber
into the doomed trenches and later into the ruined village. It was
eight o’clock in the morning, one-half hour after the beginning of the
artillery action, that the village was bombarded. During this time
British soldiers were enabled to walk about in No Man’s Land behind
the curtain of fire with absolute immunity. No German rifleman or
machine gunner left cover. The scene on the German side of the line was
like that upon the blasted surface of the moon, pock-marked with shell
holes, and with no trace of human life to be seen above ground.
An eye-witness describing the scene said:
“The dawn, which broke reluctantly through a veil of clouds on the
morning of Wednesday, March 10, 1915, seemed as any other to the
Germans behind the white and blue sandbags in their long line of
trenches curving in a hemicycle about the battered village of Neuve
Chapelle. For five months they had remained undisputed masters of the
positions they had here wrested from the British in October. Ensconced
in their comfortably-arranged trenches with but a thin outpost in their
fire trenches, they had watched day succeed day and night succeed night
without the least variation from the monotony of trench warfare, the
intermittent bark of the machine guns--rat-tat-tat-tat-tat--and the
perpetual rattle of rifle fire, with here and there a bomb, and now
and then an exploded mine.
[Illustration: © _Illustrated London News_.
CHARGING THROUGH BARBED-WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS
In one sector at Givenchy, the wire had not been sufficiently smashed
by the artillery preparation and the infantry attack was held up in
the face of a murderous German fire.]
“For weeks past the German airmen had grown strangely shy. On this
Wednesday morning none were aloft to spy out the strange doings which,
as dawn broke, might have been descried on the desolate roads behind
the British lines.
“From ten o’clock of the preceding evening endless files of men marched
silently down the roads leading towards the German positions through
Laventie and Richebourg St. Vaast, poor shattered villages of the
dead where months of incessant bombardment have driven away the last
inhabitants and left roofless houses and rent roadways....
“Two days before, a quiet room, where Nelson’s Prayer stands on the
mantel-shelf, saw the ripening of the plans that sent these sturdy sons
of Britain’s four kingdoms marching all through the night. Sir John
French met the army corps commanders and unfolded to them his plans for
the offensive of the British army against the German line at Neuve
Chapelle.
“The onslaught was to be a surprise. That was its essence. The Germans
were to be battered with artillery, then rushed before they recovered
their wits. We had thirty-six clear hours before us. Thus long, it was
reckoned (with complete accuracy as afterwards appeared), must elapse
before the Germans, whose line before us had been weakened, could rush
up reinforcements. To ensure the enemy’s being pinned down right and
left of the ‘great push,’ an attack was to be delivered north and south
of the main thrust simultaneously with the assault on Neuve Chapelle.”
After describing the impatience of the British soldiers as they
awaited the signal to open the attack, and the actual beginning of the
engagement, the narrator continues:
“Then hell broke loose. With a mighty, hideous, screeching burst of
noise, hundreds of guns spoke. The men in the front trenches were
deafened by the sharp reports of the field-guns spitting out their
shells at close range to cut through the Germans’ barbed wire
entanglements. In some cases the trajectory of these vicious missiles
was so flat that they passed only a few feet above the British trenches.
“The din was continuous. An officer who had the curious idea of
putting his ear to the ground said it was as though the earth were
being smitten great blows with a Titan’s hammer. After the first few
shells had plunged screaming amid clouds of earth and dust into the
German trenches, a dense pall of smoke hung over the German lines.
The sickening fumes of lyddite blew back into the British trenches.
In some places the troops were smothered in earth and dust or even
spattered with blood from the hideous fragments of human bodies that
went hurtling through the air. At one point the upper half of a German
officer, his cap crammed on his head, was blown into one of our
trenches.
“Words will never convey any adequate idea of the horror of those five
and thirty minutes. When the hands of officers’ watches pointed to
five minutes past eight, whistles resounded along the British lines.
At the same moment the shells began to burst farther ahead, for, by
previous arrangement, the gunners, lengthening their fuses, were
‘lifting’ on to the village of Neuve Chapelle so as to leave the road
open for our infantry to rush in and finish what the guns had begun.
“The shells were now falling thick among the houses of Neuve Chapelle,
a confused mass of buildings seen reddish through the pillars of smoke
and flying earth and dust. At the sound of the whistle--alas for the
bugle, once the herald of victory, now banished from the fray!--our
men scrambled out of the trenches and hurried higgledy-piggledy into
the open. Their officers were in front. Many, wearing overcoats and
carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, closely resembled their men.
[Illustration: BRITISH INDIAN TROOPS CHARGING THE GERMAN TRENCHES AT
NEUVE CHAPELLE
Germany counted on a revolution in India, but the Indian troops proved
to be among the most loyal and brilliant fighters in the Imperial
forces.]
“It was from the center of our attacking line that the assault was
pressed home soonest. The guns had done their work well. The trenches
were blown to irrecognizable pits dotted with dead. The barbed wire
had been cut like so much twine. Starting from the Rue Tilleloy the
Lincolns and the Berkshires were off the mark first, with orders to
swerve to right and left respectively as soon as they had captured the
first line of trenches, in order to let the Royal Irish Rifles and the
Rifle Brigade through to the village. The Germans left alive in the
trenches, half demented with fright, surrounded by a welter of dead
and dying men, mostly surrendered. The Berkshires were opposed with
the utmost gallantry by two German officers who had remained alone
in a trench serving a machine gun. But the lads from Berkshire made
their way into that trench and bayoneted the Germans where they stood,
fighting to the last. The Lincolns, against desperate resistance,
eventually occupied their section of the trench and then waited for
the Irishmen and the Rifle Brigade to come and take the village ahead
of them. Meanwhile the second Thirty-ninth Garhwalis on the right had
taken their trenches with a rush and were away towards the village and
the Biez Wood.
“Things had moved so fast that by the time the troops were ready to
advance against the village the artillery had not finished its work.
So, while the Lincolns and the Berks assembled the prisoners who were
trooping out of the trenches in all directions, the infantry on whom
devolved the honor of capturing the village, waited. One saw them
standing out in the open, laughing and cracking jokes amid the terrific
din made by the huge howitzer shells screeching overhead and bursting
in the village, the rattle of machine guns all along the line, and
the popping of rifles. Over to the right where the Garhwalis had been
working with the bayonet, men were shouting hoarsely and wounded were
groaning as the stretcher-bearers, all heedless of bullets, moved
swiftly to and fro over the shell-torn ground.
[Illustration: CHARGING ON GERMAN TRENCHES IN GAS MASKS
Each British soldier carried two gas-proof helmets. At the first alarm
of gas the helmet was instantly adjusted, for breathing even a whiff
of the yellow cloud meant death or serious injury. This picture shows
the earlier type before the respirator mask was devised to keep up
with Germany’s development of gas warfare.]
“There was bloody work in the village of Neuve Chapelle. The capture
of a place at the bayonet point is generally a grim business, in which
instant, unconditional surrender is the only means by which bloodshed,
a deal of bloodshed, can be prevented. If there is individual
resistance here and there the attacking troops cannot discriminate.
They must go through, slaying as they go such as oppose them (the
Germans have a monopoly of the finishing-off of wounded men), otherwise
the enemy’s resistance would not be broken, and the assailants would be
sniped and enfiladed from hastily prepared strongholds at half a dozen
different points.
“The village was a sight that the men say they will never forget. It
looked as if an earthquake had struck it. The published photographs do
not give any idea of the indescribable mass of ruins to which our guns
reduced it. The chaos is so utter that the very line of the streets is
all but obliterated.
“It was indeed a scene of desolation into which the Rifle Brigade--the
first regiment to enter the village, I believe--raced headlong. Of the
church only the bare shell remained, the interior lost to view beneath
a gigantic mound of débris. The little churchyard was devastated,
the very dead plucked from their graves, broken coffins and ancient
bones scattered about amid the fresher dead, the slain of that
morning--gray-green forms asprawl athwart the tombs. Of all that once
fair village but two things remained intact--two great crucifixes
reared aloft, one in the churchyard, the other over against the
château. From the cross, that is the emblem of our faith, the figure of
Christ, yet intact though all pitted with bullet marks, looked down in
mute agony on the slain in the village.
“The din and confusion were indescribable. Through the thick pall
of shell smoke Germans were seen on all sides, some emerging half
dazed from cellars and dugouts, their hands above their heads, others
dodging round the shattered houses, others firing from the windows,
from behind carts, even from behind the overturned tombstones. Machine
guns were firing from the houses on the outskirts, rapping out their
nerve-racking note above the noise of the rifles.
“Just outside the village there was a scene of tremendous enthusiasm.
The Rifle Brigade, smeared with dust and blood, fell in with the Third
Gurkhas with whom they had been brigaded in India. The little brown men
were dirty but radiant. Kukri in hand they had very thoroughly gone
through some houses at the cross-roads on the Rue du Bois and silenced
a party of Germans who were making themselves a nuisance there with
some machine guns. Riflemen and Gurkhas cheered themselves hoarse.”
Unfortunately for the complete success of the brilliant attack a great
delay was caused by the failure of the artillery that was to have
cleared the barbed-wire entanglements for the Twenty-third Brigade, and
because of the unlooked for destruction of the British field telephone
system by shell and rifle fire. The check of the Twenty-third Brigade
banked other commands back of it, and the Twenty-fifth Brigade was
obliged to fight at right angles to the line of battle. The Germans
quickly rallied at these points, and took a terrific toll in British
lives. Particularly was this true at three specially strong German
positions. One called Port Arthur by the British, another at Pietre
Mill and the third was the fortified bridge over Des Layes Creek.
Because of the lack of telephone communication it was impossible to
send reinforcements to the troops that had been held up by barbed wire
and other emplacements and upon which German machine guns were pouring
a steady stream of death.
As the Twenty-third Brigade had been held up by unbroken barbed wire
northwest of Neuve Chapelle, so the Seventh Division of the Fourth
Corps was also checked in its action against the ridge of Aubers on
the left of Neuve Chapelle. Under the plan of Sir Douglas Haig the
Seventh Division was to have waited until the Eighth Division had
reached Neuve Chapelle, when it was to charge through Aubers. With
the tragic mistake that cost the Twenty-third Brigade so dearly, the
plan affecting the Seventh Division went awry. The German artillery,
observing the concentration of the Seventh Division opposite Aubers,
opened a vigorous fire upon that front. During the afternoon General
Haig ordered a charge upon the German positions. The advance was made
in short rushes in the face of a fire that seemed to blaze from an
inferno. Inch by inch the ground was drenched with British blood. At
5.30 in the afternoon the men dug themselves in under the relentless
German fire. Further advance became impossible.
The night was one of horror. Every minute the men were under heavy
bombardment. At dawn on March 11th the dauntless British infantry
rushed from the trenches in an effort to carry Aubers, but the enemy
artillery now greatly reinforced made that task an impossible one.
The trenches occupied by the British forces were consolidated and the
salient made by the push was held by the British with bulldog tenacity.
The number of men employed in the action on the British side was
forty-eight thousand. During the early surprise of the action the loss
was slight. Had the wire in front of the Twenty-third Brigade been cut
by the artillery assigned to such action, and had the telephone system
not been destroyed the success of the thrust would have been complete.
The delay of four and a half hours between the first and second
phases of the attack caused virtually all the losses sustained by the
attacking force. The total casualties were 12,811 men of the British
forces. Of these 1,751 officers and privates were taken prisoners and
10,000 officers and men were killed and wounded.
The action continued throughout Thursday, March 11th, with little
change in the general situation. The British still held Neuve Chapelle
and their intrenchments threatened Aubers. On Friday morning, March
12th, the Crown Prince of Bavaria made a desperate attempt under
cover of a heavy fog to recapture the village. The effort was made in
characteristic German dense formations. The Westphalian and Bavarian
troops came out of Biez Wood in waves of gray-green, only to be
blown to pieces by British guns already loaded and laid on the mark.
Elsewhere the British waited until the Germans were scarcely more than
fifty paces away when they opened with deadly rapid fire before
which the German waves melted like snow before steam. It was such
slaughter as the British had experienced when held up before Aubers.
Slaughter that staggered Germany.
[Illustration: AN INCIDENT OF THE WAR IN FLANDERS
A Bavarian battery caught in British gunfire while limbering up. Only
three guns escaped in the hail of bursting shells.]
So ended Neuve Chapelle, a battle in which the decision rested with the
British, a victory for which a fearful price had been paid but out of
which came a confidence that was to hearten the British nation and to
put sinews of steel into the British army for the dread days to come.
The story of Neuve Chapelle was repeated in large and in miniature many
times during the deadlock of trench warfare on the western front until
victory finally came to the Allies. During those years the western
battle-front lay like a wounded snake across France and Belgium. It
writhed and twisted, now this way, now that, as one side or the other
gambled with men and shells and airplanes for some brief advantage.
It bent back in a great bulge when von Hindenburg made his famous
retreat in the winter of 1916 after the Allies had pressed heavily
against the Teutonic front upon the ghastly field of the Somme. The
record is one of great value to military strategists, to the layman it
is only a succession of artillery barrages, of gas attacks, of aerial
reconnaissances and combats.
One day grew to be very much like another in that deadlock of pythons.
A play for position here was met by a counter-thrust in another place.
German inventions were outmatched and outnumbered by those coming from
the Allied side.
Trench warfare became the daily life of the men. They learned to
fight and live in the open. The power of human adaptation to abnormal
conditions was never better exemplified than in those weary, dreary
years on the western front.
[Illustration: SCENE OF THE BLOODY BATTLES OF THE SOMME
The tide of war swept over this terrain with terrific violence.
Peronne was taken by the British in their great offensive of 1916-17;
in the last desperate effort of the Germans in 1918 they plunged
through Peronne, advancing 35 miles, only to be hurled back with awful
losses by Marshal Foch.]
The fighting-lines consisted generally of one, two, or three lines
of shelter-trenches lying parallel, measuring twenty or twenty-five
inches in width, and varying in length according to the number they
hold; the trenches were joined together by zigzag approaches and by
a line of reinforced trenches (armed with machine guns), which were
almost completely proof against rifle, machine gun, or gun fire. The
ordinary German trenches were almost invisible from 350 yards away, a
distance which permitted a very deadly fire. It is easy to realize that
if the enemy occupied three successive lines and a line of reinforced
intrenchments, the attacking line was likely, at the lowest estimate,
to be decimated during an advance of 350 yards--by rifle fire at a
range of 350 yards’ distance, and by the extremely quick fire of the
machine guns, each of which delivered from 300 to 600 bullets a minute
with absolute precision. In the field-trench, a soldier enjoyed far
greater security than he would if merely prone behind his knapsack in
an excavation barely fifteen inches deep. He had merely to stoop down
a little to disappear below the level of the ground and be immune from
infantry fire; moreover, his machine guns fired without endangering
him. In addition, this stooping position brought the man’s knapsack on
a level with his helmet, thus forming some protection against shrapnel
and shell-splinters.
At the back of the German trenches shelters were dug for
non-commissioned officers and for the commander of the unit.
Ever since the outbreak of the war, the French troops in Lorraine,
after severe experiences, realized rapidly the advantages of the German
trenches, and began to study those they had taken gloriously. Officers,
non-commissioned officers, and men of the engineers were straightway
detached in every unit to teach the infantry how to construct similar
shelters. The education was quick, and very soon they had completed
the work necessary for the protection of all. The tools of the enemy
“casualties,” the spades and picks left behind in deserted villages,
were all gladly piled on to the French soldiers’ knapsacks, to be
carried willingly by the very men who used to grumble at being loaded
with even the smallest regulation tool. As soon as night had set in on
the occasion of a lull in the fighting, the digging of the trenches
was begun. Sometimes, in the darkness, the men of each fighting
nation--less than 500 yards away from their enemy--would hear the noise
of the workers of the foe: the sounds of picks and axes; the officers’
words of encouragement; and tacitly they would agree to an armistice
during which to dig shelters from which, in the morning, they would
dash out, to fight once more.
Commodious, indeed, were some of the trench barracks. One French
soldier wrote:
“In really up-to-date intrenchments you may find kitchens,
dining-rooms, bedrooms, and even stables. One regiment has first class
cow-sheds. One day a whimsical ‘piou-piou,’ finding a cow wandering
about in the danger zone, had the bright idea of finding shelter for it
in the trenches. The example was quickly followed, and at this moment
the --th Infantry possess an underground farm, in which fat kine, well
cared for, give such quantities of milk that regular distributions of
butter are being made--and very good butter, too.”
But this is not all. An officer writes home a tale of yet another one
of the comforts of home added to the equipment of the trenches:
“We are clean people here. Thanks to the ingenuity of ----, we are able
to take a warm bath every day from ten to twelve. We call this teasing
the ‘boches,’ for this bathing-establishment of the latest type is
fitted up--would you believe it?--in the trenches!”
Describing trenches occupied by the British in their protracted
“siege-warfare” in Northern France along and to the north of the Aisne
Valley, a British officer wrote: “In the firing-line the men sleep
and obtain shelter in the dugouts they have hollowed or ‘undercut’ in
the side of the trenches. These refuges are lightly raised above the
bottom of the trench, so as to remain dry in wet weather. The floor
of the trench is also sloped for purposes of draining. Some trenches
are provided with head-cover, and others with overhead cover, the
latter, of course, giving protection from the weather as well as from
shrapnel balls and splinters of shells.... At all points subject
to shell-fire access to the firing-line from behind is provided by
communication-trenches. These are now so good that it is possible to
cross in safety the fire-swept zone to the advanced trenches from the
billets in villages, the bivouacs in quarries, or the other places
where the headquarters of units happen to be.”
A cavalry subaltern gave the following account of life in the trenches:
“Picnicking in the open air, day and night (you never see a roof now),
is the only real method of existence. There are loads of straw to bed
down on, and everyone sleeps like a log, in turn, even with shrapnel
bursting within fifty yards.”
One English officer described the ravages of modern artillery fire, not
only upon all men, animals and buildings within its zone, but upon the
very face of nature itself: “In the trenches crouch lines of men, in
brown or gray or blue, coated with mud, unshaven, hollow-eyed with the
continual strain.”
“The fighting is now taking place over ground where both sides have for
weeks past been excavating in all directions,” said another letter
from the front, “until it has become a perfect labyrinth. A trench
runs straight for a considerable distance, then it suddenly forks in
three or four directions. One branch merely leads into a ditch full of
water, used in drier weather as a means of communication; another ends
abruptly in a cul-de-sac, probably an abandoned sap-head; the third
winds on, leading into galleries and passages further forward.
“Sometimes where new ground is broken the spade turns up the
long-buried dead, ghastly relics of former fights, and on all sides the
surface of the earth is ploughed and furrowed by fragments of shell and
bombs and distorted by mines. Seen from a distance, this apparently
confused mass of passages, crossing and re-crossing one another,
resembles an irregular gridiron.
“The life led by the infantry on both sides at close quarters is a
strange, cramped existence, with death always near, either by means
of some missile from above or some mine explosion from beneath--a
life which has one dull, monotonous background of mud and water.
Even when there is but little fighting the troops are kept hard at
work strengthening the existing defenses, constructing others, and
improvising the shelter imperative in such weather.”