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[Illustration: Front Cover]
MY SECOND YEAR
OF THE WAR
BY
FREDERICK PALMER
Author of "The Last Shot," "The Old Blood," "My Year
of the Great War," etc.
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
1917
COPYRIGHT, 1917
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I BACK TO THE FRONT 1
II VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL 18
III A CANADIAN INNOVATION 35
IV READY FOR THE BLOW 50
V THE BLOW 67
VI FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME 81
VII OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE 94
VIII FORWARD THE GUNS! 108
IX WHEN THE FRENCH WON 119
X ALONG THE ROAD TO VICTORY 130
XI THE BRIGADE THAT WENT THROUGH 142
XII THE STORMING OF CONTALMAISON 153
XIII A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK 167
XIV THE CAVALRY GOES IN 180
XV ENTER THE ANZACS 190
XVI THE AUSTRALIANS AND A WINDMILL 201
XVII THE HATEFUL RIDGE 213
XVIII A TRULY FRENCH AFFAIR 236
XIX ON THE AERIAL FERRY 244
XX THE EVER MIGHTY GUNS 255
XXI BY THE WAY 269
XXII THE MASTERY OF THE AIR 282
XXIII A PATENT CURTAIN OF FIRE 292
XXIV WATCHING A CHARGE 304
XXV CANADA IS STUBBORN 319
XXVI THE TANKS ARRIVE 332
XXVII THE TANKS IN ACTION 348
XXVIII CANADA IS QUICK 360
XXIX THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES 374
XXX FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN 385
XXXI _Au Revoir_, SOMME! 400
MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR
I
BACK TO THE FRONT
How America fails to realize the war--Difficulties of
realization--Uncle Sam is sound at heart--In London again--A Chief of
Staff who has risen from the ranks--Sir William Robertson takes time
to think--At the front--Kitchener's mob the new army--A quiet
headquarters--Sir Douglas Haig--His office a clearing house of
ideas--His business to deal in blows--"The Spirit that quickeneth."
"I've never kept up my interest so long in anything as in this war,"
said a woman who sat beside me at dinner when I was home from the front
in the winter of 1915-16. Since then I have wondered if my reply,
"Admirable mental concentration!" was not ironic at the expense of
manners and philosophy. In view of the thousands who were dying in
battle every day, her remark seemed as heartless as it was superficial
and in keeping with the riotous joy of living and prosperity which
strikes every returned American with its contrast to Europe's
self-denial, emphasized by such details gained by glimpses in the shop
windows of Fifth Avenue as the exhibit of a pair of ladies' silk hose
inset with lace, price one hundred dollars.
Meanwhile, she was knitting socks or mufflers, I forget which, for the
Allies. Her confusion about war news was common to the whole country,
which heard the special pleading of both sides without any
cross-questioning by an attorney. She remarked how the Allies' bulletins
said that the Allies were winning and the German bulletins that the
Germans were winning; but so far as she could see on the map the armies
remained in much the same positions and the wholesale killing continued.
Her interest, I learned on further inquiry, was limited and partisan.
When the Germans had won a victory, she refused to read about it and
threw down her paper in disgust.
There was something human in her attitude, as human as the war itself.
It was a reminder of how far away from the Mississippi is the Somme; how
broad is the Atlantic; how impossible it is to project yourself into the
distance even in the days of the wireless. She was moving in the orbit
of her affairs, with its limitations, just as the soldiers were in
theirs. Before the war luxury was as common in Paris as in New York; but
with so ghastly a struggle proceeding in Europe it seemed out of keeping
that the joy of living should endure anywhere in the world. Yet Europe
was tranquilly going its way when the Southern States were suffering
pain and hardship worse than any that France and England have known.
Paris and London were dining and smiling when Richmond was in flames.
War can be brought home to no community until its own sons are dying and
risking death. In nothing are we so much the creatures of our
surroundings as in war. For the first few weeks when I was at home, a
nation going its way in an era of prosperity had an aspect of vulgarity;
peace itself was vulgar by contrast with the atmosphere of heroic
sacrifice in which I had lived for over a year. I asked myself if my
country could ever rise to the state of exaltation of France and
England. Though first thought, judging by superficial appearances alone,
might have said "No," I knew that we could if there ever came a call to
defend our soil--a call that could be brought home to the valleys of the
Hudson and the Mississippi as a call was brought home to the valleys of
the Somme, the Meuse and the Marne.
Many Americans had returned from Europe with reports of humiliation
endured as a result of their country's attitude. Shopkeepers had made
insulting remarks, they said, and in some instances had refused to sell
goods. They had been conscious of hostility under the politeness of
their French and English friends. A superficial confirmation of their
contention might be taken from the poster I noticed on my way from
Paddington Station to my hotel upon my arrival in England. It advertised
an article in a cheap weekly under the title of "Uncle Sham."
I took this just as seriously as I took a cartoon in a New York evening
paper of pro-German tendencies on the day that I had sailed from New
York, which showed John Bull standing idly by and urging France on to
sacrifices in the defense of Verdun. It was as easy for an American to
be indignant at one as for an Englishman at the other, but a little
unworthy of the intelligence of either. I was too convinced that Uncle
Sam, who does not always follow my advice, is sound at heart and a
respectable member of the family of nations to be in the least disturbed
in my sense of international good will. If I had been irritated I should
have contributed to the petty backbiting by the mischievous uninformed
which makes bad blood between peoples.
I knew, too, from experience, as I had kept repeating at home, that when
the chosen time arrived for the British to strike, they would prove with
deeds the shamelessness of this splash of printer's ink and confound, as
they have on the Somme, the witticism of a celebrated Frenchman who has
since made his apology for saying that the British would fight on till
the last drop of French blood was shed. Besides, on the same day that I
saw the poster I saw in a British publication a reproduction of a German
cartoon--exemplifying the same kind of vulgar facility--picturing Uncle
Sam being led by the nose by John Bull.
Thinking Englishmen and Frenchmen, when they pause in their
preoccupation of giving life and fortune for their cause to consider
this extraneous subject, realize the widespread sympathy of the United
States for the Allied cause and how a large proportion of our people
were prepared to go to war after the sinking of the _Lusitania_ for an
object which could bring them no territorial reward. If we will fight
only for money and aggrandizement, as the "Uncle Sham" style of
reasoners hold, we should long ago have taken Mexico and Central
America. Personally, I have never had anyone say to me that I was "too
proud to fight," though if I went about saying that I was ashamed of my
country I might; for when I think of my country I think of no group of
politicians, financiers, or propagandists, no bureaucracy or particular
section of opinion, but of our people as a whole. But unquestionably we
were unpopular with the masses of Europeans. A sentence taken out of its
context was misconstrued into a catch-phrase indicating the cravenness
of a nation wedded to its flesh-pots, which pretended a moral
superiority to others whose passionate sacrifice made them
supersensitive when they looked across the Atlantic to the United
States, which they saw profiting from others' misfortunes.
By living at home I had gained perspective about the war and by living
with the war I have gained perspective about my own country. At the
front I was concerned day after day with the winning of trenches and the
storming of villages whose names meant as little in the Middle West as a
bitter fight for good government in a Western city meant to the men at
the front. After some months of peace upon my return to England I
resented passport regulations which had previously been a commonplace;
but soon I was back in the old groove, the groove of war, with war
seeming as normal in England as peace seemed in the United States.
In London, recruiting posters with their hectic urgings to the manhood
of England to volunteer no longer blanketed the hoardings and the walls
of private buildings. Conscription had come. Every able-bodied man must
now serve at the command of the government. England seemed to have
greater dignity. The war was wholly master of her proud individualism,
which had stubbornly held to its faith that the man who fought best was
he who chose to fight rather than he who was ordered to fight.
There was a new Chief of Staff at the War Office, Sir William
Robertson, who had served for seven years as a private before he
received his commission as an officer, singularly expressing in his
career the character of the British system, which leaves open to merit
the door at the head of a long stairway which calls for hard climbing.
England believes in men and he had earned his way to the direction of
the most enormous plant with the largest personnel which the British
Empire had ever created.
It was somewhat difficult for the caller to comprehend the full extent
of the power and responsibility of this self-made leader at his desk in
a great room overlooking Whitehall Place, for he had so simplified an
organization that had been brought into being in two years that it
seemed to run without any apparent effort on his part. The methods of
men who have great authority interest us all. I had first seen Sir
William at a desk in a little room of a house in a French town when his
business was that of transport and supply for the British Expeditionary
Force. Then he moved to a larger room in the same town, as Chief of
Staff of the army in France. Now he had a still larger one and in
London.
I had heard much of his power of application, which had enabled him to
master languages while he was gaining promotion step by step; but I
found that the new Chief of Staff of the British Army was not "such a
fool as ever to overwork," as one of his subordinates said, and no
slave to long hours of drudgery at his desk.
"Besides his routine," said another subordinate, speaking of Sir
William's method, "he has to do a great deal of thinking." This passing
remark was most illuminating. Sir William had to think for the whole. He
had trained others to carry out his plans, and as former head of the
Staff College who had had experience in every branch, he was supposed to
know how each branch should be run.
When I returned to the front, my first motor trip which took me along
the lines of communication revealed the transformation, the more
appreciable because of my absence, which the winter had wrought. The New
Army had come into its own. And I had seen this New Army in the making.
I had seen Kitchener's first hundred thousand at work on Salisbury Plain
under old, retired drillmasters who, however eager, were hazy about
modern tactics. The men under them had the spirit which will endure the
drudgery of training. With time they must learn to be soldiers. More raw
material, month after month, went into the hopper. The urgent call of
the recruiting posters and the press had, in the earlier stages of the
war, supplied all the volunteers which could be utilized. It took much
longer to prepare equipment and facilities than to get men to enlist.
New Army battalions which reached the front in August, 1915, had had
their rifles only for a month. Before rifles could be manufactured rifle
plants had to be constructed. As late as December, 1915, the United
States were shipping only five thousand rifles a week to the British.
Soldiers fully drilled in the manual of arms were waiting for the arms
with which to fight; but once the supply of munitions from the new
plants was started it soon became a flood.
All winter the New Army battalions had been arriving in France. With
them had come the complicated machinery which modern war requires. The
staggering quantity of it was better proof than figures on the shipping
list of the immense tonnage which goes to sea under the British flag.
The old life at the front, as we knew it, was no more. When I first saw
the British Army in France it held seventeen miles of line. Only
seventeen, but seventeen in the mire of Flanders, including the bulge of
the Ypres salient.
By the first of January, 1915, a large proportion of the officers and
men of the original Expeditionary Force had perished. Reservists had
come to take the vacant places. Officers and non-commissioned officers
who survived had to direct a fighting army in the field and to train a
new army at home. An offensive was out of the question. All that the
force in the trenches could do was to hold. When the world wondered why
it could not do more, those who knew the true state of affairs wondered
how it could do so much. With flesh and blood infantry held against
double its own numbers supported by guns firing five times the number of
British shells. The British could not confess their situation without
giving encouragement to the Germans to press harder such attacks as
those of the first and second battle of Ypres, which came perilously
near succeeding.
This little army would not admit the truth even in its own mind. With
that casualness by which the Englishman conceals his emotions the
surviving officers of battalions which had been battered for months in
the trenches would speak of being "top dog, now." While the world was
thinking that the New Army would soon arrive to their assistance, they
knew as only trained soldiers can know how long it takes to make an army
out of raw material. So persistent was their pose of winning that it
hypnotized them into conviction. As it had never occurred to them that
they could be beaten, so they were not.
If sometimes the logic of fact got the better of simulation, they would
speak of the handicap of fighting an enemy who could deliver blows with
the long reach of his guns to which they could not respond. But this did
not happen often. It was a part of the game for the German to marshal
more guns than they if he could. They accepted the situation and fought
on. They, too, looked forward to "the day," as the Germans had before
the war; and their day was the one when the New Army should be ready to
strike its first blow.
There was also a new leader in France, king of the British world there.
Sir William sent him the new battalions and the guns and the food for
men and guns and his business was to make them into an army. They
arrived thinking that they were already one, as they were against any
ordinary foe, though not yet in homogeneity of organization against a
foe that had prepared for war for forty years and on top of this had had
two years' experience in actual battle.
On a quiet byroad near headquarters town, where all the staff business
of General Headquarters was conducted, a wisp of a flag hung at the
entrance to the grounds of a small modern chateau. There seemed no place
in all France more isolated and tranquil, its size forbidding many
guests. It was such a house as some quiet, studious man might have
chosen to rest in during his summer holiday. The sound of the guns never
reached it; the rumble of army transport was unheard.
Should you go there to luncheon you would be received by a young aide
who, in army jargon, was known as a "crock"; that is, he had been
invalided as the result of wounds or exposure in the trenches and,
though unfit for active service, could still serve as aide to the
Commander-in-Chief. At the appointed minute of the hour, in keeping with
military punctuality, whether of generals or of curtains of fire, a man
with iron-gray hair, clear, kindly eyes, and an unmistakably strong
chin, came out of his office and welcomed the guests with simple
informality. He seemed to have left business entirely behind when he
left his desk. You knew him at once for the type of well-preserved
British officer who never neglects to keep himself physically fit. It
amounts to a talent with British officers to have gone through campaigns
in India and South Africa and yet always to appear as fresh as if they
had never known anything more strenuous than the leisurely life of an
English country gentleman.
I had always heard how hard Sir Douglas Haig worked, just as I had heard
how hard Sir William Robertson worked. Sir Douglas, too, showed no signs
of pressure, and naturally the masterful control of surroundings without
any seeming effort is a part of the equipment of military leaders. The
power of the modern general is not evident in any of the old symbols.
It was really the army that chose Sir Douglas to be Commander-in-Chief.
Whenever the possibility of the retirement of Sir John French was
mentioned and you asked an officer who should take his place, the answer
was always either Robertson or Haig. In any profession the members
should be the best judges of excellence in that profession, and through
eighteen months of organizing and fighting these two men had earned the
universal praise of their comrades in arms. Robertson went to London and
Haig remained in France. England looked to them for victory.
Birth was kind to Sir Douglas. He came of an old Scotch family with fine
traditions. Oxford followed almost as a matter of course for him and
afterward he went into the army. From that day there is something in
common between his career and Sir William's, simple professional zeal
and industry. They set out to master their chosen calling. Long before
the public had ever heard of either one their ability was known to their
fellow soldiers. No two officers were more averse to any form of public
advertisement, which was contrary to their instincts no less than to the
ethics of soldiering. In South Africa, which was the practical school
where the commanders of the British Army of to-day first learned how to
command, their efficient staff work singled them out as coming men. Both
had vision. They studied the continental systems of war and when the
great war came they had the records which were the undeniable
recommendation that singled them out from their fellows. Sir John French
and Sir Ian Hamilton belonged to the generation ahead of them, the
difference being that between the '50s and the '60s.
It was the test of command of a corps and afterward of an army in
Flanders and Northern France which made Sir Douglas Commander-in-Chief,
a test of more than the academic ability which directs chessmen on the
board: that of the physical capacity to endure the strain of month after
month of campaigning, to keep a calm perspective, never to let the
mastery of the force under you get out of hand and never to be burdened
with any details except those which are vital.
The subordinate who went in an uncertain mood to see either Sir Douglas
or Sir William left with a sense of stalwart conviction. Both had the
gift of simplifying any situation, however complex. When a certain
general became unstrung during the retreat from Mons, Sir Douglas seemed
to consider that his first duty was to assist this man to recover
composure, and he slipped his arm through the general's and walked him
up and down until composure had returned. Again, on the retreat from
Mons Sir Douglas said, "We must stay here for the present, if we all die
for it," stating this military necessity as coolly as if it merely meant
waiting another quarter-hour for the arrival of a guest to dinner.
No less than General Joffre, Sir Douglas lived by rule. He, too,
insisted on sleeping well at night and rising fresh for his day's work.
During the period of preparation for the offensive his routine began
with a stroll in the garden before breakfast. Then the heads of the
different branches of his staff in headquarters town came in turn to
make their reports and receive instructions. At luncheon very likely he
might not talk of war. A man of his education and experience does not
lack topics to take his mind off his duties. Every day at half-past two
he went for a ride and with him an escort of his own regiment of
Lancers. The rest of the afternoon was given over to conferences with
subordinates whom he had summoned. On Sunday morning he always went into
headquarters town and in a small, temporary wooden chapel listened to a
sermon from a Scotch dominie who did not spare its length in awe of the
eminent member of his congregation. Otherwise, he left the chateau only
when he went to see with his own eyes some section of the front or of
the developing organization.
Of course, the room in the chateau which was his office was hung with
maps as the offices of all the great leaders are, according to report.
It seems the most obvious decoration. Whether it was the latest
photograph from an aeroplane or the most recent diagram of plans of
attack, it came to him if his subordinates thought it worth while. All
rivers of information flowed to the little chateau. He and the Chief of
Staff alone might be said to know all that was going on. Talking with
him in the office, which had been the study of a French country
gentleman, one gained an idea of the things which interested him; of the
processes by which he was building up his organization. He was the
clearing house of all ideas and through them he was setting the
criterion of efficiency. He spoke of the cause for which he was fighting
as if this were the great thing of all to him and to every man under
him, but without allowing his feelings to interfere with his judgment of
the enemy. His opponent was seen without illusion, as soldier sees
soldier. To him his problem was not one of sentiment, but of military
power. He dealt in blows; and blows alone could win the war.
Simplicity and directness of thought, decision and readiness to accept
responsibility, seemed second nature to the man secluded in that little
chateau, free from any confusion of detail, who had a task--the greatest
ever fallen to the lot of a British commander--of making a raw army into
a force which could undertake an offensive against frontal positions
considered impregnable by many experts and occupied by the skilful
German Army. He had, in common with Sir William Robertson, "a good deal
of thinking to do"; and what better place could he have chosen than this
retreat out of the sound of the guns, where through his subordinates he
felt the pulse of the whole army day by day?
His favorite expression was "the spirit that quickeneth"; the spirit of
effort, of discipline, of the fellowship of cohesion of
organization--spreading out from the personality at the desk in this
room down through all the units to the men themselves. Though officers
and soldiers rarely saw him they had felt the impulse of his spirit soon
after he had taken command. A new era had come in France. That old
organization called the British Empire, loose and decentrated--and
holding together because it was so--had taken another step forward in
the gathering of its strength into a compact force.
II
VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL
German grand strategy and Verdun--Why the British did not go to
Verdun--What they did to help--Racial characteristics in
armies--Father Joffre a miser of divisions--The Somme
country--Age-old tactics--If the flank cannot be turned can the front
be broken?--Theory of the Somme offensive.
In order properly to set the stage for the battle of the Somme, which
was the corollary of that of Verdun, we must, at the risk of appearing
to thresh old straw, consider the German plan of campaign in 1916 when
the German staff had turned its eyes from the East to the West. During
the summer of 1915 it had attempted no offensive on the Western front,
but had been content to hold its solid trench lines in the confidence
that neither the British nor the French were prepared for an offensive
on a large scale.
Blue days they were for us with the British Army in France during July
and early August, while the official bulletins revealed on the map how
von Hindenburg's and von Mackensen's legions were driving through
Poland. More critical still the subsequent period when inside
information indicated that German intrigue in Petrograd, behind the
Russian lines which the German guns were pounding, might succeed in
making a separate peace. Using her interior lines for rapid movement of
troops, enclosed by a steel ring and fighting against nations speaking
different languages with their capitals widely separated and their
armies not in touch, each having its own sentimental and territorial
objects in the war, the obvious object of Germany's policy from the
outset would be to break this ring, forcing one of the Allies to
capitulate under German blows.
In August, 1914, she had hoped to win a decisive battle against France
before she turned her legions against Russia for a decision. Now she
aimed to accomplish at Verdun what she had failed to accomplish on the
Marne, confident in her information that France was exhausted. It was
von Hindenburg's turn to hold the thin line while the Germans
concentrated on the Western front twenty-six hundred thousand men, with
every gun that they could spare and all the munitions that had
accumulated after the Russian drive was over. The fall of Paris was
unnecessary to their purpose. Capitals, whether Paris, Brussels, or
Bucharest, are only the trophies of military victory. Primarily the
German object, which naturally included the taking of Verdun, was to
hammer at the heart of French defense until France, staggering under the
blows, her _morale_ broken by the loss of the fortress, her supposedly
mercurial nature in the depths of depression, would surrender to
impulse and ask for terms.
After the German attacks began at Verdun all the world was asking why
the British, who were holding only sixty-odd miles of line at the time
and must have large reserves, did not rush to the relief of the French.
The French people themselves were a little restive under what was
supposed to be British inaction. Army leaders could not reveal their
plans by giving reasons--the reasons which are now obvious--for their
action or inaction. To some unmilitary minds the situation seemed as
simple as if Jones were attacked on the street by Smith and Robinson,
while Miller, Jones' friend who was a block away, would not go to his
rescue. To others, perhaps a trifle more knowing, it seemed only a
matter of marching some British divisions across country or putting them
on board a train.
Of course the British were only too ready to assist the French. Any
other attitude would have been unintelligent; for, with the French Army
broken, the British Army would find itself having to bear unassisted the
weight of German blows in the West. There were three courses which the
British Army might take.
_First._ It could send troops to Verdun. But the mixture of units
speaking different languages in the intricate web of communications
required for directing modern operations, and the mixture of transport
in the course of heavy concentrations in the midst of a critical action
where absolute cohesion of all units was necessary, must result in
confusion which would make any such plan impracticable. Only the
desperate situation of the French being without reserve could have
compelled its second consideration, as it represented the extreme of
that military inefficiency which makes wasteful use of lives and
material.
_Second._ The British could attack along their front as a diversion to
relieve pressure on Verdun. For this the Germans were fully prepared. It
fell in exactly with their plan. Knowing that the British New Army was
as yet undeveloped as an instrument for the offensive and that it was
still short of guns and shells, the Germans had struck in the inclement
weather of February at Verdun, thinking, and wrongly to my mind, that
the handicap to the vitality of their men of sleet, frost and cold,
soaking rains would be offset by the time gained. Not only had the
Germans sufficient men to carry on the Verdun offensive, but facing the
British their numbers were the largest mile for mile since the first
battle of Ypres. Familiar with British valor as the result of actual
contact in battle from Mons to the Marne and back to Ypres, and
particularly in the Loos offensive (which was the New Army's first
"eye-opener" to the German staff), the Germans reasoned that, with what
one German called "the courage of their stupidity, or the stupidity of
their courage," the British, driven by public demand to the assistance
of the French, would send their fresh infantry with inadequate artillery
support against German machine guns and curtains of fire, and pile up
their dead until their losses would reduce the whole army to inertia for
the rest of the year.
Of course, the German hypothesis--the one which cost von Falkenhayn his
place as Chief of Staff--was based on such a state of exhaustion by the
French that a British attack would be mandatory. The initial stage of
the German attack was up to expectations in ground gained, but not in
prisoners or material taken. The French fell back skilfully before the
German onslaught against positions lightly held by the defenders in
anticipation of the attack, and turned their curtains of fire upon the
enemy in possession of captured trenches. Then France gave to the
outside world another surprise. Her spirit, ever brilliant in the
offensive, became cold steel in a stubborn and thrifty defensive. She
was not "groggy," as the Germans supposed. For every yard of earth
gained they had to pay a ghastly price; and their own admiration of
French shell and valor is sufficient professional glory for either
Pétain, Nivelle, or Mangin, or the private in the ranks.
_Third._ The British could take over more trench line, thus releasing
French forces for Verdun, which was the plan adopted at the conference
of the French and British commands. One morning in place of a French
army in Artois a British army was in occupation. The round helmets of
the British took the place of the oblong helmets of the French along the
parapet; British soldiers were in billets in place of the French in the
villages at the rear and British guns moved into French gun-emplacements
with the orderly precision which army training with its discipline alone
secures; while the French Army was on board railway trains moving at
given intervals of headway over rails restricted to their use on their
way to Verdun where, under that simple French staff system which is the
product of inheritance and previous training and this war's experience,
they fell into place as a part of the wall of men and cannon.
Outside criticism, which drew from this arrangement the conclusion that
it left the British to the methodical occupation of quiet trenches while
their allies were sent to the sacrifice, had its effect for a time on
the outside public and even on the French, but did not disturb the
equanimity of the British staff in the course of its preparations or of
the French staff, which knew well enough that when the time came the
British Army would not be fastidious about paying the red cost of
victory. Four months later when British battalions were throwing
themselves against frontal positions with an abandon that their staff
had to restrain, the same sources of outside criticism, including
superficial gossip in Paris, were complaining that the British were too
brave in their waste of life. It has been fashionable with some people
to criticize the British, evidently under the impression that the
British New Army would be better than a continental army instantly its
battalions were landed in France.
Every army's methods, every staff's way of thinking, are characteristic
in the long run of the people who supply it with soldiers. The German
Army is what it is not through the application of any academic theory of
military perfection, but through the application of organization to
German character. Naturally phlegmatic, naturally disinclined to
initiative, the Germans before the era of modern Germany had far less of
the martial instinct than the French. German army makers, including the
master one of all, von Moltke, set out to use German docility and
obedience in the creation of a machine of singular industry and rigidity
and ruthless discipline. Similar methods would mean revolt in democratic
France and individualistic England where every man carries Magna Charta,
talisman of his own "rights," in his waistcoat pocket.
The French peasant, tilling his fields within range of the guns, the
market gardener bringing his products down the Somme in the morning to
Amiens, or the Parisian clerk, business man and workman--they are France
and the French Army. But the heart-strength and character-strength of
France, I think, is her stubborn, conservative, smiling peasant. It is
repeating a commonplace to say that he always has a few gold pieces in
his stocking. He yields one only on a critical occasion and then a
little grumblingly, with the thrift of the bargainer who means that it
shall be well spent.
The Anglo-Saxon, whose inheritance is particularly evident in Americans
in this respect, when he gives in a crisis turns extravagant whether of
money or life, as England has in this war. The sea is his and new lands
are his, as they are ours. Australians with their dollar and a half a
day, buying out the shops of a village when they were not in the
trenches, were astounding to the natives though not in the least to
themselves. They were acting like normal Anglo-Saxons bred in a rich
island continent. Anglo-Saxons have money to spend and spend it in the
confidence that they will make more.
General Joffre, grounded in the France of the people and the soil, was a
thrifty general. Indeed, from the lips of Frenchmen in high places the
Germans might have learned that the French Army was running short of
men. Joffre seemed never to have any more divisions to spare; yet never
came a crisis that he did not find another division in the toe of his
stocking, which he gave up as grumblingly as the peasant parts with his
gold piece.
A miser of divisions, Father Joffre. He had enough for Verdun as we
know--and more. While he was holding on the defensive there, he was able
to prepare for an offensive elsewhere. He spared the material and the
guns to coöperate with the British on the Somme and later he sent to
General Foch, commander of the northern group of French Armies, the
unsurpassed Iron Corps from Nancy and the famous Colonial Corps.
It was in March, 1916, when suspense about Verdun was at its height,
that Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the group of British
Armies, and Sir Henry Rawlinson, who was to be his right-hand man
through the offensive as commander of the Fourth Army, went over the
ground opposite the British front on the Somme and laid the plans for
their attack, and Sir Henry received instructions to begin the elaborate
preparations for what was to become the greatest battle of all time. It
included, as the first step, the building of many miles of railway and
highway for the transport of the enormous requisite quantities of guns
and materials.
The Somme winds through rich alluvial lands at this point and around a
number of verdant islands in its leisurely course. Southward, along the
old front line, the land is more level, where the river makes its bend
in front of Péronne. Northward, generically, it rises into a region of
rolling country, with an irregularly marked ridge line which the Germans
held.
No part of the British front had been so quiet in the summer of 1915 as
the region of Picardy. From the hill where later I watched the attack of
July 1st, on one day in August of the previous year I had such a broad
view that if a shell were to explode anywhere along the front of five
miles it would have been visible to me, and I saw not a single burst of
smoke from high explosive or shrapnel. Apparently the Germans never
expected to undertake any offensive here. All their energy was devoted
to defensive preparations, without even an occasional attack over a few
hundred yards to keep in their hand. Tranquillity, which amounted to the
simulation of a truce, was the result. At different points you might see
Germans walking about in the open and the observer could stand exposed
within easy range of the guns without being sniped at by artillery, as
he would have been in the Ypres salient.
When the British took over this section of line, so short were they of
guns that they had to depend partly on French artillery; and their
troops were raw New Army battalions or regulars stiffened by a small
percentage of veterans of Mons and Ypres. The want of guns and shells
required correspondingly more troops to the mile, which left them still
relying on flesh and blood rather than on machinery for defense. The
British Army was in that middle stage of a few highly trained troops and
the first arrival of the immense forces to come; while the Germans
occupied on the Eastern front were not of a mind to force the issue.
There is a story of how one day a German battery, to vary the monotony,
began shelling a British trench somewhat heavily. The British, in reply,
put up a sign, "If you don't stop we will fire our only rifle grenade at
you!" to which the Germans replied in the same vein, "Sorry! We will
stop"--as they did.
The subsoil of the hills is chalk, which yields to the pick rather
easily and makes firm walls for trenches. Having chosen their position,
which they were able to do in the operations after the Marne as the two
armies, swaying back and forth in the battle for positions northward,
came to rest, the Germans had set out, as the result of experience, to
build impregnable works in the days when forts had become less important
and the trench had become supreme. As holding the line required little
fighting, the industrious Germans under the stiff bonds of discipline
had plenty of time for sinking deep dugouts and connecting galleries
under their first line and for elaborating their communication trenches
and second line, until what had once been peaceful farming land now
consisted of irregular welts of white chalk crossing fields without
hedges or fences, whose sweep had been broken only by an occasional
group of farm buildings of a large proprietor, a plot of woods, or the
village communities where the farmers lived and went to and from their
farms which were demarked to the eye only by the crop lines.
One can never make the mistake of too much simplification in the
complicated detail of modern tactics where the difficulty is always to
see the forest for the trees. Strategy has not changed since prehistoric
days. It must always remain the same: feint and surprise. The first
primitive man who looked at the breast of his opponent and struck
suddenly at his face was a strategist; so, too, the anthropoid at the
Zoo who leads another to make a leap for a trapeze and draws it out from
under him; so, too, the thug who waits to catch his victim coming
unawares out of an alley. Anybody facing more than one opponent will try
to protect his back by a wall, which is also strategy--strategy being
the veritable instinct of self-preservation which aims at an advantage
in the disposition of forces.
Place two lines of fifty men facing each other in the open without
officers, and some fellow with initiative on the right or the left end
will instinctively give the word and lead a rush for cover somewhere on
the flank which will permit an enfilade of the enemy's ranks.
Practically all of the great battles of the world have been won by
turning an enemy's flank, which compelled him to retreat if it did not
result in rout or capture.
The swift march of a division or a brigade from reserve to the flank at
the critical moment has often turned the fortune of a day. All
manoeuvering has this object in view. Superior numbers facilitate the
operation, and victory has most often resolved itself into superior
numbers pressing a flank and nothing more; though subsequently his
admiring countrymen acclaimed the victor as the inventor of a strategic
plan which was old before Alexander took the field, when the victor's
genius consisted in the use of opportunities that enabled him to strike
at the critical point with more men than his adversary. In flank of the
Southern Confederacy Sherman swung through the South; in flank the
Confederates aimed to bend back the Federal line at Kulp's Hill and
Little Round Top. By the flank Grant pressed Lee back to Appomattox.
Yalu, Liao Yang and Mukden were won in the Russo-Japanese war by
flanking movements which forced Kuropatkin to retire, though never
disastrously.
Pickett's charge at Gettysburg remains to the American the most futile
and glorious illustration of a charge against a frontal position, with
its endeavor to break the center. The center may waver, but it is the
flanks that go; though, of course, in all consistent operations of big
armies a necessary incident of any effort to press back the wings is
sufficient pressure on the front, simultaneously delivered, to hold all
the troops there in position and keep the enemy command in apprehension
of the disaster that must follow if the center were to break badly at
the same time that his flanks were being doubled back. The foregoing is
only the repetition of principles which cannot be changed by the length
of line and masses of troops and incredible volumes of artillery fire;
which makes the European war the more confusing to the average reader as
he receives his information in technical terms.
The same object that leads one line of men to try to flank another sent
the German Army through Belgium in order to strike the French Army in
flank. It succeeded in this purpose, but not in turning the French
flank; though by this operation, in violation of the territory of a
neutral nation, it made enemy territory the scene of future action. One
may discuss until he is blue in the face what would have happened if the
Germans had thrown their legions directly against the old French
frontier. Personally, in keeping with the idea that I expressed in "The
Last Shot," I think that they would never have gone through the Trouée
de Miracourt or past Verdun.
With a solid line of trenches from Switzerland to the North Sea, any
offensive must "break the center," as it were, in order to have room for
a flanking operation. It must go against frontal positions,
incorporating in its strategy every defensive lesson learned and the
defensive tactics and weapons developed in eighteen months of trench
warfare. If, as was generally supposed, the precision of modern arms,
with rifles and machine guns sending their bullets three thousand yards
and curtains of fire delivered from hidden guns anywhere from two to
fifteen miles away, was all in favor of the defensive, then how, when in
the days of muzzle-loading rifles and smooth-bore guns frontal attacks
had failed, could one possibly succeed in 1916?
Again and again in our mess and in all of the messes at the front, and
wherever men gathered the world over, the question, Can the line be
broken? has been discussed. As discussed it is an academic question. The
practical answer depends upon the strength of the attacking force
compared to that of the defending force. If the Germans could keep only
five hundred thousand men on the Western front they would have to
withdraw from a part of the line, concentrate on chosen positions and
depend on tactics to defend their exposed flanks in pitched battle.
Three million men, with ten thousand guns, could not break the line
against an equally skilful army of three millions with ten thousand
guns; but five millions with fifteen thousand guns might break the line
held by an equally skilful army of a million with five thousand guns.
Thus, you are brought to a question of numbers, of skill and of
material. If the object be attrition, then the offensive, if it can
carry on its attacks with less loss of men than the defensive, must win.
With the losses about equal, the offensive must also eventually win if
it has sufficient reserves.
There could be no restraining the public, with the wish father to the
thought, from believing that the attack of July 1st on the Somme was an
effort at immediate decision, though the responsible staff officer was
very careful to state that there was no expectation of breaking the line
and that the object was to gain a victory in _morale_, train the army in
actual conditions for future offensives, and, when the ledger was
balanced, to prove that, with superior gunfire, the offensive could be
conducted with less loss than the defensive under modern conditions.
This, I think, may best be stated now. The results we shall consider
later.
One thing was certain, with the accruing strength of the British and the
French Armies, they could not rest idle. They must attack. They must
take the initiative away from the Germans. The greater the masses of
Germans which were held on the Western front under the Allied pounding,
the better the situation for the Russians and the Italians; and,
accordingly, the plan for the summer of 1916 for the first time
permitted all the Allies, thanks to increased though not adequate
munitions--there never can be that--to conduct something like a common
offensive. That of the Russians, starting earlier than the others, was
the first to pause, which meant that the Anglo-French and the Italian
offensives were in full blast, while the Russians, for the time being,
had settled into new positions.
Preparation for this attack on the Somme, an operation without parallel
in character and magnitude unless it be the German offensive at Verdun
which had failed, could not be too complete. There must be a continuous
flow of munitions which would allow the continuation of the battle with
blow upon blow once it had begun. Adequate realization of his task would
not hasten a general to undertake it until he was fully ready, and
military preference, if other considerations had permitted, would have
postponed the offensive till the spring of 1917.
III
A CANADIAN INNOVATION
Gathering of the clans from Australia, New Zealand and
Canada--England sends Sir Douglas Haig men but not an army--Methods
of converting men into an army--The trench raid a Canadian
invention--Development of trench raiding--The correspondents'
quarters--Getting ready for the "big push"--A well-kept secret.
"Some tough!" remarked a Canadian when he saw the Australians for the
first time marching along a French road. They and the New Zealanders
were conspicuous in France, owing to their felt hats with the brim
looped up on the side, their stalwart physique and their smooth-shaven,
clean-cut faces. Those who had been in Gallipoli formed the stiffening
of veteran experience and comradeship for those fresh from home or from
camps in Egypt.
Canadian battalions, which had been training in Canada and then in
England, increased the Canadian numbers until they had an army equal in
size to that of Meade or Lee at Gettysburg. English, Scotch, Welsh,
Irish, South Africans and Newfoundlanders foregathering in Picardy,
Artois and Flanders left one wondering about English as "she is spoke."
On the British front I have heard every variety, including that of
different parts of the United States. One day I received a letter from a
fellow countryman which read like this:
"I'm out here in the R.F.A. with 'krumps' bursting on my cocoanut and am
going to see it through. If you've got any American newspapers or
magazines lying loose please send them to me, as I am far from
California."