power over men. He inspires devotion, and carries the secret of command
in a splendid face and figure. The empty right sleeve is a touching
testimony to his valour, and for months he walked limping with a stick,
for his right thigh and left leg had been injured also at the
Dardanelles--the place of his dismemberment. It was after a day's
bombardment and the Commander-in-Chief was watching the embarkation of
wounded on a hospital ship, for there was no place to put them on that
rocky shore, searched minutely by the enemy shells. One breaking from a
Turkish naval gun threw the General over a wall and inflicted the
injuries I have described. On the way home by ship to Marseilles,
gangrene supervened in the arm, demanding its amputation.
I saw him just after his recovery when, with a glad note in his voice,
he announced his approaching return to the Front. In conversation with
him one realised why he was called the "lion of the Argonne." There is
something king-like in his looks--the brown beard, and the manly,
well-formed features--and you are certain that the khaki tunic covers a
lion's heart. His whole career has been of the noble sort: whether
tracking Samory, the negro chieftain, into the recesses of his virgin
forest, where he captured him after he had waged fitful war with France
for seventeen years; or whether he was leading a sortie from Fez and
clearing a savage horde from its walls. For this latter feat he gained
the three stars at a time of life when most French officers have not
reached a colonelcy. When the Great War broke out Gouraud hastened from
Morocco to the east of France, where he led Colonial troops in
unexampled feats of bravery. He was shot in the shoulder, but bullets
cannot stop such a man; he seems to bear a charmed life as he passes
heedlessly amidst a storm of flying, shrieking metal. His heroic soul
is unmoved by the Inferno of the battle. Even the worst inventions of
the devil are powerless against this perfect knight, dressed in the
invincible and shining armour of his faith and patriotism.
It was good to hear him speak of his career as simply as if he were
relating the banal life of some village attorney. Perhaps an ancestor
who served in Napoleon's artillery, or a great-uncle who helped the Duc
d'Aumale to conquer Algeria, were in measure responsible for his
military tastes. Certainly he did not get them from his father
following the pacific profession of a doctor in a Paris hospital. At
sixteen or seventeen years of age the Tonking campaign attracted him
with its promise of adventure, but his youthful imagination was mainly
fired by reading the travels and explorations of Livingstone, of
Cameron, Stanley, Brazza and Gallieni. And the Colonies, whatever their
bad old reputation in France for forming soldiers who were theatrical
and had no notion of modern warfare, since they fought against savages,
has proved in this war the nursery of manly virtues. Therein a man
learns courage and endurance, self-reliance and a faculty for
improvising everything. It has produced men of the type of Marchand,
one of the most romantic figures that ever donned the uniform of the
Republic. His hold over his men is quite extraordinary; they are ready
to follow him into the jaws of death. His exploits in the Soudan recall
a time when there was no smile on the face of John Bull as he looked
across to France. A poet in his ideality and lyric quality, he has the
sublime courage of the Early Christian, the personal sway of the born
leader, the heart and tenderness of a woman.
No French general has come into closer contact with the English than
Foch, for his army neighboured theirs for long months together, and none
has a higher opinion of their qualities or was more sensible of the vast
improvement effected in their fighting methods during the progress of
the war. Foch is one of the most learned of the chiefs of the army; he
directed the War School during a period of his career, and his lectures
on the art of leading troops in battle are models of their kind. When
war broke out, he was commanding at Nancy the 20th Army Corps, which
includes the famous Iron Division. As disciplinarian he offers no
excuses for himself or for others for any failure in duty; and there is
no soldier, if it is not Petain, who has adapted his science more
successfully to the problems of a twentieth-century war. Looking
forty-five, though twenty years older, he is of those who prepared
assiduously for the great day of the battle. Alas! his own family were
early victims of it, for at Charleroi fell his son and his son-in-law.
Amongst his officers at Nancy was General Balfourier in charge of a
brigade. Tall and slim and dark until active service had whitened his
hair, Balfourier has the perfect manners of a man of the world. You
would take him for a courtier if you did not know that he was a soldier
and a particularly brave one. The Tsar's congratulations reached him in
the midst of the gigantic battle of Verdun, where he had handled the
20th Corps with such skill and daring as to attract universal attention.
There was always a perfect union between his infantry and artillery. He
and his wife kept open house at Nancy to the officers under his command,
and their handsome fortune enabled them to entertain lavishly both here
and at their residence at Chantilly. The General's father was as far
removed from Gouraud's from the trade of arms, for he followed the
unlikely profession of a notary; but both obeyed the call to a soldier's
life and achieved an equal distinction.
These, then, are the men who have led France to victory. To-morrow
others will spring from her fruitful soil and represent her courage, her
hope, and her resourcefulness. The Great War has demonstrated the
adaptability of the race. It is perennial in its freshness and
inspiration.
*CHAPTER XV*
*CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIGHTING*
When the German horde surged upon Verdun, and was hurled back; when,
again and again, they swept to the attack and left their dead piled high
before the might and heroism of France--then was it most clearly
demonstrated that the days of old-fashioned forts were no more. The
fortress of stone crumbles before the mighty guns of to-day, and the
hideous machines of war, belching forth tons of metal, grind steel and
concrete into dust. Before Verdun it was proved that the fortress of
France was the soul of her soldiers: a fortress that the mightiest guns
could not shake nor all the horrors of modern warfare humble. To the
armed barbarity of science the French soldier opposed his chest, and
barbarism was swept back. That is the first lesson of the war of
millions. In spite of all the fearful war machines--the huge guns, the
gas, the liquid fire, engines of destruction before which man is as puny
as a fly--in spite, too, of the impersonal strategy that moves regiments
as pieces in a game of chess and seems to take no stock of the little
soul of a man, yet, after all, it is the man that counts. Both
combatants can pour out money, both can heap up _materiel_, but the side
that can expend the richest store of heroism is the side that will win.
This personal element in the battle of to-day was the only factor
overlooked by the war expert. Bloch, the great Russian writer on
military science, foresaw only one end to fighting, and that was
immobilisation, for each side would sit down in trenches and wait for
the other; but the strange thing was that this new game of sap and mine,
by a curious detour, conducted to the old hand-to-hand encounters, in
which the right arm played the determining part and even the bowie-knife
was resuscitated as a deadly weapon, so that we seemed to live again in
the days of Fenimore Cooper and the Indian fights; and though the
Germans sent at our trenches liquid fire, asphyxiating gases, flying
torpedoes and all manner of explosives, all this science was accompanied
by ambuscades, by acts of treachery and _ruses de guerre_ not unworthy
of the Redskin in the most romantic pages of the novelist. Thus modern
civilisation and savagery met and shook hands as men of the same family,
unconscious of any difference in their mental equipment, unembarrassed
certainly by any divergence in _Kultur_. And perhaps because of this
personal factor in the fighting, which it was thought would be blotted
out and suppressed in modern warfare, there was developed an individual
courage so remarkable and romantic as to be unbelievable in its
splendour, its intensity, and its quality of rich lavishness. Never
since the world began has there been such an _etalage_ of personal
valour, such outpouring of splendid deeds of indomitable and deathless
daring. Seemingly in the sombre monotony of modern warfare there could
arise no glorious exploit, and yet the trenches were frequently the
unlikely frame of the most palpitating and stupendous defiance of man's
nervous system. For the weak envelope triumphed by the grace of the
soul; and man, though his teeth chattered by the mere brutal concussion
of monstrous weapons, yet showed in his moral resistance a wealth and
splendour of achievement unknown to the old and picturesque days. Thus,
though the nations warred in such incredible masses that there seemed no
room for personal bravery, yet never before had it been so richly poured
out, so that even the spies were brave and went to their doom with hands
untied and eyes unbandaged in utter calmness. Never in the history of
warfare has there been a more splendid show of every human quality,
whether fighting this desperate affair of the trenches or out in the
open, under the pitiless rain of unheard-of bombardments, as at Verdun,
where, in one single day, were fired 3,000,000 shells. And if there had
never been a greater squandering of metal than in this Titanic conflict
of the arsenals, there had never been a greater expenditure of those
splendid treasures of sacrifice, or such a vast extravagance of youth
and manhood, gold and precious stones from the treasury of all the manly
virtues.
But if Bloch had discounted the personal element of modern warfare, his
theories otherwise were justified by events. The Germans knew their
Bloch and heartily believed his doctrine, but in the opening stages of
the battle they made a desperate effort to escape from his conclusions.
They began in what Mr. Wells in a famous chapter called the "1900
spirit," that is to say, they were convinced that neither England nor
France was alive to the latest trench warfare. Their first methods, the
precipitate attack, massed movements and enveloping tactics, were
dictated by the thought that their adversaries were old-fashioned
fighters who had not learned this doctrine of the squatting war, who had
not, in fact, read their Bloch or drawn from him the lessons the Germans
had. And so they fought in the open in these first phases of the
campaign, trusting by their force and speed, superior leadership and
brutal shock tactics to bear down the Allies before they were prepared
to meet them. And, of course, they were greatly aided in this
traditional method of fighting by the fact that they had been allowed to
build unchallenged strategic railways to their frontiers, which enabled
them to pour a million men into the country, instead of the 300,000 that
the French General Staff expected by the northern route.
The ready adaptation of the Allies to the new exigencies of war forced
the Germans to rush to earth. There came a change so sudden that it
seemed as if one had jumped literally from one century to another. "We
have driven them underground," said M. Paul Deschanel, the eloquent
President of the Chamber. But after they sank into the earth the
Germans still made desperate efforts to escape Bloch's conclusion: that
immobility which he predicted as being the inevitable result of the
conflict of armed nations. They endeavoured by their inventive genius
to break that immobility. By asphyxiating gas, by liquid fire, by
aerial warfare (especially against England), did they seek, as Mr. Wells
points out, to create, such diversion as would avoid so barren a
conclusion to armed effort.
With the second phase of the battle the pulsing, stirring features of
the old warfare largely disappeared. There was no longer the crowded
rustle of the ranks, except when men crept in the semi-darkness from
their trenches and attacked in the open against barbed wire and
murderous missiles. The long, sinuous line of red, with its sheen and
shimmer of weapons glancing back the sun, gay plumes to give a nodding
note of youth, almost of feminine finery, had passed to the limbo of
military museums and the pages of the historians of past battles. None
of these things; instead, men in musty garments, covered with dust in
summer or the mud of winter rains, and, in place of the cavalry charge
in the open, the terrible twilight war began. Those who waged it shirked
the daylight, dwelt in pits and crouched in dark ramparts as if the
sight of God's good sun shamed them. Gone was the brave display riotous
in colour and glory, glittering from ten thousand points. In its place
was a lone and dismal landscape, a drab expanse of trenches interminably
long; of furrows deeply drawn through the earth hiding living grain in
their depths. Singular country, like some vast cemetery, stretching
indefinitely towards a dull horizon dead in its outer aspects, and yet
hiding in its bowels the quick and the dead, the living happily
outnumbering those who live no more. Of course, the great novelty of
the war was its vast length of front. In France it stretched from the
North Sea to the rocky ramparts of Switzerland, 700 kilometres across
the fair land of France; and if one counted all the ramifications and
convolutions, then 10,000 kilometres represented the sum of this amazing
and ceaseless industry which turned soldiers into navvies; moreover,
this trench warfare was universal where fighting occurred, and was not
special merely to Belgium and France, for it existed in Russia, in
Mesopotamia, and the Balkans. A French Army Corps numbers 35,000 men,
and, taking the general character of the ground, the parts that can be
naturally defended with those that require barricades of barbed wire and
other obstacles to reinforce their strength, this Army Corps can hold a
line of ten kilometres. Thus 2,000,000 men is about the normal garrison
of a line of 500 kilometres. But it must not be supposed that the lines
are uniform; they vary considerably. For instance, where the ground is
steep and rocky, the defence is rendered easier and the guards of the
first trench may be less numerous than in cases where the conditions are
more favourable to attack. But such matters are settled by the local
commandant, who takes into consideration all the conditions and makes
his dispositions accordingly. There are parts of the line where it is
not necessary to place men because the parts are enfiladed by cannon,
and other places where every mechanical means has been resorted to for
strengthening the trenches. The telephone is largely used, and is
linked with advanced posts, called _postes d'ecoute_, where the observer
can note the least activity in the enemy's trenches. Thus the men
guarding the first-line trenches can be sensibly reduced, leaving a
greater proportion to remain in the second-line trenches and in rest
chambers dug out of the earth at the ends of the lines. Of course, the
trenches vary considerably, and the commander takes note of the
character of the soil. He makes use of a hill-side, even of the ditches
with embankments on the side of the road, of every natural conformation
of the soil, and the number of men necessary to defend the line varies
according to these circumstances.
It is true, certainly, that trench warfare has inflicted a great loss of
the picturesque, of glittering movements, of kaleidoscopic effects which
turned and twisted into wonderful pictures; the picture to-day is
replaced by a melancholy waste of earth scored and humped into mounds.
Within was life, and no end to labour, for there were trenches, always
more trenches to be dug as the line swayed or curved in new forms,
yielding to pressure or being broken by it. And in the trenches
themselves there was a perpetual search for improvement, and the longer
the troops stayed there, the more highly organised became their abodes.
If there was not an abundance of hot water there was generally enough of
cold, and gas on every floor; alas! too much of it. There were wooden
floors and wooden walls and pictures, and even sculpture adorned them.
In these subterranean passages dwelt our men in a kind of heroic
enjoyment Of a battle without issue, of a sort of deadly ding-dong, only
varied by the blackening of the sky with the monstrous smoke of
projectiles that count a man a mere atom in their whirlwind
path--fearful engines that lay waste the country, that reduce villages
to a hopeless jumble of stones and bent iron and splintered wood, with
derisive-looking chimneys floating in a troubled sea, like derelicts in
the track of a tornado.
It was clear that in this squatting war all traditions had crumbled
hopelessly and wilted away. The monstrous engines belched fire and
destruction. From the caverns themselves, deeply cut in the once fertile
fields, issued a storm of shot and shell from machine-guns, from mortars
of an old-fashioned type, from cannon of the newest type--every
imaginable engine of destruction, down to the old hand-grenade, again in
usage from a distant past--a past so ancient that Scott reminds us in
_Rob Roy_ that "in those days this description of soldiers" (_i.e._ the
Grenadiers) "actually carried that destructive species of firework from
which they derive their name." Thus every device known to man's
inventive and destructive brain was directed into a new and diabolical
channel, and from time to time the vast engines employed emitted a
rending noise as if the earth were spitting flame and its rocky ribs had
shattered into quivering fragments--a volcano in its most fearful mood,
sending forth a mad jumble of rocks and a living stream of lava
devastating and devouring.
A gaunt and desolate country haunted by the melancholy crows, resounding
with clacking detonations of fusillades and a hoarse bass of heavy
cannon, is the place of invisible war. One rubs shoulders with it
without being aware of it. One comes suddenly upon it in all innocence.
A journalistic friend, at the beginning of the war, dashed into its area
all unknowing that he had come on top of it. To his unpractised eye the
lines were no more clearly marked than the Equator or the North Pole.
And, of course, every effort is made to conceal the battle-field.
Beet-root grows riotously on battlements, guns hide behind trees and are
covered with branches, so that the airman, peering from his height, sees
nothing but the flicker of leaves. The line hides itself as soon as it
fights, and without loss of time prepares against a possible retreat.
That is the method of it. Should it be driven back, there are strong
positions in the rear for the rallying, for the defence _a outrance_,
and for the counter-attack. Fronts have two or three lines of shelter
trenches, deep enough to cover a man and generally a yard in width.
These trenches are proportioned to the effectives employed. They
contain redoubts and blockhouses where guns are placed; they are linked
by zigzag paths, and, as a last resort, with a trench of cement, a
veritable fortress where are cannon as well as machine-guns. These
covered over and fortified trenches nearly always contain rest chambers
and magazines for rifles and the different sorts of ammunition required.
The lesson of this trench warfare, therefore, is that if a combatant
retires before it is too late he has every chance to survive to fight
another day; and he has all the more chance of a new offensive, or at
least of maintaining a strong defensive, if he retires in the direction
of his resources, or what is called his line of operation, whence he
receives his munitions, food and material of war. He retires from the
battle, therefore, at the psychological moment when he sees he is likely
to be overwhelmed, and reconstitutes himself in the rear. The opening
phases of 1914 gave us two parallel retreats: from the Belgian frontier
to the Seine by the Allies, and from the Marne to the Aisne by the
Germans. The campaign in Poland also showed a similar disposition, and
the Russians reformed their line and beat the Germans after they
retreated before them. Therefore a mere retreat may be, literally,
little more than a strategic movement in the rear. It does not mean,
certainly, that all is lost or that the position of the retreating force
is one of utter hopelessness.
After the opening phases of the war, the subterranean character of the
fighting was maintained, until such big offensives as Verdun re-evoked
the old-time battle, when the Kaiser watched the operations from an
eminence, and on a front of twenty miles scenes of the old onslaught
were re-enacted. But in this case the initiative was left to the
Germans. To them also the greater part of the losses, for whilst they
manoeuvred in the open and hurled masses of their grey-green warriors
upon the French trenches, the defenders enfiladed the masses and mowed
them down with the gigantic scythes that their science had forged since
the war began.
A curious feature of the fighting in the Great War was the element of
fatigue. We have met with it everywhere. It follows closely the course
of the war; it is seen in every phase. At Charleroi and Mons and those
terrific fights that marked the beginning of the war, the retreating
armies of England and France escaped because of the exhaustion of the
Germans. If cavalry had harried their rearguards and mobile cannon had
cannonaded their flanks the retreat might have been turned into a rout.
For the French, largely composed of reservists, were within an ace of
demoralisation. And again the Allies, as conquerors, showed extreme
fatigue in the battle of the Marne, when the victory might have been
more decisive had it been followed up by unwearied troops, or, again, by
masses of cavalry.
The cavalry, indeed, of both combatants proved singularly ineffectual,
and, as I have just pointed out, failed as a means of attack or to
pursue retreating armies; and an interesting feature was the dismounting
of the cavalry and its employment as infantry in the trenches.
Cavalrymen were divorced from their horses and given infantry guns; and
their equipment and appearance approached very nearly that of the
foot-soldier. The Cuirassiers, for instance, took off their picturesque
manes and removed the top pieces of their helmets, and thus very nearly
imitated the _bourguinet_, or low, mediaeval-looking helmet of the
French infantry. Even reconnaissance, the old duty of the cavalry, has
been undertaken by the aeroplane; and the horse-soldier, indeed, has
little place in modern warfare. Some experts, however, hold that a new
role has emerged from the war which the cavalry is qualified to fill.
It consists in their employment in large forces flanked by mobile cannon
and cyclists, whereby their offensive radius is greatly extended.
In these few pages I have endeavoured to sketch the varied phases of a
war that opened with the glittering pageant of the time of Napoleon and
merged into the dreary and sombre monotony of trench warfare. The
"heroic" days of battle were over, but a new heroism arose. Men fought
no longer to triumph as men among men; they were content to go forward,
nameless and unrecognised: "to march heroically" (in the words of the
French writer), to become, not men among men, but--
"des morts parmi les morts."
*CHAPTER XVI*
*MILITARY COMMAND AND THE REVOLUTION*