THE WAR OF POSITIONS
The Germans have a mania for phraseology. Their language lends itself
to it, capable, as it is, of accumulative word-building and every
kind of permutation. “German is a code, not a language,” has been
very justly said. Theirs is the pigeon-hole brain in which everything
is ticketed with its precise label, and classified under its own
particular head. I have been often amused to find them carrying this
habit of theirs into military matters. Thus, a German in a letter home,
describing an attack on his trench, says that the warning passed along
was: “_Höchste Alarmbereitschaft_” (_highest alarm-readiness_).
In the same way they describe trench warfare as the “_Stellungskrieg_,”
the _war of positions_. It was from a German prisoner that I first
heard this expression, a big, fair Westphalian captured at Neuve
Chapelle, with whom I had some conversation in the train that was
taking him and some 500 of his comrades down to Havre to embark for
England. I did not at first grasp what he meant by his continual
references to the “_Stellungskrieg_,” and asked him what the phrase
signified. “‘_Stellungskrieg_,’” he said, “you know, what followed the
‘_Bewegungskrieg_’” (_the war of movements_).
The German mind again! “The war of movements!” What a priceless phrase
to flash in the eyes of a blindly credulous people! The phrase has the
inestimable advantage of being entirely vague. It does not say _which
way the movements went_. I tested my prisoner on this point. He was
quite positive that the Bewegungskrieg stopped and the _Stellungskrieg_
set in by virtue of the carefully laid plans and ripe decision of the
Great General Staff, and not of military necessity imposed on the
Fatherland by the Allies. “Everybody knows,” a German-Swiss paper
“kept” by the German Government cried the other day, “everybody knows
that there never was a battle of the Marne!” That is the conviction
of all German soldiers who did not take part in that disastrous and
unforgettable retreat.
But this German phrase “_Stellungskrieg_” is a very accurate
description of the great stalemate on the western front which we, more
vaguely, term “trench warfare.” It is, indeed, a constant manœuvring
for positions, a kind of great game of chess in which the Germans,
generally speaking, are seeking to gain the advantage for the purposes
of their defensive, whilst the Allies’ aim is to obtain the best
positions for an offensive when the moment for this is ripe. It is
a siege in which we are the besiegers, the Germans the besieged. I
adhere to this view despite the great German thrusts against the
Ypres salient. Both these were comparable to sorties _en masse_ from
a fortress, and in both instances, although the besieged were able to
push the besiegers a little farther away from them, they failed to
achieve their object, which was to break the lines of investment, and,
if possible, cut off and surround part of the besieging forces.
The situation on the Western front, at least as far as the British line
is concerned, for only of that am I competent to speak, represents
siege warfare in its highest expression. The opponents face one another
in endless lines of trenches winding in and out of the mostly flat
country of Flanders, following the lie of the ground or the positions
captured or lost in one or other of the great battles which from time
to time break the monotony. By monotony I mean only the sameness of
life and not inaction. For work never ceases on either side. It is not
sufficient to capture, consolidate, and hold a position. The general
situation must be reviewed in relation to the ground gained. Its
possible weaknesses and the opportunities it offers for strengthening
the adjacent positions must be studied. Trenches must be joined up with
those captured, redoubts constructed to counteract a danger threatening
from some point, and communication trenches dug to afford safe and
sheltered ingress to and egress from the new position.
The ground is under ceaseless survey. A move by the enemy calls for
a counter-move on our part. A new trench dug by him may be found
to enfilade our trenches from a certain angle, and while by the
construction of new traverses or the heightening of parapet and
parados, the trench may be rendered immune from sniping, a fresh trench
will be dug at a new angle, or a machine-gun brought up to make life
sour for the occupants of the new German position, and force them in
their turn to counter-measures.
Anyone who saw the trenches at Mons or even, much later, the trenches
on the Aisne, would scarcely recognize them in the deep, elaborate
earthworks of Flanders with the construction of which our army is
now so familiar. At Mons our men sought shelter in shallow ditches
dug in the ground, the entrenchments of field-days in the Chiltern
Hills. In Flanders the trenches are dug deep into the soil, and built
up with sandbags high above the ground-level, plentifully supplied
with traverses to localize the effect of bursting shells. Very solid
affairs, too, these traverses are, great masses of clay firmly bound
together with wire-netting and topped with sandbags--stout sacks filled
with earth--that can be relied upon to stop a bullet.
Trenches must not be too wide, or they would afford too broad a target
to bullets and shells, yet they must be spacious enough to allow
comparative freedom of movement to their inmates to pass swiftly from
place to place in the event of a sudden attack. They must be roomy
enough for the men holding them to live therein with a fair measure of
comfort, with places for dug-outs where the men off duty may sleep,
and where the officers, who are never off duty, properly speaking, in
the trenches, may have their meals and snatch a few hours of slumber
between times. There must be safe storage-places for such dangerous
wares as ammunition, bombs, fuses, and flares, and specially prepared
emplacements for the machine-guns. Sanitation, on which the lives of
thousands depend, must also have its special arrangements.
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood phot._
A CORNER OF A TRENCH WITH A TRAVERSE IN THE EXTREME LEFT--NOTE
OFFICER’S GAS HELMET.]
The flooring of the trench must be boarded--sometimes in marshy places
with two or three layers of planks--against the wet, with “grids”
laid across. In the winter not even pumps sufficed to keep the trenches
dry. Sandbags, disembowelled by the continual patter of bullets, must
be constantly renewed. A stray shell, plumping through the timber and
earth roofing of a dug-out, may do damage that will take three days (or
rather nights, if the fatigue-party is in view of the enemy by day)
to repair. Then the access to the trenches is a question requiring
constant attention and unremitting labour.
Men in the firing-line roundly declare they would rather be in the
front trench than in the area behind the lines. Both sides attempt to
embarrass the bringing-up of reliefs and supplies by shelling the roads
and communication trenches leading up to the firing-line. Of course,
nothing is ever allowed to interfere with the sending-up of reliefs
or food, but the shells that crash daily, mostly towards evening,
behind the lines claim their toll of life. It is to guard against this
promiscuous shelling, against snipers posted in coigns of vantage in
the enemy lines, and against spent bullets that come whinneying over
from the front (gallant John Gough, most beloved of Generals, was
struck and mortally wounded by a stray bullet at a long distance from
the firing-line, in a spot that was believed to be entirely safe), that
communication trenches are necessary.
The amount of work that some of these communication trenches represent
is simply incredible. Going up to some trenches in the Ypres salient, I
remember, I came across a short patch of road, 200 yards of it at the
outside, which was well in view of the enemy and over which shrapnel
burst from time to time, whilst bullets skimmed over it the live-long
day. To avoid this dangerous area a communication trench had been dug
in the fields bordering the road, and threaded its way in and out of
the corn and the poppies for fully a mile before it again rejoined the
road, which by this had wound out of view of the Germans. In many parts
of the line there is a walk of a mile and a half through communication
trenches up to the firing-line.
All these trenches have to be as deep as a man’s waist, and many as
a man’s height. Most of them must have a timber flooring to make
them passable in wet weather, and sometimes little bridges have to
be constructed to cross the innumerable irrigation ducts and ditches
which seam the fertile fields in the region of our army. There must
be hundreds of miles of planks in our trenches in Flanders. If you
consider that each plank has to be cut and fashioned to fit in its
place, after the trench itself has been dug deep enough to be lined,
you can form some kind of estimate of the enormous amount of labour
which has gone to the welding of our line. As I have trudged down
communication trenches behind the regimental guide taking me up to
the firing-line, I have often had a sort of mental vision of a vast
mountain of energy, as it were, a great sea of sweat and blood,
representing the toil and lives expended in the digging of these deep,
secure cuttings which are the straight paths leading to the glory of
the fighting-line.
I do not think it would be going too far to say that these modern
trenches are impregnable to direct assault. Indeed, the experience of
the war of positions has been to show that neither side can succeed
on the offensive unless the trenches have been destroyed, and not
always then. Well protected in their deep earthworks, the men with the
magazine-rifle and the machine-gun can beat off even such tremendous
attacks _en masse_ as the Japanese essayed with success, though at
awful cost, in the siege of Port Arthur. As long as the trenches endure
they are impregnable. Their impregnability only vanishes when they
cease to exist, when they have been destroyed by shell-fire.
Three epochs of war meet in the war of positions. We have returned to
methods and weapons of war which in our proud ignorance we thought
to have discarded from our military experience for ever. The short
broad knife of the primitive savage, the bomb and sap of the soldiers
of Wellington, the machine-gun and heavy howitzer of the scientific
inventor of the twentieth century, are the weapons of this war, a
combination of brute force and man-slaying machinery which is surely
a crowning dishonour to our civilization. In this siege warfare the
magazine-rifle, which we believed to be the last word in military
progress, has fallen from its place. High explosive, either in giant
shells hurled from enormously powerful guns or concealed in mines
in the bowels of the earth, to shatter the enemy in his skilfully
contrived positions, the bomb and knife for the infantry who sweep
forward to complete his discomfiture cowering in his battered trench,
the automatic rifle and machine-gun to mow down survivors still
holding out in their redoubts, with machine-guns playing on the
captured position--these are _die Forderung des Tages_, the demand of
the moment, in a phrase of Prince Bülow’s which was once a political
catchword in Germany.
This siege warfare is a war of force against force, the force of
machinery dealing ponderous, mighty blows against a wall of steel,
smashing, smashing, smashing, always in the same place, until the line
is bent, then broken, then the force of man coming into play in a wild
onrush of storming infantry, with their primitive passions aflame,
surging forward amid clouds of green and yellow and red smoke, bombing
and slashing their way through the breach their machines have made.
Not the strategist but the engineer is trumps in this warfare, this
Armageddon in which, for all our vaunted civilization, we have returned
to the darkness of the Dawn of Time.
What I have written of the trenches above will suffice to show,
I think, that only the methods of siege warfare--that is, heavy
guns and mines--can be used against them with any hope of success.
High-explosive shells in unlimited quantities are necessary to keep
the hammer pounding away at one given spot. To break a path for our
infantry through the weakly held German trenches round Neuve Chapelle
we had many scores of guns pouring in a concentrated fire on a front
of 1,400 yards for a period of thirty-five minutes. In the operations
round Arras the French are said to have fired nearly 800,000 shells in
one day. Even this colossal figure was surpassed by the expenditure
of high-explosive shells by the German and Austrian armies in their
successful thrust against Przemysl. Our bombardment at Neuve
Chapelle was, in the main, effective, though barbed-wire entanglements
in front of part of the German trenches were not cut, and heavy
casualties were thus caused to the infantry when they advanced. For
the most part, however, we found the German trenches obliterated, the
little village a smoking heap of ruins, and those Germans who survived
dazed and frightened amid piles of torn corpses. If this enormous
concentration of guns was required to blast a path of 1,400 yards with
a thirty-five minute bombardment, what a gigantic concentration of
artillery, what a colossal expenditure of ammunition, will be required
to drive a wedge several miles deep through positions which the Germans
have spent three seasons in strengthening and consolidating!
[Illustration:
_From “J’ai Vu.”_
THE WAR OF BOMB AND KNIFE: FRENCH SOLDIERS WITH MASKS AND STEEL
HELMETS.]
I make bold to prophesy (fully aware how dangerous this practice is
in military matters) that, when the moment arrives for a resolute
offensive in the West, the preliminary bombardment will not be a
question of minutes or even of hours, but of _days_ on end, an endless
inferno of fire and steel and smoke in which no man will live. For this
is a war of extermination.
My friend and colleague (if he will allow me to style him thus),
“_Eye-Witness_,” remarked in one of his letters from the front on the
bizarre circumstance that, during the lulls in the operations, the
principal fighting went on in the air and beneath the ground. Sapping,
which has played so notable a part in the war of positions, aims at a
local effect as contrasted with bombardment, which covers a much wider
area. Sapping, however, possesses the prime and obvious advantage
that it can go forward without the enemy’s knowledge, whereas anything
like a heavy bombardment will always awake the enemy’s suspicions, and
enable him to prepare for the attack which he guesses to be impending.
Secrecy is the essence of sapping. The army does not like talking about
its mines. You will never find in an official _communiqué_ anything
but the vaguest indication as to the region in which “we made a sap,
laid a mine, and destroyed the enemy’s position.” An important branch
of sapping and mining is the listening for the sound of the enemy’s
subterranean operations in special “listening galleries” running out at
intervals from the main sap. A precise indication of the locality where
a mine was exploded, or rather of the trench from which the shaft of
the sap was sunk, might not only intimate to the enemy that our sappers
and miners were active in that particular sector, but might give him
valuable assistance in testing the efficacy of any special apparatus
or means he employs for listening underground. As far as human
foresight may judge, this book will appear before the war has reached
its conclusion, and therefore I must refrain, as in the case of much
else I should like to write, but may not under the eye of my friend
the Censor, who will scan these pages, from enlarging on the splendid
daring, the amazing resourcefulness, and the inexhaustible endurance of
our sappers and miners in their subterranean galleries.
I went down one of our mines one night. The proceeding was irregular,
I believe, and if I had applied for permission through the official
channel I make no doubt that it would have been refused. Incidentally,
I was nearly shot on emerging, but that is another story. I was
spending the night in our trenches, and in the course of an
after-dinner stroll my host, the Captain in command of this particular
section, asked me if I would care to see “our mine.” Considerations of
the Censorship impel me to abridge what follows up to the moment when
I found myself in a square, greasy gallery, with clay walls propped up
by timber baulks leading straight out in the direction of the German
trenches. Guttering candles stuck on the baulks at intervals faintly lit
up as strange a scene as I have witnessed in this war.
Deep in the bowels of the earth a thick, square-set man in khaki
trousers and trench boots, a ragged vest displaying a tremendous
torso all glistening with sweat, was tipping clay out of a trolley,
and gently chaffing in quite unprintable English of the region of
Lancashire a hoarse but invisible person somewhere down the shaft. I
crawled round the quizzer, slipping on the greasy planks awash with
muddy water on the floor of the gallery, and found myself confronted
by another of the troglodytes, a man who was so coated with clay that
he appeared to be dyed khaki (like the horses of the Scots Greys) from
top to toe. I asked him whence he came, so different was he, in speech
and appearance, from the black-haired, low-browed Irishmen watching at
the parapet of the trench far above us. “A coom fra’ Wigan!” he said,
wiping the sweat from his forehead with a grimy hand, and thus saying
he turned round and made off swiftly, bent double as he was, down the
low gallery.
I followed, the water swishing ankle-deep round my field-boots.
The air was dank and foul, the stooping position became almost
unbearable after a few paces, one slipped and slithered at every
step. At intervals side-galleries ran out from the main sap, unlit,
dark, and forbidding--listening posts. After a hundred paces or so a
trolley blocked the way. Behind it two men were working, my taciturn
acquaintance and another. The latter was hacking at the virgin earth
with a pick, the former was shovelling the clay into the trolley.
Heavens, how these men worked! Their breath came fast and regular, they
spoke not a word; one heard only the hack, hack, of the pick and the
dull smack of the earth-clods as they fell into the trolley. There was
no overseer there to harry them, no “speeder-up” to drive. They were
alone in their sap, working as though life depended on it (as maybe it
did). Good for Wigan, wasn’t it?
I had not been out of that mine for more than a minute when an electric
lamp flashed in my eyes, and an excitable young man, who held an
automatic pistol uncomfortably near my person, accosted me thus: “I beg
your pardon, sir”--it occurred to me that the pistol accorded ill with
this polite form of address--“but may I ask what you were doing down
_my_ mine?” My friend, the Captain, rushed forward with an explanation
and an introduction, the pistol was put away, and the sapper
subaltern--all credit to him for his vigilance!--was easily persuaded
to come along to the dug-out and have a drop of grog before turning in.
That night I heard much of mining, its perils and its humours--of
mine-shafts blocked by tons of earth dislodged by shells; of thrilling
races underground, when the pick of the enemy sapper could be clearly
heard and our men had to pile on every ounce of energy to get their sap
finished and the mine laid before the German was “through” with his;
of hand-to-hand fights with pick and shovel in cramped places in the
dark when two saps meet. Through all the yarns appeared, bright as the
flares that shone out above the trench-lines while we sat and talked,
the young officer’s intense pride in his men, these stout North of
England miners “doing their bit” in the bowels of the earth.
One story which made us laugh was the story of the subaltern fresh
out from home. He was a keen young officer, as they all are, “smart
as paint,” as Long John Silver would say, and full of zeal. One night
he came to the dug-out of the sapper officer who was supervising the
digging of a mine in this particular section of the line.
“You must get up at once,” he whispered in his ear, in a voice hoarse
with excitement; “it is very important. Lose no time.” The sapper had
gone to his dug-out worn out after several sleepless nights, and was
very loth to sally forth into the cold and frosty air. “It is a mine, a
German mine,” said the subaltern fresh out from home; “you can see them
working through the glasses.” The sapper was out in a brace of shakes,
and hurriedly followed the subaltern along the interminable windings
of the trenches. In great excitement the subaltern led him to where a
telescope rested on the parapet. “Look!” he said dramatically. The
sapper applied his eye to the glass. There was a bright moon, and by
its rays he saw, sure enough, figures working feverishly about a shaft.
There was something familiar about it, though--then he realized that
he was looking down his own mine. The wretched youth who had dragged
him from his slumbers had forgotten the windings of the trench. This,
and much else, the sapper pointed out with great forcefulness before
he went back to resume his broken rest, leaving the young officer
pondering over the coarse language of the Royal Engineers!
Vermelles is the best example I have seen of the important rôle that
sapping plays in this siege warfare. Indeed, this little village, which
the French wrested from the Germans by sapping along and blowing it up
house by house, is renowned along the entire front of the Allies as a
kind of exhibition model of fighting typical of the war of positions.
Vermelles is in the Black Country of the North of France, five miles
south-east of Béthune, a pretty little village lying on a small ridge
running up from a fertile plain. The French Tenth Army, under General
Maud’huy, advancing after the failure of the great German thrust
against Arras in October, found their passage barred at Vermelles
by the Germans, whose machine-guns, their muzzles thrust out of the
cellar openings of the houses, held them up at the very entrance to
the village. A French frontal attack from the western approaches to
the place failed with heavy loss, and tentative attempts from the
flanks to carry the village by assault were fruitless. Every house was
a German stronghold, bristling with machine-guns, defended by deep
trenches, and linked up by telephone with the _poste de commandement_,
which was installed in the cellars of the Château of Vermelles under
the front steps.
[Illustration:
_“Daily Mail” phot._
A BURSTING MINE.]
To visit Vermelles, as I was privileged to do, is to get an
object-lesson of the methods of the new French Army, that wonderful
weapon of efficiency which has emerged finely tempered, pliant, and
sharp from the furnace of those first disastrous months of war. Never
was the painstaking thoroughness of the French mind seen to better
advantage than in the patient and elaborate operations which culminated
in the two centres of German resistance in Vermelles, the brewery and
the château respectively, being squeezed in a pair of pincers, as it
were, and crushed. The French, recognizing that the German machine-guns
made a direct attack practically hopeless, sapped their way under each
German stronghold in turn, and, having made a breach, rushed in with
bomb and bayonet, and made good the position, afterwards sapping on to
the next.
I found practically every house in Vermelles roofless, every window
broken, every wall pierced with loopholes and pitted with shell-holes
and bullet-marks. There were long, narrow trenches innumerable, marking
the line of the French saps, and ending in deep, wide craters where the
explosion had taken place and opened a passage for the French infantry.
Four bleak walls surrounding an immense tumulus of rubbish were all
that was left of the château, whose grounds were literally honeycombed
with trenches in all directions. The Germans made their last stand
here, holding in turn the two high red-brick walls surrounding the
château grounds until the French, by means of a sap more than 100 yards
long, blew a breach and rushed the place.
I saw this mine. It starts in the white chalky soil of some kind of
garden outside the château wall. This same white soil nearly proved the
undoing of the assailants, for the Germans in the château “spotted” the
French operations by the high white piles of clay thrown up from the
mine almost level with the top of the wall, and our Allies were forced
to explode the mine before the operation was quite complete. However,
it did its work well. Two huge craters were made right beneath the
wall, the masonry of which was blown apart in great chunks, which were
still lying about when I visited the spot. The last German resistance
was broken. Vermelles was captured. There will be many Vermelles in
this war before the Hun is beaten to the ground.
The trench mortar and the bomb have become essential weapons of the
war of positions. Both weapons of the past, they seem strangely out of
place beside such modern man-slaying instruments as the machine-gun and
the magazine-rifle. But they have come in response to the demand of a
unique situation because the weapons which military experts believed
to represent the last word in progress in their profession no longer
sufficed. Handier to manipulate than a field-gun, because much smaller
in bulk, of short range, the trench mortar, throwing a heavy bomb
filled with high-explosive, might at least blow in a part of a trench
which, as I have shown, in the ordinary way is impregnable to direct
assault. There are all kinds of trench mortars, from modern specimens
to rudimentary kinds of catapults, knocked together by inventive
officers or men in their spare time. The French, I believe, have
actually used mortars taken from old fortresses of the days of Vauban.
Of all the ills attendant on the life of the men in the trenches I know
of none more trying to the nerves than these trench mortars. As they
are fired at close range from the enemy’s trench, which may be anything
from 30 to 300 yards away, one has no warning of their coming. You hear
a sudden report mingled with a kind of screech, and the rush of a heavy
body through the air, then a deafening explosion, with a spout of earth
and clouds of black smoke and a rain of fragments of iron and earth
for yards around. The bombs thrown by the big mortars allow you about
two seconds--the interval between the impact and the burst--in which
to take cover. The small bombs, on the other hand--which our men call
“sausages”--burst on impact, without warning.
Just as the men in the trenches in the winter months adapted their
costume to suit the trying climate (rather to the horror of some
military martinets out here!), so these weapons of trench warfare have
been evolved by the men in the firing-line. The revival of bombing
began when a British soldier, to while away an idle moment, put some
high-explosive and a lighted fuse in a discarded bully-beef tin, and
pitched it into the German trench opposite him. In his way the British
soldier is as handy as the blue-jacket, and the long days of the winter
monotony produced all kinds of inventions in the way of mortars and
bombs, which led to the scientific development of this mode of warfare.
A Territorial officer was discovered making all manner of ingenious
bombs and trench appliances in his spare time. He was taken out of the
trenches and installed in an empty school, and when last I heard of him
had a regular factory turning out bombs for the firing-line.
Bombing is very tricky work. Your bomb must be safe as long as it is in
your possession. Nor must it be liable to explosion if dropped after
the safety-catch has been removed. That is why bombs are provided
with time-fuses. Some nicety of judgment is required to hurl them so
that they will explode on impact or immediately afterwards. If the
time-fuse has still a second or so to burn when the bomb falls in
the enemy trench, a resolute man will pick it up and fling it back,
with disastrous consequences to the bomber. Therefore bombers must be
trained. The training is extremely simple, but it is essential, and I
look forward to the time when every soldier who comes out to France
from home will have gone through a course of bombing just as he has
gone through a course of musketry. The work of experimenting with bombs
and of training in bombing has claimed many victims in our army behind
the firing-line, but the blood thus shed has not been spilt in vain,
for by every account the bombing companies now attached to each brigade
are of invaluable assistance.
In the war of positions the bombers seem to be obtaining the chances
for winning imperishable glory that in the _Bewegungskrieg_ fell to
the lot of the gunners. The bombers have their motto already, as
unalterable as the rule of the sea. “The bombers go first!” Private
Appleton, of the bombing company of the 16th (Vancouver) Battalion of
the Canadian Division, consecrated the phrase in a _beau geste_ which
is the spirit of our bombers incorporate. The battalion was attacking
a German stronghold known as The Orchard, situated south-east of
Festubert, during the successful advance of the First Army on May 20.
Just in front of the position a grave and unlooked-for obstacle was
encountered in the shape of a deep ditch with a thick hedge on the
other side. Many scrambled across the ditch, and at the only opening
in the thick-set hedge an officer wanted to lead the way. Then spake
Private Appleton, girded about with bombs. “Excuse me, sir,” he said,
“bombers must go first!”
So the bombers went first. That is the rule of the game. When the
first line of German trenches has been captured in an attack, up come
the bombers, their bombing aprons lined with pockets (like the skirt
of a lady shop-lifter), jogging as they trot along, and plunge, bombs
uplifted to fling, into the narrow communication trenches where, behind
the first traverse, Death, in grey-green dress, is lurking. The path
of the bombers is starred with golden deeds. V.C.’s and D.S.O.’s and
D.C.M.’s and M.C.’s reward their prowess sometimes, but more often
their recompense has been a few feet of brown earth in Flanders and a
corner for ever green in the memory of their fellows.
The bomb goes with the knife. The bayonet fixed on the rifle is too
long for the _corps-à-corps_ in a narrow trench. When a German trench
has been obliterated by a bombardment or an exploded mine and the
infantry rush forward, there is no time for the niceties of bayonet
drill. You want to get at your man and kill him before he can recover
from his shock. The French infantry have been known to fling aside
their rifles when the charge sounds, and hurl themselves on the Germans
with their bayonets alone or with clasp-knives, or even with knives of
their own manufacture.
Lord Cavan, who for many months commanded the famous Guards Brigade
in the war, told me of an Irish Guardsman who killed a dozen or so of
Germans with a spade. The Irishman was going up a narrow communication
trench when a German rushed out round a traverse. The Guardsman shot
him with the last cartridge in his magazine. He was so cramped for
space that he did not know whether he could spare time to load again,
as he knew that other Germans were behind the first. So, quick as
thought, he called to a comrade who was working on the parapet of the
trench above him. “Show us your spade here, Mike!” The other handed
down his spade just as a second German came round the traverse. The
Guardsman promptly felled him with a blow that would have killed an ox,
and went on “slipping it across them” (as he would have said himself)
as fast as they emerged. I believe that in this way he actually
accounted for ten or more Germans. The rifle and bayonet will play
their part again when the time comes for an advance over a broad
front. For the rush through a narrow breach the knife and bomb are the
weapons.
Siege warfare will not be the last word in this war. Opinions vary,
but for me there will be no peace of the kind that will banish the
German peril for generations to come unless the German lines can be
broken and the enemy hurled back in disorder from the North of France
far back into Belgium, and maybe beyond. Once the German line is
pierced, if only the breach be wide and deep enough, we return to the
_Bewegungskrieg_, which is the only kind of fighting in this war for
which both sides have a standard of comparison in previous campaigns,
and for which consequently the Germans are better equipped than the
Allies.
The weapon of the _Bewegungskrieg_, as we learnt in the fighting at
the outset of the war, and of the _Stellungskrieg_ as well, as often
as the armies have “got moving,” is undoubtedly the machine-gun.
The machine-gun, or, generally speaking, the automatic gun that
fires several hundred shots a minute, is, I believe, the principal
contribution which this war is destined to make to military science.
Just as the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 introduced the needle-gun, and
the Franco-Prussian War the _chassepot_ rifle, and the South African
War was the war of the magazine-rifle, so the present war will be
known as the war of the automatic gun. When the German General Staff
sits down to write its official history of the Great War, it will be
able to attribute the greater part of the success that German arms may
have achieved to its foresight in accumulating an immense stock of
machine-guns, and in studying the whole theory and tactics of this
comparatively new weapon before any other army in the world became
alive to its paramount importance.
When Germany went to war she is believed to have had a very large
supply of machine-guns in her army. They were assembled together in a
Machine-Gun Corps, on the principle of our Royal Artillery, and the
machine-guns were attached to divisions and brigades, with their own
divisional and brigade commanders on the same lines as our divisional
artillery. I do not know how many machine-guns the British Army
possessed, but it was a negligible quantity, somewhere about two per
battalion. We had studied the handling and mechanism of the gun and its
tactical employment, but had not accustomed the army generally to its
usage. Our machine-guns are attached to battalions, and may on occasion
be handed over by the brigade to the brigade machine-gun officer for a
special emergency. In the German Army, however, the machine-guns are at
the immediate disposal of the Division Commander, just as the artillery
is. Their utility is thus greatly enhanced, for, instead of being
operated according to strictly local requirements, their disposition is
governed by the needs of the general situation. An example will best
illustrate the value of the German system.
The war correspondent of the _Frankfürter Zeitung_, attached to the
German General Headquarters in the West, in a despatch dealing with
the operations of the German Army cavalry (_Heereskavallerie_) during
the advance on Paris and the retreat from the Marne, mentions that a
_Jäger_ battalion, sent out to check the British advance, was able to
put _no fewer than twenty-one machine-guns_ into line on a front of
1,000 yards against a single British battalion, which as a result was
practically destroyed.
The machine-gun has been of priceless advantage to the Germans in
this war. If they made good use of it during their advance through
Belgium towards Paris, they came to rely almost entirely upon it
when their advance was checked and they found themselves called
upon to remain on the defensive for many months on end. In all the
campaigns of this war it has been the same story. On the western and
eastern fronts, in Gallipoli, in Africa, the machine-gun has been the
deadliest foe of the attacking force, _because the German, possessing
this weapon in far greater numbers than his opponent, has been able
by its means to increase the fire-power of his battalions to such a
point as to give him actually the effect of superior numbers_. As the
offensive is the Allies’ only key to success, our salvation lies in
the machine-gun, which Sir Ian Hamilton, in his historic Dardanelles
despatch, lachrymosely calls “that invention of the devil”--thousands
of machine-guns--but also the automatic rifle.
The only factor that furnishes anything like a certain basis for
calculation as to the date of the conclusion of the war is the number
of fighting-men available for each of the different belligerents. Of
all the supplies required for making war, the supply of men is limited.
The Germans recognized this sooner than any of their opponents. In the
machine-gun they had a machine that does the work of many men. They
reckoned that a machine-gun in a trench on the Western front would
release at least a score of men for one of their great thrusts in the
Eastern theatre of war. They took measures accordingly.
Time and time again we came up against this deadly weapon. The only bar
that stood between us and Lille on that fateful March 10, after the
capture of Neuve Chapelle, were the German strongholds, bristling with
machine-guns, along the Moulin de Piètre Road and the fringe of the
Bois de Biez. On the Fromelles ridge, at La Quinque Rue, at Hooge in
May and June, it was the German machine-guns that stemmed our further
advance after our first objectives had been gained and beat us to
earth, while the German heavy artillery were getting the range of the
new positions and the bombers were creeping forward to drive us back.
The machine-gun is the multiplication of the rifle. The Vickers
gun fires up to 550 shots a minute. This is also about the average
performance of the German gun. To silence this multiplication of
fire you must outbid it, you must beat it down with an even greater
multiplication. This is where the difficulty comes in for an attacking
force. The machine-gun, with its mounting and ammunition and spare
parts, is neither light in weight nor inconspicuous to carry. When the
infantry has rushed a trench after the preliminary bombardment, the
machine-guns have to be carried bodily forward over a shell and bullet
swept area, where the machine-gun detachment is a familiar and expected
target for the German marksmen. This is where the automatic rifle is
destined to play a part--a part so decisive, in my opinion, as may win
the war for us.
The automatic rifle is a light machine gun. In appearance it
resembles an ordinary service rifle, with rather a complicated and
swollen-looking magazine. It is not water-cooled like the machine-gun,
but air-cooled, and is therefore not absolutely reliable for long
usage, as it inevitably becomes heated after much firing. It will fire,
however, up to 300 odd shots a minute, and can be regarded as the
ideal weapon for beating down German machine-gun fire and checking the
advance of bombers while the heavier but more reliable machine-guns are
coming up.
Its mechanism is extremely simple. It can be carried at a good pace
over a distance of several hundred yards by a single man, and it is
not distinguishable from the ordinary rifle except at fairly close
range. It is my conviction that the automatic rifle is the key to the
machine-gun problem, which has hitherto proved of such insurmountable
difficulty to the Allies in the different theatres of war.
It has been said that we hold our trenches with infantry, the French
with their 75-centimetre guns--“the black butchers,” as my friend, Mr.
George Adam, calls them in his admirable book “Behind the Scenes at
the War”--but the Germans with machine-guns. The more machine-guns we
have--and this view is fully upheld by the new Ministry of Munitions at
home--the thinner we can make our front line in the trenches, and the
more men we shall accordingly have at our disposal for an offensive at
one or more points.