TRICKS FOR THE TRENCHES
A closing word should be said on the subject of trench ruses. As in
every other form of warfare, deception must be practised on the enemy.
He must be made to believe you are doing things that you are not doing
and that you propose doing things that are not in your plans at all.
Any number of these ruses will occur to the minds of my readers, and I
want to mention a few of them that we actually tried.
One of the best ruses is to let the enemy get hold of fake orders.
These can be placed on bodies immediately after an action and there
will be a good chance of the enemy accepting them as genuine. We have
reason to believe that some of the prisoners that we took came over for
the purpose of letting false orders fall into our hands. It is pretty
hard on the individual to make him the goat in this way and I do not
recommend it.
Making elaborate preparations for an attack in one spot, and then
actually attacking from another point when his reserves have been drawn
to the first point, also used to work well.
It is well to learn the calls and signals of the enemy for use during
an attack, and thus to throw his men into disorder. There have been
Germans in this war who carried out the daring ruse of appearing in
our lines in the uniforms of staff officers and giving orders to our
men. They were brave individuals and scarcely seem to merit the swift
punishment that came to them on detection.
In the trenches it was sometimes necessary to move about the few men
that we had and to keep them firing first in one place and then in
another to convey the impression that we were in considerable force.
Ruses had to be adopted to discover snipers. On one occasion I needed
to find a sniper who had just killed three of my men, and was such an
excellent shot that he broke my periscope. For this purpose I made a
dummy man out of sand bags and had a soldier put him cautiously above
the parapet (head only) while I observed from a neighbouring bay. I
detected him from the dust that his bullet raised from his parapet,
and a few well aimed artillery shots put him and his loop hole out of
business. My poor dummy was badly wounded in the process.
The Turks in Gallipoli used to paint some of their snipers a green
colour and send them out between the lines among the small bushes.
A pretended retreat will sometimes lure the enemy from his trenches to
destruction.
Sending out patrols in one section to draw fire while careful
reconnaissance work is being done at another spot will sometimes find
him off his guard.
Dummy guns, of course, have played a large part, and have been
responsible for the waste of a great deal of ammunition. They are
placed where they can be observed by the aeroplanes, who promptly
report their presence. It is said that at the Dardanelles the forts
once opened fire on the battleship _Queen Elizabeth_. After a while
they sank her--and her guns floated off! It is telling no secret now
to say that many of the units in the British navy had duplicates
constructed out of old vessels. Their business was to draw fire to
themselves while other craft did the work. Hence the wooden guns. They
served another purpose as well, for it was very difficult for spies to
inform Germany where the real fighting ships were at any time.
In short, the whole business is to "get the enemy's goat." Keep him
guessing. Wear him down with worrying. Break his nerve and spoil his
sleep, that his physical resistance may be weakened. On the other hand,
learn to estimate the intention on the enemy. Do not underrate him. In
all cases and under all circumstances follow out the excellent motto of
the Boy Scouts--
BE PREPARED.
Transcriber's Notes
Hyphen removed: "dugout" (p. xii, Figures 7-9), "loopholes" (p. 66).
p. 105: "and" changed to "an" (the only method of delivering an
infantry attack).
p. 120: duplicate "to" removed (excellent practice to have strapped).
End of Project Gutenberg's Training for the Trenches, by Leslie Vickers