CHAPTER IITHE 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,” thewar 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 saywhich way the movements went. I tested my prisoner on this point. He was quite positive that the Bewegungskrieg stopped and theStellungskriegset 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 sortiesen massefrom 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, whichwas 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.
A corner of a trench with a traverse in the extreme left—note officer’s gas helmet.
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 viewof 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 directassault. 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 attacksen masseas 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 theirredoubts, with machine-guns playing on the captured position—these aredie 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!
The War of Bomb and Knife: French soldiers with masks and steel helmets.
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 ofdayson 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 obviousadvantage 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 officialcommuniquéanything 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 Imake 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 downmymine?” 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 andits 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 Germanstronghold, bristling with machine-guns, defended by deep trenches, and linked up by telephone with theposte de commandement, which was installed in the cellars of the Château of Vermelles under the front steps.
A BURSTING MINE.
“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 inall 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 blowin 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. Inhis 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 beobtaining the chances for winning imperishable glory that in theBewegungskriegfell 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 abeau gestewhich 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 thecorps-à-corpsin 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 thetime 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 theBewegungskrieg, 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 theBewegungskrieg, as we learnt in the fighting at the outset of the war, and of theStellungskriegas 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 thechassepotrifle, 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 ofmachine-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 theFrankfürter 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 aJägerbattalion, sent out to check the British advance, was able to putno fewer than twenty-one machine-gunsinto 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 isdestined 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.