LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

one vital purpose—to smash the enemy’s field force.” The dancing dervishes of Pan-Germanism had already announced in detail the use to which the occupied territories would be put. For Germany to fall back from the Somme to the Meuse would have toppled down the whole flimsy edifice of German confidence. It was unthinkable; her political commitments were too great; her earlier vainglory sat like an Old Man of the Sea on her shoulders.

      Yet, in spite of this weakness in the strategic situation, the German stronghold in the West was still formidable in the extreme. From Arras southward they held in the main the higher ground. The front consisted of a strong first position, with firing, support, and reserve trenches and a labyrinth of deep dug-outs; a less strong intermediate line covering the field batteries; and a second position some distance behind, which was of much the same strength as the first. Behind lay fortified woods and villages which could be readily linked up with trench lines to form third and fourth positions. The attached trench map will give some idea of the amazing complexity of the German defences. They were well served by the great network of railways which radiate from La Fère and Laon, Cambrai, and St. Quentin, and many new light lines had been constructed. They had ample artillery and

      shells, endless machine-guns, and consummate skill in using them. It was a fortress to which no front except the West could show a parallel. In the East the line was patchy and not continuous. The Russian soldiers who in the early summer were brought to France stared with amazement at a ramification of trenches compared with which the lines in Poland and Galicia were like hurried improvisations.

       THE BRITISH ARMIES.

      The British Armies had in less than two years grown from the six divisions of the old Expeditionary Force to a total of some seventy divisions in the field, leaving out of account the troops supplied by the Dominions and by India. Behind these divisions were masses of trained men to replace wastage for at least another year. With the possible exception of France, Great Britain had mobilised for the direct and indirect purposes of war a larger proportion of her population than any other belligerent country. Moreover while engaged in also supplying her Allies, she had provided this vast levy with all its necessary equipment. Britain is so fond of decrying her own efforts that few people have realised the magnitude of her achievement. There is no precedent for it in the history of the world. She jettisoned all her previous theories and calculations; and in a society which had not for a hundred years been called upon to make a great effort against an enemy, a society highly differentiated and industrialised, a society which lived by sea-borne commerce and so could not concentrate like certain other lands exclusively on military preparation, she provided an army on the largest scale, and provided it out of next to nothing. She had to improvise officers and staff, auxiliary services, munitionment—everything. She had to do this in the face of an enemy already fully prepared. She had to do it, above all, at a time when war had become a desperately technical and scientific business and improvisation was most difficult. It is easy enough to assemble quickly hordes of spearmen and pikemen, but it would seem impossible to improvise men to use the bayonet and machine gun, the bomb and the rifle. But Britain did it—and did it for the most part by voluntary enlistment.

      The quality of the result was not less remarkable than the quantity. The efficiency of the supply and transport, the medical services, the aircraft work, was universally admitted. Our staff and intelligence work—most difficult to improvise—was now equal to the best in the field. Our gunnery was praised by the French, a nation of expert gunners. As for the troops themselves we had secured a homogeneous army of which it was hard to say that one part was better than the other. The original Expeditionary Force—the “Old Contemptibles,” who for their size were probably the best body of fighting men on earth—had mostly disappeared. Territorial battalions were present at the First Battle of Ypres, and New Service battalions at Hooge and Loos. By June, 1916, the term New Armies was a misnomer. The whole British force in one sense was new. The famous old regiments of the line had been completely renewed since Mons, and their drafts were drawn from the same source as the men of the new battalions. The only difference was that in the historic battalions there was a tradition already existing, whereas in the new battalions that tradition had to be created. And the creation was quick. If the Old Army bore the brunt of the First Battle of Ypres, the Territorials were no less heroic in the Second Battle of Ypres, and the New Army had to its credit the four-mile charge at Loos. It was no patchwork force which in June was drawn up in Picardy, but the flower of the manhood of the British Empire, differing in origin and antecedents, but alike in discipline and courage and resolution.

      Munitions had grown with the numbers of men. Anyone who was present at Ypres in April and May, 1915, saw the German guns all day pounding our lines with only a feeble and intermittent reply. It was better at Loos in September, when we showed that we could achieve an intense bombardment. But at that date our equipment sufficed only for spasmodic efforts and not for that sustained and continuous fire which was needed to destroy the enemy’s defences. Things were very different in June, 1916. Everywhere on the long British front there were British guns—heavy guns of all calibres, field guns innumerable, and in the trenches there were quantities of trench-mortars. The great munition dumps, constantly depleted and constantly replenished from distant bases, showed that there was food and to spare for this mass of artillery, and in the factories and depots at home every minute saw the reserves growing. Britain was manufacturing and issuing weekly as much as the whole stock of land service ammunition which she possessed at the outbreak of war. The production of high explosives was sixty-six times what it had been at the beginning of 1915. The

      monthly output of heavy guns had been multiplied by six in the past year, and that of machine-guns by fourteen. We no longer fought against a far superior machine. We had created our own machine to nullify the enemy’s and allow our man-power to come to grips.

       THE GREAT LOMBARDMENT.

      About the middle of June on the whole ninety-mile front held by the British, and on the French front north and south of the Somme there began an intermittent bombardment of the German lines. There were raids at different places, partly to mislead the enemy as to the real point of assault, and partly to identify the German units opposed to us. Such raids varied widely in method, but they were extraordinarily successful. Sometimes gas was used, but more often after a short bombardment a picked detachment crossed no-man’s-land, cut the enemy’s wire, and dragged home a score or two of prisoners. One, conducted by a company of the Highland Light Infantry near the Vermeil es-La Bassée Road, deserves special mention. Our guns had damaged the German parapets, so when darkness came a German working-party was put in to mend them. The Scots, while the engineers neatly cut off a section of German trenches, swooped down on the place, investigated the dug-outs, killed two score Germans, brought back forty-six prisoners, and had for total casualties two men slightly wounded. During these days, too, there were many fights in the air. It was essential to prevent German airplanes from crossing our front and observing our preparations. Our own machines scouted far into the enemy hinterland, reconnoitring and destroying.

      On Sunday, June 25th, the bombardment became intenser. It fell everywhere on the front; German trenches were obliterated at Ypres and Arras as well as at Beaumont Hamel and Frieourt. There is nothing harder to measure than the relative force of such a “ preparation,” but had a dispassionate observer been seated in the clouds he would have noted that from Gommecourt to a mile or two south of the Somme the Allied fire was especially methodical and persistent. On Wednesday, June 28th, from an artillery observation post in that region it seemed as if a complete devastation had been achieved. Some things like broken telegraph poles were all that remained of what, a week before, had been leafy copses. Villages had become heaps of rubble. Travelling at night on the roads behind the front—from Bethune to Amiens—the whole eastern sky was lit up with what seemed fitful summer lightning. But there was curiously little noise. In Amiens, a score or so of miles from the firing line, the guns were rarely heard, whereas fifty miles from Ypres they sound like a roll of drums and wake a man in the night. The configuration of that part of Picardy muffles sound, and the country folk call it the Silent Land.

      All the last week of June the weather was grey and cloudy, with a thick brume on the uplands, which made air-work unsatisfactory. There

Скачать книгу