Lessons We Have Learnt
Not all of the questions, military or political, have as yet been solved by experience. Many of them are, however, already partially solved, some wholly solved. And we may consider them usefully one by one.
(1) The value of permanent fortification.
Perhaps the most striking lesson of the war, and the one which is already conclusively taught by its progress, is the fact that modern permanent works, as we have hitherto known them at least, are dominated by modern siege artillery, and in particular by the mobile large howitzer using the last form of high explosive. It is here important to give the plain facts upon a matter which has from its suddenness and dramatic character given birth to a good many lessons.
Modern fortification has gone down after a very short resistance to howitzer fire, throughout the western field of the campaign. In general, if you can get the big, modern, mobile howitzer up to striking distance of modern permanent work, it batters that work to pieces within a period which will hardly extend over a week, and may be as short as forty-eight hours.
It is not a question of tenacity or courage. The greatest tenacity and the greatest courage can do nothing with a work that has been reduced to ruins, and in which there is no emplacement for a gun. So much is quite certain. But we must not run away with the idea either that this is the end of fortification for the future; temporary mobile batteries established outside the old permanent works will shield a garrison for an indefinite time. Nor is it true that the Germans have in this field any particular advantage save over the Russians, who are weak in their heavy artillery and have limited powers of increasing it. It will be discovered as the war proceeds that the Western armies are here in the same boat with the Germans.
It is true that the Germans have a larger howitzer than the French and the English. They have a few 420 millimetre howitzers, that is, guns of a calibre between 16 and 17 inches. But this gun is almost too large to use. What has done the work everywhere is the 11-inch howitzer, and a gun of much the same size is in possession of the French. Only hitherto the siege work has fallen to the German invaders. When and if the rôles are reversed, German permanent work will be just as vulnerable to French howitzer fire. And as for the abolition of fortification in future we need not look for that.
It is probable that the system of large, permanent enclosed works will give way to a system of narrow, prepared, parallel trenches connected by covered ways, which, by offering too small a target for accurate fire from a distance, and by being doubled and redoubled one behind the other, will be able to hold out far longer than the larger works which bore the brunt of the present war. But that the defensive will devise some means of meeting the new and unexpected powers of the offensive we may be certain, upon the analogy of all past warfare.
(2) In the matter of formation the surprise of the war has undoubtedly been the success of another German theory, to wit, the possibility of leading modern short-trained troops, against enormous losses, in close formation. Everywhere outside Germany that was doubted, and the Germans have proved that their initial contention was right, at least in their own case. But there is another aspect of this question which has as yet by no means been proved one way or the other, and that is, whether the very heavy losses this use of close formation entails are worth while in a campaign not immediately successful at the outset. We are not yet able to say how far troops once submitted to such violence can be brought to suffer it again—or how long after—nor are we able to say what effect this lavish expenditure of men has towards the end of a campaign if its primary object, immediate initial success, fails.
(3) In the matter of aircraft, four things have come out already.
(a) Men will engage each other in the air without fear and they will do so continually, appalling as the prospect seemed in its novelty before the outbreak of this war.
(b) Aircraft can discover the movement of troops in large bodies more accurately and successfully than had been imagined.
(c) That body of aircraft which is used to a rougher climate, and to working in heavier winds, will have an immense advantage not only in bad weather but in all weather. It is this, coupled with a very fine and already established tradition of adventure, which has made the English airmen easily the superior of their Allies and enemies.
(d) The aeroplane is neither as invulnerable at a great height as one school imagined it, nor as vulnerable as the opposite school maintained. The casualties are not as high in proportion to the numbers engaged as they would be in any other arm—at least so far—but they exist. And it would seem that the impossibility of telling whether an aeroplane belongs to friend or foe is a serious addition to the risk.
Many questions connected with aircraft still remain to be solved; by far the most important of which to this country are connected with the efficiency of the dirigible balloon.
(4) The amount of attention that should be given to good rifle firing and the importance that should be attached to the bayonet seem both to have been answered hitherto by the war.
Superior rifle fire, especially under the conditions of a difficult defensive, was the saving of the British force during the retreat from Mons, and, during the whole battle of the Marne, French accounts agree that the bayonet was the deciding factor in action after action. But even if it be true, in the words of a French officer, that “all actions end with the bayonet,” the actual number of troops thus engaged and the casualties connected with them, are not in a very high proportion to the whole.
It almost seems as though the bayonet had replaced the old shock action of cavalry in some degree, and that it was to be used only when the opposing troops were shaken or were occupied in too precipitate a retirement. Of successful bayonet work against other conditions we have at least had no examples recorded.
(5) On the two chief points in connexion with field artillery, records hitherto received tell us little. We shall not know until more detailed accounts are available whether the vastly superior rapidity of fire enjoyed by the French 75 millimetre gun has given it a corresponding superiority over its opponent, the German 77. That it has a superiority is fairly clear. The degree of that superiority we shall not learn until we have the story of the war from the German side.
Neither are we established upon the question of weight. General Langlois’ theory, which convinced the French that the light gun was essential, has not so far been proved absolutely certain, and there have been occasions when the English heavier gun (notably at Meaux) was of vast importance to our Allies. But I suggest that this question will be better answered now the weather has changed. In dry weather, that is, over hard ground, the difference between the heavier and the lighter gun is not so noticeable; once the ground is heavy it becomes very noticeable indeed.
(6) With the next question, that of the materials and their supply, we enter a region of the utmost interest to this country in particular, because it is the superiority of this country at sea, and the almost complete blockade of the Germanic Powers, that is here concerned. Roughly speaking, we find (a) That a blockade of enemy ports from a great distance is easy; (b) of enemy supply through neutrals very difficult indeed; (c) That certain special products which modern science has made necessary in war are most affected. For example:
Of the many things a modern army requires which are to be found only in a few special places, and those, most of them, out of Europe, the most important of all is petrol. It is obviously of capital importance for air work, and where you have a number of good roads, as in the Western field of operations, it is almost as important for transport work.
Now it so happens that petrol is not found in Western Europe at all. The European supply as a whole is limited, and is in the main confined to Galicia, Roumania, and Russia. The Asiatic and American supply is only available to Austria-Hungary and Germany by way of the ocean, and the ocean is closed to them. Russian supply, of course, they cannot obtain. Galician supply swings back and forth now in the possession of the Austrian and now in that of the Russian Army.
There remains only Roumania, and though Roumania is neutral it is doubtful or rather nearly certain that no sufficient supplies are coming into the Germanic Powers from that source. This is up to the moment of writing the chief effect of the British naval superiority, to which I will next turn.
(7) Most of the things that were said in time of peace about the effect of naval superiority or “command of the sea” have proved true. The blockade of the inferior naval powers is nearly complete—though it must be remembered that they have an exceedingly limited coastline, and that the problem will be very different against a large fleet possessed of many ports upon an extended coastline.
Further, the submarine has not proved itself as formidable against men-of-war as some thought, and the superiority of large craft is still admitted. On the other hand, it has been shown that a few hostile cruisers could continue to hold the seas for a much longer period than was imagined, and permanently to threaten commerce.
The conception that almost immediately after a declaration of war naval superiority would prevent the inferior naval power from commerce destroying, and that the trade routes of the superior power would be as safe as in time of peace has broken down. So has the idea that submarines could seek out the enemy’s fleet in its ports and destroy them there.