The coming of the generals who know how to talk to the men who will meet their death with simplicity and conviction, has a profound and decisive influence on the open-hearted mass of infantrymen. Handling soldiers was formerly the greatest accomplishment of commanders, who did not confine themselves to the brief and abstract formulas of their orders. Today as formerly, the word of the great chief, rational and assured, is graven in ineffaceable letters in the hearts of the combatants. Beyond the chief, the soldier clearly sees his native country, whose supreme will still claims the sacrifice, and in himself he feels his courage harden.
Toward the 15th of April, returning from Belgium, our regiment passed in review before General F—, our former Corps Commander, who assembled the officers and said to them: “We are going to attempt another maneuver ..., the waiting has come to an end, we are going after them ..., we have today cannon and ammunition in abundance, we will crush their shelters, we will destroy their machine guns.... Then the infantry will be launched and will crush them; after the first ones, there will be others ..., then others ...; if we do not succeed, we shall have no one to blame but ourselves.” These words sank into the hearts of the company officers, and they repeated them with conviction to their soldiers, and the latter heard them so well that they surpassed all that could have been expected; they are not the ones whom General F— might blame.
Thus the troops see clearly the object, but the moral preparation would be insufficient if the man felt himself incapable of accomplishing it. Each day the officers should instil in the troops the idea of the effort and show them how it may be realized; there are even questions concerning the instinct of preservation that it is well to bring into play. Thus instead of fearing the ordeal, the man little by little gets accustomed to the idea of facing it.
It remains now to complete and exalt the offensive spirit by an intense period of appropriate exercises. Trench life has a tendency to kill the offensive spirit of the troops. They think only of protecting themselves, they are always under cover, they circulate in the boyaux, and all this creates a horror of the open ground. Daily experiences, such as not being able to show one’s head without running the risk of receiving a bullet in the face, create a very acute sensation of danger. They dare no longer stir, and to attack the terrible trenches of the enemy which one cannot look at even for a second seems a mad and irrealizable project. The service in the trenches creates terror of the hostile trench.
The Man Must Be Put into Forward Movement
Make him run, jump, and rush in the open spaces; let him get intoxicated with air and movement; the attitude creates the mentality. As soon as he has lost the habit of hanging his head and hunching his back, he has also lost his exaggerated prudence and the fear of unsheltered spaces.
At the cantonments at Fiefs and Berles, where we passed a fortnight before the 9th of May, the afternoons were entirely given up to sport. We organized “field days” in the woods, obstacle races, and the men, recruits and old reservists, galloped through these spring days with absolutely unbounded animation. To give the men the habit of moving without anxiety over open ground where the bullets whistled, I took advantage of the nights when we were working on saps and parallels to make them march in patrols a short distance in front of the lines. If I saw that the workmen were thinking of crouching down, I made them stand up for a while; as for me, I fortified myself by walking up and down in front of the working party.
We wished for an irresistible assault and therefore tried to inculcate in the men the instinct of hand-to-hand fighting, at which they ordinarily hesitate with the result that the close combat is stopped for days and months at a few score metres from the enemy. We had bayonet fencing, but it was a demoniacal fencing, the fencing of the chargers of Froeschwiller.
The fencing exercises, carried out by the company to prepare for the attack, were as follows: first, a brief review of the movements, then immediately fencing on the run; the men were formed at a few paces intervals and then started on a run; it was “Halt! Thrust! Thrust again!” They started again, climbed the embankments, lunged and relunged furiously; they got winded, so much the worse.... “Right face!” and everyone ran to the right, descended the slope stabbing and stabbing again, getting excited and feverish, the officers and sergeants galloping more furiously than the rest.
Afterwards fencing with the dummy. We had stuffed sacks full of straw and made them smaller each day to make a smaller target and oblige the men to be more accurate in their thrusts.