In enclosing the Germans in an entrenched front he so economised his force that it became, though less in number, equal to that of the enemy in power. The simple proof of that is that the Germans were unable to break the barrier. They did their utmost to break it. Their success or their failure in the war depended upon being able to break it. They sacrificed at Ypres, on the Yser, and in later battles more than half a million of men in the endeavour to break it. It remained firm against every assault.
Nor was the loss of life the only loss. These battles has led to a vast, and as it proved, wasteful expenditure of ammunition. Since the barrier could not be broken, the question now was how to render the envelopment scheme abortive by inflicting on the Allies losses which would delay or make impossible the offensive on the part of the Allies to which the scheme was designed to lead. Expedients to that end had to be devised more effective than the fire of heavy howitzers. They must also be less costly expedients. Thus hand grenades and trench mortars reappeared, and mechanical sniping. The reserve of shells with which Germany had begun the war was used up. Such munitions had to be employed more sparingly. Besides, owing to the scarcity of copper resulting from the British naval blockade, both the cost and the difficulty of manufacturing shells had immensely increased.
The German ordinary grenade was nothing more than the small iron bomb which had been used during the campaigns in Flanders in the seventeenth century. It was now filled with a charge of guncotton, and hurled into the hostile trenches by hand. Another variety had attached to the globe a short iron stump. This enabled the grenade to be stuck on to the muzzle of a rifle, and fired into the opposing trenches when the distance was too great to allow of the use of hand bombs. The trench mortar fired in the same way an iron globular bomb about a foot in diameter. The bomb was stuck on to the muzzle of the mortar by a short iron stump projecting from it, and filled with a heavy charge of nitro-glycerine, was fired at a high angle, so that it might fall right into a hostile trench and by the tremendous force of the explosion wreck it.
These projectiles, grenades and mortar bombs, were now turned out of the German arsenals in huge quantities. They were both much cheaper than shells, always a primary consideration in German warfare, and the mortar bombs required no copper driving bands.
In addition to these expedients mines were resorted to. Several blind saps—tunnels slightly below the surface—driven towards a hostile line of trench would be connected by a cross tunnel, and in this just in front of the trench the mines would be laid. At the moment chosen for attack they would be exploded from the German position by electricity, and a rush made to occupy the craters so formed. Yet another ruse was to drive an open sap—a narrow zigzag cutting—to a point commanding a hostile trench, and there instal a machine gun. For daring in these operations military distinctions were freely bestowed, and it is not surprising that in carrying them out many of the enemy displayed an audacious cunning.
When, however, we consider that the British and Belgians alike were much more expert riflemen, and that all three Allies as time went on steadily emphasised their ascendancy in artillery, the failure of these efforts of German perseverance to make up for the German want of military genius, was, it is not difficult to see, inevitable. The British troops improvised hand grenades out of army jam or beef tins. In grenade throwing they speedily became expert. Every German device was countered and improved upon. Parties engaged in mining met each other underground, and fought it out hand to hand. To diminish the losses arising from rifle and artillery fire, the larger German operations in this stage of the campaign were their night attacks. In these night battles the country before plunged in total darkness would suddenly present the spectacle of flights of star shells and flares, mingled with the play of searchlights, and the lurid flash of guns and rifles.
Attack and counter-attack, varied in every interval of clearer weather by artillery duels, went on during week after week. The lines round Ypres and to the west of Lille, more especially about La Bassee, remained among the main scenes of German activity.
Round Ypres the shot-torn and shell-ploughed woods became those melancholy and unapproachable "zones of the dead" where the German slain lay unburied, and many of the wounded had been left miserably to perish.
Frequent allusion has been made (the British "Eye Witness" wrote on November 20) to the losses of the enemy. Round Ypres we are continually finding fresh evidence of the slaughter inflicted. On November 15 one of our battalions, upon advancing discovered a German trench manned by seventeen corpses, while there were forty-nine more in a house close by. Next day a patrol discovered sixty dead in front of one trench, and fifty opposite another. In fact, all the farms and cottages to our front are charnel houses. The significance of such small numbers lies only in the fact that they represent the killed in a very small area.
According to prisoners the German attempts to take Ypres have proved costly. One man stated that there were only fifteen survivors out of his platoon which went into action fifty strong; another reported that of 250 men who advanced with him only nineteen returned.