Germany's Fighting Machine / Her Army, her Navy, her Air-ships and Why She Arrayed Them Against the Allied Powers of Europe

by Ernest F. Henderson

Machine Guns Being Loaded on Pontoons

The communication troops consist of the railroad regiments, which in time of war have to see to the building and running of railroads; of the telegraph battalions, which put up telegraph lines; of the fortress telephone companies, which attend to all telephone matters in the fortress; of the air-ship and aeroplane battalions, who are entrusted with spying out the land and the enemy’s positions by means of balloons, air-ships and aeroplanes.

The communication troops are armed like the infantry.

The transport service (Train) supplies every kind of column of the army with bridge materials, food, ammunition, etc. Its weapons are swords, carbines and revolvers.

It is not worth while here to enter into the question of uniforms. In time of peace the blue coats and red collars of the infantry, the varied colored attilas and fur caps of the hussars, the helms with the flying eagles of the guards, the tresses, the gleaming epaulettes, the scarves, the waving plumes, are all interesting enough, especially to the other sex; but in war that is all laid aside. In order to be as invisible as possible to the enemy all categories of troops wear the same ashen gray—a comparatively recent adaptation of the principle of protective coloring.

Mountain Earthworks

In the German army the cavalry is merely an adjunct of the infantry. It is the infantry which decides battles—not the cavalry, not even the artillery. However, the infantry of to-day is something very different from the infantry of the eighteenth and even from that of a great part of the nineteenth century. German military writers acknowledge that the world learned new tactics from the sharpshooters and riflemen of the American war of the rebellion. The whole modern battle formation rests on the idea of giving more play to the individual. In spite of the technical progress that has made of armies great machines, more weight than ever before is laid on quick judgment, on good shooting, on physical bravery and endurance. I know that an idea quite contrary to this prevails, that many consider war reduced to the art of setting off the greatest quantities of explosives within a given time. But this is very far from the truth. The battles of the past were of much shorter duration than are those of the present. Wagram was won in two hours, Mukden took three days.

Pursuit