Bird’s-eye View Berlin Parade Grounds
The great military authority, Bernhardi, in an article in Das Jahr 1913, points out various ways in which military science has developed since the Franco-Prussian War and shows how completely we have had to abandon many of the conceptions gained by a study of earlier campaigns. Responsible in the main for the changes are the increased size of the armies and the new technical inventions of our age.
Arrival of Recruits
Almost all the states of continental Europe have gone over to the principle of universal military service, with the result that the armies are greater now in time of peace than ever before in time of war, and that when mobilization is called for and the reserves are summoned, the number of men in the field amounts to millions. The first result has been that far other means of transporting and concentrating such masses have to be employed than used to be the case and that networks of railroads have had to be built for purely strategic purposes. In the maneuvers that were to have taken place this coming autumn at Münster in Germany it had been intended to make a record in the matter of quick transportation and to dispose of 120,000 men in the course of a single morning without interrupting the regular passenger traffic. The old method of victualing armies, too, has had to be changed, for it is impossible for such hordes to nourish themselves by what they chance to find in the enemy’s country. Problems of another kind have arisen. Modern armies are composed of regulars and reservists alike: the reservists are not so hardened as the regulars and often not so efficient, so that it has become a custom to distribute them in such a way as to achieve the best results. As a rule, the regulars must be spared for decisive actions and reservists must occasionally be sacrificed, apparently needlessly. There may be cases, for instance, where the reserves must expose themselves to a murderous fire while the regulars are engaged in the more difficult but less dangerous task of cutting off the enemy’s line of retreat.
The Field Kitchen
Technical improvements, such as the longer range and quicker fire of the guns, swifter means of communication and of signaling and the like, not to speak of other considerations due to experience, have so changed the old tactics that a line of battle is now more than ten times as long as it was only a few years ago. At Sadowa, with 215,000 men, the Austrians had a front of only 10 kilometers; at Mukden the attacking line of the Japanese, who had only 170,000 men, extended for 110 kilometers. “The broken line,” writes Bernhardi, “is to-day the only battle formation of the infantry.” To-day, officers and men fight in trenches and take every advantage of the inequalities of the ground; in 1870 it was considered disgraceful to take such advantages and the officers stood erect in the most deadly fire. In consequence of the length of the lines a check in one quarter is no longer so serious a matter as it used to be; a modern battle is a succession of single engagements of which the victor only needs to win a good majority. The commander no longer takes up a position, as Napoleon did at Leipzig, where he can oversee the whole field of operations; the best place for him is some railroad junction or central telephone station, with wireless and ordinary telegraph equipment, where messages can constantly be sent and received, and to and from which he can despatch troops, automobiles, motor-wagons or aeroplanes. One of the chief modern problems is supplying sufficient ammunition for quick-firing guns—the baggage trains must not be so long as to hinder the advance of the troops, yet where there are many guns and each shoots off hundreds of shots a minute, great quantities of ammunition are needed.
