My Year of the Great War

by Frederick Palmer

A factor overlooked, but even more significant than training or staff work, was that what might be called martial team-play had become an instinct with the continental peoples through the necessity of their situation. This the Japanese also possess. It is the right material ready to hand for the builder. Not that it is the kind of material one admires; but it is the right material for making a war-machine. One had only to read the expert military criticism in the British and the American press at the outset of the war to realise how vague was the truth of the continental situation to the average Englishman or American—but not to the trained British staff.

So that little British Expeditionary Force, in ratio of number one to twenty or thirty of the French army, crossed the Channel to help save Belgium. Gallantry it had worthy of the brightest chapter in the immortal history of its regiments from Quebec to Kandahar, from Waterloo to South Africa, Guards and Hussars, Highlanders and Lowlanders, kilts and breecks, Connaught Rangers and Royal Fusiliers, Duke of Wellingtons and Prince of Wales’ Own, come again to Flanders. The best blood of England was leading Tommy Atkins. Whatever British aristocracy is or is not, it never forgets its duty to the England of its fathers. It is never ingrate to its fortune. The time had come to go out and die for England, if need be, and these officers went as their ancestors had gone before them, as they would go to lectures at Oxford, to the cricket field and the polo field, in outward phlegm, but with a mighty passion in their hearts.

The Germans affected to despise this little army. It had not been trained in the mass tactics which hurl columns of flesh forward to gain tactical points that have been mauled by artillery fire. You do not use mass tactics against Boers, nor against Afridis or Filipinos. It is difficult to combine the two kinds of efficiency. Those who were on the march to the relief of the Peking legations recall how the Germans were as ill at ease in that kind of work as the American and British were at home. It made us misjudge the Germans and the Germans misjudge us when they thought of us as trying to make war on the Continent of Europe. A small, mobile, regular army, formed to go over seas and march long distances, was to fight in a war where millions were engaged and a day’s march would cover an immense stretch of territory in international calculations of gain and loss.

For its own purposes, the British Expeditionary Force was well-nigh a perfect instrument. As quantity of ammunition was an important factor in transport in the kind of campaign which it was prepared for, its guns were the most accurate on a given point and its system of fire adapted to that end; but the French system of fire, with plentiful ammunition from near bases over fine roads, was better adapted for a continental campaign.

To the last button that little army was prepared. Man for man and regiment for regiment, I should say it was the best force that ever fired a shot in Europe; this without regard to national character. As England must make every regular soldier count and as she depended upon the efficiency of the few rather than on numbers, she had trained her men in musketry. No continental army could afford to allow its soldiers to expend the amount of ammunition on the target range that the British had expended. Only by practise can you learn how to shoot. This gives the soldier confidence. He stays in his trench and keeps on shooting because he knows that he can hit those advancing figures and that this is his best protection. The more I learn, the more I am convinced that the Germans ought to have got the British Expeditionary Force; and the Germans were very surprised that they did not get it. With their surprise developed a respect for British arms, reported by all visitors to Germany.

Mr. Thomas Atkins, none other, is the hero of that retreat from Mons. The first statue raised in London after the war ought to be of him. If there had been five hundred thousand of him in Belgium at the end of the second week in August, Brussels would now be under the Belgian flag. Like many other good things in this world, including the French army, there were not enough of him. Many a company on that retreat simply got tired of retreating, though orders were to fall back. It dug a trench and lay down and kept on firing—accurately, in the regular, business-like way, reinforced by the “stick it” British character—until killed or engulfed. This held back the flood long enough for the remainder of the army to retire.

Not all the generalship emanated from generals. I like best that story of the cross-roads where, with Germans pressing hard on all sides, two columns in retreat fell in together, uncertain which way to go. With confusion developing for want of instructions, a lone exhausted staff officer who happened along took charge and standing at the junction in the midst of shell-fire told every doubting unit what to do, with one-two-three alacrity of decision. His work finished, he and his red cap disappeared, and I never could find any one who knew who he was.

After the retreat and after the victory of the Marne, what was England’s position? The average Englishman had thought that England’s part in the alliance was to send a small army to France and to take care of the German fleet. England’s fleet was her first consideration; that must be served; France’s demand for rifles and supplies must be attended to before the British demand; Serbia needed supplies; Russia needed supplies; a rebellion threatened in South Africa; the Turks threatened the invasion of Egypt. England had to spread her energy out over a vast empire with an army that had barely escaped annihilation. Every soldier who fought must be supplied over seas. German officers put a man on a railroad train and he detrained near the front. Every British soldier had to go aboard a train and then a ship and then disembark from the ship and go aboard another train. Every article of ordnance, engineering, medical supply, food supply, must be handled four times, while in Germany they need be handled but twice. Any railway traffic manager will understand what this means. Both the British supply system and the medical corps were marvels.

Germany was stronger than the British public thought. Germany and Austria could put at the front in the first six months of the war practically double the number which the Allies could maintain. Russia had multitudes to draw from in reserve, but the need was multitudes at the front. There she was only as strong as the number she could feed and equip. In the first year of the war England suffered 380,000 casualties on land, six times the number of bayonets that she had at Mons. All this wastage must be met before she could begin to increase her forces. The length of line on the Western front that she was holding was not the criterion of her effort. The French who shared with the British that terrible Ypres salient realised this.

Aside from the regulars she had the Territorials, who are much the same as our National Guard and varied in equality in the same way. Native Indian troops were brought to France to face the diabolical shell-fire of modern guns, and Territorials went out to India to take the place of the British regulars, who were withdrawn for France. Every rifle that England could bring to the assistance of the French in their heroic stand was a rifle to the good.