France had at the beginning of the war 24 squadrillas, each of five or six machines, all scouts, of a speed from 50 to 70 miles an hour. M. Engerand says that “Germany entered the campaign with 1500 aeroplanes; we had on the front only 129.” Captive balloons had been abandoned as incapable of following the armies in the war of movement then almost exclusively contemplated. “Events proved our mistake,” says the official publication already quoted. “Enemy balloons followed the rapid advance of the armies of invasion. Ascending immediately behind the lines, they rendered the adversary indubitable services at the battle of the Marne. Then we hurriedly constituted balloon companies; and in 1915 we followed the German model of ‘sausage’ balloons.”
Mons and the Retreat, by Captain G. S. Gordon, a British Staff officer (London: Constable. 1918), contains some information of the Royal Flying Corps in August and September 1914. The Corps was founded in April 1912. At the beginning of the war, it included six squadrons, only four of which could be immediately mobilised, with a complement of 109 officers and 66 aeroplanes. These, however, did excellent work from the beginning. The writer says: “If we were better scouts and fighters, the Germans were better observers for the guns. The perfect understanding between the Taubes and the German gunners was one of the first surprises of the war.”
DE BLOCH’S PROPHECY AND FRENCH’S CONFESSION
[8] De Bloch, who had been a large railway contractor in the Russo-Turkish War, and a leading Polish banker, published the results of his experiences and researches, in six volumes, under the general title La Guerre, during the last years of the nineteenth century, and afterwards established a “Museum of War and Peace” at Lucerne to illustrate the subject. His chief thesis was that, owing to the technical development of military instruments and other factors, an aggressive war between States of nearly equal resources could not now give the results aimed at; and there is no longer any doubt that he foresaw the main track of military development as few soldiers did. The following sentences from a sketch of the writings and conversations of de Bloch, published by the present writer in 1902, will serve to show that he anticipated some of the governing characteristics of the Great War:
“The resisting power of an army standing on the defensive, equipped with long-range, quick-firing rifles and guns, from ten to twenty times more powerful than those of 1870 and 1877, expert in entrenching and the use of barbed wire and other obstacles, and highly mobile, is something quite different from that which Napoleon, or even later aggressors, had to face. Not only is it a much larger force, the manhood of a nation; it is also a body highly educated, an army of engineers. Its infantry lines and battery positions will be invisible. Reconnaissances will be easily prevented by protecting bands of sharpshooters; and no object of attack will offer itself to the invader till he has come within a zone of deadly fire. The most heavy and powerful shells, which are alone of use against entrenched positions, cannot be used in great number, or brought easily into action. Artillery shares the advantage of a defensive position. If the attackers have a local superiority, the defenders can delay them long enough to allow of an orderly retirement to other entrenched positions. The attacker will be forced to entrench himself, and so the science of the spade reduces battle to sieges. Battle in the open would mean annihilation; yet it is only by assault that entrenched positions can be carried.
“Warfare will drag on more slowly than ever. While an invading army is being decimated by sickness and wounds, and demoralised by the heavy loss of officers and the delay of any glorious victory, the home population will be sunk in misery by the growth of economic burdens, the stoppage of trade and industry. The small, elastic, and manageable army of the past could make quick marches, turning movements, strategical demonstrations in the widest sense. Massed armies of millions, like those of to-day, leaning on long-prepared defences, must renounce all the more delicate manifestations of the military art. Armies as they now stand cannot manœuvre, and must fight in directions indicated in advance. The losses of to-day would be proportionately greater than in past wars, if it were not for the tactical means adopted to avoid them. But the consequence of distance and dispersion is that victorious war—the obtaining of results by destroying the enemy’s principal forces, and thus making him submit to the conqueror’s will—can exist no more.”
With all its errors of detail, de Bloch’s picture, drawn when the aeroplane and the petrol motor-wagon, “wireless” and the field-telephone, poison-gas and barrage fire were unknown, was a true prophecy, and all the belligerents paid dearly for neglecting it.
For somewhat similar prognostications by a French officer, see Comment on pouvait prévoir l’immobilisation des fronts dans la guerre moderne (Paris: Berger-Levrault), being a summary of the writings of Captain Emile Mayer, whose first studies date from 1888.
[9] He adds: “and that if, in September, the Germans had learned their lesson, the Allies would never have driven them back to the Aisne.” This is a more disputable proposition. On the Sambre, the French were immediately driven back; on the Ourcq, the Germans held out for four days, and retired partly because their supply services had given out. To a very large extent they had certainly learned their lesson; and for nearly four years thereafter they bettered it on the Aisne hills.
The quotations are from the volume 1914, by Field-Marshal Viscount French of Ypres (London: Constable. 1919), an important body of evidence, passages of which, however, must be read critically. Lord French in his narrative repeatedly insists upon the slowness with which the need of a “transformation of military ideas,” owing to the factors named, was recognised. “It required the successive attempts of Maunoury, de Castelnau, Foch, and myself to turn the German flanks in the North in the old approved style, and the practical failure of these attempts, to bring home to our minds the true nature of war as it is to-day.”