I need not go into technical details about the French gun, though naturally all its secrets, including that of the famous liquid substance in its hydropneumatic brake, are well known to the Germans. For English readers it is enough to say that its muzzle diameter (75 mm.) is a trifle more than 3 inches, or one-thirty-third of its length, which is therefore just under 9 feet, that it fires two kinds of shells, a shrapnel shell of about 16 pounds, containing 300 balls, with a muzzle velocity of 1735 feet, and a high explosive shell of 11 pounds, containing 30 ounces of melinite, with a muzzle velocity of 1915 feet. These shells can be fired at the rate of thirty a minute, or about twice the rate possible for the 77 mm.
Its further superiority over the German gun the Soixante-Quinze owes, partly to the excellence of its débouchoir (the instrument by which the bursting point of the fuse is automatically regulated before the shell is put into the breech) and partly to the control of its liquid brake, which causes the gun to return after the recoil as nearly as possible to its exact original position. The Germans use a hand-débouchoir, which takes longer to manipulate and gives less accurate results, and because of its less powerful brake the aim of the 77 mm. has constantly to be readjusted.
The other chief French field guns are the 155 court, called the Rimailho after its inventor; the 120 long, a siege gun converted into a field gun; the 120 court; the 105, which is like a larger 75, and fires a shell of thirty-six pounds; and the 65, a mountain gun, which can be carried in four pieces on the backs of mules, and has done excellent work in the fighting in the Vosges. In English measurements the diameters of the shells fired by these different pieces are approximately: 65 mm., 2½ inches; 75 mm., 3 inches; 105 mm., 4¼ inches; 120 mm., 4¾ inches; and 155 mm., 6 inches.
Before they knew by actual experience what the Soixante-Quinze could do the Germans nicknamed it “the cigar-holder.” Now it has become (it was what they called it in Lorraine when we were there) “a barbarous and disgusting engine of war,” and the French artillerymen “the black devils.” Learn a lesson from the German gunner. Whereas he complains of “barbarous engines” and “black devils,” the French soldier greets his various projectiles as la grosse or la petite marmite, or “the slow-coach,” or “the whistler,” or “the train,” just as our own men talk of Black Marias and Jack Johnsons. The contrast is significant. For it means that the Germans fear the French shells more than the French fear theirs. If the difference in the mental attitude is well founded, hardly anything could augur better for our eventual success. And it is. The ideal of Krupp, as of all Greater-Germanists, is the Kolossal. But the Frenchman is the better gunner. He not only has in the Soixante-Quinze a finer weapon, with better-regulated fuses, but he is incomparably quicker in serving it, and has a disconcerting way in hot actions of placing his battery in position (in an incredibly short space of time), firing the appointed number of rounds of spreading or direct fire, and then limbering up and departing to fresh woods and pastures new before the Germans have discovered where he is.
It is not a bad thing to have a gun which hits as hard and as quick as Bombardier Wells, and battery commanders as elusive as the Scarlet Pimpernel. For the combination means that the Soixante-Quinze and its sister field guns do the maximum of damage to the enemy with the minimum risk of destruction for themselves. No wonder the French people are proud of their artillery and work for it with unbounded enthusiasm. And no wonder—for a different reason—that the British Mission which went to France towards the end of 1915 to study the production of ammunition were greatly impressed by the state of things which they found in the French workshops. There was, they reported, no loss of time, no trade-union restrictions, no limitation of profits, no objections raised by the workpeople, no difficulties created by the introduction, in practically all cases, of female labour, and no restrictions on the women working the same hours as the men “with a good-will which is most impressive,” and, in short, everything done to increase production. “As the war has proceeded,” says the report of the Mission, “the French nation has settled down with determination and a feeling of set purpose to the fulfilment of the task allotted to it. There is no question but that the nation is at war, and the dominant sentiment, not only of the men but also of the women, is to carry the war to a successful termination. Everything else is subordinated to this determination.”
In that spirit the French nation and the armies of the east settled down to the second period of the war—the struggle of the trenches. It was not so picturesque as what had gone before, not so pregnant with possibilities of thrilling victories or saddening but stimulating defeats, not so anxious, not so inspiring. It was utterly foreign to the genius of the French soldier. Morning after morning the official communiqués hardly ever varied. Rien de nouveau sur le front occidental.
And yet, though there was nothing new there was always the same thing—always suffering and exposure and wounds and death, and always fresh names added to the roll of honour. And sometimes, though one never knew any of the glorious details till even the men who had taken part in them had almost forgotten about them, there were more decided efforts to make headway and bloodier encounters than the minor struggles to gain a hundred yards of trench, wasting and deadly as that daily routine was bound to be. When the historians get to work they will give us, I suppose, a real record of all this trench warfare. They will tell us how the different battalions and regiments fared on different parts of the line, how one charged brilliantly across fifty yards of open ground and barbed wire and drove the enemy out of the opposite trench, only to be enfiladed by a murderous fire of mitrailleuses and forced to retire to their old trench, leaving half their men behind them, and all for nothing. They will tell of how another repelled a night attack with such gallantry and vigour that they drove the enemy helter-skelter before them and occupied after half an hour’s work a position which they had been sitting in front of for months, harassed all the time by the daily wastage caused by snipers, gas attacks, hand-grenades, bombs of all kinds, trench mortars, Minenwerfers, and all the other improved prehistoric death-dealing devices which have sprung into being from the mud and chalk and solid rock of the trenches. Then we shall know the names of the gallant living and the gallant dead, and many other details of intense interest which at present it is impossible to know and still more to realize.
But for a general description I doubt if any of them will give us anything much better than the following account, written by a German journalist, of the wearing monotony of the life of the men at the front. I give it partly for that reason, but chiefly because I think it is useful for all of us to realize that French and English soldiers are not the only ones who, however brave and however cheerful they are, must sometimes be appalled by the unendingness of the struggle. There are two sides to the nightmare of the trenches, just as there are to the moral effect of shell-fire and the horror of the horizon. And sometimes non-combatants—I do not say the soldiers—are apt to forget the way in which it may be and must be affecting the enemy. Let them listen to this German, writing from the other side of the line:—
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“And the siege goes on.