“An attack. The trench is turned inside out and left defenceless. The enemy comes. The air shrieks again as our shells soar off towards the enemy, leaving behind them a curtain of smoke, gases, and scraps of iron which cover the lost trench. No one can cross that zone.

“It is impossible for the enemy to bring up reinforcements. A counter-attack. The reserves advance, the enemy falls exhausted, and the trench is ours again. It is always the same thing, always as savage and always as heroic. France is besieged, and she keeps trying and trying to burst the girdle that surrounds her. The insignificant breach that her shells have made is closed again at once. It was like this in the month of May and in June on the heights of Lorette. This is just what happened, too, in September near Loos and Vimy and in Champagne. The French launched asphyxiating gases and bombs and millions and millions of shells against the ramparts of their besiegers, but it was in vain. Her regiments, though they were heroic and daring, broke themselves up without gaining any success. Our rampart resisted. Joffre and French, who had tried everything, recognized the impossibility of destroying this rampart, and retired despairing and worn out from the theatre of the war. Will Castelnau be able to discover the secret which Joffre and French have not been able to discover?...

“Telephones, automobiles, railways, long-range guns, and incalculable supplies of munitions have completely changed the methods of attack and defence. This war is less a war of men against men and courage against courage than a war between two industries. It is iron-mines, coal, chemical factories, huge furnaces, that conduct the war, and also the brains of inventors and manufacturers. The soldier of to-day is a courageous and intelligent machine who, with the life that he risks, works for this giant industry of the nations. Newer and more ingenious methods would be needed to destroy these dreadful engines. The enemy have not discovered them so far....

“A trench is taken and lost again, and that is all. Nothing important in the west. And the siege goes on. The rifles crack in the trenches, the revealing Bengal lights soar up into the thick night, the search-lights explore the darkness. The sentinels are crouching in the saps and look-outs. The aeroplanes fly and the batteries destroy each other. The pioneers work underground and the mines explode.

“The German soldier will stay at his post in spite of it all, faithful and magnificent. He will stay there as long as his country has need of him, or till he falls for her. Never, at any hour of the day or night, must we forget our valiant and wonderful soldiers.”

I think we most of us have an idea by now of what trench-life is like, even though we may not have seen it. Even if we have seen it we should find it difficult to better that description of the sameness and the horrors of it. There are points in it which are naturally coloured by the imagination and predisposition of the writer. Joffre and French have not retired, despairing and worn out, from the theatre of the war. Nor is France besieged. That is the grand mistake that he makes. By rights it should be, since Germany was the attacking party. But with the one exception of the abortive attempt to attack Calais, which was foiled by French’s contemptible little army, ever since the Germans were driven back to their trenches from the Marne to the Aisne, and from Nancy to the Seille, it is the Allies who have been the assailants. They have been met by a marvellous defence. There have been countless desperate sallies. But gradually, steadily, little by little, line upon line, trench by trench, they are sapping their way up to the earthen walls defended by the beleaguered garrison.

And the end is sure. The German garrison, for all their brave deeds and all the brave words of their Xenophon, are obviously getting downhearted. When you have spent a few hours in the trenches, with your head always below the level of the ground, with nothing above you but the sky and nothing in front of you or behind you but endless lines of mud or chalk, like the earth thrown up by the side of a newly-made grave, you can understand the wonderful descriptive truth of those four words, “That is their horizon.” To live for days and nights at a time—to live for long months with scanty intervals of cave-dwelling in holes scooped out in the sides of hills—down there in the newly made grave, on a floor of mud between walls of mud, with tiny loopholes for your only windows, through which you see a narrow segment of the landscape (always with another mud-bank in front of you) between the stalks of the grasses, with your eye on a level with their roots—that, quite apart from the question of shells and fighting, has been the life and the outlook of our men and the French soldiers at the front, ever since they began fifteen weary months ago to be a besieging force. But, as I have tried to show earlier in this book, the French do not think about their life as this German and his compatriots in the trenches obviously do—for the simple but all-sufficient reason that they are the besiegers and not the besieged.

For the French and the English, though for them, too, “that is their horizon,” can see beyond it, not perhaps the Angles of Mons, but decidedly the Angel of Victory.

CHAPTER XX
SIEGE WARFARE

The kind of modern siege in which the Allies are engaged, unlike the bombardment of a modern fortress, but like the sieges of old times, is bound to be a protracted affair. Still it is not likely that Germany will hold out as long as Troy did. From her geographical position, nearly surrounded by the host of enemies that her arrogance and self-seeking have arrayed against her, she was bound sooner or later to be the besieged party, unless she succeeded in crushing one or more of them by her first impetuous rush. It was not enough to drive them back. She had to annihilate them or at least to bring them to terms at the outset, and that she failed to do. Now, for the time being, she has created troublesome diversions in the Balkans and other parts of the world outside the main field of action, and has even opened a sally-port in the direction of Constantinople. But everywhere else her exits, and to a certain extent her entrances, are barred, north and south by the fleets of the Allies and the hitherto no-man’s land of two neutral states, on the east by the armies of Russia, and on the west by lines of trenches every bit as strong as her own.