The Two Maps of Europe, and Some Other Aspects of the Great War

by Hilaire Belloc

Not all of the questions, military or political, have as yet been solved by experience. Many of them are, however, already partially solved, some wholly solved. And we may consider them usefully one by one.

(1) The value of permanent fortification.

Perhaps the most striking lesson of the war, and the one which is already conclusively taught by its progress, is the fact that modern permanent works, as we have hitherto known them at least, are dominated by modern siege artillery, and in particular by the mobile large howitzer using the last form of high explosive. It is here important to give the plain facts upon a matter which has from its suddenness and dramatic character given birth to a good many lessons.

Modern fortification has gone down after a very short resistance to howitzer fire, throughout the western field of the campaign. In general, if you can get the big, modern, mobile howitzer up to striking distance of modern permanent work, it batters that work to pieces within a period which will hardly extend over a week, and may be as short as forty-eight hours.

It is not a question of tenacity or courage. The greatest tenacity and the greatest courage can do nothing with a work that has been reduced to ruins, and in which there is no emplacement for a gun. So much is quite certain. But we must not run away with the idea either that this is the end of fortification for the future; temporary mobile batteries established outside the old permanent works will shield a garrison for an indefinite time. Nor is it true that the Germans have in this field any particular advantage save over the Russians, who are weak in their heavy artillery and have limited powers of increasing it. It will be discovered as the war proceeds that the Western armies are here in the same boat with the Germans.

It is true that the Germans have a larger howitzer than the French and the English. They have a few 420 millimetre howitzers, that is, guns of a calibre between 16 and 17 inches. But this gun is almost too large to use. What has done the work everywhere is the 11-inch howitzer, and a gun of much the same size is in possession of the French. Only hitherto the siege work has fallen to the German invaders. When and if the rôles are reversed, German permanent work will be just as vulnerable to French howitzer fire. And as for the abolition of fortification in future we need not look for that.

It is probable that the system of large, permanent enclosed works will give way to a system of narrow, prepared, parallel trenches connected by covered ways, which, by offering too small a target for accurate fire from a distance, and by being doubled and redoubled one behind the other, will be able to hold out far longer than the larger works which bore the brunt of the present war. But that the defensive will devise some means of meeting the new and unexpected powers of the offensive we may be certain, upon the analogy of all past warfare.

(2) In the matter of formation the surprise of the war has undoubtedly been the success of another German theory, to wit, the possibility of leading modern short-trained troops, against enormous losses, in close formation. Everywhere outside Germany that was doubted, and the Germans have proved that their initial contention was right, at least in their own case. But there is another aspect of this question which has as yet by no means been proved one way or the other, and that is, whether the very heavy losses this use of close formation entails are worth while in a campaign not immediately successful at the outset. We are not yet able to say how far troops once submitted to such violence can be brought to suffer it again—or how long after—nor are we able to say what effect this lavish expenditure of men has towards the end of a campaign if its primary object, immediate initial success, fails.

(3) In the matter of aircraft, four things have come out already.

(a) Men will engage each other in the air without fear and they will do so continually, appalling as the prospect seemed in its novelty before the outbreak of this war.