American soldiers, arriving on the Western Front in the fourth year of the War, feel themselves in very much the same position as the self-conscious adventurer described above.
Ever since—in some cases, before—our country came in, we have been schooling ourselves for the day when we should find ourselves Over Here, among veteran soldiers. Methods have varied, of course. Some of us have followed every turn of the operations in official summaries and technical articles. To such, the War has been a glorified game, we will say, of scientific football. Others—Miss Sissy Smithers, for instance—have educated themselves upon more popular lines—from the Sunday newspapers, or illustrated magazines of the domestic variety, in which healthy patriotism and “heart interest” are not fettered by any petty considerations of technical possibility.
Over here, Disillusionment awaits both these enthusiasts. The student of tactics soon realizes the difference between fighting a battle in imagination and in reality. Imagination cannot bring home to any human brain the extent to which the chess-board dispositions of modern strategy are tempered by the actualities of modern fighting—in other words, by the strain upon the human machine. All the five senses are affected—hearing, by the appalling din; seeing, by the spectacle of a whole group of human beings blown to shreds; smelling, by the reek of gas and explosives; touching, by the feel of dead men’s faces everywhere under your hand in the darkness; and tasting, by the unforgettable flavour of meat in the mouth after forty-eight hours’ continuous fighting in an atmosphere of human blood. The War is going to be won, not by the strategists, but by the man who can endure these things most steadfastly.
Miss Sissy Smithers need not be taken so seriously. He may be disappointed at first to find that Red Cross nurses follow their calling in Base Hospitals and not in No Man’s Land; and that performing dogs, loaded with secret despatches and medical comforts, are not such a prominent feature of modern warfare as the lady novelist would have us believe. But no enterprise, however grim, was ever the worse for a touch of glamour. Sissy will soon settle down.
Still, we have come to school knowing more than most new boys—far more, indeed, than our seasoned French and British companions knew when they embarked upon their martial education. The American soldier takes the field to-day, thanks to the recorded experiences of others, with a serviceable knowledge of the routine of trench warfare. Gas is no surprise to him, and he is familiar with the tactical handling of bombs, machine guns, and trench-mortars.
Up to date, however, we have not by any means drunk deep of warlike experience, for the good reason that the authorities are breaking us in by degrees. We are now in trenches, holding what is described as a quiet sector of the Line, recently taken over from the French, and hitherto very lightly held.
For the past two years, the Intelligence people tell us, the trenches opposite have been manned by only one German to every four yards of front. Eddie Gillette has already announced that when he has finished doing what he came out here to do the number of Germans opposite may be the same, but the method of distribution will be different. “Not one Dutchman to four yards,” he explains, “but a quarter of a Dutchman to every one yard. Yes, sir!”
Every Army has its own system of conducting trench warfare, founded largely upon national characteristics. The Germans, it used to be said, hold their trenches with machine guns, the British with men, the French with artillery. Certainly in nineteen-fifteen, when stationary warfare was the order of the day upon the Western Front, the Germans kept few men in the front trenches—except perhaps at night—leaving the line very much to the protection of barbed wire and machine guns, the latter laid and trained in such a fashion as to create if need be a continuous and impenetrable horizontal lattice-work of bullets in front of every section of the line. The British, having at that time more men than munitions—a battalion was lucky if it possessed four Vickers guns and a single trench-mortar—filled their trenches with as many defenders as they would hold, and trusted, not altogether vainly, to the old British tradition of rapid rifle fire and close work with the bayonet to keep the line intact.
The French temperament called for more elasticity than this. The one thing a Frenchman hates to do in warfare is keep still. He prefers active counter-measures to dogged resistance. So in nineteen-fifteen, whenever a sector of the French trenches was heavily bombarded, the garrison was promptly withdrawn to a position of comparative safety—where, the story goes, they seized the opportunity to cook an extra-elaborate dinner. If the Germans followed up their bombardment with an infantry attack, that attack was met mainly with an intensive barrage from that amazingly rapid and accurate piece of scrap-iron, the soixante-quinze field gun. When the German attack fizzled out, as it usually did, the incident ended, and the French infantry returned to their place in the line. But if it penetrated the barrage and occupied the French trenches, the Frenchman finished his coffee, adjusted Rosalie, his bayonet, and prized Brother Boche out of his new quarters.
But all that was in nineteen-fifteen. In warfare your best teacher is your opponent. Nowadays we have, on each side of No Man’s Land, assimilated one another’s methods. Moreover, trench warfare of to-day has developed into a fluid affair. For one thing, trench-mortars, tanks, and intensive artillery bombardments can make hay of the most elaborate defensive works. You can no longer surround yourself with barbed wire and go comfortably to bed, secure in the knowledge that your opponent cannot possibly get at you without a long and laborious artillery preparation. In nineteen-sixteen, before the First Battle of the Somme, British and French guns pounded the German trenches night and day for three weeks. It was a great pounding, but it cannot be said that the subsequent attack came as a surprise to the enemy. Under such prolonged and pointed attentions even a German is apt to suspect that something is in the wind. But to-day we have other methods. Three minutes of pandemonium from massed trench-mortars—a rush of tanks—and your defences are gone and the Philistine is upon you.