What to-day would be thought of a mechanical engineer who applied 1870 methods? Nothing; he would go bankrupt in six weeks if he started business on 1870 lines. This is exactly what the armies of 1914 did; they tactically went bankrupt because they were sufficiently big, or the area of operations was sufficiently small, to deny to them strategical movement. Could this have been foreseen? Given the numbers, given the weapons, and given the area of operations, a simple rule-of-three sum can be worked out, the answer to which is siege warfare and the tactics of which is the frontal attack of penetration;[38] yet every Field Service Regulations, in 1914, favoured envelopment and paid but a passing attention to trench warfare.
Inevitably the preordained tactics of penetration were forced on the contending parties, and human points were thrown over the parapets in handfuls; as if men, armed with a rifle and bayonet, who could only secure their existence by remaining underground, had any chance whatever of attaining a decisive victory by forsaking their shelters and facing weapons in the open which had previously forced them to earth. What was the result? The Germans failed at Ypres and Verdun; the French in the Champagne, at Verdun, and at Reims; and we at Neuve Chapelle, Loos, the Somme, Arras, and Passchendaele. Between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 casualties on one side of the balance sheet and a few square miles of uninhabitable ground on the other was the sum-total of these united endeavours, and all because no single army had, since 1870, realised the mechanical side of the science of war. In October, ten weeks after the war had opened, as the second chapter of this book has already related, the mechanical side was realised and a solution was found in the production of a chariot not so very dissimilar to that depicted on the “Victory Stele of Eannatum” of Lagash, 3,000 years B.C.—no very novel mechanical invention!
Time, a few months, was, however, requisite for the substitution of the petrol engine for the horses of the Assyrians, and as time could not be wasted other mechanical lapses were made good which might have well been foreseen had penetration and not envelopment been diagnosed as the leading tactical act of the war.
At first each contending nation in turn passed through its barbed-wire crisis, its gun shortage and its ammunition scandal. Millions of miles of wire were produced, thousands of guns were made, and ammunition was manufactured not by thousands of rounds, but by hundreds of thousands of tons. Had any one side been able to fire at the other, in September 1914, 100,000 tons in a couple of days, that side would have, probably, won the war. This is practically what happened at the Dunajec in 1915—the Russians were out-weaponed and consequently defeated.
On the Western Front, as the artillery competition was more or less mutual, stagnation became still more complete. In place of hurling men against uncut wire, shells were hurled instead, the bombardments being sufficiently long to enable the Germans to transport troops from the east of Poland to France in time to meet the assault. As the frontage of this assault was usually under ten miles, the total battle-front being over 500, the operation may be compared with that of attempting to take the life of a rhinoceros with a hat-pin. These tactics inevitably failed, not only through the impossibility of economically wearing away the enemy’s reserves, but on account of the impossibility of rapidly moving forward our own; for in the act of destroying wire, simultaneously did the guns create an area so difficult to move over that, had it been possible to advance the infantry, it would never have been possible to feed or supply them.
That stationary warfare should have increased in endurance as the gun-power of each side was multiplied was not necessary; this was clearly proved during the first two German battles of 1918. By this date, on all sides, had artillery attained its zenith, but the Germans, by threatening a front of nearly 250 miles—practically from the Channel to the Meuse—and then, after an intense bombardment lasting but a few hours, attacking on a comparatively wide front of some fifty miles, were able to develop their machine power to its fullest effect, that is to say, with the least opposition.
It took nearly three years from the date of the battle of the Dunajec before the use of the gun as a weapon of surprise was grasped; this will probably prove one of the most astounding tactical anomalies of the war. During this period two other weapons were devised which were destined in most respects to outclass the gun; the idea of both must have arisen at approximately the same time.
For years before the war the French and ourselves had been the leading mechanical engineers of Europe; in a similar respect the Germans were its leading chemists. Both, once a deadlock had arisen in the war, sought aid from the sciences they best understood during peacetime, and from which, had they understood war as a science, they would have looked for assistance years before its present outbreak.
The first stroke of genius delivered in the war was the use the Germans made of gas on April 22, 1915, and the second the use we made of tanks on September 15, 1916; both failed through want of a scientific grasp of war. They were tentative attacks, not delivered in strength or mass, yet curious to relate both were delivered by armies which, having been brought up in the 1870 school of thought, were fully conversant with the old precept of “superiority of numbers at the decisive point”; but, thinking in muscular terms only, they failed to apply it to the mechanical and chemical contrivances now placed at their disposal.
By many soldiers even to-day it is not realised that gas is a missile weapon following directly along the evolutionary path of all projectiles. A solid shot has to hit a target in order to injure it; as targets became difficult to see it became necessary to increase the radius of effect of the solid shot by replacing it by a hollow one filled with explosive. By means of this shell, a target might be missed by the shell yet hit by a flying fragment; the danger zone of the solid shot was increased many hundreds of times. Once targets not only become invisible but disappear into under-earth shelters, the shell has but little effect unless days are spent in bombardment, consequently the most effective manner of hitting them is to replace the shell by a gas inundation which will cover extensive areas and percolate into trenches and shelters. Gas has, in fact, multiplied the explosive radius of action of a shell indefinitely, and had it been used in quantity by the Germans before the Allies could protect themselves against it, the enemy might well have won the war.