With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

Lord Cavan, who for many months commanded the famous Guards Brigade in the war, told me of an Irish Guardsman who killed a dozen or so of Germans with a spade. The Irishman was going up a narrow communication trench when a German rushed out round a traverse. The Guardsman shot him with the last cartridge in his magazine. He was so cramped for space that he did not know whether he could spare time to load again, as he knew that other Germans were behind the first. So, quick as thought, he called to a comrade who was working on the parapet of the trench above him. “Show us your spade here, Mike!” The other handed down his spade just as a second German came round the traverse. The Guardsman promptly felled him with a blow that would have killed an ox, and went on “slipping it across them” (as he would have said himself) as fast as they emerged. I believe that in this way he actually accounted for ten or more Germans. The rifle and bayonet will play their part again when the time comes for an advance over a broad front. For the rush through a narrow breach the knife and bomb are the weapons.

Siege warfare will not be the last word in this war. Opinions vary, but for me there will be no peace of the kind that will banish the German peril for generations to come unless the German lines can be broken and the enemy hurled back in disorder from the North of France far back into Belgium, and maybe beyond. Once the German line is pierced, if only the breach be wide and deep enough, we return to the Bewegungskrieg, which is the only kind of fighting in this war for which both sides have a standard of comparison in previous campaigns, and for which consequently the Germans are better equipped than the Allies.

The weapon of the Bewegungskrieg, as we learnt in the fighting at the outset of the war, and of the Stellungskrieg as well, as often as the armies have “got moving,” is undoubtedly the machine-gun. The machine-gun, or, generally speaking, the automatic gun that fires several hundred shots a minute, is, I believe, the principal contribution which this war is destined to make to military science. Just as the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 introduced the needle-gun, and the Franco-Prussian War the chassepot rifle, and the South African War was the war of the magazine-rifle, so the present war will be known as the war of the automatic gun. When the German General Staff sits down to write its official history of the Great War, it will be able to attribute the greater part of the success that German arms may have achieved to its foresight in accumulating an immense stock of machine-guns, and in studying the whole theory and tactics of this comparatively new weapon before any other army in the world became alive to its paramount importance.

When Germany went to war she is believed to have had a very large supply of machine-guns in her army. They were assembled together in a Machine-Gun Corps, on the principle of our Royal Artillery, and the machine-guns were attached to divisions and brigades, with their own divisional and brigade commanders on the same lines as our divisional artillery. I do not know how many machine-guns the British Army possessed, but it was a negligible quantity, somewhere about two per battalion. We had studied the handling and mechanism of the gun and its tactical employment, but had not accustomed the army generally to its usage. Our machine-guns are attached to battalions, and may on occasion be handed over by the brigade to the brigade machine-gun officer for a special emergency. In the German Army, however, the machine-guns are at the immediate disposal of the Division Commander, just as the artillery is. Their utility is thus greatly enhanced, for, instead of being operated according to strictly local requirements, their disposition is governed by the needs of the general situation. An example will best illustrate the value of the German system.

The war correspondent of the Frankfürter Zeitung, attached to the German General Headquarters in the West, in a despatch dealing with the operations of the German Army cavalry (Heereskavallerie) during the advance on Paris and the retreat from the Marne, mentions that a Jäger battalion, sent out to check the British advance, was able to put no fewer than twenty-one machine-guns into line on a front of 1,000 yards against a single British battalion, which as a result was practically destroyed.

The machine-gun has been of priceless advantage to the Germans in this war. If they made good use of it during their advance through Belgium towards Paris, they came to rely almost entirely upon it when their advance was checked and they found themselves called upon to remain on the defensive for many months on end. In all the campaigns of this war it has been the same story. On the western and eastern fronts, in Gallipoli, in Africa, the machine-gun has been the deadliest foe of the attacking force, because the German, possessing this weapon in far greater numbers than his opponent, has been able by its means to increase the fire-power of his battalions to such a point as to give him actually the effect of superior numbers. As the offensive is the Allies’ only key to success, our salvation lies in the machine-gun, which Sir Ian Hamilton, in his historic Dardanelles despatch, lachrymosely calls “that invention of the devil”—thousands of machine-guns—but also the automatic rifle.

The only factor that furnishes anything like a certain basis for calculation as to the date of the conclusion of the war is the number of fighting-men available for each of the different belligerents. Of all the supplies required for making war, the supply of men is limited. The Germans recognized this sooner than any of their opponents. In the machine-gun they had a machine that does the work of many men. They reckoned that a machine-gun in a trench on the Western front would release at least a score of men for one of their great thrusts in the Eastern theatre of war. They took measures accordingly.

Time and time again we came up against this deadly weapon. The only bar that stood between us and Lille on that fateful March 10, after the capture of Neuve Chapelle, were the German strongholds, bristling with machine-guns, along the Moulin de Piètre Road and the fringe of the Bois de Biez. On the Fromelles ridge, at La Quinque Rue, at Hooge in May and June, it was the German machine-guns that stemmed our further advance after our first objectives had been gained and beat us to earth, while the German heavy artillery were getting the range of the new positions and the bombers were creeping forward to drive us back.

The machine-gun is the multiplication of the rifle. The Vickers gun fires up to 550 shots a minute. This is also about the average performance of the German gun. To silence this multiplication of fire you must outbid it, you must beat it down with an even greater multiplication. This is where the difficulty comes in for an attacking force. The machine-gun, with its mounting and ammunition and spare parts, is neither light in weight nor inconspicuous to carry. When the infantry has rushed a trench after the preliminary bombardment, the machine-guns have to be carried bodily forward over a shell and bullet swept area, where the machine-gun detachment is a familiar and expected target for the German marksmen. This is where the automatic rifle is destined to play a part—a part so decisive, in my opinion, as may win the war for us.

The automatic rifle is a light machine gun. In appearance it resembles an ordinary service rifle, with rather a complicated and swollen-looking magazine. It is not water-cooled like the machine-gun, but air-cooled, and is therefore not absolutely reliable for long usage, as it inevitably becomes heated after much firing. It will fire, however, up to 300 odd shots a minute, and can be regarded as the ideal weapon for beating down German machine-gun fire and checking the advance of bombers while the heavier but more reliable machine-guns are coming up.