With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

All these trenches have to be as deep as a man’s waist, and many as a man’s height. Most of them must have a timber flooring to make them passable in wet weather, and sometimes little bridges have to be constructed to cross the innumerable irrigation ducts and ditches which seam the fertile fields in the region of our army. There must be hundreds of miles of planks in our trenches in Flanders. If you consider that each plank has to be cut and fashioned to fit in its place, after the trench itself has been dug deep enough to be lined, you can form some kind of estimate of the enormous amount of labour which has gone to the welding of our line. As I have trudged down communication trenches behind the regimental guide taking me up to the firing-line, I have often had a sort of mental vision of a vast mountain of energy, as it were, a great sea of sweat and blood, representing the toil and lives expended in the digging of these deep, secure cuttings which are the straight paths leading to the glory of the fighting-line.

I do not think it would be going too far to say that these modern trenches are impregnable to direct assault. Indeed, the experience of the war of positions has been to show that neither side can succeed on the offensive unless the trenches have been destroyed, and not always then. Well protected in their deep earthworks, the men with the magazine-rifle and the machine-gun can beat off even such tremendous attacks en masse as the Japanese essayed with success, though at awful cost, in the siege of Port Arthur. As long as the trenches endure they are impregnable. Their impregnability only vanishes when they cease to exist, when they have been destroyed by shell-fire.

Three epochs of war meet in the war of positions. We have returned to methods and weapons of war which in our proud ignorance we thought to have discarded from our military experience for ever. The short broad knife of the primitive savage, the bomb and sap of the soldiers of Wellington, the machine-gun and heavy howitzer of the scientific inventor of the twentieth century, are the weapons of this war, a combination of brute force and man-slaying machinery which is surely a crowning dishonour to our civilization. In this siege warfare the magazine-rifle, which we believed to be the last word in military progress, has fallen from its place. High explosive, either in giant shells hurled from enormously powerful guns or concealed in mines in the bowels of the earth, to shatter the enemy in his skilfully contrived positions, the bomb and knife for the infantry who sweep forward to complete his discomfiture cowering in his battered trench, the automatic rifle and machine-gun to mow down survivors still holding out in their redoubts, with machine-guns playing on the captured position—these are die Forderung des Tages, the demand of the moment, in a phrase of Prince Bülow’s which was once a political catchword in Germany.

This siege warfare is a war of force against force, the force of machinery dealing ponderous, mighty blows against a wall of steel, smashing, smashing, smashing, always in the same place, until the line is bent, then broken, then the force of man coming into play in a wild onrush of storming infantry, with their primitive passions aflame, surging forward amid clouds of green and yellow and red smoke, bombing and slashing their way through the breach their machines have made. Not the strategist but the engineer is trumps in this warfare, this Armageddon in which, for all our vaunted civilization, we have returned to the darkness of the Dawn of Time.

What I have written of the trenches above will suffice to show, I think, that only the methods of siege warfare—that is, heavy guns and mines—can be used against them with any hope of success. High-explosive shells in unlimited quantities are necessary to keep the hammer pounding away at one given spot. To break a path for our infantry through the weakly held German trenches round Neuve Chapelle we had many scores of guns pouring in a concentrated fire on a front of 1,400 yards for a period of thirty-five minutes. In the operations round Arras the French are said to have fired nearly 800,000 shells in one day. Even this colossal figure was surpassed by the expenditure of high-explosive shells by the German and Austrian armies in their successful thrust against Przemysl. Our bombardment at Neuve Chapelle was, in the main, effective, though barbed-wire entanglements in front of part of the German trenches were not cut, and heavy casualties were thus caused to the infantry when they advanced. For the most part, however, we found the German trenches obliterated, the little village a smoking heap of ruins, and those Germans who survived dazed and frightened amid piles of torn corpses. If this enormous concentration of guns was required to blast a path of 1,400 yards with a thirty-five minute bombardment, what a gigantic concentration of artillery, what a colossal expenditure of ammunition, will be required to drive a wedge several miles deep through positions which the Germans have spent three seasons in strengthening and consolidating!

From “J’ai Vu.”
The War of Bomb and Knife: French soldiers with masks and steel helmets.

I make bold to prophesy (fully aware how dangerous this practice is in military matters) that, when the moment arrives for a resolute offensive in the West, the preliminary bombardment will not be a question of minutes or even of hours, but of days on end, an endless inferno of fire and steel and smoke in which no man will live. For this is a war of extermination.

My friend and colleague (if he will allow me to style him thus), “Eye-Witness,” remarked in one of his letters from the front on the bizarre circumstance that, during the lulls in the operations, the principal fighting went on in the air and beneath the ground. Sapping, which has played so notable a part in the war of positions, aims at a local effect as contrasted with bombardment, which covers a much wider area. Sapping, however, possesses the prime and obvious advantage that it can go forward without the enemy’s knowledge, whereas anything like a heavy bombardment will always awake the enemy’s suspicions, and enable him to prepare for the attack which he guesses to be impending.

Secrecy is the essence of sapping. The army does not like talking about its mines. You will never find in an official communiqué anything but the vaguest indication as to the region in which “we made a sap, laid a mine, and destroyed the enemy’s position.” An important branch of sapping and mining is the listening for the sound of the enemy’s subterranean operations in special “listening galleries” running out at intervals from the main sap. A precise indication of the locality where a mine was exploded, or rather of the trench from which the shaft of the sap was sunk, might not only intimate to the enemy that our sappers and miners were active in that particular sector, but might give him valuable assistance in testing the efficacy of any special apparatus or means he employs for listening underground. As far as human foresight may judge, this book will appear before the war has reached its conclusion, and therefore I must refrain, as in the case of much else I should like to write, but may not under the eye of my friend the Censor, who will scan these pages, from enlarging on the splendid daring, the amazing resourcefulness, and the inexhaustible endurance of our sappers and miners in their subterranean galleries.