My Second Year of the War | Page 6

to him and to every man under him, but
without allowing his feelings to interfere with his judgment of the
enemy. His opponent was seen without illusion, as soldier sees soldier.
To him his problem was not one of sentiment, but of military power.
He dealt in blows; and blows alone could win the war.
Simplicity and directness of thought, decision and readiness to accept
responsibility, seemed second nature to the man secluded in that little
chateau, free from any confusion of detail, who had a task--the greatest
ever fallen to the lot of a British commander--of making a raw army
into a force which could undertake an offensive against frontal
positions considered impregnable by many experts and occupied by the
skilful German Army. He had, in common with Sir William Robertson,
"a good deal of thinking to do"; and what better place could he have
chosen than this retreat out of the sound of the guns, where through his
subordinates he felt the pulse of the whole army day by day?
His favorite expression was "the spirit that quickeneth"; the spirit of
effort, of discipline, of the fellowship of cohesion of
organization--spreading out from the personality at the desk in this
room down through all the units to the men themselves. Though
officers and soldiers rarely saw him they had felt the impulse of his
spirit soon after he had taken command. A new era had come in France.
That old organization called the British Empire, loose and
decentrated--and holding together because it was so--had taken another
step forward in the gathering of its strength into a compact force.

II
VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL
German grand strategy and Verdun--Why the British did not go to
Verdun--What they did to help--Racial characteristics in armies--Father
Joffre a miser of divisions--The Somme country--Age-old tactics--If
the flank cannot be turned can the front be broken?--Theory of the
Somme offensive.
In order properly to set the stage for the battle of the Somme, which
was the corollary of that of Verdun, we must, at the risk of appearing to
thresh old straw, consider the German plan of campaign in 1916 when
the German staff had turned its eyes from the East to the West. During
the summer of 1915 it had attempted no offensive on the Western front,
but had been content to hold its solid trench lines in the confidence that
neither the British nor the French were prepared for an offensive on a
large scale.
Blue days they were for us with the British Army in France during July
and early August, while the official bulletins revealed on the map how
von Hindenburg's and von Mackensen's legions were driving through
Poland. More critical still the subsequent period when inside
information indicated that German intrigue in Petrograd, behind the
Russian lines which the German guns were pounding, might succeed in
making a separate peace. Using her interior lines for rapid movement of
troops, enclosed by a steel ring and fighting against nations speaking
different languages with their capitals widely separated and their armies
not in touch, each having its own sentimental and territorial objects in
the war, the obvious object of Germany's policy from the outset would
be to break this ring, forcing one of the Allies to capitulate under
German blows.
In August, 1914, she had hoped to win a decisive battle against France
before she turned her legions against Russia for a decision. Now she
aimed to accomplish at Verdun what she had failed to accomplish on
the Marne, confident in her information that France was exhausted. It
was von Hindenburg's turn to hold the thin line while the Germans

concentrated on the Western front twenty-six hundred thousand men,
with every gun that they could spare and all the munitions that had
accumulated after the Russian drive was over. The fall of Paris was
unnecessary to their purpose. Capitals, whether Paris, Brussels, or
Bucharest, are only the trophies of military victory. Primarily the
German object, which naturally included the taking of Verdun, was to
hammer at the heart of French defense until France, staggering under
the blows, her morale broken by the loss of the fortress, her supposedly
mercurial nature in the depths of depression, would surrender to
impulse and ask for terms.
After the German attacks began at Verdun all the world was asking
why the British, who were holding only sixty-odd miles of line at the
time and must have large reserves, did not rush to the relief of the
French. The French people themselves were a little restive under what
was supposed to be British inaction. Army leaders could not reveal
their plans by giving reasons--the reasons which are now obvious--for
their action or inaction. To some unmilitary minds the situation seemed
as simple as if Jones were attacked on