My Second Year of the War | Page 8

the British staff in the course of its preparations or of the
French staff, which knew well enough that when the time came the
British Army would not be fastidious about paying the red cost of
victory. Four months later when British battalions were throwing
themselves against frontal positions with an abandon that their staff had
to restrain, the same sources of outside criticism, including superficial
gossip in Paris, were complaining that the British were too brave in
their waste of life. It has been fashionable with some people to criticize
the British, evidently under the impression that the British New Army
would be better than a continental army instantly its battalions were
landed in France.
Every army's methods, every staff's way of thinking, are characteristic
in the long run of the people who supply it with soldiers. The German
Army is what it is not through the application of any academic theory
of military perfection, but through the application of organization to

German character. Naturally phlegmatic, naturally disinclined to
initiative, the Germans before the era of modern Germany had far less
of the martial instinct than the French. German army makers, including
the master one of all, von Moltke, set out to use German docility and
obedience in the creation of a machine of singular industry and rigidity
and ruthless discipline. Similar methods would mean revolt in
democratic France and individualistic England where every man carries
Magna Charta, talisman of his own "rights," in his waistcoat pocket.
The French peasant, tilling his fields within range of the guns, the
market gardener bringing his products down the Somme in the morning
to Amiens, or the Parisian clerk, business man and workman--they are
France and the French Army. But the heart-strength and
character-strength of France, I think, is her stubborn, conservative,
smiling peasant. It is repeating a commonplace to say that he always
has a few gold pieces in his stocking. He yields one only on a critical
occasion and then a little grumblingly, with the thrift of the bargainer
who means that it shall be well spent.
The Anglo-Saxon, whose inheritance is particularly evident in
Americans in this respect, when he gives in a crisis turns extravagant
whether of money or life, as England has in this war. The sea is his and
new lands are his, as they are ours. Australians with their dollar and a
half a day, buying out the shops of a village when they were not in the
trenches, were astounding to the natives though not in the least to
themselves. They were acting like normal Anglo-Saxons bred in a rich
island continent. Anglo-Saxons have money to spend and spend it in
the confidence that they will make more.
General Joffre, grounded in the France of the people and the soil, was a
thrifty general. Indeed, from the lips of Frenchmen in high places the
Germans might have learned that the French Army was running short
of men. Joffre seemed never to have any more divisions to spare; yet
never came a crisis that he did not find another division in the toe of his
stocking, which he gave up as grumblingly as the peasant parts with his
gold piece.
A miser of divisions, Father Joffre. He had enough for Verdun as we

know--and more. While he was holding on the defensive there, he was
able to prepare for an offensive elsewhere. He spared the material and
the guns to coöperate with the British on the Somme and later he sent
to General Foch, commander of the northern group of French Armies,
the unsurpassed Iron Corps from Nancy and the famous Colonial
Corps.
It was in March, 1916, when suspense about Verdun was at its height,
that Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the group of British
Armies, and Sir Henry Rawlinson, who was to be his right-hand man
through the offensive as commander of the Fourth Army, went over the
ground opposite the British front on the Somme and laid the plans for
their attack, and Sir Henry received instructions to begin the elaborate
preparations for what was to become the greatest battle of all time. It
included, as the first step, the building of many miles of railway and
highway for the transport of the enormous requisite quantities of guns
and materials.
The Somme winds through rich alluvial lands at this point and around a
number of verdant islands in its leisurely course. Southward, along the
old front line, the land is more level, where the river makes its bend in
front of Péronne. Northward, generically, it rises into a region of rolling
country, with an irregularly marked ridge line which the Germans held.
No part of the British front had been so quiet in the summer of 1915 as
the region of Picardy. From the