My Second Year of the War | Page 9

hill where later I watched the attack of
July 1st, on one day in August of the previous year I had such a broad
view that if a shell were to explode anywhere along the front of five
miles it would have been visible to me, and I saw not a single burst of
smoke from high explosive or shrapnel. Apparently the Germans never
expected to undertake any offensive here. All their energy was devoted
to defensive preparations, without even an occasional attack over a few
hundred yards to keep in their hand. Tranquillity, which amounted to
the simulation of a truce, was the result. At different points you might
see Germans walking about in the open and the observer could stand
exposed within easy range of the guns without being sniped at by
artillery, as he would have been in the Ypres salient.

When the British took over this section of line, so short were they of
guns that they had to depend partly on French artillery; and their troops
were raw New Army battalions or regulars stiffened by a small
percentage of veterans of Mons and Ypres. The want of guns and shells
required correspondingly more troops to the mile, which left them still
relying on flesh and blood rather than on machinery for defense. The
British Army was in that middle stage of a few highly trained troops
and the first arrival of the immense forces to come; while the Germans
occupied on the Eastern front were not of a mind to force the issue.
There is a story of how one day a German battery, to vary the
monotony, began shelling a British trench somewhat heavily. The
British, in reply, put up a sign, "If you don't stop we will fire our only
rifle grenade at you!" to which the Germans replied in the same vein,
"Sorry! We will stop"--as they did.
The subsoil of the hills is chalk, which yields to the pick rather easily
and makes firm walls for trenches. Having chosen their position, which
they were able to do in the operations after the Marne as the two armies,
swaying back and forth in the battle for positions northward, came to
rest, the Germans had set out, as the result of experience, to build
impregnable works in the days when forts had become less important
and the trench had become supreme. As holding the line required little
fighting, the industrious Germans under the stiff bonds of discipline
had plenty of time for sinking deep dugouts and connecting galleries
under their first line and for elaborating their communication trenches
and second line, until what had once been peaceful farming land now
consisted of irregular welts of white chalk crossing fields without
hedges or fences, whose sweep had been broken only by an occasional
group of farm buildings of a large proprietor, a plot of woods, or the
village communities where the farmers lived and went to and from their
farms which were demarked to the eye only by the crop lines.
One can never make the mistake of too much simplification in the
complicated detail of modern tactics where the difficulty is always to
see the forest for the trees. Strategy has not changed since prehistoric
days. It must always remain the same: feint and surprise. The first
primitive man who looked at the breast of his opponent and struck

suddenly at his face was a strategist; so, too, the anthropoid at the Zoo
who leads another to make a leap for a trapeze and draws it out from
under him; so, too, the thug who waits to catch his victim coming
unawares out of an alley. Anybody facing more than one opponent will
try to protect his back by a wall, which is also strategy--strategy being
the veritable instinct of self-preservation which aims at an advantage in
the disposition of forces.
Place two lines of fifty men facing each other in the open without
officers, and some fellow with initiative on the right or the left end will
instinctively give the word and lead a rush for cover somewhere on the
flank which will permit an enfilade of the enemy's ranks. Practically all
of the great battles of the world have been won by turning an enemy's
flank, which compelled him to retreat if it did not result in rout or
capture.
The swift march of a division or a brigade from reserve to the flank at
the critical moment has often turned the fortune of a day. All
manoeuvering has this object in view. Superior numbers facilitate the
operation, and victory has most often resolved itself into superior
numbers pressing a flank and nothing more; though subsequently his
admiring countrymen acclaimed the victor as the inventor of a strategic
plan which was old before