第25章 THE GRADES OF WAR(4)

The French attack resolves itself into a triple system of gun-fire.First for a day or so, or two or three days, there is demolition fire to smash up all the exactly located batteries, organisation, supports, behind the front line enemy trenches;then comes barrage fire to cut off supplies and reinforcements;then, before the advance, the hammering down fire, "heads down,"upon the trenches.When at last this stops and the infantry goes forward to rout out the trenches and the dug-outs, they go forward with a minimum of inconvenience.The first wave of attack fights, destroys, or disarms the surviving Germans and sends them back across the open to the French trenches.They run as fast as they can, hands up, and are shepherded farther back.

The French set to work to turn over the captured trenches and organise themselves against any counter attack that may face the barrage fire.

That is the formula of the present fighting, which the French have developed.After an advance there is a pause, while the guns move up nearer the Germans and fresh aeroplane reconnaissance goes on.Nowhere on this present offensive has a German counter attack had more than the most incidental success;and commonly they have had frightful losses.Then after a few days of refreshment and accumulation, the Allied attack resumes.

That is the perfected method of the French offensive.I had the pleasure of learning its broad outlines in good company, in the company of M.Joseph Reinach and Colonel Carence, the military writer.Their talk together and with me in the various messes at which we lunched was for the most part a keen discussion of every detail and every possibility of the offensive machine; every French officer's mess seems a little council upon the one supreme question in France, /how to do it best./ M.Reinach has made certain suggestions about the co-operation of the French and British that I will discuss elsewhere, but one great theme was the constitution of "the ideal battery." For years French military thought has been acutely attentive to the best number of guns for effective common action, and has tended rather to the small battery theory.My two companies were playing with the idea that the ideal battery was a battery of one big gun, with its own aeroplane and kite balloon marking for it.

The British seem to be associated with the adventurous self-reliance needed in the air.The British aeroplanes do not simply fight the Germans out of the sky; they also make themselves an abominable nuisance by bombing the enemy trenches.For every German bomb that is dropped by aeroplane on or behind the British lines, about twenty go down on the heads of the Germans.British air bombs upon guns, stores and communications do some of the work that the French effect by their systematic demolition fire.

And the British aviator has discovered and is rapidly developing an altogether fresh branch of air activity in the machine-gun attack at a very low altitude.Originally I believe this was tried in western Egypt, but now it is being increasingly used upon the British front in France.An aeroplane which comes down suddenly, travelling very rapidly, to a few hundred feet, is quite hard to hit, even if it is not squirting bullets from a machine gun as it advances.Against infantry in the open this sort of thing is extremely demoralising.It is a method of attack still in its infancy, but there are great possibilities for it in the future, when the bending and cracking German line gives, as ultimately it must give if this offensive does not relax.If the Allies persist in their pressure upon the western front, if there is no relaxation in the supply of munitions from Britain and no lapse into tactical stupidity, a German retreat eastward is inevitable.

Now a cavalry pursuit alone may easily come upon disaster, cavalry can be so easily held up by wire and a few machine guns.

I think the Germans have reckoned on that and on automobiles, probably only the decay of their /morale/ prevents their opening their lines now on the chance of the British attempting some such folly as a big cavalry advance, but I do not think the Germans have reckoned on the use of machine guns in aeroplanes, supported by and supporting cavalry or automobiles.At the present time I should imagine there is no more perplexing consideration amidst the many perplexities of the German military intelligence than the new complexion put upon pursuit by these low level air developments.It may mean that in all sorts of positions where they had counted confidently on getting away, they may not be able to get away--from the face of a scientific advance properly commanding and using modern material in a dexterous and intelligent manner.