Part 6 (1/2)
The trained and specialised military man probably apprehends them as feebly as anyone.
This is a thing that I want to state as emphatically as possible. It is the pith of the lesson I have learnt at the front. The whole method of war has been so altered in the past five and twenty years as to make it a new and different process altogether. Much the larger part of this alteration has only become effective in the last two years. Everyone is a beginner at this new game; everyone is experimenting and learning.
The idea has been put admirably by _Punch._ That excellent picture of the old-fas.h.i.+oned sergeant who complains to his officer of the new recruit; ”'E's all right in the trenches, Sir; 'e's all right at a sc.r.a.p; but 'e won't never make a soldier,” is the quintessence of everything I am saying here. And were there not the very gravest doubts about General s.m.u.ts in British military circles because he had ”had no military training”? A Canadian expressed the new view very neatly on being asked, in consequence of a deficient salute, whether he wanted to be a soldier, by saying, ”Not I! I want to be a fighter!”
The professional officer of the old dispensation was a man specialised in relation to one of the established ”arms.” He was an infantryman, a cavalryman, a gunner or an engineer. It will be interesting to trace the changes that have happened to all these arms.
Before this war began speculative writers had argued that infantry drill in close formation had now no fighting value whatever, that it was no doubt extremely necessary for the handling, packing, forwarding and distribution of men, but that the ideal infantry fighter was now a highly individualised and self-reliant man put into a pit with a machine gun, and supported by a string of other men bringing him up supplies and ready to a.s.sist him in any forward rush that might be necessary.
The opening phases of the war seemed to contradict this. It did not at first suit the German game to fight on this most modern theory, and isolated individual action is uncongenial to the ordinary German temperament and opposed to the organised social tendencies of German life. To this day the Germans attack only in close order; they are unable to produce a real modern infantry for aggressive purposes, and it is a matter of astonishment to military minds on the English side that our hastily trained new armies should turn out to be just as good at the new fighting as the most ”seasoned troops.” But there is no reason whatever why they should not be. ”Leading,” in the sense of going ahead of the men and making them move about mechanically at the word of command, has ceased. On the British side our magnificent new subalterns and our equally magnificent new non-commissioned officers play the part of captains of football teams; they talk their men individually into an understanding of the job before them; they criticise style and performance. On the French side things have gone even farther. Every man in certain attacks has been given a large scale map of the ground over which he has to go, and has had his own individual job clearly marked and explained to him. All the Allied infantrymen tend to become specialised, as bombers, as machine-gun men, and so on. The unspecialised common soldier, the infantryman who has stood and marched and moved in ranks and ranks, the ”serried lines of men,” who are the main substance of every battle story for the last three thousand years, are as obsolete as the dodo. The rifle and bayonet very probably are becoming obsolete too. Knives and clubs and revolvers serve better in the trenches. The krees and the Roman sword would be as useful. The fine flourish of the bayonet is only possible in the rare infrequent open.
Even the Zulu a.s.segai would serve as well.
The two operations of the infantry attack now are the rush and the ”sc.r.a.p.” These come after the artillery preparation. Against the rush, the machine gun is pitted. The machine gun becomes lighter and more and more controllable by one man; as it does so the days of the rifle draw to a close. Against the machine gun we are now directing the ”Tank,”
which goes ahead and puts out the machine gun as soon as it begins to sting the infantry rush. We are also using the swooping aeroplane with a machine gun. Both these devices are of British origin, and they promise very well.
After the rush and the sc.r.a.p comes the organisation of the captured trench. ”Digging in” completes the cycle of modern infantry fighting.
You may consider this the first or the last phase of an infantry operation. It is probably at present the least worked-out part of the entire cycle. Here lies the sole German superiority; they bunch and crowd in the rush, they are inferior at the sc.r.a.p, but they do dig like moles. The weakness of the British is their failure to settle down. They like the rush and the sc.r.a.p; they press on too far, they get outflanked and lost ”in the blue”; they are not naturally clever at the excavating part of the work, and they are not as yet well trained in making dug-outs and shelter-pits rapidly and intelligently. They display most of the faults that were supposed to be most distinctively French before this war came to revolutionise all our conceptions of French character.
2
Now the operations of this modern infantry, which unlike any preceding infantry in the history of war does not fight in disciplined formations but as highly individualised specialists, are determined almost completely by the artillery preparation. Artillery is now the most essential instrument of war. You may still get along with rather bad infantry; you may still hold out even after the loss of the aerial ascendancy, but so soon as your guns fail you approach defeat.
The backbone process of the whole art of war is the manufacture in overwhelming quant.i.ties, the carriage and delivery of sh.e.l.l upon the vulnerable points of the enemy's positions. That is, so to speak, the essential blow. Even the infantryman is now hardly more than the residuary legatee after the guns have taken their toll.
I have now followed nearly every phase in the life history of a sh.e.l.l from the moment when it is a segment of steel bar just cut off, to the moment when it is no more than a few dispersed and rusting rags and fragments of steel--pressed upon the stray visitor to the battlefield as souvenirs. All good factories are intensely interesting places to visit, but a good munition factory is romantically satisfactory. It is as nearly free from the antagonism of employer and employed as any factory can be. The busy sheds I visited near Paris struck me as being the most living and active things in the entire war machine. Everywhere else I saw fitful activity, or men waiting. I have seen more men sitting about and standing about, more bored inactivity, during my tour than I have ever seen before in my life. Even the front line trenches seem to slumber; the Angel of Death drowses over them, and moves in his sleep to crush out men's lives. The gunfire has an indolent intermittence.
But the munition factories grind on night and day, grinding against the factories in Central Europe, grinding out the slow and costly and necessary victory that should end aggressive warfare in the world for ever.
It would be very interesting if one could arrange a meeting between any typical Allied munition maker on the one hand, and the Kaiser and Hindenburg, those two dominant effigies of the German nationalists'
dream of ”world might.” Or failing that, Mr. Dyson might draw the encounter. You imagine these two heroic figures got up for the interview, very magnificent in s.h.i.+ning helms and flowing cloaks, decorations, splendid swords, spurs. ”Here,” one would say, ”is the power that has held you. You were bolstered up very loyally by the Krupp firm and so forth, you piled up sh.e.l.l, guns, war material, you hoped to s.n.a.t.c.h your victory before the industrialisation and invention of the world could turn upon you. But you failed. You were not rapid enough.
The battle of the Marne was your misfortune. And Ypres. You lost some chances at Ypres. Two can play at destructive industrialism, and now we out-gun you. We are piling up munitions now faster than you. The essentials of this Game of the War Lord are idiotically simple, but it was not of our choosing. It is now merely a question of months before you make your inevitable admission. This is no war to any great commander's glory. This gentleman in the bowler hat is the victor, Sire; not you. a.s.sisted, Sire, by these disrespectful-looking factory girls in overalls.”
For example, there is M. Citroen. Before the war I understand he made automobiles; after the war he wants to turn to and make automobiles again. For the duration of the war he makes sh.e.l.l. He has been temporarily diverted from constructive to destructive industrialism. He did me the honours of his factory. He is a compact, active man in dark clothes and a bowler hat, with a pencil and notebook conveniently at hand. He talked to me in carefully easy French, and watched my face with an intelligent eye through his pince-nez for the signs of comprehension.
Then he went on to the next point.
He took me through every stage of his process. In his office he showed me the general story. Here were photographs of certain vacant fields and old sheds--”this place”--he indicated the altered prospect from the window--”at the outbreak of the war.” He showed me a plan of the first undertaking. ”Now we have rather over nine thousand workpeople.”
He showed me a little row of specimens. ”These we make for Italy. These go to Russia. These are the Rumanian pattern.”
Thence to the first stage, the chopping up of the iron bars, the furnace, the punching out of the first shape of the sh.e.l.l; all this is men's work. I had seen this sort of thing before in peace ironworks, but I saw it again with the same astonishment, the absolute precision of movement on the part of the half-naked sweating men, the calculated efficiency of each worker, the apparent heedlessness, the real cert.i.tude, with which the blazing hot cylinder is put here, dropped there, rolls to its next appointed spot, is chopped up and handed on, the swift pa.s.sage to the cooling crude, pinkish-purple sh.e.l.l shape. Down a long line one sees in perspective a practical symmetry, of furnace and machine group and the sh.e.l.ls marching on from this first series of phases to undergo the long succession of operations, machine after machine, across the great width of the shed in which eighty per cent of the workers are women. There is a thick dust of sounds in the air, a rumble of shafting, sudden thuddings, clankings, and M. Citroen has to raise his voice. He points out where he has made little changes in procedures, cut out some wasteful movement.... He has an idea and makes a note in the ever-ready notebook.
There is a beauty about all these women, there is extraordinary grace in their finely adjusted movements. I have come from an after-lunch coffee upon the boulevards and from watching the ugly fas.h.i.+on of our time; it is a relief to be reminded that most women can after all be beautiful--if only they would not ”dress.” these women wear simple overalls and caps. In the cap is a rosette. Each shed has its own colour of rosette.
”There is much esprit de corps here,” says M. Citroen.
”And also,” he adds, showing obverse as well as reverse of the world's problem of employment and discipline, ”we can see at once if a woman is not in her proper shed.”
Across the great sheds under the shafting--how fine it must look at night!--the sh.e.l.ls march, are shaped, cut, fitted with copper bands, calibrated, polished, varnished....