THE five months of war in 1914 had been filled with virtually continuous fighting, nearly all in the open. By the close of the year, however, the Western Front had coagulated. As yet the fortifications had not become anything like as strong or as deep as they were to be later, but they were already formidable obstacles.
They exercised a profound influence on the struggle throughout the year 1915. The results of the biggest battles were scarcely perceptible on any but large-scale maps. Between battles trench warfare became a routine. On some parts of the fronts, the Lys valley, for example, ‘trench’ was not the correct word. The subsoil water lay so close to the surface that trenches filled almost as fast as they were dug. Here the line was often held in breastworks. And in wet weather, sometimes all through the winter, many trenches were apt to fill to a depth of two feet or more, making the existence of their occupants miserable. Frost brought relief, and men put up with the cold because it kept them dry. But frost paid off badly. Thaw brought collapse, on a big or small scale according as the trenches were well or badly revetted.
The year 1915 was one of expansion. In its course the B.E.F., ten divisions strong at the outset, was raised to 37 (including two Canadian and the Guards Division), the French strength in the home country to 107, and the German to 94, out of a total of 159. Russia was the only belligerent whose military growth was sharply checked by lack of arms, and her rate of enlistment in proportion to her total man-power was by far the lowest. Britain was, however, heavily handicapped. Her position would have been desperate but for the resource of her private armament firms, which in peace had subsisted mainly on foreign orders and had been reviled in consequence. It was they rather than the Government’s armament works or the new national factories that delivered the goods. The figures for the whole war are quite extraordinary. Just 90 per cent of the 28,750 guns issued to the Army and 97 per cent of the output of 55,000 aircraft came from them.1 Large orders were now placed in the United States, despite a protest from Congress, but these were mainly for ammunition.
Output increased in 1915, but very slowly, as must be the case when works have to be built and tooled up to start the process. Another factor was excessive enlistment of skilled labour in the forces—nothing would hold back men in the early and ardent phase. Getting wind of the shell shortage, with details from Sir John French himself, the powerful newspaper proprietor Lord Northcliffe launched violent attacks on Lord Kitchener. They were generally unpopular, since Kitchener was looked on as the greatest man in the country, far more important than any other Cabinet Minister. Yet the shortage was one of the causes of the setting up of a Coalition Government and the sole cause of the establishment of the Ministry of Munitions, with Lloyd George at its head. Later on opinion attributed the improvement entirely to him, and though he must have realized that this was nonsense, he did not disclaim the laurels. Undoubtedly, however, his energy was useful in clearing away obstacles from the path of his subordinates.
The British Royal Flying Corps was divided into a Military and a Naval Wing. The division between their functions was, however, a wide one, with the result that the Naval Wing quickly became known as the Royal Naval Air Service and then the title Royal Flying Corps came to stand for the Military Wing alone. The growth was in each case less rapid in numbers than in design and armament. By August 1915 the B.E.F. had increased from four to thirty divisions but the R.F.C. only from four to eleven squadrons. On the other hand, aircraft types had advanced and new equipment or tactics had made the general picture very different from that of August 1914.
Photography, mentioned once or twice already, had made great progress. Cameras were now fixed to the aircraft and fitted with a plate-changing device. The use of wireless had extended and the quality of the equipment had improved. Wireless was not, however, and never became, reliable enough to do away with the need for simpler means of communication between troops on the ground and aircraft during a battle. Smoke candles, flares, cotton strips, and small mirrors worn on the back—or fixed to packs when these were carried in action—could only indicate infantry positions, but that much amounted to a good deal. Signalling lamps could do more, but they were dangerous instruments anywhere near the firing line. The flares, strips, and lamps appear to have been first used by the French in their autumn Champagne offensive. Another big development was the ranging of artillery from the air. Squared maps, on which objects could be pin-pointed, were used by the R.F.C. for this purpose as early as October 1915.
The growing success of aircraft in these functions inevitably led to a struggle for mastery of the air, and it in turn led to better armament. To begin with, aircraft suitable for fighting were included in squadrons, but in July 1915 the first homogeneous fighter squadron joined the B.E.F. in France. Squadron encounters began to replace single-handed encounters, and in the latter part of the war these battles swelled till sometimes a hundred or more aircraft manoeuvred and fought in a small area.
To begin with, the best fighter was held to be the ‘pusher’, that is, an aircraft with the propeller in the tail. In these machines the French generally took the lead. Then the Germans produced something startling. It was the Fokker, the name being that of its Dutch inventor. The first Fokker was a monoplane, still something of a rarity. It was also a ‘tractor’—with the propeller in front—and had a gear which synchronized the flow of machine-gun bullets with the engine propulsion, so that they passed between the propeller blades. The aircraft was fast and handy. It appeared in October 1915 and was superior to all others until the following May. Synchronizing gear came into general use, but few British aircraft were fitted with it even during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
Tactically, the most striking combat-winning trick was the long-famous ‘Immelmann turn’. Max Immelmann, finest of the Fokker pilots, observed that they seldom got a second chance because, having dived on their opponents, they maintained the dive if it had failed, in order to avoid being attacked from above. His expedient was to make his aircraft rear up, as though to loop, turn sideways, and flatten out in the opposite direction, thus regaining height and reversing course simultaneously. Many victories were won by him and his imitators by these means.1
The young men of the air forces, national and racial characteristics apart, resembled each other closely. They returned from their expeditions to comfortable billets beside airfields in the heart of the countryside. For them the battlefields were not as depressing as for the land forces who slept there. The airmen were adventurous, high-spirited, and gay, though they passed through bad phases when the other side exploited superior aircraft. In general they suffered big losses in proportion to their numbers. Death being always so near, they tried to make the most of life. Life often meant for them Wein, Weib, und Gesang, and parties ending with smashed glass, crockery, and furniture.
Most of the great fighter pilots died. Among the survivors several, like the Frenchman Charles Nungesser, lost their lives soon after the war in civilian flights. Though formation flying became more and more the rule, theirs was a war of individual warriors, Lancelots and Tristrams who worsted one individual foe after another. Rittmeister Freiherr von Richthofen shot down five British aircraft in a single day, 29 April, 1917, one of them being his fiftieth victim. Captain J. L. Trollope shot down six German aircraft in about four hours on 24 March, 1918.1
One service tried earnestly to avoid advertisement or even identification of individuals. The British, as usual, failed to realize that heroic deeds were a national tonic. Even they, however, could hardly keep quiet about the winning of a Victoria Cross, and Albert Ball, V.C., of Britain became as famous as Georges Guynemer of France. Hero-worship was inevitable when the feats of such ‘aces’ became known. Even now, as we look back upon them, there is something magical, superhuman, about them. Guynemer and Fonck, Ball and McCudden, Boelcke and Richthofen appeal to us all the more because some of their secrets elude us. It does not suffice to say that Ball was fantastically brave, that his reflexes were uncannily rapid, and that he was a deadly shot. Their methods differed widely. Guynemer, gentle and delicate but with never a word of pity for a slain foe, was wildly reckless and returned again and again with his aircraft peppered with bullet-holes. Fonck, icily cool, is said to have brought his back nearly always unmarked. Guynemer died over Passchendaele; Fonck lived to be a business man and an unprepossessing right-wing politician at the time of the Second World War. The distinctive characteristics of all the leaders in combat and of fighter pilots were an immense concentration, extraordinarily quick thinking, and unquenchable activity. Ball, whose spelling did not match his marksmanship, put it that he liked a life of ‘bussel’. This was the sort of life they lived, while it lasted.
Despite the growth of the B.E.F., the weight of the war in the west was still borne mainly by the French. Control went with responsibility. In theory the British were not under French command; in practice the demands of General Joffre were almost always met. Sir John French’s actions were governed by his loyalty to the alliance. It was his finest quality. It instilled into his mind the principle that, since he commanded a relatively small contingent, he must act as Joffre desired even when he would rather have done something different. He might have nursed and seasoned his young troops for future opportunities, but just as Joffre felt bound to launch offensives in support of Russia and because the Germans had shifted forces to the east, so the British Commander-in-Chief felt bound to take part up to the limit of his resources, sometimes beyond them.
The end of open warfare had left between the sea and the Meuse a front bulging westward in a big blunt-nosed salient with its apex near Compiègne. Joffre’s strategy was to attack one side of it eastward from the Artois plateau and the other northward from Champagne. He believed he could finally break the German defences on both fronts. Then, when the enemy was floundering, he would launch a third offensive from Verdun, to threaten and if possible cut the enemy’s only good railway south of the Ardennes. The lines north of the forest would not suffice to maintain a fighting front, and the Germans would be compelled to quit French and Belgian soil.
It was good strategy on paper. It was, in fact, essentially the strategy of 1918, by means of which the Germans were forced not merely to abandon their hold on France and Belgium but to sue for peace. The strategic aim, however, depended on tactical success. Strategy is the art of conducting a war; tactics the art of fighting. ‘Tactics, weapons, and supply are the master-keys which alone can open the door to strategy.’1 And in 1915 tactical defence, based on the machine-gun and barbed wire and the high quality and resolution of German troops, proved to be very strong.
After a pause of a month in January and February, the French renewed their offensive in Champagne. Once more the fighting was fierce and bloody; once more the gains were very small and the losses vast, some 90,000 men killed, wounded and prisoners of war on either side. The attack was broken off on 17 March, but Joffre was determined to try again in that quarter.