part0045

The fundamental difficulty in the art of war is in the application of its theories in order to test their values. Like surgery and medicine, it demands its patients or victims as its training-ground, and without these it is most difficult to arrive at expert judgments and conclusions. It is an art which is neither directly commercial, materially remunerative, nor normally applicable, consequently it has generally been looked upon as a necessary evil, an insurance against disaster rather than the application of a science which should have as its main object the prevention of the calamity of war.

As an applied science, war is half human, half mechanical; it is, therefore, pre-eminently a live or dynamic science, a science which must grow with human understanding itself, so that its means of action, materialised in the soldier, may not only keep level with progress but absorb it to its own particular ends. When we look back on the history of war, what do we see? A school of pedants fumbling with the past, hoodwinked against the future, seeking panaceas in past victories, the circumstances under which these were won being blindly accepted as recurring decimals. Thus do they lumber their minds with obsolete detail, formulæ and shibboleths, precepts and rituals which are as much out of place on the modern battlefield as phlogiston or the philosopher’s stone would be in a present-day laboratory.

Time and again has it been asserted that war itself is the sole test of a soldier’s worth and that on the battlefield alone will the great be sifted from the little.

And why? Because, until to-day, we have never emerged from what may be called the “alchemical” epoch of warfare, the compounding of illusions without knowledge, the application of actions without understanding; we have not reduced war to a science founded on definite principles nor learnt that 99 per cent. of victory depends on weapons, machinery placed in the hands of man so that he may kill without being injured.

Galen was a great physician and so was Paracelsus, but who to-day would apply their methods when they can employ those of Pasteur and Lister? Where we have been so wrong and will continue to remain so wrong, unless we radically change our peace methods of warfare, is that we possess no process of producing great peace soldiers—scientists for war. We do not realise that an army is formed to prevent war, that it is composed of human points, that the good player will not lose many of these points, and that the bad player will go bankrupt. That the loss or gain depends on superiority of brains and of weapons and not necessarily superiority of rank and numbers of men. When we do realise this, then shall we cast the ancient balsams, solvents, and coagulants to the winds and set about developing the mental and mechanical sides of war in days of peace, so that, should wars become inevitable, we may win them with the minimum of human loss.

Soldiers have laughed at Joly de Maizeroy, Massenbach, and Maurice de Saxe for suggesting “victory without fighting,” “wars without battles”; but seldom are their eyes dimmed with a tear when they read of a victory which cost thousands of lives, and a victory which might have been won at the cost of a few hundreds. Yet surely is the saving of men’s lives and limbs as great an attribute of good leadership as the taking of those of the enemy; is it not in fact endurance, or the staying power in human lives, which is the backbone of victory itself?

In August 1914 the Great War opened to all intents and purposes as an exaggerated 1870 operation. The doctrine of the contending armies was 1870, its leaders were saturated with 1870 ideas, its weapons were improved 1870, it was 1870 in complexion, in tone, in manner, in thought, in tactics, and in movement. If this be doubted read the text-books prior to the war and compare them with those of 1872 and then with the events of the war itself. Take any great army of 1918 and place it over the same army of 1914: the sides do not coincide. What is the one great difference? Mechanical progress in weapons, not numbers of men, for men potentially had in numbers decreased; yet any 1918 equipped army would have beaten a 1914 one because of guns, heavy guns, super-heavy guns, mortars, shells, bombs, grenades, gas, machine guns, machine rifles, automatic rifles, range-spotters, sound-detectors, smoke, aeroplanes, lorries, railways, tramways, armoured cars, and tanks.

What to-day would be thought of a mechanical engineer who applied 1870 methods? Nothing; he would go bankrupt in six weeks if he started business on 1870 lines. This is exactly what the armies of 1914 did; they tactically went bankrupt because they were sufficiently big, or the area of operations was sufficiently small, to deny to them strategical movement. Could this have been foreseen? Given the numbers, given the weapons, and given the area of operations, a simple rule-of-three sum can be worked out, the answer to which is siege warfare and the tactics of which is the frontal attack of penetration; {37} yet every Field Service Regulations, in 1914, favoured envelopment and paid but a passing attention to trench warfare.

Inevitably the preordained tactics of penetration were forced on the contending parties, and human points were thrown over the parapets in handfuls; as if men, armed with a rifle and bayonet, who could only secure their existence by remaining underground, had any chance whatever of attaining a decisive victory by forsaking their shelters and facing weapons in the open which had previously forced them to earth. What was the result? The Germans failed at Ypres and Verdun; the French in the Champagne, at Verdun, and at Reims; and we at Neuve Chapelle, Loos, the Somme, Arras, and Passchendaele. Between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 casualties on one side of the balance sheet and a few square miles of uninhabitable ground on the other was the sum-total of these united endeavours, and all because no single army had, since 1870, realised the mechanical side of the science of war. In October, ten weeks after the war had opened, as the second chapter of this book has already related, the mechanical side was realised and a solution was found in the production of a chariot not so very dissimilar to that depicted on the “Victory Stele of Eannatum” of Lagash, 3,000 years B.C.—no very novel mechanical invention !

Time, a few months, was, however, requisite for the substitution of the petrol engine for the horses of the Assyrians, and as time could not be wasted other mechanical lapses were made good which might have well been foreseen had penetration and not envelopment been diagnosed as the leading tactical act of the war.

At first each contending nation in turn passed through its barbed-wire crisis, its gun shortage and its ammunition scandal. Millions of miles of wire were produced, thousands of guns were made, and ammunition was manufactured not by thousands of rounds, but by hundreds of thousands of tons. Had any one side been able to fire at the other, in September 1914, 100,000 tons in a couple of days, that side would have, probably, won the war. This is practically what happened at the Dunajec in 1915—the Russians were out-weaponed and consequently defeated.

On the Western Front, as the artillery competition was more or less mutual, stagnation became still more complete. In place of hurling men against uncut wire, shells were hurled instead, the bombardments being sufficiently long to enable the Germans to transport troops from the east of Poland to France in time to meet the assault. As the frontage of this assault was usually under ten miles, the total battle-front being over 500, the operation may be compared with that of attempting to take the life of a rhinoceros with a hat-pin. These tactics inevitably failed, not only through the impossibility of economically wearing away the enemy’s reserves, but on account of the impossibility of rapidly moving forward our own; for in the act of destroying wire, simultaneously did the guns create an area so difficult to move over that, had it been possible to advance the infantry, it would never have been possible to feed or supply them.

That stationary warfare should have increased in endurance as the gun-power of each side was multiplied was not necessary; this was clearly proved during the first two German battles of 1918. By this date, on all sides, had artillery attained its zenith, but the Germans, by threatening a front of nearly 250 miles—practically from the Channel to the Meuse—and then, after an intense bombardment lasting but a few hours, attacking on a comparatively wide front of some fifty miles, were able to develop their machine power to its fullest effect, that is to say, with the least opposition.

It took nearly three years from the date of the battle of the Dunajec before the use of the gun as a weapon of surprise was grasped; this will probably prove one of the most astounding tactical anomalies of the war. During this period two other weapons were devised which were destined in most respects to outclass the gun; the idea of both must have arisen at approximately the same time.

For years before the war the French and ourselves had been the leading mechanical engineers of Europe; in a similar respect the Germans were its leading chemists. Both, once a deadlock had arisen in the war, sought aid from the sciences they best understood during peacetime, and from which, had they understood war as a science, they would have looked for assistance years before its present outbreak.

The first stroke of genius delivered in the war was the use the Germans made of gas on April 22, 1915, and the second the use we made of tanks on September 15, 1916; both failed through want of a scientific grasp of war. They were tentative attacks, not delivered in strength or mass, yet curious to relate both were delivered by armies which, having been brought up in the 1870 school of thought, were fully conversant with the old precept of “superiority of numbers at the decisive point”; but, thinking in muscular terms only, they failed to apply it to the mechanical and chemical contrivances now placed at their disposal.

By many soldiers even to-day it is not realised that gas is a missile weapon following directly along the evolutionary path of all projectiles. A solid shot has to hit a target in order to injure it; as targets became difficult to see it became necessary to increase the radius of effect of the solid shot by replacing it by a hollow one filled with explosive. By means of this shell, a target might be missed by the shell yet hit by a flying fragment; the danger zone of the solid shot was increased many hundreds of times. Once targets not only become invisible but disappear into under-earth shelters, the shell has but little effect unless days are spent in bombardment, consequently the most effective manner of hitting them is to replace the shell by a gas inundation which will cover extensive areas and percolate into trenches and shelters. Gas has, in fact, multiplied the explosive radius of action of a shell indefinitely, and had it been used in quantity by the Germans before the Allies could protect themselves against it, the enemy might well have won the war.

Gas, whatever its possibilities were before this protection was obtained, remains but a projectile evolved as above described. Tanks were a “creation,” and the introduction of the petrol-driven cross-country tractor on the battlefield, it is thought, will mark a definite close to the “alchemical” epoch of warfare. All war on land, in the past, has been based on muscular energy; henceforth it will be based on mechanical. The change is radical, and Wilson’s “Big Willie” will one day pass into legend alongside Stevenson’s “Rocket.” As steam, applied as a motive force, in 150 years changed the world more than it had previously been changed since the days of palæolithic man, so, before the present century has run its course, may as great a change take place in the realms of war. The cause of both is the same: as the invention of the steam engine rendered obsolete to a high degree the hand-tool and replaced it by the machine-tool, so the application of petrol to the battlefield will force the hand-weapon out of existence and replace it by the machine-weapon. That the tank will continue in its present form is as unlikely as it would have been to expect, in 1769, that Watt’s pumping engine was the “Ultima Thule” of all such engines. It is not the form which is the stroke of true genius, but the idea, the replacing of muscular energy by mechanical force as the motive power of an army .

Had the combatant nations of the Great War possessed more foresight, had they thought of war as a science in place of as an insurance policy, they could have had a steam-driven tank thirty years ago and a petrol-driven one immediately after the South African War. The Batter tractor existed, anyhow in design, in 1888, and during the South African War Mr. W. Ralston drew a comic picture entitled “Warfare of the Future: The Tractor Mounted Infantry in Action,” to say nothing about the story by Mr. H. G. Wells. But no, the breath of ancient battles had to be breathed, and whilst military students were studying Jena, Inkerman, and Worth, the commercial sciences were daily producing one invention after another which a little adjustment would help win the next war more speedily than the study of scores of Jominis and Clausewitzs.

To show how unscientific the soldiers of the 1870-1914 epoch had become it is only necessary to quote that after the battle of the Somme in the highest German military circles the machine was considered as a veritable joke. Apparently it could not be seen that, though the Mark I tank was far from perfect, it, being able to reintroduce armour and to provide the soldier with a mobile weapon platform, revolutionised the entire theory of 1870 warfare.

On July 1, 1916, the opening day of the battle of the Somme, the British Army sustained between 40,000 and 50,000 casualties. On September 25, one single tank forced the surrender of 370 Germans at a cost of five casualties to ourselves, yet in July 1917 the Mark IV tank was still considered but as a minor factor. Its design was not sufficiently reliable, its true powers were more or less a matter of conjecture; the troops were not fully accustomed to it, nor would they place sufficient faith in it to accept it in lieu of artillery support, in fact, in its present state of development the tank was but an adjunct to infantry and guns. Such were some of the views held regarding it when, like a bolt from the blue, the battle of Cambrai shot across the horizon of 1870 battles .

At Cambrai it was the Mark IV tank which was used, the same which had existed in July; the Tank Corps had not increased materially in size; the infantry were for the most part used-up troops—some had received a few days’ training with tanks, others had never even seen these machines. The assault was an overwhelming success: at the cost of some 5,000 infantry casualties an advance was made in twelve hours which in extent took ninety days at Ypres, and which in this last-named battle cost over a quarter of a million men. Yet, in spite of this astonishing success, so conservative had the Army grown to the true needs of victory that there were certain soldiers who now stated that the tactics employed at Cambrai could never be repeated again and that the day of the tank had come and gone.

Then came the “crowning mercy”—the attack on Hamel. Something had to be done to reinstate the credit of the Tank Corps. There were but three suitable localities to do it in: the first, against the Merville salient—the ground here was bad, being intersected by dikes and canals; the second, eastward from between Arras and Hebuterne—the ground here was much cut up, and the tactical objective was not suitable; the third, eastwards from Villers-Bretonneux—the ground here was excellent, but the Australians, who held this sector, had little confidence in the tank.

Human prejudice is, however, not difficult to overcome to the student of psychology. After tactful persuasion the Australian Corps was induced to accept sixty machines, as an “adjunct” to their operations. The tanks (Mark V.*) were drawn up 1,000 yards in rear of the attackers, yet, nevertheless, within a few minutes of the attack being launched, they caught up with the leading wave and carried this wave and those in rear right through to the final objective. The loss of the 4th Australian Division was insignificant; their prejudices vanished and a close comradeship between them and the Tank Corps was established which redounds to their gallantry and common sense.

Hamel, minor incident though it was, was of more importance to the immediate problems of the British Army than Cambrai itself. General Rawlinson, commanding the Fourth Army, saw his opportunity, and the result was that from Hamel onwards the war became a tank war. The machine had made good in spite of prejudice and opposition. The Germans lost their heads, and with their heads they lost the war. That the war might have been won without tanks is quite possible, but that fifty-nine British divisions would, without their assistance, have beaten ninety-nine German ones in three months is extremely unlikely.

What had the influence of the tank really been? Let us examine this question and so close this retrospect.

The effect of the tank’s mobility on grand tactics was stupendous. Between the winter of 1914 and the summer of 1918, to all intents and purposes, the Allies waged a static war on the Western Front. During these three and a half years various attempts were made to wear down the enemy’s fighting strength as a prelude to a decisive exploitation or pursuit, but these battles of attrition were mutually destructive and the Allies undoubtedly lost more casualties than they inflicted. Attrition without the possibility of surprise or mobility is a mere “push of pikes,” it is a muscular but brainless operation. At the Third Battle of Ypres it cost us a quarter of a million men. Then came the tank, and true attrition was rendered possible; in other words, in tank battles the enemy lost more in human points than we did: it is doubtful whether in killed and wounded we lost, between August 8 and November 11, 1918, as many men as the prisoners we captured. This was only possible by our possessing the means of putting the grand tactical act of penetration into operation, by breaking down the “inviolability” of the German front, and by so doing rendering envelopment a reality .

In minor tactics it was possible, by means of the tank, to economise life by harmonising fire and movement and movement and security; the tank soldier could use the whole of his energy in the manipulation of his weapons and none in the effort of moving himself forward; further than this, sufficiently thick armour could be carried to protect him against bullets, shrapnel, and shell splinters. Human legs no longer controlled marches, and human skin no longer was the sole protection to the flesh beneath it. A new direction was obtained, that of the moving firing line; the knight in armour was once again reinstated, his horse now a petrol engine and his lance a machine gun.

Strategy, or the science of making the most of time for warlike ends, had practically ceased since November 1914. Even the great advances of the Germans in 1918 came to an abrupt stop through failure of road capacity, and roads and rails form the network upon which all former strategy was woven. The cross-country tractor, or tank, widened the size of roads to an almost unlimited degree. The earth became a universal vehicle of motion, like the sea, and to those sides which relied on tanks, naval tactics could be superimposed on those of land warfare.

With the introduction of mechanical movement every principle of war became easy of application and, to-day, to pit an overland mechanical army against one relying on roads, rails, and muscular energy, is to pit a fleet of modern battleships against one of wind-driven three-deckers. The result of such an action is not even within the possibility of doubt: the latter will for a certainty be destroyed, for the highest form of machinery must win, because it saves time, and time is the controlling factor on the battlefield as in the workshop.