mans, wide extension of the attacking infantry was relied on to reduce the casualties. The Germans favoured mass tactics, trusting to break through by weight of numbers in spite of loss.
Up to the outbreak of the war, therefore, partly owing to a wrong estimate of possibilities; to a non-appreciation of the progress of science in its application to warfare; to fallacious reasoning based thereon; to the necessity for economy in military matters; and to the mechanical difficulties which had so long stood in the way and which were still thought to stand in the way, not only had no solution of the problem of providing mobile protection been arrived at, but no serious effort to reach a solution had for a long period been attempted. It followed that when hostilities opened in 1914, save for the development of artillery tactics and matériel, not one of the combatants was really in possession of better means of rendering possible the advance of infantry under fire than those which had been at the disposal of the opposing forces in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Indeed, in face of the actual growth in strength of the tactical defensive all armies were in this direction relatively weaker than in previous wars of modern days. And the weakness seems to have caused no anxiety. The prevailing complacency, however, was soon to receive a rude awakening.
It might be imagined, since the Germans first assumed the offensive on the western front, that they would have been the first to become aware of this deficiency and to feel the need for mobile protection. This was not so. Though they carried out a succession of attacks during the first month of the war they were not held up, except for a short time before the fortresses Liége, Namur, Maubeuge, and Antwerp, which they reduced by gunfire, and were able until they reached the Marne to continue their onward rush and to maintain their pressure. These attacks, with the exception of the abortive assault on Liége, were not executed against carefully prepared positions such as developed later, and were not usually of a purely frontal nature unassisted by tactical or threatened strategic flank operations or envelopment. Nevertheless, the German losses were extremely heavy, probably more severe than had been expected, but were thought to be the price of the apparent general success of their strategy at the time. They would have been truly justified had the German plan of campaign in fact succeeded. During this period such losses as they suffered were caused mostly by the quick-firing field artillery of the French on the one hand, and on the other by the musketry of the highly trained long-service British infantry hastily entrenched in improvised positions. This, it is stated, was so intense as to lead to the erroneous conclusion that the British Expeditionary Force had been secretly and lavishly equipped with machine-guns. And it was not owing to the strength of the resistance of the British or French field armies on the defensive that the progress of the Germans was finally brought to a standstill at the Marne.
It was only when the rôles of the two sides were reversed and the Allies assumed the offensive that the factors first came into play that eventually forced on them a fresh effort to solve the ancient problem. It was then, so far as the British were concerned, that it became apparent that, notwithstanding the weakness shown by permanent forts which had quickly succumbed to the power of specially designed ordnance, not only had the capacity for passive resistance of field defences been much increased, but the active power of the defensive had been very greatly enhanced by the application of modern methods and the scientific employment of modern arms.
More than a hint of this was given first by the nature of the resistance made by the German rear-guards during the battle of the Marne, notably at the crossing of that river at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre on Sept. 9, where the British Ath Div. was held up almost entirely by machine-gun fire in its endeavour to force the passage. It has since become known that the Germans had concentrated at this spot some 42 machine-guns, equivalent to the number of these weapons with 21 British battalions.[1] Later, during the fighting on the Aisne, greatly as the British were harassed by the German weight of artillery, it was mostly by machine-guns that their efforts to advance were checked, in some instances by the combined action of these guns and obstacles, such as abattis and wire entanglements, which though improvised, were found to be very effective, especially in view of the British weakness in artillery. Even at this early stage so strong were the German defences that the nature of the operations began to approximate to that of siege warfare. Later, at the beginning of Oct., in the more open action when the British endeavoured to outflank the German right to the north of Lille it was the same story. Their progress was in every direction opposed by machineguns, sometimes in the open, sometimes in defended villages or houses, and often protected by improvised entanglements. Almost invariably the presence of German advance troops even in small bodies implied the presence of machine-guns which were handled with the greatest skill. The static warfare which then ensued on the western front during the winter of 1914-5 after the failure of the German offensive and the efforts of both sides to outflank each other on the coast, only accentuated the tendencies already noted. Its effect was to convert the struggle into a species of "field siege" warfare from which all possibility of manoeuvre was excluded and in which all efforts at the offensive had perforce to be attempts to break through, entailing frontal attacks. Nevertheless, though this development had been expected by the Germans no more than by the Allies, and their immense preparations had been based on their original plan of an overwhelming and short offensive campaign on this front, they were in many ways well equipped for it. They were for a long time in possession of an immensely preponderating artillery an advantage in attack or defence; whilst in defence the nature of the fighting gave full scope to their untiring industry backed up by their genius for field fortification. They also had a great proportion of technical troops and an armament of machineguns far superior to that of the Allies. Though the relative conditions between the sides in these particulars changed, in the struggle which lasted for nearly four years the defensive was for a long time to prove stronger than the offensive, all attempts at which had to be carried out without finesse, by the method of brute force with its prodigal loss of life. It was during this period more especially that the machine-gun was to exert its influence and to reveal to the full its true power in the prepared defensive.
The machine-gun was no new invention, but its possibilities when cleverly used in numbers, though shown to some extent in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, had not been proved. The British and German were equipped with almost identical types of the same gun differing only in detail, both being the outcome of the genius of the late Sir Hiram Maxim.[2] Previous to the Russo-Japanese War the weapon had never been held in great esteem by the British military authorities, except by a few enthusiasts; but the lessons of that campaign had led to an effort to increase the proportion of these guns in the equipment of the army beyond that which existed at the time of the S. African War. But this was not done owing to mistaken ideas of economy. It was also held that superior musketry fire discipline would make up for any deficiency in this respect, and great pains were taken to train the infantry to attain a rate of fire which in fact did exceed that of any other troops. On the other hand the machine-gun had become the weapon par excellence of the Germans. They perhaps of all nations had most correctly gauged its worth, the fact that it combined the maximum of killing power with the minimum of vulnerability, and the economy in a military sense of its adoption on a large scale. And after the Russo-Japanese War they had made a specialty of it. Without ostentatiously increasing the proportion of machineguns with their infantry formations they had armed special units with them and accumulated a large stock in reserve. They had also trained a body of picked officers and men in their technical and tactical use. Their army, therefore, entered the Wr in this particular better equipped than any other. The first sign of this fact was given by the bold method in which they employed machine-guns in their onrush in the west. The next, as has been said, was the skilful way in which they used them in defence, at first in rear-guard operations, and then in the prepared defensive. In these tactics they excelled, and specialized in combining the intense fire power of the machine-gun wifh the obstacle usually barbed wire entanglements in a way which had never before been done. So far from the weapon being looked upon as a rare article impossible of replacement to be cherished and kept out of danger, it was not considered a disgrace for a gun to be lost once it had earned its value in killing the enemy. This apparent prodigality was a measure of the
