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THE WAR

ILLUSTRATED

ALBUMDELUXE

P* •'.' bi S/,,, ,,.(,,. ,./,,.

H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES (A War-Time Portrait

THE WAR

ILL! T RATED

ALBUMrcLUXE

the C

.1 lolcJ

in.i P..

.ICOE REDV

OF 1916

THE WAR

ILLUSTRATED

ALBUMDELUXE

The Story of the Great European War told by Camera, Pen and Pencil

J. A. HAMMERTON

CHAPTERS BY

LORD NORTHCLIFFE, LADY JELLICOE

COMMANDER BELLAIRS, R.N., MAJOR REDWAY

H. W. NEVINSON, ARTHUR D. INNES, M.A.

1,190 ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME VI.

THE SPRING AND SUMMER CAMPAIGN OF 1916

PUBLISHED BY

THE AMALGAMATED PRESS, LIMITED LONDON, 1916

X

S075K3

V,

ilote to Foltime

X this volume of our pictorial survey of the war, for the first time we can discern unmistakable evidence of the great and overwhelming forces gathering for the ultimate victory of the allied cause. Volume V. closed with the initial struggle for the possession of Verdun still undecided, and, indeed, confusing in its indecision. But as the spring and summer campaigns of 1916 slowly and remorselessly develop we may perceive the steady setting of the German star — Verdun, against whose bastions the barbarian waves had vainly beaten and spent, month after month, still holding firm. It cannot be said with absolute certitude that even now the extraordinary series of violent attacks and counter- attacks which characterised the struggle for Verdun had been definitely and irrevocably determined. Yet victory lay with the glorious French army that had so long withstood the German pressure and hurled back the waves of invaders, in the mere fact that for so many months it had prevented the enemy from achieving his most cherished objective. For even had the Germans gained possession of Verdun before the close of the summer of 1916, still were they defeated, as the brilliant defence of that fortified region by the French had contributed vastly to immobilise the Germans on the northern sector of their Russian front, and to prevent their lending timely assistance to Austria when the Russian and Italian pressure on her two frontiers became most acute.

in importance, and probably eventually most important of all the movements in the summer of 1916, was the opening of the British offensive on July 1st. The months preceding had been merely a continuation of the seemingly interminable trench warfare ; but the British line was gradually extended to Albert, thus enabling the French to con- centrate stronger forces for the defence of Verdun, and stealthily but steadily enormous reserves of men and munitions were piled up behind the British lines, ready for the great blow which General Haig was fortunately able to launch against the enemy at the beginning of July, when the battles of the Somme began, with highest promise of suc- cess to our gallant forces engaged. The story of these battles is as rich in epic achievement as the memorable fighting retreat from Mons or the great battle of the Marne.

picturesque and thrilling of the many individual episodes that go to the making of the story of the Great War during the spring and summer of 1916, was the brilliant naval battle off the coast of Jutland, when, despite severe losses both in ships and men, British battle squadrons gave a splendid account of themselves against the naval niight of Germany, and the " High Seas Fleet " of the enemy was speedily driven to the shelter of its mine- fields and its ports on the appearance of Admiral Jellicoe's main fleet. The losses inflicted on the Germans were actually no less severe, and relatively far greater than those which favourable conditions of weather and visibility had enabled the Germans to inflict upon our squadrons.' The immediate result of this great sea

affair, claimed by the Germans as a victory, was to reduce German naval strength to such a point that an anti-Russian offensive with naval co-operation from the Baltic could not then be effected, and Hindenburg, unsupported from the sea, could not press forward his campaign in the Riga direction ; whereas Russia, free from the immediate menace of such a German offensive, was able to launch her magnificent attack on the Hungarian frontier, and win a series of victories, sensational in their suddenness and in the losses of men and material which they imposed upon Austro-Hungarian armies.

ALY, which from May I4th had been struggling somewhat unequally against the great Austrian offensive in the south-east and south of the Trentino, was not only able, as a result of Russia's brilliant achievements along the Hungarian frontier, to regain the initiative over the Austrians and speedily to throw them back into their own territory, reconquering, by the end of July, all the ground lost in other directions by the Austrian onrush, but to begin a new attack on the Isonzo, culminating in the capture of Gorizia on August gth. Thus the guns of Admiral Beatty's battle-cruisers, which sent the Kaiser's " High Seas Fleet " hastening to its protective ports, re-echoed far away on the Hungarian and Italian frontiers, and that extraordinary battle of the high seas, which at first seemed fraught with ill-tidings to England, had proved by its results an unmistakable victory.

ENERALLY speaking, every force at the com- mand of the Allies during the period illustrated in this volume seems to be gathering with increased momentum in the decisive direction of victory. There were other incidents which at the moment seemed disastrous enough — such as the surrender of Townshcnd at Kut, after the ineffectual efforts to relieve him — but, seen at a little distance of time, recede in importance and take their places among the minor matters of the war. The lamented death of Lord Kitchener on June 5th is one of the shadows falling across this period of high promise and brilliant achievement ; but the British nation found consolation in thinking that, sad though it was that the great soldier who had initiated our military preparations for this frightful struggle, and had raised millions of men for the army of freedom, was not spared to see the rich fulfil- ment of his plans, yet he had the satisfaction of knowing that the crowning achievement of his life had been accomplished ere that pitiful moment when he sank with the ill-fated Hampshire in the northern sea.

ESE are but a few of the main features in the strange medley of events with which the cameras of war-correspondents in almost every clime have filled the pages of this present volume ; but they are sufficient in their world-wide interest and enduring historical importance to justify the opinion that no volume of THE WAR ALBUM is more appealing in the scope, variety, and detail of its contents than that to which these lines are introductory. J. A. H.

Principal Literary Contents

The Moving Drama of the Great War : VI. — The Spiing and Summer Campaign of 1916. By Arthur

D. Innes, M.A 1809

The Glorious First of July. By Edward Wright . .1838 A Night Affair on the Western Front. By H. F.

Prevost Balterfby 1 848

General Sir Charles C. Monro, K.C.B. . . . 1856

The Struggle for Verdun. By Lord NortJicliffe , . 1 859

General Pctain 1890

The French Swoop on Pironne. By Edward Wright . 1 892

General Foch, G.C.B 1920

My Ride with the Caucasian Cavalry. By H. C.

Seppings Wright 1939

Between Two Fires at Mamomitza. By Basil Clarke . 1955

The Legend of General Cantore. By R. Mackenzie . 1961

Geneial Sir Bryan T. Mahon, C.B., K.C.V.O . . 1994

PAGE

When I Was Wounded on Chocolate Hill. By H. W.

Nevinson ......•• 1997

The Campaign in Mesopotamia to the Capture of Amara 2001

The Advance on Bagdad and Memorable Siege of Kut 2012 How German Military Plans Failed. By Major George

W. Redway . ." 2027

The British Naval Victory off Jutland. By Edward

Wright 2047

The Jutland Battle by Night. By Edward Wright . 2054 Blunders of German Naval Policy. By Commander

Carlyon Bellairs, R.N., M.P 2059

Rebuilding Ruined Lives. By Lady Jellicoe . .2110

The Rt. Hon. Viscount Grey, K.G. . . . 2122

Romance of Rail- Power in the War. By Edwin A. Pratt 2124

The Rt. Hon. William Morris Hughes, P.C. . . 2144

Earl Kitchener : The Last Post. By Arthur Machen . 2146

List of Maps

Map Showing the Great Biitish Advance of July, 1916 1826

The Battle-Fronts in the Opening Stages of the Fight for Verdun 1858

Large Scale Map of First Phase of the Struggle for Verdun 1862

The Last German Colony, East Africa 1922

Area of the Russian Victories on the Strypa .............. 1938

Map of the Trentino Front 1960

The Hour of Fate on the Tigris 1996

The Principal Railways of Europe and Asia Minor 2124

Railway Systems of the Allies and Germany 2126

Special Full-Colour Plates

H.R.H. The Prince of Wales (A War- Time Portrait) Frontispiece

Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, K.C.B., D.S.O. Facing page 1840

Monochrome Colour Plates

Calm at Eventide : Commander-in -Chief Surveying the Field of Victory ...... Facing page 1809

Wayside Calvary in France .................. 1825

British Heavy Howitzer in Action on the Western Front „ 1857

Brothers in Arms : A " Poilu " Greets British Soldiers .........,,„ 1905

Magnificent Charge of Indian Troops Against the German Trenches ........... 1937

Fearless Cossacks Sabre and Put to Flight Hungarian Hussars ........,,., 1952

David Against Goliath : British Torpedo-Boat Destioyer Makes an End of German Battleship 2049

Missed ! tJ Boat's Torpedo Passes Beyond the Stern of British War Vessel „ 2065

Lieutenant A. de Bathe Brandon Attacking a Zeppelin Raider .... . . ..,.., 2072

Glorious Charge of the Fusiliers at St. Eloi , 2081

Dashing Dragoon Guards Rout German Infantry in the Great Advance , 2096

"Heave-to!" A British Patrol-boat Stopping a Suspect Vessel « 2128

180C

TABLE OF CONTENTS-CMtimMd

The Spring and Summer Campaign, 1916

large Calibre Shells on the Way to Front at Verdun . . I'KIO

Inexhaustible Supply of Munitions for the Battle Zone . . 1812

British Cross-Channel Pilots Awaiting Orders . . . 1814

The Prussian Guard at Southampton 1823

With the Flag in France and Flanders

The Jubilant Sentry 1825

The Great Push I France Salutes the Ally . . . '. 1827

Guns that Pounded German Trenches to Powder . . . 1828

After Victory: German Soldiers in Captivity . . If 29

The Billet in the House of God 1830

Splendid British Charge at La Boisselle .... 1831

To the Fighting Line, via Marseilles 1832

Royal Welsh Fusiliers Along the Somme .... 1834

Great Leaders in History's Greatest Crisis .... 1835

Before and After the Moment of tiie Advance ' . . . 1836

Pardon, Kamcrad ! An Incident at Montauban . . . 1837

Wiltshires and East Yorks in the Forward Move . . . 1839

Prisoners from Contalmaison and Boisselle ... 1841

Calling the RoU After the Dawn of Victory .... 1842

Recurrence of Red Cross Treachery at Thiepval . . . 1843

Thoughts of Home Before the Critical Effort .... 1844

The Deathless Story of Gommecourt Wood .... 1845

Hurrah ! Hurrah ! ! Hurrah ! ! ! 1846

The " Fighting Fifth " Scores Again at St. Elol . . . 1847

Allied Action with Bayonet, Bomb, and Mine' . . . 1849

Moments of Suspense with British Sniper Party . . . 1851

Charge of Deccan Horse at Foureaux Ridge .... 1852

London Scottish Advance to the Piper's Tune . . . 1853

Pluck and Peril with the Gallant Seaforths .... 1851 PERSONALIA OF THE GREAT WAR— GENERAL SIR.

CHARLES C. MONRO, K.C.B., G.C.M.O. . . . 1855

The Struggle for Verdun

Poignant Pictures from the Furnace of Verdun . . . 1861

Where the Gennans were Shattered at Donaumont , . 1865

Xc ir Verdun Where War Was Fierce and Furious . . . 1867

Forest of Fire in the Slope of Dead Man's Hill . . . 1869

German Shrapnel Storm in the Valley of the Meuse . , . 1870

En Avant! For the Glory of France at Douaumont . . 1871

Personalities and Pawns in the Verdun Contest . . . 1872

Actualities from the Environs of Verdun .... 1873

Deserts of Debris Along the Wooded Mcuse .... 1874

Ferocious Fighting for the Great French Fortress . . . 1875

With our Wonderful Ally near Louvemont and Vaux . . 1876

Lovely Settings for the Grim Drama of Verdun . . . 1877

The End of the Line in the Sodden Pretre Wood . . . 1878

A June Morning in the Caillette Wood 1879

After a Futile German Onslaught. Somewhere on the French

Line Before Verdun 1880-81

Shambles ! A Warm Corner of the Verdun Sector . . 1882

The Shell-Ploughed Ridge of Douaumont .... 1883

Over the Meuse and in the Heart of Verdun .... 1884

Frenzied Fighting Hand to Hand for Fort Vaux . . . 1885

Debris and Derelicts of the Verdun Storm .... 1886

Pi -twin's Heroes to and from the Tiattlc-Front . . . 1887

The Human Emplacement : For the Glory of France . . 1888

PERSONALIA OF THE GREAT WAR— GENERAL PETAIN 1889

With the Glorious Armies of France

With General Foch Advancing on the Somme . . . 1893

In France by Rivulet and Silver Birch 1895

Dawn in tlin French Line 1896

Cave- Men an<l Cavalry In the French Lines . 1897

Tlir- Mansion in Ruins and the Cottage Intact . . . 1898

A Shattered Sanctuary in Mcurtlie and Moselle . , . 1899

French Ilii-iirs in the Trenches as Infantrymen . . . 1900

Warm Corner Amid 1'incs of the Snowy Vosges . . . 1901

French Troops Advancing to a Counter- Attack . . . 1902

Young Ears tint Heard the Cacophony of War . . . 1903

Bayonets (ililter Along the Yser Canal 1904

Against the Foe Through Wire nnd Wattles .... 1905

-IICS and Incidents Along the French Front 1906

The Vlvandierc : A Romantic Figure Recalled 1907

Moroccan Spahis to Aid Europe's Deliverance 1908

To the War by Wire in the Snowy Vosgcs .

To the Place of Peace

The Daily Jaunt to "No Man's Land" and Back . French Dogs of War Decorated for Field Service . Poison Masks for School Children of Rheims . French Colonials Getting into Fighting Fettle Russia's Glorious RaUy to her Wonderful Ally

After the Attack

Music and Menu Amid the Debris of Battle . . . . A Weapon of the Dark Ages ..... PERSONALIA OF THE GREAT WAR— GENERAL FOCH

PAGE 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919

The Conquest of German East Africa

General Smuts in his Armoured Car

British Drive into German East Africa .

War Traffic on the Trek in East Africa .

Forward to Victory Through the Sombre Bush

With Our Special Photographer in East Africa

In the Van of General Smuts' Great Advance

Native Regiments in British East Africa

On the March to Kilimanjaro

Stalwart Burghers Move on German East Africa

The Martial Parade in Sunny Durban

The Campaign Against the Kaiser's Last Colony

Artillery in Action on the East African Front .

Fighting the King of Beasts in African Jungle

The Great Push Against German East Africa .

In the Wake of General Smuts' Offensive

With Russia Resurgent

Russia Strikes on the Eastern Front ....

Caucasian Cavalry Advance in the Carpathians

Imperial Russia Keeps Guard over Trelizond

First Scenes from Erzerum .....

Exclusive Photographs of Erzerum, the Captured ' Jletz of A Minor ' ......

Erzerum, the Anvil for the Grand Duke's Hammer-Stroki Cossacks Search for Wounded with Electric Torch . Slav and Teuton in Close Conflict ....

Slavs Push on to Cities of Immortal Romance Four Phases of the Victorious Russian Army . Russian Grand Dukes at Teheran and in Japan Russian Royalties Work and Rest Behind the Lines War and the Spiritual Force of Slavdom

Thrilling Charge of the Cossacks

By River and Road near the Russo-German Front . The Tsar of Russia on the Northern Front .

.sla

1921 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936

1937 1941 1942 1943

1944-5

. 1946

. 1947

. 1948

. 1949

. 1950

. 1951

. 1952

. 1953

. 1954

. 1957

. 1958

Scenes from Italy's Alpine War

Powerful Italian Gun on High Alpine Peak .... 1959

A " War Illustrated " Contributor on Italy's Front . . 1963

The Tube of Death : Vivid Italian Battle Scenes . . . 1964

Faulty Shells and Spies on the Isonzo Front .... 1965

Four Pluses of the Italo-Austrian Conflict .... 1966

Italian Bcrsaglieri and Alpini in Action .... 1967

Diogenes Up-to-Date 1968

Facing the Austrian Onslaught in the Trentino . . . 1969

Stirring Scenes from the Italian Front 1970

The Allies in the Balkans

British Heavy Gun Position at Salonika .... 1971

British Troops at Work in the Balkans .... 1972

From Field to Field of Britain's Endeavour .... 1973

Great Naval Guns Speak in the Balkans .... 1974

East Joins West to Uphold Freedom's Cause 1975

Hunting the Spy in Levantine Backwaters .... 1976

Aviation, Communication and Adjniration .... 1977

On Guard Against Treachery near Salonika .... 1978

The Rumble of War Through Macedonian Valleys . . . 1979

Allied and Enemy Ordnance at Salonika .... 1980

Four Splendid Hussars Fight Two Hundred Huns . . . 1981

Enter the Russians in the Balkan Area 1982

Military Movements Under Britannia's Shield 1983 Preparations for the Day on the Balkan Front 1984 Round About the Allied Base at Salonika . 1985

1807

TABLE OF CONTENTS-conftnued

Serbs and Indians Ready to take the Balkan Field . Impromptu Overtures to the Neutral Greeks . Gallant Serbia Again Takes the Balkan Field Emergency Treatment of Wounded at Salonika . With the Itritish Start on the Balkan Front . Saving a Comrade from the Uhlan's Lance . Lord French's Sister Decorated at Salonika . PEKSONALIA OF THE GREAT WAR— GENERAL BRYAN T. MAHON, C.B., K.C.V.O.

In Mesopotamia and Egypt

SIR

T\OR

l'J86 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992

1993

Golden Deeds of Heroism

Decorated for Valour: More of Britain's Bravest . Mouth-Organ Melody Under Heavy Fire Decorated for Valour: More of Britain's Brave Sons Giant Anzac Heaves German Over Parapet . Decorated for Valour : More of Britain's Brave Sons Golden Laurels for Gallant Londoners . Decorated for Valour: More of Britain's Brave Sons Brave Munsters Reply to German Insults Decorated for Valour : More of Britain's Brave Sons

PAGE 2076 2077 2078 2079 2080 2081 2082 2083 2084

Under Way for Kut-el-Amara

on the Way to Kut : Scenes in the Tigris Valley .

Following the Relief Column Towards Kut .

British Charge Through the Tigris Swamp .

Wayi-ide ('aha and Conflict Towards Kut .

The Arah Patrol on the Tigris Flood

Strenuous Effort in the Valley of the Tigris .

Beasts of Burden in Asian and African Areas

Along the River Way to Kut

Slav and Briton Meet in Mesopotamia ...

The Flame of War in the Palm Groves of Eden

Wounded Heroes from Kut Recoup at Basra

Clean Fighters: Clean Hands and Clean Conscience

Indian Fighters and Arah Bargees on the Tigris .

Anzac Swords and Bombs Scatter Enemy in £gypt

A Nightmare for the Senussi

Beasts of Antiquity Engaged in Armageddon

War Scenes and Incidents East of Suez

Stormy Days In the Threatened Protectorate

Bedouin Hostility Broken Down by British .

Following the Drum in Ancient Persia and Syria .

Western Juggernauts In the Mysterious East

Peeps Behind the Enemy Lines

With the Baffled Foe on Four Fighting Fronts The Crown Prince's Emblem of Good Fortune How Krupp Guns are Tested at Essen . Three Grenadiers : Civilisation at Lowest Ebb With Enemy Forces in the Balkans Germany Organises Against the Hunger Wolf German Activities Along the Coast Through German Eyes : Two Phases of the War British Bayonet Charge as Seen by the Enemy Incidents of the Austrian Eftorts Against Italy Martial Clatter Echoes with Mountain Cascade Austrian Al]iinc sddiers Amid the Dolomites Flames and Grenades ..... The Hand of Science in the Cause of Humanity Within an Austrian Fort on the Adriatic Austrian Activities in Montenegro and Albania Austrians Prepare for New Russian Offensive

. 1995

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. 2006

. 2007

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. 2010

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. 2014

. 2015

. 2016

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. 2021 2022

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Records of Regiments in the War

Sec.-Lieut. McGregor Winning the Military Cross

Lancashires' Gallant Attack on Vimy Ridge .

The Loyal North Lancashires

The Spirit that Made for Victory .

The Yorkshire Light Infantry

Three " Jocks " Guard Six Hundred Prisoners

The Cameron Highlanders ....

The Royal Irish

Smiling Soldier Sons of the Emerald Isle .

The Cameronians or Scottish Rifles

Brave Highlanders to the Attack at Mamctz .

The Cheshires

The East Surreys

The Royal Wrest Kents ....

2020 2029 2030 2031 2032 2033 2034 2035 2036 2037 2038 2039 2040 2041 2042 2043 2044

The War by Sea and Air

Sunk o(t Jutland 2046

I) Is Not Words for (lod and King and Country . . . 2040

"She Fought a I.:, II nit Vinht. " 2050

GiTinan ships Rehearsing for Jutland Battle .... 2051

i:ri:i-h Collier Gits lleltcr of U Craft 2n:>2

New Ettorts for Britain's Great Senior Service . . . 2053 JtritMi Battle-Cruiser Fleet Engaging the Might of the German

Navy oft Jutland 2056-7

Impri"ion nf the Action oft the German Cnr.st . . . 2058

spare Time. War Work on a l!attl--ship at Sea . . . 2061

I ini; V.M nt with the Grand Fl<-rt 2IM'2

Peril on the. Waves fro m Shi 11 and 'IVmpcst, .... 2063

A Three-Act Drama of the Air near La Panne . . . 2064

The Last nf /, ppelm l.-jn nit siavangcr 2065

i,lii-tlv I'.ml of an Enemy Pilot 2066

Thrilling Moments in the Flying Man's Car .... aif.7

HOW the Huns were Blinded in the Great Advance . . . SM',S

Letting Him Down: Frem h Pilot's Kxi>e<lient . . . 2000

Hf'ith-phmge of /eppelin L7 liiiTn

Sentinel* of the Skies : Naval Airships on Patrol . . . 2071

Perennial Duel Between " Archies" and Skycraft . . . 207^ I'.ir.l of E\il limn, Hi, s ( ivcr the i'.niish

Front ....... 207.1

The Dying Gasbag LI 5 . . . 2074

Canada on the Western Front

Canadian Lance-Corporal Decorated with the D.C.M.

Canadians Adopt the Shrapnel-Proof Casque

Bayonets, Bombs, and Bullseyes in Flanders .

Hunting for Rats on the Western Front .

Maple Leaf for Ever ! Canadians' Crater Battle .

Canadians Carry Trenches in Counter- Attack .

The Final Eftort of a Brave Canadian

The Great Dominion Ready for Emergencies . .

Britain in War Time

Back from the Front to Clubland

Lord French Reviews Britain's National Reserve . The First Wounded Heroes from the Somme .... Ceaseless Endeavour at Home for Victory Abroad . Haunts of Peace After the Nightmare of War .... Thrills for the Neophyte at a Riding School . . . . Oft to France and Back to the Home Country Womanhood the Great Reserve Behind the Lines . Women Work with a Will while Men Make War The First and Last of the Dublin Revolt . . . . Scenes in the Track of the Sinn Feiners . Princely and Ducal Service in Britain's Cause PERSONALIA OF THE GREAT WAR— VISCOUNT GREY, K.G.

2085 2086 2087 2088 2089 2090 2091 2092 2093 2094 BOOT 2096 2097 2098

2099 2100 2101 2102 2103 2104 2105 2106

2108 2100 2111 2112 21 IS 2114 2115 2116 2117 2118 2119 2120

2121

World-Wide Echoes of the Clash of Arms

Army Service Corps Under Fire .2123

War Time Pets : More Units of the Mascot Battalion . . 2125

Fresh Air and Liberty After Heat of Conflict .... 2127

"\\oincn of the Allied Nations on War Work . . . Uli^s

Some Quaint Extremes in War-Time Transport . . . jiai

To Uphold Freedom's Cause : Portugal in Arms . . . 2130

Live Stock to Feed Soldiers and Refugees .... 2131

Allied and Enemy Prisoners in Two Continent* . . . 2132

Minor Incidents Pictured in Many War Centres . . . 2133

With Friend and Foe Ashore and Atloat .... 2134

Givasr paint and Property-Box near the Trenches . . . 2135

Th.' World-Wide War by Camp. Sea and Waterway . . 2136

War-time. Autos and Some shell-Wrecked Derelicts . . 2137

Pieture Stories from the Album of the World-War . . . 2138

Topsy-Turvevdom in Sport and Service .... 2139

Happy 'I liom.'hts (lf Handy .Men in Emergency . . . 2140

Switzerland's Kindly Care of liritish Prisoners . . . 2141

Training in the Art of Bomb-Throwing ..... 2142 PERSONALIA OF THE GREAT WAR— THE RT. HON.

WILLIAM MOKKIS HUGHES, P.C. . 2144 Britain's Roll of Honoured Dead . 2145-54 Diary of the War .... 1M.V, mi

1808

To frier i*t'jf ;«

1809

The Moving Drama of the Great War

VI.- -The Spring and Summer Campaign of 1916

Progress of Events by Land, Sea and Air from the Eve of Verdun to the Opening Battles of the Somme

Written by

ARTHUR D. INNES, M.A.,

Author of "A History of the British Nation," etc.

THE news, received on February I7th, 1916, that the Russians were in Erzerum signalised what promised to be the opening of a new chapter in the war. It marked the fact that Russia was again ready, when the lavourable moment should arrive, to take up a different r8le from that which had been forced upon her during the summer of 1915, or from that which she had success- fully maintained through the late autumn and winter.

Still, a great offensive on the eastern front in Europe on the part of either belligerent would certainly be impossible until not only the winter, but at least the early spring, should be past. Before that time should arrive it was necessary lor Germany to strike in some other quarter a blow which should at the least paralyse or disorganise French and British in the west, so that they should be unable to assume a vigorous offensive at the moment when the grapple with Russia should again become active. It was conceivable, then, that the Germans would seek a decision in the Balkans ; but only on the condition that they could throw a very powerful force into the eastern peninsula without such a depletion on either of the two main fronts as would involve a very serious risk of disaster. The alternative was con- centration upon a decisive blow in the west.

On February igth came the first definite though not yet fully unmistakable sign that this was the project for which the Germans had been preparing. It was a probability so obvious that the French and British had also prepared for it very thoroughly. It was no part of the Fianco-British plan to be enticed into a premature offensive ; that was to await the conditions which would simultaneously bring the activity of the Russians in the east into full play. The German plan had two alternative aims, either to smash through the Franco-British line, or to beguile the Franco-British forces into the opening ot a premature attack by which they would exhaust themselves before it was practicable for Russia to play her part in the east. It was the business of the French and British to prevent the Germans from achieving either of those aims.

Tremendous Importance of Verdun

The presumption then was that the Germans would open a great attack at one point or more upon the long western line. The event proved that the point actually chosen by the Germans was the Verdun salient. In the week between February igth and February 26th it had become obvious that the battle of Verdun would be perhaps more critical and more desperate than any which had taken place throughout 1915.

The attack then was fully expected, and the tre- mendous importance of its success to the Germans was fully appreciated. The soldiers knew that the strategical value of Verdun itself could be very much overrated. It had been a fortress of immense strength, but the first months of the war had demonstrated that fortresses of immense strength had in fact become obsolete. Verdun might be abandoned, as the Russians had abandoned their fortresses, without involving the breaking of the French line. But it was quite certain that its abandonment would have a disastrous effect morally perhaps upon the Allies themselves, and without any doubt at all upon neutrals ; while it would raise the confidence of the German population to the highest pitch. It was therefore the confident belief of those who

had learnt to trust in French generalship that the French command had taken its measures, and that the Germans would not get to Verdun.

Nevertheless, at the end of the first week it required a good deal of faith to maintain that confidence ; even the most resolute were beginning rather to emphasise the theory that the fall of Verdun would not be an irretrievable disaster, than to insist upon their belief that Verdun was not going to fall. For during that week the whole French line, the semicircle screening Verdun, had been pushed back day by day, and the news that the Germans had seized the fort of Douaumont seemed to suggest the beginning of the end. As a matter of fact, it would have been a good deal nearer the mark to call it the end of the beginning.

The French Scheme of Defence

To follow the course of this great and extremely critical battle is "by no means easy except with the use of a large scale map. Approximately the position in the middle of February was this. The French line ran in a slightly flattened semicircle round the front of Verdun. Taking Verdun as the centre, the two ends of the arc rested on Malancourt, west-north-west of Verdun, and Manheulles, east-south-east of it, the core of the semicircle being an approximately straight line running from Manheulles to Malancourt through Verdun. The radius was from eight to ten miles. The river Meuse flows through Verdun, crossing the French line at Brabant, eight miles north-north-west of Verdun, taking a very winding course.

The main wall, so to speak, of the French defence was not, however, the line of the French Front, but lay between it and Verdun at a distance of five miles or so along the Charny Ridge on the west or left bank of the Meuse, and the Louvemont Ridge on the right bank. The western shoulder of the Louvemont Ridge is Peppei Hill ; the eastern is the Douaumont Plateau. To reach Verdun the Germans had first to reach and break through either the Charny Ridge line west of the Meuse, or the horseshoe-shaped Louvemont Ridge east of it, or the south-eastward continuation of the line, called the Heights of the Meuse, rising out of the plain of Woevre. At the present season, however, it appears that the waterlogged character of the plain prevented the develop- ment of an effective attack upon this third sector.

Now, had the original outer circle of the French line been actually the main line of defence, the Germans would have achieved their object by smashing the French out of that line. But the French scheme of defence did not concern itself with the permanent holding of that front line at all. The theory of it was to hold with small forces a series of screens from which the gradual retire- ment should be effected upon the very much shorter line of the Louvemont Ridge, where the attack would find itself up against defences which might prove im- pregnable ; while it was calculate that the regulation methods of the German attack would involve for the enemy, in the course of their advance, an enormous expenditure both of men and munitions, an expenditure worth while it it meant the breaking of the French line, but not otherwise.

For the whole of the first week, then, the German onslaught was developed upon the middle sector, the curve of the arc on the east of the Meuse and on the north

B5

1810

THE DRAMA OF THE WAR

Supplies of large-calibre shells on their way to the front organisation of transport to and from Verdun was largely re of our ally's great resistance.

of Verdun. On February 2ist, alter two days of artillery preparation, the German infantry was launched upon the French. Day by day the French screen fell back a mile or so, inflicting losses very much heavier than it sus- tained. On Friday, the 25th, the French had been pushed in to the Louvemont Ridge, which was con- tinued on the west of the Meuse by the Charny Ridge. The attack, how- ever, had not been developed in the west of the Meuse, where the French had been subjected only to heavy bombardments. The French Front there still ran by Malancourt, past 15 •thincourt to the Meuse, facing Brabant. Between the left flank of the I.ouvemont Ridge and Brabant ran the Meuse, like the letter S turned the wrong way round, an impassable barrier, completely com- manded by the French artillery in position on the hills on the left of the Meuse between the French front line and the Charny Ridge.

The French, therefore, on the left of the Meuse were not threatened by the German advance on the right of the Meuse, but the right flank of the German advance, by the

time that it was fronting Pepper Hill, was exposed to the storm ot fire from the French guns on the left of the Meuse, and any attempt to storm Pepper Hill must be made under that fire. If, therefore, a successful attempt was to be made to storm the Louvemont Ridge, it must be on the eastern side of the horseshoe, which was not under fire from the left bank of the Meuse.

The Momentous Day

Therefore, on Friday, February 25th, the immediate German ob- jective was the eastern key of the horseshoe, the Douaumont Plateau. If the Germans could master that plateau in force, they would be able to envelop the Louvemont Ridge. So far, although the huge masses of the Germans had rolled forward some four miles nearer to Verdun so that they were actually able to shell the town, there had been no crisis, although, at least, to unexpert eyes they seemed to have won a series of victories ominous of disaster to the French. The crisis came only when they were up against the wall of the Louvemont Ridge.

The Saturday then (February 26th) was a supremely momentous day ; for on it the Germans made their grand attack all round the horseshoe front from Pepper Hill to Douaumont. Time after time they swept forward only to be mowed down by the murderous fire on front and flank upon Pepper Hill, "the Germans' grave." Time after time fresh masses took the place of those who had been mowed down, only to meet with the same fate. Five times they came on ; five times they were shattered. But on the east, the Douaumont side, they were covered from the flanking fire ; yet it was only with the seventh onslaught that they won at last a

looting on the plateau, and the alarming news was proclaimed that they had captured the fort of Douaumont.

by lorry. The French ponsible for the success

To the first line on board motor-lorries. How the gallant French man-at-arms went

into battle near Verdun

1811

THE SPRING AND SUMMER CAMPAIGN OF 1916

The man who turned the tide. General Balfourier, who was in command of the French Twentieth Army Corps, the men who •wept the Germans oft the Plain of Douaumont when the enemy had all but succeeded in carrying the coveted position.

As a matter of fact, the achievement at Douaumont, though serious, was very far from being so important as it seemed. The so-called fort was one of what had been a ring of outlying forts round Verdun, all of which had been dismantled a year before, when the uselessness of forts under the new conditions had been made clear. The Germans had a footing on the plateau, and that an extremely precarious one ; the dismantled fort, occupied by a Brandenburg regiment, made a dip in the French line. That was all ; for though the French, under the storm of artillery fire which had preceded the last attack, were obliged to fall back for a short distance, arrangements had been made to deliver a counter-attack with a mass of picked troops precisely at the critical moment. The German mass was beaten back, and it was only a small wedge that succeeded in clinging on to the position, which it did not in any possible sense command.

Germans Attack West of the Meuse

Nevertheless, there was a period of intense anxiety before the news published on the 2 8th and following days restored a confident belief that the French would hold their own on the Douaumont Plateau. In spite of jubilant German declarations, the enemy • never succeeded in getting possession of the village of Douau- mont, which gave its name to the fort.

All through the next week a series of recurring onslaughts was made upon the Louvemont Ridge, accompanied by a good deal of hard fighting and some unimportant French withdrawals along the southern extension of the line. The main effort continued to be directed against the Douaumont Plateau, both from the north-east as before, and on the Vaux ravine just on its south, where lay the village of Vaux and the dismantled fort of 'Vaux south of the village ; but though the Germans acquired a footing in the village, they were unable to

carry it. Each day increased confidence in the strength of the defence of the line.

With the beginning of the third week the attack developed on the west of the Meuse. Here the French held strong positions in the hills flanking the river between the front line and the Charny Ridge, notably the ridge in the northern loop of the S called the Cote de 1'Oie, the Goose Crest, where lay the three heights known from their elevation as Hill 265, Hill 295 (other- wise called the Mort Homme), and, on another ridge. Hill 304, the most westerly. Here the French line was bent back, the Germans getting possession of the eastern part of the ridge and Hill 265, while the French remained in possession of the Mort Homme and Hill 304.

The Deathtrap of Mort Homme

As the situation developed, it became clear that the Mort Homme was simply a deathtrap for the Germans, and would remain so at least until they could get possession of Hill 364. Nor would the capture even of the Mort Homme open the way to Verdun, since between it and Verdun lay the main wall of the Charny Ridge. It was not, however, till nearly the end of the third week that the strength of the Mort Homme position had demonstrated itself. For the Germans not only captured Hill 265, but also established themselves between it and the Mort Homme in the Crows' Wood, which brought them so close to the Mort Homme that the chance of their being able to storm the height from it seemed by no means remote. By the end of the week, however, the Crows' Wood itself had been recovered by the French.

So far, then, the effect had been this. The original French line ran in a north-easterly curve from Avocourt, through B^thincourt, to the Meuse at Brabant on its right bank. The attack on the Goose Crest had pushed back the line between Bethincourt and the Meuse, so

1812

THE DRAMA OF THE WAR

that it now lay Irom Bethincourt to Cumieres, still in front of the Mort Homme. This had created a salient (Avocourt-Bethincourt-Cumieres) within which lay the Mort Homme and Hill 304 to the west of it.

Since the Mort Homme had proved its capacity for defying attack on the east and north of this salient, the next move was to thrust at the west of the salient, in the hope of reaching and carrying Hill 304, which would dominate the Mort Homme and render that position untenable. That move did not begin till the fifth week, on March 2oth. For in the fourth week the Germans recovered possession of Crows' Wood, and made two furious attacks on the 24th and the 26th,

directed upon another " Hill 265," which flanks the Mort Homme on the north-west. (These figures, by the way, represent the number of metres above the sea level. Roughly speaking, thirty metres equals one hundred feet.) The result of this was that the Germans penetrated to the slope of this second Hill 265, but no more, though this extremely costly gain of ground was somewhat inexplicably proclaimed by them as the capture of the Mort Homme. A fresh blow was also discharged against Vaux, but here, also, the German attack was repulsed.

French Line Intact After Six Weeks

It was on

March 20 th, just a month after the opening of the grand attack which was to have captured Verdun, broken the French line, and started the German Army upon another rush to Paris within a fortnight, that the Germans began the movement to take the Mort Homme position in flank by an advance upon Avocourt. By the use of the most atrocious of their uncivilised weapons, liquid fire, they succeeded in making some impression, and in pushing forward during the ensuing days to the lower slopes of Hill 304.

But at the close of the month of March, when the battle for Verdun had been in progress for six weeks, the French line still ran intact in front of Verdun. Since the first week the Germans had gained no appreciable ground, though they had brought forward great masses of reserves. Their attacks had weakened, and their losses had been enormous, the most extravagantly favourable esti- mates placing them at not less than 150,000. The French, on the other hand, had not brought their reserves into action at all, except upon particular occasions when they had been employed to deliver counter-attacks, as at Douau- mont on February 26th. And their losses had not exceeded 50,000.

The Germans had neither taken Verdun, nor had they induced the Allies to enter upon a premature offensive

Part of the inexhaustible supply of munitions for mitrailleuses on the way to the battle zone. Inset : Welcome reinforcement for the men in the first line. Cans of hot soup ready to be transported to the trenches during the great battle of Verdun.

THE SPRING AND SUMMER CAMPAIGN OF 1916

on other parts of the line. There could be no more than the faintest shadow of a doubt that a tremendous effort had been made to force a decision in the west at an enormous cost, and that the effort had failed.

The British had taken no direct part in the great defence, though it was well understood that they were both able and willing to do so if desired. Not till the struggle had been for a long time in progress did it become known that they had in fact released a large number of French troops to support the Verdun defence by taking over a greatly extended line, though the troops they released had not been called into action.

Britain's Role During the Verdun Struggle

The obvious suggestion was made that when the Germans were massing against Verdun the British should have seized the opportunity to strike hard in Flanders and Artois. Instead, the r6le assigned to them was that of maintaining a constant menace unaccom- panied by any violent effort. Before Verdun, provided that the French could maintain their hold, it was all to the good that the Germans should send more and more of their men to destruction in the attempt to smash through.

So there went on a great deal of that bombarding which is a necessary pre- liminary to any grand attack. The German capture of the International trench near Ypres, on February I4th, had been perhaps more of an insult than an injury. It was extremely an- noying that the attempts to recover it had failed. It was, therefore, highly satisfactory to learn that on March 2nd the trench was recaptured, and that in the attack the line of trenches previously held by the Germans had also been penetrated and occupied. On the same day there were successful mining operations further south at the Hohenzollern Redoubt, where one effect was the de- struction of the enemy's main mining shaft. Again, at the end of the month, on March 27th, the German salient at St. Eloi, not three miles south of Ypres, was carried by the Northumberland and Royal Fusiliers and the Canadians, rectifying a somewhat troublesome portion of the line.

While the Italians were still nibbling their way for- ward on the Isonzo line, there appeared to be a complete lull in the Balkan operations. There, it was presumed, the Allies would not open an offensive campaign until the time should come for a general and simultaneous attack on every front. The general conviction was that the future conduct of the Balkan States, Serbia and Montenegro excepted, would depend chiefly upon the result of the Verdun operations.

Russia and the Balkan! Still Waiting

Nobody doubted that Germany's Turkish allies were already in a condition little short of desperate, while Bulgaria, whatever Ferdinand's feelings might be, was resentful of the German neglect of her claims — suspicious that she had allowed herself to be used as a tool, misled by the belief that victory was already in the grasp of the Central Powers. Her sullen mood might be dis- pelled by an emphatic German success ; but if the Verdun business proved a failure, Bulgaria would realise, as Turkey had already realised for herself, that she had been .duped, and would, at the worst, be unwilling to stir a finger in aid of the ally who had duped her. As for Rumania, she, unless actively attacked, would

Field-Marshal von Haeseler, the veteran

In supreme command of the German

Verdun offensive.

certainly not move so long as she was in doubt which side would win. It was at least possible that the Verdun battle or campaign would dispel her questionings ; while its issue was uncertain, Rumania's conduct would remain uncertain.

In these circumstances, the Allies, Bulgaria, and Rumania all remained outwardly quiescent. But Rumania, at least, was likely to be strongly affected by another factor. What part would Russia be capable of playing in the coming campaign ?

Twelve months before, Rumania had seemed to be on the verge of joining the fray. But it had then become evident that she had no intention of coming in in order to turn a dubious scale ; she would come only when assured that the scale would turn without her inter- vention. She had not stepped in to help Russia ; on the contrary, she had sat still while Russia was pushed back and back. Still, the Russian retreat had not convinced her that Russia was beaten ; she had neither given the lead to Bulgaria nor followed her in joining the Central Powers. If now she were convinced, first, that the power of the Central Empires was wearing out, and secondly, that the power of Russia was renewing

itself, she might soon judge that the time had come when she could intervene with more profit to herself than if she tarried too long. And the omens pointed to the re- suscit ation of Russia. It was in- deed notorious that conditions of climate and conditions of soil would prohibit a grand offensive in the east on either side until the season which is sometimes called late spring and sometimes early summer. The moment for Rumanian intervention would probably come, if it came at all, simultaneously with the general offensive of the Entente Powers. But in the meantime Russia was giving more than a hint of that recovery of strength which would certainly be one of Rumania's requirements.

Preparation* on the Eastern Front

The long Russian line from Riga to Rumania was cut in two by the Pripet Marshes. There could be no rapid movement of troops between the northern section and the southern section. When the great offensive should come, whether Russia or Germany should strike first, the Russian offensive would be in the south ; in the north she would remain, primarily, at least, on the defensive. The Central Empires might, and probably would, reverse these conditions.

Through the late winter or early spring, therefore, both sides were moving, not to start on the offensive, but to gain the positions from which the offensive could be set in motion with the passing of spring. Thus, from time to time, there were sharp engagements at various points both on the northern and on the southern portions of the line, with highly contradictory statements issued from Petrograd and Berlin respectively as to the size of the forces and the severity of the losses. It was difficult on either side to show a distinct gain on the balance in the north ; but it was tolerably clear that in the southern section the Russians had the upper hand of the Austrians. And everywhere the reports concurred in showing that the last year's fatal deficiency of ammunition on the part of the Russians had been made good.

And in the meanwhile it was significant that in Persia and in the Caucasus, Russia was dealing faithfully with the enemy ; and there was at least a reasonable

The man and the hour. Qeneral Retain,

to whose brilliant leadership was due

the glorious defence of Verdun.

1814

THE DRAMA OF THE WAR

Nonchalant attitudes of the most alert of fighting men. British cross-Channel pilots somewhere on the South Coast awaiting orders for departure. (Special photograph issued by the Press Bureau.)

prospect of a Turkish collapse, which would ere long liberate large reinforcements for the front in Russia itself. Unhappily, the progress of the Russians in the Asiatic area was not accompanied by corresponding British success in Mesopotamia. The position there was one of deadlock. General Townshend at Kut-el-Amara was virtually blockaded by an immensely superior Turkish force. It appeared that General Aylmer's relief expedition was not strong enough to raise the blockade, though only five and twenty miles of the Tigris lay between it and Kut.

Against German East Africa and the Senussi

It was known that there had been a painful failure to supply the advance column with medical and other necessaries ; it was not known how long its food supplies would hold out ; and consequently, the whole situation in Mesopotamia could only be viewed with the gravest anxiety. For it could not be expected that the Russians would be able for many weeks to come to send south- wards a column of such strength as to break its way to Bagdad and put to flight the forces investing Kut.

It was only in German East Africa and on the west ot

Presentation aeroplanes lined up somewhere in England overseas to the war zones

Egypt that the fighting had a character bearing any resemblance to the wars of the past. The East African command had in February been entrusted to General Smuts, as stout a champion of the British Empire now as he had been a champion of the Boers in the South African War. The talents which Lord Kitchener had once recognised in an adversary were now given play in a colleague, and the nature of the East African campaign was thoroughly suited to the genius and the experience of General Smuts. All the news from that quarter showed his thorough understanding of the task before him, and pointed to its swift and successful completion. At the same time the hostile movements of the Senussi on the western borders of Egypt presented no new problems of warfare, while the British were able to bring into operation, with decisive effect, the military weapons evolved during the twentieth century — motors and aeroplanes. By the end of March it was clear that no further serious trouble was to be feared from the Senussi.

The Operations of the Moewe

For a long time past naval activity had not been conspicuous, apart from the submarine piracy and from the operations of the Moewe. The month of March was more prolific.

In its first week it became known that the enterprising German cruiser had succeeded in evading detection, slipped through the British patrols, and found her way to a German port. Her complete bag had numbered no less than fourteen vessels. Whether her methods had been altogether legitimate may be questioned ; but, at least, she had been honourably distinguished by an observation of recognised principles of humanity which was refreshing. It did not become known till some weeks later that her sister ship, the Greif, had started upon a similar errand to that of the Moewe, but had been caught and sent to the bottom while still in the North Sea on Febru- ary zgth. Sailing under Norwegian colours, she had been detected by the British patrol boat Alcantara, an arrned merchant cruiser.

An engagement followed in which the gunfire of the Alcantara had very nearly sealed the fate of the Greif

prior to being piloted

1815

THE SPRING AND SUMMER CAMPAIGN OF 1916

when her own steering-gear was disabled, and she became an easy target for the Greif "s torpedoes. Two more ships arriving settled the Greif, but the Alcantara was also sunk. Most of the British and a considerable number of the Geiman crew were rescued and brought to Scotland.

Great British Air Raid on Schleiwig

A great air raid over Zeebrugge on March 2ist appears to have been responsible for bringing about another naval skirmish between destroyers. Three German destroyers escaped from Zeebrugge, but were sighted and chased by four British destroyers, which stopped the pursuit when the Germans sought to draw them into a mine area. Two of the Germans were known to have been badly hit, but the damage done to the British was trifling.

On March 25th there was a still livelier engagement under wild and exciting weather conditions. An air raid on the Schleswig coast, directed against the Zeppelin bases, was accom- panied by the light cruiser squadron of Commodore Tyr- whitt. The squadron was en- gaged by German cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft. One destroyer was rammed, a couple of armed trawlers weff sunk, and it appeared at least that several other destroyed were very hard hit, while one of the aircraft was brought down. In spite of the heavy seas, the British succeeded in rescuing a considerable number of Germans. On the other hand,

Flight-Corn. R. J. Bone, who brought down a German aeroplane In the Channel, March, 1916.

The Duke of Westminster (left) with the Duke of Marlborough. The former scattered retreating Bedouins near Sollum.

Elevated German machine - gun

in action in Flanders against an

allied aerial reconnaissance.

a British ship, the Medusa, was sunk by a collision, though her crew were rescued, and three of the British air squadron were forced to descend, not by gun- fire, but through failure of their engines. Their occupants had the unusual fate of being picked up and taken prisoners instead of being left to drown.

So much for the naval operations proper. The piracy record was still more remarkable. The P. & O. liner Maloja was sunk by a mine off Dover, with a loss of one hundred and fifty lives. A new programme was announced to come into force on March ist. No immediate results were apparent, since, according to

the general belief, the Kaiser and the Chancellor wished to avoid a positive breach with the United States, which had definitely refused to endorse the German theory that neutrals travelled at their own peril. The belief seemed to be endorsed by the dismissal of Admiral Tirpitz on March i6th. But whatever the wishes of the Kaiser and the Chancellor may have been, public opinion in Germany had pinned its faith to the Tirpitz programme with such feverish intensity that the Govern- ment was forced to carry it through in spite of the dismissal of its originator.

Cross-Channel Steamer Sussex Torpedoed

On the same day, March i6th, the Dutch liner Tubantia was torpedoed without warning by a German submarine ; though happily the crew and passengers were rescued. The Tubantia was followed by the Palembang, another Dutch vessel sunk without warning, and on March 25th the cross-channel steamer Sussex, carrying three hundred and eighty civilian passengers, including some American citizens, was torpedoed without warning. On the 2jth a like fate befell the Atlantic cruiser Minne- apolis ; while a still worse crime was the deliberate sinking of the Russian hospital ship Portugal on March 30th in the Black Sea. Of the two hundred and seventy- three persons on board, one hundred and fifteen were lost, including fourteen sisters of charity.

All through the month of March the activity of the air warfare upon the battle fronts was increasingly prominent, but official reports were far from illumining, A general impression certainly prevailed that the Ger- mans had the better machines. Aircraft construction being still in its infancy, it would seem to be almost certain that weaknesses must be gradually revealed.

181C

THE DRAMA OF THE WAR

Headquarters of one of the French divisions established in a strongly fortified cellar near the firing-line. Staff officers, some of whom are wearing the steel casque, are busy working out some military problem.

or, rather, that the causes ot weaknesses can only be gradually discovered, and on the other hand that im- provements will suggest themselves which take time to test before they can be adopted even in new machines, and before it becomes clear that they are not merely steps to further improvement for the development of which it is better to wait. Hence from time to time either side succeeds in bringing into operation machines better adapted for some specific purpose than those in present use ; with the result that a temporary ascend- ency passes to the side which has brought the new machine into the airfield.

Aerial Activity of Friend and Foe

Experts pin their faith to particular developments which in the eyes of other experts will be of little per- manent account ; but the faithful are exceedingly angry over the incompetence of the authorities who do not at once recognise their obvious duty. To more level-headed persons it appears inevitable that superiority in the machines should alternate so long as the intel- lectual capacity and the productive power of both sides are approximately equal, but that in the balance the ascendency must fall to the side whose machines are controlled by the best men. There was never any reason to doubt that if the Germans achieved a tem- porary superiority, no long time would pass before it would be redressed.

As we have pointed out before, the fact that the greater part of the aerial fighting is carried on over the enemy's lines, not over the lines of the Allies, meant that comparatively few of the aircraft which were forced to descend, whether of the Allies or of the Germans, did so within the allied lines.

Thus, whereas the allied losses could be reckoned, those of the Germans could only be vaguety guessed ;

while it was absolutely certain that the figures published by the enemy had only the remotest possible connection with the actual facts. And it hardly seemed probable that if there was actually a marked superiority on the part of the Germans, their airmen would continue to yield the palm of audacity to those of the Allies.

Along the battle front, then, the airmen of the Allies and of the Germans fought each other with a balance of success which it was not possible to gauge. On the other hand, while England was subjected to occasional slight aeroplane attacks, and to a scries of Zeppelin raids, several aeroplane raids on a larger scale were organised by the Allies against points behind the Ger- man lines ; Metz being apparently the favourite ob- jective of the French, while the British attacks were developed against the coasts. Of these we have already noted the two of principal importance.

Zeppelin Attempts on the East Coast

On March 2oth, sixty-five British, French, and Belgian planes bombarded Zeebruggc, suffering only one casualty, and dropping four tons of explosives ; and on March 2gth took place the joint air and sea operations on the Schleswig coast, in which it was believed that very substantial damage was done, though three British planes were lost. On the other hand, it appeared that the defences of London had been so far perfected that no more Zeppelins appeared there ; though three Zeppelins came over the Hast Coast on March 5th, when they succeeded in killing thirteen persons, injuring thirty-three, and doing an appreciable amount of miscellaneous damage.

There was good reason, however, to believe, in spite the absence of official notification, that several visits were in the course of the month paid to the East Coast by Zeppelins and aeroplanes, which were turned back

1S1T

THE SPRING AND SUMMER CAMPAIGN OF 1916

without effecting any damage whatever, though pre- sumably without actual loss.

If to some observers it was patent at the beginning of April that the attack on Verdun had definitely failed, that was nevertheless true only in the sense that, if ever the Germans did get to Verdun itself, they would still be utterly unable to achieve the objects with which the great blow had been delivered. But it remained conceivable that the retention of Verdun by the French might prove so costly that the Allies would rather choose retirement. On the other hand, the Germans were so deeply committed to the adventure that admis- sion of their inability 1o carry it through would have had upon their own people and upon neutrals a most disastrous effect ; an effect compared with which the abandonment of the Galli- poli enterprise by the Allies would have been trivial.

The German effort there- fore in no way relaxed, though each fresh exertion followed an all but identical course. Either on the Mort Homme sector, or on the Douaumont sector, or both, a prolonged and intensified bombardment prepared the way for a sledge-hammer infantry on slaught and the pene- tration of some "ele- ments "of the French front line — usually, but not invariably, followed by a French counter-attack which ejected the Germans from the elements gained ; after which there would ensue a lull for a few days, until the forces were reorganised for the next attack.

Calculations of the losses on either side could hardlv be

regarded as even approximately trustworthy. The principle, however, holds good that whether positions were held or evacuated, the heavier toll was paid by the attacking party, whether in a main attack or a counter- attack. As the German attacks were directed against positions which in the main were held, while the French counter-attacks were delivered only against occasional positions which had been lost, there could be no doubt that the German losses were much the greater. The losses could hardly be less than 50 per cent., and might be much higher.

Along the British front, extended for the liberation

of French forces transferred to Verdun, the battle for front line trenches continued ceaselessly ; mainly about the mine-craters at St. Eloi and the Hulluch quarries, craters and trenches changing hands from week to week — almost from day to day — as concentrated bombardments made one spot or another untenable by its tem- porary occupants. But in accordance with the plans of the General Staff, the British were not to be tempted or goaded into premature activity on a larger scale. Apart from the well-meant but curiously unintelligent clamour of a few people in England, that the British were " doing nothing to help their allies," it was very

Belgian soldiers en route for a spell of trench digging. The first photograph shows a group of stalwart Belgian soldiers outside their billets, and the centre snapshot is of M. Poincare, the French President, saluting King Albert, wearing his khaki uniform.

1818

THE DRAMA OF THE WAR

well understood that this activity was restricted not by their own will, but by the military direction of the Allies. On the sea the violent outburst of submarine piracy which distinguished the last fortnight of March was of brief duration. In fact, the campaign was over within a month of its beginning. It had apparently been started in response to the feverish clamour which arose when it was popularly supposed that the Tirpitz programme had been thrown overboard ; and it was abandoned publicly on political grounds, as a concession to American opinion, for which a return was expected in the form of pressure to stop the blockade of imports. The case of the Sussex in particular had met with a reception in the United States which could almost be called threatening. There were suspicions, however, that the true cause of the abandonment was to be found in the counter- measures of the British Admiralty, and the consciousness of failure. Capture of Trebizond bv the Russians

In the Balkans the adversaries were marking time. The Allies were accumulating forces and supplies, and the Bulgarians were presumably not prepared to attempt an offensive single-handed, while sufficient demands were made upon the Austrians by the Italian and Russian fronts to prevent them from giving their strange com- panions-in-arms the desired support. As for the Germans, every battalion that Hindenburg could spare was needed at Verdun.

And the Turks ? The Turks had more than enough to occupy them in Asia. They had one considerable army tied to the position on the Tigris between the British and Bagdad ; they had scattered forces in Persia, for the most part being hunted by Russians; their main forces were hard put to it by the Grand Duke's armies from Erzerum ; and their position became all the more critical when, in mid-April, the Russians captured Trebizond on the Black Sea. Their doom, it seemed, could hardly be postponed for very long ; yet for them the situation was not without its consoling feature.

At Kut-el-Amara lay General Townshend with some 9.000 men, mainly Indian battalions. He had been there since December ; first grimly gripping the position which was to be the key to Bagdad for the approaching expeditionary force ; then holding out with indomitable resolution till that force should win the mastery over the river, the marshes, and the larger forces of the Turks — holding out, because to cut the way through was im- possible ; holding out with an ever-nearing prospect of being starved into surrender ; while only five and twenty miles away General Gorringe, who had taken General Aylmer's place, was struggling desperately to overcome the insuperable obstacles that lay between.

Defence and Fall of Kut

Viewed merely as a military operation, the event at Kut-el-Amara was of little enough significance. The fall of Kut would not even release the Turkish forces. They would still be tied to the spot by General Gorringe, since, if they retreated, his way to Bagdad would be open. Their fate would be ultimately sealed when Russian columns arrived from the north. Townshend had done his heroic work. It was true that a surrender would put 9,000 men permanently out of action, but in this portentous war that was practically a negligible number.

On the other hand, it was possible that British prestige in the East might suffer seriously, yet that was im- probable. Nevertheless, the progress of the struggle was watched with the keenest anxiety ; for it was the universal conviction that Townshend was the splendid victim of a blunder in no wise of his own making, that the defence of Kut was one of the most gallant episodes in Great Britain's military annals, and that victory, not defeat, was the brave defender's due.

It was not to be. An attack, not to be denied, carried Gorringe's troops into the enemy's first lines ; but the good tidings were followed by the news that the victors

in that fight had again been forced to fall back by over- whelming numbers. It was known that Townshend 's supplies could only last a very few more days. A daring dash up the Tigris was made by a supply boat, but it could not reach its objective ; and on May ist came the official announcement that Townshend had surrendered unconditionally. The Turks, as usual, showed their superiority to their allies by paying full honour to their heroic adversary and by promptly arranging an exchange of wounded prisoners.

The last week of April, during which Kut actually fell, and the first days of May, were rich in events of varying significance, though their appal to the imagina- tion was more striking than their direct bearing on the war. The stage was at last reached when the resources of voluntary enlistment were obviously exhausted, and all but the most extravagant advocates of volun- taryism felt with a certain relief that the compulsory summoning of the small percentage of men still available for military service was no longer to be opposed.

Insurrection of the Sinn Feiners

The Germans, grievously disappointed by the crass stupidity which had made not only Canada and Australia but South Africa and India prefer the integrity of the British Empire to a Teutonic world-domination, still had hopes from Ireland — having learnt nothing from the magnificent exploits of the Irish regiments at the Front. The news that a German auxiliary cruiser, carrying arms and ammunition for a rising, had been sunk off the Irish coast, and that Sir Roger Casement was a prisoner, appeared on April 25th simultaneously with the report of an almost harmless Zeppelin raid on the East Coast ; and on the next morning came the announcement of a second Zeppelin raid, a naval raid on Lowestoft, and an insurrection of the Sinn Feiners — the Irish extremists— in Dublin. No one doubted that all these events were intimately connected.

The second Zeppelin raid was as abortive as the first, the raid on Lowestoft hardly less so. The latter was the work of the German battle-cruiser squadron, which bombarded Lowestoft for twenty minutes, was engaged vigorously by a British light-cruiser squadron, turned tail, and vanished to safe quarters — presumably under the impression that British ships of a more formidable type might be expected immediately. The brilliant audacity displayed by the light cruisers in their attack upon the immensely stronger German squadron was well rewarded. Far more serious and deplorable was the unhappy attempt of the Irish irreconcilables to wreck the cause to which Nationalists were ren ering much splendid service even at that moment. That there were plenty of irreconcilables still in Ireland everyone knew ; that the outbreak could have been prevented by a stronger Chief Secretary than Mr. Birrell nearly everyone believed. But that the attempt should have been made was hardly more surprising than its effective limitation to Dublin, where its suppression was hampered by the desire of the authorities to avoid operations involving the des- truction of property. Within the week, the rebels had realised the futility of continued resistance, and Ireland had vindicated her loyalty to the Empire, and to the cause into which the Empire had thrown itself.

Belgians Invade German East Africa

Progress in East Africa was somewhat retarded by the rainy season as well as by the vastness of the area of operations and the comparative absence of means of communication. A Belgian contingent from the Congo, however, was now beginning to play an active part, a fresh British column was about to invade the south, and success was steadily attending the British arms wherever the enemy were brought to an engagement. No variation developed in the character of the fighting before Verdun and on the British Front in Flanders and Artois ; while for a long time past the mutual hammering of Italians and Austrians on the Isonzo Front had been apparently no less unproductive of definite result.

Now, however, it seemed that Austria was to take her

1819

THE SPRING AND SUMMER CAMPAIGN OF 1916

Hoisting a shell aboard a British warship, to be stored until the German Fleet ventured out again. Having won a great victory off Jutland, May 31st, 1916, the British Fleet was alert for any further activity on the part of the Germans.

turn in seeking to procure some striking success for the Central Powers. The Germans were committed to the great effort on the western front, and could not, as it seemed, spare forces to enable Hindenburg to attempt another grand offensive against the Russian northern army. If the frontal struggle on the Isonzo area offered no opportunity for a decisive blow, there was still another way which might be tried.

Austrian Offensive on Trentino Front

It was pointed out in a previous volume that the Italian frontier fixed in 1866 had retained for Austria the immense advantage of the Trentino wedge, lying on the flank of the Lombard Plain, which is the great highway of communication between industrial and central Italy and the strategic frontier of the north-eastern corner. It had been a fundamental necessity for the Italians, when the campaign opened in 1915, to cover the Lombard Plain from an -attack through the Trentino, which would seriously imperil the communications of armies operating on the Isonzo.

The new Austrian move, then, was a concentration upon the Trentino with a view to bursting through, threatening the entire industrial area of northern Italy, and placing the Italian forces on the Isonzo in a very- dangerous position. Should this movement be successful it might have a paralysing effect upon Italy, and even compel her to make separate terms and retire from the war. On the other hand, the attempt involved, as the event showed, the withdrawal of heavy guns and picked troops from the Russian front between Pripet Marshes and the Bukovina.

This, then, was the plan which, after full and secret preparation, was brought into play in the third week of May. Trent, always in possession of the Austrians, is the point on which converge the two routes down to the Lombard Plain by the Brenta and the Adige, the Val Sugana and the Val Lagarina. Both these routes were blocked by the Italians. If the Austrians could obtain the effective mastery of either, the whole Italian position would be gravely imperilled. If they could pierce the defensive line stretching across from one valley to the other, they could descend upon one valley or the other in the' rear of the Italians.

By the end of the week, after prolonged and heavy bombardments and furious fighting, in which the

Austrians claimed to have captured many prisoners and much war material, the Italians had been forced to withdraw from their advanced position in both valleys, but only to new positions which still commanded them completely. At the same time the whole intervening Inie was being pushed back, so that while our allies were in fact holding their own securely in the two flanks of the line, the Austrians were forming a growing salient on the centre, and their forward pressure was increasing.

And in the meanwhile the Germans were able to claim a slight but appreciable success against the British on the Vimy Ridge, and the fight before Verdun was again increasing in intensity both on the Douaumont section and on the left of the Meuse, resulting in some gain of ground to the Germans, who succeeded in occupying Cumidres in the latter area, while the capture of Douau- mont " fort " by the French was followed by a German counter-attack which recovered it.

Terrific onslaughts and furious return strokes, costing no one knew how many thousands of lives, had by this time become so much the recognised order of the day that they almost ceased to excite emotion. Trenches defended till bombardment had battered them out of all semblance of defences, trenches stormed, trenches recovered, countless deeds of heroic courage worthy of a V.C., out in this war accepted as the sort of thing that everyone was doing as a matter of course, these things had become commonplaces of every day. There was something fantastic in attempting to recall to our minds wars in which the cutting up of a detachment of some scores or hundreds of men had thrilled us as lamentable disasters. The battering of the Germans upon the allied defences was becoming as monotonous to our exhausted imaginations as the crashing of the tide upon a granite cliff. The public was waiting, almost incredulously, for something that would stir it and startle it.

First News of the Jutland Battle

And on the night of June 2nd came the news that was more than startling. The next morning's papers con- tained the bald announcement from the Admiralty, which amounted to this: "The German Fleet had come out of its lair, there had been a great battle in the North Sea, and the Germans had returned to port, but they had first sunk three - British battle-cruisers and three cruisers, besides, perhaps, nine destroyers." They

1820

THE DRAMA OF THE WAR

themselves had lost one battle-cruiser and a couple ol light cruisers, besides, perhaps, another battle-cruiser and battleship. It was believed that further serious damage had been inflicted.

What had happened ? On the face of it, a German victory. Not, of course, a victory that disabled the British Fleet, but one in which it had suffered heavy loss in capital ships, apparently twice as heavy as the Germans. The thing was intolerable, inexplicable. Had Beatty committed some fatal blunder, fallen into some skilfully laid trap, rushed to destruction in the belief that reckless valour was the one virtue required of a British admiral ? A beflagged Germany was ringing from end to end with this triumphant vindication of her naval might. Could it be the sober truth that British naval supremacy was actually in doubt ? The fight had taken place forty-eight hours before the British Ad- miralty had issued its reluctant information. Was there more behind ?

The Admiralty's Second Report

There was more behind, but not by any means on the lines anticipated, even by persons usually sanguine, although it was true that after the first shock it was possible to suspect that first impressions had been too pessimistic.

The second report from the Admiralty seemed to promise that if the British Fleet had been hard hit, the German Fleet had been hit at least as hard, relatively ; the proportionate strength of the two, that is, had not altered in favour of Germany, and the capital fact was outstanding that after the battle the enemy had with- drawn to his own ports, had sought no further conflict, and had pursued no other objective. Unless he had aimed at nothing more than an experimental passage of arms it was clear that technically, at least, he had not won a victory. Still, a drawn battle between the British and German Fleets must be accounted as a distinct moral victory for the Germans. Nelson did not deal in drawn battles.

The Germans had joyfully appropriated and trumpeted abroad for the edification of Germany, of neutrals, and even of the Allies themselves, the admissions of the British Admiralty as to British losses and its first statement as to the ascertained losses of the Germans, modified by a scornful rejection of its suggestion that the losses not ascertained were serious. Britannia's ocean throne had been found to rest upon shifting sands ; her trident was but a broken reed ; as the Chancellor expressed it with his accustomed happiness of phrase, " she had been taught that rats can bite ! "

Unmistakably a Britiih Victory

But the British Admiralty continued imperturbably on the course it had deliberately adopted. Its first announcement of the actual facts known to it had only been made to prevent the development of more sinister rumours ; it would keep back nothing, but i\ would not announce successes so long as they were matters of surmise. And thus the note of professed disappoint- ment was still prevalent when a whole week had passed since the battle.

Only then was it beginning to be understood that the battle of Jutland, the biggest naval conflict on record, had been quite definitely and unmistakably a British victory in every sense of the term ; a battle in which the British battle-cruiser squadron had engaged the whole German Fleet, fought against tremendous odds, held its own, and only just failed to prevent the enemy's precipitate flight when the Grand Fleet came up. The victory was not one of the same annihilating type as the Nile or Trafalgar or Quiberon, for the simple reason that the conflict was not one between the main Fleets — which was undoubtedly a cause of profound disappointment to Admiral Jellicoe. That was a type of action which the German Fleet never proposed to risk, though it had a very narrow escape.

Whatever ulterior objects the High Seas Fleet had in view, it may be surmised that it came out — being in

lull strength — in the hope that it would meet and engage the battle-cruiser squadron, more or less annihilate it, and escape home, metaphorically, festooned with laurels. In the alternative Beatty might refuse battle, in which case the British Fleet would have " fled " ; or, if something more than the battle-cruiser squadron proved to be about, the way home was clear. The programme failed, because Sir David provided a fourth alternative. He did not refuse battle, but he was not annihilated, and he came near to drawing the High Seas Fleet into the grip of Sir John Jellicoe.

So far as it is possible to judge the battle was admirably fought from beginning to end. When the advance squadron under Von Hipper came in sight of the British battle-cruisers, Sir David — at the moment in superior force — at once engaged. Von Hipper retired upon the main body, having incidentally the good luck to sink the Queen Mary and the Indefatigable. Sir David, presently reinforced by four Queen Elizabeths, drew the fight northward, and was joined first by Admiral Hood, whose flagship was almost immediately sunk, and then by Admiral Arbuthnot, of whose cruisers three met the same fate. Precisely what destruction was wrought in the enemy fleet remains uncertain, but up to this point, except at the first moment of contact, the Germans had been in greatly superior force.

Arrival of the Grand Fleet

Now, when visibility was made .very defective by an uncertain mist, the Grand Fleet itself appeared and began to open fire, whereupon the High Seas Fleet took the only course it had ever intended to take in such circumstances — since it had not come out to court annihilation — and made for home at top speed, the pursuing fleet being unable to overtake it, though an effective pursuit was carried -&r into the night by the British destroyers.

Against three British battle-cruisers and three cruisers were reckoned ultimately the certain loss by the Germans of two Dreadnoughts, another battleship, a Dreadnought battle-cruiser, and five light cruisers, while nine destroyers were definitely accounted for, and another battleship and battle-cruiser were known to be almost in a sinking condition. There was good reason to believe this was far from being a complete tale of the German losses, but the German Admiralty, which first denied (" for military reasons "), and then confessed (when conceal- ment had become impossible), the loss of the Liitzow is never likely to divulge the truth.

Assuredly if there was cause lor jubilation it lay with the British. Every quality that Britain attributes to her Navy had been displayed in the highest degree by commanders and crews. A victory had been won which still more decisively established the unqualified command of the seas, of which it was a complete demon- stration. Nevertheless, the jubilation was very con- sciously limited. The losses had been grievous ; and England would never feel really satisfied with anything less than another Trafalgar.

Lord Kitchener Drowned

Even at the moment when the public was beginning to realise something like the truth about the Jutland battle came grievous tidings such as no man had dreamed of. Off the Orkneys on Monday night, June 5th, H.M.S. Hampshire, carrying Lord Kitchener and his staff to Russia, was " mined or torpedoed," and it was feared that there were no survivors. Ultimately, out of the whole crew a dozen, who had succeeded in clinging to a raft, came to shore alive after all hope had been aban- doned. The torpedo idea was definitely discarded ; in the seas which were running on that fatal night no torpedo practice was possible, even had it been con- ceivable that a submarine was in these waters. The Hampshire had undoubtedy been destroyed by a loose mine. The stormy waves had completed the work, sweeping every raft and engulfing every boat that had put off from the doomed vessel.

The heavy seas had compelled her separation from

1821

THE SPRING AND SUMMER CAMPAIGN OF 1916

Members of the Volunteer Training Corps on the Downs at Brighton, where generations of our old Volunteers manoeuvred.

the escorting destroyers an hour or two before the catastrophe. For Kitchener there was to be no burial " to the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation." The sea holds him as it holds Francis Drake — the maker of Great Britain's Army to-day, as the maker of Eng- land's Navy three hundred years ago. And the nation mourned in silence that meant more than any pageantry of grief. For in its heart it knew how mighty a work had been wrought for England and for the world by him who now was lying " full many a fathom deep " beneath the waves that guard the land he loved so well.

Some dramatic success was daily becoming more and more necessary to the Central Powers if they were to maintain among their populations the theory that their victory was already assured, and that the war was only being prolonged by the crass stupidity of the Allies in not confessing themselves beaten. The haste with which the glorious triumphs of the North Seas Fleet were announced, with its deliberate suppression of losses, was proof positive that the All-Highest was feverishly conscious of the necessity imposed by the fact that the French armies still stood in front of Verdun and the British in front of Ypres. But the belief in the imaginary victory of Jutland could obviously not be maintained for long, and there could be no halting in the effort to inflict upon the Allies in the west some blow which, whether of strategic importance or not, would appeal at least to German imaginations.

Fall of Fort Vaux

These efforts met with a degree of success during the first days of June. West of the Meuse the progress made was indeed infinitesimal. The French could not be dislodged from the Mort Homme and Hill 304, however hard the Germans pressed upon the slopes. But on the other side the Germans at last came into

possession of the fort of Vaux on the south of Douaumont when the defences had been annihilated by prolonged and concentrated bombardment. Vaux, in fact, held out to the last, when it had become positively untenable. Such importance as attached to it was due to its value as an observation-post to the French ; its direct value to the Germans was small. And in spite of furious attacks upon Thiaumont to the northward, no further progress was at first made in this region.

Grand Surprise for Central Powers

On the other hand, the attack on the Ypres salient where the Canadians held the British line increased in intensity. Here, along a front of a mile and a hah1, the Germans succeeded in thrusting forwards to a depth of seven hundred yards on June 2nd, and though a fierce counter-attack drove them out again on the next day, the ruined trenches' could not again be made tenable, and the position was again relinquished ; but only to be once more brilliantly recaptured on June I3th by the Canadians, who this time succeeded in " consoli- dating " their gains. Here, therefore, there was no sign that anything of a striking character was imminent. In the Trentino the Austrians, when they had advanced their salient so far as to include Arsiero and Asiago, were apparently brought to a standstill.

The grand surprise was of another sort than that which the Central Powers desired. And yet it seems strange that nothing of the kind had been anticipated. Before the winter was over, Russia had given evidence of her recuperation by the almost miraculous campaign which had given her Erzerum in February.

Contrary to her customary reticence, she had been almost ostentatious in her announcements that her earlier deficiencies in equipment had been made good. In the early spring she had made sundry tentative movements upon both her northern and her southern European fronts with satisfactory results.

Photograph of a too infrequent scene on which the British Navy was eager to set eyes. Armoured cruisers of the German High Seas Fleet steaming out to sea. They were an appreciably smaller company after they had met Sir David Beatty's

Battle-Cruiser Squadron on May 31st, 1916.

1822

THE DRAMA OF THE WAR

How a British aeroplane is held in position until

Ready to be off after enemy aircraft somewnere over the Allies' positions. How a British

engine speed is up and the pilot gives the signal to " let go.

Perhaps the Central Powers were lulled into a sense of security by a belief that those tentative movements had been the best attempt she could make in the way of a grand offensive. This much at least is clear, that the Germans were sure enough of their own satety on the Front from Riga to the Pripet Marshes to draw upon it in order to maintain their strength before Verdun and Ypres ; and the Austrians had been rash enough to weaken their lines from the Marshes to Czernovitz for the concentration in the Trentino.

Opening of Great Russian Offensive

The sudden development of Russian activity was therefore a surprise in every sense of the term. It was their response to the Austrian move in the Trentino, the significance of which they realised. A smashing blow in Volhynia at a favourable moment might anticipate that simultaneous offensive on east and west which was supposed to be the allied programme, but would not necessarily disconcert it, while it would quite certainly disconcert the Austrians at a critical hour.

The new campaign opened on June 4th, at the moment when Austria was thoroughly gripped by the Trentino venture. There was not the remotest possibility of reinforcements coming from that quarter where failure now would almost certainly mean disaster. Hindenburg would probably attempt a diversion in the north, but it was improbable, in view of the western situation, that such a diversion would develop in to an effective menace — or, on the other hand, that he could risk dispatching any substantial aid to his ally. Along a front two hundred miles in length the Russians flung themselves upon the Austrians, having on the previous day opened the huge bombardment which was the necessary preliminary.

The movement in its early development was quite unlike the German offensives against Ypres or Verdun, or the German onslaught upon the Russians fourteen months ago. In each of these cases the obvious inten- tion was to hurl an overwhelming force upon a narrow front, drive a wedge clean through at that point, and cut the enemy armies in two. The aim of every offensive

has been either to turn a flank or — after there were no flanks exposed — to smash through and envelope. The smashing through had never yet been attained on any front. This Russian attack rather conveyed the im- pression that it was delivered all along the line with the aim of sweeping back the whole line and securing points — railway points presumably — for the further develop- ment of the plan of campaign.

There was no breaking through, but the whole Austrian line, with its ends standing fast, swayed backwards into an arc instead of a straight line. But there were bulges in the arc ; and at the end of a fortnight's fighting it looked as if the Russians had two objectives in view, one the railway centre at Lemberg, the other Czernovitz, where the Austrian Bukovina borders on neutral Rumania. Czernovitz might mean the turning of the Austrian flank. But it was still too soon to form a clear opinion as to what the scheme of the Russian commander Brussiloff might be. Only this was ap- parent. Lutsk and Dubno were occupied by the advancing Russians ; they put the Strypa (on the northern sector) on their rear instead of on their front ; they were capturing prisoners at the amazing average rate of 13,000 daily ; and then came the news that, after a week's hard fighting, the Russian left wing had occupied Czernovitz, and the Austrians in that quarter were in full retreat.

The Capture of Czernovitz

The capture of Czernovitz meant that the whole Bukovina must shortly be in Russian hands. The Austrian right was broken up ; it was possible that a portion of it might be driven off the board into Rumania, and probable that a substantial section would make its escape over the Carpathians by way of the Borzo Pass. In the meanwhile, the Russian right seemed to have been checked in its advance towards Kovel on the north, and the centre upon the long line between Tarnopol and Lemberg was definitely held up. The situation was gradually becoming clear.

The pace of the first surprise onslaught of the Russians could not be maintained ; with inadequate communica- tions the heavy guns could only follow the advance

THE SPRING AND SUMMER CAMPAIGN OF 1916

1823

slowly, whereas the enemy had been pushed back upon his own supports and readier communications. Rein- forcements— at whatever strain — were being hurried up to his aid in the centre. But the fact remained that at the end of three weeks the Russians had taken some 200,000 prisoners, and it was hardly conceivable that the prisoners could be much more than half of the total Austrian casualties, which must therefore have amounted approximately to one half of the entire Austrian force between the Marshes and Czernovitz.

Objects of the Russian Attack

What would the next development be ? That also was growing clearer. The Russian attack was to be concentrated on the wings — towards Kovel on their right, towards Kolomea on their left, both railway points of great value for further operations. But more than that, the capture of either Kovel or Kolomea would threaten a flank of the Austrian centre ; the capture of both would threaten its envelopment. On the other hand, if the Austrians — now, according to rumour, with Mackensen of the Phalanx commanding them — could drive through the Russian centre, weakened to strengthen the wings, there would be something like the turning of the tables.

Of this, however, there was little apparent prospect, though in the centre it was now the Russians rather than their foes who were on the whole giving ground. Northward, the struggle towards Kovel showed no signs of immediate decision ; it was hard to say whether the thrusting forward of a Russian wedge was to be accounted as a menace to Kovel or as the creation of a dangerous salient. But southward there was no doubt whatever that all was going in favour of the Russians ; and the menace to the right flank of the Austrian centre mate- rialised very thoroughly with the capture of Kolomea, announced to the world on July ist.

Other developments, too, were in progress in the

Eastern regions. From Asia Minor and Mesopotamia there came little enough news ; but the troubles of the Turks were not lightened by the revolt of the Sherif of Mecca— virtually a repudiation of the Ottoman Caliphate (which began four hundred years ago), by the man in whose hands are the Holy Places of Islam. The possible effect on the Mohammedan world was not easily measurable. And at the same time the relation's between the Greek Government and the Entente Powers reached such a point of strain that the situation had become intolerable. Virtually, if not technically, an ultimatum was delivered which resulted in the immediate resignation oi King Constantino's Cabinet and the formation of a new Ministry, with M. Zaimis at its head, which submitted to all the demands put forward by the Allies.

Cadorna Forces Back the Austrians

If the operations of the Russians during June were sensational, those of the Italians in the Trentino were, to say the least, reassuring. The Austrians, over- confident of their own strength or of Russia's weakness in Volhynia, had effected a powerful concentration in order to achieve a decision on the Trentino front — a thrust down from the mountains into the Lombardy Plain which might have been a knock-out blow for the Italians. It had indeed aroused the gravest anxiety among the Allies, tempered, however, by a confidence in the foresight and skill of General Cadorna which was to be fully justified.

The Italian centre had been driven back to the mountain rim ; but the wings had held fast. Early in June the Austrian advance had been held up. The Italian reinforcements, which had silently been held in readiness, were poured up to the fighting line ; the counter-attack was launched. Doubtfully at first, then quite unmistakably, the Austrians began to yield the ground they had won at heavy cost by six weeks of

The " invasion " of England. Some of the Prussian Quard after leaving the boat at Southampton en route for an internment camp In the North of England. They were interested in the trophies of the Crimean War, which are a feature of the sea front.

IS'.' I

THE DRAMA OF THE WAR

desperate effort. The slow yielding became almost a precipitate retreat; perhaps the qualifying word is superfluous. Neither retirement nor pursuit in the mountains could be otherwise than slow, but by the end of the month the Austrians were practically back on the lines from which they had started on their rash adventure. They had left behind them sinister proofs of an earnest effort to emulate the practices and illustrate the principles of warfare on the Frufsian model.

If matters were going ill for the Central Empires on the Russian and Italian fronts, it was all the more imperative — from the political point of view, at least — that they should achieve something on th? western Front. Not a " decision " — that had been clearly out of reach at least since the early days of April — but something which could at least be advertised as a trium- phant blow. Their own strategy and the French reply had bound them irrevocably to the Verdun adventure. There lay their one chance, such as it was, and there they again hurled forward to the attack with desperate fury. At no other point was it possible for them to un- dertake a concentrated offensive, and they could not afford to acknowledge that the time had come when a stubborn defensive all along the line had been imposed upon them.

Renewed Attack on Verdun

And the renewed on- slaught was terrific enough to give them encourage- ment and to shake all but the steadiest nerves among the spectators of the allied group. Although on the west of the Meuse they still made no progress, the struggle of the Douau- mont Plateau became ex- ceedingly threatening. On June 23rd, in spite of a desperate resistance, they had broken into the Thiau- mont Work ; and they followed this up by an advance into the village of Fleury, only some three miles from Verdun itself. Nor could any amount of insistence upon the strategical unimportance of Verdun dissipate the feeling that if the Germans succeeded in entering it, a very heavy blow would be dealt to the cause of the Allies.

But the Germans were not in Verdun. The losses on both sides in the struggle were immense ; a gain of ground had been made more appreciable than any since the first week of the great attack four months earlier. But the French defence remained unbroken, and on July ist they had again driven the Germans out of the Thiaumont Work. Whether they could -hold it them- selves was another matter ; but the fact itself was

French soldiers fixing an aerial torpedo to be fired against hostile aircraft. Note the wings, which assist in the projectile's flight.

significant of the desperate character of the task which the Germans had set themselves.

What was the meaning of this furious conflict ? Why, if Verdun was of minor strategic importance, did the French Command maintain this heroic and costly resistance ? They knew that the Germans were wrong in believing that the morale of Frenchmen would collapse if the enemy got into Verdun. But they also knew that till the Germans reached Verdun they must go on

straining their resources to the utmost in order to get there, but that once they were there their energies would be liberated upon other quarters — and they were not to be liberated.

Battle of the Somme Starts

There were signs for those who could read. There were uninstructed wailings that the British had been doing nothing — nothing but making ready, worrying the German lines, keeping up a perpetual harassing menace, drawing to their own front every enemy unit that could b; spared for local accumula- tion ; nothing but just the precise thing which the allied command required of them — until the time should come. Doing " nothing " incidentally in- volved heroic episodes such as that of the Canadians at Zillebeke.

Also we were allowed to learn that it was coming to mean the accomplish- ment of innumerable patrol raids upon the enemy trenches — whereof the true import was that the British were collecting a va.it amount of accurate infor- mation as TO the strength of the enemy at various positions all along the line, and were doing so at small cost. The men from every part of the Empire were taking their turns — Anzacs, Highland Light Infantry, Welsh Fusiliers, Royal Irish Rifles, Cana- dians, Warwickshires, is a list of names drawn at haphazard from those men- tioned from day to day, but popular report attri- buted to the Anzacs the credit of inaugurating the new method.

And along with the tales of the patrol raids, came the casual mention of " considerable artillery activity on several sectors," occasionally developing as " heavy bombardment," and then " continuous bombardment."

And then on July ist : " Attack launched north of River Somme this morning at 7.30 a.m. in conjunction with French. British troops have broken into German forward system of defences on front of sixteen miles. Fighting is continuing."

The Battle of the Somme had begun.

1825

Tramp, tramp, tramp, the lads go by in the dark.

Dim and shadowy shapes, to the lilt of a whistled air.

Light of heart and of step they go to the fight — and hark! A careless jest and the laugh of a mind that is free from care

It is the hymn of France, a song with a martial swing

That rises slirill and clear o'er the terrible thunders afar. Telling of comrades in arms and the timely aid that they bring. Of brave hearts ranged by her side in the tumult and stress

of her war.

0 Frti nee. does thy bosom throb to the pulse of that measured I eat As the ghostly marching ranks swing past on their glorious

quest ?

Surely thy soil must thrill to the tread of the conquering feet. Knowing of those that must sleep their last long sleep in thy breast I — CLAUDE E. BURTON.

With the Flag in France and Flanders

The jubilant sentry : German prisoners under guard after the British Advance, July, 1916.

1826

The War ITTustrat

THE WESTERN ARENA.— Map indicating the region of the British offensive. From Arras to the Somme Britain's batteries roared and British infantry went forward. Ths advance began on July 1st, 1916, after a concentrated artillery effort.

1827

The Great Push! France Salutes the Ally

Not «ven at home was the great British offensive hailed with more Joy and enthusiasm than it was in France. For months our splendid ally had patiently awaited the moment when Britain would be prepared to go forward and relieve the tension.

On the morning of July 1st, 1916, the French seemed to know instinctively that the hcur had struck, and many a wai — wcrn " Poilu " of the earliest class raised a hand to his helmet in saluting his ally with the words" Bonne chance, mon camarade I "

1828

Guns that Pounded German Trenches to Powder

The Great Push. — British gunners ramming home the shell of a heavy gun on a railway mounting.

_ne of the British heavy guns in action against the German line* On ment bv our aniil.ru lines. On July 1st, 1916, after five days' intense bombard-

tTe Somm. Inset A comT 3fen81v8 wa" launched on a front of about twenty-five miles north and on both bank, of complimentary message ready to be sent to Fritz. (Official photographs. Crown copyright reserved.)

1829

After Victory : German Soldiers in Captivity

Evidence of the victory. Column of German prisoners resting by the roadside, behind the British lines, awaiting to be sent to an internment camp.

soldiers taken prisoners during the British offensive of July, 1916, were unani- mous as to the terrible work of the British artillery.

The continuous bombardment rendered the German first line untenable, and many of those who escaped death from shell fire were so dazed as to be unable to defend themselves when the British infantrv stormed their trenches

Party ot German prisoners, many o» whom were slightly wounded, marching along a French road in charge of a British uuard. Inset: A ration party photographed after they had "done their bit" in the great offensive. (Official photographs.)

1830

1831

Splendid British Charge at La Boisselle

Wonderful photograph of British troop-) charging over No Man's Land to the attack at La Boisselle. A hugs shell has burst to the right of the soldiers, throwing two of ths forms into strong silhouette. The barbed-wire having been swept aside, these splendid

Scots were soon afterwards in ths German firing line.

Appearance of a modern battlefield. A mine has been sprung in the foreground, and it is difficult to realise that but a few before this barren spot was teeming with life and activity. Nothing remains now but calcined debris. All life is obliterated ~cers contemplating the scene and the R.A.M.C. orderlies at their humane work in the background.

for some British office

is difficult to realise that but a few hours All life is obliterated save

1832

To The Fighting Line via Marseilles: Scottish

A contingent of British troops disembarked at Marseilles on May 8th, 1916, among whom were a number of Scottish soldiers, who marched to the music of the nines.

Some of the Indian warriors who arrived at M

band" 'the n-fw "rT,1"68 to<>*thBr with the S«t. and Australians. The centre photograph shows th< a of the new allied troops who were to aid in the deliverance of France.

1833

\ustralian and Indian Troops Enter France

Australian, marching down the main boulevard of Marseilles. They were accorded a great welcome, and each man was presented with a bouquet of flowers

Scene, of great enthu.ia.m on the

,rt of the French populace were witnessed In the Avenue du Prado as the Scottish, Australian, and dian contingent pas.ed through the city on their *ay to the front.

1834

Royal Welsh Fusiliers Along the Somme

A heap of trench -mortar ammunition behind the lines ready for transport to the firing front.

First-aid for heroes of the Somme. Looking after the wounded in the trenches during the gr

^_i

_ Royal Welsh Fusiliers in bivouac. On July 6th, 1916, these gallant fighters made a successful raid

lerman trenches south of the La Bassee Canai. Inset: The East Yorks on the march through a French village

to the front line. (Official photographs.)

1835

Great Leaders in History's Greatest Crisis

M. Briand, the French Prime Minister, phutographed during his

tour of the British lines with Sir Douglas Haig and some ol

his Staff.

The great British offensive of July 1st, 1916, was carried out simultaneously with that of the French forward movement. General Haig in here seen greeting General Joffre at the British Headquarters. Inset: Characteristic snapshot of the British Generalissimo.

1830

Before and After the Moment of the Advance

Anzacs on the western front bringing up a water-cart, a task they would have gladly welcomed in sun-baked Qallipolt.

War-time fashions. Group of British soldiers wearing another new type of headgear, light and soft for summer campaigning.

Fhe irrepressible British Tommy. Chalking shells with complimentary messages for Fritz.

comfortable rest in the trenches when " things were quiet.

1837

Pardon, Kamerad! An Incident at Montauban

1838

BATTLE PICTURES OF THE GREAT WAR

The Glorious First of July

By EDWARD WRIGHT

ON Midsummer Day, 1916, the result of the labours of our myriads of munition workers was displayed to the enemy. A line of flame and thunder stretched for ninety miles from Ypres to the Somme River. The German commanders hurried up reserves to meet the coming shock of our infantry attack. But no attack was delivered. Day and night the crashing line of fire was maintained. In sunlight the German trenches were veiled in a fog of bursting shells. By starlight French towns- people, thirty miles away, sat in darkness on their roofs, watching with grim joy the strange long rim of roaring radiance on their eastern sky-line.

Nothing like our bombardment has been seen in any field of the European War. The front of flame was longer than that which the Germans had produced at Gorlice and Verdun, and it lasted longer. It was the first grand triumph of the workers in our munition factories. Our country was using shells by the million, and wearing out guns by the thousand, in order to save the lives of our soldiers. At times the French armies from the Somme to Rheims joined in the unparalleled bombardment, making the line of flame one hundred and eighty miles long.

Triumph of Organisation

Sir Douglas Haig, sitting with his Staff near his central telephone exchange, was using tens of thousands of motor- lorries in the way a skilful fencer uses his rapier. By continually changing the sector at which the main shell supply was delivered, he varied the spear-head of his bombarding force. Our airmen attacked the German balloons and aeroplanes, thus blinding the enemy's aerial observers, until at last our shell supplies could come up in daylight as well as in darkness, without the enemy knowing what part of his force would next be swept with extreme intensity by our heavy artillery. Our guns were also able to concentrate and reconcentrate along our front of ninety miles, leaving the enemy ignorant of the new direction in which they were massing.

Never has an army worked as ours then worked in sustaining for a week the thunderous flame of our grand bombardment and the continual clouds of our asphyxiating gas. No longer were we weakly replying to German gas attacks with mild, innocuous, intoxicating fumes. We were giving the Germans, who had tortured us with chlorine gas, a new gas of our own that took them by surprise. As our infantry raids on the hostile lines increased in number, our men were able to see heaps oi gassed, dead figures in the opposing trenches on the very days when the German communiques said that our clouds of poison had floated harmlessly over the German lines.

The German Stall Deceived

Meanwhile, the German Staff had to decide where to mass its best troops — the Prussian Guard and its main reserve. Sir Douglas Haig, by a violent demonstra- tion near the Somme River on June zyth, seems to have misled the Germans. For it afterwards appeared that they thought this British move was a feint, and that our mam attack would be delivered between Albert and La Bassee, with Arras as the centre of our breaking movement. The Prussian Guard was placed north of Albert, near the hamlet of Gommecourt, and the main stream of German shell was directed towards the batteries round Arras.

But on Thursday and Friday, June 2gth and 3oth, our troops round Arras had an easy time of it compared with the labour that fell upon the men holding the line just north of the Somme. Here were a Territorial Division, an Ulster Division, Tynesick-rs, .Manchester men, Scotsmen, and English county battalions, who came up to make the attack, and worked first to supply the guns. For forty- eight hours they slept only by snatches, amid the unending thunder that disturbed the atmosphere and produced a great downfall of rain. The mud added to the difficulties of maintaining the flow of ammunition between the columns

of motor-trucks and the batteries ; but, in spite of alt troubles, our bombardment, gas attacks, and raids continued. Then, at six o'clock on Saturday morning, July ist, 1916, Sir Douglas Haig revealed his' long-prepared plan of attack, and showed the Germans that he had outplayed them. Our great bombardment had been a bluff. On our southern wing, by the Somme, was one of the finest armies of France, under one of the finest French commanders, General Foch. Foch had been remarkably quiet during our week of hurricane fire. Instead of knocking the enemy's trenches about as he could have done, he had lent us some of his quick-firers, in order to increase the volume of our fire, and make it seem that France was so exhausted by the long defence of Verdun that she had to leave the great answering, offensive movement entirely to Britain.

General Foch Surprises the Enemy

But on the glorious First of July, when our army of the Somme sent out its last smashing tornado of shells, the army of General F'och spoke even louder than ours did, ai;d with thousands of siege-guns abruptly flattened the enemy's trenches on a sector of some eight miles. For an hour and a half the morning mist, half veiling the downland country between Peronne and Baupaume, was thickened by the smoke of half a million or more high-explosive shells. Then, at half-past seven, nothing could be seen from the great chalk ridges where the German observing officers, sheltering in deep caverns in the chalk, peered through their periscopes. The British and French armies sent out huge, rolling masses of black smoke that blanketed all the front and screened the rows of brown and blue figures that were moving on the German lines.

The general movement of the Allies extended for some thirty miles, irom Foncquevillers, about twelve miles south- west of Arras, to Foucaucourt, about seven miles south- west of Peronne. A considerable part of this genera) movement was designed to hold the Prussian Guard and the main reserve under Prince Rupert of Bavaria. The German armies were arranged somewhat like those of the Allies. The strongest force, under Rupert of Bavaria, faced the British lines as far as Thiepval. Then southward, from the Somme sector to the Oise River, mainly facing the French, was the Sixth German Army, which had fought at Charleroi under General von Biilow, and was now com- manded by General von Einem. It was against Einem that our main attack was directed. We had arranged to assail his northern wing at its point of junction with the army of Rupert of Bavaria, while the French force under General Foch drove .unexpectedly in upon Eincm's centre of communications at Peronne. Meanwhile, it was vitally essential that Einem should be stopped from getting help from his immediate neighbour, Rupert of Bavaria. The Prussian Guard at Gommecourt, for instance, was only twenty-four miles away from Peronne, with a light railway service connecting them with Eincm's northern wing. Therefore, they had to be violently held in the position to which they had been lured by our long, deceptive bombardment.

Rupert's Men in Readiness

The necessity for this holding action against Prince Rupert's forces gave occasion for one of the finest examples of indomitable tenacity in British history. All Rupert's men were prepared for our attack. They apparently knew it would take place on July ist, and they certainly divined that the Gommecourt salient, above Albert — the western- most point in France held by the enemy — would be a critical position. When our bombardment opened at six o'clock on Saturday morning all the German troops retired to dug-outs twenty to thirty feet below the trenches. Then, at half-past seven, when our guns lifted on the enemy's second line, the Germans came out of their lowest cellars in the chalk, bringing their machine-guns with them, and entered a series of upper dug-outs, which had loopholes almost on the surface of the ground. [Continued an page 1840

1839

Wiltshires and East Yorks in the Forward Move

Wiltshire yeomen, high-spirited soldiers from the historic English county, on their way to gather laurels in the momentous fields of Flanders. Brandishing their steel helmets with a loud hurrah, these men were truly glad to be on the move.

The Sleep of the Brave. British reserves resting in the trenches. So tired were they after a long march that they did not even trouble

to remove their steel helmets.

rvien ot Ihe East Yorka passing along a French village street to the zone of operations. Heavily equipped, smothered in dust from head to foot, these men were typical of thousands going forward in the cause of Albion and Liberty.

1840

BATTLE PICTURES OF THE WAR (c°^"^r

They began to fire through these loopholes when our fcrecn oi black smoke went up, and they continued to fire throughout the first phase oi the action. They did not at first take any aim — our smoke screen prevented that — but their machine-gun positions were so arranged that a mechanical and continuous shower oi bullets swept all the zone between the opposing fronts and pattered against our sand-bags. The German system of defence was an extraordinary piece of engineering. The machine- gunners could not be reached by our shells, and, being provided with gas helmets, they could not be killed by our gas attacks.

At the same time as the German machine-guns opened fire the German artillery flung a storm of shrapnel over our front trenches. Around Gommecourt were three curtains of intense shrapnel fire between our men and their goal. For here it was that the Germans had con- centrated their main mass of guns. Yet the British troops came out steadily under the awful rain of death, raised their own machine-guns on the parapet, and then, dropping in hundreds, but never wavering, made their way across a zone of five hundred yards to the enemy's front line.

Devilish Machine-Gunners

The Prussian Guard also came with' its machine-guns through our curtain of fire, and fought with great courage in the open No Man's Land between the wooded promontory of Gommecourt and our positions round Hebuterne. In the end our men were defeated, because they had not behind them the enormous weight of artillery the Germans had. But this local defeat won the general battle for us. All the forces of the Crown Prince of Bavaria were held down at the appointed place, with the result that General von Einem could not obtain any reinforcements and suffered, not a local defeat, but a far-reaching disaster.

South of Gommecourt, between the Hill of Serre, the valley of the Ancre, and the ridge of Thiepval, our troops were at first amazingly successful. In a series of charges, as heroic as that made by the Scottish Division at Lens, our men took the German trenches, and then bombed their way into Serre and Thiepval, reaching the third and last line of German works. Some battalions had no casualties whatever in the rush against the German first line, but we did not allow for the remarkable intrepidity of some of the German machine-gunners. These men we're devilish in spirit when our wounded lay at their mercy and tried to creep to shelter.

Einem Calls Reserves from Verdun

At Serre and Thiepval they let our charging lines pass them, and then came out of their dug-outs, swept our rear, and knocked down our parties who were bringing up bombs for the troops ahead in the German third line. One German gunner was found wounded in nine places and still fighting like a dervish of the Sudan. Little more than a score of these determined men, working behind our victorious line, succeeded in stopping ammunition reaching our troops at Serre and Thiepval. They thus compelled our men to retire when the Crown Prince of Bavaria, about midday on Saturday, flung his reserve against the two points on his wing that were so near to breaking. Yet

the actions at Thiepval and Serre completed the design of the terrible action at Gommecourt, and extended Rupert's army to its full strength. Our troops hung on for four days to the south of Thiepval, where they repulsed the German Guard and all the other reserves of Prince Rupert. He could not spare a single battalion for Einem. So Einem had slowly to gather reinforcements from Rheims and Verdun in order to meet the main allied attack. And Einem could not do this in time.

For in our main assault our success was swift and com- plete. We aimed at the great German salient built on a ridge overlooking our position at Albert, and known as the Fricourt salient from a village lying at the point of it. The main strength of the position, however, resided in a great fortified chalk ridge, some five miles long, extending from the hamlet of Boisselle to the village and brickfield of Montauban. The hamlet of Mametz rose on the southern slope of the ridge.

The Pincers Round Fricourt

We did not make an immense, surging charge all round the great salient, but delivered two great thrusts. Fricourt was not attacked, but the line on either side of it was broken in two places about two and a half miles from each other. The Gordons advanced against Mametz, and, though raked horribly by machine-gun fire, stormed the position ?nd held it. Then some miles away on their right the men of Lancashire, supported by the Surreys, Rents, Essex, Bedfords, and Noriolks, carried the main ridge at Montauban in one strong, narrow stream of invasion. At the other end of the ridge, by Boisselle, the Suffolks and the Tynesiders, with the Tyneside pipers playing on their men, swept by the northerly German hill fortress and advanced well beyond the salient to the village of Contalmaison. The Suffolks reached this village at the price of only one man killed, but again the German machine-gunners in our rear near Boisselle checked our advance for the time being.

The Measure of Success in Four Days

The fact was our wonderful troops did more than had been expected of them. Fricourt was left untouched for two days, as we had made larger gains on either side of it than had been designed. Our principal attention was directed towards smashing up the reinforcements that Einem hurried towards the high ground on the ridge. There we broke brigade after brigade, leaving Fricourt open like a trap for more Germans to enter. But we joined our two wedges round Fricourt on Sunday afternoon, stormed Boisselle the next day, and then resuming our onward progress advanced some miles eastward along the road to Combles.

So tremendous was the pressure with which we pushed back Einem's northern wing that General Foch's army, in four days of sledge-hammer work, took the plateau south of the Somme, dominated Peronne, hauled up the great French siege-guns, and brought Einem's northern railway and motor communications beneath a heavy incessant shell fire. In other wprds, Haig's and Foch's armies did as much in four days' fighting to threaten the German routes of supply at Peronne as the Germans had done in five months' fighting to threaten the French routes of supply at Verdun

The skeleton village of Zillebeke. Curious effect of shell flre on houses and trees. The tiles have been shaken from the Is purely by vibration of shells passing and bursting in the vicinity. (Canadian Government copyright reserved.!

. II) MLATTY, K.C.B., K •• <l of the Battle Cruiser Kleel

TLE PICTURES OF THE WAR

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The skeleton village of Zillebeke. Curious effect of shell fire on houses and trees. The tiles have been shaken from the roofs purely by vibration of shells passing and bursting in the vicinity. (Canadian Government copyright reserved.!

By permission o/C,ro. Pnltnan F~ Sons, /.t<f. Photo by J. Russell fr So

VICE-ADMIRAL SIR DAVID BEATTY, K.C.B., K.C.V.O., D.S.O.

In Command of the Battle Cruiser Fleet

7" /',i,, f<ii,-r 1840.

1841

Prisoners from Contalmaison and Boisselle

Qorman prisoners arriving from Contalmaison. Many of them, particularly the wounded ones, are proceeding to the rear via the trench, thus to be out of danger from shell fire. Of the three figures in the foreground, one is severely wounded.

Brothers in adversity cling together. Scene on the footpath to La Boisselle, showing German prisoners trudging along, some carrying

their helpless comrades. Inset : British soldier gives a wounded German water from his flask. (Official photographs.) D6, D 5

1842

Calling the Roll After the Dawn of Victory

Loading ammunition into the waggons for the great advance. The heaps of empty cases and boxes tell their own story.

The roll-call of the gallant Seaforths after the first

Lady Butler's famous picture of a former campaign Inset". BH" • ™8 :fmarkfbl>' Pathetic photograph is reminiscent of

et . Bringing in a " casualty " on a newly-designed stretcher.

1843

Recurrence of Red Cross Treachery at Thiepval

According to the report of an eye-witness therewas at least one recurrence of Prussian Red Cross treachery during the British advance. In the course of desperate fighting near Thiepval a German soldier showed himself above a shattered parapet,

violently waving a Red Cross flag. He was permitted to approach, and was seen to lift something back into the trench. Immediately after a machine— gun began its deadly work. The burden of the Prussian was neither a wounded nor dead comrade, but a Maxim.

1844

1845

The Deathless Story of Gommecourt Wood

Perhaps the most glorious epic of the great advance which began on July 1st, 1918, la the undying story of Qommecourt, at the northern end of the British attacking line. An attempt to capture the Qommecourt Wood drew from the German guns a triple barrage fire. Nevertheless, the British went forward

as though on parade. Men were struck down at every step, but many succeeded in getting through the three curtains of death, only to be confronted by a number of machine-guns. Owing to their heroism, which diverted the German forces, these troops greatly helped to achieve the victory farther south.

1846

1847

The 'Fighting Fifth' Scores Again at St. Eloi

Fun and frolic altar victory at St. Eloi. Northumberland Fusiliers, or the famous " Fighting Fifth," trying on German helmets and respirators captured from the enemy In the attack on St. Eloi, March 27th, 1916.

Happy In captivity. Types of German infantry taken prisoners in the St. Eloi fighting. The foremost of them is wearing

the steel helmet which was used universally by the belligerents.

1848

True Tales of the War by Famous Correspondents

A Night Affair on the Western Front

How British Daring Foiled a German Surprise

By H. F. PREVOST BATTERSBY

Mr. H F. PREVOST BATTERSIJY

MR. H. F. PREVOST BATTERSBY, the brilliant war correspondent of the "Morning Post," was educated for the Army at Woolwich and at Sandhurst, whence he passed to a commission in the Royal Irish Rifles. He represented his paper throughout the South African War (being twice wounded) and in Somaliland, and in the Great War in Flanders, where he was wounded in 1916. Under his pen name of "Francis Prevost " he has published two volumes of poetry, works on hockey — in which game he played for the South against the North on five occasions — and many novels. Author, traveller, big-game hunter, and all-round sportsman, Mr. Prevost Battersby has enjoyed a varied career. His identity with the brilliant novelist "Francis Prevost " must tidt lead our readers to suppose that this present story is a piece of fiction ; it is cast in fictional form because that helps to bring the thrilling adventure before the mind with more vivid actuality, but it is really a narration of fact.

HENRY ALTON looked at his colonel with a certain mild surprise. None of his surprises were ever more than that.

" Yes," said his C.O. " It is, as I told you, rather off the usual line, but the Chief sees no other way of doing it. He doesn't want to waste the men on a raid, and besides, you know how little one learns from them of what the Boche is up to."

Briefly, the job was to discover what in the way of mining the enemy was doing. Along this stretch of the front mining on both sides was the chief amusement. Very little, so far, had actually come of it, but nothing is more trying to the steadiness of men who have much else to try them than the muffled tick, tick of a hostile pick at some unknown depth beneath them, with the certainty at no distant date of being dismembered in the air or buried alive under the debris of one's own parapet.

Alton was therefore asked to discover where the mine shafts started in the German lines, and the direction they took. How he was to do that, no one, including himself, had the least idea. He was not a soldier by profession, having been, till past thirty, a bank clerk in a Midland town, and, having a wife and child and no money, had tried for as long as he could to think that Britain could do without him. He had enlisted, but found himself after five months' service a first lieutenant. He was the sort of man men trust, and having captained a famous football team, knew how to handle them.

To go with him on this occasion he chose a small, quick- witted Cockney of his own company, called Smith, on the strength of his ability to think quicker and go through smaller gaps than himself.

The thing had, of course, to be done at night, and they waited at the sally-port — a dignified name for the little tunnel that burrowed under the parapet and out beyond the barbed-wire — for enough darkness to conceal their movements. They each had revolvers, which they did not mean to use, and, fastened by a loop to their right wrists, the handle of an entrenching tool, up to the top of which had been slipped a cogged circlet of iron, guaranteed to crush the hardest of Square-head skulls.

Rain and an 111 Wind

Grey blankets were draped like Crusaders' cloaks from their shoulders, to mask their outlines when they had to flatten themselves against the ground to cheat the German flares. There was the usual dreary drizzle of rain, that smeared the sides of the trenches with slime, and made the bottom boards slippery as an ice-slide. The rain was all to the good ; the soft drift of it would dull as much of the sentry's ears as it had not hunted under his coat collar, but the wind that brought it was the wrong way, west by south, carrying sounds to the enemy.

The man who was thrust into such an enterprise was talcing his life in his hands, in his finger-tips one might sav

so insecure was the holding ; but where that is done by so many, it loses all its picturesqueness. There was no " warm grip of a hand " to speed him on his way. There was no warmth anywhere a yard away from the braziers that chilly night. A certain length of the front line had to be warned of his adventure, so that he should not be fired on going and returning, otherwise no one would have paid any particular heed to him. He did not expect thera to. He had seen men, shaving by a periscope mirror, just crook their bodies forward to make room for a casualty carried away in a blanket, without troubling to look to see if it was one of their pals. He did not even know the subaltern who gave him a careless nod of farewell at the sally-port. He had been away on a week's leave, and there were a lot of new faces. That was the way of the Army, always renewing itself like a tree ; old leaves fell, new ones sprouted ; the tree remained.

Flares and Rifle Shots

Clear of the slimy little tunnel, he looked carefully about him, only his head raised. Here and there the quick crack of a rifle told of vigilant or nervous eyes strained across that uninhabitable country into which he was come, and flares, like flowers of white flame opening in the air, were beginning to outline the battle frontier for leagues on either hand.

His idea was to find some unseen way into the German trenches. He had really only a hazy idea of what he expected. He would crawl along the entangle- ments, hoping that, in the glare of the Very lights, some dark port of entry might reveal itself. Then, if he could get into the trench, he would have to grope about among its defenders — who were fortunately known to be few — till he found what might pass for a mine-shaft. It all seemed very vague and unpromising ; but other men had done it.

He crawled along in the rain, the Cockney youth behind him, the blankets trailing over their backs, all the front of their bodies from their chins to their toes soaked from being pressed for concealment at every flare-burst into the soggy ground. As they crawled, even with outspread palms, their arms sank to the elbows and the slush closed over their knees. The rain dulled their hearing, but once, when stopping to listen, they were aware of whispering voices. They flattened themselves into the mud at once, and Alton, his hands cupped over his wet ears, could make out the speech to be German. The trenches here were far enough apart for night patrols to be used, and when they met, fierce, stabbing, throttling fights ended in one or other being finished off in silence. While wondering if he dared make such a fight for it, there was a soft rush in the air above them, and, before the flare burst, the mud quaked with the precipitation into it of the German patrol, too big a one obviously for two men to tackle 'Continued mi pane l.°5r>

1849

Allied Action with Bayonet, Bomb and Mine

This is one of the most thrilling photographs ever taken from a first-line British trench. It depicts our infantry dashing forward to attack a German trench with the bayonet after throwing smoke-bombs, and so forming a covering wh te cloud.

Inside a captured mine crater, giving a graphic idea of the amount of earth displaced by the explosion of a land Directly a crater is occupied by the infantry and cleared of the debris of battle, it is fortified and transformed strong trench, while sappers commence fresh mining operations, as shown in this photograph

mine.

Into »

1850

A NIGHT AFFAIR ON THE WESTERN FRONT

iCont inued from page 1S48.I

The Germans lay grunting and muttering for several minutes, only a few yards away; then crept on cautiously towards the British lines, one of them actually stumbling over Smith's foot, which he took, no doubt, for one of the many that would never move again from that country.

About thirty yards farther on, while still crawling, Alton felt the ground give way under his arms ; the grass at which he grabbed proved to be lying loose about him, and his body slid forward till all of it had disappeared except one boot, to which his follower clung with a faithful pertinacity that almost foiled Alton's apoplectic efforts to free it.

The Secret Passage

He had fallen into what proved to be the end of a tunnel about four feet deep. Canvas had been laid across the opening, and strewn with grass and earth. The tunnel led towards the German lines, but could hardly be a mine- shaft, and was needlessly long for a sally-port.

Alton paused. The chances of his coming out of that burrow alive, if he went into it, were, he knew, small ; but he was there for just the chance it offered, so, whispering to his companion to wait for him for a couple of hours before returning, he unstrapped the blanket from his shoulders, felt along the lanyard to the handle of his revolver, took a firmer grip of his knobkerrie, and began to grope his way with lowered shoulders through the gluey slush which clung half way to his knees. He listened after each thrust into it of his clotted feet, and heard presently above the queer conch-like hum of the tunnel the drip of water. Caution, bred of the sound, and the swift thrust of his head against the roofing, saved him from mishap a moment later when his foot suddenly trod upon air. There was plainly some sort of a drainage hole in front of him, and after much wary balancing between the slimy walls he managed to bridge it with his long legs and again crept forward.

Ten yards farther on — they took him as many minutes — he heard a grunting which seemed to be human. The sound came nearer, but, while it still appeared to him some little way off, a heavy body lurched against him. He struck as he lost his balance, and buried his knobkerrie in the oozy wall. There was a splutter of Teutonic gutturals before he struck again, hitting this time a solid that was not mud. Something heavy fell forward against his stomach, and he felt fiercely for it with his hands, making out with desperate swiftness a man's head and shoulders, and fixing his fingers into the neck. There was no resist- ance, and, with the swift instinct that danger quickens, he crushed the thing in his hands down into the mud and held it there for a long two minutes. Then he felt for the rest of the body, and, pressing it down to the side out of his way, went on. He was not conscious of being upset, but had to stop because he was trembling. Killing a man in that dark, secretive fashion seemed somehow more like murder than war. A little farther on he thought his nerves were playing tricks, for he began to see something red that came and went in that subterranean blackness.

It was a long time before he made it out to be the glow of a brazier near the end of the tunnel, and figures passing to and fro in front of it. He moved nearer, cautiously, and caught the murmur of voices. Nearer still, and he could hear what they said, and discriminate between shapes and shadows against the parados. He propped his back on the side of the tunnel and listened. The talk was spas- modic— the mere trench personalities that he knew so well. He waited half an hour, chilled to the marrow, biting his fingers to keep the blood in them. Then they began to talk of to-morrow. He knew German well, but not well enough to make out all they said ; but it was clear that there was going to be some sort of sally the next day, and the outlet they were guarding had something to say to it. Then he tumbled quite suddenly to the meaning of that long tunnel.

By it, and others like it, the Bodies were going after dark to get out into No Man's .Land, close up to our wire, waiting there for their guns to demolish the parapet, knowing that when our guns replied they would be laid wholly ineffectively to prevent a raid on their own empty trenches.

It was quite a new move in the game, and new moves paid ; and the knowledge of it was much more important to his own people than any news of mine-shafts. As he turned stiffly to go, something was being hauled into the mouth of the tunnel, a machine-gun, perhaps. That gave a better chance to his stiffened joints to carry him out of danger. As he blundered along on them he fell over the dead German. Obviously he could not be left there, yet to drag him through that mud out of the tunnel was not to be thought of. Then Alton remembered the drainage pit. By an immense effort he pulled the body forward, and thrust it down into the hole, hearing with great relief the slime slushing down on top of it. Then suddenly a beam of light flashed past him. The men carrying the gun were using an electric torch. They saw him, but probably taking him for the comrade of whose corpse he had just disposed, only grunted something at him. He was soaked with sweat when he reached the entrance, and got a grip of the little Cockney's hand. The men behind were so near that they could not replace the covering of the tunnel. To leave it uncovered might give away their knowledge. Signing to Smith to imitate him, Alton spread himself by the mouth of the tunnel, his knobkerrie laid back to strike. A head appeared, then another ; woollen caps on both.

i The Work of the Knobkerrie

" Now ! " he said, and struck. Fortunately Smith had selected the other. Both men had to be got out of the hole, by no means an easy job. Then they had to be dragged towards the British lines, so that their deaths might, when discovered, be attributed to an indiscretion. It was risky work, for either side might shoot. The bodies were at last laid near our wire, and then Alton, to run no risk, smashed in one of the skulls with his knobkerrie.

He was going to repeat the operation on the other when his companion saved him the trouble, with a blow into which he put an infinite relish. Ten minutes later they were again within their own lines with the news that would foil the enemy's raid on the morrow and carpet the sad spaces of No Man's Land with blue-grey uniforms.

TRAFFIC CONTROL AT THE FRONT.— British troops moving along a main road during the course of a British advance in the west, with a military policeman on point duty in the middle of the road. (Official photograph. Crown copyright reserved.)

1851

Moments of Suspense with British Sniper Party

British outpost searching fora German sniper in the ruins

;tory-

1852

Charge of Deccan Horse at Foureaux Ridge

After the charge on July 14th, 1916. Deccan Horse pleased and elated with their performance

the woods and riding dow Horse awaiting orders to ad

'n they enemy"infantrv"<nrCe<t0f acharaeBinc8 the early days of the war, the Deccan Horse debouching fr m Ivance. The inset picture was ?"?!! . "rnfields- This striking impression shows the Deocan

<en while the Indian Lancers were on the move. (Official photographs.)

1853

London Scottish Advance to the Pipers' Tune

London Scottish marching to the trenches to the skirl cff th pipes. Inset : German howitzers broken by British E he I Is

The steel casque in place of the glengarry. London Scottish on the way to the fighting zone equipped from head to foot. Highland soldiers were perhaps the most popular Britons, among General Haig's armies, in the land of our Gallic ally.

1854

Pluck and Peril with the Gallant Seaforths

Two of the Seaforths ready to fire a trench-mortar directly the observer, watching through the periscope, indicates the moment. The tins in the foreground are for subsequent use as bombs.

German shell bursting near a British rest camp. Some soldiers are contemplating the explosion with unconcern.

German reply to the mortar seen in first photograph. Shrapnel bursting near the British parapet.

Having received the signal from the observer shown at the top of the

page, the Seaforths fire their bomb, which can be seen in flight.

(Photographs Crown copyright.)

Seaforths who won D.C.M.: R. S.-M. Sutherland,

Bergt. Porter, Corpl. Ward, Lce.-Corpl. Reid,

Corpl. Macleod.

1855

( /

THEWILLUSTRATED-GAIlERYoF LEADERS

GENERAL SIR CHARLES C. MONRO, K.C.B., G.C.M.G.

Appointed in December, 1915, to the Command or (be First Army on the Western Front, and formerly in Command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.

1856

OF THE GREAT WAR

GENERAL SIR CHARLES C. MONRO

A HARD - HEADED, determined man, with a bright intelligence and much force of character ; rather thick-set, with steely eyes and short, bristly moustache, and a voice quiet but emphatic ; one trusted implicitly at sight, of the type of leader associated with Wellington's Peninsular campaign ; in general appearance bearing a somewhat striking resemblance to Viscount French — such, in a sentence, is Sir Charles Carmichael Monro. " You can see a regiment stiffen under his very glance," said one who met him " somewhere in France."

11 A Dark Horse " to the General Public

Of him it may be said, with literal truth, that, so far as the mass of the public was concerned, he was unknown before the Great War. Up to the dawn of that fateful August of 1914, when the Prussian mask was thrown away, Charles Monro was a highly efficient but comparatively subordinate part of the British Army machine ; a major- general of some four years' standing. When the world- conflict was in the twenty-first month of its eventful pro- gress, he had been in the thick of it on three fronts, gained two steps in substantive rank, and become a K.C.B., a G.C.M.G., and a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.

He is not a man of whom many anecdotes are told. With his heart in his profession he 'has entrenched himself against publicity tehind his work. Born on June 15th, 1860, a few months after far-reaching changes in Prussia's military organisation had been foreshadowed by the Crown Prince William, he is the youngest son of the late Henry Monro, of Craiglockhart, a mile or two from Edinburgh town, one of a family the members of which are not un- known to military history, but are more famous as pioneers of one of the most celebrated schools of medicine and surgery in Europe. Three of Charles Monro's forebears held in succession the Professorship of Anatomy and Surgery at Edinburgh University.

An Officer of Marlborough's Regiment

Charles Monro, entering the army while still in his teens, obtained his first commission in a regiment- — the old and Foot— in which John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, began his career. When, two years later, in 1881, he became a lieutenant, the old and Foot had changed its name to the Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment). For five years he was adjutant, and he did not get his captaincy until 1889. His first experience of active service came in 1897-8, on the North- West Frontier, of India, when he took part with the " Tangerines " in the Mohmand, Bajana, and Tirah expeditions. He then received the medal with two clasps and promotion to the rank of major.

Several Staff appointments followed. From October, 1898, to March, 1899, he was Brigade-Major at Gibraltar ; and between April and December, 1899, he was D.A.A.G. at Guernsey and at Aldershot respectively. Three months after the South African War began he went out as a Staff officer with Lord Roberts, and was present at the relief of Kimberley, the heading-off of Cronje at Paardeburg, and the hard-fought action at Driefontein, where the enemy were turned out of their positions at the point of the bayonet. Mentioned in despatches, he received the Cjueeix's medal and three clasps, and the brevet-rank of lieutenant-colonel.

Valuable Services at Hythe

K> turning to England, Lieut .-Colonel Monro, in February, 1901, took over the highly important post of Chief In- structor and Staff Officer at the School of Musketry, Hythe. He became Commandant here in March, 1903, and retained this post till March. 11,07, having in the meantime been promoted colonel. One of the lessons learned by bitter experience on the veldt was the vital importance of musketry training in the army. Lord Roberts never tired of emphasising this, and as we read with pride of what " French's contemptible little army " did with their rifles at Mons and elsewhere in 1914, under the most galling of imaginable conditions, it is to be remembered that no small part of their effective work was inspired by the

thorough system of training inaugurated under Colonel Monro's supervision at the famous Cinque Port School.

Rewarded with the C.B., Colonel Monro, in May, 1907, crossed the Irish Channel and took over the command of the I3th Brigade, which had its headquarters in Dublin. He remained here till January, 1911, having in the previous October risen to the rank of major-general. His next appointment, in March, igia, was as G.O.C. Second London Division of the Territorial Force, and he retained this until the outbreak of the Great War. From the first he had taken a close interest in our " citizen soldiers," and he displayed this interest by a characteristic insistence on the necessity for hard, practical, persistent training. Among the men his zeal won for him the soubriquet of " Old Squad Drill."

The Monro Doctrine of "Thorough"

In the army manoeuvres of 1913, he created something like a sensation by his masterly handling of a Territorial Division which was opposed by units of the Regular Army. His men took cover, cut off convoys, destroyed communications, and generally made things distinctly unpleasant for their opponents ; and at the end of it all it was hard to say who was the proudest, the Territorials of their commander, or he of them. Headquarters realised that the Monro doctrine was " Thorough," and when the London Territorials met the flower of the German Army in France and Flanders, some of the results of that doctrine were made obvious to the man-in-the-street at home.

When the First Army Corps went to France from Alder- shot, in August, 1914, under Sir Douglas Haig, a divisional command was allotted to Major-General Monro, who led his men through the thickest of the fighting, between August and November, on the Aisne and elsewhere. In the first battle of Ypres he had a narrow escape, being knocked unconscious by an enemy shell. On the re- organisation of Sir John French's force into armies, the leadership of the third was given to Sir Charles Monro, then a K.C.B., with mention in despatches for pre-eminent and valuable services.

Successor to Sir Ian Hamilton

In October, 1915, Sir Charles Monro was gazetted lieu- tenant-general, and with the rank of temporary general he -succeeded Sir Ian Hamilton as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, with the onerous task of reporting to the Government on the advisalility or otherwise of a withdrawal from the Dardanelles. By many of his friends the task was viewed with some not unnatural concern, for it was felt that, whatever might be his decision, it would be attacked by the critics. He reported in favour of a withdrawal. Lord Kitchener went out himself, and arrived at the same conclusion, which, bitter as may be the inevitable reflections called up by it, eventually commended itself to general acceptance.

In Command of the First Army

With the help of Admiral Wemyss, Sir Charles Monro was responsible for the masterly withdrawal, with in- finitesimal losses, of the troops, guns and stores from Anzac and Suvla Bay, and their debarkation at Salonika. His services were rewarded in March, 1916, with the G.C.M.G., and in the following month he received the insignia of a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.

The withdrawal from Gallipoli took place in December, 1915, and in the same month Sir Douglas Haig succeeded to the command of the British Forces on the Western front, whereupon Sir Charles Monro returned to France to take over the leadership of the First Army. Thereafter, the civilian at home, no less than military men, watched for news of his activities with the most lively interest. It was felt to be high time that an infantry officer should be placed in charge of what was essentially infantry war when it was not a war of artillery.

In March, igia, Sir Charles Monro married the Hon. Mary Caroline Towneley-O'Hagan, daughter of the first Baron O'Hagan, K.P., twice Lord Chancellor of Ireland.

1857

Silken guise is swept aside

From thy armour grim and black, A nd to-day we watch with pride —

As those countless hordes attack — Dauntless Verdun hurl the tide BACK.

In this bloodiest of frays —

Scarred on history's expanse. All the world shall sing thy praise,

Gallant land of Old Romance, Crown thy sons with deathless bays — FRANCE.

—JESSIE POPE

The

Struggle for

Verdun

General Retain, the heroic defender of Verdun, looks across the fateful field.

1858

1859

THE STRUGGLE FOR VERDUN

By Lord Northcliffe

fHE extraordinary series of attacks and counter-attacks which went to make up the long-drawn-out and ever-changing battle for the possession of the Verdun positions embodied more material for the military historian than most of the great wars of the past. It is impossible in any reasonable space adequately to tell the story of that titanic struggle. The most that can be done is to present some impressions of certain aspects of it — features that are likely to stand out in the general history of the war as characteristic of this, its most epic, period. It was the privilege of Lord Northcliffe to be an eye-witness of some of the earlier stages of this great struggle, and the series of despatches which he then wrote to the "Times," and which were quoted at length in the newspapers throughout the world, were universally recognised as the most noteworthy contributions made by any journalist to the endless narrative of the war. The following chapter, written by Lord Norlhcliffe in the second week of April, 1916, in large measure summarising the most salient points of these famous despatches, in the light of the situation at that date, enables the reader to gather a really vivid and enduring idea ol what the struggle for Verdun was like.

\ 7ERDUN is, in many ways, the most extraordinary Y of battles. The mass of metal used on both sides is far beyond all parallel ; the transformation on the Douaumont Ridge was more suddenly dramatic than even the Battle of the Marne ; and, above all, the duration of the conflict already looks as if it would surpass anything in history. When, by the kindness of General Joffre and General Petain, I was able to watch the struggle from various vital view-points, the battle had already been raging for a fortnight, and four to five thousand guns were still thundering round Verdun. Impossible, therefore, to describe the entire battle The most one can do is to set down one's impressions of the first phases of the terrific conflict.

My chief impression is one of admiration for the subtle powers oi mind of the French High Command. General Joffre and General Castelnau are men with especially fine intellects tempered to terrible keenness. In 1914, when they were commanders, France was inferior to a great degree in point of numbers to Prussianised Germany. In armament, also, France was inferior at first to her enemy. The French High Command thus had to do all that human intellect can against almost overwhelming hostile material forces. General Joffre General Castelnau — and, later, General Petain — rhad to display genius where the Germans were exhibiting talent, and the result is to be seen at Verdun. They there caught the enemy in a series of traps of a kind hitherto unknown in modern warfare — something elemental, and yet subtle, neo-primitive, and befitting the atavistic character of the Teuton. They caught him in a web of his own unfulfilled boasts. Germany's Gigantic Preparation

The enemy began by massing a surprising force on the western front. It was usually reckoned that the Germans maintain on all fronts a field army of about seventy-four and a half army corps, which at full strength number three million men. Yet, while holding the Russians from Riga to the south of the Pripet Marshes, and maintaining a show of force in the Balkans. Germany seems to have succeeded in bringing up nearly two millions and a half of men for her grand spring offensive in the west. Troops and guns were withdrawn in increasing numbers from Russia and Serbia in December, 1915, until there were, it is estimated, a hundred and eighteen divisions on the Franco- British- Belgian front. A -large number of 6 in. and 12 in. Austrian howitzers were added to the enormous Krupp batteries. Then a large proportion of new recruits of the 1916 class were removed into Rhineland depots to serve as drafts for the fifty-nine army corps, and it is thought that nearly all the huge shell output that had accumulated during the winter was transported westward. All this gigantic work of preparation could not be hidden. But I do not think the allied Staffs, in spite of their various and wide sources of information, penetrated deeply into the Ger- man plan ; for the hostile Chief of Staff, General Falkenhayn, made his dispositions in a very skilful manner. Out of his available total of one hundred and eighteen divisions, he massed his principal striking force of thirty-two divisions against the British army. Verdun was apparently only a secondary objective, against which fourteen and, later, thirty divisions were concentrated. At the time of writing, the principal enemy mass was still placed, according to the last information I have, against Sir Douglas Haig's army.

One effect of this massing of German troops against the new and longer British line was that the then French commander at Verdun, General Herr, scarcely expected the overwhelming attack made upon him on February 2ist, 1916. General Herr's Staff knew — though he himself obstinately declined to believe it — that the enemy was preparing a formidable assault in the woods north of the old French frontier fort. But though the German airmen were very active throughout January and February, a good deal could be seen by the French aerial observers of the vast work going on amid the misty tracks of woodland. Lieutenant Immelmann and other crack Fokker pilots joined the Crown Prince's army, and for some weeks our allies at Verdun almost lost the command of the air above their lines.

The French Handicap in Aircraft

It is true that one Zeppelin was brought down by gun fire while trying to bombard the French railway line of communication, and two German aeroplanes were destroyed out ot a squadron of fifteen that bombed Revigny. But the triumph over the Zeppelin did not in any way alter the effective situation. Our allies were at a very serious disadvantage in regard to aircraft during the critical periods of the German preparations and the enemy's main attacks. It was not until the middle of March that the French recovered fully at Verdun the power of reconnoitring the enemy's positions and bombing his distant lines of communication.

The French Staff reckoned that Verdun would be attacked when the ground had dried somewhat in the March winds. It was thought that the first enemy move- ment would take place against the British front in some of the sectors of which there were chalk undulations, through which the rains of winter quickly drained. The Germans skilfully encouraged this idea by making an apparent preliminary attack at Lihons, with rolling gas- clouds and successive waves of infantry. During this feint the veritable offensive movement softly began on Saturday, February igth, 1916, when the enormous masses of hostile artillery west, east, and north of the Verdun salient started registering on the French positions. Only in small numbers did the German guns fire, in order not to alarm their opponents. But even this trial bombardment was a terrible display of power, calling forth all the energies of the outnumbered French gunners to maintain the artillery duels that continued day and night until Monday morning, February aist.

Looking at the country from the observation point east of Verdun, one can see why it was chosen by the German Staff for a grand surprise attack. As I stood, with the flooded Mouse and its high western banks behind me, and before me the famous plateau crowned by the ruins of Douaumont Fort, I was reminded of Scotland. Perth on the Tay, amid its fir-wooded heights, is rather like Verdun in the basin of the Meuse. It was the evergreen fir-woods that attracted the (ierman Staff, as splendid cover for their vast artillery preparations. As their aircraft at last almost dominated the French aeroplanes, they completed their concentration of guns by an arrogantly daring return to old-fashioned methods. Instead of digging any more gun-pits, they placed hundreds of pieces of artillery side by side above ground, confident that the French artillery would be overwhelmed before it could do any damage. A French airman, sent to count the batteries in the small

I860

THE STRUGGLE FOR VERDUN

wood of Granilly, gave up his task in despair, saying there were more guns than trees.

The method ot handling these great parks of artillery was a development of the phalanx tactics used by Von Mackensen in breaking the Russian lines at Gorlice ; and according to a rumour, Von Mackensen was at Verdun, with his chief, General von Falkenhayn, superintending the disposition of guns and men. The commander nomin- ally in charge, however, was Field-Marshal von Haeseler, a tall, thin man of eighty, of the type of Von der Goltz — excellent at drawing up schemes on paper, and accounted, before the test of war, the best military leader in Germany. He had, therefore, been placed in command ot the Crown Prince's army, so that by his genius he might win personal glory for the Hohenzollern dynasty. In any case, it is clear that Von Haeseler either adopted and developed Von Mackensen's new system of attack, or that Von Mackensen in person directed the movement, with Von Haeseler in nominal command, in order to mislead the French Staff as to the way in which the movement was likely to develop. Certainly, General Herr did not antici- pate the character or the tremendous violence of the assault that opened at dawn on February 2ist, 1916.

Two Army Corps Against Seven

For two days the German heavy howitzers had been battering at the twenty-five miles of defensive earthworks round Verdun, in order to make so large a gap that the hostile long-range guns of defence behind the third line could not close the rent by means of curtain fire. General Herr and his Staff had only two army corps to hold back the seven army corps that the Germans first brought forward ; but the high, broken, difficult ground about Verdun favoured the defending forces. Moreover, the French engineers had worked in an astonishing fashion to perfect the natural difficulties of the terrain. In the low ground, such as that round the two Omes heights held by the Germans, the French had tunnels running to a depth at which no shell could penetrate. In the three important woodlands between Ornes and the Meuse — Haumont Wood, Caures Wood, and Herbebois Wood — there was all the intensive system of protection that had been developed in the Argonne fighting. General Sarrail had only extended his lines to the woodlands in the plain between the Meuse and Ornes in the spring of 1915, snatching the ground from the enemy bit by bit when the German forces at Verdun were weakened through sending reinforcements to the Champagne and Lille fields of conflict. General Sarrail, however, seems to have extended his lines into the low- lying northern woodlands with considerable reluctance. He liked hill positions himself, and there was a dispute between him and the High Command regarding his manner of fortifying the newly-won ground. As a result he was sent to Salonika, and the defence of Verdun in the new style was given to a new man, little known to the public — General Herr.

But the phalanx tactics of the Von Mackensen school were calculated to overwhelm any system of defensive works, new or old, in forests or on hillsides. The German attack was irresistible, and it was only the large space of country avail- able for retreat between the Meuse and Ornes line and the Douaumont Plateau that saved Verdun from rapid capture. Precision o! German Gun Fire

The enemy seems to have maintained a bombardment all round General Hcrr's lines on February aist, 1916, but this general battering was done with a thousand pieces of field- artillery. The grand masses of heavy howitzers were used in a different way. At a quarter past seven in the morning they concentrated on the small sector of advanced en- trenchments near Brabant and the Meuse ; 12 in. shells fell with terrible precision every few yards. The trenches were obliterated. In each small sector of the six-mile northward bulge of the Verdun salient the work of destruc- tion was done with surprising quickness. After the line from Brabant to Haumont was smashed, the main fire power was directed against the other end of the bow at Herbebois, Ornes, and Maucourt. Then when both ends of the bow were severely hammered, the central point of the Verdun salient, Caures Wood, was smothered in shells of all sizes. In this manner almost the whole enormous force of heavy artillery was centred upon mile after mile of

the French front. When the great guns lifted over the lines of craters, the lighter field-artillery, placed row after row in front of the wreckage, maintained an unending fire curtain over the communicating saps and support entrenchments.

Then came the second surprising feature in the new German system of attack. No waves of storming infantry swept into the shattered works. Only strong patrols at first came forward, to discover if it were safe for the main body of troops to advance and reorganise the French line so as to allow the artillery to move onward. The German commanders thought it would be possible to do all the fighting with long-range artillery, leaving the infantry to act as squatters to the great guns, and occupy and rebuild line after line of the French defences without any serious hand-to- hand struggles. All they had to do was to protect the gunners from surprise attack, while the guns made an easy path for them, and also beat back any counter-attack in force.

General Castelnau's Perplexing Tactics

But, ingenious as was this scheme for saving the man- power of Germany by an unparalleled expenditure of shell, it required for full success the co-operation of the French troops. But the French did not co-operate. Their High Command had continually improved their system of trench defence in accordance with the experiences of their own hurricane bombardments in Champagne and the Carency sector. General Castelnau, the acting Commander-in- Chief on the French front, was indeed the inventor of hurricane fire tactics, which he had used for the first time in February, 1915, in Champagne. When General Jofire took over the conduct of all French operations, leaving to General Castelnau the immediate control of the front in France, the victor of the Battle of Nancy weakened his advance lines and then his support lines, until his troors actually engaged in fighting were very little more than a thin covering body, such as is thrown out towards the frontier while the main forces connect well behind.

The tactical effect of this extraordinary measure was to leave remarkably few French troops exposed to the appall- ing tempest of German and Austrian shells. The fire- trench was almost empty, and in many cases the real defenders of the French line were men with machine-guns, hidden at some distance from the positions at which the German gunners aimed. The batteries of light guns, which the French handled with the flexibility and continuity of fire of Maxims, were also concealed in widely-scattered positions. The main damage caused by the first intense bombardment was the destruction of all the telephone wires along the French front. Communications could only te slowly re-established by messengers, so that many parties of men had to fight on their own initiative, with little or no combination of effort with their comrades.

The Memorable Defence of Caures Wood

Yet, desperate as were their circumstances, they broke down the German plan for capturing trenches without an infantry attack. They caught the patrols and annihilated them, and then swept back the elisillusioned and reluctant main bodies of German troops. The small French garrison of every centre of resistance fought with cool, deadly courage, and often to the death.

The organisation of the French Machine-gun Corps was a fine factor in the eventual success. One gun fired ten thousand rounds daily for a week, most of the positions selected being spots from which each German infantry advance would be enfiladed and shattered. Then the French " 75 s," which had been masked during the over- whelming fire of the enemy's howitzers, came unexpectedly into action when the German infantry attacks increased in strength. Near Haumont, for example, eight successive furious attacks were repulsed by three batteries of " 75's."

Some of the Haumont guns got through the German fire curtain, and helped in the defence of the Caures Wood. Here there occurred some memorable exploits. First of all the wood was lost by the smashing effect of the German heavy shell fire. The position was almost as strong as the famous German Labyrinth near Arras, and, knowing this, the enemy used his i6'8 in. Berthas in addition to the 12 in. Skoda guns. The deep roofs were driven down upon the men sheltering beneath, and the wood had to be abandoned. But the survivors of the garrison held the enemy back.

ISlil

Poignant Pictures from the Furnace of Verdun

Squad of French prisoners captured by the Germans in one of their assaults against Verdun. Judging by the distinctly miserable expressions of the German soldiers, one would be inclined to think that they were the prisoners and our allies were the captors.

Ashes to ashes. Scene in a war-stricken corner of France. Military funeral procession consisting of a two-horsed waggon, two French infantrymen, and the village priest. The cortege is passing through a village shattered by gun flre.

1862

1863

THE STRUGGLE FOR VERDUN

while a lieutenant of engineers with his men laid a large number of mines with electrical firing wires. The German general, after his skirmishers and bombing-parties had been beaten off, went back to the old Prussian method of a mass attack, and launched a division against the wood. By arrangement, the French covering troops fled in apparent panic, and were hotly chased down the trenches and com- munication saps to the southern outskirts. As the last man left the wood, the lieutenant of engineers, who was near Beaumont waiting the signal, pressed a button. Many of the trees rose in the air, and the Germans suffered very badly.

Lieut. -Colonel Driant's Magnificent Stand

Soon afterwards, Lieutenant-Colonel Driant, with two fine battalions of Chasseurs, recovered by a counter-attack the southern part of Caurcs Wood. Driant was a magnifi- cent soldier. His heroic end saddened the French people, and yet inspired them with fresh courage. The day after his fine victory the forces on either side of him were com- pelled to withdraw, and the Germans closed round him on both sides. Arranging his two battalions in five columns, he made a splendid fighting retreat between the two German divisions which almost enveloped his force. With only a hundred men he rearguarded the retirement, and was found dead by the Germans on the battlefield. He was buried beside one of his captains close to the wood.

In spite of the vast forces employed by the enemy, the Germans achieved but little on the first day of battle, February 2ist. They won a footing in the first-line trenches and in some of the supporting trenches — a thing any army could have done with a large expenditure of shell. The French still held Brabant and Haumont, with Colonel Driant in Caures Wood and the garrisons of Herbebois Wood and Ornes holding their own. But on the morning of February 22nd, the Germans worked up a ravine between Brabant and Haumont by means of burning liquids spurted from flame-projectors. At the same time the German artillery renewed its smashing, intensive fire, wrecking and flattening out Haumont village and breaking up the French works for a depth of three or four miles. Fortified farms were bombarded south of Haumont Wood and trans- formed into volcanoes by the huge German shells, and when night fell trench warfare had come to an end so far as the northern part of the Verdun garrison was concerned.

French Retire from Herbebois

All their earthworks had been swept out of existence, and the troops fought and worked in the open in a tragic darkness lighted by the enemy's wonderful star-shells. They had been hammered out of Brabant, on the edge of the Meuse, and their centre had been driven in. On the right, however, the garrison of Herbebois Wood still clung on to part of their original position, under an intermittent hurricane of heavy shell, the intervals of which were filled ' by infantry attacks. Under the enemy's fire the French troops linked their Herbebois line with Hill 351, digging all night in a rain of death to connect the two positions for a fresh defence against an enfilading attack on Beaumont. When morning broke, the Germans began the attack on this new French line. After a desperate struggle lasting twelve hours, in which the enemy commander continually brought up fresh regiments, the French retired from Herbebois and another wood below it, but still held on to the hill.

All along this side of the salient hand-to-hand fighting went on, from Ornes to Bezonvaux and the advanced position of the Hill of Vaux. Small French garrisons held advanced positions in the plain stretching towards the enemy's base of Etain. There was terrible fighting at Maucourt, where the French had some quick-firing guns, posted only five yards apart, and unmasked against German columns charging twenty men abreast in close ranks. The French soldiers themselves sickened at the slaughter they wrought. From Ornes to Vaux the ground was covered with dead or maimed men. The French gunners suffered more in proportion than their infantry, especially in the centre and the left wing, where the guns had to fight a continual rearguard action in the open. Though they often caught German columns at short range, they were in turn smitten by the heavy German guns, enemy airmen circling over them and directing the fire. Ornes held out until the afternoon of February 24th, when the garrison retreated

to Bezonvaux, from which a ravine ran up to Douaumont. Covering the country north of Douaumont was a superb set of fighters composed of Zouaves and African sharp- shooters. They recaptured part of the wood between Herbebois and Hill 351, and then withstood a prolonged bombardment of terrific intensity. The din and concussion of the heavy shells were appalling ; the blood at times poured from the men's ears under the shock of the pressure of air, and yet they stuck to their job. They were pushed out of Beaumont and out of the wood they had recaptured, and they lost Fosses Wood a little way below the Douaumont Plateau, towards which they retired.

Meanwhile, the centre and left of the French salient were hammered back with increasing rapidity. The division close to the Meuse, which had withdrawn from Brabant and Haumont, tried in vain to counter-attack from their second line at Samogneux, Hill 344, and a fortified farm near by. The enemy massed his guns against them across the Meuse, northward, and north-westward. They could not move out to attack, and by the evening of February 23rd their position was untenable. In the night they withdrew from Samogneux towards Pepper Hill (C6te du Poivre), which was practically their last dominating position. Pepper Hill was, indeed, the critical position of the entire defence of Verdun. Had the enemy won it he would have been able to advance along the Meuse and cut off a large part of the French forces in the salient.

Sanguinary Struggle for Pepper Hill

General Herr and his Staff, however, devised a deadly system of defence for Pepper Hill. Across the river at this point the French held several lines of dominating heights, from which they poured a flanking fire into every hostile force advancing from Brabant and Haumont. The nearer the Germans came to Verdun, on the Pepper Hill sector, the more terribly they suffered from the fire across the Meuse. They came within range of rifles, machine-guns, and light field-pieces, as well as heavy howitzers, and while their flanks were thus shattered, their front was hammered from the Pepper Hill position. At Vacherauville, a village just below Pepper Hill, the enemy's advance was definitely checked on February 25th. In one ravine near the village, as day was breaking, some French gunners on Pepper Hill espied a grey mass of hostile forces, and shelled it furiously. The Germans did not move. When the light was clear, it was seen that the figures were dead, though many still stood upright. They had been caught the evening before by the guns across the river and slain wholesale, more by shell-blast, apparently, than by shell fragments. Von Haeseler had made a costly mistake in driving up the Meuse towards Pepper Hill before he cleared the French from Goose Crest (Cote 1'Oie), Dead Man Hill (Mort Homme), and Charny Ridge across the river. He afterwards tried to remedy his error by bringing his main artillery forces against Goose Crest and Dead Man Hill. But before thus widening the scope of his attack, he tried to preserve the intensive, narrow method of assault in the Von Mackensen style by thrusting into the centre of the flattened Verdun salient. That is to say, he shifted the point of the phalanx from Pepper Hill to the middle of the Douaumont Plateau. This was the right and plain course, for it removed the attacking masses and their immediate artillery supports from the French flanking fire across the Meuse, and brought them nearly within reach of victory.

Snowstorm Aids the French

The great thrust into the French centre also cleared the French out of the eastern edges of the Heights of the Meuse overlooking the Woevre Plain, for the Zouaves and Moroccans and the former garrisons of Herbebois and Ornes were farthest from Verdun, and most in danger of being cut off. The Zouaves and Moroccans fell back on Douaumont, while the troops from Bezonvaux entrenched by the Douaumont Ravine and the Vaux Ravine.

Then the great snowstorm of February swept over the hilly battlefield and the lowland marshes of the Woevre. The storm was a disaster to the Germans. It robbed them in the crisis of the struggle of their tremendous power of artillery. Gunners and aerial observers were blinded, and from their point of view matters were not much improved by the mist that followed the snow. Snowdrifts in the valley paths delayed the forward movement of the guns and

18G4

THE STRUGGLE FOR VERDUN

the bringing up of ammunition and supplies to the firing- line. This was when the original German plan for economy in men went all to pieces. The High Command could not wait for its guns to resume full action. The infantry- had to undertake, with diminished artillery support, the terrible work of breaking the French front by hand-to-hand fighting. Verdun, after all, was to be purchased with German blood and not with German shells.

The great arc of artillery was still able to work by the map and by observers in the firing-line. It could pound villages, farms, and old forts, in which French troops might be sheltering, but it could not aim at the manoeuvring columns and discern all the paths of communication. On the Plateau of Douaumont, some four hundred feet above the Meuse, the garrison of Verdun had the old entrenchments prepared at the outbreak of the war and improved by long labour. Then there were many improvised new defences — masked batteries of quick-firers, to be unmasked only against mass infantry attacks, hundreds of machine-guns detached irom battalion service and acting as a sort of secondary artillery corps. And far behind the flaming, smoking plateau there was a superhuman outburst of activity in France, veiled from enemy air scouts by the falling snow. The Situation Becomes Very Critical

General Joffre, General Castelnau, and their Staff were now convinced that Verdun was the enemy's first objective. The British army took over all the line where the second grand German offensive was expected, thus liberating important French reinforcements for the battle on the Heights of the Meuse. All lines and roads leading, round- about or direct, towards Verdun, were crowded with men and material. The main French force was driving towards the enemy. The only matter of doubt was whether it would arrive in time to hold Verdun, or whether the supreme contest between French and German would take place on the western side of the Meuse.

This depended upon the staying power of the small, original garrison of Verdun. At heroic sacrifice they had to cover the massing of the great new forces. The situation had become very critical on the afternoon of February 24th, when large enemy forces debouched between Louvemont village and the hill in front of the Douaumont Plateau. General Herr flung all his remaining reserves into the fight, with the order that the line between Douaumont and Haudromont was to be held at any cost. Von Haeseler, in turn, brought up all his available infantry and employed them in mass attacks of great ferocity and persistence. His aim was to wear down the physical power of endurance of the French. On February 25th the Germans, after a long hand-to-hand wrestle, took all the village of Louvemont at the slope of the plateau, and climbed up the ridge, but were thrown down.

About this time General Castelnau came to Verdun to see how things were going on. He was not contented with what he saw. The Germans had won a magnificent artillery position on the high land at Beaumont, towards which they were dragging the main group of their heavy guns. The command of the air had been almost lost, and there was not enough pontoon bridges across the flooded Meuse to bring up quickly the needed reinforcements. General Herr was relieved of his command, and a very fine engineer, who was also a specialist in handling heavy artillery — General Petain — was entrusted with the reorganisation of the Verdun defences. Meanwhile, before General Petain could get to work, there was the immediate task of checking the massed infantry attacks which the enemy was employing until the air cleared and his guns were sited on the new Beaumont position. General Castelnau could not bring up a large force — time and means were lacking. A picked body of fighters Was needed, and the general wired for the Bretons who had won the Battle of Nancy for him — the Bretons of the Twentieth Army Corps, under General Balfouricr.

General Baltourier's Timely Arrival

They arrived just in time on the plateau on February 26th. As was the case at Nancy, the Kaiser was present, watching the development of a " grand German victory." He stood on one of the hills near Ornes, with the Crown Prince by his side, and Von Falkcnhayn and Von Haeseler. For reasons of domestic politics a purely Prussian force — the Brandenburgers — had been chosen to deal the decisive

stroke. All the previous day and the previous night ordinary German divisions carried out the real work of smashing against the Zouaves and Moroccans, and bringing them to the limit of human endurance.

The Zouaves were perfect. They were in front of Douaumont village, with the Moroccan Division and two infantry regiments ; they fought for two days and two nights without eating or sleeping. On February 26th, when Douaumont Fort was lost, the Zouaves and their comrades still held the village, and on February 2yth, without help, they broke the long prepared attack by part of the German Fifteenth Army Corps. They let their foes come within two hundred yards, and then put a shrapnel curtain behind them to prevent retreat or reinforcement, and smote them down with " 75's," machine-guns, and rifles. The struggle for the village went on to the end of the month, by which time the Germans had made eighteen attacks in force, all of which were broken. When the approaches to Douaumont were covered with dead and wounded the French made a counter- attack, and won a footing in a redoubt north-west of the village, from which the enemy had been pouring an uncom- fortable machine-gun fire. The Crisis at Douaumont Stubborn, however, as was the stand made by the Zouaves, they would have perished on the critical day of the Douaumont fight but for the arrival of Balfourier's Bretons. On the afternoon of that day they were in extreme peril of being enveloped on their right. The dismantled fort had been taken by three thousand Branden- burgers during the heavy fog. Still working by the map, the gunners of the long-range German and Austrian artillery massed with remarkable precision against the fortress works, and then poured great shells about it, in a blind profusion which was expensive but effective. After this bombardment had made the trenches of the troops untenable, the Brandenburgers, who had come in the night up the ravine from Bezonvaux and gathered in a wood, charged under cover of the fog, and won a footing on the plateau. Reaching the dismantled fort, that crowns a swell of ground some 1,200 feet above sea-level, the men •of the Brandenburg Mark tried to break through the French rearguard. But after withdrawing foi a mile and a quarter, the French line remained unbroken, bent away from the fort, but still curving round the village. Friday night (the 25th) and Saturday morning were a period of extreme crisis. Open field fighting of the most desperate nature went on continuously. The Germans fought with great bravery, according to the best tradition of Prussian discipline. But the French, French Colonial, and African troops still bore up against the superior numbers of fresh enemy forces. Fighting and working, our allies strove to establish themselves solidly on their new line of defence, while the Germans, with victory apparently well within their reach, tried to break through by overwhelming weight and unfaltering driving power. They took, without breaking, heavier punishment than their own theorists before the war expected modern national armies to stand. But firm as they were, the outnumbered French soldiers were firmer, and as twilight was falling, Balfourier, with the famous Twentieth Army Corps, came into action.

Kaiser Trapped in his own Boasts The vehemence of attack of the frtsh French force was terrific. The men went forward with such speed that the enemy was surprised. The Bretons smashed onwards for more than a mile, joining on to the Zouaves at Douaumont village, and enclosing part of a Brandenburg regiment in the fort. The Germans on the slope of the ravine, however, managed to hold on to a sap running through a coppice and connecting with the fort. The enemy thus retained a valuable observation station on the plateau, from which he could direct his main batteries at Beaumont. But for the rest he was trapped.

The Kaiser in person had sustained a more disastrous defeat than he had received at Nancy, for at Verdun he could not retire. He had telegraphed to Berlin news of his great victory over the " hereditary enemy " ; his officials had filled the German and neutral Press with glorious anticipations of the capture of Verdun, of which the principal fort was alleged to have fallen. Rumania, ccording to Teutonic opinion, was only being restrained

1865

Where the Germans Were Shattered at Douaumont

Until the end of February , 1916, Douaumont was but an obscure village on the Meuse salient, but after then It bore the brunt of the Verdun offensive, and this curious word with four consecu- tive vowel sounds will be remembered as the scene of Uie mo*' appalling slaughter ever imagined.

Thousands of Germans

met their fate on the Douaumont Ridge, being shattered piece- meal by the French artillery. The town itself was taken and retaken four times. This remarkable Impression MCTCM extremity of the village. In the background Is seen the ridge leading up to the fort rushed by the Brandenburgers.

1866

THE STRUGGLE FOR VERDUN

from following the example of Italy by the tremendous energy with which the Germans were renewing their drive in France. The Kaiser's telegram concerning the conquest of Douaumont had been sent to Berlin as a transmitting station ; its true destination was Bukarest. Political and Moral Value oi Verdun

I cannot think of any parallel in history to this phase of the situation at Verdun. The War Lord of Germany was entangled in the web of his own prestige. To General Castelnau and General Joffre the operations at Verdun assumed a new complexion. If they could bring up and organise their forces in time, they had the enemy so fixed that they could bleed white one of his largest armies. They might also sap the strength of movements he was preparing in other directions, by compelling him continually to reinforce at all costs his Verdun army. Only so long as they kept the Crown Prince out of Verdun could they hold the Kaiser trapped in his own boasts, with all his people waiting for the fulfilment of their high hopes, in an intensity of spirit that might be an important moral factor if cheated of success. Verdun had become more than a military objective. For Germany its political and moral value had become even greater than its strategical importance. It was worth capturing Verdun at a cost of life that made the capture equivalent, in terms of ultimate resources, to a defeat. Two hundred thousand German casualties are alleged to have been the Kaiser's estimate of the worth of Verdun.

All this, however, greatly aggravated the burden on the mind of the new defender of the French frontier town, General Petain, who, nevertheless, carried his burden easily. Tall, fair, blue-eyed, of the northern stock of France that has absorbed much Flemish blood, Petain was radiant with energy of both character and mind. He was only a colonel of the engineers in August, 1914, but while developing his own special branch of knowledge and showing a fine gift of leadership in the handling of infantry, he became also a master-gunner — the new French heavy howitzers being his favourite weapon. It was as the master- gunner of France that he was brought by General Castelnau to Verdun to fight against the two thousand guns of the German phalanx, the largest pieces of which carried farther than the French heavy howitzers immediately available. General Pctain's Methods

General Petain, however, had a method of getting more out of his howitzers than the manufacturers expected. Even with his medium pieces he could often overpower heavy enemy guns. He had, besides, worked out a method by which he could use these medium pieces with the flexibility of light field-artillery. But until he had con- structed his telephone service, recovered the command of the air, and got his guns into the special positions required by his system, he had a desperately hard struggle to main- tain his line and win time for completing his preparations.

After breaking against the Douaumont Ridge on February 26th, the German attack seemed to weaken. Fierce infantry fighting continued at Douaumont village till the end of the month. Then came an ominous period of calm, lasting three days. The enemy was moving his enormous parks of guns closer to Verdun. But the time thus spent by the Germans was like a gift from heaven to General Petain. He threw bridges over the Mcuse ; he augmented his gun power on the western heights at Dead Man Hill and Charny Ridge, making his flanking fire from this direction more deadly and far-reaching ; he strengthened the Douaumont Plateau defences, and poured in guns, ammunition, and fresh troops. General Petain did not, however, pack liis infantry into the restricted Verdun area. Under fire his men were scattered but fresh, the main force being well out of range of the German artillery, and used in short shifts at the front. On the other hand, no German within five miles of the French guns was safe. As the new French com- mander's shell supply quickened, by his constant improve- ment of his lines of communication, and as newly-rifled guns arrived regularly to replace those worn by firing, he gradually dominated the German artillery.

In continual drum-fire bombardments it was not only shell stores that were spent, but the life of the heavy ordnance. The wasting of shell accumulation and the wearing out of the guns crippled the immediate offensive

power of a nation in a manner that no reserve of man-power could supply. General Petain therefore had 1o provoke the hostile artillery into constant action, as well as induce the German infantry to fling itself against his quick-firers and machine-guns. Thus, even if he could have done so at once, it might not have been sound policy to overwhelm the enemy with a large part of the French accumulation of shell. Considerable subtlety in playing upon the mind of the German commander was needed, in order to induce him to exhaust all his resources thoroughly while not doing any grievous damage to France.

General Petain was always willing to sell at a good price the pieces of ground he did not want. On the first day of his command he withdrew all French posts in the Woevre Plain and placed them upon the high ground. But after- wards he was not so sternly scientific in his concentrations of force. Instead of evacuating his weak points, he concealed machine-guns around them with observers at the end of a telephone wire, which ran to a central exchange, fiom which heavy guns by the hundred could be aimed. This gave the Germans something strenuous to achieve, and, going on the principle that the struggle was greater than the prize, they had, after accomplishing their object, something to celebrate in their communiques.

Abrupt Change in the Situation

In the first days of March they resumed their bombard- ment and infantry attacks upon the Douaumont Plateau, losing heavily, but not shifting General Balfourier's corps ; but Douaumont had then become a place of secondary importance. General Petain had not waited for bridging material to transport his big guns across the Meuse. Instead of concentrating round the spot at which the enemy was striking, he ran his new heavy ordnance more quickly up the Argonne Forest to the hills above Verdun, on the opposite side of the stream. There, with a range of five miles, he could sweep all the reserve, support, and firing lines of the enemy's forces engaged on the front of three and a half miles between Pepper Hill and Douaumont.

This abruptly changed the situation, as the Germans viewed it. They had to take the hills across the Meuse — Dead Man Hill and Charny Ridge especially — in order to recover fully Jthe power of making mass attacks on the Douaumont Plateau. So the tide of battle shifted — but at the masterly direction of General Petain. The great batteries at Beaumont swung round to westward to make a flanking bombardment on the French positions across the Meuse, and east of these positions another mass of heavy German artillery near Montfaucon opened a hurricane fire. Then on March 6th infantry assaults began. Forges was taken at great cost, but the enemy could not debouch from the hamlet on to the northern slopes of the Goose Crest. The force that attempted to do so was shattered. But the next day a fresh German division reached part of the crest, and worked down the railway to Regneville, lying over against Samogneux, with the river between. Again new forces were deployed on March yth, and by another day of hard and good fighting the German commander made a brilliant stroke. He captured Crows' Wood (Bois des Corbeaux) and Cumi^res Wood, from which a decisive advance could be made on Dead Man Hill. If Dead Man Hill fell, General Petain's power over the enemy's ground across the Meuse would be seriously reduced, and his more southerly position on Charny Wood would be menaced.

Attack on Fort of Vaux

He at once threw reinforcements towards Dead Man Hill, and by an attack quite as fine as that of Balfourier's corps at Douaumont, the division recovered the greater part of the two woods. All the next day it withstood frontal and flank attacks, with the enemy's guns pounding it from the north, east, and south, the reverse fire coming from German batteries across the river near Pepper Hill. On March loth another fre:;h, large enemy force of some 20,000 infantry worked again through part of Crows' Wood and Cumieres Wood, suffering frightful losses and achieving no great result ; for all that General Petain had fought for was time. He had gained more than forty-eight hours in which to organise the works on and round Dead Man Hill in the way lie wanted. This important advanced position had now become safe — for the crucial time at least.

1867

Near Verdun Where War Was Fierce & Furious

French " 75 " gun the target of a Qerman 280 mm. weapon. The latter, however, failed to hit the mark, though the state of the ground proves that its shells fell near enough.

Striking proof of the undaunted heroism and ready resource of the French Army. During a fierce bombardment in the Verdun

sector the troops of our ally retired to a wood, and rapidly organised a new position by felling trees and digging trenches.

Inset: French Alpine Artillery on their way to the firing-line in the Vosges region.

1808

THE STRUGGLE FOR VERDUN

The enemy commander also needed lime io bring up his guns to cover the ground he had won in the woodlands and by the river. So there was a lull round Dead Man. But on the distant eastern side of the Verdun salient the German offensive was resumed with extreme violence. The new objective was the Fort of Vaux, south-east of Douaumont Fort, and connecting with it in the old system of defence before the structures of armoured concrete were emptied of guns. The fort on the plateau was approached by a ravine in which lay the village of Vaux. Supported by their heavy artillery 'in the Woevre Plain, the Germans attacked round the mouth of the ravine on March gth, and at night some 6,000 Poles got into the village, but were scattered by a bayonet charge.

But, to the amazement of General Petain and his Start, the Berlin wireless spread the news that the Posen Brigade had stormed not only the hamlet in the hollow but the fort on the plateau. Paris was perturbed, and General Petain had to send one of his Staff officers to Vaux. He found the garrison in merry mood, with the soldiers off duty playing cards. They had neither won nor lost any battle ; the enemy had not come near them. Meanwhile, the German Staff discovered it had made a ridiculous mis- statement, and tried to palliate its blunder by ordering the fort to be taken. But General Petain now knew that the Vaux sector had become important, and that if he massed an unusual number of guns and men there, and improved his means of bringing up shells, his labour would not be wasted. Thus opened another general butchery of Germans, slaughtered for the sake of Prussian prestige. Vaux Fort had become Verdun in little. It had to be captured to save the reputation of a race of braggarts. Germans Show Signs of "Groggincss"

But it was not captured just then, though the struggle for it we.nt on for weeks with increasing fury. Even by the middle of March the ground below the fort was heaped with greyish forms, where the dead and dying had rolled down the slopes. In the ravine below the Germans, by the end of March, won the eastern houses of the village, but could not for long advance farther. Vaux Fort still remained untaken, and the neighbouring Caillette Wood was recovered early in April, thus strengthening both the Douaumont and Vaux positions.

The Germans began to show definite signs of " grog- giness." The chief among these signs was their tendency to lies of a gross and childish nature. Their claim to the capture of Vaux Fort* was possibly a bad mistake, due to some eager Staff subordinate's misunderstanding. But in the middle of March, when the Vaux attacks looked like

* Vaux Fort did not definitely fall to the enemy until June Oth, 1910; by which time he had paid for it a terrible price. — Eu.

failing, the German Staff claimed the capture of Dead Man Hill. They stormed the Dead Man by conveying the name to a lower ridge of no decisive importance which they had occupied. Challenged on the matter by the French Staff, they tried to evade the charge of falsehood by stating that the words " Mort Homme," as lettered on the French map they used, extended to the lower ground. As though the best-informed War Staff in the world did not know every acre of ground near its own frontiers ! Most likely it was an attempt to soothe the German people, whose anxiety in regard to Verdun was turning into angry despondency.

Von Falkenhayn had increased the Crown Prince's army to twenty-five divisions. In April he added five more divisions to the forces around Verdun by weakening the effectives in other sectors and drawing more troops from the Russian front. It was rumoured that Von Hindenburg was growing restive, and complaining that the wastage at Verdun would tell against the success of the campaign on the Riga-Dvinsk front, which was to open when the Baltic ice melted.

The Crown Prince's Gamble

Great as was the wastage of life, it was in no way imme- diately decisive. But when the expenditure of shells almost outran the highest speed of production of the German munition factories, and the wear on the guns was more than Krupp and Skoda could make good, there was danger to the enemy in beginning another great offensive likely to overtax his shell-makers and gun-makers. Von Falkcnhayn's great concentration against our army, lor example, remained perhaps only a silent demonstration because of the shell and gun difficulty. There was, of course, ample munition for a most violent and sustained attack, but if after another operation like that at Verdun our line was unbroken and our artillery power undiminishcd, it would be difficult for the enemy to turn against re-armed Russia.

The attacks continued on the Heights of the Mouse, and especially round Dead Man Hill, to the middle of April. Victorious Verdun was still being blown up in flaming ruin like Rheims and Ypres. Whenever an infantry assault failed, the Germans hurled incendiary shells into the unattainable town. Yet it was still to be attained by their forces, only the price at which the Crown Prince- was to be allowed to ride by Vauban's citadel was nun h higher in April than it was in February. General Pehiin was a hard bargainer. And he could not be left alone. He had forcibly to be kept in the -position he occupied, for if the force against him weakened he might in turn employ his enormous artillery power to blast a path right through the German lines. His position, at the eastern corner of the long German line stretching to the sea, was very menacing. Far from the Battle of Verdun being ended, there were possibilities in it of a decisive develoument.

lough the bugler is not a conspicuous figure in modern warfare, the French Army boasted these musical units, and during the rd fighting round Verdun the inspiriting notes of the bugle did much to steel our ally at critical moments. This photograph shows bugler members of a French regiment practising their calls.

1869

Forest of Fire on the Slope of Dead Man's Hill

On the slope of Dead Man's Hill— a flery furnace set aflame by German, incendiary shells. On March 6th, 1916, when the enemy first attacked on the west bank of the Mouse, they were repulsed on this sinister-named height, a French artillery position of incalculable value. The combat was so furious that

the position became a veritable inferno. In addition to a terrific bombardment, enemy aeroplanes circled overhead and rained bombs on the French. When the German infantry advanced, doubtless expecting to find the hill peopled only with the dead, they were heavily countei — attacked by our irresistible ally.

1870

German Shrapnel Storm in the Valley of the Meuse

Desolate appearance of the neighbourhood of the Crown

Prince's offensive against Verdun, March, 1916. Shrapnel is

seen bursting in the centre of the photograph.

German shrapnel bursting in the environs of Verdun. These photographs were taken at the very considerable risk of the operator, who was, in fact, severely wounded. Inset: Corner of reconquered Alsace. Impression of part of a former

German possession, now French again.

1871

En Avant ! For the Glory of France at Douaumont

When the German onslaught on the Douaumont position had the rolling white snowflelds, the flashing bayonets, the shining all but succeeded, a staggering counter-blow was delivered. bugles and flaming Tricolour made as impressive a spectacle

, .

After waiting eighteen hours in the snow the French reserves came into action, Bretons and Zouaves dashing forward oblivious to the fearful storm of German shells. Blue, khaki,

as could be imagined. With an inspired courage the men of France stemmed the German tide at the critical moment, sweeping the enemy over the Douaumont Ridge, February 26th, 1916.

1872

Personalities and Pawns in the Verdun Contest

Types of German prisoners captured in the Verdun fighting showing how the Prussian intantry had degenerated.

Artillery horse tethered to a post. Its rider and his comrades were killed in the Verdun assault.

On the outskirts of Verdun. General Joffre himself made sure that the Prussian forces hurled against Verdun were on the

decline in point of physique and fighting power. Together with a number of Staff officers, he surveyed them critically.

Above is a photograph of the hero of Verdun, General Petain (in fur coat).

1873

Actualities from the Environs of Verdun

"on. of the chief factors which brought about the success of the French Verdun resistanc