LAND AND WATER 
February 20, 1915. 
From this conclusion we can deduce a formation Bui6< 
able for an oflensive aerial fleet which is indicated in Diagram 
2, where A denotes the leader of an aerial squadron of nine 
aeroplanes. In this arrangement the leading machine flio 
over the vertical plane containing the target, and there are 
on each side of that plane four machines. If the bombs 
dropped from the machines on the right of the leader arc 
blown by the wind away from the target, those dropped from 
the machines on the left of the leader will be blown towards 
the target. 
The same arrangement for a larger number of aeroplanes 
can be made as indicated in Diagram 3, where each dot re- 
presents a machine, and an examination of that diagram will 
make evident the importance of the number of the aircraft 
necessary to effect an aerial ofiensive of real value. 
THE COMING SIEGE OPERATIONS 
AND THE INSTRUMENTS TO BE 
EMPLOYED THEREIN. 
COMPARISON WITH SEBASTOPOL. 
By COL. F. N. MAUDE, C.B. (late R.E.). 
THE resemblance between the present war of trenches 
and the old siege warfare grows daily closer, and 
from all my friends at the front I hear indications 
of changes towards the more wholesome methods of 
former days. Sapping and mining are going 
strong, and every day we hear of mines exploded, 
craters occupied, and successfully maintained, against the 
enemy's counter attacks. 
It is this successful tenure of the ground won that empha- 
sises the advantages we are accumulating, for the holes blown 
out by mines are mere death-traps for the troops that rush 
them, unless and until their artillery, has secured a consider- 
able ascendancy over the enemy's guns and infantry. What 
happens now is something like this. Before our mines are 
exploded, our gunners have located and ranged upon every 
German gun position in their section; then, as soon as the 
mine is fired, and the crater rushed, every one of our guns 
turns on the enemy, and covers their batteries with showers 
of shell, thus rendering it impossible for them to interfere with 
our men in the mine crater whilst they are engaged in convert- 
ing the side towards the enemy into a fire position, and helping 
them to scatter his columns as soon as they break cover for 
the counter-stroke that inevitably follows every mine explo- 
sion, whoever makes it. 
We did exactly the same thing in the Crimea, and so did 
the Confederates in the siege of Petersburg, and the lines cover- 
ing Richmond. 
Some day it may occur to the man on the spot that driving 
mine galleries at the rate of one foot an hour in order to create 
a moderate sized crater once a week is a very slow and tedious 
method of progression when one's howitzer shells will produce 
as many craters, big enough for the purpose, and, moreover, 
grouped with sufficient accuracy, wherever and whenever you 
please. Then we shall adopt a far more rapid and secure 
method of progression than any we have hitherto tried. The 
idea is in the air; I have watched it coming for a long time, 
and one day we shall wake to find its universal application. 
Meanwhile we are also beginning to find out that trenches, 
in themselves, are nothing; it is only the men inside them that 
render them unassailable; and as week by week the quality of 
our adversaries deteriorates, our operations will crystallise out 
into a more co-ordinated form, and we shall begin to apply in 
a more drastic manner the resources we possess for localising 
the defenders in each separate sector of the front, and apply- 
ing to them in a modified form, but equally effectively, the 
methods of isolation from supplies and reinforcements which 
have always in the long run undermined the soul of the defence 
with the greatest certainty. Men may get accustomed to shell 
fire, and grenades, etc. ; they never become acclimatised to 
hunger and cold. 
Our chief support in this coming phase of the campaign 
will be our airmen, and the manner of their operation is 
clearly foreshadowed by the raid on the Belgian coast last 
.week. 
What happened there, locally, will soon be general, at 
efaosen points, all along the front, and until the Germans can 
find men as bold and daring as our own there is no protection 
{or them from tbii foim of attack. 
Raiding the node points of the enemy's communication*, 
whether by road or rail, they will gradually make the supply 
of the men in the trenches almost a matter of impossibility; 
and as our gunners gradually work up under cover of our, 
trenches to ever closer ranges, their shells will go flying milea 
beyond the enemy, tearing up the roads between the dep6ta 
and the front, until the supply of food and small arm ammu- 
nition, to say nothing of heavier articles — trench mortars, rolls 
of wire for entanglements, etc.— becomes practically ruled out. 
We know what our men sufiered during the first months, when 
all the advantages of heavy artillery, searchlights, and so 
forth, were on the enemy's side. We have been profiting 
largely by that experience, and intend to improve on the 
example given us. 
All this it needs no prophet to forecast. It is all in the 
course of natural evolution. We are passing rapidly through 
the same cycles our ancestors traversed again and again in the 
past; the objects before us were always the same, and all we 
have had to do has been to adapt our new means to the acquisi- 
tion of the same ends. In the Crimea we had no searchlights, 
but we used star shell and carcases (smoke shells) for the same 
purpose, and when our siege train proved inadequate we 
brought out and employed heavier weapons in numbers never 
befor'e thought of. We even went beyond the mechanical skill 
of the age, and designed a 36in. mortar, by the side of which' 
Krupp's much-vaunted 42 cm. mortars would have looked 
mere babies. But the war ended before this monster could be 
brought to the front, and it was concluded, as I think this one 
will, by the sudden and complete collapse of the moral will 
power of the enemy. 
We had never succeeded in easily investing him. Supplies 
could still, with difiiculty, get through to the last, but the cease- 
less strain of slaughter and the hopelessness of relief gradually 
undermined his powers of resistance, and the end came 
abruptly with the storming of the Malakoff by the French, an 
operation in which MacMahon's Division of the French Army 
lost nearly 50 per cent, of its men in a rush from the trenches 
of barely 200 yards. That night the enemy was in full re- 
treat, and at some time not very far off a similar assault (in 
which, I hope, we shall play a more distinguished part than 
we did that day), only on a far greater scale, will bring about 
a similar result. 
Men remain human beings only, and like causes produce 
like effects, whatever the weapons may be by which these 
causes are set in operation. 
The current issue of the Asiatic lieview is noteworthy, in view of 
the present prominence of matters Grecian, for an article on "Greece 
and the War," by Professor Platon Drakoules, who ranks as oce of 
the principal authorities on Greek afiairs, standing probahly second 
only to Mr. Vcnizeloa himself. The article, dealing as it does with 
the policy of Greece, the rise of the Young Turk party, and the dement* 
out of which the present situation in the Balkans has arisen, is s 
valuable contribution to current war literature. Other interesting 
articles, including "England, Turkey, and the Indian Mohammedans," 
by Syu'd Ilossain, and a descriptive sketch of the Cocos-Ktelins 
Islands, where the Emden was destroyed, make this an extremely topical 
and Tcadaibl« number of the Asiatic, 
12* 
