8 
LAND & WATER 
April 13, 1916 
his efforts here are not intended to be carried on as far 
as the Charny ridge, but have only for their object the 
clearing of all the front between the first positions and 
the Charny ridge in order to prevent the French from 
firing across the Meuse upon the German troops which 
continue to front the main position beyoiul the ( 6te 
du Poivre and so round to Douaumont and Vaux. But, 
at any rate, whether he intends ultimately to make his 
main attack upon the Charny ridge or no, his immediate 
objc( t is tlie carrying of the Mort Honmie, or Hill 295 
and Hill .;o4 above and behind it. 
The first disposition made by the l-"rench conunand for 
meeting this massed attack — intended probably for the 
<onclusion of all this last month's efforts west of the 
^leuse — was the evacuation of the salient of Bethincourt. 
This evacuation was effected partly in the night between 
Friday and Saturday, partly in the night between Satur- 
da\- and Sunday last the 8th and qth of April. The new 
F'rench litje ran on the morning af the Simday tiie c)th 
as does thv^ continued jjlack line from (' to D upon Sketch 
1, the sharp salient shaded in the sketch being wholly 
abandoned by the F-rcnch before the Sunday morning. 
In the process of this abandonment the (ii>rnians claim 
that the French left isolatt^d certain small bodies which 
they surrounded and captured. I'nfortunately the 
(ierman comnnmitjucs for some time past in what concerns 
the fighting round Verdun have been quite untrustworthy. 
I say "unfortunately," because an enemy's claims in 
such statements are esstMitial to any jur.t judgment of a 
situation, and the less reliable they are the lesr. accurately 
can one piece together the scanty material at one's 
disposal. Occasionally the French are at the pains of 
issuing a detailed denial, though usually tlicy leave the 
statements to pass for what they are worth. It is posJblc 
that a few score men went astray in the darkness. It is 
almost certain on the analogy of the puerile statements 
in the past with regard to F'orges. Malancourt, Douau- 
mont. Vaux and half a dozen othvr points, that the 
numbers of several hundred unwounded prisoners given 
by the enemy are false. What the exact amount of the 
exaggeration may be we cannot tell. The point is at any 
rate insignificant in view of the forces about to be en- 
gaged. 
The French new line thus drawn up upon the morning 
of Sunday, the loth, presents, as will be seen from 
Sketch 1, the form of a slight salient,. but the bend is not 
so accentuated as to present to the enemy any advantage, 
and the form which the attack took was little concerned 
with the salient formed and much more with the lie of the 
ground. 
If the reader will glance at the contourr, of the foregoing 
sketch Map I, he will .see, as lias been pointed out in 
former articles, that there are two opportunities, the one 
direct and the other indirect, for mastering the ilort 
Homme. 
The first is by rushing the comparatively small distance 
— -about 700 yards — separating the Crows' Wood and its 
southern portion (called the wood of Cumieres) from the 
summit of the hill. The enemy can debouch from the 
cover, such as it is, of these shattered woods and has but a 
comparatively short distance to go before he reaches the 
lowest slopes of the ;\Iort Homme. Looked at from the 
edge of the wood this height is a rounded boss, the culmina- 
ting point of which is about 100 feet above one ; and the 
first French trenches coming up from the fork of the roads 
near Bethincodrt touch the lower edge of the bos^ rather 
more than half-way from its summit to the wood. 
They stretch on down the hill, covering the ruins of 
Cumieres village and so to the Meuse, the floods in the 
valley of which have subsided. 
The second, indirect, method is. as we have seen in 
j)revious articles, to turn Mort Homme by the capture of 
Hill 304, a height which .slightly dominates the Mort 
Homme at a range of rather over 2.500 yards. 
As we have also seen in previous attacks, the only enemy 
approach to Hill .',04 available is by the easy western 
slope, which conies up from the woods of Avocourt and 
the south-western side of the valley in which the ruins of 
Haucourt and Malancourt stand. 
We can get a good deal of light thrown upon the imme- 
diate tactical method and object of the enemy and a fair 
measure of his success or failure by quoting the main 
])oints of a document captured from him during the fcburse 
of the winter. 
In this document the lessons taught by the great 
Allied offensive of last Septemberj^werc summarised and 
certain modifications of such an offensive necessary to 
future success are defined. 
Further Notes on the Enemy's Effort against 
the Verdun Sector — An Enemy Document 
The gist of the report was that an attack upon the first 
line would. almost certainly be successful at a given 
expense of men and after a gi\en and very expensive 
artillery preparation. But that to continue Injin this 
immediately to attacking the second line was an error. 
The time retpiired for moving the heavy artillery forward 
and still mcjre the time required for establishing new 
head supplies of heavy munitionment, the exhaustion of 
the troops employed or, alternatively, the ditticulty of 
bringing up very large reserves at such short notice 
makes a continuous effort very doubtful of success. 
So far, the conclusions of those German students of 
the war who drew up the report were at once negative and 
fairly common ground. It was the recognition of such 
truths which led the French Higher Command to "cut 
their losses " and preserve what might have been wasted 
in too prolonged an attempt against the second line. 
But there followed i'^ this document something 
more important, to wit a positive prescription. In 
future (it affirmed) the advance must be made by stages. 
You must not hope to break the resistance at one blow. 
You must, after "appreciating the result of your fin.t great 
effort, leave some interval for the preparation of a second. 
You must follow that by a third and a fourth, always 
calculating your expenditure of men as against a total 
which you are prepared to sacrifice for a final result. 
These efforts stage by stage will obviously cost a much 
greater accumulation of munitionment than the effort 
tcndu — that is, the attack without relaxation — but they 
may hcjpe within a certain margin of time and a certain 
margin of expense in men and munitions to pierce the 
enemy front permanently. 
If the German attack upon the sector of Verdun liad 
successfully followed these lines we should only have to 
regard it, in spite of its prolongation, as the full and 
successful working out of a pre-arranged scheme, and 
certain students of the war, notably in America, did in an 
earlier stage of the great battle treat it so. 
But if we examine the thing as a whole, we shall discover 
that there is no such exact correspondence between the 
plan and the result. Far from it : there has been a mis- 
carriage. 
In the first place there was an effort to break through 
all at once. ,In other words, the enemy Higher Com- 
mand only used the doctrines of this report as a " second 
best " after their initial failure on February 26th. 
In the second place the " successive stages "— wlien 
once reluctantly accepted by the enemy — have worked 
irregularly and at far too great an expense of time, men 
and material. True, what succeeded to the first great 
blow was a series of efforts intended to be spaced apart 
by about the time required to reorganise the attack and 
especially to bring up heavy munitionment. But wlicn 
it came to practice instead of theory, the intended regular 
advance by successive and calculated steps failed. The 
factor of time has been quite disproportionate to the result 
aimed at, and the factor of exhaustion in men has also 
been disproportionate. Further, after a comparatively 
early stage in the action it was clearly found impossible 
to proceed by successive general efforts. That first 
general effort (by which 1 mean that effort upon a broad 
front) was succeeded by a great number of particular 
efforts agaiii-st narrow fronts. Only upon very rare occa- 
sions spread out at great distances of time was there any- 
thing like advance in line. One might almost say that 
sinfe the original great movement, which was checked 
on Saturday, February 26th. there has been no similar 
blow delivered U])on a broad front until the effort of last 
Sunday. April ()tli. 
That part of the plan which has come nearest to 
realisation has been the .succession of intensive bombard- 
ments. The supply of munifionment has been kept up 
perhaps beyond the expectation of the .\llics, and sliows 
so far. no sign of failing. It is clear, as we have pointec 
out in these columns already, that the expenditure o 
munitionment is at a far greater rate than the supply car 
possibly be ; but still the supply is coming in on to thii 
