M 
tAND & WATER 
November 30, 1916 
expert at something, and all must be expert bomb- 
throwers. 
The Verdun attack was successful for the French 
because they had prepared to the last detail, and put in 
theu- best brain- work. I was reminded of something 
yi. Loucheur, the chief shell manulacturer in France, 
had said to me : " The nation that makes war in the most 
cojupiicuted manner has the best chance of success." 
In tliis respect the Germans had all the ad\ untage 
over the French at the beginning. If the Frencli liad not 
succeeded in keeping the secret of their .75 mm. gun, they 
V'ould have been defeated at the Battle of llic Marne, 
regardless of heroism. When the war broke out the 
(k-nnans had j,500 pieces of heavy artillery, pieces 
buiiiciently big to destroy as the Froide Terre is destroyed. 
Coacentrated Attacks 
It has alwaj's been a part of the German plan of cam- 
paign to make concentrated attacks, but they never 
bolore carried the idea as far as they did at Verdun 
commencing with February 22nd. They brought up 
suJhcicntly heavy eirtillery and a sufficient number of 
divisions to charge up the hill from the W'oevre and carry 
the heights. They captured Douaumont in four days. 
But they did it against an unprepared ar^y. The light 
was nowhere near even. It was not even at any tune 
during the long fight on the tops of the ridges, because 
the Germans always had the superiority in artiller}^ The 
French line held, but it paid in blood lor its lack of heavy 
artillery. Here, as on the Marne, the .75 had to do most 
of the work of defence. 
But the French have been making big guns and getting 
more nearly on an equality with the Germans from tlie 
point of \iew of artillery. They did not start as soon as 
they might have, as the faith of the mihtary authorities 
in the .75 was so great as to retard the building of hea\'y 
aitillerj' e\en after the war had lasted many months. 
The sons of France paid dearly because their army was 
not adequately supplied with heavy artillery, just as the 
sons of England, America or any other country would 
pay and have paid, under similar circumstances. Provi- 
dence was bound to be on the side of the army with the 
heaviest artillery. 
So the French poilus saved Verdun largely with their 
small .75's and their helmeted heads. It was magnificent, 
but expensive. The Crown Prince, having plenty of 
heavy artillery and great stores of munitions, began his 
attack on the heights to the east of Verdun on the twenty- 
second of last February and in four days had reached 
Douaumont and beyond. The Kaiser praised his "brave 
Brandenburgers " for doing it, and, while they were 
certainly brave and indefatigable in attack, they owed 
their success chiefly to the concentrated artillery fire 
thrown out before them. The French had never ex- 
perienced any such fire as this, because the Germans 
had never before taken the full ^advantage of their 
artillery superiority. An army less brave and devoted 
than the French would not have stood and died there. 
Verdun without adequate heavy artillery was looked 
upon by the French army as almost certain death for 
its defenders. Everyone who saw the Verdun armj? last 
spring was struck by the stricken, though determined 
aspect of the soldiers. When I went there in early 
No\'ember I was as much struck by the superhuman 
coolness of these men under shell-fire. They had gone to 
Verdun convinced they would die there. Now they had 
lived through a miracle and found the great sacrifice no 
longer necessary. They had reason for feeling they had 
charmed lives. 
If the original defence of Verdun did not cost the French 
as nmch as the attack cost the Germans, it was because 
the .75 is a marvellously versatile gun. It did not, as i\ 
matter of fact, cost the French as much as it cost the 
Germans, but the price of defence was much greater than 
it should have been. The Germans brought up twenty- 
two divisions of 20,000 each before Verdun by the first 
of July. .After that time the necessity of shifting the 
mobile divisions of the German army to the Somme 
stopped the continuous attacks. The exact casualties 
of the Germans cannot be ascertained, but out of the 
440,000 men who attacked Verdun, between 160,000 
and 175,000 were lost. Few were taken prisoners and 
more than the usual average, perhaps one in four, were 
killed outright. At least forty thousand Gennans fell 
dead or mortally wounded before Verdun. The casualties 
of Verdun have been figured as high as a million. 
The French retook Douaumont lor a few days iaMay, 
a great feat of arms when it is considered that they were 
still inferior from the point of view of artillery. 
But the French were able to do nothing effective 
until they M'cre in a position to bring up new heavy 
artillery equal to that of the Germans opposing them. 
Then they took the German idea of concentrated attack 
and carried it to its logical conclusion. They had already 
had some practice in concentration on the Somme, but, 
as if in poetic justice, it was at Verdun that they made 
the most complete reply to the German metliod. 
At Verdun we have a comparison of the development 
of the warfare in six months. \\'hen the Germans made 
their attacks last winter and spring they were preceded 
by a heavy, but not a completely devastating, artillery 
fire. They also brought up their men in the old mass 
formation. So they did not destroy entirely the front 
line that faced them and their mass formations were but 
targets for the French artillerymen. 
Note the change in six months : 
The French artillery fire began by destroj'ing every 
destroyable protection. 
The curtain of fire was much more intense than the 
German. 
Instead of a mass attack, there were three separated 
lines, offering a poor target for the German barrier-fire. 
Only Possible Defence 
The only defence possible against this new type of 
attack is the deep dug-out, or its improvement, the 
imderground fort. There is no relying on trenches and 
barbed wire. They disappear before a sufficiently hea\y 
fire. That is the most significant fact about the latest 
development in warfare. But, as the Germans found on 
the Froide Terre and the adjoining ridges, disconnected 
forts, such as Thiaumont, Douaumont and Vaux, cannot 
be held against a sulficiently determined attack. A con- 
tinuous line must be presented the enemy, and, even 
though he over-run this line in the heat uf an attack, 
it must be there complete and full of defenders when the 
attack is over. The Germans found that wlien their 
trenches were blown to bits and their few sur\ivors were 
cornered in shelters, the French lines swept around the 
three sides of the forts, and they had to evacuate or 
surrender. In Douaumont they surrendered, but in- 
Vaux they profited by the lesson of the week before and 
left while there was still time. But the fact that these 
forts escaped with so little interior damage vi^hen the 
surrounding country was turned into a fantastic mud- 
hole shows that the only effective way to meet the attack 
of the newest warfare is by building continuous forts, 
with deep communicating underground passages. 
*vV'hen the truly brave Brandenburgers took Douaumont 
in mass formation, their losses were so terrible that the 
Kaiser felt called upon to make up for it in praise. So he 
declared they had taken " the keystone of the strongest 
fort of our most important enemy." When the French 
retook Douaumont and the surrounding forts with only 
three divisions of infantry it did not even call forth an 
" order of the day," and at this time a complete official 
statement of the feat has not appeared. The French 
did not have to go into heroics, because their losses were 
not so heavy that they needed to hearten up the troops. 
The people of France also took it calmly because it had 
become generally known that France at last had the 
artillery to match its troops. 
A good collection of the war cartoons of Allied and 
neutral countries is embodied in Caricalures d Images 
(Librarie Chapelot, Paris, 2 fr.), which devotes a section to 
the work of each country — even including South America — 
and gives a goodly share of its space to the work of Kac- 
maekers. The various points of view, especially the American 
standpoint, are well demonstrated. 
The Verdict of India, by Sir M. Bhownaggree (Hodder and 
Stougliton, 2d. net), is a statement of tlie merits of British 
rule in India by an eminent native of the countrj-. I is 
intended to combat German vilification of the British system 
of government in India, and shows that, in spite of enemy 
efforts, the loyalty of the Indian Empire is unimpaired. 
