August 2, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
13 
Military Events of the Week 
By Hilaire Belloc 
THAT upon which all attention is now concentrated 
in connection with the war is, of course, the pre- 
liminary bombardment which announces in Flanders 
an action upon the very greatest scale — upon a scale 
greater than the war has hitherto seen. 
No discussion of this would be possible, or if it were possible, 
of no profit : we must await the event. But meanwhile 
it may be of some service to consider two subsidiary points 
which have been vividly present before the public during 
the present week— I mean the German actions against the 
French for the recapture of the Aisne. Ridge and the con- 
ditions of the deplorable situation upon the Eastern front. 
As to the first of these we have now very full details com- 
municated by the French and admirably put before the 
English public by Mr. Warner Allen, from whose accounts, 
coupled with those of the French correspondents and military 
despatches, I depend for the analysis that follows. 
It will be remembered that in the special effort of the last 
ten days the first great enemy attack -was that of Thursday 
the 19th of the month, when the Fifth Division of the Guard 
tried after a long bombardment to seize the edge of the crest. 
They failed. The 15th Bavarian and the 5th Reserve, a 
Brandenburg formation, were thrown in, and on the 22nd 
(last Sunday week) some measure of success was attained. 
The French front line of trenches, which is here almost 
exactly coincident with the northern edge of the California 
plateau, was entered. A little later in the day the enemy 
got a similar footing in the French trench on the edge of the 
Casemates Plateau to the west. The preliminary bombard- 
ment had continued all the night between Saturday and 
Sunday, and was conducted by some 260 heavy pieces. The 
German batteries exercised a converging fire, standing upon a 
crescent from behind Cerny to the positions by Juvincourt, 
north of Berry-au-Bac. It was the heaviest bombardment 
the enemy has yet delivered upon any sector. What followed 
was a very good example of the inherent weakness attaching 
to such tri,cks as the segregation of storming troops, tricks 
that are never adopted until a high degree of exhaustion has 
been reached. The seizing of the French front trenches on 
the two plateaux was the work of these specially trained men, 
who were brought directly on to the field quite fresh without 
having suffered any previous bombardment or any of the 
fatigues of the front lines. So far so good for the enemy. 
But the segregation of the " storming troops," their relief 
from all previous strain, etc., mearis a corresponding de- 
pression in quality and vigour of the " ordinary " troops 
from whom the " storming troops " are taken away. 
Therefore, when it came to occupying these captured 
trenches and consolidating them, the " skimmed milk " of 
the ordinary troops' from whom the storming troops are 
chosen, had to do the work — a,nd they were unequal to it. ' 
We know from captured documents and from the evidence 
of French prisoners taken and afterwards released, rtiat the 
storming troops complained of the slowness of the ordinary 
troops in following up, and that the men of the ordinary forces 
complained openly in their turn of being given all the worst 
work, and of the privileges the storming troops enjoy. 
The counter-stroke of the French, which took the form of 
a crushing bombardment upon the newly taken positions, was 
very violent, and we have proof that in certain German units, 
such as the 214th and the 215th regiments, the total losses 
that day, first and last, amounted to half the effectives present. 
Such figures are, of course, only on a par with losses on many 
other similar occasions in the latter part of this war, and niost 
commanders could cite examples of worse punish- 
ment. Still, it is a very high percentage to come at the end 
of several days' efforts and proves the determination of the 
enemy to recapture the ridge even at this very high expense 
to himself. , ■, 1 
The French did not re-act upon Monday the 23rd, a delay 
which probably gave the enemy to understand that they no 
longer had the power to do so, for he tried during the 23rd to 
extend his success westward. But on the morning of Tuesday, 
the 24th, a sudden counter-attack organised by the French 
command was launched, and was completely successful, arid 
threw the Germans back again down into the northern slope 
of the ridge ; the plateaux were again wholly in French 
hands, with the exception of a very small patch of less than 
100 yards on the north-western edge of California. 
On Wednesday, July 25th, exactly 24 hours after the 
French success, and therefore shortly after dawn, the enemy 
attempted to retrieve this defeat, but failed with very con- 
siderable losses. The next day, Thursday, but not until the 
evening, he attacked again further west beyond Hurtebise, 
got into the trenches there, and lost them again. This action, 
which filled Uttle space in the papers, was on a large scale and 
was marked by one most interesting feature, which was that 
the enemy threw in no less than two divisions successively 
upon a front shorter than that which one division had hitherto 
sufficed for even in this crowded piece of fighting, when 
the whole effort has for now ten days dealt with a bit of 
down-land no longer than that between Reigate and Dorking, 
and the heat of it has been on a bit of the slope less than two 
miles long. On the Friday, the 27th, the enemy continued to 
attack, though with less energy and without success. ' 
The whole series of operations was summed up on Saturday 
in a French official message, short but of great interest, which 
tells us that three of the five German divisions engaged in thti 
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