May 2, 191.8 
Land & Water 
J finch u^iu* 
American Troops on the Verdun Front 
French Officii 
General Philipot presents the Croix de Guerre 
tenance and supply under those conditions. This form of 
warfare was the form normal to British tradition and experi- 
ence. With aJl other nations it was rare, abnormal, and, 
as a rule, unsuccessful. 
It is true that the United States had quite recently engaged 
in two such affairs — the Cuban War and the occupation of 
the Philhpines. But the former was close at home, and 
neither were conducted against an equal enemy. There 
could be no serious threat of interference with communica- 
tions ; there was no serious fear of an equal struggle upon 
landing being established ; and if we omit those two recent 
e.xperiments, the whole mihtar\' and jwhtical tradition of our 
present Allies was purely continental and, indeed, domestic. 
But it is the hmitation of time, as I have said, which is the 
most serious condition of all which affect this sudden creation 
of a vast new force out of such insufficient origins. It is as 
evident to the enemy as to ourselves that, while no exact 
hmit can be laid down, the interval between the opening of 
the present fighting season and the moment when consider- 
able American forces can first appear in the field must be the 
crisis of the whole campaign. In other words, there is 
applied here a spur of haste, with its consequent threat of 
insufficiency and confusion, and it is apphed after a fashion 
far more severe than was the case between 1914 and 1916, 
when the vast Russian armies were still in being, and when 
the siege of the Central Powers was still fully maintained. 
This, then, the mere creation of so great a force within 
such menacing hmits of time, is the prime difficulty over- 
shadowing all others. It is the one upon which the enemy 
most counts, and with reason. But it is also a problem the 
solution of which the enemy should most dread, for if it is 
solved his doom is certain. By so much as his latest opponent 
is distant, and by so much as that latest opponent is numerous, 
by so much must the enemy forgo any hope of a poUtical 
diversion. If the new great armies are created in time, their 
effect will never be Aiodified in favour of the enemy by any 
pohtical action of his to divert them from their aim. They 
will come fresh frorn a nation fully determined ; unex- 
hausted by previous effort ; quite secure at home, and with as 
clean an objective before it as that of the French themselves. 
The second and novel difficulty — the mechanical one of 
communication— may be said to differ only in degree from 
similar difficulties in the past. But the degree is so great 
that it involves a clear difference in quality. 
All the older wars normally permitted of an easy landing 
wherever that landing was unopposed ; that is, of an easy 
transition from the maritime to the terrestrial communica- 
tions of a transmarine force. There were many reasons for 
this : The proportion of the armies to the civilian population 
was such that civUian harbours were usually ample for 
maritime needs. In many cases, landing could be effected 
when it was possible to choose one's weather, from open 
roadsteads. The material to be transliipped from vessels • 
to the shore was not in very heavy units. Once the tran- 
shipment had been effected, the orcUnary means of communi- 
cation by land were, as a rule, ample and available to the 
advancing force. 
What has changed all this to-day is the magnitude of the 
forces compared with the civiUan population ; the greater 
draughts of ships and the weight of the units of material that 
have to be handled. The accommodation of civihan harbours 
is unsuited to the transhipment of a large force save in very 
rare cases. The railway terminals, the wharfage accommoda- 
tion, the amount of rolling stock present, and the nature of 
the track leading from the harbours inland are, save in those 
rare cases of exceptionally large and deep marine depots, 
insufficient for their work. A great deal has to be remade. 
In the particular case of this Expeditionary Force there is 
a further handicap. Most of the best French harbours in 
the north are already earmarked for British supply. Those 
nearest to the American ports, and providing the shortest 
communications by the sea, are, with few exceptions, of 
moderate depth ; nor were they engaged in any great volume 
of trade such as would have developed their resources. Many 
of those most famous in history did their work undet the old 
conditions of small vessels and import upon a far smaller 
scale than that of the great commercial nations to-day. 
The French western and north-western coasts have nothing 
corresponding to Antwerp or Plymouth or New York. There 
lies behind them a broad belt of purely agricultural territory ; 
the happier and the more civilised, indeed, from what is 
called "industrialism," but none the less consequently iU- 
provided with rapid communication, and neither needing 
nor creating large facilities for import at its few points of 
access- by sea. 
The result of all this is that the harbours, the terminals, 
the railway tracks beyond, and their rolling stock, all have 
to be transformed with the utmost rapidity if the Americam 
force is to come into play at all in useful time ; and such a 
condition has never arisen in the history of war before — or, 
at any rate, upon nothing like this scale'. 
The last of the principal difficulties we are noting is the 
most novel of all. It is unique and particular to this war. 
The developments of the campaign since ^he autumn of 
1914 have been such that a completely new tactical art has 
arisen, most of which can only be learnt upon the spot. The 
old armies, if they left your home ports as trained soldiers, 
landed upon a distant soil as ready for combat as ever they 
would be. The weapons they had to handle and their way 
of handhng them were as famihar to them at home as abroad. 
The trench warfare of the last three years, the elements of 
poisonous gas introduced by the enemy ; the enormous- 
expansion of aerial observation, experience not only of cover, 
but of leaving cover, of concealment, of a vast development 
of new missile weapons, and on the top of all tliis the unpre- 
cedented strain of the thing — all have to be learnt, or, at 
least, the learning of them completed within the zone of- 
action, and most of them upon the front of that zone. You 
can teach a man at home to dig a trench and to put up wire, 
to handle trench weapons, and (with no feeling of reality) 
to adjust a gas-mask. You can / teach them somewhat 
imperfectly the rudiments of observation from the air ; but 
the difference between this preliminary instruction and its 
completion upon the front is like the difference between 
learning the grammar of a foreign language at school and 
having to talk it abroad. It is a new chapter altogether, and 
an absolutely necessary one. 
The consequence of this is that to the difficulties of merely 
raising and training a vast new force out of a very small 
nucleus and to the special difficulties of transhipment you 
have added the "bottle neck" of intensive training upon the 
European side. The great bodies of men, even though long 
under discipline and of good training poured over from the 
reservoir beyond the sea, must pass through the gate of 
special instruction before they can spread out upon the far 
side of it as troops in line equal to the present emergency. 
And that again is a condition which the past never knew. 
HiLAiRE Belloc 
