May 2, 191 8 
Land & Water 
15 
expense in men. You can no more say which of two oppon- 
ents under such circumstances will play his hand better than 
you can say it of two chess players of whom one has " the 
move," but of whom neither has yet so lost pieces as to be 
manifestly inferior. What you can present is the conditions 
of the play. 
The object of this offensive is, before the limit of its exhaus- 
tion is reached, to absorb — that is, to put through the mill 
in defensive work — all that is still fresh upon the Allied side, 
and in the process so to shake a line that has already been 
rendered viscous as first to render it fluid and then dissolved. 
The object of the defensive is to compel the offensive to 
crippling losses which will end by his exhaustion while the 
defensive still stands organised and still has solid fresh assets 
in hand. This is all the more the game of the Allies because, 
though the time handicap is very severe, there arc very large; 
resources ultimately behind them. 
A concrete point will make this play of judgment clearer : 
You, the defensive, are holding a certain sector of, say, 
20 miles, on to which you only returned, say, ten days ago, 
and of which the new defensive system is necessarily imper- 
fect. To the south end of that sector is a specially strong 
point — say, a hill or well-wired wood. The offensive com- 
mander says to himself : " If I launch four divisions at that 
point, which I now know to be held by only one division, 
I shall probably take it — at the immediate expense of perhaps 
10,000 men. I njay suppose the 8,000 or 9,000 men opposed 
to me to lose less than half that amount. I may have better 
luck, and make them lose nearly their whole effectives, in 
which case our losses are pretty well equal. But, meanwhile, 
if I get it quicker than they expect, the line to the north will 
have to fall back again from their already imperfect defences, 
and begin others yet more imperfect — partly prepared, no 
doubt, but not yet strong — behind the sector they are now 
holding." The defensive commander says to himself: ''If 
there is a tactical success, and I hold the strong point for, 
say, forty-eight hours, there will be plenty of time for the 
pyeoplt in the north to fall back ; and in such a time of con- 
tinued assault I will inflict far greater losses on the attack 
than he will inflict on my men. It may be that my defensive 
success will be complete (compare the case of the Hinges 
Bridge a few days ago) ; in that case, I have locally suc- 
ceeded in my general object beyond all expectation. But it 
may be that his success will be unexpectedly rapid. In that 
case, I must tell my one division to hang on until it is wiped 
out, and even then there may be only just barely time for 
the people to the north to get back." 
The hazard is engaged, and, in general terms, one of these 
two things happens in a greater or a less degree. Either the 
strong point is rapidly taken, the single defending division 
knocked to pieces without more than corresponding loss to 
the attack and the line to the north badly shaken by its 
necessity for rapid retirement on to the imperfectly prepared 
defences behind, or, in various degrees, the defensive gets 
the advantage by its prolonged resistance, the most extreme 
example of which would be the complete repulse of the attack 
with losses corresponding to its violence and density. 
It is clear that any amount of modification surrounds so 
simple a statement. The attack or the defence may be 
blunderingly led on to attempt an impossible task, and 
may suffer correspondingly. The man commanding the 
sector in the north may send word that it will take him two 
days at least to effect his retirement because he has mis- 
handled things, in which case the unfortunate defensive will 
have to go on feeding fresh men into what is virtually a new 
offensive of its own, terribly expensive. The attacking 
general may lose his head or even his temper (such things 
have happened in war), and get men massacred quite use- 
TfighHnad 
"E^eqfPtateau '*i»in«"iii- 
Exfitnte Umii'of 
Etvemyiaffadi 
iTvtttatendqfaitLin .— — — — 
lessly by a prolongation of what he ought to have seen after 
the first stages to be an impossible task — something of that 
sort happened on April 4th to the Germans in front of Amiens. 
Meanwhile, the general principle holds. The best player is 
he who in this terrible game first exhausts his adversary. 
The best player wins, only, unfortunately, nobody knows, 
or can possibly know, the full situation even at a given 
moment — let alone its future chances. 
Two Great Actions 
Now, let us turn to the two great actions of the week : 
that of Villers-Brettoneux and that of Kemmel. 
The action in front of Villers-Brettoneux was of great 
importance. 
There stands between the Somme River and the valley of 
the Brook Luce, a tributary of the Avre, a plateau about 
150 feet above the water levels, rising in some places to as 
much as r8o. It is a bare rolling countryside of open fields, 
diversified only by two considerable tracks of wood, the 
smaller on the south known as Hangard Wood ; the larger, 
on the north, called in various parts by various names, but 
better called, for the purposes of our study, the Wood of 
Villers. This plateau is the last high ground between the 
junction of the Avre River with the Somme, and is therefore 
the last high ground directly in front of Amiens. From the 
edges of it the land falls away uninterruptedly to the great 
railway junction and works at Longeau, almost a suburb of 
Amiens, hardly more than three miles from the edge of the 
plateau, and entirely overlooked from it. Further, this 
plateau between the Somme and the Brook Luce, upon a 
trace of about 10,000 yards, carried the point of union between 
the British and the French forces. The escarpment of the 
plateau towards Amiens is not regular. It falls away sharply 
immediately behind the village of Villers-Brettoneux, but to 
the south it leans much further away and more gently west- 
ward. While immediately beyond the village of Villers- 
Brettoneux and along the edge of the escarpment runs the 
big wood of which I have spoken, having about half-way 
along its southern edge the village of Cachy. To the south 
in the French line, on the edge of the plateau overhanging 
the Brook Luce, are the ruins of the village of Hangard. 
It will be clear from all this what the object of the enemy 
was in this neighbourhood. It was his task to thrust the 
British back over the edge of the plateau and hold Villers- 
Brettoneux ; to work round the wood by the south at 
Cachy and to push the French back from Hangard. 
The attack as a whole was undertaken, as far as we can 
make out, by eight divisions, counting those who were trying 
to work round by the extreme south. Three'divisions struck 
against the British along the high road, starting from their 
original line about a thousand yards east of the village ; 
while another three divisions attacked the French against 
the wood and village of Hangard down to the Luce. Mean- 
while, apparently two divisions (but the number is not given) 
fought hard to outflank the French by the south. 
The action began at half-past six in the morning of Wednes- 
day, the 24th, after the usual intensive preliminary bombard- 
ment. Its general result was as follows : 
In the first attack it was repulsed along the whole line. 
In the second it entered the eastern edge of the wood of 
Hangard and the ruins of Hangard village. What is more 
important, it also in the second attack (in which the German 
tanks appeared ior the first time) carried the village of 
Villers-Brettoneux ; reached the edge of the plateau, and, 
south of the wood, got to the outskirts of Cachy. This 
latter movement uncovered the French left flank and caused 
'the French to leave Hangard. By the evening two more 
divisions had appeared against the British, and it was evident 
that the enemy intended a very serious operation. 
But the point was altogether too important for the "selling 
of ground," which is the general policy of the defensive where 
there is opportunity for manoeuvre. A counter-attack was 
organised, and proved completely successful. Fighting con- 
tinued throughout the night, and in the morning of 
Thursday, April 25th, the Germans were thrust back again 
far from Cachy (where some of the new British tanks did 
great execution) and by noon out of Villers-Brettoneux 
itself ; the latter success being due to Australian troops 
co-operating with British battalions. The fighting for the 
village had gone on all during the night, and the consumma- 
tion of the success covered the hours from seven in the 
morning onwards. About a thousand prisoners were left in 
British hands after the affair. The sum total of the action 
was that the enemy had completely failed to master the 
plateau. He had for the eighth time penetrated into Hangard 
Village and Wood (the line here is perpetually fluctuating), 
but these are far from the edge of the plateau. Villers- 
