The Wonder Book of Soldiers 2
The Wonder Book of Soldiers
Trench Warfare
The wonderful development of trench warfare, as it has come to be called, is much fuller of interest and excitement than might seem possible. In the first place the construction of the trenches alone has been carried to such a point that often a modern position is to all intents and purposes a strong fortress, with subterranean galleries, storehouses for arms and food supplies, and all manner of conveniences such as electric lighting and heating, and well-fitted dug-outs, or recessed chambers, in which officers and men can sleep and eat quite comfortably when not actually on duty in the trenches themselves. In any case latter day trenches are generally rather elaborate affairs, although from the surface they may be hardly distinguishable from the surrounding country. In the old days it was always considered necessary to build up the ground in front of a trench so as to form an additional protection called a "parapet." Nowadays the trench is generally dug of sufficient depth to afford shelter to a man standing upright, and extra cover with loopholes is only added as may be required. For protection against sudden assault wire entanglements, or " abattis " (trees cut down and laid with their branches pointing towards the enemy), are placed at some distance in front of the trench. To prevent the trench from being raked, or, to use the technical term " enfiladed," by the enemy's guns banks of earth are built at right angles to the trench with passages round them, or the trench itself is recessed at intervals, the firers standing in the niches, while the jutting out portions serve as protection against the deadly enfilading fire which otherwise would devastate the trench from end to end.
It must be remembered that such trenches have other uses besides that of giving shelter. They must be made so that the ground in front of them can be swept by the defender's fire, and also so that an advance can be made from them with as little difficulty and delay as possible when the moment arrives to attack- the enemy in his trenches. At the same time a trench must first of afford decent shelter, as without this no troops can nowadays hope to hold a position against an enemy armed with modern artillery which can search every square yard of open ground with shrapnel and other shell in the most precise and methodical fashion. Even in trenches it is often found necessary to roof over portions with hurdles upon which earth is piled by way of overhead shelter.
Trenches in close contact with the enemy are called "advanced" or "first line " trenches, and behind these there is -almost always a second, and often a third and fourth, line to which the defenders can retire if turned out of the first. Between the lines are communication trenches," not for the purpose of assisting such retirements, but for that of bringing up supplies and of enabling troops in the advanced trenches to be relieved from time to time by other units which have been resting in the rear. In the ease of our armies in France these reliefs came in time to be carried out pretty regularly, a unit serving, say, four days in the trenches and then going into billets sonic miles in the rear for the next four days in order to “pick up." But, of course, everything does not go like clockwork in war, and in other emergencies, the reliefs have to be entirely passed over.
BOMBING AND MINING
The monotony of trench warfare and it can be very monotonous, with nothing happening but an occasional shell burying itself in front or rear or passing overhead is varied in several ways. Nearly always there are "snipers," or picked marksmen, on either side on the look-out, and if a head is incautiously popped up over a parapet or the front wall of a trench, it is pretty certain to get a bullet through
Sometimes trench mortars are used, which throw a fat explosive shell into an enemy's trench even when the latter is a good distance away. Occasionally the opposing lines arc so near that bombs or grenades are thrown from one to another by hand, and many cases have occurred of men picking up an enemy bomb before it has had time to explode and hurling it back among those from whom it came. But the latest patterns of bombs are too deadly to be trifled with by any but experts.
More terrible than bombing is a mine explosion, which is generally the result of weeks of patient labour and is often followed by serious loss of life. There are various kinds of military mine, but the most ordinary form used in trench warfare consists first of a long tunnel driven in the direction of the enemy’s lines and ending in branches in which quantities of high- explosives are packed. The miners, having connected up the explosives, retire with the connecting cables to their own trenches, and then in due course are electrically exploded, the explosion being generally followed by an attack. Mining is extremely difficult and dangerous work. It requires the greatest skill to “hit off" accurately the spot in which it is desired to create the explosion, and there is always the danger that the enemy may be countermining, and the chance that the wall of one's own tunnel may be blown in and the workers overwhelmed by a skillfully planned enemy explosion. Sometimes opposing mining parties actually meet, and then the struggle is grim indeed.
ARTILLERY DUELS
But, of course, the great and startling interruptions to anything like dull routine in the trenches are when either a great enemy attack has to be met or an equally great attack has to be delivered. In either case the preliminary performance as regards the actual fighting is much the same from the standpoint of the men in the advanced trenches, consisting as it does of an artillery duel of terrific intensity, lasting sometimes for weeks on end.' The side that is about to attack naturally sees to it that its pounding is the harder, but, if they had had no other warning, it would often be difficult for those in the trenches to know whether in the next stage of the fight they were going to be attackers or attacked. Ceaselessly the roar of the big guns fired from points miles in rear goes on. The shrapnel bursts overhead, sending showers of bullets hurtling down, but happily always in a forward direction, which enables them to be avoided by pressing into the rear wall of the trench.
Other high explosive shells fail in the trenches, sometimes quite harmlessly, at others taking a ghastly toll of life and limb, or among the wire entanglements, which it is the attacking enemy's great object to wreck as much as possible before the assault takes place. Then, when the guns of the attack have obtained some sort of mastery over these of the defence, and the trenches and the obstacles in front of them are deemed to have been sufficiently knocked about, there generally ensues for perhaps some hours a cannonade of peculiar fierceness, when the most powerful high explosive shells are fired, and it seems as if the defenders' position were being rent in pieces-which indeed is sometimes actually the case and finally the infantry attack begins.
THE ATTACK
Countless descriptions of attacks from trenches during the Great War have been published, and there must be few even among the youngest readers of this book who have not a very fair idea of what happens on these stirring occasions. The difference, of course, between an attack of this kind and one delivered during what may be called a battle in the open, when at the beginning of the day's fighting the opposing forces may be, and generally are, miles apart, is considerable. In trench warfare, as has been explained, the distance to be covered is frequently only a few hundred yards, and sometimes a mere stone's throw. Consequently there is no regular succession of stages in the advance, and often no attempt at lying down and seeking cover. The great object is to get into the enemy's trenches as quickly as possible, and to lessen the terrible loss of life which must continue as long as the defenders are " pumping lead " from behind cover upon the attackers. Sometimes the artillery preparation is so effective that the shattered defence can only make a feeble resistance, but generally the reception is a pretty warm one, and stern fighting goes on even after the attackers have struggled through the remnants of the wire entanglements and other obstacles and jumped down among the enemy.
What makes the attack in trench warfare particularly deadly is the wonderful efficiency of the modern machine gun, with which a single man can often do as much execution against a mass of opponents as a score or two of men armed even with quick-firing rifles. This form of defence can be carried on, too, with deadly effect when the enemy have entered the trenches. During the construction of the latter it is a common practice to choose positions from which a machine gun, - sometimes cunningly concealed, can be turned on to a crowded mass of attackers with deadly effect. It goes without saying that when a hostile trench is entered one of the first considerations is to put a stopper on any machine guns that may be spitting out death from dark corners.
A great attack seldom ceases with the capture of a first line trench. It is extremely important, if a definite result is aimed at, to hustle the enemy while he is shaken, and so, if the attackers are not exhausted by their grim struggle, and supports have come up, the enemy, after being turned out of his advanced trenches, is pursued to his second and third lines, which are generally quite as strong as, and sometimes stronger than, the first line. But only comparatively seldom is an attack such plain sailing as this. For, as soon as the enemy commander realizes that his first line is in the enemy's hands he can safely order his artillery in the rear, who have, of course, the range to a nicety, to send down a storm of shell on the new tenants. Meanwhile the guns have probably been showering shrapnel bullets among the troops coming up in support. Finally, the enemy may have succeeded by this time in bringing his own supports up to his second line, and is thus able without delay to deliver a counterattack. Scores of times in the Great War first line trenches were brilliantly won, but had to be evacuated, because either the captor;' could not carry on under the fire of the defending artillery, or had to give way before a determined counter-attack.
The records of the War teem with instances showing how magnificently our soldiers, whether of the Mother Country, of the great Oversea Dominions, or from India, have adapted themselves, both as regards attack and defence; to the conditions of the new trench warfare. In the early stages of the operations in France and Flanders our men had to pick up their knowledge as they went along, and to many trained in widely different methods the process must have been strange and difficult. But the British soldier very soon makes himself at home in new surroundings, and what he did not know about trench warfare after a few months' intimate acquaintance with it was hardly worth knowing, as the enemy has repeatedly found to his cost. In the case of the New Armies the very sensible step was taken of giving them a thorough training in trench fighting before leaving for the Front. All over the country, in the neighbourhood of the various training camps lines of trenches were constructed by the men, who had then to occupy them night and day under active service conditions, delivering and repelling attacks and otherwise acting just as if they were in the field. The importance to the commanders at the Front of receiving reinforcements of units able to take their place in the trenches without any further instruction will be readily understood.
