Fighting in Champagne
- a French mine explodes
- all photos from a French magazine - 'le Miroir'
The Terrible French Defence in Champagne
THE swift, smashing defeat of the German offensive movement in Champagne on Sunday, January 9th, 1916, was an affair of great technical interest. The battle was merely a sudden, machine-wrought slaughter on a large scale ; the interesting, illuminating thing about it was the method by which thirty thousand German troops of fine fighting quality were shattered. The event proved that the French had discovered the best solution of the problem of trench defence. This problem has occupied the minds of the leading military men of the belligerent nations for the. last sixteen months. They had to find the means of reducing the wastage of their infantry while these were holding the trenches so strongly that no surprise rush by the enemy could succeed. The old-fashioned British and Russian method of packing troops into the fire-trench and sweeping the zone of advance with rapid musketry fire was very expensive, for the men were too densely exposed to high-explosive shell fire, torpedoes, bombs, and mines.
The Enemy's Method
The Germans were able to save their entrenched infantry by a now well-known device. At the outbreak of war they possessed more than four times as many machine-guns as any allied army. As the struggle proceeded, they rapidly increased their productive plant, until by the winter of 1915 they had one Maxim, either fixed or pivoted, for every twenty infantrymen. They bristled the front with machine-guns, built machine-gun redoubts between their lines, and in the rear they protected their artillery and made a rallying line for their troops by means of a row of houses, hills, block-houses, and earthworks containing machine-guns. This rear row of Maxim posts, which stopped our advances at Neuve Chapelle and Loos, was the main element of the German defensive system. The mass of infantry, during the ordinary course of trench life, was sheltered in dug-outs, secure from practically every form of attack, except a gas cloud.
decorating a soldier in the trenches
The French Counter-System
The French armies gradually increased the number of their machine-guns, put yet remained far behind the enemy in regard to this important secondary armament. Meanwhile General Joffre had quickly to discover a regular system of trench defence which should avoid wastage, and leave the balance of the process of attrition heavily against the ingenious and foreseeing German.
We do not yet know the names of the French officers; who invented and developed the national form of trench defence, but their work was a miracle of terrible, subtle skill. It reversed the German system. The forts in their modern form of deep, narrow earthworks, with underground chambers of refuge, were placed well in advance of the fire-trench Saps were dug at fairly wide intervals towards the hostile wire entanglements. Round the head of each sap a machine- gun redoubt was made and garrisoned with the gunners and artillery observing officers, connected with their distant batteries with telephone wires.
The modest name of "listening-posts" was given to these small advanced forts, but they were so arranged that the ground between them was swept by their machine-guns. They guarded the entire front from surprise rushes. The fire- trenches behind them were weakly held, chiefly by parties of infantry working trench mortars, periscoping for snipers, and watching over sappers engaged in driving mines or making saps for further listening-posts. The masses of , troops were, like the main bodies of German infantry, sheltered in dug-outs .in the second and third, lines. Therefore the daily wastage was small.
On Saturday January 8th, a movement was seen in the German lines behind Tahure Hill. The french commander divined what was about to happen; but, when the great hostile counter-attack was seen to be coming, he did not pack his fire- trenches with troops. On the contrary, be stripped his front line of men, but increased his artillery ammunition, and meanwhile brought his howitzers to bear on. the German lines.
Shells and .Fumes
The German guns, on Sunday, started a violent reply, and their fire rose to an intensity which would have been devastating if the French lines had been full of troops. It was the famous "drum fire" heralding an infantry advance — the fire in which the big guns make a continuous rolling thunder of enormous volume. The great shells, flung by the hundred thousand on the trench positions on the downland between the Suippes River and the Argonne Forest, were chiefly asphyxiating shells, and the green poison fumes spread over the deep trenches dug out of the chalk of Northern Champagne. Had there been two French riflemen to every yard in those trenches, the casualties might have been heavy. But the narrow, zigzagging cuttings were empty, except for a few masked figures in dug-outs, watching through periscopes and like their comrades in the out-flung listening-posts communicating by telephone to headquarters and batteries.
The German gunners changed to high-explosive shell, with which they battered the first French line. Then they changed again to shrapnel and mixed explosive and. bullet missiles, with which they curtained off their opponents' support trenches. This they did when a north-easterly wind. enabled the German gas corps to float a terrifying cloud of chloride fumes towards the French trenches between the Hill of Tahure and the Hill of Mesnil. But the clerk of the weather on that Sunday afternoon was in an anti-German mood, for when the cylinders were opened, the wind changed, and a large part of the gas was driven into the grey masses of German infantry.
But these consisted of part of the Prussian Guard Corps, often reconstituted, but still inspired by its fine traditions and regiments selected for their proved valour. In all there were two army corps drawn up for attack, and of these three divisions were actually launched against the French lines. Nominally, 60 000 German soldiers, therefore, were employed, but of these only 36,000 were infantrymen, and, in matter of fact, the battalions were already wasted by fighting and not more than 30,000 men seem to have taken part in the charges.
German prisoners captured during te fighting
The Wall of Melinite
They advanced in dense lines on a front, some five miles in length. Their ranks were closer at both flank near the village of Tahure and near the down known by its peculiar shape as the Hand of Massiges. In the middle of the crescent which they formed their weight was lighter. But whether it was light or heavy, the result was the same. There was a marked line along the zone between the French and German trenches which no German passed ; for thousands of French gunners, directed by officers in the advanced posts, maintained a rampart of melinite and shrapnel shell. The French infantry had practically no work to do. They were gathered in the communication trenches and in the large shelters hewn from the chalk, in some of which an entire battalion could safely rest. They were loaded with hand-bombs and armed besides with daggers, and close at hand they had vast magazines of grenades capable of keeping them supplied for days. Practically all the dangerous work fell upon the small advanced parties, watching the enemy, noticing the effect of gun fire upon him.
Victory Complete
When night fell, the Germans made a last man-attack — their fourth. But the French gunners, having their ranges fixed mechanically, scarcely needed star- shells and searchlights. Only in two places, near either flank, did any body of attackers reach a French fire-trench, and the couple of hundred yards that was lost was quickly recovered by bombing parties, who rushed up the communication ways. By Monday morning the enemy held only a single listening-post near the farm of Maisons de Champagne. The French losses in the advanced and fire- trenches were under a thousand ; the German losses exceeded ten thousand. It will thus be seen that our allies use their fine light field-gun, the 75 millimetre, with a more deadly effect in defence than the enemy uses his innumerable machine- guns. The French infantry seldom hold their trenches under heavy pressure ; they retire and let their gunners knock the enemy out of the position, and then return with bombs to complete the clearance.
EDWARD WRIGHT
an overview of parts of the battlefield
see also another contemporary piece on the Champagne offensive : Fighting in Champagne
