TOPICS OF THE DAY.
A QUESTION OF NERVES. NOW that we have reached another critical moment in the great German offensive, it is of the utmost import- ance that, as a people, we should remain perfectly calm and perfectly united, whatever the politicians may say or do. The war has taxed our resources in men and money, but it has taxed, and will tax, our will-power more heavily still. In its later stages the war has become a question of nerves. The German offensive is directed not only at the British Army but also at the British people. Any display of panic in speeches or in the Press at this time would be worth more to the enemy than the capture of a town. Panic often takes the form of querulous fault-finding. It is also manifested in wild speculations as to what the enemy might do if his plans were worked out to a logical conclusion, and the Allied Armies did not interfere with him. Doleful forecasts and idle recrimi- nations are alike unworthy of the occasion and of our national tradition. All that is required of the civilians at home is patience and confidence. After more than three years of war we all ought to know that we can put our faith in the British and French Armies, which have proved their superi- ority over the Germans in many a hard battle. The soldiers are more cheerful and more certain of victory than ever they were. It would be absurd of civilians, who know far less about the military situation, to be depressed when the soldiers are in good spirits and fighting with extraordinary bravery and skill. The topographical fallacy is, of course, still potent. The idea that military success or failure can be accurately gauged by the movement of the battle-front on a newspaper map still obsesses far too many intelligent people. The belief that the British Empire has been shaken when British troops move from the front to the rear of a battered town in Flanders is much too common. We do not mean to imply that positions have no intrinsic value, and that the evacuation of any place may be regarded with in- difference. Even Wellington, the hero of innumerable retreats, had his Ne plus ultra, in the phrase of Villars—his Torres Vedras lines, which he meant to hold till he was forced out. But, as a general rule, positions are infinitely less important than men. A good army, especially in modern warfare, can hold any line, provided that the line is unbroken. The trenches which our troops held for many months in the low ground before Ypres owed their defensive strength solely to the gallant fellows who manned them. The Germans, with every advantage of position and with an overwhelming superiority in guns, failed in two great battles to drive our men from those miserable waterlogged ditches. The British line was maintained, with help from the French, and the enemy was foiled in his purpose. Though he had won a victory on the map by gaining ground, he had not broken the British Army. Nor will he break it now, though he is employ- ing still larger numbers of troops and using them still more recklessly than he did three years ago. Our front may be drawn back from places which were won by hard fighting, but so long as that front remains intact the temporary loss of a few square miles of ground is immaterial. For every foot of that ground the enemy is paying dearly, and he has no America to fill up the huge gaps in his battered divisions.
The war is a question of nerves for the Generals too, and it would be deplorable if civilian clamour were to disturb General Foch and Sir Douglas Haig in their conduct of the defensive at an anxious moment. It is apparent from the war corre- spondents' letters that the Allies are pursuing their old policy of sparing men, while the enemy has never used up his divisions more rapidly. We fear, however, that the corre- spondents, in their anxiety to show how well the British soldier fights, unintentionally give a wrong impression of the skill of his Generals. The civilian, who has been assured by the Prime Minister that the Allied forces on the Western Front with their reserves are at least equal to the enemy's forces and his reserves, is puzzled by the continual statements to the effect that at this or that place the enemy attacked in over- whelming numbers, and therefore made progress. We do not know the strength of the Allies or the strength of the enemy, though they cannot be very unequal. But the enemy, as the attacker, can obviously mass his troops at one given point, whereas we have to be ready to defend our whole line. More- over, it is an elementary principle of tactics that the defensive should employ the smallest possible number of troops. When the correspondents say that six British battalions held Bailleul against an attack by three picked German divisions, or, in other words, that five thousand British troops resisted the onslaught of thirty thousand Germans, they pay the highest compliment both to the troops who retired in good order and to the General who used so few men to effect his purpose. It is true that the enemy took Bailleul ; it is probably also true that the casualties which he incurred in taking it outnumbered the whole strength of our garrison. There were last winter civilian critics in high places who talked gloomily of the heavy losses which we had incurred in battering at the German front. It is absolutely certain that the losses which we sustained then were far smaller than those which the enemy is suffering now. Our troops captured the whole Messines Ridge in one day. It has taken the enemy eight days to retake part of it by incessant assaults. That is only one obvious example to show what a fearful price he is paying for his geographical gains. As Mr. Lloyd George said on Tuesday, we are sustain- ing considerable losses in repelling or checking the German mass attacks, but our casualties are nothing compared with the German casualties. Now it will be admitted, even by the pessimists, that the German strength is not an infinite quan- tity, and that there will come a time when the two hundred German divisions, at least one hundred and twenty-six oof which have been used once in these battles, while many have been thrown in twice or even thrice since March 21st, will be exhausted by the stress of constant fighting and heavy losses.. The real problem for the Allied command is to keep troops in hand for that moment. As Clausewitz says; " the final decision is mostly affected by the relative number of fresh troops remaining at the last "—not by the number of square miles of shell-torn ground occupied by this side or that. It is clear that the Allied reserves are being used far more sparingly than the German reserves, and to that extent the news from he front is distinctly encouraging. No man can say when the impetus of the German offensive in the battle of Flanders will be spent. Days or weeks may pass before the turning-point comes. But we feel confident that our troops, with the support of our Allies, will exact a heavy toll of the enemy for every advance that he may make, and that in the end the Germans will find that their apparent victories have ruined them.
It must be remembered, too, that in this stupendous war every episode is magnified both in fact and in the publicity which is given to it. A battle is now an affair of weeks, and each phase of a battle may take several days. To interpret rightly the official bulletins which are issued twice a day, we must continually remind ourselves to take a broad view of the news. Let us suppose that every movement at the battle of Waterloo had been chronicled by a reporter, transmitted to London, and published on a tape-machine, as every move in a great football match used to be reported for the sport- loving public in the days of peace. We can imagine what intense anxiety would have been excited, following the retreat from Quatre Bras, by the news that La Haye Sainte had been lost, that Hougouniont was surrounded and• in flames, that the enemy in overwhelming numbers was repeatedly assaulting the British squares on the low ridge, that the Old Guard was moving to the attack. Another would-be conqueror of the world is now playing his last card, as Napoleon did at Waterloo, against us, but in this battle the thrilling anxiety, instead of being concentrated in a few hours of a wet Sunday, is protracted week after week, and each temporary success or reverse is made known to us at intervals of a day or two, instead of an hour or a few minutes, as it might have been had telegraphy been invented in 1815. We must guard ourselves against undue exaltation or excessive anxiety as we watch the• fluctuating course of the battle of Flanders, which, though a mighty conflict, is in turn only a part of the struggle between the Allied and the German Armies on the Western Front. Each incident has to be judgedr in relation to the whole. The enemy's determined thrust for the Wytschaete Ridge, which continues as we write, has led already to our evacuation of our advanced lines east of Ypres, and may have further local consequences. But if a retirement at this part of the line benefits the position of the Allies as a whole—and of this only the Generals in command can judge—it need not cause concern to the civilian public. It is conceivable that the Allied line may be altered in many respects before the German offensive is brought to a standstill, like Napoleon's attack at Waterloo, by sheer exhaustion. But so long as the Allies preserve their line and remain in close contact, with their reserves ready to take advantage of the weakened enemy, they will be assured of victory inthe end, It is noticeable that the enemy during the past week has sus- pended his operations on the Somme, and that in the Flanders battle area he has failed to make any substantial progress out- side the Bailleul-Messines sector of his large new salient., The pause has been more welcome to the Allies than to the enemy.
Previous page
