TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE BATTLE OF ARRAS.
THE battle of Arras (Easter Monday, 1917) is up till now, . fromthe British point of view, the greatest single-day military event of the war. It is this whether judged from the results achieved, the amount of enemy ground occupied, the number of prisoners and guns taken, or from the strategic consequences of the victory. It was a battle without a drawback. In spite of our tremendous artillery preparation, the attack was a surprise. It began by the assault, by the Canadian Divisions, of the Vimy Ridge, the vast German stronghold which hitherto had defied not only our efforts but the efforts of our gallant Allies the French. It is a happy event that the Canadians should have had the good fortune, and so the priceless honour, of taking the Ridge, and that for all time they will have the credit of this astounding feat of arms. But though Canada will so proudly bear Vimy Ridge upon her military escutcheon, and may boast that what none could do she has done, we must not forget the splendid record of France. The ground over which the gallant soldiers of the Now World raced is hallowed to her as no other part of the nation's soil. It is the grave-ground of thousands of her brave sons. On that shell-torn hillside lie the men who throughout the summer of 1915 poured out their blood like water in their country's cause. It fell to the Canadians to reap the laurels of fame, but, generous as they are brave, they will be the first to acknowledge the claims of France—claims thrice hallowed by the grave. We have called the Vimy Ridge a German stronghold, but this can give the ordinary man no sort of notion of the appal- ling, the seemingly impossible, task which lay before the Canadians when they went over the top. The Germans boasted that their fortress was impregnable, and no wonder when we think of the labyrinth of artfully constructed trenches, the concealed machine guns, the protecting artillery, and the acres of barbed wire spread out with all the deadly efficiency and ingenuity of our enemy's engineers. But though when described in words the position sounds so formidable, those who have seen the Vimy Ridge (as was the good fortune of the present writer) can recall nothing which visually suggested impregnability. There is nothing to be seen like the great fortresses of ancient or even of modern times, nothing in the nature of Corinth or Gibraltar or Port Arthur. Parodying Wordsworth, one may ask : " What is Vimy Ridge but the rounded edge of a not very impressive chalk down, sloping gradually to a chalk valley or bottom ? " Similar ridges can be seen any day all over Kent or Surrey or Sussex :— " There are a thousand such elsewhere
As worthy of your wonder."
We talk of the Vimy Ridge, but no one must think of frowning cliffs to be scaled as the mountaineer scales some rocky fortress of the Alps. The plough could climb the slopes of Vimy, and, if we remember rightly, in old days it did so, for the land is good and closely cultivated. Within the next week or two we may be sure that the wild, or rather the escaped, corn and barley will be springing up on the little plateau of Notre Dame de Lorette, which juts out towards the Vimy Ridge, and from which the eye can command the Vimy position and a vast stretch of surrounding country.
As the dawn broke on Monday morning, an observer looking to his right front from the right side of the plateau of Notre Dame de Lorette would, if the light had been strong enough, have seen half-way up the Vimy slope a dirty, untidy line without a sign of life on it—a line such as a speculative builder suffering from delirium tremens might have traced as a road- line in a suburban building estate. That was the British line. Further on lay perdu what we have termed the impregnable German position. It is, or rather was, nothing whatever to look at, and yet was made so strong by Nature and by Art that those who held it might almost be said to have been drowned in the sense of security which its strength engendered. That was the state of affairs on the Monday morning till just before the light came. Then suddenly the Canadian Divisions went over the top, and within fifteen minutes had captured the fortress which for two years had defied all the efforts of the Allies, raced through the main German trenches, and, after an hour or so of desperate fighting, got down to the reverse slope, on the German side, and were taking prisoners and guns, arms and machine guns, and other spoils of war innumerable. The present writer would rather have heard the cheer raised by the Canadians as they stood on the fatal:Ridge even than the cheer at Albuera, or of the British brigade which hurled Ney's column to ruin at Waterloo. Such. was the fight for the Vimy Ridge. But that was not all, or anything like all, the battle. It was only the encounter most romantic in -character--the encounter which can most easily be made intelligible to the newspaper reader at home. The battle, as Sir Douglas Haig puts it in his laconic despatch, extended on a wide front—i.e., from Givenchy to Henin. Along this front of twelve miles the British troops everywhere penetrated the enemy's lines, everywhere surprised their enemies, and everywhere took prisoners and guns—till at last the total tally of the day rose to over eleven thousand prisoners and over one hundred guns. As for machine guns and the other spoils of war, they were on Easter Monday accounted but as dross. Since Monday our advance has been continuous. Thursday's reports show the capture of more guns and more villages and a thousand more prisoners. As Sir Douglas Haig puts it with grim humour, and capturing the enemy's style as well as the enemy's lines, " the situation is developing favourably in accordance with the general plan." The official German reports, it may be remembered, very strongly emphasized the statement that their retirement was according to plan. It is too early yet to estimate the results of the battle of Arras, but there can be no doubt that Sir Douglas Haig has greatly improved his position from every point of view. Ever since the battle of the Somme he has been in the position of the attacker, but from the purely technical point of view he has by no means always possessed the initiative. Indeed, a scientific German militarist might argue that Hindenburg from this standpoint has hitherto always had the better of him. After all, did not Germany retain the initiative when she accomplished her retirement on the Somme ? She was not forced back by our attacks, but withdrew entirely on her " mere motion." We may have gone on, but it was Germany here who called the tune, led the dance, and dictated the way and the place in which the fight should take place. Nothing of that kind can be said about Monday's battle. Here we were not only the attacking force, but we also had the initia- tive. It was we, and not the Germans, who " taught the doubtful battle where to rage," laid down the conditions of the fighting, and reaped the incomparable advantage which of necessity belongs to those who take the initiative—surprise. As a German Brigadier confessed with those tears which flow so easily from Teutonic eyes—a pathetic line or phrase in Racine could always draw floods of tears from Frederick the Great—he and his Staff and most of his men were captured before they knew the fight had begun. We hear also of a German reinforcing unit, quite unaware of what was taking place, coming up to lend aid to their comrades and walking straight into the arms of their enemies. All they did in the way of reinforcement was to reinforce our prison cages. And here we may add that the account of the moral of the prisoners is very curious. We are told of business men of sixty side by side with boys of sixteen, and of the unsoldierly bear- ing of so much of this strange crowd. The men appear to be heartily delighted to be captured, but the Prussian officers remain true to type—angry, arrogant, ill-tempered, and boastful. Trading, of course successfully, upon our generosity and humanity, they talk, almost at the moment of capture, of the wonderful things they will do in the way of revenge.
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