VERDUN. T HE public make many mistakes in regard to strategy
and tactics and the art of war generally, but none greater than the mistake of giving undue importance to particular places. They will regard war as a kind of game in which certain values are attached by the rules to the possession of particular towns or districts. if you take town W it counts ten, if X twenty, if Y a hundred, and if Z you win the game. But war is not really like that. We do not for a moment say that particular places may not have a very great, even decisive, influence on a particular campaign ; but there is nothing absolute or final about them, as Napoleon found when, yielding to the fatal notion that wars are won by taking picturesque capitals, he rushed on Moscow and his fate. He took the city, only to find that none of the wonderful things which he anticipated, such as the hoped-for revolt of the " Moscow aristocracy," savagely jealous, as he believed, of Petersburg, occurred. He had been fooled by the rattling of a name. To put it in a more scientific and more military way, he paid too high a price to get Moscow. Looked at in the cold light of the Bureau of the General Staff, every town, every position, every series of lines, has its price, and the question, just as in business, is : " Are you or are you not buying too dear " The trader is often ruined by an apparent success. By a large expenditure of time, energy, and money he obtains a particular piece of business for which many rivals have been contending, and finds that, instead of having succeeded, he has ruined himself. The apparent success, when shown on the balance-sheet, turns out to spell failure. In war, even more than in business, prices vary with circumstances. A particular place may be worth very great sacrifices in January, but may not be worth them in June or July. Time is of the essence of the contract in all military affairs. A delivery of the goods that comes too late may make them valueless. But the public will seldom remember this. They set their hearts passionately upon either gaining or retaining a particular bit of ground, without con- sidering its absolute, still less its relative, value, and when it is gained or lost, as the case may be, their feelings are moved out of all proportion.
Take, for example, the Ypres Salient. No doubt there would be tremendous elation on the part of the Germans, and a corresponding depression here, if we were to abandon the Salient—if we were now to draw our trench-line south instead of north of Ypres, and tell the Germans that they might take possession of the ruins which they have made. Yet the military results thus secured by our enemies would really be infinitesimal, or, rather, we might actually have placed ourselves in a far better military position than we were in before. As is well known, the present configuration of the trench-line was largely a matter of accident, we had almost said of weariness. We and the Germans at this point of the line were engaged in a race with our noses pointing west, and each side dug themselves in at haphazard, though no doubt a haphazard influenced to some extent by moral and political considerations. We were near Ypres, and we wanted if possible to keep it, while the Germans wanted to take it. Accordingly we pushed our trench-line out of what might be called its normal course in order to include the town. This made our line at this point stick out—made what, in the Latinized terminology of the seventeenth- century military engineers, was called a salient or salient- angle, an angle that protrudes like a spearhead. Now it is always tempting, and, other things being equal, comparatively easy, to batter in a salient. You can attack it not only in front but on the sides, which, so to speak, run into the enemy's country. The Germans have been for some nineteen months trying to take advantage of the fact that our position is a salient. The result has been that the town has lain fully exposed in the shell zone which lies always behind the trench- line. That is why its proud towers and noble public monu- ments have been battered to the ground. This does not, of course, show that we were wrong in giving battle at Ypres or in continuing to hold the town. Though our losses have been great in holding it, it is certain that the German losses in trying to take it have been much greater. They have been paying an enormous price, and have not obtained the object for which they have striven.
If we turn our attention to Verdun, the lesson of the exaggerated price is even more clearly taught. Nearly a hundred and twenty days ago the Germans determined to take Verdun, not because to do so would throw the road open to Paris, or compel a general falling back of the whole French line, or because it was a great French city the capture of which would deprive France of some important arsenal or place of arms, but rather because it was a place that the Germans, as we see now on very insufficient grounds, regarded as one which it would be comparatively easy to take. It was also a place on which the French, acting like all other nations in regard to other fortresses, had wasted many millions in bricks and mortar, or, rather, in reinforced concrete and steel, and thus a place of considerable prestige and moral importance. We suspect, in addition, that when the full story is told it will be found that the German Staff came to the conclusion that they must do something to keep the French occupied, and also something to occupy their own armies. The Germans are governed by the notion, a thoroughly sound one in itself, though, like all good notions, or, indeed, like everything else in human affairs, capable of being overdone— every notion must be subject to the golden rule of measure and proportion—that in war the attack in the local and physical sphere, and.the initiative which is the attack in the spiritual region, are the source of victory. They further argued, again rightly per se, that you should attack when and where you are unexpected. Thirdly, they argued that it was no use to say that time and circumstances were not favourable, for had not Clausewitz himself, the Confucius of war, said that if the force of circumstances prevented you from doing the best, or even the second best, you must do the next best—in a word, do anything rather than merely do nothing ? Accordingly they went hammer and tongs for Verdun, Verdun being to a very considerable extent a salient in the existing trench-line as well as the greatest of French fortresses. For over four lunar months the Germans have been attacking inch by inch, with an incredible loss of life, and an incredible sacrifice of material in the way of shells and the wearing out of the tubes of their great guns. Whether the Germans will even now be able to take Verdun, in spite of their having reached a point within four miles of it, remains to be seen. We hold that it is more than probable that they will not be able to do so, or at any rate not before the first week in July. Further than that it is not necessary or even wise to inquire. But even if the French think it prudent to yield the town, how will the position really stand ? The Germans will, of course, have achieved a nominal or moral triumph, and no doubt excitable people in France and here will talk with horror for a few days of " the great reverse." What, however, the people with cooler heads and wiser minds will do after the fall of Verdun will be to ask what price the Germans have paid for it. If this question is answered fairly and not in terms of panic, it will be found that the price has been out of all proportion to the object attained. By his careful and business- like action General Joffre has exacted a colossal toll in mea and munitions from the Germans. No doubt the French have also lost heavily in men and munitions, but nothing like what the Germans have lost. It has probably cost the French two hundred thousand casualties to deny Verdun to the Germans for four months, but it has almost certainly cost the Germans three hundred and fifty thousand to attack it. What the last pull on the rope, if it can be given, will cost, no man can of course calculate. In any case, and in order to achieve what they have achieved at Verdun, the Germans have had to scrape their line very thin in other places, to exhaust their general reserve, and to bring men back from Poland and Bulgaria—places where the course of events may soon prove that they were much more needed than before Verdun. That is one point which will have to be considered if—and remember it is still only an " if "—the town of Verdun falls.
The next question to be considered is, what will the Germans do with Verdun ? Can it be said that the posses- sion of it will open a gate through which a great German invading army may rush like a torrent, overwhelm the North-East of France, and even roll its iron tide to the gates of Paris We do not believe that there is the slightest fear of any such thing taking place. We re no signs that the French flanks will be obligedto give way if the Germans get to Verdun. No doubt a certain amount of re-formation will be required, but it will only back re-formation of the existing line. No general falling such as took place after Mons will be required. Until the French flanks yield, the Germans will accomplish no more by taking Verdun than we accomplished by taking Lees, or the French by their great forward movement in Champagne. As has been proved again and again in this war, if you are willing to pay the price you can always break the enemy's line, and break it on a considerable front ; but when yon have broken it you are no better off than you were before. If you push on too far, you have only made a dangerous salient, from which you will probably be driven later by counter-attacks. Further, if, as in this case, it has taken some four months' hard fighting to make your gap, you will discover that the enemy have had ample time to prepare fresh lines in front of you, and that your business, instead of being ended, is only just beginning. There is, of course, the possibility that these considerations may be negatived through the place at which the line has been broken having some geographical peculiarities that create an exception to the general rules of trench combat. It is arguable, for example, that the hills through which the Meuse runs are so commanding, and the situation of such enormous strength, that the possessor of them can dominate the surrounding country, and so forth. But this is pure hypothesis. There is no reason to believe, but plenty of reason to the contrary, that there is any military spell to be cast from the heights around Verdun. Whatever advantage heights may have had in olden days, there is no magic about them now. Other things being equal, it is easier to attack trenches on a hill than trenches on the level. Probably the best defensive positions in the world are those with which we were actually confronted in Mesopotamia—namely, a well-made line of trenches drawn across a perfectly level plain in which there was not a tree, or a rock, or a dip in the ground, or a vestige of cover of any sort. A position of this kind is almost im- pregnable if its flanks cannot be turned owing to the fact that it is linked up with trenches which stretch to some impassable barrier on either side. Probably the French lines prepared beyond the hills at Verdun are not quite as ideal as the trenches around Kut-el-Amara, but certainly they arc none the worse for being lines in flat rather than in mountainous country.
In view of all these facts, we strongly advise our readers, should the town of Verdun be evacuated by the French and occupied by the Germans, not to be awed by rumour or frightened by a word. Let them remember that the Germans have bought Verdun at a great price in blood and money, and ask whether that price was or was not too high. When they have arrived at the answer, we expect that they will truthfully be able to parody a well-known quatrain of Wordsworth's :- " For what is Verdun but a town That lies the dark hills under ? There are a hundred such elsewhere
As worthy of your wonder."
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