The Battles of Arras
THE new volume of the Official History covers the fighting in France and Belgium during the first five months of 1917. Considered in terms of historic consequences, the land-warfare of that period may loom small beside such contemporary happenings as the Russian Revolution, the entry of America into the war, or even the introduction of the convoy system. Nevertheless, the Battles of Arras remain of high technical interest to the military student and provide more than one vital moral for present-day commanders ; while the melancholy but instructive saga of the rise and fall of the dashing, plausible
Nivelle offers a perennial warning of how the lives of fighting- men may be thrown away in thousands by personal dis- harmonies among the Olympians.
The Battles of Arras are unrivalled, even among the 1914-18 offensives, in their grim contrast between promise and per- formance. "Easter Monday of the year 1917," the day that brought, among other splendid feats, the capture of the Vimy Ridge, "witnessed," we read, "the most formidable and at the same time most successful British offensive hitherto launched." And elsewhere, "the operations achieved a greater measure of initial success than in any previous offensive." But at the end of it all, a month later, "this series of engagements appears on reflection profoundly disappointing. . . . The German casualties in the Arras offensive were lighter by com- parison with those of the British than in most other offen- sives "—some 85,000 against 142,000 in the major episodes— partly because "after its favourable opening the British offen- sive never enjoyed any considerable success." We are driven to seek an explanation, and, when every allowance has been made for the consequences to our army of Nivelle's wilful obstinacy and eventual failure, the dispassionate reader of this volume will hardly avoid the conclusion that the indomitable British soldier was principally handicapped by lack of imagina- tion at the top.
This is not exactly the lesson that the Official History—a thought too lenient, perhaps, to senior individuals on our side—seeks to emphasise. Stress is laid, it is true, on the "rigid dispositions" enforced on our men compared with the Germans, but this is attributed to lack of training and con- doned as inevitable in a hastily raised amateur army. Again, the hampering effects of our "chain of command" are brought out most vividly in comparison with the wide German delega-
tion of authority and discretion to subordinate leaders in a system that made the battalion commander the "real con- troller of the battle." All this is true and highly pertinent, but it is not the whole or even the greater part of the truth. In 1917 the Germans had profited from the blood-bath of the Somme to develop what General Edmonds himself describes as a whole new "philosophy of the defensive," while we con- tented ourselves with a few somewhat trivial amendments in our offensive technique. Ludendorff and Von Lossberg between
them evolved a defensive theory that will live in military history as a superb combination of abstract ingenuity and successful opportunism. They had no counterparts on our side. The Official History would have done well to say so as dearly as it has been said by one of Captain Falls' assistants, Captain Wynne, in his recently published tour de force, If
Germany Attacks.
"The tactical dispositions adopted by the Germans after the first few days," we are informed in an appendix to the present volume, "did not expose their troops to the same degree as on the Somme in 1916." Behind this simple state- ment lies the whole development of the defence in depth in the form that proved our undoing at Arras. Not that all was plain sailing on the German side. Von Lossberg himself, while the supreme exponent of the defence in depth and the use of the counter-attack by troops held back in safety for that purpose, was only with difficulty induced to introduce that element of "elasticity," of letting the front-line troops yield ground in order to spring back later "like an elastic band," that was Ludendorff's special contribution. Then, too, this same "elastic defence," when misunderstood as by the German Sixth Army on the first day of the Battles of Arras was a positive liability to its practitioners and contributed largely
to the British success. Nevertheless, the Official History is soon admitting its "unhappy results for the British against the 34th Division south of Roeux and the and Division at Oppy on April 28th." While by the time we reach the Third Battle of the Scarpe, "nothing less than a disaster from the British standpoint," there can be no minimising "the readi- ness with which the German infantry yielded to the first assault and the energy of its counter-attack." In short, not only defence in depth, but elastic defence in depth had estab- lished itself by the end of the Arras Battles a, the deciding factor.
If it be reasonable to suggest that this and other theoretizal lessons might have been underlined more insistently in he Official History, even at the risk of controversy, that is almost the only criticism which the most hypercritical can cffer. Style, arrangement and erudition are once again subject for equal congratulation. It goes without saying that the volume
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