The war against the Matabele in 1890 was a joint venture between the British state and a private company, Cecil Rhodes’s Chartered British South Africa Company, and the Maxim was a massively persuasive voice in the acquisition of Matabeleland. About four thousand Ndebele (the dominant tribe in Matabeleland) attacked a British force of about seven hundred that, apart from rifles and two small artillery pieces, was armed with five Maxims. The machine guns’ interlocking fields of fire left fifteen hundred warriors dead. The Daily News of London observed: “Most of the Matabele had probably never seen a machine-gun in their lives. Their trust was in their spears, for they had never known an enemy able to withstand them. Even when they found their mistake, they had the heroism to regard it as only a momentary error in their calculations. They retired in perfect order and re-formed for a second rush. Once more, the Maxims swept them down in the dense masses of their concentration. It seems incredible that they should have mustered for another attack, but this actually happened. They came as men foredoomed to failure.”40
It was a splendid investment. For the loss of fifty white men’s lives and a cost of perhaps fifty thousand pounds, the colonists had won 400,000 acres.
And yet, despite the evident success of machine guns in killing large numbers of black men at a discount cost per head, the military establishment back in England resisted embracing the machine gun. It was precisely the fact that it had been used primarily in colonial warfare against enemies considered backward and in every way inferior that tainted the weapon in the eyes of the military hierarchy. It was not quite right, not, somehow, within the tradition of European warfare.
The wars of the British against the Boers of South Africa (the first in 1880–81; the second, 1899–1902) were unlike other colonial wars in that the Boers were white, armed with relatively modern weapons, and pretty skilled in their use. If the heroic tradition of Western warfare was predicated on frontal attack, the British Army fighting the Boers, particularly during the Second South African War, had a foretaste of how that tradition, as tenacious as it was, could be destroyed by the skillful use of modern rifles and artillery artfully deployed behind sound defensive positions protected by barbed wire.
Although the British had already experienced the killing power of Boer riflemen during the First South African War, with bloody defeats at Laing’s Nek (for example, a frontal attack cost the Fifty-Eighth Regiment 160 casualties, including all its officers, out of its initial strength of 480) and Majuba Hill (on which the British lost 93 men killed, including their commander, Sir George Colley, and 133 wounded, for the loss of 1 Boer killed and 5 wounded), they nurtured a contempt for what they considered a bunch of hick farmers. In one week—the “Black Week” of December 10–15, 1899—the British suffered 7,000 casualties in actions that included two catastrophic frontal charges, at Magersfontein and Colenso. Nor could they complain that they had not been given fair warning. In November 1899, Lord Methuen, the British commander-in-chief, had made three frontal attacks: at Belmont, Graspan, and the Modder River. In each case entrenched Boers, armed with the superb German-manufactured, magazine-fed Mauser rifle, coolly shot down the attackers, inflicting well over 1,000 casualties for negligible loss. Nothing if not consistent, Methuen committed the Highland Brigade to a frontal attack at Magersfontein, where they met not only withering rifle fire but also three heavy machine guns, Krupp-manufactured artillery, and barbed wire. The rout that followed was comprehensive and shocking. There were more than 800 British casualties including 120 killed. Four days later another British commander, General Sir Redvers Buller, was defeated at Colenso with 143 killed, 755 wounded, and ten of his artillery pieces captured—an unforgivable humiliation. The Boers lost 6 killed and 21 wounded.41 The whole war would cost the British 22,000 dead, of whom 5,832 were killed in battle, the rest dying from wounds and disease.42
In all this there was something chillingly prescient. The barbed wire, the machine guns, the mass attacks against entrenched and prepared riflemen—“a dress parade,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in 1903.
* Although the technique of breechloading had been known since the seventeenth century, breechloaders made their first appearance in the British Army on a very limited scale during the American War of Independence, in the form of the Ferguson rifle.
† At Beecher’s Island on the Arikaree River, Colorado, in September 1868, 50 US Army scouts under Major George Forsyth were attacked by some hundreds of Cheyenne commanded by Roman Nose. Armed with Spencer repeaters, the scouts killed somewhere in excess of 100 braves (including Roman Nose) for the loss of 2 men.
SIX
“THIS HIGH PLACE OF SACRIFICE”
“Going West” in World War I
In answer to the German bugles or trumpets came the cheerful sounds of our officers’ whistles, and the riflemen … sprang to action. The great roar of musketry rent the air, varying slightly in intensity from minute to minute as whole companies ceased fire and opened again.…
Our rapid fire was appalling [lethal], even to us, and the worst marksman could not miss, as he had only to fire in the “brown” of the masses of the unfortunate enemy, who on the fronts of two of our companies were continually and uselessly reinforced at the short range of three hundred yards. Such tactics amazed us, and after the first shock of seeing men slowly and helplessly falling down as they were hit, gave us a great sense of power and pleasure. It was all so easy.
—Corporal John Lucy, Royal Irish Rifles, at the battle of Mons, 19141
The [leading wave] was now half-way across no-man’s-land. “Get ready!” was passed along our front … and heads appeared over each shell crater edge as final positions were taken up for the best view and machine guns mounted firmly in place. A few moments later, when the British line was within a hundred yards, the rattle of machine gun and rifle fire broke out along [our] whole line of shell holes.… The advance rapidly crumpled under a hail of shell and bullets. All along the line men could be seen throwing up their arms and collapsing, never to move again.… The extended lines, though badly shaken and with many gaps, now came on all the faster. Instead of a leisurely walk they covered the ground in short rushes at the double [and] within a few minutes the leading troops had advanced to within a stone’s throw of our front trench.… Again and again the extended lines of British infantry broke against the German defence like waves against a cliff, only to be beaten back. It was an amazing spectacle of unexampled gallantry, courage and bull-dog determination on both sides.
—A German eyewitness to the first day of the battle of the Somme, 19162
CORPORAL LUCY AT Mons and the German observer at the Somme are describing the central strategic tactical truth of the First World War: Defensive capability would usually trump offensive ambitions, and even relatively successful attacks would have a very significant price tag. The lure of the possibility of the offensive breakthrough, the victory of dash, courage, and discipline, the concentration of numbers, the faith in the preparatory bombardment, all were part of the siren call of attacking warfare. The more securely locked into their defenses the protagonists became, the more frantically did the strategists search for the attacking key. The force that drove the First World War and sent so many to their deaths was, ironically, the belief in the holy grail of mobility. Although the spirit was surprisingly willing, the human body, exposed in the pitiless killing grounds of no-man’s-land or the trenches, was all too often no match for the homicidal efficiencies of organized rifle fire, concerted machine gunnery, or artillery ordnance in vast number and variety and targeting capability, all aided and abetted by deep swaths of barbed wire that tenaciously defied attempts by the opposing artillery to destroy it. As one military historian succinctly puts it, attackers were “unable to advance, unwilling to retire, meat for artillery fire.”3
The mortality statistics of the First World War are almost as opaque and slippery as the mud of the Western Front. Data was not methodically collected; commentators sometimes confuse overall casualty statisti
cs with those who were killed, or they add in deaths from disease and other non-battle-related fatalities. However, a consensus suggests that during the course of the war, in all theaters and across all combatants, approximately 8.6 million men were either killed in action or died from wounds. Of the larger combatants, Germany lost 1.8 million; Russia, 1.7 million; France, 1.3 million; Austria-Hungary, 922,000; Britain, 650,000 (and its empire, another 226,000); and Italy, 460,000.4 America lost approximately 116,000 men from all causes, of which 53,400 were combat fatalities.5 To put it another way, in France there were 34 deaths per 1,000 population; in Germany, 30; in Britain, 16.6 The ratio of killed to wounded for the whole war was 3 wounded for every combat death.7 But in some battles the ratio was far worse. On the first day of the Somme, July 1, 1916, the attacking British troops suffered 38,230 casualties and 19,240 killed: a ratio of just under 2 to 1. An attacking British infantryman on that day had about a one in five chance of being killed.8
If the Somme was a massive hemorrhage for the British and French armies (the July–November battle would rack up “official” British casualty figures of 420,000 and 204,000 for the French), it was also an unmitigated catastrophe for the Germans, who suffered 650,000–680,000 casualties. If the war of attrition—Materialschlacht is the German term—had any justification, then it was here on the Somme. After the war the Reichsarchiv (German Imperial Archive) recognized that the “grave loss of blood affected Germany very much more heavily than the Entente.… The Materialschlacht gnawed terribly into the entrails of the defenders.… The consequence was a frightful death-roll of the finest and most highly trained soldiers, whose replacement became impossible. It was in this that the root of the tragedy of the battle lies.… The Somme was the muddy grave of the German field army.”9 When General Erich von Falkenhayn (and later Hindenburg and Ludendorff) applied the German version of Materialschlacht, during the grotesque ten-month slugfest at Verdun in 1916, he discovered the central truth of attritional warfare: To make your enemy bleed, you too have to bleed. According to the French Official War History, France suffered 377,231 casualties, of which 162,308 were killed or missing. The Germans took approximately 337,000 casualties, of whom about 100,000 were killed or missing.10
Officers were twice as likely to be killed as the men they led.11 An anonymous British junior officer wrote in 1917: “I am certainly not the same as I was a year ago.… After all, just imagine my life out here: the chances of surviving the next battle for us platoon commanders is about 4 to 1 against!”12 In the German army the infantry casualty rate as a whole was 13.9 percent, but for the officer class it was a staggering 75.5 percent.13 During a disastrous attack by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders at La Bassée in 1915, of the 16 officers who led their men, 14 were killed (87.5 percent).14 Corporal Hodges of the Royal Fusiliers had 5 company commanders between April and November 1918, and of those, 4 were killed. One, he recalled, “was not with us long for me to get to know his name. He was the one who was wounded and then killed with stretcher-bearers.”15
AND HOW WERE soldiers killed? What weaponry, rolling off the production lines in unprecedentedly prodigious quantities, did them in? And what strategies and tactics—so intricately enmeshed in that great web of political goals, civilian expectations, weapons capabilities, available manpower, topography—led men to their deaths? Death could come in many ways, as Private Bernard Livermore remembered: “Death from a sniper’s bullet, death from a rifle grenade, death from a Minnie [sometimes referred to as a “moaning Minnie,” slang for minenwerfer, a German mortar used to throw a 100- to 200-pound shell into opposing trenches] or a toffee apple [stick grenade]; death from shrapnel (possibly from our own guns) or from gas, if the wind were in the right direction. Death also might come from bayonet or nail-studded cosh if the Bosche raided our lines.”16
The greatest killer, however, was artillery, hence the shockingly high proportion of men whose bodies were never recovered and who have no known grave. More than 300,000 British and British Empire dead of the Western Front—40 percent of the total killed there—were never found.17 On the Menin Gate memorial at Ypres alone, the names of 54,896 British and Empire dead whose bodies were never recovered are recorded. The great vaulted memorial, designed in 1921, proved too small to carry all the names of the unrecovered dead, so those killed after August 15, 1917, were recorded on the Memorial to the Missing at Tyne Cot cemetery. On the memorial at Thiepval there are 73,367 names of men killed who have no known grave, and that encompasses losses during the fighting on the Somme (1915–1918). They were either obliterated or churned into the earth by remorseless artillery fire.
Captain J. C. Dunn, the much-decorated medical officer of the Second Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, describes the transition from death by small arms, which was preponderant in the early phase of the war, to artillery as the primary cause as the war progressed. In October 1914, he records, “Most of the deaths were from rifle-fire, shells caused comparatively few.” A year later, however, he observes that “the wounds on this front are mostly multiple and often horrible, being nearly all caused by shell or mortar-bomb or grenade.”18 Artillery was a much more efficient killer than infantry. According to Paddy Griffith’s calculations, the British infantry lost one casualty (wounded as well as killed) for every 0.5 it caused, whereas artillery lost one casualty for every 10 it caused.19
Taking the war overall, small arms, particularly machine guns, accounted for the next largest segment of deaths. In one representative British division, 58 percent fell to artillery, 37 percent to small arms, and 5 percent to other agents (bombs, gas, and bayonets, for example).20 Of those killed by bullets, about half fell to machine-gun fire, and of all casualties about 25 percent were inflicted by machine-gun fire.21 Although it caused fewer deaths than artillery, the machine gun became the exemplar of killing on an industrial scale. By 1914 both Britain and Germany were manufacturing machine guns based on Hiram Maxim’s patents. Vickers received its license in 1892; Krupp the following year. Leading up to the war the supply of machine guns to the British Army had been minuscule (only eleven per year from 1904).22
The officer class of European armies, drawn largely from the landed gentry, was deeply rooted in the preindustrial era. Mechanized warfare lacked the heroic attributes of the rifle and especially the bayonet, and so the antediluvians “clung to their old beliefs in the centrality of man and the decisiveness of personal courage and individual behaviour.”23 Although it was a tension that played out all through the war, nothing could prevent the massive industrialization of combat killing. In 1914, Germany deployed 4,900 machine guns (of which most, 4,000, were on the Western Front); France had 2,500, and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) could muster the grand total of 108. By war’s end, however, Vickers had made not only 71,350 Maxim-style machine guns but also 133,000 Lewis guns. (Weighing 30 pounds, including a forty-seven-round drum magazine, they were the first truly effective light machine guns.)24
Machine guns were just the job for relatively unskilled “operators.” The mass levies of citizen-soldiers who replaced the small cadre of professionals (mostly killed off by early 1915) did not have the handcrafted rifle skills, honed over years of practice, of the old sweats (thirty rounds in one minute, all on target at 300 yards, was not unusual) and so “power … passed from the artist to the artisan.”25
That is not to say that the operators did not take pride in their machines. George Coppard remembered his Vickers almost fondly: “This weapon proved to be most successful, being highly efficient, reliable, compact and reasonably light. The tripod was the heaviest component, weighing about 50 pounds; the gun itself weighed 28 pounds without water [water-cooling extended firing time]. With a gun in good tune the rate of fire was well over 600 rounds per minute. There were normally six men in a gun team. Number One was leader and fired the gun, while Number Two controlled the entry of ammo belts into the feed-block. Number Three maintained a supply of ammo to Number Two, and Numbers Four to Six were reserves and carr
iers.”26 If those six men had been employed as riflemen, each one would have been able to get off approximately twelve rounds per minute for a total of seventy-two rounds: a very poor exchange compared with their machine-gun function. In 1914, machine guns (in the British army two per battalion, twelve battalions to a division) could deliver the equivalent of 9,120 rifles per division. By the end of the war they could deliver the equivalent of 38,000.27
In the beginning of the war the Germans had about the same ratio of machine guns to infantry as did the BEF, but they tended to concentrate their guns in separate companies rather than allocating them to infantry battalions under infantry control as the British did until the formation of the Machine Gun Corps in October 1915. At the hands of the Germans the British learned the very bitter lesson of the effectiveness of machine guns deployed in concentration and manned by troops trained specifically in their use. At the battle of Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915, for instance, the Second Scottish Rifles went into the attack preceded by an intensive artillery barrage intended to knock out any resistance in the German front trench:
Ferrers was first out from “B” company, his monocle in his eye and his sword in his hand. As the guns stopped firing there was a moment of silence. Then the guns started again, firing behind the German lines.… Almost at the same moment came another noise, the whip and crack of the enemy machine guns opening up with deadly effect. From the intensity of their fire, and its accuracy, it was clear that the shelling had not been as effective as expected.… As the attack progressed the German positions which did most damage were two machine gun posts in front of the Middlesex [the Second Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment was an extension of the attacking line of which the Second Scottish Rifles was a part]. Not only did they virtually wipe out the 2nd Middlesex [battalion sizes varied, but about 600 would be average] with frontal fire, but they caused many of the losses in the 2nd Scottish Rifles with deadly enfilade, or flanking fire [meaning, instead of firing into the attackers frontally, they were firing into their flanks and therefore able to hit a great many more men].28
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