In the lieutenant’s last action, he almost got his wish. The soldiers set out on foot with twenty-inch bayonets affixed to their Type 30 carbines, picking their way through stacks of corpses from the waves before. The company commander, a captain, brandished a sword in the charge. He was killed. This was Lieutenant Sakurai’s moment. “From henceforth I command Twelfth Company!” he shouted. His command would be brief. He ordered a renewed charge, but soon the fire was thick and the men around him were few. What had been a company was a handful of survivors, including the lieutenant, who had been shot through the right hand. The Russians counterattacked. The remnants of Twelfth Company fell back, consolidated, and were trapped as the Russians brought up machine guns to finish the fight. The lieutenant was wounded and suffered the indignity of survival. It meant that he was able to tell what happened at the end. “Men on both sides fell like grass,” he said.22
This was not a distant colonial fight. It was a head-to-head conventional war between rival empires and soldiers bearing modern arms, fought in the presence of Western military attachés. The attachés observing the battles did a mixed job of assessing and reporting the discernable facts. Some noted that the Russian guns were effective. Lieutenant Colonel A. Haldane, a British attaché, wrote that Japanese attacks were “checked by machine gun and rifle fire, and there is no doubt that a strong feeling exists in the infantry that the presence of machine guns with the Russian army confers upon it a distinct advantage.”23 American reports were uneven. One officer reported that the Japanese had used their own machine guns quite effectively, and that Japanese officers had learned during the war that machine guns could be used offensively as well as in defense of held ground—an echo of what Captain Parker had proposed for ten years, and had proved outside Santiago. But another American officer wrote that “the machine gun [had] played a useful but not great part in the war.”24 As a body, those who could carry the word out—military observers and war correspondents alike—were distracted from the obvious: that in the age of machine guns assault tactics urgently needed to be rethought. Colonel Louis A. La Garde, of the United States Army Medical Corps, later reviewed casualty data from the war and noticed something that should have been readily observable by any attaché on hand: the military futility of a bayonet charge. Of 170,600 Russian soldiers documented as wounded or killed, bayonet wounds accounted for 0.4 percent.25 More wounds, Colonel La Garde found, were caused by stones. And yet some Westerners present at the war still succumbed to a fascination for the spirit of the Japanese soldiers, missing the technical and tactical points while filing dispatches describing what they regarded as fanaticism, whether bizarre or sublime. What did Westerners have to learn from the Japanese experience, after all, when everyone knew that no Western army would resort to attacks by human wave? One correspondent’s dispatch was typical:
It is said that when men have made up their mind to die they act and speak like gods. That day, when the fight was at its fiercest and the bullets were falling like rain, Lieutenant Sakamoto, who had been sent out towards the right flank on scouting duty, found himself pressed by a greatly superior force of the enemy and unable either to advance or to retreat. He sent an orderly to ask the commanding officer for final instructions. The reply was, “Go back and say to the Lieutenant, ‘Die.’” The orderly, saluting, rode off. What a grand order—“die.” The one word, “die”!26
Germany drew a different lesson. Kaiser Wilhelm II had continued his support for machine guns, and by 1899 the German military had four-gun machine-gun batteries. In 1908, each regiment had batteries of six guns, and the German army underwrote extensive inquiry and experimentation into how best to use them. All the while, the gun works at Spandau were producing more of its Maxim clones. The other Western militaries breezed through the early twentieth century without clarity on how they might use machine guns in the next war. Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, the American army’s chief of staff, noted that his service did not have a doctrine, or even a plan, for the guns on order.
The War Department is now confronted with this situation: We have adopted a type of gun, mount and pack outfit, and contracted for a considerable number [120 for field service and 75 for coastal fortifications], and actual deliveries [80 guns] are being made pursuant to this contract; but no plan for the distribution and use of these guns has been formulated.27
Everything was set for disaster when World War I broke out.
In summer 1914, as one nation after another declared war, Germany invaded Belgium and made a thrust into France. Under prewar agreements, Great Britain was committed to provide France with military aid. Much of the British army was spread about the globe on imperial duty, but the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF—a contingent of six regular British infantry divisions and another division of cavalry—quickly crossed the Channel and took its place between the beleaguered Belgian and French militaries. Though the expeditionary force was small (Kaiser Wilhelm II called it a “contemptible little army”), it was experienced, highly trained, and professional, and it made a determined fight. But it was outnumbered and outgunned. Within weeks its ranks were thinned. Soon the BEF was joined by the British version of reserves, known as the Territorials. These units, too, suffered heavy losses.
The near destruction of the core of the British regular army meant that Britain resorted to a massive recruiting drive to build what Lord Kitchener, now the minister of war, would call the New Army. “We have been asked who will volunteer for Foreign service and I have said I will,” wrote Alfred Chater, one of the men mobilizing for war, in a note to his girlfriend as he made his choice that summer. “It was put to us in such a way that unless one is married it is almost impossible to say anything else.” A letter soon after was rueful: “It would be a splendid experience for those who come back.”28 The early months in Europe saw a war of movement, with armies racing across the countryside trying to outflank each other and check each other’s advance. But gradually the lines extended, and extended more, and settled by the fall into the Western Front. The opposing sides faced each other across a maze of trenches, pillboxes, and barbed wire. A modern form of siege warfare set in, as the Allies waited for replacement units to reinforce the lines and allow for an offensive to dislodge the entrenched German troops.
The imbalance of firepower was devastating. The German army went to war with more machine guns, and distributed them more widely, than any of their opponents. It began the war having issued sixteen machine guns to every infantry battalion, while the British army had issued two—thus part of the mismatch faced by the British Expeditionary Force in the war’s opening months.29 In 1892 the German gun works at Spandau had entered into an agreement with Ludwig Loewe and Co. (later the Deutsche Waffen and Munitions Fabrik) that gave the German firm the right to manufacture Maxim-pattern machine guns for sales to Germany and its united governments. Though many German officers initially resisted machine guns, the events at Omdurman and the Russo-Japanese War had made their impression, and by the early twentieth century, manufacturing had begun in earnest of the German modification Maschinengewehr 08, or MG08. The German military had at least forty-nine hundred of these Maxims by the start of the war. Manufacturing accelerated after hostilities began.30 Even Germany’s colonial troops were equipped with machine guns, which led to one of the failed British actions outside of Europe and demonstrated yet again that the British military mind did not yet grasp matters at hand.
In November 1914, a British naval and infantry force moved against East Africa, hoping to push aside the thin contingent of German soldiers along the coast and assert British control over the continent. The crown’s plan included an attack on Tanga, a seaport located in what is now Tanzania. An amphibious British force, accompanied by Indian units, landed outside the city and passed through most of the tropical forest around the port. The enemy’s pickets were waiting. As the invasion force drew within six hundred yards of Tanga’s outskirts, the Germans and their colonial units opened fire. “Bullets came
thick, men falling in all directions,” wrote Captain Richard Meinertzhagen, a British intelligence officer who went ashore in the landing party’s little boats. “Half of the 13th Rajputs turned at once, broke into a rabble and bolted, carrying most of the 61st Pioneers with them.” In the afternoon, the invasion force managed to round up enough of its scattered soldiers to push forward and into the city. “I had collected some 70 Rajputs and two private soldiers of the North Lancs and got them back to the firing line,” the captain wrote. As these small contingents pressed on, they were met by machine guns in the hands of native African soldiers under German command. This was both a reversal and precursor. For decades the British had used machine guns to bloody effect in Africa. Now Africans were pointing machine guns back.
Machine guns were deadly and swept every approach, every house spitting fire. The Kashmir Infantry and two companies of Rajputs were doing well. I particularly admired the pluck of young Hammick of the Rajputs, quite a lad and appearing to revel in bullets. I joined on to some Kashmiri Dogras and we were doing well, taking house after house near the Customs House, when we came to a broad street which was an inferno of machine-gun and rifle fire. This brought us up short. My party was twenty-five men, and nine fell at the first attempt to cross.
Facing heavy fire, the British and Indian soldiers lost their hold on the city. Soon the troops had “dwindled away or were shot and I found myself with two men in the Customs House,” Captain Meinertzhagen wrote. The British attack was broken. Soldiers were scattered along the route of their advance, many shaking with fear. Bullets had struck beehives in the trees, and the insects swarmed upon the miserable force, stinging soldiers cowering on the ground. A British ship, in the harbor, was shelling the shore randomly. Some of the incoming rounds exploded among the British troops. The breakdown was complete. “Most of the men had gone, we were all parched with thirst, ammunition was short and the last remnants of the British firing line were a few British officers, each fighting their own battle,” the captain wrote. Tanga would remain in German hands. British plans were checked by machine-gun fire. Africa was not ever to be the same, though the salient point about machine gunnery was largely lost on the defeated soldiers, who commiserated not about the difficulties, even the pointlessness, of using old tactics against these modern weapons, but about being defeated by Africans.
“The Lancs are very dejected at having lost so many friends, for their best have gone,” Meinertzhagen wrote. “They also feel the disgrace of losing a fight against black troops. They are not a first-class battalion.”31 The captain offered a similarly dismissive reaction to the Rajputs’ fear when they first came under fire. The Indians, he wrote, “were all jabbering like terrified monkeys.” Both comments were instructive. Racism still informed colonial operations. And Captain Meinertzhagen, who published his diaries years later and with the benefit of seeing the outcome on the Western Front, could not, even with the passing of time, understand the technical picture for what it was: Intensive machine-gun fire could hardly be beaten back by men with rifles using tactics of yore.
By this time, the Western Front was taking on an air of permanence, and the war in Europe was settling into the shape for which it would be remembered. The trench systems were a complicated and carefully considered network. A set of forward trenches served as the front line, supporting trenches were dug farther back, and the reserve trenches farther still—all part of a defense in depth that could absorb an enemy thrust. Along the lines, trenches rarely ran in straight lines for any distance; soldiers dug them according to the contours of the countryside—the sides of hills, across knolls, in positions overlooking concealed routes of approach—in ways that gave the occupants a commanding view of the ground out front. This maximized their defensive potential by providing clear fields of fire into likely infiltration routes. On level ground trenches were typically cut into the earth in zigs and zags, a precaution so that if an artillery or mortar shell landed squarely inside, or an enemy infantryman lobbed in a grenade, the blast would be contained and casualties would be limited to the few unlucky souls in one small bit of ditch. But the defense was not simply linear, weaving, and wide. It was buttressed by strong points, concentrations of soldiers and weapons in woodlots or higher ground where they could fight from even more sturdy positions. These strong points were often near enough to one another to be mutually supporting by interlocking fire. In front of all this were listening posts, from which sentries could give early warning of an attack or approaching patrol. And throughout the front proper, snipers scanned the terrain from concealed positions, ready to shoot any man who dared to expose himself by day. When the sun was up, the warrens of earthworks could seem eerily deserted, save for noise and the smoke rising from cooking fires. Soldiers learned not to lift their heads above their parapets until after dark. This lesson was reinforced by the fate of the incautious, who often were shot by high-powered rifle bullets in the head.
Between the opposing trenches was No-Man’s-Land, a ribbon of unoccupied territory that resembled the ground where Japanese soldiers had perished by the thousands at Port Arthur. No-Man’s-Land was narrow in many areas, and soldiers listened to their enemies’ voices. “In my part of the line the trenches are only 50 or 60 yards apart in some places, and we can hear the Germans talking,” Captain Chater wrote his girlfriend after arriving in France. “They often shout to us in English and we respond with cries of ‘waiter!’”32 In other places, one thousand yards separated the soldiers. This open ground was watched over by machine guns and by artillery observers, who were ready to call down fire onto troops in the open by day, or at night, to send flares aloft that might illuminate enemy patrols. The machine guns of the time only faintly resembled their predecessors of fifty years before. No longer were they wheeled about on heavy timber frames between carriage wheels, to be mistaken for cannon. They had shrunk, some of them to under one hundred pounds, including their tripod mounts and other gear, and could be rigged low to the ground. The tripod served as a stable firing platform, making the guns far more accurate than handheld rifles, and allowing gunners to traverse the barrels in sweeps. Smokeless powder in the cartridges of the time meant that gunners crouching behind a machine gun, firing through a slot in the earth, were difficult to spot.
Given the intricacy of the defenses, and the difficulties they posed, large battles were rare. The soldiers on both sides of the trenches followed routines: a full alert, known as “stand-to,” at dawn and dusk. Nightfall brought patrols or manual labor repairing earthworks, filling sandbags, and the like. The soldiers slept in snatches by day. Helmets, the most valuable piece of personal defensive equipment in the entire war, were rarely issued to British soldiers during the first two years of fighting, and heads were unnecessarily exposed to shrapnel and ricochets. Front-line officers carried pistols and swords, weapons that were useless except at exceptionally short range. The British Lee-Enfield rifles were not often fired. Riflemen almost never saw a clear target. The large British bayonet was almost universally issued, though as one historian dryly observed, it was principally “useful for chopping wood and other domestic work.”33
New battalions arrived at the Western Front with roughly one thousand men. Without major battles, they could expect to lose thirty soldiers a month to injury or death, and another thirty to disease.34 Those not struck by German ordnance or weakened by illness endured a singular ordeal: a maze of rats, rot, tinned food, infection, and trash. They were soaked and muddy much of the year and bitterly cold in winter. Random violence—a sniper shot or an incoming artillery or mortar round—was a constant threat. To fortify the young soldiers, many officers issued swigs of rum before missions, hoping to lift spirits in the face of the fear and ugliness ahead.
In fall 1914, as the British units fought in these woeful conditions, new volunteers were being rushed through preparations to take their place. Swarms of men were being kitted out and drilled. Equipment remained scarce. “Rifles and bayonets are also at a premium,” wrot
e Private Arthur Anderson, a teenager who joined the Second Battalion, Ninth Royal Scots. “Only a matter of dozen ancient patterns of each being available per company, with the result being that our progress in rifle drill is somewhat slow.”35 Private Anderson was a meticulous penman and easy writer, and his diary documented the state of British training as he was converted from a Scottish boy to an infantryman in kilt, deemed ready for war. By late November, he had been issued a rifle. In December his unit was practicing maneuvers in city parks, and later in a system of training trenches dug into a golf course at Riccarton. There was much prewar monotony and dreariness: inspections, inoculations, church parades, bland food, and crowded quarters. The practice trenches offered a hint of realism and could have been used to drill a wide range of tactics for attacking German lines defended by machine guns, except that thoughtful tactics for that sort of battle did not yet exist. Brigadier General Ivor Maxse, a senior British officer regarded as a premier tactician, dispensed wisdom that looked not much different from what the Japanese army had tried at Port Arthur. “A single line will fail; two will usually fail, three lines will sometimes fail, but four will usually succeed,” General Maxse said—an official endorsement of attack by human wave.36 Private Anderson waited to be old enough to ship to France. In the interim, he stood picket duty against amphibious landing and collared drunken soldiers home on leave. His record of the training he received reads like the chronicle of an alert and intelligent young man sent nonchalantly to die. “The rest of the time is taken up with the usual routine of drills and exercises,” he wrote, “and putting in a good deal of firing practice and bayonet fighting.”
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