TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PROGRESS IN FLANDERS.
If1HE characteristic of the war on land has been the JL rapid and wholesale changes in methods of attack and offence. It must not be supposed that these changes have been confined to the fighting of the Allies—that the Allies have continually been experimenting in new means for overcoming sonic consistent principles of German warfare. The fact is, of course, that the Germans have changed their methods quite as much as we have. No one would have been more astonished than the members of the German Great General Staff if they could have known three years ago how their vast cut-and-dried schemes would miscarry and to what undreamt-of expedients they would be reduced to-day. It has often been said that the Germans firmly believed that they could advance to Paris in a fortnight, and it is probable that they did believe that. When their plans were upset, they were compelled to improvise new ones. It would be a great mistake not to give the Germans credit for the extent and ingenuity of their improvisations. At the same time, we may fairly say without boasting that our own improvisa- tions have been far more remarkable, more successful, and more creditable to us in every military sense. The Germans at least had the existing material and man-power to apply to new purposes. We have built up things almost from a foundation of nothing. The peculiar triumph of Sir Douglas Haig's latest successes in Flanders is that by yet another new method of attack he has overcome the newest, and on the whole we believe the most dangerous and most cunning, of German methods of defence.
Perhaps not every newspaper reader understands how completely the aspect of a battle has changed even since the great affair of the Somme. On the Somme it was possible for our airmen flying above the German lines to photograph perfectly systems of trench fortifications. Any one who has sewn the maps made from the photographs of our airmen knows that successful photography gave a precise instruction to our gunners, who could proceed without the last possibility of mistake to train their guns with an accuracy measured in inches and to reduce the German trench system to dust. Of course below the German trenches and behind the German lines were enormous subterranean borrowings which gave the Germans who used those rooms and corridors perfect safety from shell-fire while they were awaiting the attack, but the very qualities of this type of dug-out involved considerable moral disadvantages. It is well known among soldiers that when an advancing line of men has been allowed to lie down under fire, it is more difficult—except of course among highly trained troops—to induce them to rise and continue their advance than it would have been to keep them moving if they had never lain down. That is the result of an extremely natural and explicable operation of the average human mind. It is a counterpart of the experience of the Germans in using their deep dug-outs. Under the hottest of bombardnsents, the men who found themselves quite secure while they remained in a kind of " Safe Deposit," were much more reluctant to emerge into the reeling and half-obliterated world around them than men would have been who had had throughout only the partial shelter of a shallow trench. One of the notorious facts in the Somme fighting was that we took enormous numbers of prisoners. This was due to the Germans surrendering in large numbers in their dug-outs. They kept putting off the extremely disagreeable moment for emerging ; and in most cases they put it off till it was too late, and a few men with bombs at the entrance to a dug-out could hold up and accept the surrender of hundreds of prisoners.
The Germans themselves quickly recognized these dis- advantages, and they entirely changed their system into what we see at present. On the Flanders front now our airmen find very little to photograph. The regular lines of trenches are not there. The tell-tale hedges of beautifully aligned barbed wire are also not there. What the Germans have done is to employ the craters caused by our bom- bardment, and to trick them out with every device that will make them as tenable as possible without betraying them to the observing eyes that fly above in the air. The art of camouflage has reached a pitch never before heard of. No doubt dug-outs are still freely used, but in the front lines they are not nearly so deep as before. They tend rather to be temporary rest.places dug into the sides of the craters. And where craters which lie near together are put into a state of defence, they have been joined. together by tunnels. As for barbed wire, it is of course still greatly used; but it is placed here, there, and everywhere, so that our airmen cannot, by merely following its lines, discover any clue to the German positions. Sometimes the Germans are behind a bunch of barbed wire, sometimes they are not. The forward craters are not very strongly held, for no amount of defence or camouflage can make them anything but dangerous places to keep. ' Above all, in the front lines the Germans make use of their famous blockhouses of reinforced concrete which are known as " pill-boxes." These are so tough that the fragments of shell bursting near by have little or no effect upon them. Nothing but a direct hit by something really heavy will knock one out, though it is true that the concussion of high explosives near them frequently reduces the occupants to unconsciousness. The occupants are often found in this state with bleeding ears and noses. While the German front lines are more lightly held than before, the reserves further behind the lines are stronger than ever. These reserves wait their opportunity for a counter-attack, which is delivered with the greatest possible force when our men are in the very inhospitable country just vacated by the German forward troops. In describing the new German methods we must not forget the fortified farms. In this part of the country the homesteads generally stand up a little above the surrounding district, not very high it is true, but still in some places looking almost like the Isle of Ely as seen from the fenlands of Cambridgeshire. Frequently the farms are surrounded by moats. It is clear that farms of this sort lend themselves supremely to fortification. They have, indeed, become most formidable fortresses, and there is not even the consolation that the guns in these places are an easy mark for our artillery. Among groups of houses the Germans seem to leave nothing standing that could possibly " give them away." They pull down everything into a kind of rubble-heap, and guns and machine-guns are somewhere in that heap. But our airmen in trying to discover them are not now guided by any such things as the gun-pits and embrasures which in former days they were accustomed to look for. This brief review of the new conditions of fighting will show what unexampled difficulties our troops have had to overcome; and the more we are impressed by the difficulties, the deeper must be the admiration we feel for Sir Douglas Haig 's complete and very speedy success in the battles of the Menus Road. It is an open secret that experienced British officers regarded the latest German methods as the most formidable yet invented. We look forward with intense interest to learning some time, but not perhaps just now, by what devices Sir Douglas Haig overwhelmed the German resistance without apparently any boggling, delay, or un- expected mischances at a single point. it is a very strange fact that it should be possible to make a mystery of our new methods, but we suppose the truth is that there are very few survivors (except prisoners) from the German front craters and pill-boxes, and that it is possible to keep secret the nature of operations which were actually performed in the open. Now that the Germans know that Marshal von Hindenburg's most up-to-date itgenuities have availed them nothing, they are bound to suffer further in their confidence, though it would be wrong to conclude that their fighting value is still not fairly high.
The Germans in ridding themselves of the moral dis- advantages of their Somme methods have to put up with a new disadvantage—which is that their necessarily scattered, and disconnected scheme of defence deprives the German soldier of his old sense of solidarity. The German soldier is not remarkable for what is professionally called individual initiative, and yet German expectations of successful defence now depend entirely upon the exercise of that quality. When the Germans began to see how things were going on the Somme they set to work to prepare the so-called Hindenburg Lino behind. The difference between circumstances then and
now is that there is no possible Hindenburg Line behind the present German front. There is a line, of course, but it is a line that the Germans simply cannot afford to lose.
Any one who looks at the map will see that when we have progressed a little further we shall be in a position to strike
heavily at Lille from the north and at the Belgian coast towns from the south. All the accounts from the front prove that the fighting has reached a degree of intensity never before known. There is no leisure or rest for any ono. The instru- ments of destruction whioh fly through the air by day and night are more numerous and more various than before.
Even what our magnificently trained Expeditionary Force suffered from in the retreat from Mons to the Marne cannot be compared with the quantity or quality of the latest inventions fn flame and missile. On what are called by courtesy " dull " days, the strain to which the enemy, even more than ourselves, is subjected is terrific beyond words. We imagine that for one shell that the Germans send over we throw across four, five, or perhaps six. There is also what may be called a kind of camouflage in artillery work, when the drum- fire which the Germans regard as the sure herald of a coming attack culminates in no attack. The nerves of the enemy are, in fact, kept at the breaking-point the whole time. His counter-attacks of course continue, as his methods necessarily require, but they are always local in object and extent. The soldiers who have spent all their lives thinking according to the gospel of Clausewitz now find themselves compelled to abandon the primary doctrine of Clausewitz, which is to defend yourself invariably by attacking. Palmerston, when he was once amiably discussing the probable outcome of a war between France and Great Britain, informed his French interlocutor that, in his opinion, the British would win because they would " hold out ten minutes longer." We are doubly assured that the doctrine of the ten minutes will suffice us now, not only because we should always hold out ten minutes longer than the Germans, but because as things are going the Germans have much more to hold out against.
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