The Last Full Measure (28 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
The workmanship of the guns [Gatling, Gardner, Nordenfelt, and Hotchkiss] is exquisite. Their weak point does not lie here, but arises from another cause, which would be very difficult to remedy in them. It is said by some military men that no machine-gun has ever been brought into action which has not become “jammed” at some critical moment.
[At Abu Klea, Sudan, for example, a British column under Sir Hubert Stewart was attacked by a much larger force of Mahdists on June 16, 1885. The single Gardner machine gun was placed outside the square and got off seventy rounds before jamming and being overrun with the loss of eight British killed.] Even if that is not strictly true, still the liability to accident from this cause is very great. A certain percentage of all cartridges fail to explode promptly at the instant of being struck: to use the technical expression, they “hang fire.” Suppose that, while the handle of the gun is being worked at its highest speed, one of these sluggish cartridges happens to enter the barrel. It is struck and instantly, before it explodes, the breech is opened, and the cartridge begins to be withdrawn again out of the barrel. At this instant the explosion takes place, breaks the shell in two, drives the front half out of the breech and sometimes blows up the magazine. At any rate, it always drives the forward end of the cartridge firmly into the chamber of the barrel; and if the magazine does not explode, the next rotation of the crank drives a loaded cartridge into the chamber; the gun then becomes blocked or jammed, and of no further use.
37
Maxim’s gun was, by comparison, self-regulating: “If a round fails to fire, it stops the action of the gun.… The gunner can then manually eject a faulty round … and continue firing as before; the misfire does not result in the gun becoming jammed solid and thus useless.”
38
By the 1880s, Maxim’s machine gun was “bowling over and dropping like nine pins” (to use the sporting analogy favored by British commentators) large numbers of native warriors who through some ancient heroic compulsion for massed frontal attack fed themselves into the killing machine. An observer at
Omdurman salivated: “The Dervishes seemed to rise up out of the ground, making full use of [the available cover]. For a moment it seemed that they might overwhelm Kitchener’s forces [
as
] in dense array, moved to consume their feast of flesh, but their ranks were torn by murderous machine-gun fire. As soon as the gunners found the range, the enemy fell in heaps, and it was evident that to the Maxims went a large measure of credit in repelling the Dervish onslaught. [The official account credits them with three-quarters of all casualties.]”
39
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.
IX
“T
HIS
H
IGH
P
LACE OF
S
ACRIFICE”
“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, 1914
1
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, 1916
2
C
ORPORAL 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 statistics 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
