The Gun (20 page)

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.”
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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!’”
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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.”
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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.
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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,” wrote 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.”
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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.
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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.”

British fascination with the bayonet persisted in the face of all evidence that it was a weapon long outmoded. In theory, the mettle of disciplined men moving forward into fire to slash and stab their foes was enough to unnerve almost any enemy force. In practice, moving forward with a big knife into machine-gun fire, across open ground and in extended lines, was not much different from Zulu warriors attacking British Gatlings with spears at Ulundi in 1879, or Sudanese men rushing with swords toward General Kitchener’s Maxim guns along the Nile in 1898. Casualty reports from World War I were not fully reliable, especially in real time. Lists were incomplete or repetitious, and there was no standardized method among the Allies for collecting and distributing information crucial to assessing the wounding agents in war. But the available statistics, for all of their flaws, virtually roared on one point: Bayonets were unquestionably ineffective in what war had become. One military critic wrote in February 1916 that data collected from a French army corps that had been in heavy action found that bayonets caused 0.5 percent of casualties, while shells, grenades, trench explosions, shrapnel, and bullets accounted for a combined 92.5 percent (7 percent of the injuries were of undetermined cause).
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That even one-half of one percent of the casualties were caused by bayonets was a testimony less to their martial utility than to the fact that both sides insisted on fighting with them. Such data might have suggested to the war’s planners, and to the designers of infantry-school curricula, that perhaps it was time to explore an alternative set of weapons and means of fighting. And yet as fresh troops were being drilled to enter the war, prowess with the bayonet remained near the center of infantry training. Thus the British manual on the subject, a terrifying period piece:

The bayonet is essentially an offensive weapon. In a bayonet assault all ranks go forward to kill or be killed, and only those who have developed skill and strength by constant training will be able to kill. The spirit of the bayonet must be inculcated into all ranks, so that
they go forward with the aggressive determination and confidence of superiority born of continued practice, without which a bayonet charge will not be effective.
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There happened to be other factors that made bayonet charges ineffective; Hiram Maxim and the European gun works that received licenses to manufacture his patterns had seen to that. But the romance with cold steel endured. Traditions—and bad ideas—die more slowly than men.

As Private Anderson waited for his turn in France, news from the front was grim. The Royal Scots’ First Battalion suffered heavy casualties soon after it landed, and two of his friends were killed. By this time, early in 1915 and after a winter of misery, British troops had shed illusions of war. The early cheer had vanished. One noncommissioned officer, A. J. Rixon of the London Irish Rifles, also left a diary of his experiences. It was a laconic account of daily life and tactical choices that filled him with anguish and disgust. “Trenches are like a maze only a trifle more dangerous,” he wrote, describing the difficulty of moving any distance on even the friendly side of the line. “An awful time. 1½ miles doubled up like a pocket knife. Reached the corner but then had to go along a road about a mile under fire all the time. One man hit in the leg, almost wish it had been me, if this is a usual thing.”
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As his unit prepared for an attack, his diary entries assumed an air of helplessness and dread. “Once more I wish I was single, no game for a man with responsibilities cant do as would like.
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Life not my own.”
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When he watched another unit return, his emotions almost overwhelmed him. “Not many came out unwounded, those who did all have souvenirs, helmets etc. Some wounds sickening but boys bearing up wonderfully no grumbling. Enemy throwing petrol bombs on wounded, and many burned to death ammunition exploding in meantime. Snipers refuse to let S.Bs
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go near wounded between lines many shot if attempt to move. God help enemy if boys ever get at them.” Sergeant Rixon was not a young man. He was thirty years old and responsible for keeping his company’s soldiers ready and leading them in battle. But he was spent. Worn
down and confused, he was near despair. “The language in this trench is awful,” he wrote. “Fed up with everything. Its not war but murder.”

The resolve he finally found within was rooted in resignation. “Must buck up,” he wrote, “as I am not dead yet.”

Still the tactics had not evolved. The London Irish Rifles went into battle with its soldiers marching in extended lines across No-Man’s-Land. Sergeant Rixon saw the madness of this even while urging his men along, enforcing the absurdity by shouting orders to keep the formation intact. He described himself as: