The Gun (21 page)

... personally being more or less guilty of inanely and with parrot like frequency exhorting the boys to keep their 5 paces, although after the first 300 yards I couldn’t see more than 50 yards each side of me, owing to the smoke, and vision obscured by smoke helmet. I realised after a time that my efforts were being wasted the smoke helmet smothering my voice so shut up, confining myself to watching if any of the boys went down so as to replace them by carrying men whom we had with us for that purpose. I don’t wish to give the impression by the above that I was absolutely coolness itself; I wasn’t by any means, but in a horrible state of funk, as men were falling all around me.
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As the army gained experience of the sort that was unraveling Sergeant Rixon, the replacement soldiers were drilled to fight in the same ways. Back in Scotland, Private Anderson’s battalion’s “bayonet fighting team” was preparing for a military tourney and exhibition for local dignitaries. “When the great day arrives the weather is broken, and by the time it is our turn to go on the rain is coming down in torrents and the ground is practically deserted, with the exception of the judges and a few notables, all of whom are comfortably settled in a covered stand,” he wrote. “Clad only in shorts and singlets we bravely carry through our performance.” The British army had at last realized that it needed machine guns in far greater numbers than it had them. A royal warrant in fall 1915 had ordered the creation of a Machine Gun Corps.
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And in addition to the redoubtable Vickers, the British army was also issuing Lewis guns, light machine guns of American design that had been rejected in the United States but that were being quickly produced at a gun works in Birmingham,
England. The gun weighed less than thirty pounds and could be moved about the battlefield much more quickly than the heavier guns of the day. But in all of Private Anderson’s diary, there is no mention of machine-gun training for the war. He was busy mastering his rifle’s potential as a twentieth-century spear.

All the while, the battalion was shrinking. Its members were being sent to France as replacements for the ravaged battalions on the front. In April 1916, Private Anderson’s turn to ship out came, and he departed for the French countryside, where he soon encountered garish sights. Almost two full years into the war, some soldiers were not yet in dull-colored clothes. “French soldiers, in their red and blue uniforms, are also much in evidence now, and much amusement is caused by the sight of French Cavalry, complete with brass helmets and breast-plates,” he wrote. “In some cases the helmets are covered with sacking and breast-plates daubed with some dull substances, but there is no doubt that such a get-up could hardly be considered appropriate to modern war conditions.”

Private Anderson was assigned to the infamous Labyrinth, a warren of trenches below the Germans in Vimy Ridge. A French unit had held the position in the winter, before the Scots arrived, and had buried its dead soldiers in the parapets; as the soil eroded in the warm spring rains, decomposing bits of corpses slipped out, filling the trenches with nauseating smells and occupying the attention of rats. Private Anderson had his first encounter with the German machine guns, Maxim’s offspring from Spandau, when he was part of a night patrol sent into No-Man’s-Land. A stray round passed through another soldier’s knee. The young Scots huddled near the wounded man, hoping he would not cry out and reveal their location. It was no use.

The Germans heard all right, but their fusillade of bullets passed wide of us. We completed our job and, helping our wounded man along, returned cautiously in what we trusted was the right direction. No sounds could be heard from the trench before us, and we were compelled to lie flat in the mud, hoping to get some sign to let us know we were at our own lines. After a bit, getting fed-up lying in the dirt our sergeant decided to risk giving a shout. Fortunately for us it was answered by one of our own sentries, and we scrambled back to the shelter of the trench, but not before my dear old friend
Miller, hit by a bullet, dropped dead over the parapet. This is a hot spot for machine-guns.

Private Anderson’s indoctrination continued its ghastly escalation. In mid-May 1916, the Germans began a heavy bombardment along the lines. Within two days shells were landing and exploding on Private Anderson’s sector through the night. His unit was put on alert ahead of an anticipated ground attack. The battalion began to lose men in the barrage, including a captain, who was carried past dead. The side of his head was gone. That evening the German artillery fell silent. The attack came.

They are moving across the open being pretty well bunched up in places, and affording an excellent target. Our front-line is unable to stop their advance however, and we in the support line get orders to open fire, and pour a steady rifle and machine-gun fire into them. By now, also, our field guns have started shelling and the attackers are being badly cut up but they reach our front line, which has now been vacated, and our own troops are doubling back over the open to our support trenches.

British guns pounded their own front-line trenches, hoping to dislodge the German soldiers. Private Anderson knew what this meant. He waited for the order to counterattack. When it came, he experienced his first taste of running into concentrated machine-gun fire.

It is still twilight when the signal is given and we go over the top, advancing across the open ground with difficulty, as two lines of trenches have to be “jumped” by means of narrow bridges, which causes much congestion. Everyone is in the charge; stretcher-bearers, signalers and the Lewis gunners, and we make our way blindly forward through a chaos of bursting shells and machine-gun bullets. It is only possible to see one’s nearest neighbors in the smoke, the sense of direction is entirely lost, and there is an awful feeling of being very much alone. The noise, which at first was deafening, is hardly noticed after a few minutes, shell splinters and bullets are practically ignored, and dead and wounded lying in the way are only looked upon with a sort of mild interest. The sole idea seems to be to keep
on until something happens. It appears as though it would be impossible to get through such an inferno, but at last we reach the trench. The Germans have put up a stout resistance but we managed to get about sixty prisoners before they break away for their own lines.

The fighting stalled. Anderson’s company had retaken its trench. Thirty-five of its soldiers were killed. Nearly one hundred others were wounded. The trench routine returned.

Equipment can drive tactics. In a nimble military organization it often does. The British misapprehension of machine guns was related in part to the fact that British units had few machine guns of their own, which meant few officers and soldiers had experience with automatic fire before facing it from the opposite side. Those who did gain a sound technical and tactical understanding were often incapacitated or killed, which resulted in a regular winnowing of hard-won knowledge. Where were the British machine guns? This was a question being asked at the top. During 1915, David Lloyd George, then serving as the nation’s minister of munitions, tried to determine why the British were underequipped with a weapon that the enemy had stockpiled. He found that from August 1914 to June 1915, the British military requested only 1,792 machine guns from the Vickers plant. “This would work out to two machine guns per battalion with none left for training at home,” he wrote, with palpable anger, and “no margin for losses or breakages.” The munitions minister, soon to become the British premier, excoriated the senior officer class. “It took our generals many months of terrible loss to realise the worth of the machine gun. They were converted by representations from officers who had witnessed its deadly effect in action. The farther they were from the fighting line the less impressed were military commanders with the power and peril of the machine gun,” he wrote. He added a caustic aside: “It is an incredible story for anyone who had no actual experience of the fanatical hostility displayed by the Higher Commands to any new ideas.”

In summer 1915, the munitions ministry confronted Lord Kitchener about the military’s pitiable requests for automatic arms and demanded estimates for future manufacture. Kitchener, having commanded the British and Egyptian forces at Omdurman, might have been expected
to know something about the machine gun’s value in combat. But in a meeting with Sir Eric Geddes, one of Lloyd George’s deputies, he was indifferent. He had no idea how many guns the forces would need. Nor was he able to offer guidelines for purchases through early 1916.

“Do you think I am God Almighty that I can tell you what is wanted nine months ahead?” Kitchener said.

Geddes insisted. At last Kitchener answered that “the proportion was to be two machine guns per battalion as a minimum, four as a maximum and anything above four was a luxury.” Geddes was disgusted. (“This was the opinion of the Secretary of War, who was looked upon generally as our greatest soldier,” he wrote.) He asked Kitchener to sign a memorandum to that effect.

Geddes, satisfied that he had a document that would enable him to deliver more machine guns to the front, presented the memorandum to Lloyd George. Lloyd George was aghast. He had quietly taken to talking on his own with soldiers returning from the horrors of France, and had been told repeatedly that the troops needed more machine guns. As minister of munitions, he had no authority to exceed the secretary of war’s request. He seemed not to care. He almost tore up Kitchener’s memo, but Geddes managed to save it for posterity. Lloyd George then broke policy.

“Take Kitchener’s maximum [four per battalion],” he said. “Square it, multiply that result by two; and when you are in sight of that, double it again for good luck.”

In this way, over the objections of its most senior officer, the British military began to get its guns. By 1918 it would have 138,349 more machine guns on order. It planned for nearly 200,000 more in 1919. The stock on hand in June 1915, roughly at the time of the spat between Geddes and Kitchener, was 1,330 machine guns in all. Lloyd George was unapologetic to the end. “Nor do I think that the Army ever had cause to regret that the supply proposed by Lord Kitchener in July, 1915, was increased sixteenfold. Photographs taken of dead Highlanders lying in swaths in front of a single German machine gun on the battlefield of Loos, which I saw some weeks later, taken by Colonel Arthur Lee and brought to me, finally disposed of any qualms I may have had at having taken upon myself the responsibility for overriding military opinion.”

Military opinion was overridden. The material side of machine gunnery
was now being addressed, at least for the British. The tactical side remained far behind.

Two years into the war, in summer 1916, Kitchener’s New Army was deemed sufficiently ready to attack. The Allies chose to open a French and British offensive in the countryside near the River Somme, a rural area of northwestern France, striking along a wide belt of front. The battle was meant in part to take pressure off the French at Verdun, where Germany had launched an offensive of its own. For the early part of the war, the front near the Somme had been entirely a French sector. By late 1915, as the Royal Scots arrived at the Labyrinth, British troops had been assuming command on the lines. The ground was hardly ideal for an attack. No-Man’s-Land here was wide-open, usually treeless, and covered with a fine, chalky soil. Cover was all but nonexistent.

By this time, the Machine Gun Corps had come into existence, and gunners attended an eight-week course. Lloyd George’s requisitions were having an effect in the field. A division now had 204 machine guns at its disposal; at the start of the war, a division had 24.
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But while the British had become materially more formidable, their tactics for storming enemy positions remained undeveloped. A veteran French captain from the 153rd Infantry, André Laffargue, had begun working out new methods. His ideas held promise. Laffargue had survived traditional attacks across open ground, into the teeth of German defenses. He grasped that machine guns were not only defensive weapons. Like Captain Parker in the United States, he proposed that the weapons be rushed forward and used to suppress enemy positions as the infantry moved close. “The machine gun should be pushed as far as possible in front of the halted line of fire,” he wrote. “It will enable the infantry line to advance for some time under the cover of its fire; it is the tooth of the attack.”
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Through bloody experience, Captain Laffargue had also learned that enemy machine guns needed to be knocked out for an attack to have a realistic chance of success. He proposed that light artillery move behind the attack, like a gigantic rifle, to blast German machine guns by direct fire whenever German guns appeared. He also proposed a detailed reconnaissance of any trench to be attacked, with the intention of locating the enemy’s machine guns so that they might be silenced before they reaped their toll. “The weapon
that inflicts the heaviest losses on infantry is the machine gun, which uncovers itself suddenly and in a few seconds lays out the assailants by ranks. It is therefore absolutely necessary to destroy them before the attack or have the means of putting them out of action as soon as they disclose themselves.”
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Captain Laffargue’s proposals were not flawless; he still believed in the value of rigid open-order formations. But he also urged riflemen to fire their weapons as they advanced, and to suppress German fighters as they fired back. Taken together, his proposals were well enough regarded in French military circles that Joseph Joffre, chief of the French General Staff, circulated an article Laffargue wrote throughout the French army. It was translated into English by the
Infantry Journal,
an American publication, and given wide circulation among officers in 1916.

None of the proposals appeared to influence British planning for the offensive ahead.