Verdun and the Russian Drive

Verdun and the Russian Drive

BY DR. JOSEPH M. TANNER

THE STRATEGY OF VERDUN Just what the Germans intended by their attack upon Ver- dun is a subject of controversy by military experts and has been the source of speculation from almost every conceivable point of view. The German general staff has some of the ablest minds which the present war has brought into action. But there is something beyond the discovery of military experts that is still a mystery about what we call formally a battle, but what, compared with other military struggles, might almost be designated as the war of Verdun. Can the Germans take Verdun? The best military writers generally concede that they can if they are willing to pay the price. In a trench defensive battle, the odds are always against the offensive. Some say it takes two men to dig one out of a trench, others three, and it is known positively that in some in-

stances ten men were exacted for every one driven from his ma- chine gun and his defensive position in the trench. The question therefore resolves itself into this: Can Germany afford to pay the price? what will the price be? There must be some If so, far-reaching consequence that military experts do not see in the genius of capture of Verdun that would cause the great military Germany to risk so much on such a hazardous undertaking. If Verdun falls, what will Germany have gained? The French certainly be predicted will fall back on Toul, and it may almost that every mile of the one hundred and fifty between Verdun and Paris is a net work of trenches. It is true that the German so- called sector, or military line of a given section, would be short- ened, and Germany saved perhaps the need of 200,000 men to hold' the position she now occupies; but Germany must have lost in her total casualties up to the present time in this battle clo?e on to half a million. It will be noticed at Verdun that the French have made but gaining cer- few attacks. These have been for the purpose of tain positions which they were willing to pay an extra price to secure. Otherwise the whole strategy of the French at this fort _

has been to kill as many Germans as possible with a minimum loss of their own men. The recent assault of the Germans upon the revealed a somewhat fort of Vaux and its capture by them has

872 IMPROVEMENT ERA remarkable situation. After the most intensive bombardment of this position,and the loss of thousands of men in the attack, the Germans finally reached Vaux and found there of its defenders only seven hundred men. The number of prisoners was out of all proportion compared to the sacrifice that the Germans had

to make. This capture of Vaux, therefore, leads to all sorts of speculations. In the first place, there must have been a vastly increased so-called efficiency of the machine gun and there is a secret wonderment as to the question of great underground tun- nels leading from the French trenches back to the rear through which a majority of the men defending a certain position may escape when they are finally compelled to surrender it. The nature and extent of these trenches are, of course, military secrets. They will undoubtedly be objects of study more interesting than the catacombs of Rome after the war is over. Some writers are profuse in their declarations that after the war the rush of tourists to the battlefields of France will, by its enormous contribution, more than rebuild all the cities of that country which the Ger- mans have destroyed. In the expenditure of ammunition and the loss of life the strategic skill of the battle of Verdun is, without a parallel, the

greatest in the history of the world. The roar of its tremendous guns has been heard at a distance of more than a hundred miles. Its great artillery has so torn up the earth, destroyed forests and changed the natural scenery of the Touraine, that those who have visited the place and are familiar with its landscape will scarcely recognize it. A single week of this famous battle has perhaps consumed as much ammunition as the entire Franco-Prussian war. The German people have been taught through their papers that Verdun was to be the decisive battle, that the fate of Europe awaited the downfall of this French fort, that its fall was certain and that with its fall peace was assured. It is difficult to escape the belief that there is not something political in this battle. The center of the German army was fixed there, and the center was presided over by the crown prince. The crown prince, it has long been known, was impatient for the fight. He has fallen com- pletely under the control of the Prussian military party that has been urging war for a number of years. Before Verdun he had done nothing to distinguish himself, indeed two or three times he had almost been entrapped. His face must be saved, his repu- tation established, so that the military party of Germany may be triumphant when the war ends. Nothing would do more to pre- serve and maintain the military regime of the extremists in Ger- many than the triumph of the center at Verdun. What would the fall of Verdun decide? Nothing. The Germans would not be one step nearer peace. They would have paid extravagantly for their triumph, without having gained any

VERDUN AND THE RUSSIAN DRIVE 873

decisive advantages, and yet the battle of Verdun goes on. The failure of the Germans at that point means more against Ger- many than its success would mean against France and her allies, in my opinion.

THE RUSSIAN DRIVE

The Russian drive is vastly more important as a decisive op- eration than the battle of Verdun. It should be known that in the recent conflict the acquisition of territory by one or the other of the great contending parties is of comparatively small import- ance. Germany may win territory. She may occupy Belgium, overrun Poland, annihilate Serbia. These great feats of her armies may conclude nothing. It is a struggle between armies. One of the other parties must take an army, not a country, before it can be considered a conquest. If Germany, in its great drive from the Dunajec, had captured even a wing of the Russian army, there would have been in that drive something decisive, but the Russian army in its retreat remained intact and awaited only re- organization to come again at Austria and Germany in full force. True, there may be advantages in the occupation of the enemy's territory, but advantages and decisive results are two very differ- ent things. Two weeks of the first part of the Russian drive, ac- cording to reports from Petrograd, have cost the Germans two hundred thousand prisoners. That would probably be in dead, wounded and prisoners, a loss to Austria of something like four hundred thousand men, and in such a rout it would not be exces- sive to compute the loss of Austria in total casualties at half a million. That would mean more than one-third of the entire Aus- trian army pitted against the Russians. The fall of Czernovwitz put the Russians in control of all southern Galicia. It is the cap- ital of Bukovina and has been taken and lost a number of times. The drive into the so-called sector of Czernovwitz naturally di- vided the southern wing of the Austrian army. A part of it was driven back on to the Carpathian mountains and the southern division into the plains of Hungary. At this critical moment the Germans undertook to draw soldiers from the northeastern part of Poland, and at the same time the Russians began an intense bombardment from the western banks of the Dwina. The Ger- mans were therefore held in the clutch of a fierce Russian attack from the north. The accounts given by the German prisoners of these bombardments by the Russians indicate that they are the most terrible which they have experienced in the war. The effect of the high explosives manufactured by the Japanese has been the death of a large number of soldiers crouched in the bottom of the trenches where they were safe from the blows of exploding shrapnel. It is hinted that these Japanese munitions are some-

874 IMPROVEMENT ERA thing entlreiy new, that their destrnctiveness is something more terrible than the war has yet revealed. The inability of the Ger- mans to withdraw any considerable number of their men from the north gives us some incontrovertible evidence that Germany is running short of men.

It should be remembered that the battle front between the Russians and Germans and Austrians is unlike that in the west. The entire country of something like a thousand miles from Riga to Rumania is broken by large swamps which compelled the Russians in their retreat, a year ago, to divide its army so as to get passage between the narrow strips that lay between these swamps. These swamps afford natural barriers. They are bet- ter fortifications than anything erected along the French frontier. Against the tremendous odds which the Germans enjoyed in con- sequence of these marshes the Russians must contend. If once they break through and drive the enemy beyond them, in the di- rection of Warsaw, the situation will change to the advantage of the Russians. In the present drive, however, the Russians se- lected the southern frontier because, throughout that part of Galicia and Bukovina, the touraine consists of rolling hills suit- able both for attacks and defense, and the Russian army is there- fore not hampered by the marshes that would have made an at- tack in the north so much more difficult. The reasons, therefore, that this attack was made in the south are not due, as some sup- pose, to the fact that Hindenberg is in command of the northern division. The attack in the south was made for two very distinct reasons: first, the contour of the country was favorable from the standpoint of the Russians, and in the second place the line in the south was manned by Austrians and throughout all the war they had been proved to be inferior to Russian soldiery. An- other reason, and that is that on to this Russian front the Aus- trians have taken army corps of Italians, Bohemians and Slavs, that at heart have no courage for fighting, and there is reason to suspect that Russia's enormous capture of so-called Austrian pris- oners is due to the fact that the men Russia captured were not Austrians by race but Austrians by nationality. In other words, they were not Germans, neither were they Huns, but Italians and Slavs who, it is suspected, under favorable opportunities would be glad to surrender and await the end of the war as prisoners in Russia.