1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [10]
But already in 1887 the clumsy hand-cranked Nordenfeld was obsolescent. Before long it was replaced by the quick-firing fully automatic Maxim and the new Kaiser brought even the ‘old donkeys’ of his General Staff round to the view that a few more machine-guns in other regiments would not come amiss. By the turn of the century the German Army possessed more of them than any other in Europe – and once they had taken up the idea they made the most of it. Machine-gunners were highly trained, there were inter-regimental competitions to keep them on their toes and, as a further incentive, prizes for the winners, who each received a watch inscribed with the Kaiser’s name and presented as his personal gift. The standard of firing was high and every German machine-gunner was a marksman.
In the British military establishment there were men who grasped the significance of this new weapon – the great Sir Garnet Wolseley as early as 1885, General Allenby as late as 1910, and in the years between there were others who urged and lobbied, pleading the case for machine-guns. A few were grudgingly purchased, but the High Command remained unconvinced.
To these professional minds – trained long ago to study ancient battles, schooled in the belief that the classic practices of war were inviolable – the idea of the machine-gun as a short-range weapon for the use of infantry did not come easily, for the infantry were still expected to charge cheering with the bayonet, clearing the way for the cavalry to dash gloriously past and take up the real battle. The General Staff were cavalrymen almost to a man, and if they bothered to think of machine-guns at all they thought of them as highly over-rated weapons. Even when they blazed into action in the Russo-Japanese war, even when Sir Ian Hamilton as British Military Observer reported on their devastating effect, the British General Staff remained unmoved.
The assessment of supplies of equipment and ammunition likely to be required in any foreseeable circumstances had been fixed in 1901 at the end of the Boer War. In 1904 it was reviewed and confirmed. That year Vickers supplied the British Government with ten machine-guns for the use of the British Army. By 1914 when Great Britain went to war with Germany, this standard annual order had not been increased. By now the Infantry Training Manual devoted just a dozen pages to machine-guns, and the Cavalry Manual still enjoined that ‘it must be accepted as a principle that the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel’.
This principle was still held sacred by the army commanders when the British Army went to war with Germany in 1914. By the turn of the year when the bogged-down armies were standing face to face across a dreary stretch of Flanders mud, they had seen no particular reason to change their view. Winter was always a time of breathing space. Soon the spring would come, the armies would be on the move and the cavalry would come into its own.
Chapter 2
There were new graves in the burgeoning cemeteries behind the lines where they had buried the missing of the autumn battles whose bodies had been recovered during the Christmas truce. During January, as the sad parcels of belongings reached home and the last sparks of hope were