To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [92]
Writing home a few days later, John Kipling asked for "a really good pair of bedroom slippers (fluffy & warm with strong soles)." Then, after an 18-mile march through rain: "Just a hurried line as we start off tonight. The front-line trenches are nine miles off from here so it wont be a very long march. This is THE great effort to break through & end the war.... One will be in the thick of it tomorrow."
12. NOT THIS TIDE
MORE THAN ANY previous war, this one depended on huge quantities of industrial products and the raw materials needed to make them. The Germans soon coined a word for it, Materialschlact, the battle of materiel. Among the more important goods was precision optical equipment—aerial reconnaissance camera lenses, periscopes, rangefinders, telescopic sights for sniper rifles, and binoculars. All were essential, particularly the last: when the lives of his men on the battlefield could depend on locating an enemy sniper or machine-gunner, every officer or NCO needed a reliable pair of binoculars hanging from his neck. The British military, however, was running disastrously short of binoculars. An appeal to the public brought in some 2,000 pairs (including four each from the King and Queen), but not the tens of thousands needed. Manufacturing high-quality lenses requires special glass that is difficult to make: it must transmit light without flaws, dimming, or distortion, yet be strong enough not to crack or shatter when ground and polished. Optical factories in England were capable of increasing their output only slowly.
And so, in mid-1915, just as preparations were getting under way for the big attack at Loos, British authorities turned to the world's leading manufacturer of precision optics: Germany.
Before the war, German companies, like the famous firm of Carl Zeiss in Jena, had been major exporters of top-of-the-line optical goods. From London, an agent of the Ministry of Munitions was quietly dispatched to neutral Switzerland to propose a deal. The answer from Germany was prompt and positive, and the outlines of an agreement were sketched out. The German War Office would immediately supply 8,000 to 10,000 each of two types of binoculars, one for infantry officers and one for artillery officers. "For the future," reads the dry official record of the History of the Ministry of Munitions, "they were prepared to deliver, six weeks after the signing of the contract, 10,000 to 15,000 [of each type] and they were even prepared to demobilise special workmen from the Army to enable these orders to go through quickly." Of lower-grade binoculars for NCOs, Germany could supply 10,000 to 12,000 immediately and 5,000 a month thereafter. It would also be happy to supply 5,000 to 10,000 telescopic sights per month "and to provide as many rangefinders as the British Government required. In order to obtain samples of the instruments, it was suggested that the British Forces might inspect the equipment of captured German officers and artillery."
And what did Germany want in return for this astonishing bounty of tools that would better aim British rifles and howitzers at German troops? One treasured commodity, vital for everything from telephone wires to factory machinery to the tires and fan belts of motor vehicles, a commodity unavailable to Germany because of a tight blockade imposed by the Royal Navy, but abundant in the Allies' African and Asian colonies: rubber. Without rubber the Germans, among many other problems, faced the prospect of using steel tires on their army trucks, which rapidly chewed roads to bits. The rubber, it was agreed, would be delivered to Germany at the Swiss border.
During August 1915, the first month of this top-secret devil's bargain, the Germans delivered to the British even more than first agreed to: some 32,000 pairs of binoculars, 20,000 of them the higher-quality types for officers.