Offensive (military)

“ They will learn that there is in the fury of an insulted nation a danger which the most exquisite military combinations cannot remove, which the most perfectly served artillery cannot sweep away, before which all the bayonets, and gunpowder, and lines of fortification in the world are useless—and compared with which the science of the commander is pedantry, and strategy but a word. ”

“ In regard to the other point of the proclamation to which you refer, I desire to say that I do not think the Enemy can either misconstrue or urge anything against it, or undertake to make unusual retaliation. The shooting of men who shall rise in arms against an Army in the Military occupation of a Country, is merely a necessary measure of defense, and entirely according to the usages of civilized warfare. ”

“ In many cases, doubtless, as in the landing on the French coast, no real benefit was derived from them, and they only tended to exasperate and embitter a contest that already was sufficiently imbued with these feelings. They brought the horrors of war on defenceless people, as well as on the enemy’s military and naval resources. In so doing they harassed and annoyed, and to some extent lent their aid to the otherwise needless dispersion of the enemy’s troops ”

“ But I considered that he was at fault. Assassins must not be killed by passers-by; it is the business of the gendarmes to arrest them. In war it is the army’s business—it is strong enough for the job—to punish the enemy. ”

“ If the people of that portion of an invaded coun­try which is not yet occupied by the enemy, or of the whole country, at the approach of a hostile army, rise, under a duly authorized levy, en masse to resist the invader, they are now treated as public enemies, and, if captured, are prisoners of war. ”

“ It was then that an officer advancing with his men, in the midst of a deadly fire, silenced one of the largest and most deadly guns of the enemy—a deed that has seldom, if ever, been exceeded for noble daring and self-sacrificing patriotism in the annals of any age or of any country. ”

“ Our own attacks have therefore not to be directed against the enemy's strong points but against his weak spots-the flanks, the rear and the lines of communication-if possible in his administrative areas. Infiltration of our own attacking troops through the enemy lines is therefore of supreme importance. ”

“ The resources of the enemy in men seemed endless, their persistence remarkable, their recklessness in the face of sure death almost unbelievable. The noise was terrific; the constant rattle of the machine guns, the spitting of rifles, the booming of the artillery, the whining and crashing of shells, the yells of the charging troops, the shrieks of the wounded. In the British trenches the men were assembled, ready to pour out at the whistle and repel the assault on open ground ”

“ The paving-stones seemed to leap from the ground and to form themselves into bulwarks surmounted by black-red-gold flags, and manned by citizens, university students, tradesmen, artists, laborers, professional men—hastily armed with all sorts of weapons, from rifles and shotguns down to pikes, axes and hammers. There was no preparation, no plan, no system, in the uprising; everybody seemed to follow a common instinct. Then the troops were ordered to the assault. ”

“ In the future war every body of troops holding itself on the defensive or found taking the offensive, when it is not the question of sudden assault, will have to fortify itself in a chosen position and the war will be confined principally to the form of a series of combats in which the possession of fortified positions will be disputed, and in which the assailant will have to meet the accessory defensives in the neighbourhood of the fortifications such as barricades, barbed wire, etc., the destruction of these objects costing many victims.... ”

“ Once more he is the smart Himmelstoss of the parade-ground, he has even outstripped the lieutenant and is far ahead.
Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades—words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
Our faces are encrusted, our thoughts are devastated, we are weary to death; when the attack comes we shall have to strike many of the men with our fists to waken them and make them come with us—our eyes are burnt, our hands are torn, our knees bleed, our elbows are raw. ”

“ Then began the race between the contending armies to produce guns and shells of such size and in such quantities as would blast a whole area with death, bury the machine-guns and the garrisons, destroy the superiority of the infantry in defence, and give the game once more into the hands of the offensive. ”

“ For two more days we carried on this most tiring of all kinds of fighting: for the infantry, hourly scraps with a watchful plucky foe; for the gunners, perpetual readiness to fire protective bursts should the enemy suddenly seek to shake our grip on this most fateful stretch of front; in addition to day and night programmes of "crashes" that allowed the gun detachments no rest, and at the same time demanded unceasing care in "laying" and loading and firing the guns. ”

“ So I and my three riflemen fell in as the troops tramped past; and I, for one, was astonished to hear their drums beating so loudly in the enemy's country, and to observe the careless indiscipline in the ranks, where men talked loudly and their reckless laughter often sounded above the steady rolling of the drums.
"Are there no officers here to cuff their ears!" muttered Mount, in disgust.
"Bah!" sneered Elerson; "officers can't teach militia--only a thrashing does 'em any good. After all, our people are like the British, full o' contempt for untried enemies. ”

“ In the field, like all raw levies, they are apt to be alarmed by any thing unaccustomed, as the sound of musketry from the rear, or a threatened flank attack: they can not reserve their fire; they aim wildly, to the peril of friend and foe, and they have been accused of unmilitary cruelties, such as scalping and flaying men, shooting and killing squaws and children. And they never fail, after the fashion of such men, to claim that they have done all the fighting. ”

“ Here and there the invaders have forced their way into the long corridors; and you hear the musketry rattling inside, the crash of glass, and the shouts and yells of the combatants, as little jets of smoke curl out of the closed lattices. Lying amid the orange-groves are dead and dying sepoys, and the white statues are reddened with blood. Leaning against a smiling Venus is a British soldier shot through the neck, gasping, and at every gasp bleeding to death. Officers are running to and fro after their men, persuading or threatening in vain. ”

“ They are merely honest and call a thing by its name; for there is a very great deal of fraud, injustice, and baseness in the army.—Is it nothing that regiment after regiment returns again and again to the ever more hopeless struggle, that attack follows attack along the weakening, retreating, crumbling line?
From a mockery the tanks have become a terrible weapon. Armoured they come rolling on in long lines, and more than anything else embody for us the horror of war. ”

“ They had been told to occupy the heights and hold on, and this they had done for fifteen mortal hours under an incessant shell fire, without the moral and material support of a single gun ashore, and subjected the whole time to the violent counter-attacks of a brave enemy, led by skilled leaders, while his snipers, hidden in caves and thickets and among the dense scrub, made a deliberate practice of picking off every officer who endeavored to give a word of command or to lead his men forward. ”

“ I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of agression and conquest. ”

“ How, then, are we to oppose the hostile force? Must human blood be substituted for skill and preparation, and dead bodies of our citizens serve as epaulements against the inroads of the enemy? To some extent, we fear it must be the case ”

“ For although the guerilla bands are still fighting when attacked, or when attacking small bodies of enemy soldiers, they try to avoid a pitched battle, and content themselves with the constant harassing of the victorious army, the destroying of bridges and railways, cutting off communications and supplies, attacking convoys, and the like, always in the hope that some event or events may occur which will induce the victorious army to withdraw from the conquered territory. ”

“ A great offensive on a wide front is a big show; a raid by night into hostile territory is a little show; a feint by infantry, undertaken with intent to deceive the other side at a given point while the real attack is being launched at a second given point, and accompanied by much vain banging of gunpowder and much squibbing-off of rockets and flares and star shells is a “Chinese show”—to quote the cant or trade name; I think the English first used the term, but our fellows have been borrowing ever since the first contingent came over last year. ”

“ Without such particularity of procedure, an army going into an enemy's country would soon become a rabble or mob—war would soon become rapine—officers would soon lose all control of their men, and from thenceforth plundering, spoliation, and pillage would become the order of the day. ”

“ It is probable, all the same, that many German soldiers, on entering Belgium or France, were obsessed by the idea of civilians firing on them. The cry of a soldier trembling with fear, drunk, or thirsting for pillage—"Man hat geschossen (they have fired) "—is enough for a locality to be delivered up at once to the wildest fury. "When an inhabitant has fired on a regiment," said a soldier at Louvain, "the place belongs to the regiment." What a temptation for a Boche soldier to fire a shot that will at once unloose pillage and massacre! ”

“ The red flag, temporarily lowered, was again shaken aloft. Men with faces distorted by wrath and a desire for vengeance were shrieking their anger, flourishing their clubs, brandishing knives, daggers, pistols, gathering from the street missiles of any and every kind with which to charge upon their enemy. They could not conceive that sixty Guardsmen in khaki, with rifles and bayonets, could check the murderous onslaught of five hundred desperate and daring men. ”

“ Imagine detachments of cavalry and dragoons making their way through different parts of the town at full gallop to the posts assigned them; trains of artillery rolling over the pavements with a monstrous noise; bands of ill-armed ruffians and women, drunk with brandy, running through the streets like furies, breaking the shops open, and spreading terror every where by their howlings, mingled with frequent reports of guns or pistols fired in the air; all the barriers on fire; thousands of smugglers taking advantage of the tumult to hurry in their goods ”

“ The commanding general considers that no greater disgrace could befall the army, and, through it, our whole people, than the perpetration of the barbarous outrages on the innocent and defenceless, and the wanton destruction of private property, that have marked the course of the enemy in our own country. Such proceedings not only disgrace the perpetrators, and all connected with them, but are subversive of the discipline and efficiency of the army, and destructive of the ends of our present movements. ”

“ But if it is military it is also militant, and it is the fact that fighting is one of its chief objects, which has caused it to be so much abused by foreigners. It is necessary in the first place to understand the conditions of the sanguinary battles between the Korps, and the points by which they are distinguished from the more serious affairs which are occasionally settled by appeal to arms. ”

“ The reason is that assaulting troops edge away from the source of hostile fire, and when the lines of men are too thin, they move forward through the gaps in the hostile defences without dealing with them. ”

“ They could cut their way through all opposition that we could offer. We have neither the infantry, nor the ar [108] tillery, nor the cavalry, to oppose them, and the artillery we have is of so much shorter range that at no time could we get near enough to the enemy to reach him with our guns.
If war comes between us and any of the Great Powers, the splendid young men of the country—husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, lovers—will have to go to the front and meet the invaders. ”

“ The troops parade and study military tactics every day, and seem determined to repel, with spirit, the threatened invasion. The probability is, that the report respecting the attack, is, as John Bull says, "all humbug," and this training and marching has already been a source of no little annoyance to us, as the miserable little skeleton of a saddler who is engaged to work for our party, has neglected his business, and must go a soldiering in stead. ”

“ Thus the grand fortress fell, as the Puritan historian describes it, upon the attack of "four thousand undisciplined militia or volunteers, officered by men who had, with one or two exceptions, never seen a shot fired in anger in all their lives, encamped in an open country and sadly deficient in suitable artillery." ”

“ All these attacks will be made, at first, not against the enemy’s army, which will be mobilising underground, but against the civil population in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker. ”

“ Seeing the invaders approach, the defenders went out to meet them, and gave them battle on the open space in front of the pa; but the sound of the guns, and the sight of men falling as by the hand of some invisible enemy, so terrorised the defenders that their lines were soon broken, and they fled, a demoralised host, back to their stronghold, which was immediately stormed and taken with great slaughter. ”