Nicholas Murray - The Rocky Road to the Great War: The Evolution of Trench Warfare to 1914

The Rocky Road to the Great War

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The Evolution of Trench Warfare to 1914

NICHOLAS MURRAY

FOREWORD BY HEW STRACHAN

Copyright 2013 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

All rights reserved

Potomac Books is an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murray, Nicholas, 1966 The rocky road to the Great War: the evolution of trench warfare to 1914 / Nicholas Murray; foreword by Hew Strachan. First Edition

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59797-553-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61234-105-7 (electronic) 1. Fortification, FieldHistory. 2. IntrenchmentsHistory. 3. Military art and scienceHistory. I. Title.

UG403.M87 2013

355.44dc23

2013008396

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute z39-48 Standard.

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The trenches of the First World War have a bad reputation. Smelly and muddy, rat and lice infested, they do not rate among the most beautiful of military constructions. Nor, unlike the castles of the Middle Ages or the fortifications of Vauban, have they lasted well. They defined not only the western front but also the war as a whole and what it meant for a generation. Yet, a hundred years later, we need to look carefully if we are to detect where they once were.

Their notoriety is undeserved. They saved lives; without them the war would have been even more destructive than it was. In the half century before 1914, a revolution in firepower transformed the battlefield, creating a beaten zone swept by machine-gun fire and quick-firing artillery. Tactically, the attack became much harder to execute and its demands of human endurance even greaterat least in the minds of the general staffs that had to find a solution to the problem. One answer, and the one for which they have been most often castigated, was to stress the importance of morale and the need, in the final rush, to press home the offensive, cost what it will. But this was neither the solution most regularly adopted in the First World War nor the only one to which military minds were bent before it. An alternative was to develop field fortifications, to think through how to fight the defensive battle, and to devise ways of making it strategically effective as well as tactically sensible. That is the storya neglected one but one without which we cannot understand twentieth-century warfarethat Nicholas Murray tells in his important book.

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, permanent fortification, built of masonry and stone, came to be seen as a specialist matter, separated from the conduct of campaigns of maneuver, and studied by a separate and self-contained part of the army. It was a subject for geeks, and it also cost a lot of money. The latter was a serious consideration when the technical advances in artillery, permitting heavier calibers to take the field and enabling them to fire with greater precision and consistency, presented fixed defenses with continuous obsolescence. Those built by France in the decade after the Franco-Prussian War were out of date ten years later, with adoption of smokeless powder and reinforced concrete.

Field fortification was cheaper than permanent structures, and defenses made of earth, reinforced with materials like wood, could be constructed more quickly and in locations where they were actively needed. It was not just price and materials that made field fortification attractive. It also fulfilled one of the cardinal principles of war, that of economy of force, and it did so in at least three ways. The first has already been mentioned: that of saving lives. Second, mass armies, made up of short-service conscripts, often with low levels of discipline and training, promised to be both easier to control and more effective if placed in defensive positions. At their most basic, they made desertion more difficult. And, third, a fortified position could be held defensively with fewer men, releasing others for operations elsewhere, including the offensive. In other words, field fortification could enable maneuver, as well as retard it.

Extraordinarily, no scholar has told before the story that Nicholas Murray tells here. Perhaps its importance has been too obvious; more probably, as he suggests himself, the determination to criticize the military thinkers who flourished in Europe between the ending of the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of the First World War, has prompted historians to deny such an obvious manifestation of common sense and pragmatism. Contained within it are the histories of five wars, the Russo-Turkish War of 18771878, the South African War of 18991902, the Russo-Japanese War of 19041905, and the two Balkan Wars of 19121913. All five were fundamentally shaped by field fortification and its application on the battlefield, and all were, in that sense and others, precursors of the First World War. Some of these conflicts themselves qualify for the epithet neglected, and for all of them the role of field fortification has long demanded that they be examined not only in their own right but also for their contribution to changes in the conduct of war as the latter absorbed the impact of industrialization. Nicholas Murray has carried out research in archives in London, Paris, Vienna, and the United States, and he has ransacked the professional literature of a reflective and deeply committed generation of soldiers. He has filled a massive gap in the history of war. All those who study it are in his debt.

Hew Strachan
Chichele Professor of the History of War
University of Oxford

Between 1877 and 1914 the use of field fortification became increasingly important, and its construction evolved from primarily above-to belowground. These changes explain the landscape of the First World War, yet they have remained largely unstudied. This book defines, examines, and tests the theories and construction of field fortification between 1877 and 1914 for the first time.

The changes that took place in constructing field fortifications reflected the technological developments then occurring and the changing priorities of the forces reasons for constructing them. Those reasons included preventing desertion, protecting troops, multiplying forces, reinforcing tactical points, providing a secure base, and achieving domination of an area. Field fortification theory and practice changed not solely at the whim of improving firepower or technology but rather through a combination of those factors as well as societal ones.

The primary sources of information for the case studies are the reports of military attachs who observed the conflicts. Frequently the observers witnessed events in person or were in a position to interview recent combatants. They were also military men with an understanding of the nature of war and, consequently, of much of what they witnessed. Many of their reports were disseminated around the armed forces of their respective countries in the form of histories or campaign reports. The other main source material is taken from contemporary technical manuals, which provide an exact idea of what was going on at a specific moment in time. The exception is for the chapter on the Second Anglo-Boer War of 18991902. The attachs in this war were at the front only a limited time, and most of them went home as soon as the major fighting ended. Thus, they largely missed seeing the prolonged guerrilla war and the extensive use of fortifications later in the conflict. In addition, as Britain was one of the combatants during the war and did not have any attachs to speak of, I have chosen to include a number of personal accounts with their firsthand eyewitness descriptions of events to supplement the reports of the French, Austrian, and American attachs. I have also used the official history rather more for this chapter than is the case in the other wars examined. This solution is not perfect, but it does allow the reader to study the war with some level of detail.