I visited some French guns during the tir de demolition phase.  I counted nine aeroplanes and twenty-six kite balloons in the air at the same time.  There was nothing German visible in the air at all.

It is a case of eyes and no eyes.

The French attack resolves itself into a triple system of gunfire.  First for a day or so, or two or three days, there is demolition fire to smash up all the exactly located batteries, organisation, supports, behind the front line enemy trenches; then comes barrage fire to cut off supplies and reinforcements; then, before the advance, the hammering down fire, “heads down,” upon the trenches.  When at last this stops and the infantry goes forward to rout out the trenches and the dug-outs, they go forward with a minimum of inconvenience.  The first wave of attack fights, destroys, or disarms the surviving Germans and sends them back across the open to the French trenches.  They run as fast as they can, hands up, and are shepherded farther back.  The French set to work to turn over the captured trenches and organise themselves against any counter attack that may face the barrage fire.

That is the formula of the present fighting, which the French have developed.  After an advance there is a pause, while the guns move up nearer the Germans and fresh aeroplane reconnaissance goes on.  Nowhere on this present offensive has a German counter attack had more than the most incidental success; and commonly they have had frightful losses.  Then after a few days of refreshment and accumulation, the Allied attack resumes.

That is the perfected method of the French offensive.  I had the pleasure of learning its broad outlines in good company, in the company of M. Joseph Reinach and Colonel Carence, the military writer.  Their talk together and with me in the various messes at which we lunched was for the most part a keen discussion of every detail and every possibility of the offensive machine; every French officer’s mess seems a little council upon the one supreme question in France, how to do it best. M. Reinach has made certain suggestions about the co-operation of the French and British that I will discuss elsewhere, but one great theme was the constitution of “the ideal battery.”  For years French military thought has been acutely attentive to the best number of guns for effective common action, and has tended rather to the small battery theory.  My two companies were playing with the idea that the ideal battery was a battery of one big gun, with its own aeroplane and kite balloon marking for it.

The British seem to be associated with the adventurous self-reliance needed in the air.  The British aeroplanes do not simply fight the Germans out of the sky; they also make themselves an abominable nuisance by bombing the enemy trenches.  For every German bomb that is dropped by aeroplane on or behind the British lines, about twenty go down on the heads of the Germans.  British air bombs upon guns, stores and communications do some of the work that the French effect by their systematic demolition fire.