scale map of the ground over which he has to go, and has had his own individual job clearly marked and explained to him.  All the Allied infantrymen tend to become specialised, as bombers, as machine-gun men, and so on.  The unspecialised common soldier, the infantryman who has stood and marched and moved in ranks and ranks, the “serried lines of men,” who are the main substance of every battle story for the last three thousand years, are as obsolete as the dodo.  The rifle and bayonet very probably are becoming obsolete too.  Knives and clubs and revolvers serve better in the trenches.  The krees and the Roman sword would be as useful.  The fine flourish of the bayonet is only possible in the rare infrequent open.  Even the Zulu assegai would serve as well.

The two operations of the infantry attack now are the rush and the “scrap.”  These come after the artillery preparation.  Against the rush, the machine gun is pitted.  The machine gun becomes lighter and more and more controllable by one man; as it does so the days of the rifle draw to a close.  Against the machine gun we are now directing the “Tank,” which goes ahead and puts out the machine gun as soon as it begins to sting the infantry rush.  We are also using the swooping aeroplane with a machine gun.  Both these devices are of British origin, and they promise very well.

After the rush and the scrap comes the organisation of the captured trench.  “Digging in” completes the cycle of modern infantry fighting.  You may consider this the first or the last phase of an infantry operation.  It is probably at present the least worked-out part of the entire cycle.  Here lies the sole German superiority; they bunch and crowd in the rush, they are inferior at the scrap, but they do dig like moles.  The weakness of the British is their failure to settle down.  They like the rush and the scrap; they press on too far, they get outflanked and lost “in the blue”; they are not naturally clever at the excavating part of the work, and they are not as yet well trained in making dug-outs and shelter-pits rapidly and intelligently.  They display most of the faults that were supposed to be most distinctively French before this war came to revolutionise all our conceptions of French character.

2

Now the operations of this modern infantry, which unlike any preceding infantry in the history of war does not fight in disciplined formations but as highly individualised specialists, are determined almost completely by the artillery preparation.  Artillery is now the most essential instrument of war.  You may still get along with rather bad infantry; you may still hold out even after the loss of the aerial ascendancy, but so soon as your guns fail you approach defeat.  The backbone process of the whole art of war is the manufacture in overwhelming quantities, the carriage and delivery of shell upon the vulnerable points of the enemy’s positions.  That is, so to speak, the essential blow.  Even the infantryman is now hardly more than the residuary legatee after the guns have taken their toll.