The advantages of attacking in close formation are threefold.

(a) You launch your attack with the least possible delay.  It is evident that spreading troops out from the column to the line takes time, and that the more extended your line the more time you consume before you can strike.

[Illustration:  Sketch 16.]

If I have here a hundred units advancing in a column towards the place where they are to attack (and to advance in column is necessary, because a broad line cannot long keep together), then it is evident that if I launched them to the attack thus:—­

[Illustration:  Sketch 17.]

packed close together, I get them into that formation much more quickly than if, before attacking, I have to spread them out thus:—­

[Illustration:  Sketch 18.]

(b) The blow which I deliver has also evidently more weight upon it at a given point.  If I am attacking a hundred yards of front with a hundred units of man and missile power, I shall do that front more harm in a given time than if I am attacking with only fifty such units.

(c) In particular circumstances, where troops have to advance on a narrow front, as in carrying a bridge or causeway or a street or any other kind of defile, my troops, if they can stand close formation and the corresponding punishment it entails, will be more likely to succeed than troops not used to or not able to bear such close formation.  Now, such conditions are very numerous in war.  Troops are often compelled, if they are to succeed, to rush narrow gaps of this kind, and their ability to do so is a great element in tactical success.

I have here used the phrase “if they can stand close formation and the corresponding punishment it entails,” and that is the whole point.  There are circumstances—­perhaps, on the whole, the most numerous of all the various circumstances in war—­in which close formation, if it can be used, is obviously an advantage; but it is equally self-evident that the losses of troops in close formation will be heavier than their losses in extended order.  A group is a better target than a number of dispersed, scattered points.

Now, the Germans maintained in this connection not only, as I have said, that they could get their men to stand the punishment involved in close formation, but also that:—­

(a) The great rapidity of such attacks would make the total and final wastage less than was expected, and further:—­

(b) That the heavy wastage, such as it was, was worth while, because it would lead to very rapid strategical decision as well as tactical.  In other words, because once you had got your men to stand these heavy local losses and to suffer heavy initial wastage, you would win your campaign in a short time, so that the high-rate wastage not being prolonged need not be feared.

Well, in the matter of this theory, the war conclusively proved the following points:—­