The Last Full Measure: How Soldiers Die in Battle by Michael Stephenson

Author:Michael Stephenson [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Weapons, Military, History, Strategy, General
ISBN: 9780307952776
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2012-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT WAS LEFT of the warrior code, with its emphasis on individual combat, on a death in some way chosen? There were, of course, many acts of great valor and ennobling self-sacrifice, and there was a kind of individual combat during trench raiding. But the general tenor of warfare had become long-distance, mechanical, anonymous, processed. Nevertheless, within this process there was a need to reassert the power of the individual warrior—and as in all previous wars since the introduction of the gun and cannon, it was the blade that represented the last vestige of the heroic duel. And in World War I that heroic blade was embodied in the bayonet.

The bayonet was the figurative and literal point of the frontal attack. It was by the physical ejection of the enemy from his frontline trenches that defenses could be breached, which reserves could exploit, and victory would be won. The attack with the bayonet also represented the moral fiber of the soldier, and cold steel embodied the aggressive élan that would force the great unlocking of the stalemate.

On the eve of the war, Field Marshal Foch, for example, declared that “the French Army, returning to its traditions, no longer knows any other law than the offensive.… All attacks are to be pushed to the extreme with the firm resolution to charge the enemy with the bayonet, in order to destroy him.… This result can only be obtained at the price of bloody sacrifices. Any other conception ought to be rejected as contrary to the very nature of war.”98 It was an emphatic reaffirmation of the offensive doctrine of France’s revolutionary and Napoleonic armies and would echo Danton’s famous invocation of the supremacy of the attaque a l’outrance: “Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace et la France est sauvée.”99 The Germans adhered to the same flamboyant heroic credo: “When the decision to assault originates from the commanders in the rear, notice thereof is given by sounding the signal ‘fix bayonets.’ … As soon as the leading line is to form for the assault, all the trumpeters sound the signal ‘forward, double time,’ all the drummers beat the drums, and all parts of the force throw themselves with the greatest determination upon the enemy.… When immediately in front of the enemy, the men should charge with bayonet and, with a cheer, penetrate the position.”100 (German Infantry Regulations, 1899)

The problem proved to be getting to the trenches in the first place, and the frontal attack became the focal point for what many saw as the murderous failure of general staffs in their relentless pursuit of breakthrough. Ironically, in a war that had become literally and metaphorically deadlocked, the strategic obsession, shared by all the general staffs, was with movement and fluidity. Siegfried Sassoon recalls the clash between the tactical realities that inhibited fluid warfare and the official line that insisted upon it: “The Fourth Army School was at Flixécourt.… Between Flixécourt and the War … there were more than thirty English miles.

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