Div. disembarked in France in the second week of February. This gave him a total of 13 infantry and 5 cavalry divisions, besides a number of selected territorial battalions. These reinforcements allowed him to form his command into two armies, the first under Sir Douglas Haig and the second under Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, and at the same time to extend his front gradually N. into the Ypres salient.
A further integral part of the preparation for the spring cam- paign consisted of a number of attacks intended to divert the enemy's attention from the Artois front and to gain experience in the tactics of trench warfare. One of these attacks was carried out by the French during the winter against the salient of St. Mihiel, when they learnt that the position (which appears from a map to be almost untenable) could with the aid of trenches and
- barbed wire be made very formidable. Other attacks were
made in Champagne on either side of the Perto and in Flanders. In the latter of these British troops cooperated by a minor attack opposite Wytschaete, which had very little success. In fact on the whole the Germans gained the chief success in this preliminary sparring, for in the middle of Jan. 1915 they made an attack uport the lines which had been held during the battle of the Aisne by the British army, N. of that river near Soissons, and drove the French back to the S. bank. -
The British army, which like other European armies, had been trained to believe in the supreme virtue of attack, had since the beginning of the war, with the exception of the short period of the advance to the Marne and the Aisne, been com- pelled to fight defensively, and Sir John French desired to give it a wider experience of attack upon entrenchments. For this [purpose he had been carefully saving up artillery ammunition by strictly limiting the amount to be expended in the routine of trench warfare, and he calculated that he would have sufficient it his disposal to allow him to engage in a considerable battle
, early in March. He entrusted the execution of this battle to Sir Douglas Haig's I. Army, which was directed to attack the
'German lines near Neuve Chapelle, an operation which it was hoped would result in a favourable position for the further battle which was to be undertaken later in cooperation with Foch. The battle of Neuve Chapelle opened on Mar. 10 with what was in those days held to be a very heavy bombardment.
'This bombardment was followed by an infantry assault, which
'was at first successful, and carried the village of Neuve Chapelle, but was soon brought to a standstill by the enemy's machine- guns. In this battle the British first experienced the difficulty of bringing up reserves at the right time through roads blocked by the debris of battle and over ground scarred by trenches and torn by shell-fire. On the whole, however, both the French and the British were impressed by the result of the bombardment, which was held to promise great things when there should be more guns and more ammunition. Preparations for further battles therefore went forward.
The Germans, guessing what was on foot, were not slow to interfere with these preparations. On April 17 a portion of Smith-Dorrien's II. Army attacked and gained a footing upon Hill 60, an important feature on the S. face of the Ypres salient. The Germans, counter-attacking, promptly regained possession of the hill and followed up this success by a far more serious enterprise on April 22. By then Foch's preparations for the attack on the Vimy Ridge were far advanced, and to obtain the troops he needed for the coming battle he had greatly weakened the French forces left in the N. portion of the Ypres salient. Against this portion the Germans launched waves of poison gas discharged from cylinders, which completely over- whelmed the French troops, who had no protection against this utterly unexpected barbarity. The flank of the ist Canadian Div. was completely exposed, and for a short time a definite Breach was created in the Allied line. Fortunately the Germans
- were unprepared for the extent of their success, and had not the
- troops at hand to take immediate advantage of it, while the
j gallantry of the ist Canadian Div. and the 28th Div. held the enemy at bay until reinforcements could be brought up. The first complete British territorial division to arrive in France, the
46th North Midland Div., was fortunately in the neighbourhood, and these and other reinforcements, some contributed by Foch from the reserves he was holding in readiness for his battle, sufficed to save Ypres and to patch up a new line.
But the second battle of Ypres, if it did not give the Germans all the success they might have attained had they been ready to follow up the first success gained by the employment of a method of attack which no civilized nation had conceived to be possible in modern war, at least gained a great part of their pur- pose by weakening the forces and exhausting the meagre supply of ammunition which the Allies were accumulating for their projected battle.
That battle began on May 9 with an attack by the I. British Army under Sir Douglas Haig on either side of Fromelles, and an attack by the I. French Army, commanded by General d'Urbal but under the direction of Foch, on a much wider front which extended from the Scarpe to the N. of the Souchez. The British attack made very little progress and it was soon evident that the preliminary bombardment had not sufficed to destroy sufficiently the enemy's defences, or, what was of greater im- portance, to overcome his machine-guns. Sir John French, however, felt himself bound by his agreement with Joffre and Foch to keep the enemy occupied on his front as long as possible, and the battle of Fromelles became merged in the battle of Festubert by bringing the front of attack slightly S. into what it was hoped would prove more favourable ground. The experi- ence of Festubert was, however, hardly more favourable than that of Fromelles, for again the German machine-gunners checked all real progress, while the lack of artillery ammunition became more and more felt. The situation was made more difficult in this latter respect by renewed German attacks in the Ypres salient upon the II. Army, now under the command of Sir Herbert Plumer. The situation of the British army in Flanders was somewhat eased by the arrival of five more divi- sions of territorials, followed by the first of the New Army divi- sions, the gth, but it was lack of shell rather than lack of men which forced Sir John French to stop his attacks, and the battle of Festubert petered out on May 25.
Meanwhile, on the British right, Foch was making encourag- ing if slow and very costly progress. In the battle of Souchez the villages of Ablain St. Nazaire, Carency, Neuville St. Vaast and Thelus were carried by d'Urbal's men, who fought their way doggedly up the W. slopes of the Vimy Ridge. The French found the German machine-guns to be the chief obstacle to progress and, the prime cause of casualties, particularly in the villages, in which the enemy's machine-gunners fought indomitably from cellar to cellar and in a certain elaborate series of works which became known to fame as the Labyrinth. The French had by this time embodied the flower of the manhood of the nation in their army, and the splendid gallantry with which Foch's regiments fought their way forward in the battle of Souchez, enduring tremen- dous losses but ever gaining ground, if only at the rate of a score or two of yards per day, towards the crest of the Vimy Ridge, was never surpassed in the whole long war. When the British ceased their attacks on May 25, Foch had made enough head- way to encourage him to believe that he could gain the whole ridge, and he determined to continue the battle alone. But for this he wanted more troops, and an extension of the British front, which would set free Frenchmen, while both he and Joffre were fearful lest the New Army divisions preparing to leave England should be sent to the Dardanelles. The French commander-in- chief therefore wrote, at the end of May, a letter to Kitchener which contains the key to the developments of the following months. It ran as follows:
" The retreat of the Russian army, consequent upon the temporary failure of its offensive, will doubtless allow -the Central Powers to withdraw, at least for a time, a certain number of army corps which they will be able to use on another front, but it is probable that the greater part of these will be required to meet the situation created by the entry of Italy into the war. 1 The situation of the Russians, who will be for some time to come unable to undertake a decisive offensive, and the difficulties of ground which the Italian
1 The Italian troops crossed the frontier at midnight May 24-25.
