“Then came the second surprising feature in the new German system of attack.  No waves of storming infantry swept into the battered works.  Only strong patrols at first came cautiously forward, to discover if it were safe for the main body of troops to advance and reorganize the French line so as to allow the artillery to move onward.  There was thus a large element of truth in the marvelous tales afterwards told by German prisoners.  Their commanders thought it would be possible to do all the fighting with long-range artillery, leaving the infantry to act as squatters to the great guns and occupy and rebuild line after line of the French defenses without any serious hand-to-hand struggles.  All they had to do was to protect the gunners from surprise attack, while the guns made an easy path for them and also beat back any counter-attack in force.

“But, ingenious as was this scheme for saving the man-power of Germany by an unparalleled expenditure of shell, it required for full success the co-operation of the French troops.  But the French did not co-operate.  Their High Command had continually improved their system of trench defense in accordance with the experiences of their own hurricane bombardments in Champagne and the Carency sector.  General Castelnau, the acting Commander-in-Chief on the French front, was indeed the inventor of hurricane fire tactics, which he had used for the first time in February, 1915, in Champagne.  When General Joffre took over the conduct of all French operations, leaving to General Castelnau the immediate control of the front in France, the victor of the battle of Nancy weakened his advance lines and then his support lines, until his troops actually engaged in fighting were very little more than a thin covering body, such as is thrown out towards the frontier while the main forces connect well behind.

“We shall see the strategical effect of this extraordinary measure in the second phase of the Verdun battle, but its tactical effect was to leave remarkably few French troops exposed to the appalling tempest of German and Austrian shells.  The fire-trench was almost empty, and in many cases the real defenders of the French line were men with machine guns, hidden in dug-outs at some distance from the photographed positions at which the German gunners aimed.  The batteries of light guns, which the French handled with the flexibility and continuity of fire of Maxims, were also concealed in widely scattered positions.  The main damage caused by the first intense bombardment was the destruction of all the telephone wires along the French front.  In one hour the German guns plowed up every yard of ground behind the observing posts and behind the fire trench.  Communications could only be slowly re-established by messengers, so that many parties of men had to fight on their own initiative, with little or no combination of effort with their comrades.