The aerial torpedo, terrorizing the defenders in the interior of their
shelters, already neutralizes them in part; but the best plan of
eliminating the enemy is to destroy him. In order to destroy him, it is
necessary to force him to expose himself, to oblige him to come out to
become the prey of the iron hail. For this there are several means:
Have the infantry advance during the preparation by the artillery;
Simulate the attack;
Finally a third method that can be transferred from the domain of fox
hunting to that of the war with Germany: smoke him out.
The first plan is not applicable from first trenches as they are too
near the enemy; we shall speak of this again.
In order to simulate an attack, interrupt the artillery fire suddenly
and _open rifle fire with a great deal of shouting_; the enemy hurries
out immediately to his combat positions; after several minutes’ waiting,
a violent rafale of 75. This is what we did from time to time when we
wished to make the Germans come out into their trenches so that we could
demolish some of them by artillery fire. At Arras, there was a brusque
interruption of artillery fire for ten minutes, but it was an absolute
and impressive silence. The Germans were not misled by it, and when the
interruption for the real attack came with its fusillade and noise, they
manned their trenches to meet it.
As a third scheme _we have suffocating grenades and cartridges_, which
irritate the eyes and produce tears and render the neighborhood of the
spot where they fall untenable for several minutes. We could also have
projectiles of larger dimensions, containing materials giving off heavy,
suffocating gas. Thus this gas would creep over the ground, fall into
the bottom of the trenches, and enter the shelters, driving out the
occupants, who would then come under the fire of the high-explosive
shells. This gas, being, moreover, only suffocating, would afterwards
have the advantage of not incommoding our soldiers in their trench or
during the attack.
While the heavy artillery may be replaced very advantageously by
torpedoes for the preparation on the continuous line of trenches, it may
be employed effectively against the centers of resistance, where its
more concentrated effects will not produce the simply superficial
disorganization of the 75, which leaves the cupolas of the machine guns
intact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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