The First World War

by John Keegan

Since uncut wire in front of defended trenches was death to attacking infantry, this complacent misappreciation by the staff was literally lethal. Finally, the confidence shown in the artillery to lay a creeping barrage was misplaced. The movement of a line of exploding shells just in front of a line of advancing infantry, ideally fifty yards in front or less, was a new technique and demanded high gunnery skills. Without communication between infantry battalions and artillery batteries—and there could be none without tactical radio, a development of the future—the artillery had to fire by timetable, calculated by the speed at which the infantry was expected to advance, roughly fifty yards a minute. The guns would lay a barrage on an identified trench line, then “lift” to the next at a moment when the infantry was deemed to have arrived. In practice, because the artillery feared killing its own infantry, the intervals in distance between “lifts” was made too long, in time too short, with the result that the experience of attacking waves would be, too often, to see the barrage creeping away in front of them, beyond trenches still strongly held by the enemy, without any means of recalling