FRANCE'S NEW STRATEGY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVIV, Issue 27, 7 January 1916, Page 4

FRANCE'S NEW STRATEGY.

According to a special dispatch received at San Francisco, a new war strategy has developed in France, a strategy so terrible in its purpose and so ghastly in its success that it hni seized upon the imagination of the French people and placed a new aspect on the war. According to one special correspondent it hives and annihilates the enemy. It forces the

Germans to gather hundreds of thousands of soldiers right under the French cannon, and then tears them to pieces with literally millions of shells. The new strategy is develop- ( ed so openly that it has made useless the complicated system of German espionage. Here, as so often, the 1 French nimbleness of mind has counteracted German thoroughness and preparedness. It has made fools of the German spies. They have': been using all their circuitous and expansive system of sending to Germany information that the French staff \va s eager for the German staff, to have. It has lifted and made a 1 joke of the spy peri). General de Castelnau, commander of the army in Champagne, conceived the deadly new strategy, and the enormous German losses before the French trenches are attributed to his military genius. The strategy is his. He conceived and presented the plan and wa s al- ( lowed to carry it out. He had no less, a purpose than chewing the German army to pieces as it came under his j superior artillery. If the German j commanders threw in army corps J after army corps, so much the tvorse for them. Eventually there would be no German army left. The new-, est aspect of this new strategy is; that it is a matter of indifference | whether the enemy knows what is go-' ing on. The more the enemy Knows, j in fact, the more he plays into your hands. He must either stand and | be torn to pieces or "get out from under." It was indifferent to Gene-1 ral de Castelnau which the Germans, did. The day came and the enemy found that to hold the great French army in Champagne it was necessary ( for the Germans to move forward at least 300,000 men. But the more] they brought forward the better the grim old warrior de Castelnau like it. He wanted plenty of' food for his powder and fodder for his cannons., He got it, too. Nine German army! corps' (360,000 men) came under the fire of the French guns in Cham-, pagne, and a third of them were! killed, wounded or prisoners within four days. The French also gained ground,"but that was incidental, even, accidental. It was not in de Castel- ( nan's plan except as an after-thought. His purpose was to kill as many Ger-j man soldiers as he could. H e want-j ted to wear down the German army faster than! it could be built up. The plan did not work out exactly as ex- ( pected, as the French troops could not be held in their trenches. After a year of trench warfare' they » were anxious to push on, and General de Castelnau was fo/ced to yield to their impatience. Another time they will. be more easily controlled, and as long as France has plenty of shells there is nothing to prevent the French AVmy from'blowing the Germans out of France five miles at a time. Of course, the Germans could retaliate if they could afford to concentrate great numbers of cannon at . any point. But it does not look as though they will be able to do this.