Information, Please

Humpty France and Dumpty Germany continued sitting on their walls last week. Neither had a great fall and neither required more horses or men. The French did some digging in and dragged up some heavy artillery back of Perl at their supposedly "weak" corner by the Luxembourg frontier, where the right flank of a German assault would be protected by neutral territory. They sent about 1,000 men charging up a hill southwest of Pirmasens beside the Hornbach salient, but the Germans counterattacked and the French, after using planes to strafe their assailants for the first time in this war, marched down again. The Germans did some fairly heavy shelling farther east in the Wissembourg sector, to which the French replied in kind. On the Rhine frontier, the French tried some heavy machine-gunning across the river at Kehl. The Germans replied but no one tried to cross the river.

Continued quiet in the ticklish Forbach salient, overlooking the ghost industrial city of Saarbruecken, led observers to guess that the German onslaught there last month, which for a time had the French defenders entirely cut off from support and supplies (TIME, Nov. 13), was a typical German "information" offensive, designed to find out what the French command will do in given circumstances rather than to take an objective now. Before the great Ludendorff push of 1918, the Germans conducted innumerable attacks of inquiry, compiled a thorough textbook on the behavior of various generals commanding various parts of the Allied line. They learned, for example, that General Gough's army was disposed strongly in its forward or battle zone, but weakly in the rear; that Lieut. General Butler's forces were organized with most of their strength to the left; that the British Buffs of the 18th Division were organized around a quarry. When the big push came, each of these positions received special treatment; Gough a tremendous bombardment just behind his battle line, cutting off his rear completely; Butler, an enveloping attack; the Buffs' quarry, a blasting from field guns brought right into the German front line. So may it go at Forbach, Hornbach, Wissembourg, et al., if & when Adolf Hitler decides to push--or his generals let him.

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