What if there hadn't been a Pechot?

Looking back at the fifty three months of the Great War, no-one thinks it could have been different. Somehow huge armies on several Fronts magicked the resources to slug it out for a protracted period. In fact, since the American civil war, nothing on this scale had occurred. The answer, we believe, is that portable narrow gauge railways, quickly laid, had overcome the logistics problem. Millions could be fed, watered and reinforced on the field.

Yet the invention was not inevitable. History turns on human will, not on faceless 'forces'. If Pechot hadn't devoted his considerable energies over a life-time to military transport, the French wouldn't have had a supply system ready - well - almost. There were the little problems of actually getting stuff made and training up the troops. They overcame such problems for the best possible reason - the opposition already had railways and trained troops. We are confident that the German Feldbahn system - of just such portable railways - owed its existence to the fact that, some years before the War, they saw what the French were doing!

A 60cm railway goes into the French fort  of Bois L'Abbe near Epinal. Before 1914, the French strategy was to depend on a network of these forts to deter invaders. Supplies and reinforcements were quickly moved thanks to the little railway which was equally at home inside as out.

There was nothing 'inevitable' about the Pechot System. We can imagine how things might have been if there had been no Prosper Pechot. Let us look at the British experience. In the 1870s, around the time that Pechot was looking at difficulties in military transport, the British Army were aware of these problems and setting their best minds to it. Those minds were in the Royal Engineers - allow me to be a little prejudiced - my Grandpa was a Sapper! Railways were the best form of military supply for the period but were hard to lay quickly, one obstacle being steep gradients. Mother Nature does not like flat spaces. If there are any, she fills them up with water. Elevated track in 18" (45cm) gauge looked promising. This was the Fell System. 500 man-days, it was calculated, were required to construct each mile of track. After a few trials in 1872-4, the Engineers filed a report and that was it.

The British Pechot, Mr Henry Handyside, lately Assistant Engineer to the Government of Nelson Province, New Zealand, then came forward. The Handyside Patent System enabled a locomotive to be used as a stationary engine to haul  its train up inconvenient gradients. Existing locomotives could be retrofitted with the necessary equipment. The need for civil engineering was much reduced. Handyside got into the Press and found himself a commercial backer. In 1876, the Royal Engineers were moved to witness trials, and by November 1876, they were ordering their own version - in their favoured gauge of 18". Trials went on until 1885 when it was decided to abandon the system Handyside System altogether on the grounds of unit and operational cost. Metre gauge lines were proposed as an alternative although no-one was delegated to look into the matter. Naivety or complacency? You decide. By 1914, 2'6" (75cm) was the British Army's gauge of choice - not that they had much material anyway (4 1/2 miles).

In the period 1874-80, Captain Pechot of the French Artillerie had conducted trials to determine which gauge would be best for portable military track. When his superiors were too mean or cautious to help him, he turned to Paul Decauville the industrialist. He encountered opposition from the French equivalent of the Sappers. At the time that the British abandoned their trials, the French concluded to their own satisfaction that metre gauge would do for military purposes.  Pechot looked to the Navy for support. Then the Press discovered that all France's defences could be blown to smithereens by high explosive. The Government were forced to act. By sheer force of personality and the sacrifice of all his weekends, Pechot showed that 60cm gauge could, cheaply and quickly, provide the new mobility that was required.

And what of the Germans? They had favoured 75cm for military gauge. When the French were conducting trials around Toul, they too switched gauge to ... 60cm. Soon after the Pechot Bourdon loco appeared, the Germans switched from small locomotives with conical boilers and horse-drawn wagons to a system of bogie wagons of roughly the same dimensions as the Pechot ones, pulled by locomotives analogous to the Pechot one. They worked even harder at field supply than the French. By Christmas 1914, at the time when most experts decreed that the War would be over, it had only just begun.