Octolxir 17, 1914 
LAND A:&TD water 
thoiigli tliis factor is much more difficult to appreciate 
than is the material, and can never be appreciated so 
exactly. 
First of all -vve have the factor of homogeneity : 
which of the two bodies of opponents is moralli/ the viost 
vniled, the Allies or the Ilapshiirg-IIohcnzollerns ? 
There is here a very subtle problem. 
The Allies consist in three great national groups, 
to which must be added the two smaller nations of 
Belgium and Servia. Now as regards each of these 
gi'oups, the national feeling is absolute and unanimous. 
Evoiy single Frenchman, every single Belgian, every 
single Eussian, every single Servian is determined 
upon the French, the Russian, the Servian, and what 
is now the Belgian ob ject of the war. One may even 
justly say that (with the exception of certain German 
populations in the Russian Baltic) those populations 
which are not in sj-mpathy with the central govern- 
ments of Russia and England, but which are subject 
to them, are far more in sympathy with the anti- 
German policy of Russia and England than with any 
other ])art of Russian or British policy. For instance, 
the chief doubtful element of aU, the Poles, are, as a 
nation, far more inclined to-day to support Russian 
than Prussian aims. Tlie Allies have then that 
essential moral element in strategy : a common 
purpose really inspiring them. 
On the other hand, the Germanic Powers are 
handicapped by the fact that only the Gorman 
speaking core, and not quite all of that, is 
enthusiastic for theu' cause. The Magyars are 
certainly in sympathy, but they are disparate. They 
are occupied (or have been until the present war) in 
the government and even the oppression of aliens. 
Millions of Roumanians, and millions of Catholic 
Slavs who are not of the Mag}'ar temper and who do 
not desire any Austro-Hungarian success, are subject 
to them. The Austrian-German is somewhat at issue 
with the Catholic Slav of Bohemia, violently at issue 
with the small Itahan- speaking population in the 
Bouth on the Adriatic. That brave, intelligent, and 
intensely vital Italian body is a highly important 
factor for disruption and peril to the Hapsburgs at 
the present moment. 
There is a sufficient measure of orthodox Serbs 
in the south-east to be another source of peril ; and 
though the Austrian-Pole is not averse from Austria, 
Polish feeling must be taken as a whole, and it has 
been permanently alienated from the Germanic claim 
by the political incapacity of Prussia. For Prussia 
cannot govern. 
Belgium, which Germany proposes to adminis- 
trate (we may look at any moment for a policy of 
annexation, that is — even without formal decree — for 
the establishment of German Courts, as of German 
currency, and for the official Gennan re-naming of 
Belgian topogi'aphy), is less reducible to the German 
claims than any area in Euro^je, great or small. 
Alsace-Lorraine is enemy's country to the Germans, 
though it talks the German tongue ; and all Prussian 
Poland — that is, everything more than one hundred 
miles east of Berlin, and everything more than thirty 
miles from the Baltic Sea — is stiU more bitterly anti- 
Gennan. 
If, upon the immediately preceding map, you 
mai-k Avith a thick black line the frontier of the area 
occupied by our enemies at this moment and mark 
off with hatching the ai'ca occujiied by populations dis- 
affected to those who occupy their ten-itory with arms, 
you will find no such areas among the AUies and a 
very large proportion of such areas within the territory 
for the moment administrated by our enemies. 
Yet another modification must, however, be 
allowed before we have any complete view of the 
spiritual factors the strategist must consider. 
Though the German powers are thus handicapped 
by whole regions which are either actively hostile or 
doubtful in their allegiance, they liaA'^e this advantage 
— that where they are united they are completely 
luiited. What the war may bring forth in the long 
run we can none of us tell, but we may make quite 
certain that at the present moment, and for a long 
time to come, that which is German in the Germanic 
effort stands as one man. The Allies — Russia, 
England, and France — may be equally determined upon 
one object ; but the German resistance is one thing. 
The Russians coming over the boundary of East 
Prussia, the threat of a French advance upon, say, 
Treves, each violently affect and almost in the same degree 
a man of education living in Leipsic. But to hear 
that the Germans were recently occupying the govern- 
ment of Suwalki makes no Englishman's blood boil. 
Few Russians would feel it intolerable that the 
Germans should have been in Arras. ITie stay of 
some hours which the Germans made in Ai'ras (where, 
by the way, they failed to bum the MSS., upon which 
the Life of St. Patrick is based, but seem to have 
destroyed St. Waast) means to a Fi-enchman some- 
thing very different from what it can mean to any 
Englishman. Thirty shells dropped upon Westminster 
Abbey and leaving it a rain would mean to an 
Englishman something quite different from the burning 
of Rheims. To most Frenchmen it would mean 
nothing at all. 
That is the moral strategical disadvantage in all 
alliances, that every alliance is " weak at the seams," 
but this alliance suffers from the weakness less 
perhaps than any alliance in the past has suffered 
from similar divergences. 
I cannot complete this brief survey of the general 
situation (so far as material and moiul forces are 
concerned) without recalling (1) on the material side 
the factor of numbers; (2) on the moral side the 
factor of claim. 
(1) In the material factor of numbers there is a 
very simple formula, which anyone may use like a 
rule of thumb, to remember what the situation is. Of 
trained men in the first line (that is, the young armies 
with their full complements of all arms and nothing 
improvised) you may put down the Germanic Powers 
at 110; the French at 40; the British — in the first 
phase at 3 ; the Russians at, say, 25, growing rapidly 
through 30 to 50. 
In the phase immediately succeeding, allowing 
for similar losses on all sides, you get, with the 
Germanic Powers still at 110, the new British forces 
swelling from three up to anything you like — say 
twenty or even twenty-five. If the war were very 
