LxVND AND WATER September 5, 1014 
keep up vltli a pressed marcli fall out and are taken prisoner. The losses count to tlie full in a 
military sense ; tliey are complete losses to the effectives of the fighting force ; but they do not spell 
death or even wounds necessarily; their numbers are m excess of the total number of killed and 
(3) The descriptions given of a force in retreat (descriptions which never ought to be given unless 
full news from the war is permitted) are utterly misleading to the civilian mind, and confuse it. 
Tliey veil from it the true nature of that operation. A retreat is disheartening, it is painful, and all 
the rest of it ; but in mere strategj- it is an operation like any other. It only differs from an advance 
in tins— that' you abandon to the enemy that wastage from yom- organisation which you Avould, in 
an ad\-ance, send back out of the way and well cared for to your base. 
There are certain simple mottoes in the reading of warfare, whether historical or contemporary, 
which everybody should have before him as immutable guides^ to judgment. They may almost be 
reduced to three. At any rate, three such epigrams are the basis of all sound judgment in the matter, 
and the cure for all panic. 
I will put them thus and emphasize them by italics : — 
(1) Any armed force advances or retires in columns. lijjglds deployed in a line. 
(2) Until an army has been rendered materially tceaker in numbers or equipment to its opponent, no 
decision has been reached: that is, there has been no victory and no defeat. 
(3) Save in the exceptional case of an army caught in column before it can deploy, there is no render- 
ing of an army materially tceaker, still less is there any destruction of an armed force, until its deployed line 
is cither (a) turned, or {b) piei'ced. 
The amiy of the Allies, though it repose, as it may repose before these lines appear, on an 
invested Paris, though it retire south from an occupied Paris, is not, to the hour of my writing this, 
turned or pierced. It is in full being. 
THE EASTERN FIELD OF WAR. 
O lOO 200 
»l 
^^^^^Ma: 
SCALE OF MILES 
'^ U 
SKETCH OF THI FISLD OP 0FY.T.\.T10SS IX THB EAST, EETWKEX TH2 EUSSIAX, AND Till AUSTRO-HUNGARIAX AXD GEEMAX AR.VIKS. 
I said last week, and it wiU have to be said frequently in the course of comments upon these 
campaigns, that to depend upon immediate pressure exercised by the Eussian annies upon the Germanic 
powers, and particulariy upon Beriin, is to depend upon a vain thing. 
1^^^ pressure cannot come— I am willing to wager that it will not come— before the close of 
October. And it cannot be an immediate pressure from the very nature of the operations to which 
Jiussian Armies in the custom field of war are condemned. 'This is due to three quite evident 
lactora : (1) the gi-eat distances involved, (2) the paucity of communications to the east of the liussian 
6» 
