Septcmbor 5, 1914 LAND AXD WATER 
hv furtlier Englisli contingents, bj iicrpetual wearing down of tlie enemy, by compelling Iiim to 
expend men on bis communications, to make the proportion 4 to 4 at last — and tlien to take tli3 
counter offensive. 
These things being so, it is obvious that the one outstanding thing in the jn-esent situation is the 
power of the defending line to hold. It may fall back. . In falling back it may expose to every kind 
of suffering the French districts that are abandoned. It cannot but, in so faUing back, affect in some 
degree the state of mind of the defenders. But it remains mathematically true that so long as that 
line holds, and so long as it is neither pierced nor turned, (1) there has been no decision, (2) eveiy day 
that passes is in favour of the Allies. 
2. THE SUCCESS OF GERMAN THEORY. 
Tlie second outstanding fact which the progress of the war has hitherto revealed is the success of 
certain peculiarly Gei-man theories now that they have been pxit to the test of practice, though it is 
important for us to measure the exact amount of that success, and not to exaggerate it. 
Among the theories characteristically German, and propounded without actual warftu'e to prove 
or disprove them during the last generation, were, in particular, the three theories — • 
(1) That modem fortification would fall at once to a combination of heavy bombardment by siege 
artillery and determined rushes thrown upon it, at great expense of life, by the infantry of the enemy. 
(2) That men very slightly trained, or even untrained, coidd be incorporated into and digested by 
a trained force in large proportions, and rapidly, during the course of a camjjaign. 
(3) That attacks in masses, and in fairly close formation, could be earned out with all 
the advantage of weight and numbers they connote, and could be carried out because discipline 
coidd be pushed to such a point that even the enormous losses involved would not check the 
advance. 
Now, in regard to these three main points of German theory, we must clearly seize this fact : 
Tlie war has proved them to be, upon the whole, sound. Or put it this way : if you were a determined 
opponent of all these theories (and I have written against them strongly myself) then the war, so far, 
will have proved a disap]K)intment to you, and you will be constrained by intellectual candour to 
admit en'or. 
But if you put youi-self at the other standjwiut, and stand in the shoes of the man who believed 
in tho.se theories whole-heartedly, and who based his certitude of final victory upon then* complete 
reliability, then it is quite another story. For while the German theories produced during peace, and 
as yet untested by experience, have been vindicated against their opponents, they have not been 
completely vindicated by any means ; and the extent to which theii* full success was necessary to the 
German scheme is essential to our estimate of the chances of victory or defeat. 
For instance, it is perfectly true that modern fortification has yielded to heavy siege artilleiy, and 
perhaps to a combination of that with rushes of infantry ; but it has not been the sudden affaii- that 
was expected by the Germans, save in the case of Namur. The forts of Liege held out apparently for 
4 or 5 days after the heavy siege artillery was trained upon them ; the fort of ManonviUiers, an isolated 
work upon the eastern frontier, resisted for ten days at the least, and perhaps twelve. It is as v.ell, 
by the way, in this connection, not to take too seriously the stories of some mysterious German 
howitzer which nobody knew to exist. All wars produce marvellous rumonrs of that kind, and nearly 
all such rumours are nonsense. There is no limit to the size of your siege gun or shell, save the limit 
of mobility, in every sense of that word, including rapidity of fire. But it is possible that the numbors 
and the mobility of the large German howitzers were imderestiraated. 
We find then that, in this department of German theory the Germans were much more right than 
their critics, but were not altogether right, and the whole question is how thoroughly they had to bo 
right for their general plan to be successful. 
As to the second theory, we have not yet been able to test it. The use of large proportions of 
untrained or half trained reserves broke down badly in East Prussia at the beginning of the Eussiiun 
advance, but there is no sign of any breakdown in the West, where perhaps a more moderate 
proportion of the untrained reserve was incorporated. It is probable that we shall find, when the 
detailed history of the war comes to be written, that the incorporation of these untrained masses was, 
as in the case of the .•ther theories, more successfid than the critics of the Germans had imagined, but 
less successful than the Germans themselves believed it would l>e. It is probable, for instance, that 
checks (as that before Antwerp the other day) occur wherever the proportion of untrained men is more 
than a certain minimum, and it is probable that the effect of these elements would be felt in any 
retirement undertaken, at least in the earlier days of the war. For instance, you will find the rout 
after Gumbinnen probably explained by this featm-e. 
Finally, in the matter of close fomiation and the weight of numbers in advancing against an 
enemy's position, the results have far exceeded what the critics of the German theory put forward, 
iitf, by all accounts, the effort is exceptional, unique, and incapable of repetition. It is not a nonnal 
process of war, such as the Germans expected to establish to their own advantage. It is not, as was 
the charge of the column under Napoleon, an operation to be repeated by veterans indefinitely ; it is 
a thing subject to peculiar strain, the men having passed through which cannot be used in such a 
strain repeatedly. 
This last point, if it bo established, is of the first importance to the future fortunes of the 
campaign, for it must mean that the losses in the effort to break the Allied line, which effort.s have 
filled the last ten days, have been altogether out of proportion to the masses employed. 
It is impossible to guess at those losses, but it is possible to establish a minimum and a maximum. 
They may have been over 200,000 ; they can hardly have been under 150,000, counting every form o£ 
loss from death to lameness. 
