October 17, 1914 
LAND A¥D AVATER 
thongh tliis factor is much more tlifficult to appreciate 
tlian is the material, and can never be appreciated so 
exactly. 
First of all ^^■e have the factor of homogeneity : 
icliich of Ihe ftco bodies of opponents is morallj the most 
united, the Allies or the llapshirfj-Hohenzollerns ? 
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 
Ik-lgium and Servia. Now as regards each of these 
groups, the national feeling is absolute and unanimous. 
Every 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 object of the Avar. One may even 
justh' .say that (with the exception of certain German 
populations in the Russian Baltic) these populations 
which are not in s}'mpathy with the central govern- 
ments of Russia and England, but which are subject 
to til em, are far more in sympathy with tlie anti- 
Gennan policy of Russia and England than with any 
other ])ai-t of Russian or British policy. For instance, 
the chief doubtful element of all, the Poles, are, as a 
nation, far more inclined to-day to support Russian 
than Prussian arms. The 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 German 
speaking core, and not quite all of that, is 
enthusiastic for their cause. The Magyars are 
cciiainly in sympathy, but they are dispai-ate. They 
are occupied (or have been until the present war) in 
the government and even the oppi-ession of aliens. 
Millions of Roumanians, and millions of Catholic 
Slavs who are not of the Magj-ar temper and who do 
not desire any Austro-Hungaiian success, are subject 
to them. The Austrian-German is somewhat at issue 
with the Catholic Slav of Bohemia, violently at issue 
■with the small ItaUan-speaking population in the 
south on the Adriatic. That brave, intelligent, and 
intensely vital Italian body is a highly important 
factor for disniption 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 
cainiot 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 Geinnan Courts, as of German 
currency, and for the official German re-naming of 
Belgian topography), is less reducible to the German 
claims than any area in Europe, great or small. 
Alsace-Lorraine is enemy's country to the Gennans, 
though it talks the German tongue ; and all Prussian 
Poland — that is, everything more than one hundred 
miles east of BerUn, and everything more than thirty 
miles from the Baltic Sea — is still more bitterly anti- 
German. 
If, upon the immediately preceding map, you 
mark with a thick black line the fi-ontier of the area 
occupied by our enemies at this moment and mark 
off with hatching the area occupied by populations dis- 
affected to those who occupy their temtory with anus, 
you wiU find no such areas among the Allies and a 
very large proportion of such areas within the ten-itory 
for the moment administrated by our enemies. 
Yet another modification must, however, be 
alloAved before we have any complete view of the 
sjiiritual factors the strategist must consider. 
Though the Gennan powers are thus handicapped 
by whole regions which are either actively hostile or 
doubtful in their allegiance, they have this advantage 
— that where they are united they are completely 
united. 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 Gennan in the Germanic 
effort .stands as one man. The Allies — Russia, 
England, and France — may be equally detennined upon 
one object ; but the German resistance is one thing. 
The Russians coming over the boundaiy of East 
Prussia, the threat of a French advance upon, say, 
Treves, each violently affect and almost in the same degi'ee 
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 An*as. The stay of 
some hours which the Germans made in AiTas (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 Frenchman some- 
thing veiy different from what it can mean to any 
Englishman. Tliirty shells di'opped upon Westminster 
Abbey and leaving it a ruin 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 moral 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 Hne (that is, the young annies 
with their full complements of all amis and nothing 
improvised) you may put down the Geraianic 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 Avar Avere A-ery 
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