ITovem'ber 14, 1914 
LAND AND WATER 
tliey can legitimately claim small local successes, as 
for instance at Vailly the other day. Now the total 
of these small captures, though all wounded arc 
certainly included and prohably a good many civilians 
a^ well, does not amount to anything like the 
difference between tlie old figures and the new. It 
does not amount to a quarter of the difference. It is 
true that the perpetual swaying hack and forth over a 
few hundred yards of the long line from the Vosges 
to the sea gives perpetual opportunities for the picking 
up of wounded whenever there is an advance by the 
Germans, and before their next corresponding and 
inevitable retirement. The same opportunities, of 
course, occur to the French, who bag certain 
numbers of the enemy, wounded and un^vounded, in a 
similar fashion when they on their side manage to 
make a short advance followed later by a corresponding 
retirement. 
But these driblets do not, at the most, coupled 
with the larger captures already mentioned, account in 
the last three or four weeks for half the total of this 
sudden German increase. 
It is manifest, therefore, that some great effort 
has been made to swell the figures to the greatest 
possible amount credible by tlie opposing General 
Staff. It is no good asking the French General 
Staff to believe in miracles ; to give in a 
fantastic figure would be merely to defeat the 
object the Gennans have in view. But it is exactly 
what the German authorities would do to give 
the very largest number which the most credulous 
Frenchman with any available figures before him 
could be got to believe ; and it is my first point that 
the numbers conceivably taken in the field during the 
interval between the date of the first statistics issued 
and that of these last statistics come to much less than 
the increase in the German figures of French prisoners 
between the two. 
"We have a second criterion by which to test the 
validity of their figures. Of these 191,756 nominal 
French prisoners only 3,138 are officers. That is to 
say, of every sixty men taken prisoner (according to 
tliis definition of the word " prisoner ") only one man 
is of commissioned rank. 
Now I admit that the proportion of officers killed 
is always rather higher than the propoiiion of men 
killed, and that therefore in picking up the enemy's 
wounded after an advance you will probably find more 
men wounded than officers wounded lying on the 
ground. And this is particularly true of the French 
and English services where the officer leads in a fashion 
which makes him very conspicuous. But still, so 
enormous a disproportion as one out of sixty is 
exceedingly suspicious. 
Let us contrast it with the figures given of 
British prisoners. The British officer is not more 
inclined to surrender than the French, nor is his posi- 
tion during a sharp advance less conspicuous. Yet, of 
a total of British prisoners given as 16,147, 417 are 
officers. That makes not one in sixty, but one in 38. 
And one in 38, by the way, is just about a 
reasonable proportion. One would expect that there 
would be rather more tlian thirty private soldiers 
and non-commissioned officers taken, wounded and 
unwounded, for each commissioned officer, but rather 
less than forty. If the proportion fell to below thirty 
one would conclude that the men were not being 
properly led ; but above forty it gets very suspicious 
and begins to look as tliongh men Avere being counted 
as pi'isoners v.ho were not soldiers at all. 
Eememjjcr that it is more difficult to manipulate 
ijgurcs about officers than about inen ; their social 
position is conspicuous ; the number of them that are 
missing is very carefully noted upon the enemy's 
side ; any considerable exaggeration would at once 
betray itself. 
We have already, then, the following facts : — 
(1) The French prisoners claimed by Gennany 
show a proportion of one officer to about 
sixty men. 
(2) The English prisoners claimed by Germany 
show about one officer to thirty-eight men. 
We know perfectly well, as I have said, that the 
British officer does not surrender with greater facility 
than the French, and, what is more, the British have 
not lost, as the French have, whole garrisons and 
whole bodies of men in fortified positions where the 
loss of officers taken prisoners is strictly in proportion 
to their numbers on the establishment. 
We begin to see at once tliat the numbers of 
private French prisoners claimed by Germany has 
something ill-jn-oportioned and exaggerated about it. 
As we cannot easily believe, knowing the Prussian 
temperament and the object of these figures, that they 
are merely fantastic, we must conclude some category 
is included among the French prisoners which could 
not be included among the English prisoners. What 
such category is there ? Obviously the civilian 
population. There is no British civilian population 
available on the Continent to swell the German 
statistics save perhaps a handful of Englishmen of 
military age present in Germany, but there is a very 
large French population which can be pressed into 
the service of these remarkable figures. In other 
words there is a considerable body of Frenchmen 
unfit for service or use on railways, etc., which 
the Germans may carry into Germany and count 
as prisoners although they are not and have not 
been soldiers. 
In order to test the value of such a hypothesis 
let us take a third criterion, the figure of Belgian 
prisoners. 
Here we have no less than 35,444 in prisoners 
claimed by the Germans, but of these only 417 are 
officers ! 
This is frankly monstrous. It is one officer to 
more than 84 men. We are asked to believe that the 
Belgian army is quite different from all other forces in 
the world; that its officers belong to some fanatical caste 
that wiU always prefer death to surrender, even after 
capitulation, while its rank and file surrender eagerly 
and upon every possible occasion. That is tomfoolery. 
The facts are perfectly well known, and are sufficient 
to account for this extraordinary disproportion. Bel- 
gium, even more than Northern France, has been the 
prey of that singular system v/hereby the Prussian 
commanders seize as prisoners those whom they will 
of the male civilian population. I do not say that in 
so doing the Germans are not playing to win. I do 
not say that then' action is, in a military sense, useless. 
When they mop up the men who are necessary in a 
country, even during the hardest strain of war, to 
keep the machine going^the miners, the men ii>. 
arms factories, the railway men, etc. — they are doing 
what certainly subserves the cause of their victory. 
But to call these men " prisoners of war " in any 
ordinary sense is nonsense. And by the fact that 
they are called prisoners of war we must test the 
figures before us. 
I sum up, therefore, and I say that : — 
(1) Admitting that the German authorities do 
not publish in this type of communicated official 
statistic uun-oly fantastic ilgures, but rather strain the 
meaning of words, and, 
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